Words of Wisdom From Sigmund Freud

Sigmunds’ story begins from his childhood where he had a different relationship with siblings than most families. Many people believe that his childhood was the foundation for developing his character further in life. A couple of very influential people in his life were Joseph Breuer (mentor) and his patient Anna O (1880 through 1882)

He developed theories on psychoanalysis that are looked at as valid theories today. The concepts that were theorized consisted of many interconnected ideologies into the inner workings of the human brain. This really shows that looking at that the human mind instead of looking into it with modern day ex ray technologies can be as effective if not more effective. By examining a patient (analysand) through an extensive interviewing process can bring man’s associations of dreams and fantasies to light. It was taking a psychoanalytical approach where Freud found his way into the deepest pathways to the human subconscious.

Sigmund Freud Famous Quotes

1. Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
2. Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
3. No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.
4. Where id is, there shall ego be.
5. A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
6. Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
7. Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
8. Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.
9. I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.
10. Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy. A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.
11. He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
12. When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.
13. America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
14. A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.
15. (attributed)
16. Innately, children seem to have little true realistic anxiety. They will run along the brink of water, climb on the window sill, play with sharp objects and with fire, in short, do everything that is bound to damage them and to worry those in charge of them, that is wholly the result of education; for they cannot be allowed to make the instructive experiences themselves.
17. Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or another.
18. The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “;What does a woman want?”;
19. If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
20. In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
21. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
22. Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
23. At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.
24. Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
25. Collected Writings, 1924
26. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
27. Anatomy is destiny.
28. Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.
29. From error to error one discovers the entire truth.
30. A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
31. Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
32. Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men’s actions.
33. Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
34. Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
35. We are certainly getting ahead; if I am Moses, then you are Joshua and will take possession of the promised land of psychiatry, which I shall only be able to glimpse from afar.
36. The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
37. The sexual life of adult women is a “;dark continent”; for psychology.
38. Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.
39. The ego is not master in its own house.
40. Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.
41. The goal of all life is death.
42. America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
43. He does not believe that does not live according to his belief .
44. A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.
45. If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and motions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority.
46. I have found little that is “good”; about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

Sigmund Freud Facts

• Out of 8 children he was Oldest
• He was born in Moravia in a Jewish family
• He was father of 3 boys and 3 girls
• Left Vienna in 1938 after a Nazi invasion
• On Sept. 23, 1939 he Died of cancer of mouth and jaw due to cigar smoking
• Determined people turn to religion in the hope of getting control over uncontrolable urges
• To understand others behavior he used self-analysis of himself
• Used his own childhood as origins of his own behavior
• Freud’s main technique for getting to unconscious was Free Association
• Dream Interpretation and what we remember should not be taken literally

About Sigmund Freud

Sigismund Schlomo Freud- (1856 – 1939)
Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist
who pioneered the psychoanalytic
school of psychology