Sigmund Freud

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive manifestations of their aggressiveness.

The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?

When Freud turned his searing eye to socialism he saw a delusional philosophy […] To Freud, the communists of the twentieth century were engaged in a perfectionist political project […] The central flaw Freud identified in socialist doctrine was the idea that private property is the primary, if not the sole, source of man’s depravity. With this foundational idea, socialists were able to say that man could be redeemed if, and only if, the institution of private property were abolished and replaced by a kinder, more humane system. [To Freud,] Man’s “depravity” is rooted much deeper in his nature and the abolition of private property would do little or nothing to change his basic constitution. [Freud argued that] socialism has its roots not in love and fraternity, as the socialists themselves would have us believe, but rather in revenge and aggression. According to Freud, “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness” (Freud 1961, 72). Freud pointed to nascent Soviet Russia as evidence of this phenomenon: “it is intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois.”

Freud is all nonsense; the secret of neurosis is to be found in the family battle of wills to see who can refuse the longest to help with the dishes.

In 1989 the original text turned up in an auction of documents concerning the emigration of Freud's family. It contained no "recommendation" but only a very sober confirmation of not having been harassed but treated decently by the authorities, written by Freud's lawyer Dr. Alfred Indra and signed "Wien, den 4. Juni 1938. Prof. Dr. Sigm. Freud." (Alain de Mijolla: A Sale in Vienna. Journal de l'association internationale d'histoire de la psychanalyse, vol. 8 (1989), http://www.enotes.com/gestapo-reference/gestapo-187690).

It is now clear that Freud was correct in positing the unconscious mind develops before the conscious and that the early development of the unconscious is equivalent to the genesis of a self-system that operates beneath conscious verbal levels for the rest of the life span.

I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.

Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the patient's suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end prematurely. If, owing to the symptoms having been taken apart and having lost their value, his suffering becomes mitigated, we must re-instate it elsewhere in the form of some appreciable privation; otherwise we run the danger of never achieving any improvements except quite insignificant and transitory ones

If often he was wrong and at times absurd
To us he is no more a person
Now but a climate of opinion.

The two most original and creative figures in modern psychiatry, Freud and Jung were both proscribed by the Nazis … for both, though holding widely divergent views, upheld the value of the individual personality.

A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.

Probably no theory evolved by man is as absurd as Sigmund Freud's theory of penis envy. To a woman, the penis and scrotum seem superfluous to man's otherwise neatly constructed body. They are almost untidy. She cannot understand that after use the penis is not retractable like an aerial on a portable radio. And as for envy — it would never occur, even to a little girl. Not in her deepest unconscious would she wish to possess a penis; and as to being at a disadvantage compared to a little boy, that is nonsense, for she gets preferential treatment anyway.
Freud was merely the victim of training by woman's self-abasement techniques — thanks to his mother, wife, and probably his daughters as well. He confused cause and effect; a woman only says she is worth less than a man. She doesn't really think it. If anyone ought to feel a sense of envy, it is men. They should be jealous of women's power. But, of course, they never are, for they glory in their powerlessness.

I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.

How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.

Freud was one of the last representatives of Enlightenment philosophy. He genuinely believed in reason as the one strength man has and which alone could save him from confusion and decay.

American feminism’s nose dive began when Kate Millet, that imploding beanbag of poisonous self-pity, declared Freud a sexist. Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies.

"Royal road" or via regia is an allusion to a statement attributed to Euclid.

The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.