Sigmund Freud

"He sido un hombre afortunado en la vida, nada me ha sido facil." "I've been a fortunate man in life, nothing has come easy"

I take up the standpoint that the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man, and I come back now to the statement that it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.

We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which it can admire, to which it can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats it.

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.

Now it is nothing but torture.

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.

The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.

One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]

Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less "perfect".

What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and the external world.

There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one.