Sigmund Freud

Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture. (Sigmund Freud, 1930)

Analyse any human emotion, no matter how far it may be removed from the sphere of sex, and you are sure to discover somewhere the primal impulse, to which life owes its perpetuation. (Sigmund Freud)

The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.
(Sigmund Freud, 1915)

Sigmund Freud Biography
(from the Penguin Book of Interviews, Penguin Books, 1993)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the Austrian Jew who founded psychoanalysis, trained as a physician in Vienna. He also studied in Paris under Jean-Marie Charcot, who used hypnosis as a treatment for hysteria. Freud later developed his own therapeutic technique - conversational 'free association' - as well as the psychoanalytic theory of defence mechanism and repression, which argued that neurosis was the result of infantile sexuality (what he called the 'seduction theory'). In 1900 he published The Interpretation of Dreams and in 1902 was appointed extraordinary professor of neuropathology at the University of Vienna, thereafter concentrating on the study of psychological and psychopathological behaviour, and the role of sexuality of the unconscious. In 1938, when the Nazis annexed Austria (having already banned psychoanalysis in Germany), he emigrated to England. He died of cancer of the jaw.

The Penguin Book of Interviews. Sigmund Freud interviewed by Sylvester Viereck, 1930
Seventy years of life have taught me to accept life with cheerful humility. (Sigmund Freud)

I do not rebel against the universal order. After all, I have lived over seventy years. I had enough to eat. I watched many things – the comradeship of my wife, my children, the sunsets. I watched the plants grow in the springtime. Now and then the grasp of a friendly hand was mine. Once or twice I met a human being who almost understood me. What more can I ask? (Sigmund Freud)

Does it mean something to you that your name will live?
(Freud) Nothing whatsoever, even if it should live, which is by no means certain. I am far more interested in the fate of my children. I hope their life will not be so hard. However, fortunately, age is not too heavy a burden. I carry on! My work still gives me pleasure. I am far more interested in this blossom, than anything that may happen to me after I am dead.
H ave you any wish for immortality?
(Freud) Frankly, no. If one recognises the selfish motives which underlie all human conduct, one has not the slightest desire to return. Life, moving in a circle, would still be the same .. As far as I am concerned, I am perfectly content to know that the eternal nuisance of living will be finally done with. Our life is necessarily a series of compromises, a never-ending struggle between the ego and his environment. The wish to prolong life unduly, strikes me as absurd.

Even as hate and love for the same person dwell in our bosom at the same time, so all life combines with the desire to maintain itself, an ambivalent desire for its own annihilation. (Sigmund Freud)

The doctors want to make analysis except by licensed physicians illegal. History, the old plagiarizer, repeats herself after every discovery. The doctors fight every new truth in the beginning. Afterwards, they try to monopolise it. (Sigmund Freud)

To understand all is not to forgive all. Psychoanalysis teaches us not only what we may endure, it also teaches us what we must avoid. It tells us what must be exterminated. Tolerance of evil is by no means a corollary of knowledge. (Sigmund Freud)

What is your objection to the beast? I prefer the society of animals infinitely to human society. ..They are so much simpler. They do not suffer from a divided personality, from the disintegration of the ego, that arises from man's attempt to adapt himself to standards of civilisation too high for his intellectual and psychic mechanism.
The savage, like the beast, is cruel, but he lacks the meanness of the civilised man. Meanness is man's revenge upon society for the restraints it imposes. This vengefulness animates the professional reformer and the busybody. The savage may chop your head, he may eat you, he may torture you, but he will spare you the continuous pinpricks which make life in a civilised community at times almost intolerable. Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture. (Sigmund Freud)

Psychoanalysis simplifies life. We achieve a new synthesis after analysis. Psychoanalysis reassorts the maze of stray impulses, and tries to wind them around the spool to which they belong. Or, to change the metaphor, it supplies the thread that leads a man out of the labyrinth of his own unconscious. Psychoanalysis never shuts the door on a new truth. (Sigmund Freud)

Analyse any human emotion, no matter how far it may be removed from the sphere of sex, and you are sure to discover somewhere the primal impulse, to which life owes its perpetuation. (Sigmund Freud)

It is a handicap if certain accepted scientific conventions become too deeply encrusted in the mind of the student. (Sigmund Freud)

To Sigmund Freud (a private letter written by Albert Einstein around 1931-2)

It is admirable how the yearning to perceive the truth has overcome every other yearning in you. You have shown with impelling lucidity how inseparably the combative and destructive instincts are bound up in the human psyche with those of love and life. But at the same time there shines through the cogent logic of your arguments a deep longing for the great goal of internal and external liberation of mankind from war. This great aim has been professed by all those who have been venerated as moral and spiritual leaders beyond the limits of their own time and country without exception, from Jesus Christ to Goethe and Kant. It is not significant that such men have been universally accepted as leaders, even though their efforts to mould the course of human affairs were attended with small success?
I am convinced that the great men, those whose achievements in howsoever restricted a sphere set them above their fellows, share to an overwhelming extent the same ideal. But they have little influence on the course of political events. It almost looks as if this domain on which the fate of nations depends has inescapably to be given over to the violence and irresponsibility of political rulers.
Political leaders or governments owe their position partly to force and partly to popular election. They cannot be regarded as representative of the best elements, morally or intellectually, in their respective nations. The intellectual elite have no direct influence on the history of nations in these days; their lack of cohesion prevents them from taking a direct part in the solution of contemporary problems. Don't you think that a change might be brought about in this respect by a free association of people whose previous achievements and actions constitute a guarantee of their ability and purity of aim? This association of an international nature, whose members would need to keep in touch with each other by a constant interchange of opinions, might, by defining its attitude in the Press- responsibility always resting with the signatories on any given occasion- acquire a considerable and salutary moral influence over the settlement of political questions. Such an association would, of course, be a prey to all the ills which so often lead to degeneration in learned societies, dangers which are inseparably bound up with the imperfections of human nature. But should not an effort in this direction be risked in spite of this? I look upon such an attempt as nothing less than an imperative duty.
If an intellectual association of standing, such as I have described, could be formed, it would also have to make a consistent effort to mobilise the religious organisations for the fight against war. It would give countenance to many whose good intentions are paralysed today by a melancholy resignation. Finally, I believe that an association formed of persons such as I have described, each highly esteemed in his own line, would be well suited to give valuable moral support to those elements in the League of Nations which are really working toward the great objective for which that institution exists. I had rather put these proposals to you than to anyone else in the world, because you, least of all men, are the dupe of your desires and because your critical judgment is supported by a most grave sense of responsibility. (Albert Einstein writing to Sigmund Freud)