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Sigmund Freud quotes
12 quotes from 3 of Sigmund Freud’s books on this site, book by book. Each quote is copied exactly from the book’s text in this site’s reader (the Project Gutenberg e-text named under each book) and links to its passage; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against that text. Quotes we could not find in a book we host are not listed.
The Interpretation of Dreams
It is a psychic phenomenon of full value, and indeed the fulfilment of a wish; it takes its place in the concatenation of the waking psychic actions which are intelligible to us, and it has been built up by a highly complicated intellectual activity.
The whole theory that the dream is the fulfilment of a wish is contained in these sentences.
And even if a dream of different content had the significance of this offence against majesty, it would still have been in place to remember the words of Plato, that the virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.
When the work of interpretation has been completed the dream may be recognised as the fulfilment of a wish.
We have found that the dream represents a wish as fulfilled.
The result of this displacement is that the dream content no longer resembles the core of the dream thoughts at all, and that the dream reproduces only a disfigured form of the dream-wish in the unconscious.
Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.
Dream displacement and dream condensation are the two craftsmen to whom we may chiefly attribute the moulding of the dream.
In brief, what the authorities have considered arbitrary improvisation, concocted hastily to suit the occasion, we have treated like a sacred text.
To be sure the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish.
Civilization and Its Discontents
We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love-object or its love.
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics
“In the beginning was the deed”.