A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

„Usually when we introduce a patient to a medical technique which is strange to him we minimize its difficulties and give him confident promises concerning the result of the treatment. When, however, we undertake psychoanalytic treatment with a neurotic patient we proceed differently. We hold before him the difficulties of the method, its length, the exertions and the sacrifices which it will cost him; and, as to the result, we tell him that we make no definite promises, that the result depends on his conduct, on his understanding, on his adaptability, on his perseverance.”

„…there are always enough individuals who are interested in anything which may be added to the sum total of knowledge…”

„the medical teacher preponderantly plays the role of a guide and instructor who accompanies you through a museum in which you contract an immediate relationship to the exhibits, and in which you believe yourself to have been convinced through your own observation of the existence of the new things you see. Unfortunately, everything is different in psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis nothing occurs but the interchange of words between the patient and the physician. The patient talks, tells of his past experiences and present impressions, complains, confesses his wishes and emotions. The physician listens, tries to direct the thought processes of the patient, reminds him of things, forces his attention into certain channels, gives him explanations and observes the reactions of understanding or denial which he calls forth in the patient. Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day. With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.”

„Psychoanalysis is learned, first of all, from a study of one's self, through the study of one's own personality.”

„One gets much further if one allows himself to be analyzed by a competent analyst, observes the effect of the analysis on his own ego, and at the same time makes use of the opportunity to become familiar with the finer details of the technique of procedure.”

„Within the field of medicine, psychiatry does, it is true, occupy itself with the description of the observed psychic disorders and with their grouping into clinical symptom-pictures; but in their better hours the psychiatrists themselves doubt whether their purely descriptive account deserves the name of a science.”

„by the acceptance of unconscious processes you have paved the way for a decisively new orientation in the world and in science.”

„We believe that civilization was forged by the driving force of vital necessity, at the cost of instinct-satisfaction, and that the process is to a large extent constantly repeated anew, since each individual who newly enters the human community repeats the sacrifices of his instinct-satisfaction for the sake of the common good. Among the instinctive forces thus utilized, the sexual impulses play a significant role. They are thereby sublimated, i.e., they are diverted from their sexual goals and directed to ends socially higher and no longer sexual.”

„it is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it. Society thus brands what is unpleasant as untrue, denying the conclusions of psychoanalysis with logical and pertinent arguments. These arguments originate from affective sources, however, and society holds to these prejudices against all attempts at refutation.”

„let us not undervalue small signs; perhaps by means of them we will succeed in getting on the track of greater things.”

„Only a person with a mania for authority, a person who must replace his religious catechism with some other, even though it be scientific, would make such a demand. Science has but few apodeictic precepts in its catechism; it consists chiefly of assertions which it has developed to certain degrees of probability. It is actually a symptom of scientific thinking if one is content with these approximations of certainty and is able to carry on constructive work despite the lack of the final confirmation.”

„Everyone of us who can look back over a longer or shorter life experience will probably say that he might have spared himself many disappointments and painful surprises if he had found the courage and decision to interpret as omens the little mistakes which he made in his intercourse with people, and to consider them as indications of the intentions which were still being kept secret.”

„the phenomena are meaningful; they have a meaning. By ‘meaning’ we understand significance, purpose, tendency and position in a sequence of psychic relations.”

„Errors, in so far as they come into our consideration, are grouped in part with forgetfulness, in part with mistakes.”

„What one is reading is not a production of one's own psychic activity, as is something which one intends to write.”

„Various psychologists have observed it, and the great Darwin was so struck by it that he made the ‘golden rule’ for himself of writing down with particular care observations which seemed unfavorable to his theory, since he had convinced himself that they were just the ones which would not stick in his memory.”

„Mistakes, like other errors, are often used to fulfill wishes which one ought to deny oneself.”

„Interpretation means finding a hidden meaning.”

„If errors can have a meaning, the dream can, too, and errors in many cases have a meaning which has escaped exact science.”

„Sleep is a condition in which I wish to have nothing to do with the external world, and have withdrawn my interest from it. I put myself to sleep by withdrawing myself from the external world and by holding off its stimuli. I also go to sleep when I am fatigued by the external world. Thus, by going to sleep, I say to the external world, ‘Leave me in peace, for I wish to sleep.’ The biological intention of sleep thus seems to be recuperation; its psychological character, the suspension of interest in the external world.”

„Our relation to the world into which we came so unwillingly, seems to include the fact that we cannot endure it without interruption.”

„For this reason we revert from time to time to the pre-natal existence, that is, to the intra-uterine existence. At least we create for ourselves conditions quite similar to those obtaining at that time—warmth, darkness and the absence of stimuli. Each awakening in the morning is then like a new birth.”

„the greatest interest in a problem is inadequate if one does not know a path which will lead to a solution.”

„it is very possible, in fact, probable, that the dreamer does know what his dream means, but does not know that he knows, and therefore believes he does not know.”

„it is superfluous for a science that has something to offer to plead for auditors and adherents. Its results must create its atmosphere, and it must then bide its time until these have attracted attention to themselves.”

„in each one of you there is a deep-rooted belief in psychic freedom and volition, a belief which is absolutely unscientific, and which must capitulate before the claims of a determinism that controls even the psychic life.”

„The dreamer does not wish to interrupt his life, but would rather continue his work with the things that occupy him, and for this reason he does not sleep.”

„the dream is not a disturber of sleep, as calumny says, but a guardian of sleep, whose duty it is to quell disturbances. It is true, we think we would have slept better if we had not dreamt, but here we are wrong; as a matter of fact, we would not have slept at all without the help of the dream.”

„One main characteristic of the dream is that a wish is its source, and that the content of the dream is the gratification of this wish. Another equally constant feature is that the dream does not merely express a thought, but also represents the fulfillment of this wish in the form of a hallucinatory experience.”

„the content of a dream is the satisfaction of a need.”

„Dreams are the removal of sleep-disturbing psychic stimuli by way of hallucinated satisfaction.”

„One must be humble, one must keep personal preferences and antipathies in the background, if one wishes to discover the realities of the world.”

„…there are processes and tendencies in the psychic life of which one knows nothing at all, has known nothing for some time, might, in fact, perhaps never have known anything. The unconscious thus receives a new meaning for us; the idea of ‘at present’ or ‘at a specific time’ disappears from its conception, for it can also mean permanently unconscious, not merely latent at the time.”

„creative imagination can invent nothing new whatsoever, it can only put together certain details normally alien to one another.”

„As a general rule we must refrain from trying to explain one part of the manifest dream by another, as if the dream were coherently conceived and pragmatically represented.”

„Our memory deals selectively with its later materials, with impressions which come to us in later life. It retains the important and discards the unimportant.”

„the child is not to be judged as mature and answerable either before the bar of custom or before the law.”

„the unconscious in our psychic life is the infantile.”

„humanity has an instinctive antagonism toward intellectual novelties.”

„The dream does not want to tell anyone anything, it is no vehicle of communication, it is, on the contrary, constructed so as not to be understood.”

„We must not expect to find a thing that has been concealed in its accustomed place in the spot where it belongs.”

„One can often influence the dreamer as to the subject-matter of his dream, but one can never influence what he will dream about it. The mechanism of the dream-work and the unconscious wish that is hidden in the dream are beyond the reach of all foreign influences.”

„every discovery is made more than once, that none is made all at once, and that success is not meted out according to deserts.”

„I strongly dislike simplification at the expense of truth.”

„every hearer and reader arranges what is offered him in his own thoughts, shortens it, simplifies it and extracts what he wishes to retain. Within a given measure it is true that the more we begin with the more we have left.”

„Humanity, in the course of time, has had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages against its naive self-love. The first was when humanity discovered that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system hardly conceivable in its magnitude. The second occurred when biological research robbed man of his apparent superiority under special creation, and rebuked him with his descent from the animal kingdom, and his ineradicable animal nature. But the third and most irritating insult is flung at the human mania of greatness by present-day psychological research, which wants to prove to the ‘I’ that it is not even master in its own home, but is dependent upon the most scanty information concerning all that goes on unconsciously in its psychic life.”

„true psychoanalysis began when the help of hypnotism was renounced.”

„That pathogenic process which is made evident to us through the resistance, we will name repression.”

„The motivating force of human society is fundamentally economic; since there is not sufficient nourishment to support its members without work on their part, the number of these members must be limited and their energies diverted from sexual activity to labor.”

„Even if man has relegated his evil impulses to the unconscious, and would tell himself that he is no longer answerable for them, he will still be compelled to experience this responsibility as a feeling of guilt which he cannot trace to its source.”

„Whenever an account of past events is given, be it written even by a historian, we must take into account the fact that inadvertently something has been interpolated from the present and from intervening times into the past; so that the entire picture is falsified.”

„the human individual must devote himself to the great task of freeing himself from his parents, and only after he has freed himself can he cease to be a child, and become a member of the social community.”

„In scientific affairs it is a popular proceeding to emphasize a part of the truth in place of the whole truth and to combat all the rest, which has lost none of its verity, in the name of that fraction.”

„our psychic life is continually agitated by conflicts for which we must find a solution.”

„there is a way back from imagination to reality and that is—art. The artist is an incipient introvert who is not far from being a neurotic. He is impelled by too powerful instinctive needs. He wants to achieve honor, power, riches, fame and the love of women. But he lacks the means of achieving these satisfactions. So like any other unsatisfied person, he turns away from reality, and transfers all his interests, his libido, too, to the elaboration of his imaginary wishes.”

„Even so usual a performance as the organization of well-known material is not entirely subject to the particular purposes of the author. It forms itself as it will and later one wonders why it turned out so and not otherwise.”

„I think that anxiety is used in connection with a condition regardless of any objective, while fear is essentially directed toward an object.”

„The gain to the individual is a loss to society.”

„whoever has been successfully educated in being true to himself is permanently protected against the danger of immorality, even if his moral standard diverges from that of society.”

„The person cured of neurosis has really become another human being. Fundamentally, of course, he has remained the same. That is to say, he has only become what he might have been under the most favorable conditions.”

„Faith repeats the history of its own origin; it is a derivative of love and at first requires no arguments. Arguments without such support avail nothing, and never mean anything in life to most persons.”

„Hypnotic therapy seeks to hide something in psychic life, and to gloss it over; analytic therapy seeks to lay it bare and to remove it.”

„The neurotic is incapable both of enjoyment and work; first, because his libido is not directed toward any real object, and second because he must use up a great deal of his former energy to keep his libido suppressed and to arm himself against its attacks.”

„The difference between nervous health and neurosis is entirely a practical one which is determined by the available capacity for enjoyment and accomplishment retained by the individual.”

„men behave most irrationally in matters of therapy, and that we have no prospect of attaining anything by an appeal to reason.”

„Against prejudice we are powerless; you see it again in the prejudices that one group of warring nations has developed against the other. The most sensible thing for us to do is to wait and allow time to wear it away. Some day the same persons think quite differently about the same things than before.”

„no professional method of procedure is protected from misuse; a knife that is not sharp is of no use in effecting a cure.”