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The essence of analysis is surprise. When people are themselves surprised by what they say, that's when they are really making some progress.

Sigmund Freud

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Sigmund Freud
Age: 83 †
Born: 1856
Born: May 6
Died: 1939
Died: September 23
Essayist
Neurologist
Philosopher
Psychiatrist
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
Freiberg
Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Freud
Surprise
Essence
Progress
Understanding
Making
Really
People
Surprised
Analysis

More quotes by Sigmund Freud

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There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal.
Sigmund Freud
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Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world.
Sigmund Freud
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The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.
Sigmund Freud
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What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
Sigmund Freud
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Creativity is an attempt to resolve a conflict generated by unexpressed biological impulses, such that unfulfilled desires are the driving force of the imagination, and they fuel our dreams and daydreams.
Sigmund Freud
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All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.
Sigmund Freud
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Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
Sigmund Freud
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We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.
Sigmund Freud
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I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
Sigmund Freud
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Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.
Sigmund Freud
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When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.
Sigmund Freud
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Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.
Sigmund Freud
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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.
Sigmund Freud
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No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.
Sigmund Freud
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I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it.
Sigmund Freud
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If it's not one thing, it's your mother.
Sigmund Freud
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The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.
Sigmund Freud
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The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them.
Sigmund Freud
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A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable.
Sigmund Freud
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We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
Sigmund Freud