When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any more clearly for doing so.
The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
The motives for being ill often begin to be active even in childhood. A little girl in her greed for love does not enjoy having to share the affection of her parents with her brothers and sisters; and she notices that the whole of their affection is lavished on her once more whenever she arouses their anxiety by falling ill. She has now discovered a means of enticing out her parents’ love, and will make use of that means as soon as she has the necessary psychical material at her disposal for producing an illness.
The aim of all life is death.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took to flight when the woman showed him her vulva.
We have long observed that every neurosis has as its result, and probably therefore as its purpose, a forcing of the patient out of real life, an alienating of him from reality.
We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.
The sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology.
The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is in itself unconscious.
The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.
The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”