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?”
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
The act of birth is the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.
Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one’s dreams. What else is one to do with them? Unless the content of the dream (rightly understood) is inspired by alien spirits, it is a part of my own being.
No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.
No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.
Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea; they become powerless when they oppose it.
Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.
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.
If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.
