Sigmund Freud
6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939
Place of birth: Freiberg in Mähren, Moravia, Austrian Empire
Most important work: His study on Psychoanalysis
Most famous books: The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900 and The Ego and the Id, 1923
Interesting facts:
- “The Interpretation of Dreams” was initially a commercial failure.
- Freud studied the sex lives of eels.
- Freud once thought cocaine was a miracle drug.
- His death might have been an assisted suicide. In 1939 Freud was suffering intense pain from terminal, inoperable mouth cancer and it is believed that before his death, Freud said to his friend and doctor, Max Schur “Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense.” Schur injected him with morphine causing Freud to slip into a coma he never woke up from.
16 beautiful quotes:
1. “The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.”
2. “Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.”
3. “What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.”
4. “A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.”
5. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
6. “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.”
7. “A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.”
8. “The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.”
9. “Anatomy is destiny.”
10. “The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.”
11. “One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation.”
12. “Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”
13. “No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.”
14. “Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.”
15. “One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. ”
16. “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”
