Sigmund Freud
Wrong about a great deal, impossible to skip
Psychology
Freud invented the idea that we do not know why we do what we do, and built a discipline on it. Plenty of the specifics have not survived a century of testing; the central claim — that a great deal of the mind is not available to the mind — has. He wrote well enough to win the Goethe Prize for literature, which tells you how to read him.
Read when your own motive for something does not quite ring true
In the last analysis all pain is but sensation.
Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. Joan Riviere, 1930)
It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings.
Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. Joan Riviere, 1930)
The passions of instinct are stronger than reasoned interests.
Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. Joan Riviere, 1930)
Needless to say, no one who shares a delusion recognizes it as such.
Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. Joan Riviere, 1930)
Our possibilities of happiness are thus limited from the start by our very constitution.
Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. Joan Riviere, 1930)
As we see, it is simply the pleasure-principle which draws up the programme of life's purpose.
Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. Joan Riviere, 1930)
At any rate the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life.
The Interpretation of Dreams (trans. A. A. Brill, 1913) · 1900
Homo homini lupus; who has the courage to dispute it in the face of all the evidence in his own life and in history?
Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. Joan Riviere, 1930)
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. Joan Riviere, 1930)
It is easy to discover this motive in man's helplessness and dependence upon others; it can best be designated the dread of losing love.
Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. Joan Riviere, 1930)
It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of 'eternity', a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded, something 'oceanic'.
Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. Joan Riviere, 1930)
The great majority work only when forced by necessity, and this natural human aversion to work gives rise to the most difficult social problems.
Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. Joan Riviere, 1930)
The dream represents a certain condition of affairs as I should wish it to be; the content of the dream is thus the fulfilment of a wish; its motive is a wish.
The Interpretation of Dreams (trans. A. A. Brill, 1913) · 1900
Men clearly do not find it easy to do without satisfaction of this tendency to aggression that is in them; when deprived of satisfaction of it they are ill at ease.
Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. Joan Riviere, 1930)
The weak side of this way of living is clearly evident; and were it not for this, no human being would ever have thought of abandoning this path to happiness in favour of any other.
Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. Joan Riviere, 1930)
