Sigmund Freud Quotes About Suffering

Quotes about: Suffering

• The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.

  Sigmund Freud

  Reality, Ego, Suffering

• Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.

  Sigmund Freud

  Pain, Men, Anxiety

  Sigmund Freud, Peter (AFT) Gay, Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Civilization and Its Discontents”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

• We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.

  Sigmund Freud

  Love, Friendship, Secret Love

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

• We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.

  Sigmund Freud

  Love, Heartbreak, Heartbroken

  Sigmund Freud (1930). “Civilization and Its Discontents”, p.16, Courier Dover Publications

• Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us, so severe suffering is caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of one's sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses.

  Sigmund Freud

  Suffering, Needs, World

  Sigmund Freud, Peter (AFT) Gay, Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Civilization and Its Discontents”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

• Religion restricts the play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner - which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.

  Sigmund Freud

  Depressing, Real, Play

  Sigmund Freud, Peter (AFT) Gay, Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Civilization and Its Discontents”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

• Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.

  Sigmund Freud

  Suffering, Tasks, Elements

• 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

  Memories, Thinking, Suffering

  Sigmund Freud (2015). “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, p.7, Courier Corporation

• The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.

  Sigmund Freud

  Fate, Men, Suffering

  Sigmund Freud, Scientific Literature Corporation (1961). “The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud”

• Against the suffering which may come upon one from human relationships the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation, keeping oneself aloof from other people. The happiness which can be achieved along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself.

  Sigmund Freud

  People, Solitude, Suffering

  Sigmund Freud, Peter (AFT) Gay, Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Civilization and Its Discontents”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

• I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.

  Sigmund Freud

  Fate, Doubt, Suffering

  "Studies on Hysteria". Book by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, as translated by Nicola Luckhurst (2004), 1895.

• It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness - just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle -, if a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.

  Sigmund Freud

  Reality, Men, Thinking

• 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

  Frustration, Suffering, Technique

  Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1961). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

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