Freud and the Scientific Method |
Common terms and phrases
ability accept adaptive adult animal anxiety become believed biological bring called capacity celebration child childhood civilization complex concept constructive conventional deal death instinct destructive directed dominance dream drives equal existence experience fact fantasy father feelings forces Freud frustrated function give goal growth helpless human ignorance images important impulses independent individual inevitable infant influence inner insights instinct intensity interpretation kind lack leads libido limitations lived man's mastery matter meaning mental method nature never object parents patient personality position possible present pride problem produce protected psychological psychopathology reactions reason reckless recognized relationship religious repressing requires responsibility roots sadism scientific sense sexual situation social society stress submission symptoms thinking thought truth understand violence warmth
Popular passages
Page 40 - I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species.
Page 50 - His aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from — that is, it is directed towards his own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of 'conscience...
Page 62 - It may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythology and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology like this?
Page 23 - Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great • Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho...
Page 21 - Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life. The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable.
Page 45 - The members of the group were subject to ties just as we see them today, but the father of the primal horde was free. His intellectual acts were strong and independent even in isolation, and his will needed no reinforcement from others.
Page 42 - Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as 'right' in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as 'brute force'.
Page 60 - According to our hypothesis human instincts are of only two kinds: those which seek to preserve and unite — which we call "erotic," exactly in the sense in which Plato uses the word "Eros" in his Symposium, or "sexual," with a deliberate extension of the popular conception of "sexuality" — and those which seek to destroy and kill and which we class together as the aggressive or destructive instinct.
Page 63 - The ideal condition of things would of course be a community of men who had subordinated their instinctual life to the dictatorship of reason. Nothing else could unite men so completely and so tenaciously, even if there were no emotional ties between them. But in all probability that is a Utopian expectation.
Page 52 - Is it not plausible to suppose that this sadism is in fact a death instinct which, under the influence of the narcissistic libido, has been forced away from the ego and has consequently only emerged in relation to the object ? It now enters the service of the sexual function.