 |
“I taught others the virtue of confession and have
never been able to lay bare my own soul. I wrote
a short biography, but more for purposes of propaganda
than anything else, and if ever I did make a fragmentary
confession, it was in The Interpretation of Dreams.
Nobody knows or has ever guessed the real secret
of my work.”
S.S. Freud
A Visit to Freud, 1934 |
|
|
“Ethics are remote from me . . . I do not break my
head very much about good and evil, but I have
found little that is 'good' about human beings on the
whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no
matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that
ethical doctrine or none at all. This is something that
you cannot say aloud . . .”
S.S. Freud
Letter to Pfister, 1918 |
|
|
“If it was indeed true [and it was] that my craving to
be addressed with a different title was as strong as
all that, it showed a pathological ambition which I did not
recognize in myself and which I believed was alien
to me.”
S.S. Freud
The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900
|
|
“Freud, in all his confessions-so generously
dispersed throughout many of his writings-has censored with great consequence
any reference to love. He has presented himself as a villain, as patricidal,
ambitious, petty, revengeful, but never as a lover . . . This is a warning to
biographers of Freud not to assume that his autobiographical statements are random
samples. Quite to the contrary, they are rigidly censored, and follow criteria
that are not obvious.”
Siegfried Bernfeld
Sigmund Freud, M.D., 1951
|
|
|
“When memory of your letter to Fritz and our day on
the Kahlenberg comes back to me I lose all control of
myself, and had I the power to destroy the whole
world, ourselves included, to let it start all over again
-even at the risk it might not create Martha and myself-
I would do so without hesitation.”
S.S. Freud
Letter to his fiancé Martha, Dec. 1882
|
|
|
“With so happy a prospect I may be allowed to mix an
obituary; the journal founded by us three. . . It was I who
delivered the death blow; it had been ailing for a long time
and I took pity on its suffering. I gave it life and I have taken
its life away, so blessed be my name, for ever and ever, Amen.”
S.S. Freud
Jan., 1875 (year he killed John), letter to Silberstein |
|
|
“There are also reports about the self-analysis, some
hints about 'that murderous firebrand and ever-active devil in me (who has now become visible) . . . bury
him so deeply even from myself that I could regard myselfas a peace loving man of science.' ”
S.S. Freud
Letter to Ferenczi, 1915,as quoted by Grotjahn
|
|
|
“I have to deal in dark matters with people I am
ten to fifteen years in advance of, who will never
catch me up.”
S.S. Freud
Letter to Fliess, 1900 |
|
| * S.S. Freud, Conversation with R. LeForgue, 1937 |