What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’
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 to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
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.
Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or another.
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.