We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction: after all, the sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychology.

The ego is not master in its own house.

If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.

At bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.

The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual; the position of the genitals— inter urinas et faeces —remains the decisive and unchangeable factor. One might say here, varying a well-known saying of the great Napoleon: “Anatomy is destiny.”

The individual’s mental development repeats the course of human development in an abbreviated form.

I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, nor an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer . . . with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.

I owe my results to a new method of psychoanalysis, Josef Breuer’s exploratory procedure; it is a little intricate, but irreplaceable, so fertile has it shown itself to be in throwing light upon the obscure unconscious mental processes.

Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed at that time and which is of such importance in determining the symptoms of the later neurosis. . . . This discovery is confirmed by a legend that has come down to us from classical antiquity. . . . What I have in mind is the legend of King Oedipus.

We have seen that hysterical symptoms immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which they were provoked and in arousing their accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words. . . . Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.