Best 7 quotes of Ernest Jones on MyQuotes

[Censors are] people with secret attractions to various temptations... They are defending themselves under the pretext of defending others, because at heart they fear their own weaknesses.

Dividing the swing into its parts is like dissecting a cat. You'll have blood and guts and bones all over the place. But you won't have a cat.

[Freud's] great strength, though sometimes also his weakness, was the quite extraordinary respect he had for the singular fact... When he got hold of a simple but significant fact he would feel, and know, that it was an example of something general or universal, and the idea of collecting statistics on the matter was quite alien to him.

His mother's favorite, he possessed the self-confidence that told him he would achieve something worth while in life, and the ambition to do so, though for long the direction this would take remained uncertain.

Man's chief enemy is his own unruly nature and the dark forces put up within him.

...whatever other qualities Jews may posses, likable or the reverse, no one who knows them well can deny that they are personally interesting. By that I mean, specially alive, alert, quick at comprehending people or events and at making pungent or witty comments on them... One might at times find the rather hothouse family atmosphere, with it intensities and frictions, somewhat trying, but one could be sure of never being bored.

Writing on this subject in 1904 Freud gave the reason for our unshakable conviction of freedom of choice. He remarked that it is far stronger with trivial decisions than with weighty ones; with the latter we commonly feel that our inner nature compels us, that we really have no alternative. With the former, however, for example the arbitrary choice of a number, we discern no motive and therefore feel it is an uncaused act on the part of our ego. If we now subject the example to a psycho-analysis we discover that the choice has after all been determined, but this time the motive is an unconscious one. We actually leave the matter to be decided by our unconscious mind and then claim the credit for the outcome. If unconscious motivation is taken into account, therefore, the rule of determinism is of general validity. Freud never wavered in this attitude and all his researches into the workings of the mind are entirely based on a belief in a regular chain of mental events. He would have endorsed the views of the great anthropologist Tylor that 'the history of mankind is part and parcel of the history of Nature, that our thoughts, will and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motion of the waves'. When enumerating the essential elements of psycho-analytical theory, in 1924, he included 'the thorough-going meaningfulness and determinism of even the apparently most obscure and arbitrary mental phenomena.