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Quote by Sigmund Freud

“There is scarcely room for doubt that something in the psychological relation of a mother-in-law to a son-in-law breeds hostility between them and makes it hard for them to live together. But the fact that in civilized societies mothers-in-law are such a favourite subject for jokes seems to me to suggest that the emotional relation involved includes sharply contrasted components. I believe, that is, that this relation is in fact an 'ambivalent' one, composed of conflicting affectionate and hostile impulses.”

Quote by Sigmund Freud

Book:Totem and Taboo
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Totem and Taboo

Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo delves into the origins of religious and social institutions, proposing that primitive societies experienced a taboo against incest, which led to the development of totemism and other social structures. The book also examines the role of the unconscious in human behavior and the influence of primitive instincts on modern civilization. more

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Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud, born on May 6, 1856, in Moravia, and died on September 23, 1939, in London, was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. Known as the father of modern psychology, Freud made significant contributions to the understanding of human psychology, introducing concepts such as the unconscious mind, dream analysis, and sexual theory. more

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“Psycho-analysis has taught us that a boy's earliest choice of objects for his love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones - his mother and his sister. We have learnt, too, the manner in which, as he grows up, he liberates himself from this incestuous attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psychosexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them - two possibilities which may be summed up as developmental inhibition and regression.”

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Book:Totem and Taboo
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“Taboo restrictions are distinct from religious or moral prohibitions. They are not based upon any divine ordinance, but may be said to impose themselves on their own account. They differ from moral prohibitions in that they fall into no system that declares quite generally that certain abstinences must be observed and gives reasons for that necessity.”

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“Nature delights in making use of the same forms in the most various biological connections: as it does, for instance, in the appearance of branch-like structures both in coral and in plants, and indeed in some forms of crystal and in certain chemical precipitates.”

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Book:Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics
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“Obsessional prohibitions are extremely liable to displacement. They extend from one object to another along whatever paths the context may provide, and this new object then becomes, to use the apt expression of one of my women patients, 'impossible' - till at last the whole world lies under an embargo of 'impossibility'.”

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Book:Totem and Taboo
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