How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
In connection with the three women I thought of the three Fates who spin the destiny of man, and I knew that one of the three women—the inn-hostess in the dream—was the mother who gives life, and furthermore (as in my own case) gives the living creature its first nourishment. Love and hunger, I reflected, meet at a woman's breast. (5.3.30)
As Freud analyzes a dream in which he enters a kitchen and finds three women standing there, his interpretation leads him to a number of associations in which mother figures appear as objects of desire. Freud's sense that mothers are objects of both "love and hunger" complements his thoughts on the Oedipus complex. In his view, our infantile relationships with our mothers shape us for life.
Quote #2
If anyone dreams, with every sign of pain, that his father or mother or brother or sister has died, I should never use the dream as evidence that he wishes for that person's death at the present time. The theory of dreams does not require as much as that; it is satisfied with the inference that this death has been wished for at some time or other during the dreamer's childhood. (5.5.20)
As he developed his theory of dreaming, Freud came to a number of surprising conclusions about family dynamics. He figured that many of his readers would resist things like his conviction that young children are quick to wish for the deaths of their brothers, sisters, or parents. Before he could convince his readers that his method of dream interpretation was correct, he had to revolutionize their views on family tensions first.
Quote #3
[…] [M]en, that is, dream mostly of their father's death and women of their mother's. I cannot pretend that this is universally so, but the preponderance in the direction I have indicated is so evident that it requires to be explained by a factor of general importance. It is as though—to put it bluntly—a sexual preference were making itself felt at an early age: as though boys regarded their fathers and girls their mothers as rivals in love, whose elimination could not fail to be to their advantage. (5.5.31)
If Freud thought that his readers would resist the idea that young children could wish for the deaths of their siblings, imagine how he must have worried about this. Here, Freud is arguing that young children view the parent of the same sex as a sexual rival—that is, he's saying that little girls wish for the deaths of their mothers so that they can take their mothers' place in their fathers' affections, while little boys wish for the deaths of their fathers so that they can take their fathers' place in their mothers' affections. Yowza.