"This passion because it is so strong, must destroy in order to be contained within the limits of self-preservation."

- Sabina Spielrein

"In young women, I find that a feeling of anxiety is normal and moves to the forefront of repressed feelings when the possibility of fulfilment of the wish first appears. It is a well-defined form of anxiety: You feel that the enemy is within; its characteristic ardour compels you, with inflexible urgency, to do what you do not want to do; you feel the end, the transient, before which you vainly may attempt to flee to an uncertain future. You might ask: Is this all? Is this the high point with nothing more beyond?"

- Sabina Spielrein

"When a dreamer substitutes another person for himself, the substitute is not less sharply differentiated than is the dreamer himself. This is merely objectively correct: Other people exist for us only when they are compatible with our own psyche; only suitable people exist for us. When the dreamer substitutes another person for himself, he doesn't care what the person in question might represent. The image occurs immediately as a condensation of different persons. To the dreamer, it depends only on the qualities of the substituted person that correspond to the fulfilment of his wish. Should the dreamer, for example, become envious of beautiful eyes, he condenses various persons with beautiful eyes into a hybrid, producing a type rather than an individual. The type, as investigations on dreams and dementia praecox illustrate, corresponds to an archaic pattern of thinking."

- Sabina Spielrein