"I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the [system]] is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest, but we have not altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother's relations to her male child)."
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Academics from AustriaPsychiatrists from AustriaPhysicians from AustriaPsychoanalystsNon-fiction authors from Austria
Original Language: English
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Sources
Ch. 5, as translated by James Strachey and Anna Freud (1961)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud
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