Superstition (n.) is a kind of hallucination through which one satisfies desires by replacing sensory satisfaction with mental satisfaction (thus releasing pent-up tension). It is a kind of wish-fulfillment.
Superstition (n.) attacked vehemently in one's writings may claim one as its victim in one's dreams.
Superstition (n.) inverts the analyst: it believes in inner accidents and outer meanings; he believes in outer chance and inner meaning. Both refuse to let chance count as chance.
Superstition (n.) is rooted in conscious ignorance and unconscious knowledge of our own motives: the motive presses for recognition, so we lodge it in the outer world.
Superstition (n.) is largely the expectation of trouble: one raised to be good, who has repressed his evil wishes, expects punishment for his unconscious wickedness to arrive from outside.
Superstition (n.) is animism in debased form — which also survives, undebased, as the living basis of our speech, beliefs and philosophies.
Superstition (n.) grips all obsessional neurotics, usually against their better judgement — and they help along the very coincidences that confirm it.
Superstition (n.) like 'anxiety', 'dreams' and 'demons' is a provisional concept that crumbles under analysis — a screen erected against correct understanding.
Superstition (n.) is animism surviving behind religion, as hard to kill as anything that has once found psychical expression.
Superstition (n.) is double in the obsessional: he is at once superstitious and not, his belief swelling and shrinking with his resistance.
Superstition (n.) projects into the outer world causal connections that repression has severed, where they bear witness to what was effaced.