Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

The line encapsulates a tension central to Freud’s view of the psyche: people routinely underestimate their capacity for ethical restraint (because much of it is habitual, socially learned, and unconscious), yet they also radically underestimate the strength and range of their forbidden wishes and aggressive or sexual impulses. In Freud’s model, civilized life depends on repression and sublimation; moral life is therefore real, but it is built atop—and continually threatened by—drives that the conscious mind prefers not to acknowledge. The aphorism warns against naïve self-assurance: self-knowledge requires admitting both our genuine moral capacities and the darker, less imaginable contents of the unconscious.