The very fact that the youthful soul feels insecure strengthens its active aspiration to master its insecurity.

Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.

Am I a spaceman? Do I belong to a new race on earth, bred by men from outer space in embraces with earth women?

Feminism freed my mind. Yoga freed my body. It's one thing to intellectualize self-love and another to embody it.

Once we open up to the flow of energy within our body, we can also open up to the flow of energy in the universe.

Psychoanalytic investigation has shown that in mental patients excessive affection often turns to violent hostility.

Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology

Misers take care of property as if it belonged to them, but derive no more benefit from it than if it belonged to others.

Not until man is willing to recognize his animal nature - in the good sense of the word - will he create genuine culture.

My love for you isn't just my affair, it's yours too. My love says something about you that maybe you yourself don't know.

Fortunately analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.

The conception of what is normal varies not only with the culture but also within the same culture, in the course of time.

Feelings of love and gratitude arise directly and spontaneously in the baby in response to the love and care of his mother.

It is above all man's social position that decides whether he will sublimate his sadism as a butcher, surgeon, or policeman.

Like all sciences and all valuations, the psychology of women has hitherto been considered only from the point of view of men.

And the truth must finally lie in that which every oppressed individual feels within himself but hasn't the courage to express

The searching for our selves is the most agonizing, isn't it? - and yet the most stimulating - and one simply cannot escape it.

The myth is a surviving fragment of the psychic life of the infancy of the race whilst the dream is the myth of the individual.

Let me say to begin with: It is not neurotic to have conflict ... Conflicts within ourselves are an integral part of human life.

If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.

We may feel genuinely concerned about world conditions, though such a concern should drive us into action and not into a depression.

Of all evil things the least quantity is to be borne, but of learning and knowledge, the more a man hath, the better he can bear it.

Even in my first analysis of a depressive psychosis, I was immediately struck by its structural similarity with obsessional neurosis.

Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself... and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.

In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.

The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.

I do not believe that to be religious in the best, authentic sense a man has to destroy his love life and mummify himself, body and soul.

Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.

Hitler repeatedly stressed that one could not get at the masses with arguments, proofs, and knowledge, but only with feelings and beliefs.

The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!

A considerable number of persons are able to protect themselves against the outbreak of serious neurotic phenomena only through intense work.

The highly ambitious person, in spite of all his successes, always remains dissatisfied, in the same way as a greedy baby is never satisfied.

My thesis is that the moral law is articulated with relation to the real as such, to the real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing.

But what Freud showed us… was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.

If any human being is to reach full maturity both the masculine and the feminine sides of the personality must be brought up into consciousness.

The empathic understanding of the experience of other human beings is as basic an endowment of man as his vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell

Psychohistory, as a science, will always be problem-centered, while history will always remain period-centered. They are simply two different tasks.

Symptoms, those you believe you recognize, seem to you irrational because you take them in an isolated manner, and you want to interpret them directly.

Make it plain that you have no time for war, that you have more important things to do....let the diplomats and marshals of the earth shoot each other.

The question of how and why the encrustations and rigidifications of human emotional life are brought about led directly into the realm of vegetative life.

All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.

The fact that the mind rules the body is, in spite of its neglect by biology and medicine, the most fundamental fact which we know about the process of life.

Whereas the melancholic exhibits a state of general inhibition, in the manic patient even normal inhibitions of the instincts are partly or wholly abolished.

The vital energies regulate themselves naturally without compulsive duty or compulsive morality both of which are sure signs of existing antisocial impulses.

Every seemingly arbitrary destructive action is a reaction of the organism to the frustration of a gratification of a vital need, especially of a sexual need.

Both dreams and neurotic dream-states have as their function the avoidance of displeasure, but the dream-states also serve to provide a positive pleasure gain.

No one … can entirely step out of his time, that despite his keenness of vision his thinking is in many ways bound to be influenced by the mentality of his time

I think a sense of humor is the emotional equivalent of a sense of realism. One should not take everything seriously, and everybody takes some things seriously.

Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose. It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished.

Work democracy does not wish to prevent or prohibit anything. Its only intention is the fulfilment of the biological life functions, of love, work and knowledge.

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