Psychoanalysts

"(Speech of Freud before the B'nai B'rith) I soon convinced myself that I owed to my nature as a Jew alone the two qualities that had become indispensable to me in the course of my difficult life. As a Jew, I found myself free of many of those prejudices that limit other men in the use of their intellect and, as a Jew, I found myself ready to go over to the opposition and to renounce agreement with the 'silent majority'. So I became one of yours; I took part in your humanitarian and national interests, made friends among you and later convinced the few friends I had left (Dr Hitschmarm and Dr Rie) to join you. It is not that I wanted to win you over to my teachings, but at a time when no one in Europe listened to you accorded me benevolent attention. You were my first audience."

"How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved."

"Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body."

"Princess, my little Princess, Oh, how wonderful it will be! I am coming with money and staying a long time and bringing something beautiful for you and then go on to Paris and become a great scholar and then come back to Vienna with a huge, enormous halo, and then we will soon get married, and I will cure all the incurable nervous cases and through you I shall be healthy and I will go on kissing you till you are strong and gay and happy — and "if they haven't died, they are still alive today.""

"A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer."

"I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness."

"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."

"I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment."

"In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there exists a psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted and that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a senseful psychological structure which may be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state. I shall furthermore endeavor to explain the processes which give rise to the strangeness and obscurity of the dream, and to discover through them the psychic forces, which operate whether in combination or opposition, to produce the dream. This accomplished by investigation will terminate as it will reach the point where the problem of the dream meets broader problems, the solution of which must be attempted through other material."

"A woman is to soften but not weaken a man."

"I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort."

"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."

"And now, the main thing! As far as I can see, my next work will be called "Human Bisexuality." It will go to the root of the problem and say the last word it may be granted to say — the last and the most profound."

"No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed."

"He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore."

"A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist."

"Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love."

"Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety."

"We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality."

"The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life."

"Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us."

"At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father."

"Psychoanalysis ... should find a place among the methods whose aim is to bring about the highest ethical and intellectual development of the individual."

"The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race."

"The ego is not master in its own house."

"Wenn man der unbestrittene Liebling der Mutter gewesen ist, so behält man fürs Leben jenes Eroberergefühl, jene Zuversicht des Erfolges, welche nicht selten wirklich den Erfolg nach sich zieht."

"Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the patient's suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end prematurely. If, owing to the symptoms having been taken apart and having lost their value, his suffering becomes mitigated, we must re-instate it elsewhere in the form of some appreciable privation; otherwise we run the danger of never achieving any improvements except quite insignificant and transitory ones"

"We are and remain Jews. The others will only exploit us and will never understand and appreciate us."

"Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information, and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years. ...They may be of a kind which will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypothesis."

"The unconscious is the larger circle which includes within itself the smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has its preliminary step in the unconscious, whereas the unconscious may stop with this step and still claim full value as a psychic activity. Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs."

"The common characteristic of all perversions, on the other hand, is that they have abandoned reproduction as their aim. We term sexual activity perverse when it has renounced the aim of reproduction and follows the pursuit of pleasure as an independent goal. And so you realize that the turning point in the development of sexual life lies in its subjugation to the purpose of reproduction. Everything this side of the turning point, everything that has given up this purpose and serves the pursuit of pleasure alone, must carry the term "perverse" and as such be regarded with contempt."

"Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion."

"We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took flight when the woman showed him her vulva."

"Wer verliebt ist, ist demütig. Wer liebt, hat sozusagen ein Stück seines Narzißmus eingebüßt."

"Die Anatomie ist das Schicksal"

"When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any more clearly for doing so."

"The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied."

"It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world."

"The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions."

"The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own."

"The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the mother; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex."

"We obtain our concept of the unconscious, therefore, from the theory of repression … We see, however that we have two kinds of unconscious — that which is latent but capable of becoming conscious, and that which is repressed and not capable of becoming conscious in the ordinary way."

"If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?"

"The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which it may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little."

"Es braucht nicht gesagt zu werden, daß eine Kultur, welche eine so große Zahl von Teilnehmern unbefriedigt läßt und zur Auflehnung treibt, weder Aussicht hat, sich dauernd zu erhalten, noch es verdient."

"Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature."

"A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable."

"Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them."

"Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor."

"Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion."

"Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect."

"The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis."

"In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis."

"Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question.""

"But man's helplessness remains and along with it his longing for his father, and the gods. The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them."

"Man kann sich des Eindrucks nicht erwehren, daß die Menschen gemeinhin mit falschen Maßstäben messen, Macht, Erfolg und Reichtum für sich anstreben und bei anderen bewundern, die wahren Werte des Lebens aber unterschätzen."

"Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state — admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological — in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact."

"One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be "happy" is not included in the plan of "Creation.""

"Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it."

"We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love."

"The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?"

"The first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice—that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual."

"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)."

"It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive manifestations of their aggressiveness."

"In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?"

"What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."

"Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness."

"A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa."

"Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent."

"The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do."

"Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of "spiritual" forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be comprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual. Observation found the breath of air again in the human breath, which ceases with death; even today we talk of a dying man breathing his last. Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself."

"It often seems that the poet's derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: "With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe.""

"Analogies prove nothing, that is quite true, but they can make one feel more at home."

"The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girls clitoris."

"One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go."

"The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three... The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id."

"Where id is, there shall ego be."

"Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action."

"If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and motions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority."

"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities."

"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires."

"The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life."

"The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises."

"...three of life's most important areas: work, love, and taking responsibility."

"Was will das Weib?"

"America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless."

"A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist."

"I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud or perhaps even think."

"Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me."

"Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object-relations."

"I don't rack my brains much over the subject of good and evil, but, on average, I haven't discovered much 'good' in men. Based on what I know of them, they are for the most part nothing but scoundrels."

"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity."

"Sometimes a Cigar Is Just a Cigar."

"This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever."

"Time spent with cats is never wasted."

"The idea of a God was not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology. A personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever. God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshiped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind."

"The mind is like an iceberg."

"Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own"

"The formation of a lesbian (and gay) identity, divested of Freudian origin, is in process. (p 119)"

"In thinking through her body, as Adrienne Rich put it, she challenged Freud's certainty of inner and outer spaces as polar opposites. This concept informs many of Freud's theoretical constructs and especially those about the ego. (Likewise, in popular culture at the time of Freud's work, women were assigned an inner space corresponding to the home-and-hearth, cult-of-true-womanhood ideology of the nineteenth century.) Rich wrote: "As the inhabitant of a female body... in pregnancy I [did not] experience the embryo as decisively internal in Freud's terms, but rather as something inside of me, yet becoming separate from me and of-itself. ... The child I carry for nine months can be defined neither as me or as not-me. Far from existing in the mode of 'inner' space women are powerfully attuned both to 'inner' and 'outer' because for us the two are continuous, not polar.""

"If often he was wrong and at times absurd To us he is no more a person Now but a climate of opinion."

"When Freud turned his searing eye to socialism he saw a delusional philosophy […] To Freud, the communists of the twentieth century were engaged in a perfectionist political project […] The central flaw Freud identified in socialist doctrine was the idea that private property is the primary, if not the sole, source of man’s depravity. With this foundational idea, socialists were able to say that man could be redeemed if, and only if, the institution of private property were abolished and replaced by a kinder, more humane system. [To Freud,] Man’s “depravity” is rooted much deeper in his nature and the abolition of private property would do little or nothing to change his basic constitution. [Freud argued that] socialism has its roots not in love and fraternity, as the socialists themselves would have us believe, but rather in revenge and aggression. According to Freud, “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness” (Freud 1961, 72). Freud pointed to nascent Soviet Russia as evidence of this phenomenon: “it is intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois.”"

"At the core of Freud’s initial theory of psychoanalysis was his proposal of the instinctual system, which included two fundamental classes of instincts. The first were the life-preservative instincts. These included the needs for air, food, water, and shelter and the fears of snakes, heights, and dangerous humans. These instincts served the function of survival. Freud’s second major class of motivators consisted of the sexual instincts. “Mature sexuality” for Freud culminated in the final stage of adult development—the genital stage, which led directly to reproduction, the essential feature of Freud’s mature sexuality. Astute readers might sense an eerie familiarity. Freud’s two major classes of instincts correspond almost precisely to Darwin’s two major theories of evolution. Freud’s life-preservative instincts correspond to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which many refer to as “survival selection.” And his theory of the sexual instincts corresponds closely to Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Freud eventually changed his theory by combining the life and sexual instincts into one group called the “life instincts” and adding a second instinct known as the “death instinct.” He sought to establish psychology as an autonomous discipline, and his thinking moved away from its initial Darwinian anchoring."

"I have become increasingly convinced that some of the popular methods presumed to discover what is in the unconscious cannot be counted upon as reliable methods of obtaining evidence. They often involve the use of symbolism and analogy in such a way that the interpreter can find virtually anything that he is looking for. Freud, for instance, from a simple dream reported by a man in his middle twenties [i.e., Sergei Pankejeff ] as having occurred at 4 years of age drew remarkable conclusions. The 4-year-old boy dreamed of seeing six or seven white wolves sitting in a tree. Freud interpreted the dream in such a way as to convince himself that the patient at 18 months of age had been shocked by seeing his parents have intercourse three times in succession and that this played a major part in the extreme fear of being castrated by his father which Freud ascribed to him at 4 years of age. No objective evidence was ever offered to support this conclusion. Nor was actual fear of castration ever made to emerge into the light of consciousness despite years of analysis."

"In the early twentieth century the concepts of the preconscious and unconscious were made widely popular, especially in literary circles, by Freud, Jung, and their associates, mainly because of the sexual flavor they gave to them. By modern standards, Freud can hardly be regarded as a scientist but rather as a physician who had many novel ideas and who wrote persuasively and unusually well. He became the main founder of the new cult of psychoanalysis."

"A few professional alienists understood his importance, but to most of the public he appeared as some kind of German sexologist, an exponent of free love who used big words to talk about dirty things. At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America forever."

"A special reserve of my anger was directed at Freud (formerly one of my heroes) for having labeled women "neurotic" when they resisted their "natural" roles."

"He had a sharp vision; no illusions lulled him to sleep except for an often exaggerated faith in his own ideas."

"The pathologizing of variation in women's bodies is a deep bias endorsed by many psychological theorists, most certainly by Freud."

"The seventeenth-century Iroquois, as described by the Jesuit missionaries, practiced a dream psychotherapy that was remarkably similar to Freud's discoveries two hundred years later. The Iroquois recognized the existence of an unconscious, the force of unconscious desires, the way in which the conscious mind attempts to repress unpleasant thoughts, the emergence of unpleasant thoughts in dreams, and the mental and physical (psychosomatic) illnesses that may be caused by the frustration of unconscious desires. The Iroquois knew that their dreams did not deal in facts but rather in symbols. ...And one of the techniques employed by the Iroquois seers to uncover the latent meanings behind a dream was free association... The Iroquois faith in dreams... is only somewhat diminished after more than three hundred years. ...The conclusions are inevitable: Had Freud not discovered psychotherapy, then someone else would have."

"(Q: In "When Women Love Men" every woman who is sexually repressed would like to break those taboos and simply be sexually free.) If you read Freud or a little psychoanalysis, you know that society has to control that or there would be total anarchy. But everybody has the same desires."

"Freudianism has become, with its confessionals and penance, its proselytes and converts, with the millions spent on its upkeep, our modern Church. We attack only uneasily, for you never know, on the day of final judgement, whether might be right. Who can be sure that he is as healthy as he can get? Who is functioning at his highest capacity? And who not scared out of his wis? Who doesn't hate his mother and father? Who doesn't compete with his brother? What girl at some time did not wish she were a boy? And for those hardy souls who persist in their skepticism, there is always that dreadful persist in their skepticism, there is always that dreadful word resistance. They are the one who are sickest: it's obvious, they fight it so much."

"Freud captured the imagination of a whole continent and civilization for a good reason. Though on the surface inconsistent, illogical or "way out," his followers, with their cautious logic, their experiments and revisions have nothing comparable to say. Freudianism is so charted so impossible to repudiate because freud grasped the cruecail problem of moddern life: Sexuality."

"Freudianism and Feminism grew from the same soil. It is no accident that Freud began his work at the height of the early feminist movement. We underestimate today how important feminist ideas were at the time. [...] At the turn of the century, then, in social and political thinking, in literary and artistic culture, there was a tremendous ferment of ideas regarding sexuality, marriage and family, and women’s role. Freudianism was only one of the cultural products of this ferment. Both Freudianism and feminism came as reactions to one of the smuggest periods in Western civilization, the Victorian Era, characterized by its family-centredness, and thus its exaggerated sexual oppression and repression. Both movements signified awakening: but Freud was merely a diagnostician for what feminism purports to cure."

"Whether or not we can blame Freud personally, his failure to question society itself was responsible for massive confusion in the disciplines that grew up around this theory. Beset with the insurmountable problems that resulted from trying to put into practice a basic contradiction – the resolution of a problem within the environment that created it – his followers began to attack one component after another of his theory, until they had thrown the baby out with the bath."

"I believe Freud was talking about something real, though perhaps his ideas, taken literally, lead to absurdity – for his genius was poetic rather than scientific; his ideas are more valuable as metaphors than as literal truths."

"That human nature and society can have conflicting demands, and hence that a whole society can be sick, is an assumption which was made very explicitly by Freud, most extensively in his Civilization and Its Discontent. ...he arrives at the concept of "social neurosis." "If the evolution of civilization," he writes, "has such a far-reaching similarity with the development of an individual, and if the same methods are employed in both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of civilization — or epics of it — possibly even the whole of humanity — have become 'neurotic' under the pressure of the civilizing trends?"

"Freud was one of the last representatives of Enlightenment philosophy. He genuinely believed in reason as the one strength man has and which alone could save him from confusion and decay."

"While the implications of Darwin’s views were threatening and unsettling, they were not quite so directly abrasive, not quite so unrespectable, as Freud’s views on infantile sexuality, the ubiquity of perversions, and the dynamic power of unconscious urges."

"While Darwin was satisfied with revising his work after further reflection and absorbing palpable hits by rational critics, while he trusted the passage of time and the weight of his argumentation, Freud orchestrated his wooing of the public mind through a loyal cadre of adherents, founded periodicals and wrote popularizations that would spread the authorized word, dominated international congresses of analysis until he felt too frail to attend them and after that through surrogates like his daughter Anna."

"Professor Bruhl was an old man with a feeble voice. The subjects he treated were mystifying to me. He talked of "Urnings," "Lesbians," and other strange topics. His hearers, too, were strange: feminine-looking men with coquettish manners and women distinctly masculine, with deep voices. They were certainly a peculiar assembly. Greater clarity in these matters came to me later on when I heard Sigmund Freud. His simplicity and earnestness and the brilliance of his mind combined to give one the feeling of being led out of a dark cellar into broad daylight. For the first time I grasped the full significance of sex repression and its effect on human thought and action. He helped me to understand myself, my own needs; and I also realized that only people of depraved minds could impugn the motives or find "impure" so great and fine a personality as Freud."

"But [William] Glen [a distinguished geologist and historian of science at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, CA...] reminded me of the famous statement by Freud that I have often quoted in these essays: The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos."

"According to Freud, our best and highest aspirations are merely symptoms of neurosis. He defines genius as nothing more than sublimated sexual drives, and our subconscious as a sewer inhabited by monsters and vile incestuous desires."

"I am fascinated by the fact that thousands of people continue to idealize and defend [Freud] without really knowing anything about him as a person."

"The founder of modern religious existentialism and the founder of psychoanalysis could not have known one another. Kierkegaard died one half year before the birth of Freud, and it is very unlikely that Freud ever read any of Kierkegaard's works. Yet the two have much more in common than their lifelong preoccupation with the phenomenon of anxiety. The elucidation and treatment of the problem of anxiety in the works of both thinkers — who knew nothing of each other’s work — leads to most surprising results. They confirm each other in their conclusions; they criticize each other in their limitations; and they match each other perfectly."

"I differ from Freud in that I think that most dreams are neither obscure nor bowdlerized, but rather that they are transparent and unedited. They reveal clearly meaningful undisguised and often highly conflictual themes worthy of note by the dreamer (and any interpretive assistant). My position echoes Jung's notion of dreams as transparently meaningful and does away with any distinction between manifest and latent content."

"Your technique of treating your pupils like patients is a blunder. In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent puppies... I am objective enough to see through your little trick"

"The idea that different aspects of visual perception might be handled in separate areas of the brain was predicted by Freud... when he proposed that the inability of certain patients to recognize certain features of the visual world was due not to a sensory deficit, but to a cortical defect that affected their ability to combine aspects of vision into a meaningful pattern. These defects, which Freud called agnosias (loss of knowledge), can be quite specific."

"The third great revolution, the Freudian revolution of Vienna 1900, revealed that we do not consciously control our own actions but are instead driven by unconscious motives. This... later led to the idea that human creativity... stems from conscious access to underlying, unconscious forces."

"The realization that our mental functioning is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same time, including Friedrich Nietzsche... Freud, who was much influenced by both Darwin and Nietzsche... was its most profound and articulate exponent. ...Schnitzler, Klimpt, Kokoschka, and Schiele also discovered and explored new aspects of our unconscious mental life. They understood women better than Freud... and they saw more clearly than Freud the importance of an infant's bonding to its mother. They even realized the significance of the aggressive instinct earlier than Freud did. ...Plato discussed unconscious knowledge ...pointing out that much of our knowledge is inherent in the psyche in latent form. ...Hermann von Helmholtz... advanced the idea that the unconscious plays a critical role in human visual perception."

"One of the most important ways of understanding the unconscious—indeed, as Freud saw it, the royal road to discovering the nature of its contents—is the dream."

"Freud’s cultural influence [on the West] is based, at least implicitly, on the premise that his theory is scientifically valid. But from a scientific point of view, classical Freudian psychoanalysis is dead as both a theory of the mind and a mode of therapy. No empirical evidence supports any specific proposition of psychoanalytic theory.... This is what Freud believed, and so far as we can tell Freud was wrong in every respect. For example, the unconscious mind revealed in laboratory studies of automaticity and implicit memory bears no resemblance to the unconscious mind of psychoanalytic theory... Freud also changed the vocabulary with which we understand ourselves and others. […] While Freud had an enormous impact on 20th century culture, he has been a dead weight on 20th century psychology . . . At best, Freud is a figure of only historical interest for psychologists. He is better studied as a writer, in departments of [Western] language and literature, than as a scientist, in departments of psychology. Psychologists can get along without him […] Of course, Freud lived at a particular period of time, and it might be argued that his theories were valid when applied to European culture at the turn of the last century, even if they are no longer apropos today. However, recent historical analyses show that Freud’s construal of his case material was systematically distorted and biased by his theories of unconscious conflict and infantile sexuality, and that he misinterpreted and misrepresented the scientific evidence available to him. Freud’s theories were not just a product of his time: they were misleading and incorrect even when he published them."

"Whatever you call it, there is a struggle in the universe between good and evil. Now not only is that struggle structured out somewhere in the external forces of the universe, it's structured in our own lives. Psychologists have tried to grapple with it in their way, and so they say various things. Sigmund Freud used to say that this tension is a tension between what he called the id and the superego. Some of us feel that it's a tension between God and man."

"Freud contended that the clitoral orgasm was adolescent, and that upon puberty, when women began having intercourse with men, women should transfer the center of orgasm to the vagina. The vagina, it was assumed, was able to produce a parallel, but more mature, orgasm than the clitoris. Much work was done to elaborate on this theory, but little was done to challenge the basic assumptions. To fully appreciate this incredible invention, perhaps Freud's general attitude about women should first be recalled. Mary Ellmann, in Thinking About Women, summed it up this way: "Everything in Freud's patronizing and fearful attitude toward women follows from their lack of a penis, but it is only in his essay The Psychology of Women that Freud makes explicit ... the deprecations of women which are implicit in his work. He then prescribes for them the abandonment of the life of the mind, which will interfere with their sexual function. When the psychoanalyzed patient is male, the analyst sets himself the task of developing the man's capacities; but with women patients, the job is to resign them to the limits of their sexuality. As Mr. Rieff puts it: For Freud, "Analysis cannot encourage in women new energies for success and achievement, but only teach them the lesson of rational resignation." It was Freud's feelings about women's secondary and inferior relationship to men that formed the basis for his theories on female sexuality. Once having laid down the law about the nature of our sexuality, Freud not so strangely discovered a tremendous problem of frigidity in women. His recommended cure for a woman who was frigid was psychiatric care. She was suffering from failure to mentally adjust to her "natural" role as a woman."

"Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct. Freud has saturated our culture. People operate on Freudian theory in almost everything they do and they're completely unaware of it. I'm really sensitive to how Freudian theory seized the day, because as a novelist I once wrote characters with complete Freudian backgrounds. The basic assumption of Freud is that none of us is responsible for what we are: What we are is a consequence of what our parents did to us, what our culture did to us, what society did to us, the injustices we've suffered. So, in essence, we're victims. What we do as a society is seek simple answers. Freudianism is a simple answer: If what everybody does is simply a result of what was done to them as a child by their parents, or their culture, then they're not really responsible. All we have to do is put them through a 12-step program and they'll cease being a serial killer or whatever. That's so grossly simplistic. And yet it has dominated the thinking of our century, especially our legal system."

"my father was a Freudian analyst, as well as an anthropologist. He became a lay analyst. Freud said that dreaming is extremely important, and I probably absorbed that. Then I read Jung, and Jung has rather specific theories about dreams. Some of them made sense to me; some of them didn't."

"Every time I see a photograph of Freud I wonder how a man who spent his whole life tête-à-tête with sex can look that gloomy."

"Sigmund Freud… Analyze this! Analyze this! Analyze this-this-this!"

"For Freud the ultimate psychological reality is the system of attractions and tensions which attaches the child to parental images, and then through these to all other persons."

"There is no longer any risk that Freudian research will shock us by recalling what there is of the "barbarian" in us; the risk is rather that the findings will be too easily accepted in an "idealist" form."

"At one time, many philosophers held that faultless "laws of thought" were somehow inherent, a priori, in the very nature of mind. This belief was twice shaken in the past century; first when Russell and his successors showed how the logic men employ can be defective, and later when Freud and Piaget started to reveal the tortuous ways in which our minds actually develop."

"Each child makes "internal models" that help them predict their Imprimers' reactions... as an "internalized" system of values—and this could be how people develop what we call ethics, conscience, or moral sense. Perhaps Sigmund Freud had such a process in mind when he suggested that children can "introject" some of their parents' attitudes."

"Much research in psychology has been more concerned with how large groups of people behave than about the particular ways in which each individual person thinks... too statistical. I find this disappointing because, in my view of the history of psychology, far more was learned, for example, when Jean Piaget spent several years observing the ways that three children developed, or when Sigmund Freud took several years to examine the thinking of a rather small number of patients."

"How much of a person's competence is based on knowing which actions not to take? We usually think of a person's abilities in positive terms... But one could take the opposite view that "An expert is someone who rarely slips up—because of knowing what not to do." However, this subject was rarely discussed in the twentieth-century—except, perhaps most notably, in Sigmund Freud's analysis."

"Sigmund Freud's early view of the mind [is] as a system for dealing with conflicts between our instinctive and acquired ideas."

"Freud is all nonsense; the secret of neurosis is to be found in the family battle of wills to see who can refuse the longest to help with the dishes."

"Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals."

"... I think he's crude. I think he's medieval. And I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna ... with an umbrella ... inflicting his dreams upon me."

"As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime."

"When Freud comments on the shocking disparity between State-ethics and private ethics – and his observations on this point are most profound and searching – the historical method at once supplies the best of reasons why that disparity should be looked for."

"J. Robert Oppenheimer: [[wikipedia:Ernest_Lawrence|[Ernest] Lawrence]], you embrace the revolution in physics, can’t you see it everywhere else? Picasso, Stravinsky, Freud, Marx..."

"American feminism’s nose dive began when Kate Millet, that imploding beanbag of poisonous self-pity, declared Freud a sexist. Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies."

"The two deepest thinkers on sex in the twentieth century are Sigmund Freud and D.H. Lawrence. Their reputations as radical liberators were so universally acknowledged that brooding images of Freud and Lawrence in poster form adorned the walls of students in the Sixties."

"Doctor Freud not only used cocaine himself, but he also prescribed it to his patients. And then he drew his generalizations. Cocaine is a strong sexual arouser. That's why everything Freud invented — all those oedipuses, sphinxes and sphincters — is relevant only to a mental dimension of a patient, whose brain is turned to fried-eggs by cocaine. In such a state, one really has only one problem left — what to do first, to screw his mother or to do away with his father. Of course, until his cocaine runs out. And in those times, there were no problems with supplies. But so long as your daily dose is less than three grams, you don't have to fear either the Oedipus complex, nor other things discovered by Freud."

"Freud was, after all, a genius. You can tell that because people still hate him."

"Babies are … obviously narcissistic, but not in the way adults are, not even Spinoza's God, and I am a little afraid that Freud sometimes forgets that the narcissistic baby has no sense of self."

"Yes, you hate me. But didn't I try to atone? If I'd been a real Nazi I'd have chosen Jung, nicht wahr? But I chose Freud instead, the Jew. Freud's vision of the world had no Buchenwalds in it. Buchenwald, according to Freud, once the light was let in, would become a soccer field, fat children would learn flower arranging and solfeggio in the strangling rooms."

"Perhaps the last cultural fad one could still argue against was Karl Marx. But Freud — or Rawls? To argue against such persons is to grant them a premise they spend all of their effort disproving: that reason is involved in their theories."

"Freud … agreed in principle to the importance of sexual health. But he did not want what sexual health entailed, the attack on certain institutions which opposed it."

"Analytic therapy is thus a form of re-education; Freud specifically called it that. It is re-education so far as it eliminates those symptoms through which the patient has tried, mistakenly, to resolve the contradictions in his life."

"What hope there is derives from Freud’s assumption that human nature is not so much a hierarchy of high-low, and good-bad, as his predecessors believed, but rather a jostling democracy of contending predispositions, deposited in every nature in roughly equal intensities. … Psychoanalysis is full of such mad logic; it is convincing only if the student of his own life accepts Freud’s egalitarian revision of the traditional idea of a hierarchical human nature."

"I think he, Christ and Marx are responsible for the world being the way it is—and I confer my thanks upon all of them, as I withhold it."

"Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, but lapsing again quickly into the happy somnolence of imagination. Freud has shown how largely our dreams at night are the pictured fulfilment of our wishes; he has, with an equal measure of truth, said the same of day-dreams; and he might have included the day-dreams which we call beliefs."

"When I came to read Freud himself, I was amazed to discover how sensible his writings are and how much milder than what passes for Freudianism among the pseudo-intelligent."

"We all grow up in a land of giants when we are very small... within us, surely, is some part of our childhood that hasn't disappeared and hasn't grown up. ...In your formative years, you learn from direct experience, absolutely incontrovertible, that there are much larger, much wiser, and much more powerful creatures in the universe than you. And your strongest emotional bonds are to them. ...and you must propitiate them. ...Isn't it... likely that there remains a part of us that is still in the practice of this...? Could that have something to do with prayer specifically and with religious beliefs in general? Well, this is in fact the scandalous view of Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion and other famous books of the first few decades of the twentieth century."

"Freud's view was that "at bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father."... The view here is that we start out with a sense that our parents are omnipotent and omniscient... There's a part of us that has been inducted into a dominance hierarchy and doesn't like the uncertainty of having to deal with things for ourselves. ...one of the many reasons that are given for the advantages of military life and other powerfully hierarchical societies is that it's not required to think for oneself very much. There's something calming about that. ...according to Freud, we then foist upon the cosmos our own emotional predispositions."

"It is now clear that Freud was correct in positing the unconscious mind develops before the conscious and that the early development of the unconscious is equivalent to the genesis of a self-system that operates beneath conscious verbal levels for the rest of the life span."

"Freud seems most accurate when describing people most like the nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie he lived among"

"The two most original and creative figures in modern psychiatry, Freud and Jung were both proscribed by the Nazis … for both, though holding widely divergent views, upheld the value of the individual personality."

"as Freud's views on the childhood source of mental disorder have permeated our culture, there has been mounted a wide campaign of mother-suspicion and mother-discreditation. From Sidney Howard's play The Silver Cord, in the mid-twenties, to Philip Roth's more recent Portnoy's Complaint, our literature has disseminated the idea that American women alternate a diet of husbands with a diet of sons."

"Freud … showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty."

"Probably no theory evolved by man is as absurd as Sigmund Freud's theory of penis envy. To a woman, the penis and scrotum seem superfluous to man's otherwise neatly constructed body. They are almost untidy. She cannot understand that after use the penis is not retractable like an aerial on a portable radio. And as for envy — it would never occur, even to a little girl. Not in her deepest unconscious would she wish to possess a penis; and as to being at a disadvantage compared to a little boy, that is nonsense, for she gets preferential treatment anyway. Freud was merely the victim of training by woman's self-abasement techniques — thanks to his mother, wife, and probably his daughters as well. He confused cause and effect; a woman only says she is worth less than a man. She doesn't really think it. If anyone ought to feel a sense of envy, it is men. They should be jealous of women's power. But, of course, they never are, for they glory in their powerlessness."

"Many aspects of Freudian theory are indeed out of date, and they should be: Freud died in 1939, and he has been slow to undertake further revisions. His critics, however, are equally behind the times, attacking Freudian views of the 1920s as if they continue to have some currency in their original form."

"The scientific debate on reports and recollections of child sexual abuse goes back to at least 1896, when Freud argued that repression of early childhood seduction (sexual molestation) had etiological significance for adult hysteria […]. He later recanted, saying that he was wrong about the repression of actual experiences of child sexual abuse and that it was fantasies (of sexual contact with parents or other adults) that drove the hysteria [..]. The research [in peer-reviewed publications in the 1980s and ‘90s] revisited the issue of repression of child sexual abuse and suggest that a large proportion of women sexually abused in childhood have no recall of the abuse. These studies support Freud's originally hypothesized connection between child sexual abuse, no recall of the abuse, and high levels of psychological symptoms in adulthood, at least in clinical samples."

"Freud is constantly claiming to be scientific. But what he gives is speculation — something prior even to the formation of an hypothesis."

"Wisdom is something I would never expect from Freud. Cleverness, certainly; but not wisdom."

"Freud … has not given an explanation of the ancient myth. What he has done is to propound a new myth."

"Freud is an interesting case in the history of psychology. To many he is the embodiment of cultural relativism, with the great emphasis he placed on the role of the parents and family in the shaping of an individual’s personality. However, Freud deserves mention for two reasons. First, unlike many subsequent psychologists Freud was interested in ultimate questions; he was preoccupied by finding out why people behaved as they did, not simply how. Second, although many of these accounts were distinctly non-Darwinian (e.g. the Oedipus complex in which a male child desires to kill his father), some of his ideas are much more in line with recent Darwinian psychology."

"Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of psychic activity (since, at least from man’s birth until his death, thought offers no solution of continuity, the sum of the moments of the dream, from the point of view of time, and taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking) has still today been so grossly neglected."

"Candor is always a double-edged sword; it may heal or it may separate."

"People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding — a thing which is rather surmised and never spoken than known and clothed in words."

"Experience shows that this transference very soon becomes the source of resistance. Love is only a seeking for love in return, Do, ut des [I give, that thou shalt give]. If the patient notices that love is not given in return or that it has not reached that degree which he expected, defiance enters in place of the love, which in turn manifests itself as active resistance."

"An intense, unyielding stubbornness hides beneath an apparent obedience (the patient brings a vast number of dreams; his associations become endless; he produces an inexhaustible number of recollections, which seem to him very important but are actually of little moment; or he goes off upon some byroad suggested by the analyst and leads the latter into a blind alley). The child manifests the same reactions of defiance and obedience. The child, too, can hide his stubbornness behind an excessive docility (the parent's command: You must be industrious. Industry may become a mania so that the child neither goes out nor has time to sleep). Obedience is the giving up of the resistance; obstinacy the setting up of fresh resistances. This resistance is externally active. We have in recent years had sufficient opportunity to observe the law of resistance (the passive resistance). Activity and defiance show great differences. Defiance is the reaction against activity (aggression) of the environment. It may then manifest itself actively or passively and stands in the service of the defensive tendency of the ego. Every resistance reveals the ego (one's own) in conflict with another."

"We had many interesting conversations and he introduced me to his young wife. He confided to me that he had married her because she was a fanatical atheist. Atheism was the main topic of their conversations. Such fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion. The truly convinced atheist does not emphasize his atheism. He does not talk about it and is careful to avoid blasphemies. The man was interested in dreams and each morning he related several of his dreams. They were full of religious symbols. I was cautious not to reveal to him the meaning of his dreams; such off-hand analyses are always dangerous.... The banker did not want to be disturbed in his supposed atheism.... His atheism was a reaction formation established upon an ineradicable religious belief."

"Anxiety is fear of one's self."

"In reality, we are still children. We want to find a playmate for our thoughts and feelings."

"Many an attack of depression is nothing but the expression of regret at having to be virtuous."

"Love at first sight is a revival of an infantile impression. The first love object reappears in a different disguise."

"Many times I had spoken about "mental bipolarity" and proved that our affects are bipolar. Desire and disgust, love and hate, will-to-power and will-to-submission, are composed of negative and positive parts like the current of electricity. My contention was that any human affect has its own counterpart. Later Bleuler described this fact as "ambivalence," a term that was accepted by everybody, whereas previously they had laughed at my discovery, and given me the nickname "Stekel with his Bipolarity"."

"Truth is not always the best basis for happiness. There are certain lies which may constitute a far better and more secure foundation of happiness. There are people who perish when their eyes are opened."

"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."

"Stekel enthusiastically cooperated with Freud in what could be called a symbiotic or antagonistic relationship and was driven out of the psychoanalytic community when he began to question the fundamental inequality of their respective roles."

"The student of psychoanalysis can see in Stekel's notes how many of his own complexes remained obscure to him, can detect his unresolved narcissism, his overcompensated feelings of inadequacy; will smile when he reads that the man who was a master in ferreting out other people's repressions believed that he had hardly any himself."

"The mother can feel herself the center of attention, for her child's eyes follow her everywhere. A child cannot run away from her as her own mother once did."

"Accommodation to parental needs often (but not always) leads to the "as-if personality." This person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected of him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to him behind this false self. He cannot develop and differentiate his true self, because he is unable to live it. Understandably, this person will complain of a sense of emptiness, futility, or homelessness, for the emptiness is real. A process of emptying, impoverishment, and crippling of his potential actually took place. The integrity of the child was injured when all that was alive and spontaneous in him was cut off."

"The true self cannot communicate because it has remained unconscious, and therefore undeveloped, in its inner prison. The company of prison warders does not encourage lively development. It is only after it is liberated that the self begins to be articulate, to grow, and to develop its creativity. Where there had been only fearful emptiness or equally frightening grandiose fantasies, an unexpected wealth of vitality is now discovered. This is not a homecoming, since this home has never before existed. It is the creation of home."

"Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history."

"Everyone probably knows about depressive moods from personal experience since they may be expressed as well as hidden by psychosomatic suffering. It is easy to notice, if we pay attention, that they hit almost with regularity—whenever we suppress an impulse or an unwanted emotion."

"If a person is able … to experience the reality that he was never loved as a child for what he was but was instead needed and exploited for his achievements, success, and good qualities—and that he sacrificed his childhood for this form of love—he will be very deeply shaken, but one day he will feel the desire to end these efforts. He will discover in himself a need to live according to his true self and no longer be forced to earn “love” that always leaves him empty-handed, since it is given to his false self—something he has begun to identify and relinquish."

"The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful, or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience, including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, despair, and grief. But this freedom cannot be achieved if its childhood roots are cut off."

"When our children can consciously experience their early helplessness and rage, they will no longer need to ward off these feelings, in turn, with the exercise of power over others."

"Parents are indeed capable of routinely torturing their children without anyone interceding."

"Hard as it is to believe, in the entire world there is not a single faculty in which a degree is offered in the study of psychic injuries in childhood."

"Psychoanalysis does not distort the truth by accident. It does so by necessity. It is an effective system for the suppression of the truth about childhood, a truth feared by our entire society. Not surprisingly, it enjoys great esteem among intellectuals... Fear of the truth about child abuse is a leitmotif of nearly all forms of therapy known to me."

"The danger does not lie with individuals, however criminal they may be. Far more, it lies in the ignorance of our entire society, which confirms these people in the lies that they were obliged to believe in childhood. Teachers, attorneys, doctors, social workers, priests, and other respected representatives of society protect parents from the mistreated child's every accusation and see to it that the truth about child abuse remains concealed. Even the child protection agencies insist that this crime, and this crime alone, should go unpunished."

"It is the resentment of the past, we are told, that is making us ill. In those by now familiar groups in which addicts and their relations go into therapy together, the following belief is invariably expressed. Only when you have forgiven your parents for everything they did to you can you get well. Even if both your parents were alcoholic, even if they mistreated, confused, exploited, beat, and totally overloaded you, you must forgive."

"The majority of therapists work under the influence of destructive interpretations culled from both Western and Oriental religions, which preach forgiveness to the once-mistreated child. Thereby, they create a new vicious circle for people who, from their earliest years, have been caught in the vicious circle of pedagogy. For forgiveness does not resolve latent hatred and self-hatred but rather covers them up in a very dangerous way."

"In my own therapy it was my experience that it was precisely the opposite of forgiveness —namely, rebellion against mistreatment suffered, the recognition and condemnation of my parents' destructive opinions and actions, and the articulation of my own needs— that ultimately freed me from the past."

"By refusing to forgive, I give up all illusions. Why should I forgive, when no one is asking me to? I mean, my parents refuse to understand and to know what they did to me. So why should I go on trying to understand and forgive my parents and whatever happened in their childhood, with things like psychoanalysis and transactional analysis? What's the use? Whom does it help? It doesn't help my parents to see the truth. But it does prevent me from experiencing my feelings, the feelings that would give me access to the truth. But under the bell-jar of forgiveness, feelings cannot and may not blossom freely."

"I cannot conceive of a society in which children are not mistreated, but respected and lovingly cared for, that would develop an ideology of forgiveness for incomprehensible cruelties. This ideology is indivisible with the command "Thou shalt not be aware" [of the cruelty your parents inflicted to you] and with the repetition of that cruelty on the next generation."

"The possibility of change depends on whether there is a sufficient number of enlightened witnesses to create a safety net for the growing consciousness of those who have been mistreated as children, so that they do not fall into the darkness of forgetfulness, from which they will later emerge as criminals or the mentally ill."

"But who is there to help when all the "helpers" fear their own personal history? Bogus traditional morality, destructive religious interpretations, and confusion in our methods of childrearing all make this experience harder and hinder our initiative. Without a doubt, the pharmaceutical industry also profits from our blindness and despondency."

"If one day the secret of childhood were to become no longer a secret, the state would be able to save immense sums that it spends on hospitals, psychiatric clinics, and prisons maintaining our blindness. That this might deliberately happen is almost too incredible a thought."

"A genuine relationship is possible only if both partners can admit their feelings, experience them and communicate them to each other without fear."

"In the integrated relational model presented here, sexuality and relational issues are not seen as alternative foci. Rather, sexuality is regarded as a central realm in which relational conflicts are shaped and played out."

"The relational model provides different categories, different underlying structures into which experience can be organized. Here the establishment of strong connections to others, in reality or in fantasy, is presumed to be primary. Forms of relationship are seen as fundamental, and life is understood largely as an array of metaphors for expressing and playing out relational patterns: discovery, penetration, domination, surrender, control, longing, evasion, revelation, envelopment, merger, differentiation, and so on. The body is still centrally important. Sexuality and bodily experiences are viewed as particularly apt arenas for this activity, since sexuality is enormously multiform and plastic. The number of different body parts, the variability of interactions, the poignancy of the sensations, the immense number of combinations — the almost infinite variety of human sexual possibilities make this an enormously fertile reservoir of metaphors for expressing different types of relationships, different configurations of connections, between self and others."

"When sexuality is operating in the service of intimacy, it is the fact that it is the particular other who is responding to the vulnerability inherent in sustaining desire that generates intensity and meaning. It is precisely the physiological intensity of the sexual response that lends the sexual encounter its dramatic interpersonal significance. This suggests that it is a mistake to regard the role of sexuality in relation to needs for relatedness and attachment as a "sexualization," which implies that sex is carrying something that can and somehow should be attended to in other ways. (Although this is sometimes the case.) The distinction between preoedipal and oedipal developmental levels often implies such an artificial and misleading separation between sexual experience and issues of attachment and connection. There is perhaps nothing better suited for experiencing and deepening the drama of search and discovery than the mutual arousal, sustaining, and quenching of sexual desire."

"One of the most profound and universal realizations of later childhood, a realization that probably is never totally integrated, is the discovery that one's parents are not necessarily representative of the human species, that one has grown up in an idiosyncratically structured family with its own peculiarities and dramas."

"If the deepest, most fundamental levels of the analysand's pathology are to be reached, the relationship with the analyst becomes the vehicle for the establishment and articulation of bad-object relations. The analyst cannot enter the analysand's world in any form other than as a familiar (that is, "bad," or less than gratifying, object). This is true even though there often are elaborate resistances to the experience of the transference. Otherwise the analysis does not touch the analysand deeply, offers no promise, no hope for connection and transformation."

"Love and desire are both thoroughly human. Our problem with them is that they orient us toward very different goals. Love seeks control, stability, continuity, certainty. Desire seeks surrender, adventure, novelty, the unknown. In love we are searching for points of attachment, anchoring, something we know we can count on. In desire we are searching both for missing, disowned pieces of ourselves and for something beyond ourselves, outside the borders of self-recognition that, under ordinary circumstances, we protect so fiercely.Erotic passion destabilizes one's sense of self. When we find someone intensely arousing who makes possible unfamiliar experiences of ourselves and an otherness we find captivating, we are drawn into the disorienting loopiness of self/other. We tend to want to control these experiences and the others who inspire them. Thus emotional connection tends to degrade into strategies for false security that suffocate desire."

"From this perspective, the common experience of the fading of romance over time may have less to do with the inevitable undercutting of idealization by reality and familiarity than with the increasing danger of allowing oneself episodic, passionate idealization in a relationship that one depends on for security and predictability. Intense excitement about another is a dangerous business; it often is much safer to surrender to it with a person one cannot possibly spend much time with or will never see again. Sustaining desire for something important from someone important is the central danger of emotional life. What is so dangerous about desiring someone you have is that you can lose him or her. Desire for someone unknown and unobtainable operates as a defense against desire for someone known and obtainable, therefore capable of being lost."

"Rather than being a measure and consequence of the power of naturally occurring sexual desire, pornography is a measure of the extent to which people tend to prefer controlling desire through contrivance rather than being surprised by desire that spontaneously arises."

"Sexual dysfunction often plays a key role in risk management by couples over time. It seems crucial not to get too excited about the other, and diminished excitement serves the purposes at once of self-protection and revenge. I was once excited about you, the diminished arousal seems to be expressing, but there is not much to get excited about now. Often lovers work together to pretend they are safer (even if also a bit sadder) over time, by collapsing their expectations of each other in collusively arranged, choreographed routine. Each feels the other is less exciting because of being so familiar and predictable. And each acts towards the other in as wholly and artificially predictable a fashion as possible. But, of course, lowering expectations also empties out passion. No risk, no gain."

"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 important thing is not that the unconscious determines neurosis- of that one Freud can quite happily, like Pontius Pilot, wash his hands. Sooner or later, something would have been found, humeral determinate, for example- for Freud, it would be quite immaterial. For what the unconscious does it to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with a real- a real that may not be determined."

"It is not without effect that, even in a public speech, one directs one's attention at subjects, touching them at what Freud calls the navel- the navel of the dreams, he writes , to designate their ultimately unknown centre- which is simply, like the anatomical navel that represents it, that gap of which I have already spoken."

"Discontinuity, then, is the essential form in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon-discontinuity, in which something is manifested as a vacillation."

"Nature provides-I must use the word- signifies, and these signifies organize human relation in a creative way, providing them with structures and shaping them."

"There are thoughts in this field of the beyond of consciousness, and it is impossible to represent these thoughts other than in the same homology of determination in which the subject of the I think finds himself in relation to the articulation of the I doubt."

"By, the subject, where it was, where it has always been, the dream. The ancients recognized all kinds of things in dreams, including, on occasion, messages from the gods—and why not? The ancients made something of these messages from the gods. And, anyway—perhaps you will glimpse this in what I shall say later—who knows, the gods may still speak through dreams. Personally, I don't mind either way. What concerns us is the tissue that envelops these messages, the network in which, on occasion, something is caught. Perhaps the voice of the gods makes itself heard, but it is a long time since men lent their ears to them in their original state—it is well known that the ears are made not to hear with."

"Pleasure limits the scope of human possiblity-the pleasure principle is a principle of homeostasis. Desire, on the other hand, finds its boundary, its strict relation, its limit, and it is in the relation to this limit that it is sustained as such, crossing the threshold imposed by the pleasure principle."

"It is on this step that depends the fact that one can call upon the subject to re-enter himself in the unconscious—for, after all, it is important to know who one is calling. It is not the soul, either mortal or immortal, which has been with us for so long, nor some shade, some double, some phantom, nor even some supposed psycho-spherical shell, the locus of the defences and other such simplified notions. It is the subject who is called— there is only he, therefore, who can be chosen. There may be, as in the parable, many called and few chosen, but there will certainly not be any others except those who are called. In order to understand the Freudian concepts, one must set out on the basis that it is the subject who is called—the subject of Cartesian origin. This basis gives its true function to what, in analysis, is called recollection or remembering. Recollection is not Platonic reminiscence —it is not the return of a form, an imprint, a eidos of beauty and good,a supreme truth, coming to us from the beyond. It is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the lowest encounters and of all the talking crowd that precedes us, at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way, but which cannot elude constraints whose echoes, model, style can be found, curiously enough, in contemporary mathematics."

"The father, the Name-of-the-father, sustains the structure of desire with the structure of the law- but the inheritance of the father is that which Kierkegaard designates for us, namely, his sin."

"Because very few cultural theorists have a background in psychology, it can be difficult for them to assess the strengths or weaknesses of Lacanian accounts. Too much, then, has to be taken on trust or distrust. [...] Lacan’s psychological ideas, despite being widely used, have seldom been evaluated directly in terms of their evidential bases."

"Whether used in the clinic or the seminar room, Lacan's ideas are hopelessly inadequate because they are predicated on a false theory of human nature."

"As I became more familiar with Lacan's teachings, the internal contradictions and lack of external confirmation became ever more apparent. And as I tried to make sense of Lacan's bizarre rhetoric, it became clearer to me that the obfuscatory language did not hide a deeper meaning, but was in fact a direct manifestation of the confusion inherent in Lacan's own thought. But whereas most of Lacan's commentators preferred to ape the master's style, and perpetuate the obscurity, I wanted to dissipate the haze and expose whatever was underneath – even if it meant seeing that the emperor was naked."

"Like all British children, I had been given a smattering of physics, chemistry and biology at school, but this consisted solely of isolated facts and figures, without any overall view. Even worse, my high school science gave me no understanding of the process of scientific discovery, the dialectic of evidence and argument. I went on to study languages and linguistics at university, but even here the emphasis was just as much on literature as on the scientific study of language. It is hardly surprising, then, that when I came across the ideas of Jacques Lacan, shortly after finishing my first degree, I was unable to spot their serious defects. Now I understand more about how science works, those defects are so crashingly obvious that I sometimes feel ashamed of myself for being so naïve."

"Lacan's most widely quoted maxim is, “The unconscious is structured like a language,” and like that sentence, Lacan's whole oeuvre rests on a certain idea of language. His proclaimed "return to Freud" meant remedying Freud's failure to use "modern" linguistics. "Modern" linguistics for Lacan, however, means turn-of-the-century linguistics---specifically, Ferdinand de Saussure's. The trouble is that very little of Saussure's linguistics stands up today, after nearly a century's work in linguistics. [...] In writing this essay, for example, I had trouble finding linguistic texts that even refer to Saussure. Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern linguists, only by literary critics, Lacanians, and the occasional philosopher."

"Lacan goes wrong by relying (quite uncritically!) on Saussure's signifier-signified conception of language. It is understandable that Lacan, when he began to write in the 1930s, should learn Saussure's turn-of-the-century linguistics. But even at the end of his life he and now his followers write about signifiers and signifieds as though the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics had never happened. Contemporary literary theorists tirelessly quote Saussure. But why? Today's linguists no more use Saussure's model than today's physicists use the concept of phlogiston. I do not mean to suggest that linguists have all adopted Chomsky's views. They are still controversial, and he would be the first to acknowledge that they are subject to revision in the light of further evidence. Linguists who reject Chomsky's ideas, however, are trying to offer alternatives or to go beyond Chomsky. They are not turning back to Saussure. My point is not that Chomsky is right but that Saussure and Lacan are wrong."

"Saussure was trying to de-psychologize linguistics. But Lacan re- psychologizes Saussure's linguistics. Lacan is using a formal theory of language to explain empirical events in the mind. Saussure was trying precisely not to say what goes on in your or my mind when we understand a word or make up a sentence, and, within the limits of his theory, he succeeded. Lacan, however, applies Saussure's carefully apsychological theory to describe precisely what it avoided describing."

"Where are the flows in Lacan? Where would one be less likely to find anything that flows than in the gnarled post-Saussurian fetish of the signifier that dominates his texts?"

"Lacan's synthesis of Freud, Hegel and structuralism was often held to contain deep truths about the nature of desire in general and the way women live, or have lived, should or should not live in particular."

"Lacan, Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction."

"Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight."

"Robert Caserio recently said to me, “The whole profession has become a vast mimicry. The idea that there is open debate is an absolute fiction. There is only the Foucault monologue, the Lacan monologue, the Derrida monologue. There is no room for creative disagreement. No deviation from what is approved is tolerated.” These monologues are really one, the monotonous drone of the School of Saussure, which has cast its delusional inky cloud over modern academic thought. Never have so many been wrong about so much. It is positively idiotic to imagine that there is no experience outside of language. … It has been a truism of basic science courses for decades in America that the brain has multiple areas of function and that language belongs only to specific areas, injured by trauma and restored by surgery or speech therapy."

"Lacan portrayed this break [of his psychoanalytic school from the International Psychoanalytical Association] as the result of an ideological conflict between the old school and the progressive, true Freudians represented by himself. Actually it was about his greed. He needed to maximise his throughput of patients in order to finance his lavish lifestyle. (He died a multi-millionaire.) He started to shorten his sessions, without a pro rata reduction of fee, to as little as ten minutes. Unfortunately, Freudian theory fixes the minimum length of a session at 50 minutes. Lacan was therefore repeatedly cautioned by the IPA."

"[Lacan’s] clients committed suicide at a rate that would have alarmed a man armed with less robust self-confidence. He claimed that it was due to the severity of the cases he took on but it may also have had something to do with the way he would start and stop analysis at whim and would sometimes cast aside, at very short notice, people who had been under his ‘care’ for years."

"On the principle of credo ut intelligam his disciples still believed [Lacan] even when, in his last few years, he was manifestly suffering from multi-infarct dementia."

"If [Lacan’s biographer] Elizabeth Roudinesco’s account is accurate, [Lacan] must have made a hash of his first case presentation to the Société Neurologique: his patient, she says, supposedly had ‘pseudobulbar disorders of the spinal cord’—a neurological impossibility. (The innocence with which Roudinesco reports all kinds of clinical cock-ups makes this book a particularly disturbing read for a medic.) Abandoning neurology was obviously a wise career move. Unfortunately, though he lacked all the qualities necessary to make a half-way decent doctor (e.g., kindness, common sense, humility, clinical acumen and solid knowledge), Lacan did not abandon medicine altogether, only its scientific basis."

"Lacan's writings, in addition to being bad or lunatic psychiatry, are also bad mathematics."

"Lacan's thought certainly does possess a complex logical pattern. Concepts which have been introduced in one place are rarely if ever clarified by references to them elsewhere in his writing. But they are continually modified and overlaid with yet more layers of complexity and ostensible significance."

"The Lacan phenomenon is a bizarre one. Attempts to understand it have not been helped by the insistence of many of Lacan's apologists that the 'pure' theoretical issues can be separated from Lacan's therapeutic practice and the extraordinary manner in which he behaves towards his disciples. Such an attitude is no more defensible in the case of Lacan than it is in the case of Freud himself. Indeed, perhaps the only real resemblance between Lacan and Freud is that both played the role of prophet or messiah with extraordinary effectiveness and both attracted disciples who treated their person as sacred and their word as law."

"There can be little doubt that the fear of not being at a sufficiently high intellectual level, of having missed something which 'everyone important sees to feel is so crucial' has played a very large role in Lacan's success. Lacan himself - apparently quite deliberately - played upon this fear. When he appeared in a two-part television special in France in 1974, he began the programme by announcing that 'most of his audience were surely idiots, and that he was surely in error in trying to make them understand.' Such intellectual bullying is characteristic of Lacan's style. In his seminars, highly intelligent people were persuaded to listen attentively to propositions which were for the most part obscure, incomprehensible and entirely without explanatory value."

"As a Marxist, let me add: if anyone tells you Lacan is difficult, this is class propaganda by the enemy."

"In the movement of the proteron te phusei may be found the heart of thought, that which remains veiled in what thought says and which speaking obeys as some secret command. But already, when it speaks, thought no longer speaks what moves it. It no longer retains that emotion even as a fault of speech, as a dark night out of which it would expect to burst forth. Thought excludes the heart that moves it. That which makes thought live is spoiled, set outside of it. But it does not know this."

"The last two centuries were familiar with the myth of progress. Our own century has adopted the myth of modernity. The one myth has replaced the other. ... Men ceased to believe in progress; but only to pin their faith to more tangible realities, whose sole original significance had been that they were the instruments of progress. ...This exaltation of the present ... is a corollary of that very faith in progress which people claim to have discarded. The present is superior to the past, by definition, only in a mythology of progress. Thus one reatins the corollary while rejecting the principle. There is only one way of retaining a position of whose instability one is conscious. One must simply refrain from thinking—and surrender oneself to the vortex of the corollary."

"The vulgarity of the myth of modernity is plainly revealed by the preeminence in its mythology of the factors of quantity; to be modern is always to beat the record in some respect. Distinction, therefore, is opposed to modernity as quality is to quantity."

"The first of men did no more than take the fruit of the tree, and that, we are told, was sin. Modern humanity "tortures the tree in order the sooner to obtain its fruit.""

"To have lived a full life is to have learned to love, that is, to give greatly. It is to have learned how to make the gesture that some scholars have called oblative, opposing this term to captative; as though contrasting the gesture of offering with the gesture of seizing."

"The text is a practice that could be compared to political revolution: the one brings about in the subject what the other introduces into society."

"My two favorite theorists are Kristeva and Bakhtin, both of them because they see writing as infinite possibility, in which one plays with cultural and linguistic conventions rather than being limited by them."

"In the realm of emotion, early childhood experiences have been suspected to be at the root of psychopathology since the earliest theories of Sigmund Freud. Freud's psychoanalytic method aimed at tracing the threads of a patient's earliest childhood memories. Franz Alexander added the goal of allowing the patient to relive these memories in a less pathological environment, a process known as a corrective emotional experience. Although neuroscientists have no data demonstrating that this method operates at the level of neurons ad circuits, emerging results reveal a profound effect of early caregivers on an adult individual's emotional repertoire."

"In other words, gurus generalize from their own experience. Some gurus are inclined to believe that all humanity should accept their vision: others allege that, when the last trump sounds, their own followers will be saved, whilst the majority of mankind will remain unredeemed. This apparently arrogant assumption is closely connected with certain features of personality displayed by a variety of gurus."

"We must consider the possibility that the conviction expressed by gurus is less absolute than it appears in that their apparent confidence need boosting by the response of followers. As we shall see, some gurus avoid the stigma of being labelled insane or ever of being confined in a mental hospital because they have acquired a group of disciples who accept them as prophets rather than perceiving them as deluded."

"Constructing or adopting a belief system in which one is either God's prophet or God himself inflates the ego to monstrous proportions. Koresh was more deeply concerned with religion, Jim Jones with racial equality and an egalitarian society. But both compensated for isolation and lack of love in childhood by becoming infatuated with power, and both ended up with delusions of their own divinity."

"Gurdjieff then suddenly announced that he was going to Tuapse, on the Black Sea. The dutiful de Hartmanns followed. Their account of an exhausting nocturnal walk forced on them by Gurdjieff in spite of the fact that they were unsuitably clad and also dead tired is a striking example of the autocratic and unreasonable demands which Gurdjieff made on his followers which they nevertheless slavishly obeyed. Olga de Hartmann's feet were so swollen and bleeding that she could not put on her shoes and had to walk barefoot. Thomas de Hartmann had missed a night's sleep because he had been ordered to stay on guard. Their limbs ached and they were both exhausted; but they went on nevertheless."

"Gurdjieff was a dictator. He had the capacity so completely to humiliate his disciples that grown men would burst into tears. He might then show the victim special favour. He demanded unques tioning obedience to his arbitrary commands. For example, he once suddenly announced that none of his followers might speak to each other within the Institute. All communication must be by means of the special physical movements he had taught them. Gurdjieff sometimes imposed fasting for periods up to a week without any lessening of the work load. His authority was such that his followers convinced themselves that these orders were for their own good. Those less infatuated are likely to think that, like other gurus, Gurdjieff enjoyed the exercise of power its own sake."

"Reading his discourses made me realize that Rajneesh was a sad loss. He had an extraordinary range of knowledge and a vision of how life should be lived, but he proved incapable of following his own precepts."

"In 20th-century England, an individual announcing that he was the son of God and would return after death in glory would probably attract psychiatric attention; but earlier generations might have regarded such claims as unsurprising."

"Few subsequent gurus seem to have matched the simplicity and directness of Jesus′s message; but it must be remembered that we have very little information. If the world had possessed a detailed biographical account of Jesus, an authentic picture of what he was like as a man, it is quite possible that Christianity would not have been estabished as a world religion."

"The self in the psychoanalytic sense is variable and by no means coextensive with the limits of the personality as assessed by an observer of the social field."

"States the self may expand far beyond the borders of the individual, or it may shrink and become identical with a single one of his actions or aims."

"The antithesis to narcissism is not the object relation but object love."

"The creative individual, whether in art or science, is less psychologically separated from his surroundings than the non-creative one; the "I-you" barrier is not as clearly defined."

"I want to read people....the most interesting thing in nature is the human soul, and the greatest thing a person can do is to heal these souls, sick souls."

"Hold tight to the conviction that a woman is a human being too, who can be independent....Also realize that equality must exist between men and women."

"I had to get married to learn how to see the world properly."

"[Regarding looking at his inkblots:] Color is the enemy of form."

"[Said as he was dying:] In a way it is a beautiful thing, to leave in the middle of life, but it is bitter. I have done my part, now let other do theirs."

"He said to me [his wife]: "Tell me, what kind of person was I? You know, when you're living your life you don't think much about the soul, about your self. But when you're dying, that's what you want to know." I told him: "You were a noble, faithful, honest, gifted man.""

"The subject is given one plate [inkblot] after the other and asked, "What might this be?""

"Almost all subjects regard the experiment as a test of imagination. This conception is so general that it becomes, practically, a condition of the experiment. Nevertheless, the interpretation of the figures actually has little to do with imagination, and it is unnecessary to consider imagination a prerequisite....The interpretation of the chance forms falls in the field of perception and apperception rather than imagination."

"As truly as I'd love a friend, I always have loved you, riddling life, whether I've laughed with you or wept, whether you have brought me pleasure or strife.Even in your sorrow I love you, and, when you scatter me through space, I will tear myself out of your arms as a friend from a dear friend's embrace.With all my strength I cling to you! Let all your fire enkindle me. Even in the heat of battle, let me unravel your mysteries.Thousands of years to live and think! In your arms I long to remain. And, when you have no more joy to give -- very well -- you still have your pain."

"I can neither live according to models, nor shall I ever be able to provide a model for anyone else. On the contrary, what I shall quite certainly do is to shape my own life according to myself, whatever may come of it. In this I have no principle to put forth, but something much more wonderful -- something that is within oneself and is hot with sheer life, and rejoices and wants to come out."

"You also write: you had always thought that such complete devotion to purely intellectual goals was only meant to be a "transition" for me. What do you mean by "transition"? If other goals stand behind it, for which I must give up the most glorious and difficult thing on Earth, namely freedom, then I want to stay in this transition, because I won't give that up."

"Let us see whether the vast majority of the so-called "insurmountable barriers" that the world draws are not harmless chalk lines!"

"Conversing with Nietzsche is uncommonly lovely . . . The content of a conversation of ours really exists in what is not quite spoken but emerges from our each approaching the other half way. He gave me his hand and said earnestly and with feeling, "Never forget that it would be a calamity if you did not carve a memorial to your full innermost mind in the time left to you.""

"The optimistic nature finds joy in the very feeling for life; the pessimistic nature finds a feeling for life only in joy."

"What does not engage our feelings does not long engage our thoughts either."

""The grave is not the end. From the graves of those we love most and where, with those we love most, are buried all our selfish drives and desires, we must draw the strength to dedicate outselves wholly and unreservedly to the great purpose of our life: Behold: this is my religion." -- Kuno, p. 308"

"Once upon a time, everything was based on trust, free from worry or care; now everything stands in doubt. One upon a time, the wondrous was taken for granted; now everything that had been taught her -- even the most obvious and certain -- appears gnarled and incomprehensible. In such a moment, a child helplessly gropes for the hand of the adult in order to find guidance and direction; but another type of childlikeness, intimately related to the ideals of life, can rapidly gather strength and masculine force. Far from subduing Nora or attuning her to compromise, the first decisive conflict acts upon her like a battle cry . . . Resistance and bravery harden into armor. She has grasped that the peaks of wonder in life do not appear as readily as the fairies who awaken Sleeping Beauty; in life peaks must be conquered. That insight she is willing to put to the test . . ."

"A genuine Nietzsche study would require the psychology of religion that would spotlight the meaning of his being, his suffering, and his self-induced bliss. His entire development, as it were, derived from his loss of belief and therefore from his emotions that attend the death of God. These tremendous emotions reverberate in his writings up to the final work, the fourth part of Also Sprach Zarathustra, which was composed on the threshold of madness. The possibility of finding some substitutions for the lost God by means of the most varied forms of self-idolization constituted the story of his mind, his works, and his illness. (p. 26)"

"Slowly Ruth got up; an expression of utter surprise appeared on her face. Doubt, disbelief, even horror were mirrored in it. She felt as though she should call a distant friend, Erik, to come to her aid against this unknown assailant. But then she realized that it was he, it was Erik, who stood before her. (p. 326)"

"It was in September, the quietest time of year in Paris. The world of rank and fashion hid in the seaside resorts; visitors were being scared away in droves by the stifling heat. Nevertheless, the crowds that flooded the boulevards in the close evening air were so large and checkered that it would have looked like high season in any other city. (p. 3)"

""For we women who have only recently been allowed to study, it is not at all as you say," she countered, totally convinced of her position. "For us it is not an ascetic kind of life or a retreat behind a desk. How could it be -- when it now enables us to join the battle for our freedom and our rights and to enter into the fullness of life? Those of us who elect to study so not do it with our heads or our intelligence only; no -- we do wit with all our will-power and our total humanity. Our gain is not just knowledge but a new hold on life with all its emotions. What you describe as science sounds like an activity for very old men, who have finished with life as such. Perhaps it is you who are old and senile. Among us women, it is the young, the strong, and the cheerful who become inspired." -- (Fenitschka) p. 9"

""How do I imagine love? This is quite uncomplicated -- very simple and wholesome. I would compare it with things that are least demonic or romantic, like the daily bread that is blessed and stills our hunger, like the stream of air that comes into our home to refresh us. In one word, with that which is most important, most beautiful, and most natural, on which we most depend and about which we do not need to engage in empty rhetoric." -- (Fenitschka) p. 19"

"Why did he have such a rough picture of her? It was strange that he found it so difficult to comprehend women in the manifold ways of their humanity and not just schematic way, as representations of their gender. Whether he idealized them, or regarded them as diabolic, a man always interpreted women's behavior too simply and personally, based on some chance reaction to himself. Maybe the notion that woman was sphinx-like stemmed from the sole fact that her full humanity, in no way inferior to man's, could not be grasped with such artificial simplifications. p. 25"

""Listen to me," she exclaimed resolutely, "why are you putting on this farce? Why are you treating me like a breakable doll with whom you can play all kinds of games, as long as you pack her safely in cotton? I know very well that you know the whole story. Well then, you know it all. I cam here because I had forgotten something here in my room the other day. Because I do have a room here. And last night -- last night it was I who was getting into a sleigh with a man whom I love." -- (Fenitschka) p. 30"

""There was no way in which I could have intended that [to get married]!" she interrupted him. "Tell me, would one of you [men] want that perhaps, a young man for instance, who had spent his entire youth in order to become free and self-reliant, and who was just on the threshold -- about to reach his goal -- who had learned to love life because of it, because of his professional opportunities, his responsibilities, his independence? No, I cannot envision this as my aim in life: home, family, housewife, children -- it is alien to me, alien. Perhaps only at this moment, at this time in my life, how do I know? Or maybe I would never be good at all that. Love and marriage are simply not the same thing. -- (Fenitschka) p. 39"

""Do you know what love is? I mean the most profound thing about it? I will tell you: it is the mystery of completely sharing the experience of what is happening to the other person. As if hypnotized, as if replaced or exchanged with that other person, you follow the most subtle stirrings of that other person's soul, enjoying them, experiencing them, in that person. For that reason, they call love a kind of insanity or possession by the other. What is the result? The result is that both persons experience the same thing -- that they become identical, so to speak." ("Maidens' Roundelay") p. 50"

"Perhaps life's earnestness might often come to destroy the lovers' play, as it had today, perhaps the little song of love might often die out unheard amid the painful, confused tones that assail his heart [as a physician], as it had today. -- But with a happy face she will from this day forward raise up her arms to him, in gratitude that he does not merely caress her and forget life's seriousness when he is with her, but that he struggles with life for himself and for her. And in her lap he shall rest his head when he is suffering. Perhaps then a tender dream will always rise up anew -- in a night like this one -- and, ever again, secretly weave, in the dark, new love around their life. -- -- -- ("One Night") p. 74"

"His gaze lit upon a lovely girl who was just crossing the street diagonally, carefully lifting her skirt as she did so as to reveal a pair of charming little ankle boots. He had to smile about the about childish impatience of his desire to deck Marfa out like this until she too was a lovely girl -- bring her out of her dour shell. But Marfa was not coming. -- ("A Reunion"), p. 103"

"Hildegard sensed darkly that she would now at once have to spread two light gray wings and let them lift her up -- high, high, as in her dream. But she also sensed darkly how it is in feverish dreams: as though something in her were helplessly, powerlessly beating its wings -- and suddenly she didn't know whether she was flying -- or falling --. Then Dietrich drew the playing child to him. He looked at Hildegard, almost a bit timidly -- and at the same time gently kissed the child on his blond hair. And Hildegard slowly laid her hand in his. Reaching out over a paradise. -- ("Paradise"), p. 132"

""Oh, the mountains!" she said in her soft voice, and the indeterminate color of her eyes seemed to grow darker. "I used to love the plains, that's where I'm from. And it is beautiful there, too, where it is boundless, or at least appears to be so. But when people come to the plains, they immediately become human themselves, serving people, and they're no longer untouched and unapproachable. It occurs to me now that's why the mountains have the effect they do. As if one were seeing nature itself as it rises above all that's human and looks down upon it. No matter how many small settlements might grow among them, they still retain something so primeval." -- Anjuta ("Incognito"), p. 135"

""Don't you think that a great yearning is like the birds' heading south -- a sign that somewhere life is in bloom?" -- Georg ("A Death"), p. 173"

"You can tackle the problem of the erotic however you want, but you will always feel that you have done so very one-sidedly, especially if you tackle it by means of logic -- that is, from the outside. (p. 184)"

"The problem of the erotic is characterized by two things: for a start, it must be regarded as a special case within physical, psychic and social relations in general, and not, as often happens, as autocratically isolated. Rather, it relates all three of these kinds of problems to each other, and thus merges them into a single problem -- its problem. (p. 188)"

"In the fusion of single cells . . . the two cells' nuclei totally merge with each other, forming the new creature, and only what is inessential, at the periphery of the old cell, disintegrates, dying off. It may well stem from such influence that . . . the total fusion of single-cell organisms corresponds allegorically to what, in the highest dreams of love, the mind imagines as the full joy of love. That is arguably why love is so easily associated with longing and trepidation about death, which are not even clearly differentiated from each other; with something like a primal dream in which oneself, one's lover, and their child could still be one, and just three names for the same immortality. (p. 191-92)"

"The house stood on a hillside, overlooking the town in the valley and the long stretch of mountains beyond. From the country road that climbed through the hill's woods in a wide curve, you stepped right into the middle story, as if it were at ground level -- so deeply was the little, white house nestled into the slope. But perched up there it had a freer view out over the terraced garden and the broad expanse below, gazing down with many bright window-eyes and with boldly protruding bays -- extensions of original rooms that had been found too confining. This undeniably made for whimsical architecture, but it gave the house an impression of grace and lightness -- almost as if it were just resting there. (p. 1)"

"Branhardt set aside the book he had come for. Her face, which was not beautiful and, through all those years, could have faded into banality if it hadn't borne the intimate inscription of her soul, spoke eloquently to him. He loved it as strongly and deeply as he had in his youth. But differently now, because he too bore, perhaps in harsher letters, what was also written there: the signature of life itself. (p. 17)"

""Conflicted creatures, that’s what we [parents] are — we give birth, without knowing to what; we educate, without knowing whom; we must answer for it, without knowing how; and we can give up neither our power nor our fear." -- Anneliese, p. 52"

""Theory and practice, philosophy and religion, and heaven knows what, how little all that means compared to this one simple thing: the desire for life of a completely healthy, physically harmonious person — and I’m not one of them. — Only such a person knows what life really is. Life can be trusted — if Liese trusts it." -- Renate, p.52"

""No! No! Not one! Never just one! Even the wisest judgment can become unjust, willful, arrogant, when measured against life. And the worst -- you see -- the worst thing under the sun -- is the violation of one person by another." -- Anneliese, p. 117"

""But this danger you mention?" he went on. "Tell me, where is there beauty that isn't at the same time in danger? -- and when wasn't the greatest beauty also the greatest danger! -- And mind you: this know-it-all attitude and drive to control, the 'firm hand' you were talking about -- all that arrogance, especially of the usual, masculine kind, will go to pieces trying to deal with this! That approach is only best right from the start and with women who are no threat to anyone. But -- please tell me -- what's so great about a manly stance that has to look out for itself, that's so anxiously self-defensive?" -- Marcus, p. 180"

"Bear in mind that the Narcissus of legend gazed, not at a man-made mirror, but at the mirror of Nature [a pool of water]. Perhaps it was not just himself that he beheld in the mirror, but himself as if he were still All: would he not otherwise have fled, instead of lingering before it? And does not melancholy dwell next to enchantment upon his face? Only the poet can make a whole picture of this unity of joy and sorrow, departure from self and absorption in self, devotion and self-assertion."

"Objectivity is mankind's glorious goal, summoning narcissism, Eros masked, from the dreams of childhood to the service of research, progress, art, and culture. When it stays behind in childish dreaming, and when its leap falls short, it slips without a blow into the bottomless deeps of disease."

"In truth, our narcissism is nothing other than that mysterious knowledge rooted in the emotional life, which posits the ultimate in subjectivity as the keystone of objective existence. When any metaphysical position attempt to harmonize 'Being' with 'God', as the principle of absolute value, it is not only engaged in a narcissistic mode of thought but is itself the very image, philosophically elaborated, of the union of narcissism and objectivity."

"Mourning is not as singular a state of emotional preoccupation as is commonly thought: it is, more precisely, an incessant discourse with the departed one, in order to draw him nearer. For death entails not merely a disappearance but rather a transformation into a new realm of visibility. Something is not just taken away but is gained, in a way never before experienced. In the moment when the flowing lines of a figure’s constant change and effect become paralyzed for us, we are imbued for the first time with its essence: something which is never captured or fully realized in the normal course of lived existence. -- Kindle p. 26"

"[Russia's God] cannot prevent or improve all things; he can only represent closeness and intimacy for all time . . . This all-pervasive sense of security, this omnipresence, leads to a confidence in the surroundings, whatever they may be, and it presupposes an untorn integration with one’s childhood, within the unity of the womb. It was exactly that childlike purity and the primitiveness in basic outlook on life (so characteristic of the Russian spirit) that captured the imagination of the poet and was released in his language. It made possible the return to a kind of familiar divinity in mankind, as if Rilke were suddenly presented with the gift of the primal home and childhood he had been deprived of. Kindle pp. 33-4."

"For the angels [of the Duino Elegies] are not intermediaries, and that is important. For him there were no mediating saints or redeemers, although the name of the angels may have come from his Catholic childhood. For him God remained for all time the designation for the all-embracing unity. If in The Book of Hours God is addressed only as a “neighbor,” it is because the slightest removal from him would pose an absolute and hopelessly insurmountable distance. What is presented here, instead, before the dominion of the heavens over the earth, is the horizon of angels, an optically unifying illusion. -- Kindle p. 85"

"[Speaking of Rilke] Abandoning himself in everything, and thereby making himself superfluous, the benefactor becomes at once the petitioner, the recipients become donors, and he hides in their secure existence. And were this loner, who was isolated in death, still with us, I believe he would feel most immediately at home in the deepest anonymity of his work’s effects— there in the no longer audible processes of man’s union with the cosmos, where his form is allowed to fade and no longer requires visibility or the boundaries of self. Restored to a stronger presence: standing there, in deep peace, he too a nameless one among the nameless. -- Kindle p. 96"

"The more fully we enter into the 'challenge of the hour', into the present factual moment, into the conditions that hold from one case to another, instead of being trammeled by prescriptions and directives (written by human beings!), the more connectedly do we act in accord with the whole . . . If anyone thinks that is immorally presumptuous and high-handed, then it would be truer to call the childish-slavish obedience to prescriptions, which make everything easy, a convenient moral slovenliness!"

"The most daring thing we have invented was to become human, and, with that, the creation of human values as life's most sublime adventure."

"Human life -- ah! life in general -- is poetry. Unconscious of ourselves, we live it -- day by day and piece by piece -- but in its inviolable wholeness it lives, it composes, us. Far from the old phrase: "turn your life into a work of art"; we are not our art work."

"Our first experience is, remarkably, of a disappearance. A moment ago we were still everything, undivided; any other existence was indivisible from us. Then we were thrust into being born. We became a residual part of everything, which from then on had to strive not to fall into further diminution, which had to assert itself against a contrary world rising ever wider against it, a world into which it had fallen from its fullness into an initially depriving emptiness."

"If for years I was your wife, it was because in you I encountered what is real for the first time: body and person indistinguishably one, an undeniable fact of life itself. Word for word, I could have confessed what you had said in your declaration of love: ‘You alone are real.’ With that, we became spouses, even before we were friends, and we became friends hardly by choice, but rather from an unseen but already consummated marriage. Not two halves searching for one another: a startled wholeness that recognized, with a shudder, its own incomprehensible unity. And so, we were siblings – but as in previous times, before incest became a sacrilege."

"The man that we love, regardless of the exalted state of both his spirit and his soul, remains a priest in his robes who only vaguely guesses what he is celebrating."

"Whatever happens to me -- I never lose the certainty that behind me arms are open to receive me."

"[On receiving the newly completed Sixth, Eighth and Tenth Duino Elegies] Ah слава Богу [Russian for thank God] dear Rainer, how rich his gift to you -- and yours to me! I sat and read and cried from joy, and it was not just joy at all but something much more powerful, as if a curtain were being parted, rent, and everything were growing quiet and certain and present and good. I remember as if it were today how much the beginning of the last Elegy plagued you, and when it had shaken me so severely, how even that plagued you; it has been on your lips for such long years; a word which one cannot make conscious and which is there all the same; in the beginning was this word. And then the Creature Elegy [the Eighth]! -- It is the poem of my most secret heart, oh so sayably glorious; and said, the inexpressible made present and actual. And that, finally is the message of this poetry: that we are surrounded, ringed by things of mute presence that are being rescued, redeemed into existence for us only thus, and yet it is these things alone by which we live. (p. 332-33)"

"It delights me that the one thinker I approached in my childhood [Spinoza] and almost adored now meets me again, and as the philosopher of psychoanalysis. Think far enough, correctly enough on any point at all, and you hit upon him; you meet him waiting for you, standing ready at the side of the road. (pp. 75-76)"

"I cannot think of any personal fate which could have cost me anything like such anguish. And I don't really believe that after this we shall ever be able to be really happy again. (p. 20)"

"It delights me to note from year to year how long it takes for much that happens to one to become inner experience. It is only in old age that this process is completed, and for this reason it is right and proper to grow truly old, despite the less pleasant reverse side in the shape of infirmity. It seems to be that this is true even in matters of the intellect, not only in the emotional life. (p. 201)"

"Outwardly and inwardly both, Lou Salomé's life is among the richest on record. She kept company -- uncannily stimulating, uncannily receptive -- with the cultural elite of her times, as judged from ours. She wrote in the widest variety of literary genres, including a couple of her own devising, happy and unhappy respectively: the diary essaylet and the achronological memoir. And by and large she wrote well: her peers among essayists at all odds are numbered."

"In my talks with Lou, things became clear to me that I might not have found by myself. Like a catalyst, she activated my thought processes. [...] Intellectually, she was nurturing and creative. Not only encouraging – but enthralling. One felt the spark of genius in her. One grew in her presence."

"Andreas-Salomé’s work raises questions that are still urgent today: How are the binaries of Western thought [e.g., thinking of woman as the "other" of man) effectively negotiated and transformed into difference and diversity? How do language and narrative contribute to an upsetting of conventional and fixed points of view? And, finally, how does thinking with images open processes of experience and recognition that create diversity and open-endedness?"

"Published in a traditional women's genre, Das Haus had the potential to reach far beyond limited groups of female intellectuals into the homes and lives of women who might be alienated or threatened by the political articulations of champions of the German's women's movement but could still be influenced by feminist notions of emancipation in popular fiction."

"Can a woman be the subject of the gaze, even if she is also its object? . . . Revealing both women's and men's subjection to prevailing categorizations of gendered sexuality and identity, the novellas in Menschenkinder do not merely illuminate the problems of female identity but also touch on corresponding difficulties for men."

"I am delighted to observe that nothing has altered in our respective ways of approaching a theme, whatever it may be. I strike up a -- mostly very simple melody; you supply the higher octaves for it; I separate the one from the other; and you blend what has been separated into a higher unity."

"I am not saying too much when I acknowledge that we all felt it as an honor when she entered the ranks of our co-workers and co-fighters, and simultaneously as a new weapon for the truth of analytical teachings . . . She was of an unusual modesty and discretion. She never spoke of her own poetic and literary productions. She obviously knew where the real values of life are to be sought. Whoever came close to her received the strongest impression of the genuineness and the harmony of her being and could see, to his astonishment, that all feminine, perhaps most human, weaknesses were foreign to her or had been overcome by her in the course of her life."

"Salomé's construction of femininity did not challenge the ultimate fact of sexual difference or the presumption of heterosexuality head on. What Salomé did do, however, was figure woman's masculine will and strength as the mark of her completeness in herself. The double directionality of "masculinity" and "femininity" within woman only made her more woman; it differentiated her from modern man, who had renounced his own basis in what Salomé called the primal ground of life or, later, narcissism."

"My most useful activity this summer was talking with Lou. There is a deep affinity between us in intellect and taste -- and there are in other ways so many differences that we are the most instructive objects and subjects of observation for each other. I have never met anyone who could derive so many objective insights from experience, who knows how to deduce so much from all she has learned."

"Of all acquaintances I have made, the most full and valuable is the one with Fräulein Salomé. Only since knowing her was I ripe for my Zarathustra . . . Lou is the most gifted, thoughtful creature one can imagine -- naturally she also has some dubious qualities. I have some, too . . . You can't sense what consolation Dr. Rée was to me for years -- faute de mieux ["for want of anything better"], it goes with saying, and what an incredible benefit the communion with Fräulein Salomé was to me!"

"Here then is the record of long and turbulent life, a gallery of pictures that extend from her birth in Czarist Russia to her death in Nazi Germany. An unusual life, whatever judgement we pass on it. Voila, un homme, said Napoleon when he met Goethe. By way of introducing Lou Salomé, I can only say, Voila une femme."

"As is well known, happiness and harmony are much more difficult to portray than strife and suffering. [In her novel Das Haus] Frau Andreas-Salomé has succeeded in creating a beautiful, German image of the family without becoming cloying. It is very feminine, but this philosopher was always surprisingly feminine -- in the best sense. One thinks of the novellas in her collection, Im Zwischenland (In the Country Between). How she traces the germinating emotions of a fourteen-year-old girl; with what tenderness they are parsed. The same fine fingertips are at work here."

"What a great revolutionary you are. -- You didn't overthrow thrones inside me. But the one throne that waited there: you strode past it gently smiling. Ever upward. And my desire, which before had crowded and become tangled around the vacant throne like wild roses, now rise as white columns around the space from whose temple friezes you smile down into my soul and bless my longing."

"She moves fearlessly among the most burning mysteries, which do nothing to her . . . I know no one else with life so much on their side."

"As well as foregrounding the title heroine's growth in articulating her independent resolve and her awareness of its demands and costs, Andreas-Salomé's story also weaves into the background line of its critical dialogue with male traditions intimations of possible male growth and insight."

"She had a very quiet way of speaking and a great gift of inspiring confidence. I am still a little surprised today how much I told her then. But I had always the feeling that she not only understood everything but forgave everything. I have never again experienced such a feeling of conciliatory kindness, or, if you like, compassion, as I did with her."

"We need to see and understand that whatever stands behind nature is what is god. Nature itself, it is the manifestation."

"I have seen this sky every day of my life and I am still in awed by it. That is what the wild is — this intense medicinal beauty. To look at it makes you feel whole."

"I feel that men are as much of a mystery as women. Once we get past a certain amount of self-consciousness and protection of certain sacred cows by each gender, we could have a real conversation, maybe, for the first time ever in the universe, in this century."

"I understand mythology. I understand stories. I understand poetry. I understand that they cut close to the bone. I am a poet who became a psychoanalyst. That is my background. I am a cantadora. I am a storyteller. It comes from my feet, upward, not from my brain, downward."

"I interviewed Robert Bly in 1990. I can remember saying to him, “Now, what about the men’s movement?” And he said, “No, it’s not men’s movement.” And I said, “Well, what will you call it?” “Men’s work, just work with men, that’s all.” And, I really like that. I like that he called it work with men. Mythopoetic is too big a word. It is better to have simpler words."

"The way I understand my work is that it is like putting out food — a certain kind of food. People who have great hunger for that food will come. What I think for men and women is food, is healing food actually, is stories."

"It is said that the grand storytellers of your generation and my generation is the cinema. Teenagers and young adults aren’t going to grandmother and grandfather anymore to sit in the kitchen and listen to their stories. We go to the cinema to see the cliffhangers on Saturdays."

"We have means to extend the kitchen out into the world, or to extend the hearth place or the bonfire out into the world, and to gather together people who would ordinarily not be within our reach. So it is actually a very exciting time."

"The mother, if she commits herself to life and builds a vast storehouse of knowing inside of her, is her children’s bastion. She has a relationship with her children forever as mother. And she has the wisdom, hopefully, to know when to let go and let them lead their lives on their own. But she also is there when they come back and need something. There has to be a prototype for the mother who remains mother forever."

"I have to say that a man can never know who he is, or a woman cannot know who she is, until she has poured herself through the sieve that is her mother and poured herself through the sieve that is her father and come to understand through both."

"My theory, which is a blasphemous and heinous theory, is that as long as men elevate the maiden and the sexual woman, they will trash the mother and the daughter."

"Cynicism is the opposite of soulful. Cynicism means the conduit to the soul has a great kink in it, like a garden hose in which nothing flows in either direction. That’s what makes cynicism. If those conduits are open, you cannot be cynical."

"We are all filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed."

"The pathologizing of variation in women's bodies is a deep bias endorsed by many psychological theorists, most certainly by Freud."

"the Life/Death/Life forces are part of our own nature, an inner authority that knows the steps, knows the dance of Life and Death. It is composed of the parts of ourselves who know when something can, should, and must be born and when it must die. It is a deep teacher if we can only learn its tempo. Rosario Castellanos, the Mexican mystic and ecstatic poet, writes about surrender to the forces that govern life and death: “... dadme la muerte que me falta .../give me the death I need . . .” Poets understand that there is nothing of value without death"

"a world-class psychologist and writer known for her themes on women...Since Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola-Éstes has become known for her empowerment of women through the use of the very mythology that has been long used to dismiss women in society."

"I think the best camp for women is the Wild Women’s Snowboard Camp, launched by women’s 1992 World Extreme Champ, Greta Gaines, and co-directed by Mary Seibert. It follows a philosophy by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, in that women need to break free; that there is a need and obligation for each woman to reach this level and let go. Snowboarding’s a fluid sport that allows you to do just this. Like rock climbing, it’s more about balance and grace than strength and ego. Therefore, women excel."

"Psychoanalysis . . . has been insufficiently aware of its underlying paradigm and its deep roots in Western culture. The implicit model of man that underlies the psychoanalytic meta-theory is certainly not universal; the psychoanalytic notion of the person as an autonomous, bounded, abstract individual is a peculiarly Western notion. In contrast, the holistic model of man that underlies Indian mystical approaches and propels their practices is rooted in the very different Indian cultural tradition which, in some ways, lies at an opposite civilizational pole."

"I had read Kakar’s The Inner World, an exploration of Indian childhood and society that had received favorable reviews. But personally I thought his application of Freudian ideas, which had already been shown to be invalid by new research, to analyze the mind of the Indian child was pointless."

"Yoga puts our experience of enlightenment at the exact center of our being. Though we may appear separate from one another, we are no more separate than the wave is separate from the sea, or than the air in a glass jar is separate from the surrounding air. We are pervaded by and animated by the same spirit, the same nature, and that nature is constant through the manifold changes of birth, growth, and dissolution; it cannot be wounded, or separated from itself."

"Queer theory proposes to think identities in terms that place as a problem the production of normalcy and in terms that confound the intelligibility of the apparatuses that produce identity as repetition."

"If one cannot feel one’s way into people without, in actuality, representing the self as the arbitrator and judge of the other’s actions and possibilities, perhaps it is time to question what one wants from empathy. ... A more useful way to think about feelings requires attention to what it is that structures the ways in which feelings are imagined and read."

"In individual emotional development the precursor of the mirror is the mother's face."

"When girls and boys in their secondary narcissism look in order to see beauty and to fall in love, there is already evidence that doubt has crept in about their mother's continued love and care. So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her."

"From being a centre of symbolic radiation in primitive communities, the body has become in the West the negative of every “value” that knowledge, with the faithful complicity of power, has accumulated."

"The vampire is a dead person who does not want to die, one of the many imaginative reflections that express the difficulty for individuals and groups to accept death which, as Freud reminds us, returns in dreams and runs through primitive communities, terrifying them with the fear of contagion, so that the dead must be buried, even if the earth does not hide them sufficiently and, above all, does not eradicate them from the soul. The vampire is therefore a dead person who returns, because for the soul he is not definitively dead. With blood, which is life itself, he snatches virgins, images of the soul, who struggle in the arms of vampires to resist death."

"(Regarding the detractors of the Cirinnà bill and Italian Family Day) Ultimately, it is essentially the emotional relationship, i.e. love, that establishes relationships. Let's stop thinking that homosexuals are essentially “sexual”. First and foremost, they are emotional beings, they have meaningful cohabiting relationships just like heterosexual families. They can very well adopt children because it is not necessarily true that two people of the same sex are “bad”. And children need love, not necessarily sexual differences. Let them stop saying that the family is made up of a man and a woman, because this is a fundamentally materialistic view, defended by Catholics who always talk about the spirit. Because if the criterion for being together is simply to bring children into the world, then this is the most sinister materialism. Whereas being together also means loving each other, dedicating oneself to the task of raising children. [...] Children are children not because you sleep with a woman and the woman sleeps with a man, they are children because you raise them, because you are together with them, because you answer their questions, because you pay attention to their needs. This is what “fatherhood” and “motherhood” mean, whoever performs them."

"In this fusion of “'magic and history”', and in the relationship between “'history”' and “'metahistory”' that every magic inaugurates, Ernesto de Martino grasped the essence of magic and offered a true explanation of its ineradicability. Existence, in fact, is always precarious and could not survive without the protective structures that mythology, religion, magic, astrology, palmistry and reason itself are responsible for inaugurating and sustaining."

"I had the advantage of being born poor, into a family of ten children, with a deceased father, a mother who was a teacher, 60,000 lire a month, and ten of us plus my mother to live on. So we all had to start working from an early age. I was destined to become a metalworker because I didn't do very well at school. Then a priest saved me by putting me in a seminary, where I was able to study, without much success, to the point that when I reached the second year of secondary school, I couldn't tolerate the authority above me. I left the seminary and set about completing five years of middle school and three years of high school on my own. I took a few trigonometry lessons because I didn't really understand how it worked, and I sat the final exams on my own, without any school behind me. [...] I got 10 in philosophy, 10 in history, and my essay was published in the Gazzetta Varesina: a tremendous success. So I started to believe in myself, but mind you, always starting from a position of poverty, because there are people who are born university professors in the cradle, but I was not born a university professor in the cradle. Then I wanted to study medicine, but it was too long and there was no money. Thanks to that high school diploma, I won two scholarships: one from the Catholic University and one from the Province of Milan; 400,000 lire and 400,000 lire made 800,000 lire, and with that I said, 'Oh well, then I'll study philosophy. Yes, I got top marks, but that's not enough to motivate someone to study philosophy. But did you like philosophy? I had some exceptional teachers, who no longer exist."

"(About abortion) Kant taught us that man must always be treated as an end and never as a means. Forcing women to give birth every time they become pregnant means treating women's bodies as a means of reproduction, but treating women's bodies as a means of reproduction conflicts with Kant's teaching, which is not only Kant's but also Christian teaching, that man should be treated as an end and not as a means, that man is a person and not an instrument of procreation. The problem arises again in Italy because of the general subordination of Italian politicians to the demands of the Catholic Church: when I see both the right and the left genuflecting before the Catholic Church, I wonder: where is the Italian State? By definition, like any state, it must be secular, meaning that secular is a Greek word that means “common good”. So the secular person is the one who must take charge of everyone's needs, not the needs of a principle of faith: this is a very important thing. Secular people believe that they cannot have a moral code that does not derive from the will of God, but a moral code that derives from the will of God is typical of primitive moral codes, where men, not knowing how to make laws for themselves, had to anchor it to a higher will. But then we had the Enlightenment, and we began to reason; even if with little courage, we know how to use our brains. And so at this point it is quite possible to construct a secular morality, based first of all on that principle of Kant that we have mentioned, and then on another very important principle: that morality is made for men, not men for morality. This is another quote from Kant that reproduces exactly, in different words, what Jesus Christ said: the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath. In other words, woe betide anyone who bends man to the law and uses the law as a judgement against man, because what needs to be saved is not the principle of the law, but man himself."

"AIDS, by presenting us with this inextricable intertwining of life and death, and of love and death, reactivates the image of the vampire who, with his cleft lip, piercing canines, scarlet face, sharp tongue and single nostril, gruesomely represents that death which is never in its place and therefore haunts the unconscious of those who live striving to keep it as far away as possible."

"The male-female sexual division is a very strict one, which serves society more than individuals... However, we all know - biologically and psychologically - that we are all male and female, but not in the proportions of 10% and 90%, but rather 40% and 60%. After that, society channels us into a strict sexual division, male and female ...which serves society to identify us, but does not serve our lives; and fluidity ... is an anthropological structure present in each of us. And a man who has a relationship with his femininity is much more interesting than a man with a square jaw."

"The priority of Christians is to save the soul, and this has, on the one hand, placed the individual before the community and, on the other, eliminated death and awareness of the cyclical nature of time. For Christians, the future is always positive, it is progress, as it is for Western science. Whereas the past is ignorance, and the present is research. But this senseless hope that has replaced the awareness of death is dramatically passive."

"Self-realisation is therefore the decisive factor for happiness. But for self-realisation, it is necessary to exercise the virtue of enjoying what is obtainable and not desiring what is unattainable. Hence, the “right measure”. “Katà Métron” [...]. (from “Umberto Galimberti: That virtue so difficult to teach”."

"I had begun to wonder whether philosophy was a great defence against madness. [...] And I am still convinced of this today, because I am convinced that neurotics study psychology and psychotics study philosophy. Because if we consider who enrols in philosophy? People who enrol in philosophy are those who want to solve problems without going to someone else. [...] By every philosopher I mean a madman who wants to play around with his madness a little, but at the same time does not want to go mad and therefore arms himself to keep it at bay through a series of sound arguments, which are learned here... to keep madness at bay. :*from a conversation in the “'Master's Degree in Communication and Non-Verbal Languages”', Ca' Foscari University of Venice, December 2007."

"We have a continental philosophy that also speaks in a literary way, think of Heidegger, to name a philosopher of the last century. In reality, they [the British] have always been empiricists: Bacon, Locke and Hume were empiricists, then they had Stuart Mill in the 19th century, who was a positivist. In America, they have John Dewey and William James who are pragmatists. They need to see the concrete, so they are incapable of abstraction. Philosophy is abstraction... Eastern thought cannot enter into the abstract; we Westerners invented it."

"There is only one solution for raising children happily: loving relationships, whether between a heterosexual couple or a homosexual couple. Where there is love, children grow up well; where there is violence or emotional coldness, children grow up badly."

"Socrates said he knew nothing, precisely because if he knew nothing, he questioned everything. Philosophy arises from questioning the obvious: we do not accept what is, because if we accept what is, as Plato reminds us, we will become a flock, sheep. So, we do not accept what is. Philosophy arises as a critical instance, not acceptance of the obvious, not resignation to what is now fashionable to call healthy realism. I realise that, realistically, someone who enrols in philosophy is doing something crazy, but perhaps if there were no such crazy people, the world would remain as it is... as it is. So philosophy plays a very important role, not because it is competent in something, but simply because it does not accept something. And this non-acceptance of what is does not express itself through revolutions or revolts, it expresses itself through an attempt to find the contradictions of the present and of what exists, and to argue for possible solutions: in practice, thinking. And the day we abdicate thinking, we have abdicated everything."

"So, perhaps a little hastily, I must tell you that males, at least in their imagination, are not monogamous. Their polygamous fantasies are perhaps the cultural legacy of animal behaviour where, with the exception of a few species, monogamy does not exist."

"Fidelity, if we want to strip it down a little, is the virtue of those who feel weaker in the couple and have the impression that, having lost the man or woman they live with, they have no other “chance” than the desert of loneliness. And so they cling to the other's indifference, if not hostility, immersing themselves in those exaggerated forms of love that are the flip side of their absolute need for the other."

"If the need to reassure one's own intrinsic insecurity generates fidelity, the need not to lose oneself in the other generates betrayal."

"All this to say that love is not possession, because possession does not tend towards the good of the other, nor towards loyalty to the other, but only towards the maintenance of the relationship, which, far from guaranteeing happiness, which is always in the search for and knowledge of oneself, sacrifices it in exchange for security."

"By betraying them, the other person surrenders them to themselves, and nothing prevents us from saying to all those who feel betrayed that perhaps one day they chose who would betray them in order to find themselves, just as one day Jesus chose Judas to meet his destiny."

"In this way, personal merit ends up being the least significant factor in finding a job, resulting in personal frustration and the poor functioning of society, where it is only by chance or pure coincidence that the right person is found in the right place. We can thus understand why the fight against the mafia will never be won in Italy, because the mafia is nothing more than a gruesome version of widespread customs, where kinship, acquaintances, the exchange of favours, in a word, the “familistic” network prevails over the recognition of personal values and citizenship rights. What can be done? Very little can be done until the level of civilisation is raised, with the recognition of the value of individuals as its first pillar. In this regard, the Americans could teach us something and, given that today's widespread culture proclaims itself pro-American, we could import from them this one virtue in which they excel. But perhaps our pro-Americanism only means doing our business under their protection."

"We adults are responsible for this disillusionment, as we have unconditionally adhered to the “healthy realism” of a single mindset incapable of seeing beyond business, profit and individual interests, abandoning all bonds of solidarity, all compassion for those worse off than ourselves, and all emotional ties outside the narrow confines of the family. Furthermore, we have inaugurated a world view that looks at the earth and its inhabitants solely from a market perspective."

"I do not like the definition of “atheist” because it is applied to me by those who believe in God and view the world exclusively from their point of view, dividing it into those who believe and those who do not. This labelling reflects the arrogance of their mindset, which makes their faith the discriminating factor between people."

"Before the birth of reason, which is a recent phenomenon, having emerged 2500 years ago with philosophy (which, to distinguish itself from theology, has always reasoned ‘as if God did not exist’), religion was an attempt to find causal links to defend oneself from the unpredictable and the unknown, which has always terrified man and generated anguish."

"As for reason without faith, it seems to me that this falls within the scope of reason, which, as Kant reminds us, is a tiny island in the ocean of the irrational. Given its size, allow me to be among those who are committed to its defence."

"In this sense, it is possible to say that science, utopia and revolution are all animated by a deeply religious view of time and history, where what was announced at the beginning is ultimately realised."

"The Church already realised this at the time of Galileo and, without being deceived by the religious vision of history underlying both science and utopia and revolution, it came into conflict with these secularised versions of eschatological time, because it understood that they corrode it from within to the point of losing track of it, with irreversible damage to the institutions (the Churches) that have their foundation and justification in the eschatological vision of time and history. This is what history teaches us, and the facts confirm it."

"Still in accordance with God's command to man to have dominion over nature (Genesis 1:1-5), modern science will eventually take this dominion away from God, who, being less and less accessible to reason, ends up being increasingly confined to faith. Taking the place of God, reason becomes the legislator; it does not “learn” from nature, as was the case when nature was considered the unfolding design of God, but, as Kant says, it forces nature to answer its questions. In this way, nature has no meaning in itself other than that which it assumes within the human project, which tends to make it a resource available to man. Today, science, not in those who practise it, but in those (and that is all of us) who place their hopes in it, if not for salvation, then certainly for health, healing, progress and growth, continues to feed on religious ideology, even if its actual practice disregards this ideology and proceeds as if God did not exist."

"No historical era, however absolutist or dictatorial, has ever experienced such a process of massification, because no absolute ruler or dictator was capable of creating a system of conditions of existence in which conformity was the only possibility of life."

"We are in the age of technology, where it is impossible to live except at the price of complete standardisation to the world of products that surrounds us, and on which we depend as producers and consumers, to the world of technical and administrative tools that we serve and use, to the world of our fellow human beings relegated to second place, because we relate to them as representatives of their functions."

"The very fact that we talk about human beings as “capital” or refer to them as “resources” (so-called “human resources”) speaks volumes about the way we view people today. With the decline of the principle that governed Kantian ethics, according to which: ‘Man must always be treated as an end and never as a means’, today we see that not only immigrants, but each and every one of us has the right to citizenship not because we exist, not because we are human beings, but only as a ‘means’ of production and profit."

"It is clear that the more technological society becomes, the more jobs are lost. Paradoxically, what has always been man's oldest dream: liberation from work is turning into a nightmare."

"Are the goals of the economy also our goals? Or have we become mere instruments of the economic apparatus, which employs us as cogs in its organisation, insignificant links in its chain or, if we prefer, indispensable but also among the most interchangeable of all means within an economic-productive apparatus that has become an end in itself?"

"I deal with religious issues because religions, all religions, with their commandments and rules of conduct, represented the greatest educational process that humanity, as a whole, experienced before reason established itself as the regulator of human relations."

"Today, reason has found its highest expression in science, which does not conflict with faith, provided that faith renounces its claim to be the truth. Science has no relation to truth, because what it produces are only “exact” propositions, i.e. “obtained from (ex actu)” premises that have been anticipated hypothetically. The fact that the hypothesis is confirmed by experiment only tells us that we know the operational validity of that hypothesis, not the nature of the thing investigated with that hypothesis, because, when questioned, the thing did not show its face, but simply responded to the anticipated hypothesis."

"As for the relationship between faith and morality, I believe that in order to establish a proper coexistence among human beings, reason is capable of establishing a morality (see Kant) independently of faith, which, as our times and past times demonstrate, contributes more to hostility and ferocity among human beings than to their peaceful coexistence."

"Due to a few incidents of medical malpractice, which are widely reported in the news, we risk forgetting that Italy has one of the best national health systems in the world, as certified by the World Health Organisation in August 2007. In the rest of the world, people die either because of a lack of facilities and medicines, as in poor countries, or because healthcare, like all other activities, is a profit-making business, as in rich countries overseas."

"From the place where he had been imprisoned awaiting sentencing, Socrates was invited by his disciples to escape. But his response was peremptory: "I have taught you all your lives to obey the laws, and now you invite me to break them at the end of my life. What I had to teach you, I have communicated to you. My cycle is complete." There is no trace of anguish, despair or melancholy for a life that has come to an end, only consistency between teaching and life. Even the drama of the moment is subservient to the needs of teaching, to make it more persuasive, more effective. And if the moment is the eve of death, it must be faced with dignity. ‘But finally, Socrates, tell us how we should bury you,’ his disciples press him. ‘As you wish,’ he replied. And, laughing quietly, he continued: ‘O friends, I cannot convince Crito that the real Socrates is the one who is now discussing with you and not the one whom he will soon see dead’ (Phaedo 115 e). His disciples begged him to wait, as others had done, until sunset. But Socrates wants to avoid making himself ridiculous by clinging to life when there is no more. He drinks the poison in one gulp "without fear, without changing the colour or expression of his face, but, looking at his disciples as usual with his bull's eyes, he said: 'What do you think? Is it lawful to make libations to someone with this drink or not?'‘ (Phaedo 117 b). Then he resumed walking until he felt his legs grow heavy, then he lay down, and when his limbs began to grow cold, he said: ’'Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius; give it to him and do not forget it. “It will be done,” replied Crito, “but see if you have anything else to say.” Socrates did not answer this question" (Phaedo 118 a)."

"And in fact, Christians do not know how to die. A comparison between the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus suffices in this regard. [...] Unlike Socrates, Jesus is afraid, not of the men who will kill him, nor of the pain that will precede death, Jesus is afraid of death itself, and therefore truly trembles before the “great enemy of God” and has none of the serenity of Socrates, who calmly faces his “great friend”."

"We live within the Jewish Christian tradition and do not know how to face death except by entrusting ourselves to otherworldly hope. We have a very high opinion of ourselves, deserving of immortality. But does this belief reveal a truth or a disproportionate love of self? Because, in the latter case, it might be worth surrendering to our limitations well in advance, following the Greek wisdom that teaches: ‘Those who know their limits do not fear fate’."

"The face is the first sign from which the ethics of a society originate. [...] The face of a mature person is an act of truth, while the mask behind which a face treated with cosmetic surgery hides is a falsification that reveals the insecurity of those who do not have the courage to expose themselves to view with their own face. Preferring a showgirl to a mature person means preferring the anonymity of a body to a body shaped by character, which in mature age appears in its uniqueness, finally allowing us to know what a person really is in their specific uniqueness. [...] It ends up feeding into the myth of youth that views old age as a prelude to death. (p. 199)"

"This is the programme of Giordano Bruno's magic, according to which 'since no part of the universe is more important than another”, man is not granted that primacy, first biblical and then Cartesian, which sees him as “possessor and ruler of the world”, but simply as “cooperator of active nature (operanti naturae homines cooperatores esse possint)”. This difference is decisive because it unmasks the underlying kinship that, beyond disputes, links the Christian tradition to scientific agnosticism. Both share the belief that man, possessing a soul as religion would have it or rational faculties as science would have it, is, among the entities of nature, the privileged entity that can subjugate all things to himself. To this Cartesian emphasis on the subject (Ego cogito), prepared by the Judeo-Christian tradition (according to which man is the image of God and therefore has the right to dominate all things), Giordano Bruno contrasts a path radically different from that which would characterise European thought for centuries. Not the primacy of man, but the primacy of the ever-unstable and ever-reconstructed balance between subject and object, between man and nature. Magic, which is not power over nature, but the discovery of the bonds that chain all things together, according to Heraclitus' model of “invisible harmony”, is Bruno's philosophical proposal, antithetical both to mathematical science, which feeds on human planning, and to religion, which, while subordinating man to God, does not hesitate to consider him, from the day of his expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the ruler of all things."

"After Ernesto De Martino, Carlo Tullio-Altan, who passed away yesterday at the age of 89, was the greatest Italian anthropologist in two senses: as a significant exponent of cultural anthropology, a discipline so little cultivated in Italy, and as a ruthless investigator of the anthropology of Italians."

"Reason ‘knows’ what it says, while faith ‘believes’ in what it says. And since I do not “believe” that two plus two equals four because I ‘know’ it, there is no relationship between faith and reason, nor any hierarchical subordination, as claimed by men of faith who place their beliefs above their knowledge. In fact, I cannot ‘believe’ in what I ‘know’, and I cannot “know” if what I ‘believe’ is true. In reality, the area of faith shrinks as knowledge advances. Once, as Hippocrates reminds us, epilepsy was called the ‘sacred disease’; today, no doctor or patient would think of attributing the origin of this disease to God or the gods. :*From “”Faith as a remedy for senselessness“”, “'repubblica.it”', November 2006."

"What if “philo-sophy” did not mean “love of wisdom” but “wisdom of love”, just as “theology” means discourse on God and not the word of God, or “metrology” means the science of measurement and not the measurement of science? Why this inversion in the sequence of words for philosophy? Why has philosophy in the West been structured as a logic that formalises reality, withdrawing from the world of life to shut itself away in universities where, among initiates, knowledge that has no impact on existence and how to live it is transmitted from master to disciple? Could this be why, from Plato, who describes philosophy as “the exercise of death”, to Heidegger, who insists so much on being-towards-death, philosophers have fallen more in love with knowing how to die than with knowing how to live? (12 April 2008)"

"Perhaps there is nothing behind life as a couple, and this hidden nothingness arouses that infinite curiosity that makes each of us tireless seekers of love, almost always oblivious to the fact that every event of love is always decreed by heaven."

"Every love story lays bare the nature of our soul, which relies on language to express malice, envy, jealousy, kisses poisoned by hatred, tenderness feigned to the point of seeming real, the awareness of knowing each other's secrets: all links in that heavy chain that twists our soul into plots that only language can weave."

"And so each of us feels the thrill of zero growth, not knowing how to react, especially if we suspect that zero growth will increasingly be our future, not only because we cannot continue to think that four-fifths of humanity will continue to sacrifice themselves for our growth, but because when growth has no other purpose than to continue growing, it is the people of the privileged world themselves who become mere “functionary” of this fixed idea which, if it becomes the collective purpose of everyone's life, buries and destroys the “meaning” of life, its flavour, its significance for us."

"In fact, where production does not tolerate interruptions, goods “need” to be consumed, and if the need is not spontaneous, if there is no perceived need for these goods, then this need must be “produced”. In an opulent society like ours, where everyone's identity is increasingly tied to the objects they own, which are not only replaceable but “must” be replaced, we may begin to feel, beneath the sea of advertising that is poured over us every day, a sort of call for destruction, a form of nihilism due to the fact, as Gunther Anders writes, that: “Humanity that treats the world as a disposable world also treats itself as disposable humanity”.."

"Despite what advertising would have us believe, happiness does not come from the latest generation of mobile phones or computers, or more generally from “products”, but from a shred of “extra relationship”."

"All this will lead, as economists say, to a slowdown in growth, if not zero growth. And here we come to that insidious word: “growth”, which economists apply both to the dispossessed countries that account for four-fifths of humanity, and to the already developed countries that nevertheless “must grow”. How far? And at whose expense? And at what environmental cost? Here, the economy remains silent because the problem is not within its remit, and with the economy, the voices of the people who must bow to the laws of the economy also remain silent."

"And so, by giving nothingness a semantic power that radiates at a distance to mean anything, fashion cheaply solves identity problems that put an end to the agonising question: “Who am I?”."

"If old age no longer shows its vulnerability, where can we find the reasons for “pietas”, the need for sincerity, the demand for answers on which social cohesion is based?"

"Since we were born, we have been taught that appearing is more important than being. And to this terrible dogma we have sacrificed our bodies, charging them with representing what we are not, or even what we have avoided knowing."

"In this regard, I would like to recall that Thomas Aquinas, commenting on Paul of Tarsus, says that faith, unlike science expressed by human reason, leads in captivitatem omnem intellectum, that is, it makes the intellect a prisoner of content that is not evident, and therefore foreign to it (alienus), so that the intellect is restless (nondum est quietatus) in the face of science, towards which it feels in infirmitate et timore et tremore mult”. Where has this Thomistic prudence gone, which does not allow us to immediately identify faith with truth? And if Catholics already possess the truth, what is the point of studying and teaching philosophy if they already possess the truth that philosophy seeks to find? What do they say to Heidegger when he writes that when philosophy is accompanied by an adjective, as in the case of ‘Christian philosophy’, we are faced with a square circle or, as Heidegger puts it, a ‘wooden iron’? And finally, what kind of dialogue is possible with a Christian if he is already convinced that he possesses the truth?"

"“The stroke of genius of Christianity”, which exorcises death by guaranteeing immortality to every human being, has become a common belief that even science has failed to undermine; indeed, in a certain sense, it has contributed to definitively rooting this conviction."

"I am not a theologian, but a philosopher of history who follows Nietzsche's “genealogical” method, which, unlike Plato's, does not ask, for example, “what is the soul?”, but rather: “How did this concept come into being, what is its history, what meanings has it taken on, what effects has it had on reality?”, convinced as I am that the essence of a thing, its meaning, lies in its history."

"The importance of Heidegger lies in the fact that he describes his philosophy as “going beyond metaphysics”. Given that metaphysics refers to all philosophical thought from Plato onwards, this means placing oneself in a pivotal position, of which Heidegger is fully aware. What does metaphysics mean? Nothing more than the philosophical version of the religious view of the world. (p. 59)"

"If it is true that we are able to understand our time even without the word “God”, it is equally true that we would not understand it if we removed the word “Technology”, the meaning of which has been clearly explained by Sergio Givone. Heidegger said some essential things on this subject. He illustrated on several occasions that technology has brought the humanistic era to an end, so that man is no longer the “subject” of history, but the “functionary” of technical apparatuses, by which he is in some way “employed” (be-stellte). Indeed, he risks becoming raw material, indeed the most important raw material (der Mensch der wichtigste Rohstoff ist), from the point of view of absolute usability. (p. 60)"

"The more temporal power is separated from spiritual power, the more correct the relationship between the two is."

"The Church considers itself the sole repository of ethics. Ethics as the exclusive prerogative of religion brings Christianity considerably closer to the Islamic mentality. Fortunately, we have had the Enlightenment and the secular state, which have partially immunised us. On the part of the Church, however, there is a tendency to deny that ethics is a human quality, as Kant said, and instead to assert that it derives from religious dogma. Humans would be incapable of producing morality. At this rate, we end up with a theocratic state. But morals are nothing more than rules of coexistence aimed at reducing conflict. Humans can give themselves these rules: ethics is an anthropological category."

"Sometimes I wonder if the Church still believes in God. This is certainly a paradoxical and provocative statement, but it has its justification: when the Church intervenes massively to promote legislation favourable to its ethics, then we may wonder whether those who wield ecclesiastical power believe more in the instruments of the world or in the work of God."

"In ‘The House of Psyche,’ it is noted that the problems that exist today can no longer be addressed through psychoanalysis, as they once were. Psychoanalytic tools treated the discomfort of the individual, the discomfort of civilisation in the sense of the miserable conditions in which people lived, in what I call “the society of discipline”, where the game was between the desire of those who wanted to break the law and those who wanted to suppress this desire. Today, this is no longer the scenario of pain. The scenario of pain, especially under the influence of American culture, which pushes us to achieve our goals in the shortest possible time, produces situations of anxiety determined by demand. No longer the traditional psychoanalytic demand (what is allowed and what is forbidden), but what can I do, what am I capable of doing? This inability to achieve goals when the bar is set higher and higher creates a sense of inadequacy, of a lack of meaning and, ultimately, beyond the technique that has no purpose but simply functions within an absolute, radical lack of horizons in view of who knows what."

"So let's suppose that God speaks: are we sure we understand what he says? When I give a lecture, I am convinced that my students, whether there are thirty or fifty of them, understand thirty or fifty different things. Because language is immediately a translation: when you listen to me, you translate what I say into your world view. And so this translation means that you understand something I did not say. What's more, God; I don't know: some people hear him, some people believe he speaks to them. But let's be clear: did you really hear him with your ears, did he say things to you when he met you, or do you imagine that those are the words of God?"

"This is how philosophy was born: philosophy meant going into the square and teaching people how to govern well, how to lead the soul well, how to respect nature. Philosophy was born for this: to teach men these things. Socrates did this, he went to the square and talked to people. Then it became entrenched, it became an academic, self-referential thing, a doctrine. Something that now closely resembles a sort of daughter of theology."

"I am thinking of something: philosophy is always translated as love of wisdom. But this is not the case, it is the opposite: it is not love of wisdom, it is wisdom of love. And so the figure of love is first and foremost intersubjectivity, it is exchange. That is, truth must not emerge as a doctrinal body: this is wisdom, not philosophy. It must arise from dialogue. From dialogue between two people. Dialogue with the other and above all with that other who is woman. Why is it that no woman ever appears in the history of philosophy: what is this being sidelined? Perhaps women navigate in regions that are not overly logical, which frighten men? These are questions I ask myself."

"Shame is a fundamental feeling. Shame [In Italian: vergogna] comes from vere orgognam: I fear exposure. Today, exposure is no longer feared. So what happens? If I behave in a transgressive manner, well, what's the harm? I fulfil the hidden desires of each of us and expose them, how clever I am. And so at this point, the codes of good and evil are no longer clearly visible. Kant said that everyone feels good and evil naturally, he used the word “feeling”. Today, this is no longer true. Simply put, if someone has the courage to show themselves to be vicious, if they have the courage to show themselves to be transgressive, they are a person of value, at least they have courage, they have interpreted the hidden feelings of each of us. This now means, I would not say the collapse of collective morality, but even of individual morality, internal morality, psychological morality. Therefore, the end of times."

"Today, however, there is a much more subtle form of power, which is essentially the control of thought, the control of ideas. This is very dangerous because when I control the ideas of all those who are subordinate to power, they think like power, they applaud it, they want it, they desire it, they adore it. Because they think like it. And then the second degree, even more pernicious, is the control of feelings. There are television programmes that teach young people how to love, how to hate, how to fall in love, how to get angry. When I have established control over feelings, I have absolute power. Because not only do I think as the television media has taught me to think, but I feel as they want me to feel. At this point, I have achieved complete control over the world in which I operate."

"Crossed by sexuality, the ego yields its limit in order to reaffirm it at a higher level. By coming into contact with the other part of itself, the ego goes beyond fascination and desire to reach that “immense void” where the ontological decision is made, where being reaches its limit and where the limit defines being. (p. 233)"

"The explicit transition from the interiority to the exteriority of the soul, to which Christian practice had contributed, takes place with Descartes who, in radicalising Platonic dualism, ends up “abolishing” it, resolving the body and the world into representations of the soul, which thus becomes the absolute horizon of presence."

"So sex as the source of life and life as the reproduction of harmony. The sexual act as an act of creation where one does not get caught up, as we do, in births or abortions, but where at a certain point one celebrates the meaning of heaven, earth and the ten thousand things that inhabit heaven and earth in composed harmony. Why do we Westerners believe in the stars and horoscopes that fall from the stars and have forgotten that our slow, agile or violent acts change the stars, their balance, their light, their rotation? Man's act creates harmony or disharmony in the universe, and our sex, as a composing act, can become a fading not so much of ourselves, but of the cosmos that does not ignore us. (p. 219)"

"Philosophy loves disagreements, because disagreements produce, generate, feed, and create thematic variations, heuristic games, and absolute novelties. (p. 88)"

"Sexuality is a risk where the individual gambles with their identity and society with its order. To avoid this risk, we resort to the imagination, which, in a hallucinatory way, allows us to live illusory experiences that we do not have the courage to dare. Thus, the ego experiences the thrill of its identity being put at stake without losing it, and society experiences the turmoil of disorder that does not, however, affect its order. The imaginary serves this purpose, not to enhance sexuality, as is believed, but to appease it at that phantasmagorical level that leaves reality intact as it has been constructed. (p. 208)"

"Sexuality does not belong to the narrative of the ego because, in its presence, the soul undergoes a dislocation which, by shifting the regime of its rules, weakens self-possession. Its plot is interrupted by something excessive which, by breaking the continuity of speech and the order of discourse, leads to escape routes that the ego and the reason that governs it are unable to pursue. Drives and desires, in fact, bursting in as uncontrolled signifiers in the established order of meanings, bring to light other connections, other plots, other intertwining threads whose knots sink into the other part of ourselves. (p. 207)"

"Brothels have been closed down, not by the Merlin law but by a shift in demand, which no longer seeks sexual exchange but the buying and selling of the imaginary. In large cities, prostitutes have been almost entirely replaced by “'veados”', mostly Brazilian transvestites, imported for a season and then sent back to their “'favelas”'. This is a sign that what is sold on the streets is not sex and even less sexual exchange, but rather the “'representation”' of sex and the glitz of the images it produces."

"Then came Christianity and with it the curse of the flesh. Christianity broke the mandala, the four that make up harmony. Three are gathered together and separated from the fourth, the devil, whom iconography began to depict with the features of Pan, the Greek god of sex who, at his favourite time of day, chased the nymphs of the forest with his goat's hooves and broken horns. Christianity kept sexuality in check in the West, where heaven was separated from earth and spirit from flesh. If one fine day we stopped condemning pornography, which is nothing more than the flesh in its solitude, and began to condemn those who have reduced the flesh to solitude, separating it from heaven to make it the antechamber of hell, the first circle of the “'Comedy”'. (p. 220)"

"The sunset of the West is the fulfilment of a meaning contained in the word that says: “'land of the evening”', “'occasum”', the last glimmer of that light which, rising at dawn, has dominated the day. The word expresses a destiny that cannot be escaped. The sun cannot be stopped. Sunset is inevitable. The West is the land destined to host this sunset. But what is the meaning contained in the word? Is “setting” the inevitable decline of light or is it the unconscious withdrawal of the earth from the light? To grasp the meaning of this question is to decide between waiting and choosing. (Introduction to Book Two: “Western Thought”, p. 277)"

"The meditations on Nietzsche by Heidegger and Jaspers have highlighted with the utmost rigour the metaphysical essence of nihilism and its profound traces in all aspects of the Western soul. (Introduction to Book Two: “'Western Thought”', p. 279)"

"The tragic conclusion of the Second World War, with the atomic destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, is not just a historical fact for Jaspers, but an indicator of the nihilistic outcomes to which technical and scientific development left to its own devices can lead. (Chapter 58, “False Consciousness and the Claim of the Technical-Scientific Apparatus to be Beyond Comparison”, p. 422)"

"Humans have never inhabited the world, but only the description that myths, religion, philosophy and science have given of the world from time to time. (p. 15)"

"We still carry within us the traits of pre-technological man, who acted with a view to goals inscribed in a horizon of meaning, with a wealth of ideas of his own and a set of feelings with which he identified. The age of technology has abolished this “humanistic” scenario, and questions of meaning remain unanswered, not because technology is not yet sufficiently perfected, but because finding answers to such questions is not within its remit. Technology, in fact, does not tend towards a goal, does not promote meaning, does not open up scenarios of salvation, does not redeem, does not reveal the truth: technology “works”. (p. 21)"

"What does this crisis consist of? A change in the sign of the future: from the “future-promise” to the “future-threat”. And since the psyche is healthy when it is open to the future (unlike the depressed psyche, which is entirely focused on the past, and the manic psyche, which is entirely focused on the present), when the future closes its doors or, if it opens them, it is only to offer uncertainty, precariousness, insecurity and unease, then, as Heidegger says, “the terrible has already happened”, because initiatives fade away, hopes appear empty, demotivation grows, and vital energy implodes. (p. 26)"

"The lack of a promising future deprives parents and teachers of the authority to show the way. A “contractual” relationship is then established between adolescents and adults, as a result of which parents and teachers feel constantly obliged to justify their choices to young people, who may or may not accept what is proposed to them in an “egalitarian” relationship. But the relationship between young people and adults is not symmetrical, and treating adolescents as equals means not containing them and, above all, leaving them alone to face their own impulses and the anxiety that comes with them. (p. 29)"

"But which teachers assess, in addition to the cultural skills of their students, the degree of self-esteem that each of them has for themselves? Which teachers are aware that much of learning depends not so much on goodwill as on the self-esteem that triggers goodwill? Who, with appropriate recognition, reinforces this self-esteem, the primary driver of cultural education, and avoids destroying it with epithets and derision that, if directed at adults, would lead straight to court? (p. 32)"

"If learning cannot take place without emotional gratification, then neglecting emotions, or addressing them in such a hasty manner as to be counterproductive, is the greatest risk that a student faces today when going to school. And this is no small risk because, if it is true that school is the highest experience in which models of centuries of culture are offered, if these models remain contents of the mind without becoming formative ideas of the heart, the heart will begin to wander without horizon in that restless and depressed nothingness that even the noise of youth music cannot mask. (p. 38)"

"Emotional excess and a lack of reflective cooling essentially lead to four possible outcomes: 1) the “stunning of the emotional apparatus” through ritual practices such as nights at the disco or drug use; 2) “disinterest in everything”, implemented to numb emotions through sloth and non-participation, leading to an opaque attitude of indifference; 3) “violent behaviour”, when not murderous, to release emotions and achieve an overdose that exceeds the level of addiction, as with drugs; 4) “creative genius”, if the emotional burden is accompanied by good self-discipline. (p. 42)"

"[...] before the psychotherapist's couch, where words are exchanged, as we know, for a fee, before the drugs that stifle all the words with which we could learn to name and understand our soul's movements, we must convince ourselves of the necessity and urgency of preventive emotional education, which is very rare in the family, at school and in society. (p. 49)"

"We knew madness as an excess of passion. We saw its symptoms, we foresaw its possible scenarios. Today, more and more frequently, in the world of young people, madness dresses itself in the clothes of coldness and rationality, revealing nothing and exploding in unsuspected contexts that give no hint or even the slightest suspicion. (p. 50)"

"Feeling is not languor, it is not ill-concealed melancholy, it is not anguish of the soul, it is not disconsolate abandonment. Feeling is “strength”. That strength that we recognise at the heart of every decision when, after analysing all the pros and cons that rational arguments unfold, we “decide” because we feel at home with one choice rather than another. And woe betide us if, out of convenience or weakness, we make a choice that is not our own, woe betide us if we are strangers in our own lives. (p. 54)"

"If we call “intimate” that which we deny to strangers in order to grant it to those we want to let into our deepest secrets, often unknown even to ourselves, then modesty, which defends our intimacy, also defends our “freedom”. And it defends it in that core where our personal “identity” decides what kind of “relationship” to establish with the other. (p. 57)"

"Injecting heroin is called “bucarsi” in Italian. The body becomes an “abyss”, which etymologically means “bottomless”. Similarly, in French, “being an alcoholic” is called “drinking like a hole” (“boire comme un trou”). Drug addicts and alcoholics speak in ancient Greek and describe their inability to “contain” themselves with Platonic images. (p. 66)"

"[...] Desire, which, as Plato reminds us, is made up of “lack” and “nothingness”, demands that the dose be increased, so that in a certain sense drug addiction reproduces, like nothing else, the perfect functioning of desire, which does not seek pleasure in the world, but the rapid and immediate extinction of that “lack” which is its constitutive structure. In fact, no one desires what they have, but only what they do not have. “Nothingness is the soul of desire”, which, in its anaesthetic version, makes appetite irresistible and pleasure unsatisfactory. (p. 70)"

"Starting in 1968 and gradually over the following years, the contrast between the permitted and the prohibited faded away to make room for a much more painful contrast between the “possible” and the “impossible”. (p. 80)"

"Love is between me and that abyssal depth within me, which I can access thanks to you. Love is very solipsistic; and you, with whom I make love, are that Virgil who allows me to go into my Hell, from which I then emerge thanks to your presence (because it is not a given that those who go to Hell will ever come out again). Thanks to your presence, I emerge: this is why we do not make love with just anyone, but with the one we trust; and what is it that we trust? The possibility that after plunging into my abyss, you will bring me back out."

"Unlike all the beings that populate the earth, in fact, man thinks, and every thought tells him of his total estrangement from the earth. “Thrown into the infinite immensity of spaces that I do not know and that do not know me, I am afraid,” says Pascal, and he is not alluding to the infinity of cosmic spaces, but to their ignorance of human affairs: “They do not know me”. The indifference of the earth, its strangeness to the human event it hosts without knowing it, and to which it sends only a message of loneliness. (pp. 13-14)"

"Between the Self and the Self, the conflict is as violent as it is between God and the earth. (p. 20)"

"A virtue (“'areté”') that is a path towards the invisible and unspeakable centre (“'árretos”') from which only the unfolding of those harmonious circumferences that are the straight, the round, the beautiful and the just is possible. But this requires “the highest knowledge (”'méghiston mathémata'“)”, that mathematical knowledge for which Plato had the words “No one may enter here who is not a geometer” written on the door of his school. (p. 40)"

"Love is only the key that opens the doors to our emotional life, which we delude ourselves into thinking we control, while it, deceiving our illusion, leads us down paths and detours where, unbeknownst to us, the vitality of our existence flows in a tortuous and contradictory manner. (“'Love and Desire”', p. 65)"

"Unlike animals, humans know they must die. This awareness forces them to think about the beyond, which remains so regardless of whether it is inhabited by God or nothingness. This makes the future unknown to humans and the hidden trace of their secret anguish. We are not anguished by “this” or “that”, but by the nothingness that precedes us and awaits us. And since there is nothingness at the beginning and end of our lives, the question of the meaning of our existence arises unavoidably. An existence for nothing or for God?"

"Love fades because nothing remains the same over time."

"It is easy to say “love”. But only the Devil knows what lies beneath this word."

"Among the enthusiastic followers of Tissot we find Rousseau and Kant, for whom those who masturbate are not unlike ‘suicides’ who destroy with a single gesture the life that masturbators sacrifice over time. (p. 48)"

"And so the Age of Enlightenment, which for Kant marks ‘the emancipation of humanity from a state of minority’, reveals itself to be much more backward, obsessive and persecutory towards masturbation than previous centuries, which were governed by religion, which perhaps, more than reason, is familiar with the flesh and the sufferings of its loneliness. (p. 50)"

"Looking at man and looking at art, we must focus our eyes on their “belonging together”, because isolating man from his spiritual expression means reducing him to the condition of an animal, just as isolating art from man means making it twirl in the realm of the spirit, forgetting the material depth in which art, like man, takes shape and form. (p. 140)"

"“'Myth is the search for origin”', its revival and re-proposal, “”religion is the announcement of redemption, its figures are hope and faith in what is to come. [...] Where religion intersects with myth, myth dies out. (p. 65)"

"This is the ability that today's man has lost, as he is unable [...] to “imagine” the ultimate effects of his “actions”."

"Ethics, when faced with technology, becomes pathetic: we have never seen impotence capable of stopping power. The problem is not what we can do with the technical tools we have devised, but what technology can do to us."

"Reason is no longer the immutable order of the cosmos in which first mythology, then philosophy and finally science were reflected, creating their respective cosmologies, but becomes an “instrumental procedure” that guarantees the most economical calculation between the means available and the objectives to be achieved. (p. 38)"

"Truth is no longer conformity to the order of the cosmos or of God because, if there is no longer a horizon capable of guaranteeing the eternal framework of immutable order, if the order of the world no longer dwells in its being but depends on “technical doing”, “effectiveness” explicitly becomes the only criterion of truth. (p. 38)"

"Umberto Galimberti, Cristianesimo. La religione dal cielo vuoto, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2012. ISBN 978-88-07-17222-9."

"Umberto Galimberti, Gli equivoci dell'anima, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2001. ISBN 88-07-81642-3."

"Umberto Galimberti, Heidegger, Jaspers e il tramonto dell'occidente, Il Saggiatore, Milano, 1996. ISBN 88-428-0386-3."

"Umberto Galimberti, Heidegger e il nuovo inizio . Il pensiero al tramonto dell'Occidente, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2020. ISBN 978-88-07-10553-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, I miti del nostro tempo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2009. ISBN 978-88-07-17162-8."

"Umberto Galimberti, I vizi capitali e i nuovi vizi, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2004. ISBN 88-07-84027-8."

"Umberto Galimberti, Idee: il catalogo è questo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2009. ISBN 978-88-07-81527-0."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il corpo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2013. ISBN 978-88-07-88237-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il gioco delle opinioni, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2007. ISBN 978-88-07-81800-4."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il libro delle emozioni, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2021. ISBN 978-88-07-17400-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il segreto della domanda. Intorno alle cose umane e divine, Apogeo, Milano, 2008. ISBN 978-88-503-2717-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il tramonto dell'occidente. Nella lettura di Heidegger e Jaspers, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2005. ISBN 978-88-07-81849-3."

"Umberto Galimberti, Invito al pensiero di Martin Heidegger, Mursia, Milano, 1989. ISBN 88-425-0080-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, L'età della tecnica e la fine della storia, Orthotes, Napoli, 2021. ISBN 978-88-93-14314-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, L'ospite inquietante. Il nichilismo e i giovani, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2007. ISBN 978-88-07-17143-7."

"Umberto Galimberti, La casa di psiche. Dalla psicoanalisi alla pratica filosofica, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2005. ISBN 88-07-10391-5."

"Umberto Galimberti, La lampada di Psiche, a cura di Paolo Belli, Casagrande, Bellinzona, 2001. ISBN 88-7713-345-7."

"Umberto Galimberti, La parola ai giovani. Dialogo con la generazione del nichilismo attivo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editori, Milano, 2018. ISBN 978-88-07-17297-7."

"Umberto Galimberti, La terra senza il male. Jung dall'inconscio al simbolo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 1988."

"Umberto Galimberti, Le cose dell'amore, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2005. ISBN 88-07-84048-0."

"Umberto Galimberti, Orme del sacro. Il cristianesimo e la desacralizzazione del sacro, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2001. ISBN 88-07-17044-2."

"Umberto Galimberti, Paesaggi dell'anima, Mondadori, Milano, 1996. ISBN 88-04-42130-4."

"Umberto Galimberti, Psiche e techne. L'uomo nell'età della tecnica, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 1999. ISBN 88-07-10257-9."

"Umberto Galimberti, Psichiatria e fenomenologia, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2006. ISBN 88-07-81932-5."

"Umberto Galimberti, Umberto Galimberti racconta Freud, Jung e la psicoanalisi, Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, Roma, 2011."