Sexologists

"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."

"To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men."

"The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's or woman's body, is the pattern of all the process of our life."

"'Homosexual' is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it."

"Every artist writes his own autobiography."

"If men and women are to understand each other, to enter into each other's nature with mutual sympathy, and to become capable of genuine comradeship, the foundation must be laid in youth."

""Charm"—which means the power to effect work without employing brute force—is indispensable to women. Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm."

"There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself."

"Had there been a lunatic asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on the pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could but have confirmed the diagnosis."

"The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence, from Jerusalem, of a lunatic asylum."

"The text of the Bible is but a feeble symbol of the Revelation held in the text of Men and Women."

"It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution."

"The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities...A life is beautiful and ideal, or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship."

"One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take."

"The byproduct is sometimes more valuable than the product."

"All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution."

"The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men."

"The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite."

"Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself."

"The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum."

"Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry."

"In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way."

"The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought."

"A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest."

"The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness."

"What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command."

"The sun and the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago...had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands."

"1919...Henri Bergson, Karl Barth, Ernst Cassirer, Havelock Ellis, Karl Jaspers, John Maynard Keynes, Rudolf Steiner—indelible figures—were all active in their various spheres."

"The dilemma of traditional sex research lay in the unconscious, but unquestioningly assumed division into opposing drives and hereditary factors... The division into heterosexuality and homosexuality, into heterosexuals and homosexuals, is also an artifact that rests on a grave error, namely, on the assumption that a fundamentally different model is necessary to explain heterosexual and homosexual behavior. The entire investigation of etiology was ideologically loaded beforehand because it separated a segment of the sexual continuum and attempted to make analyses with the help of fundamentally different concepts."

"Appropriate patterns of reproductive, gender, and sexual conduct are all products of specific cultures and all can be viewed as examples of socially scripted conduct. Western societies now have a system of gender and sexual learning in which gender differential scripts are learned prior to sexual scripts, but take their origins in part from the previously learned gender scripts... There are two important points: The first is that both gender and sexuality are learned forms of social practice, and the second is that looking to "natural differences" between women and men for lessons about sexual conduct is an error."

"...neither tolerance nor intolerance is grounded in science and reason, but they are themselves acts of faith grounded in social custom and the politics of expediency and power."

"Both social and biosocial factors are necessary to interpret crosscultural studies, with the general proviso that one's research interest determines which elements, in what combinations, are significant for the provision of understanding."

"Social and cultural factors very broadly channel and limit sexual variation in human populations. Sexual laws, codes, and roles do restrict the range and intensity of sexual practices, as far as we can judge from the cross-cultural literature (Herdt and Stoller 1990). Kinsey lent his support to this view; Ford and Beach (1950) documented it in surveys; and Margaret Mead (1961) did so in her ethnographic studies. But biosocial, genetic, and hormonal predispositions also broadly limit and channel. Each culture's theory of the combination of these social and biological constraints we could call its theory of human sexual nature. Yet none of these broad principles, nor the local theory of human sexual nature, entirely explains or predicts a particular person's sexual desires or behaviors. A sexual behavior, that is, does not necessarily indicate an erotic orientation, preference, or desire. The homosexual is not the same as the homoerotic; whether in our society or one very exotic, I will claim, we can distinguish the homosexual from the homoerotic, as Oscar Wilde's case first hinted."

"The difficulty with our bisexual construct is that it locates the origin and meaning of preference too much inside the lone individual and not enough in the social surround. The notion of sexual preference, with its linking conception "sex object choice," requires an individual difference psychology of choice and free will that may correspond to the reality of philosophers, but seldom does for ordinary mortals. Our sexual development is driven and regulated by extraordinary forces, intrinsic and extrinisic, which include our genes, hormones, early parental relationships, peer pressures, cultural training for categories and language, and out-and-out social sanctions and physical force. We seldom are free to choose freely, but entertain the enchantment that we can."

"Wo die "Beleidigung sittlichen Gefühls", wo "moralische Begriffe" höher gestellt werden als die eigene, auf rationaler Basis erarbeitete Strafrechtstheorie, dort darf man mit voller Berechtigung von einem totalen Sieg des Vorurteils über die Vernunft sprechen."

"Als Ursachen für die so oder so vorgefundene Bewertung [einer bestimmten] Sexualität [...] lassen sich generell folgende ausmachen: Die jeweilige Stammestradition mit ihren Mythen, Ursprungs- und Fruchtbarkeitssagen und ferner die kulturellen Charakteristika der fraglichen Gruppe, nun aber geographisch großräumiger betrachtet und im Zusammenhang mit Rasse, Sprache (Sprachfamilie), Erbschaftsverhältnissen (Vater- oder Mutterrecht) sowie ihren ökonomischen und ökologischen Besonderheiten gesehen. Religion, wirtschaftliche Verhältnisse, natürliche Ressourcen sowie das ökologische Umfeld insgesamt (auch dessen Veränderungen im Zeitablauf!) erweisen sich überall als direkt aufeinander bezogen."

"Alle Menschen gehören als Gattung zu den gruppenhaft lebenden Geschöpfen, was lebensgefährdende innerartliche Aggression von vornherein ausschließt. Mit anderen Worten: Hätten schon in der Vergangenheit unserer Spezies solch schwere Konflikte [...] geherrscht wie während der letzten rund viereinhalb Jahrtausende und noch gegenwärtig, dann wären wir niemals zu Menschen geworden, sondern längst vorher ausgestorben. Denn Wesen, die als einzelne Individuen im Vergleich zu den vielen Raubtieren, die ihnen nachstellen, derart schwach und hilflos sind wie wir, brauchen Deckung und Rückhalt von anderen der gleichen Art, um überleben zu können. Wir haben weder Klauen noch Reißzähne, noch genug Muskelkraft, um allein unseren großen Freßfeinden erfolgreich Widerstand zu leisten, doch in der Gruppe gelingt es, wenn auch nie ohne selbstlose Opfer und Mut. In jener fernen Frühzeit, als unsere vormenschlichen Ahnen anfingen, in Trupps zu leben, um sich bei Gefahr zusammenzuschließen und einander beizustehen, haben sie ein Verhalten entwickelt, das man 'soziale Intelligenz' nennt: Die Fähigkeit, mit Angehörigen der eigenen Gattung zusammenzuwirken, um das Gedeihen aller zu gewährleisten. Dies Potential haben wir auch jetzt noch, aber es erweist sich als nachhaltig gestört. [...] Es muß sich um eine friedliche Welt gehandelt haben, weil die frühen Siedlungen zumeist nicht gegen menschliche Feinde gesichert sind. Für ein, zwei Jahrtausende [nach der letzten Eiszeit] haben Menschen in solchen Lebensverhältnissen offenbar ein glückliches Dasein verbracht."

"Um es vorwegzunehmen: Jene dargelegte 'kultische Dominanz' der Frau ist kein Matriarchat oder Feminat gewesen; zu der Sozialstruktur, die wir heute 'Patriarchat' nennen, hat es niemals ein weibliches Pendant gegeben. [...] Nichtsdestoweniger sind einige der Befunde, worauf die alten Ethnologen und Soziologen (und Sozialisten) ihre falschen weltumspannenden Theoreme aufbauten, tatsächlich wahr und in der Realität bei einigen Naturvölkern heute noch vorfindbar, nur müssen sie besser gedeutet werden als vordem, nämlich objektiver. Und insofern sollte eher von maternalen denn von matriachalen Kulturelementen gesprochen werden, wenn man solch kulturell-soziale Zusammenhänge unter globalem Aspekt anspricht. [...] Jedenfalls zählen zu den kulturellen Zügen, um die es hier geht, zusammengefaßt etwa folgende, die heute nurmehr selten irgendwo alle gleichzeitig auftreten: In der Erbfolgereglung wird die mütterliche Linie gewählt, Kinder gehören stets zur Mutterseite. Eigentum, gelegentlich auch Rechte werden in der mütterlichen Linie vererbt (entweder von der Mutter auf die Tochter oder vom Mutterbruder auf den Schwestersohn). Es herrscht sog. matrilokale Wohnfolge, d. h. der Ehemann tritt in die Sippe der Frau ein und wohnt dort. Bei beiden Geschlechtern herrscht voreheliche sexuelle Ungebundenheit, bei den Mädchen weitgehende Freiheit in der Gattenwahl und große Selbständigkeit in der Ehe mit leichter Scheidungsmöglichkeit für die Frau. Die weibliche Stellung in Kult und Religion ist relevanter als die der Männer. Der biologische Vater gilt als mit seinen Kindern nicht verwandt; seine Stelle nimmt, was Erziehung und Fürsorge betrifft, der Mutterbruder ein: Er ist der soziale Vater für alle Kinder seiner Schwester, auch wenn diese von verschiedenen Vätern stammen. [...] Das ganze Denkmuster, das hier nur extrem knapp umrissen wird, gibt im Grunde keinen Hinweis darauf, daß die betreffenden Menschen die Zusammenhänge zwischen Zeugung und Geburt gekannt hätten."

"Die Feste der frühen Epochen waren stark sexuell betont. Ihr Höhepunkt war oft das, was man heute Gruppensex nennt und als sozial rein negativ einstuft. Allerdings vermag Sexualität tatsächlich soziale Spannungen abzubauen, und sie 'befriedigt' nicht nur, sie befriedet auch. Der Mensch ist anthropologisch auf viel mehr Sexualkontakte angelegt, als unsere rigide Kultur uns erlaubt, ja, nur als 'menschenwürdig' hinstellt. Die als sogenannte unnennbare Unsittlichkeit abqualifizierten Sexualbräuche vieler Naturvölker wurden von den weißen Kolonialherren oft als willkommene Vorwände instrumentalisiert, um die betreffenden Stämme guten Gewissens zu drangsalieren und zu dezimieren. Künder des Islam im Orient und Vertreter des Konfuzianismus in China bemühten sich ihrerseits ebenso wie Weiße zwecks christlicher Mission, sexuelle Riten möglichst total auszurotten, wo immer sie noch auf sie trafen: Was vordem Kult war, wurde zur Unzucht umdefiniert. Die Praxis hat bei den meisten Naturvölkern dazu geführt, daß die betreffenden Rituale erloschen. Vergleichbare Sitten sind in der Frühzeit auf dieselbe Art verschwunden, zwar nicht aus denselben, aber aus ähnlich strukturierten Gründen, denn in allen patriarchalischen Ethnien gelten orgiastische Riten als sozialschädlich."

"During that time, he asked me for my phone number, which I gave to him. Later that evening, he invited me to his room. I said I didn’t feel right going alone, so two other women came with me. In the penthouse suite, I met Donald again. When we entered the room he grabbed each of us tightly in a hug and kissed each of us on the lips without asking for permission. He was wearing pyjamas. [...] Donald then asked me "What do you want?" "How much?""

"One cannot choose to not be a pedophile, but one can choose to not be a child molester. Having encountered thousands of cases, it is my experience that the pedophiles who do go on to become actual child molesters do so when they feel the most desperate. Yet, much of what society does has been to increase rather than decrease their desperation."

"Pedophiles will remain hidden if they continue to be hated and feared, which would impede efforts to better understand this sexual orientation and thereby prevent child sexual exploitation."

"Speaking as a gay men, I believe we SHOULD include the P. To do otherwise is to betray the principles that give us our rights."

"No, I proposed it simply in order not to be accused of sexism, because there are all these women who want to say, “women can rape too, women can be pedophiles too, women can be exhibitionists too.” It’s a perverse expression of feminism, and so, I thought, let me jump the gun on this. I don’t think the phenomenon even exists."

"Essay on the possible relations among anime, gender dysphoria, and autogynephilia."

"Dr. Ray Blanchard, an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, is a well-noted foe to the trans community. His most recent bad idea that’s gone viral: Anime might be making trans girls transition."

"I think I've learned that people can be different and that people have always their excuses or the reasons behind their differences and that we one of the things that I've learned is to always accept differences and accept that everybody is entitled for their the way they think and behave and that it is all has roots to their environment and their genetic make-up too"

"At that time, of course I was much younger and I wanted to understand more about my self and about other people's personalities I wanted to learn more about disorders I was very much interested in those types of things"

"I think that we have to make sure that the legislation, the law, allows people with cognitive disabilities to inter school like everyone else. We also have to change the way we train teachers;"

"We need to make sure that the curriculum becomes more flexible as to meet the"

"people on Wheelchairs or people who are using Crutches or even sensory disabilities they're much easier to deal with because they have normal intelligence and they would function well at the school and so on. I feel that the people with cognitive disabilities pose the biggest challenges so, I always feel that we have to not marginalize them, but actually include them and make sure that their needs are met in any setting."

"I will actually first try to make them understand what is it like to have a disability and that everyone anyone is prone to have a disability so, we can't be looking down upon people with disabilities just to understand what it means to have a disability and then probably I will encourage them to to to push for equal opportunity for everybody to be the ones who ask for people with every type of disability to be included in society, included in universities, included in everything the planning for the curriculum and so on; so, I think the students who have this type of ability to push for that."

"Homosexuality was part of the plan of nature and creation just like normal love."

"The more we delve into the essence of personality, the more we learn that in this world, certainly rich with natural beauty and things worthy of seeing, nothing is more attractive and worthier of knowing and experiencing than people."

"In the ranks of a relatively small party, the anarchist, it seemed to me as if proportionately more homosexuals and effeminates are found than in others."

"The persecution of homosexuals belongs to the same sad chapter of history in which the persecutions of witches and heretics is inscribed... Only with the French Revolution did a complete change come about. Everywhere where the Code Napoléon was introduced, the laws against homosexuals were repealed, for they were considered a violation of the rights of the individual... In Germany, however, despite more than fifty years of scientific research, legal discrimination against homosexuals continues unabated... May justice soon prevail over injustice in this area, science conquer superstition, love achieve victory over hatred!"

"Emma Goldman has campaigned boldly and steadfastly for individual rights, and especially for those deprived of their rights. Thus it came about that she was the first and only woman, indeed the first and only American, to take up the defense of homosexual love before the general public."