The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man’s life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian – an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own... The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization.
For there is a way back from imagination to reality and that is – art.
Suffering comes from three quarters: from our own body, which is destined to decay and dissolution, and cannot even dispense with anxiety and pain as danger-signals; from the outer world, which can rage against us with the most powerful and pitiless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations with other men.
Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life – it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.
Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people’s envy, in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place.
Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear will soon convince themselves that mortals cannot hide any secret.
We tell ourselves how lovely it would be, would it not, if there were a God who created the universe and benign Providence, a moral world order, and life beyond the grave, yet it is very evident, is it not, that all of this is the way we should inevitably wish it to be. And it would be even more remarkable if our poor, ignorant bondsman ancestors had managed to solve all these difficult cosmic questions.
That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal, is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood – the time when he was his own ideal.
With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair;.
Quite often they are lines of thought starting out from more than one centre, but not without their points of contact; almost invariably one train of thought is accompanied by its contradictory opposite, associatively linked to it by contrast.
Every one has wishes which he would not like to tell to others, which he does not want to admit even to himself.
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.
The dream shows how recollections of one’s everyday life can be worked into a structure where one person can be substituted for another, where unacknowledged feelings like envy and guilt can find expression, where ideas can be linked by verbal similarities, and where the laws of logic can be suspended.
By exposing the hidden dream-thoughts, we have confirmed in general that the dream does continue the motivation and interests of waking life, for dream-thoughts are engaged only with what seems to be important and of great interest to us.
Trying to be completely sincere with yourself is a good exercise.
The scope of one’s personality is defined by the magnitude of that problem which is capable of driving a person out of his wits.
Dreaming, in short, is one of the devices we employ to circumvent repression, one of the main methods of what may be called indirect representation in the mind.
I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.
Rather than living our lives, we are ″lived″ by unknown and uncontrollable forces.
No one who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.