Love and will … are conjunctive processes of being – a reaching out to influence others, molding, forming, creating the consciousness of other (9)
Will without love becomes manipulation … love without will in our own day become sentimental and experimental (9)
… man … is called by his consciousness to transcend the eternal return (10)
It is an old an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way (15)
“love” is simply the name for the way more powerful members of the family control other members (16)
“if there were not some new possibility, there would be no crisis – there would be only despair(18)
Break down the customary pretenses, hypocrisies, and defenses behind which we all hide in “normal” social discourse (19)
Does not every human conflict reveal universal characteristics of man as well as the idiosyncratic problems of the individual? (19)
The neurotic is the … artist who can not transmute his conflicts into art (24)
I believe it is a state of feelinglessness, the despairing possibility that nothing matters, a condition very close to apathy (27)
…the human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities (28)
I do believe that there is in our society a definite trend toward a state of affectlessness as an attitude toward life, a character state (29)
(apathy is)… want of feeling; lack of passion, emotion or excitement, indifference (29)
Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is (29)
Something worse than mediocrity – and that is absolute indifference (30)
Sexual intercourse is the human counterpart of the cosmic process (Proverb of Ancient China) (37)
There are four kinds of love. One is sex... libido. The second is eros, the drive of love to procreate or create…. A third is philia, or friendship, brotherly love. The fourth is agape ro caritas as the latins called it, the love which is devoted to the welfare of the other, the prototype of which is the love of God for man. Every human experience of authentic love is a blending, in varying proportions of these four (38-39)
The challenge a woman used to face from men was simple and direct – would she our would she not go to bed? – a direct issue of how she stood vis-à-vis cultural mores. But the question men ask now is no longer, “will she or won’t she?” but “can she or can’t she?” (41)
The battle against censorship and for freedom of expression surely was a great battle to win, but has it not become a new strait jacket? (42)
Questions typically asked about love making are not, was there passion or meaning or pleasure in the act? … how well did I perform? (44)
Is it not this intimacy that makes us return to the event in memory again and again when we needed to be warmed by whatever hearths life makes available? (45)
They are more wary of the tenderness that goes with psychological and spiritual nakedness than they are of the physical nakedness in sexual intimacy (45)
It is argued in some books on the counseling of married couples that the therapist ought to use only the term “fuck” when discussing sexual intercourse, and to insist the patient use it; for any other word plays into the patients’ dissimulation. (47)
The new Puritanism brings with it a depersonalization of our whole language. Instead of making love, we “have sex”; in contrast to intercourse, we “screw”’ instead of going to bed, we “lay” someone or (heaven help the English language as well as ourselves) we “are laid.” (47)
It is not surprising that the new puritanism develops smoldering hostility among the members of our society. And that hostility, in turn, comes out frequently in references to the sexual act itself. We say “go fuck yourself” or “fuck you” as a term of contempt to show that the other is of no value whatever beyond being used and tossed aside (48)
The possibility of finding a new lover makes it more necessary for us to accept the responsibility of choosing the one we do have if we stay with him or her (52)
Egalitarianism is clung to at the price of denying not only biological differences – which are basic, to say the least – between men and women, but emotional differences from which come much of the delight of the sexual act (54)
Another motive is the individual’s hope to overcome his own solitariness. Allied wit this is the desperate endeavor to escape feelings of emptiness and threat of apathy: partners pant and quiver hoping to find an answering quiver in someone else’s body just to prove that their own is not dead; they seek a responding, a longing in the other to prove their own feelings are alive. Out of an ancient conceit, this is called love (54)
The excessive concern with technical performance in sex is actually correlated with the reduction of sexual feeling (54)
Something significant in American society… the repressed fear of involvement with women (Cox) (58)
I don’t raise the question in advocacy… I consider some of the possibilities horrifying (Garth) (62)
The purpose of our discussion in this book is precisely to raise the questions of the alternative possibilities for good and evil – that is, the destruction or the enhancement of the qualities which constitute man’s “humane, life-giving qualities” (63)
We are in flight from eros – and we use sex as the vehicle for the flight (65)
We fly to the sensation of sex in order to avoid the passion or eros (65)
She took LSD – the kind of person who cries out to the world to give her some passion (68)
What of the anxiety which comes precisely from this new freedom? (69)
Anxiety which places a burden on individual consciousness and capacity for personal choice which, if not insoluable, is great indeed; anxiety which our sophisticated and enlightened day cannot be acted out like they hysterical woman of Victorian times and therefore turns inward and results in inhibiting feelings, suffocating passion in place of the inhibition of actions of the nineteenth-century woman (69-70)
Alienation is felt as a loss of the capacity to be intimately personal (71)
Social norms which promise virtue without trying, sex without risk, wisdom without struggle, luxury without effort – all provided that they agree to settle for love without passion, and soon even sex without feeling (71-72)
Eros seeks union of new dimensions of experience which broaden and deepen the being of both persons (74)
Eros is not a god in the sense of being above man, but the power that binds all things and all men together, the power informing all things (78)
There certainly are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies – conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or contain. And what are these conceptions? – wisdom and virtue in general. And such creators are poets and all artists who are deserving of the name inventor (79)
Their tragic view itself enabled them to delight in life. You can’t outwit death anyway by “progress” or accumulating wealth; so why not accept your fate, choose values which are authentic, and let yourself delight and believe in the being you are and the Being you are part of? (80)
The course of mental event automatically regulated by the pleasure principle … is inwardly set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of tension (Freud) (85)
The aim of all life is death (85)
To feel, then, makes their loneliness more painful rather than decreasing it, so they stop feeling (90-91)
Our feelings … are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world (91)
…the war between eros and technology. There is no war between sex and technology (96)
The lover, like the poet, is a menace on the assembly line (96)
The confrontation with death – and the reprieve from it – makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful that I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love it, to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. My river has never looked so beautiful … death, and its ever present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible. I wonder if we could love passionately, if ecstasy would be possible at all, if we knew we’d never die (Maslow) (99)
Death and delight, anguish and joy, anxiety and the wonder of birth – these are the warp and woof of which the fabric of human love is woven (100)
To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive – to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before (100)
If we can have sex without love, we assume that we escape the daimonic anxiety known throughout the ages as an inseparable part of human love. And if, further, we even use sexual activity itself as an escape from the commitments eros demand of us, we may hope to have thus gained an airtight defense against anxiety (105)
We preach a psycho-religious gospel that says the less grief the better (106)
An appreciation of the tragic not only can help us avoid some egregious oversimplifications in life, but it can specifically protect us against the danger that sex and love will be banalized also in psychotherapy (109)
If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well (Rilke) (122)
The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples (123)
Happiness is to live in harmony with one’s daimon (125)
To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. to write is to sit in judgment on oneself (Ibsen) (127)
And in my heart the daemons and the gods wage an eternal battle (Yeats) (127)
When we read in newspapers or history books of the atrocities committed by man upon man, we know in our hearts that each one of us harbors within himself those same savage impulses which lead to murder, to torture and to war (130)
The denied par of you is the source of hostility and aggression, but when you can, through consciousness, integrate it into your self-system, it becomes the source of energy and spirit which enlivens you (133)
Without rebellion, no consciousness (139)
No one who, like me conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed (Freud) (144)
To be able to experience and live out capacities for tender love requires the confronting of the daimonic. The two seem opposites, but if one is denied, other also is lost (149)
The moral problem is the relentless endeavor to find one’s own convictions and at the same time to admit that there will always be in them an element of self-aggradizement and distortion (158)
To be human means to exist on the boundary between the anonymous and the personal (163)
Yahweh, or Jehovah, means “no name” and is a device used to refer to God without pronouncing his name (168)
Thus we move from an impersonal through a persona to a transpersonal dimension of consciousness ( 177)
Victorian “will” did, indeed, turn out to be a web of rationalization and self-deciet (183)
In our understanding of human nature we have gained determinism, lost determination (Wheelis) (184)
The gift of freedom, yes; but the burden placed on the individual is tremendous indeed (187)
Philosophy, in its academic sense, is reputed to be “dead” … philosophy in our day – with the emphatic exception of the existentialists – concerns itself with formal problems rather than these critical life questions (188)
What we do when we unchained this Earth from its sun? … whither do we move now? Away from all suns? Do we not fall incessantly? Backward, sideward, forward, in al directions? Is there yet any up and down? Do we not err as though an infinite naught? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? … God is dead! (Nietzsche) (189)
But if will remains protest, it stays dependent on that which it is protesting against (192-93)
Is there possibly something going on in myself that is a cause of, or contributes to, my paralysis? (193)
Freedom to make choices experienced by a human being… has nothing whatever to do with free will as a principle governing human behavior but is a subjective experience which is itself casually determined (Robert Knight) (197)
An illusion is most significant in effect on personality change; that truth is not fundamentally (or is only theoretically) relevant to actions (198)
Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, falls the shadow (TS Eliot) (202)
In the very raising of these questions, and by taking the energy to pursue them, he is exercising some significant element of freedom (203)
“will power” expressed the arrogant efforts of Victorian Man to manipulate his surroundings and to rule nature with an iron hand, as well as to manipulate himself, rule his own life in the same way as one would an object (205)
N one needs to remind us of the great stores of resentment, inhibition, hostility, self-rejection, and related clinical symptoms which can develop as a result of this repressive kind of will power (205)
If wish is only a force, we are all involved in an abortive pilgrimage which consists of simply moving back to the state of the inorganic stone again (209)
Wishes are never merely needs, nor merely economic (210)
It is the symbolic meanings that have gone awry in neurosis, and not the id impulse (211)
Love and do what you will (Augustine) (216)
One characteristic of the creative experience is that it makes for a temporary union by transcending the conflict (217)
Will tries to take over the work of imagination (Yeats) (217)
Will is the capacity to organize one’s self so that movement in a certain direction or toward a certain goal may take place. Wish is the imaginative playing with the possibility of some act or state occurring (218)
The paralyzing effects of Victorianism, (are such that) the goal becomes twisted into a self-centered demonstration of one’s own character and th real moral issue gets entirely lost in the shuffle (222)
Learning is not the accumulation of scraps of knowledge. It is a growth, where every act of knowledge develops the learner, thus making him capable of constituting ever more and more complex objectives – and the object growth in complexity parallels the subjective growth in capacity (Husserl) (223)
Intentionality (is) the structure which gives meaning to experience (223)
Intent is the turning of the mind toward an object (229)
Meaning has within it a commitment (230)
The patient cannot permit himself to perceive the trauma until he is ready to take a stand toward it (231)
Free association is a technique of going beyond mere conscious intention and giving one’s self over to the realm of intentionality (235)
(comprehend and apprehend both stem from the Latin word prehendere, to seize with the hand (237))
But then begins the journey in my head, to work my mind, when body’s work’s expir’d; for then my thoughts – from far where I abide – inted a zealous pilgrimage to thee, and keep my drooping eyelids open wide (Shakespeare) (241-42)
Descartes was wrong in his famous sentence, “I think, therefore, I am,” for identity does not come out of thinking as such, and certainly not out of intellectualization (243)
Hatred and desire to kill, when present in adult life, generally turn out, in my experience, to be expressions of dependency on the father (261)
(consciousness comes from the words “con” and “Scire” meaning “knowing with”) (266)
Freedom can never be an abnegation of law, as though our “will” operated only in a temporary margin of relief from determinism (269)
Freedom is the recognition of necessity (Spinoza) (269)
Lacking external guides, we shift our morality inward; there is a new demand upon the individual of personal responsibility. We are required to discover on a deeper level what it means to be human (279)
(fantasy comes from the word “phantastikous” meaning “able to represent” “to make visible” (281))
We cannot will love, but we can will to open ourselves to the chance, we can conceive of the possibility – which, as patients testify, sets the wheels in motion (282)
This is the separation between self and world, the split between existence and essence (284)
Human will, in its specific form, always begins in a “no” (284)
The “no” is a protest against a world we never made, and it is also an assertion of one’s self in the endeavor to remold and reform the world (284)
Only the truly kind man knows how to love and how to hate (Confucious) (287)
This is a simply illustration of care… identification of one’s self with the pain or joy of the other; of guilt, pity, and the awareness that we all stand on the base of a common humanity from which we all stem (289)
(care is) the basic constitutive phenomenon of human existence (Heidegger) (290)
Sentimentality is thinking about sentiment rather than genuinely experiencing the object of it (291)
The old gods retained their temples and their sacrifices, but had ceased to inspire a living faith (293)
Whatever happens in the external world, human love and grief, pity and compassion are what matter. These emotions transcend even death (302)
The need is physiological in origin … the desire is psychological (310)
For human beings, the more powerful need is not for sex per se but for relationship, intimacy, acceptance, and affirmation (311)
At what moment do lovers come into the most complete possession of themselves, if not when they are lost in each other? (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) (311)
(Humans are the only creatures on Eath that procreate face-to-face) (312)
We believe that the role of affection in the socialization of primates can only be understood by conceiving love as a number of love or affectional systems and not as a single emotion (Harlow) (319)
It requires our participation in the picture itself if the painting is to speak to us (322)
The only way out is ahead, and our choice is whether we shall cringe from it or affirm it (325)
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