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The Two Most Far-reaching Critical Theories At The Beginning Of The Latest Phase Of Industrial Society Were Those Of Marx And Freud. Marx Showed The Moving Powers And The Conflicts In The Social-historical Process. Freud Aimed At The Critical Uncovering Of The Inner Conflicts. Both Worked For The Liberation Of Man, Even Though Marx's Concept Was More Comprehensive And Less Time-bound Than Freud's.

-Erich Fromm

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The Two Most Far-reaching

Erich Fromm

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The Two Most Far-reaching Critical Theories At The Beginning Of The Latest Phase Of Industrial Society Were Those Of Marx And Freud. Marx Showed The Moving Powers And The Conflicts In The Social-historical Process. Freud Aimed At The Critical Uncovering Of The Inner Conflicts. Both Worked For The Liberation Of Man, Even Though Marx's Concept Was More Comprehensive And Less Time-bound Than Freud's.

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It Seems That Great Minds A Hundred Years Ago Saw What Would Happen Today Or Tomorrow, While We To Whom It Is Happening Blind Ourselves In Order Not To Be Disturbed In Our Daily Routine.

We Substitute, Or We Rather Hide, This Fear Of Real Intimacy By A Superficial Kind Of Friendliness, Which Is Quite Nice, But Nevertheless, Very Shallow.

Integrity Simply Means Not Violating One's Own Identity.

There Is No Meaning To Life Except The Meaning Man Gives His Life By The Unfolding Of His Powers.

People Think That To Love Is Simple, But That To Find The Right Object To Love - Or To Be Loved By - Is Difficult.

Is Love An Art? Then It Requires Knowledge And Effort.

In The Nineteenth Century The Problem Was That God Is Dead. In The Twentieth Century The Problem Is That Man Is Dead.

The Task We Must Set For Ourselves Is Not To Feel Secure, But To Be Able To Tolerate Insecurity.

[sigmund ] Freud Assumes That Every Dream Represents The Satisfaction Of Adesire And In The Last Analysis, Of A Sexual Desire That Has Its Roots In Infancy.

The Capacity To Be Puzzled Is The Premise Of All Creation, Be It In Art Or In Science.

Happiness Is A Very Proud Word Of Our Whole Cultural Heritage.

People Seek A New Orientation, A New Philosophy, One Which Is Centered On The Priorities Of Life-physically And Spiritually-and Not On The Priorities Of Death.

But Not Only Medicine, Engineering, And Painting Are Arts; Living Itself Is An Art In Fact, The Most Important And At The Same Time The Most Difficult And Complex Art To Be Practiced By Man.

Intellectuals Are Hindered On The Way To Being, By Their Narcissism.

The Affirmation Of One's Own Life, Happiness, Growth And Freedom, Is Rooted In One's Capacity To Love.

Capacity To Love

There Is Hardly Any Activity, Any Enterprise, Which Is Started Out With Such Tremendous Hopes And Expectations, And Yet Which Fails So Regularly, As Love.

There Is Only One Meaning Of Life: The Act Of Living Itself.

Meaning Of Life

People Have Committed Suicide Because Of Their Failure To Realize The Passions For Love , Power , Fame , Revenge . Cases Of Suicide Because Of A Lack Of Sexual Satisfaction Are Virtually Nonexistent.

We Try To Evade The Question Of Existence With Property, Prestige, Power, Possession, Production, Fun, And, Ultimately, By Trying To Forget That We- That I- Exist. No Matter How Much He Thinks Of God Or Goes To Church, Or How Much He Believes In Religious Ideas , If He, The Whole Man, Is Deaf To The Question Of Existence, If He Does Not Have An Answer To It, He Is Marking Time, And He Lives And Dies Like One Of The Million Things He Produces. He Thinks Of God, Instead Of Experiencing God.

Our Main Way Of Relating Ourselves To Others Is Like Things Relate Themselves To Things On The Market. We Want To Exchange Our Own Personality - Or As One Says Sometimes, Our "personality Package" - For Something.

The Average American Has Separated His Private Life From His Existence As A Member Of His Society, And Leaves That To The Specialists In The Government To Take Care Of.

The Experience Of Separateness Arouses Anxiety; It Is, Indeed, The Source Of All Anxiety.

Nonviolent Communication

There Is Nothing Inhuman, Evil, Or Irrational Which Does Not Give Some Comfort, Provided It Is Shared By A Group.

The Pace Of Science Forces The Pace Of Technique. Theoretical Physics Forces Atomic Energy On Us; The Successful Production Of The Fission Bomb Forces Upon Us The Manufacture Of The Hydrogen Bomb. We Do Not Choose Our Problems, We Do Not Choose Our Products; We Are Pushed, We Are Forced -- By What? By A System Which Has No Purpose And Goal Transcending It, And Which Makes Man Its Appendix.

Modern Capitalism Needs Men Who Cooperate Smoothly And In Large Numbers; Who Want To Consume More And More; And Whose Tastes Are Standardized And Can Be Easily Influenced And Anticipated ... What Is The Outcome? Modern Man Is Alienated From Himself, From His Fellow Man And From Nature.

We Are Confronted With The Possibility Of A War Of Such Destruction That The Whole Existence Of Our Nation And Of The Whole World Is At Stake. And Yet, People Know It - People Read It In The Newspapers, People Read That At The First Attack, A Hundred Million Americans Might Be Killed. And Yet, They Talk About It As If They Were Talking About Something Being Wrong With The Carburetor Of Their Car, Perhaps.

In The Act Of Giving Lies The Expression Of My Aliveness.

In Fact, There Are Very Important Writings Of Marx Which Are Not Even Translated Into English.

The Two Most Far-reaching Critical Theories At The Beginning Of The Latest Phase Of Industrial Society Were Those Of Marx And Freud. Marx Showed The Moving Powers And The Conflicts In The Social-historical Process. Freud Aimed At The Critical Uncovering Of The Inner Conflicts. Both Worked For The Liberation Of Man, Even Though Marx's Concept Was More Comprehensive And Less Time-bound Than Freud's.

Ger-mans Love The Ambiguous Word, Verbal Assonances As Ends In Themselves,vague Concepts. Anglosaxons Are More Clear.

Whether...a Change From The Supremacy Of Natural Science To A New Social Science Will Take Place...depends On One Factor: How Many Brilliant, Learned, Disciplined, And Caring Men And Women Are Attracted By The New Challenge.

The Manual Worker Does Not Have To Sell His Personality. He Doesn't Have To Sell His Smile.

Giving Is The Highest Expression Of Potency. In The Very Act Of Giving, I Experience My Strength, My Wealth, My Power. This Experience Of Heightened Vitality And Potency Fills Me With Joy. I Experience Myself As Overflowing, Spending, Alive, Hence As Joyous.

The Duty To Be Alive Is The Same As The Duty To Become Oneself, To Develop Into The Individual One Potentially Is.

Authority Is Not A Quality One Person 'has,' In The Sense That He Has Property Or Physical Qualities. Authority Refers To An Interpersonal Relation In Which One Person Looks Upon Another As Somebody Superior To Him.

Chronic Boredom Compensated Or Uncompensated Constitutes One Of The Major Psychopathological Phenomena In Contemporary Technotronic Society, Although It Is Only Recently That It Has Found Some Recognition.

A Dream Is A Microscope Through Which We Look At The Hidden Occurrences In Our Soul.

The Right To Express Our Thoughts Means Something Only If We Are Able To Have Thoughts Of Our Own

I Understand By Socialism A Society In Which The Aim Of Production Is Not Profit, But The Use. In Which The Individual Citizen Participates Responsibly In His Work, And In The Whole Social Organization, And In Which He Is Not A Means Who Is Employed By Capital.

Integrity Simply Means A Willingness Not To Violate One's Identity, In The Many Ways In Which Such Violation Is Possible.

Well-being Is Possible To The Degree To Which One Has Overcome One's Narcissism; To The Degree To Which One Is Open, Responsive, Sensitive, Awake, Empty.... Well-being Means, Finally, To Drop One's Ego, To Give Up Greed, To Cease Chasing After Preservation And The Aggrandizement Of The Ego, To Be And To Experience One's Self In The Act Of Being, Not In Having, Preserving, Coveting, Using.

Once They Are Through The Process Of Education, Most People Lose The Capacity Of Wondering, Of Being Surprised. They Feel They Ought To Know Everything, And Hence That It Is A Sign Of Ignorance To Be Surprised Or Puzzled By Anything.

The More The Drive Toward Life Is Thwarted, The Stronger Is The Drive Toward Destruction; The More Life Is Realized, The Less Is The Strength Of Destructiveness. Destructiveness Is The Outcome Of Unlived Life.

I Believe That One Can And Must Hope For A Sane Society That Furthers Man's Capacity To Love His Fellow Men, To Work And Create, To Develop His Reason And His Objectivity Of A Sense Of Himself That Is Based On The Experience Of His Productive Energy. I Believe That One Can And Must Hope For The Collective Regaining Of A Mental Health That Is Characterized By The Capacity To Love And To Create.

The Ownership Of Industry By The State - That Is Not Socialism.

The Destruction Of The World Is The Last, Almost Desperate Attempt To Save Myself From Being Crushed By It

A Relatively Primitive Village In Which There Are Still Real Feasts, Common Artistic Shared Expressions, And No Literacy At All Is More Advanced Culturally And More Healthy Mentally Than Our Educated, Newspaper-reading Radio-listening Culture.

The Mother-child Relationship Is Paradoxical And, In A Sense, Tragic. It Requires The Most Intense Love On The Mother's Side, Yet This Very Love Must Help The Child Grow Away From The Mother, And To Become Fully Independent.

The Kind Of Relatedness To The World May Be Noble Or Trivial, But Even Being Related To The Basest Kind Of Pattern Is Immensely Preferable To Being Alone.

Immature Love Says: 'i Love You Because I Need You.' Mature Love Says 'i Need You Because I Love You.'

Man's Main Task In Life Is To Give Birth To Himself, To Become What He Potentially Is. The Most Important Product Of His Effort Is His Own Personality.

If I Am What I Have And If I Lose What I Have Who Then Am I?

Optimism Is An Alienated Form Of Faith, Pessimism An Alienated Form Of Despair.

In Times Of Change, Learners Inherit The Earth

Times Have Changed

Only When Man Succeeds In Developing His Reason And Love Further Than He Has Done So Far, Only When He Can Build A World Based On Human Solidarity And Justice, Only When He Can Feel Rooted In The Experience Of Universal Brotherliness, Will He Have Tr

If We Love Our Fellow Humans, We Cannot Limit Our Insight And Our Love Only To Others As Individuals...we Have To Be Political People, I Would Even Say Passionately Involved Political People, Each Of Us In The Way That Best Suits Our Own Temperaments, Our Working Lives, And Our Own Capabilities.

Mobilizing The Love Of Life Is The Only Force That Can Defeat The Love For The Dead.

Every Society By Its Own Practice Of Living And By The Mode Of Relatedness, Of Feelings, And Perceiving, Develops A System Of Categories Which Determines The Forms Of Awareness.

The Average American Is Not Concerned With His Society. He Talks About It, But You Know If One Speaks Of Being Concerned, I Mean Something About Which One Loses One's Sleep, Sometimes.

The Lust For Power Is Not Rooted In Strength But In Weakness.

Paradoxically, The Ability To Be Alone Is The Condition For The Ability To Love.

Ability To Love

Our Whole Culture Is Based On The Appetite For Buying, On The Idea Of A Mutually Favorable Exchange. .... For The Man An Attractive Girl - And For The Woman An Attractive Man - Are The Prizes They Are After. 'attractive' Usually Means A Nice Package Of Qualities Which Are Popular And Sought After On The Personality Market. What Specifically Makes A Person Attractive Depends On The Fashion Of The Time, Physically As Well As Mentally. ... Two Persons Thus Fall In Love When They Feel They Have Found The Best Object Available On The Market, Considering The Limitations Of Their Own Exchange Values.

Mother Is The Home We Come From. She Is Nature, Soil, Ocean.

For The Most Part, Biophiliacs,lovers Of Life, Are Found Among Simple People, Without Pretensions.

I Would Define Myself As A Marxian, And That Means Of Course Also As A Humanist.

We Are Concerned With Things. We Are Concerned With Success. We Are Concerned With Money. We Are Concerned With Instrumentalities.

I Feel Worried, Deeply Worried, Only About One Thing - The Possibility That We Fall... That We Cannot Avoid An Atomic War.

Creativity Is The Ability To See And To Respond.

If Faith Cannot Be Reconciled With Rational Thinking, It Has To Be Eliminated As An Anachronistic Remnant Of Earlier Stages Of Culture And Replaced By Science Dealing With Facts And Theories Which Are Intelligible And Can Be Validated.

One Cannot Be Deeply Responsive To The World Without Being Saddened Very Often.

This Marxian Sentence, Repeated To The Point Of Boredom, Is Misinterpreted. In Reality [karl] Marx Was A "religious" Man.

The Main Condition For The Achievement Of Love Is The Overcoming Of One's Narcissism. The Narcissistic Orientation Is One In Which One Experiences As Real Only That Which Exists Within Oneself, While The Phenomena In The Outside World Have No Reality In Themselves, But Are Experienced Only From The Viewpoint Of Their Being Useful Or Dangerous To One. The Opposite Pole To Narcissism Is Objectivity; It Is The Faculty To See Other People And Things As They Are, Objectively, And To Be Able To Separate This Objective Picture From A Picture Which Is Formed By One's Desires And Fears.

Neurosis Can Be Understood Best As The Battle Between Tendencies Within An Individual; Deep Character Analysis Leads, If Successful, To The Progressive Solution.

I Think What Democracy Means Today, In Reality, Is To A Large Extent, Manipulated Consent - Not Forced Consent, Manipulated Consent - And Manipulated More And More With The Help Of Madison Avenue.

The Most Important Misunderstanding Seems To Me To Lie In A Confusion Between The Human Necessities Which I Consider Part Of Human Nature, And The Human Necessities As They Appear As Drives, Needs, Passions, Etc., In Any Given Historical Period.

In The 19th Century Inhumanity Meant Cruelty; In The 20th Century It Means Schizoid Self-alienation.

Love Is Hot A Higher Power Which Descends Upon Mn Nor A Duty Which Is Imposed Upon Him; It Is His Own Power By Which He Relates Himself To The World And Makes It Truly His.

It Is Essential... That Discipline Should Not Be Practised Like A Rule Imposed On Oneself From The Outside, But That It Becomes An Expression Of One's Own Will; That It Is Felt As Pleasant, And That One Slowly Accustoms Oneself To A Kind Of Behaviour Which One Would Eventually Miss, If One Stopped Practising It.

Selfish Persons Are Incapable Of Loving Others, But They Are Not Capable Of Loving Themselves Either.

The Narcissistic, The Domineering, The Possessive Woman Can Succeed In Being A "loving" Mother As Long As The Child Is Small. Only The Really Loving Woman, The Woman Who Is Happier In Giving Than In Taking, Who Is Firmly Rooted In Her Own Existence, Can Be A Loving Mother When The Child Is In The Process Of Separation.

To Have Faith Requires Courage, The Ability To Take A Risk, The Readiness Even To Accept Pain And Disappointment. Whoever Insists On Safety And Security As Primary Conditions Of Life Cannot Have Faith; Whoever Shuts Himself Off In A System Of Defense, Where Distance And Possession Are His Means Of Security, Makes Himself A Prisoner. To Be Loved, And To Love, Need Courage, The Courage To Judge Certain Values As Of Ultimate Concern – And To Take The Jump And To Stake Everything On These Values.

The Need For The Creation Of Collective Art And Ritual On A Nonclerical Basis Is At Least As Important As Literacy And Higher Education.

The Danger Of The Past Was That Men Became Slaves. The Danger Of The Future Is That Man May Become Robots.

Love Is A Power Which Produces Love.

Not He Who Has Much Is Rich, But He Who Gives Much.

Love Means To Commit Oneself Without Guarantee, To Give Oneself Completely In The Hope That Our Love Will Produce Love In The Loved Person. Love Is An Act Of Faith, And Whoever Is Of Little Faith Is Also Of Little Love.

To Spare Oneself From Grief At All Cost Can Be Achieved Only At The Price Of Total Detachment, Which Excludes The Ability To Experience Happiness

We Have Faith In The Potentialities Of Others, Of Ourselves, And Of Mankind Because, And Only To The Degree To Which, We Have Experienced The Growth Of Our Own Potentialities, The Reality Of Growth In Ourselves, The Strength Of Our Own Power Of Reason And Love.

The Only Concern Which I Have Today Is That We Have A Policy, A Foreign Policy, Which Enables Us To Avoid A Catastrophe; Which, If One Understands It Properly, Is Indescribable.

The Activity At This Very Moment Must Be The Only Thing That Matters, To Which One Is Fully Given. If One Is Concentrated, It Matters Little What One Is Doing. The Important, As Well As The Unimportant Things, Assume A New Dimension Of Reality, Because They Have One's Full Attention.

Unimportant Things

Greedhas No Satiation Point, Since Its Consummation Does Not Fill The Inner Emptiness, Boredom, Loneliness, And Depression It Is Meant To Overcome.

Love Is The Only Way Of Knowledge, Which In The Act Of Union Answers My Quest. In The Act Of Loving, Of Giving Myself, In The Act Of Penetrating The Other Person, I Find Myself, I Discover Myself, I Discover Us Both, I Discover Man.

I Believe That None Can "save" His Fellow Man By Making A Choice For Him. To Help Him, He Can Indicate The Possible Alternatives, With Sincerity And Love, Without Being Sentimental And Without Illusion.

The Quest For Certainty Blocks The Search For Meaning. Uncertainty Is The Very Condition To Impel Man To Unfold His Powers.

Erotic Love Begins With Separateness, And Ends In Oneness. Motherly Love Begins With Oneness, And Leads To Separateness.

The Mother's And Father's Attitudes Toward The Child Correspond To The Child's Own Needs.... Mother Has The Function Of Making Himsecure In Life, Father Has The Function Of Teaching Him, Guiding Him To Cope With Those Problems With Which The Particular Society The Child Has Been Born Into Confronts Him.

Even The Most Sadistic And Destructive Man Is Human, As Human As The Saint.

On The Whole, Our Modern Ritual Is Impoverished And Does Not Fulfill Man's Need For Collective Art And Ritual.

Care And Responsibility Are Constituent Elements Of Love, But Without Respect For And Knowledge Of The Beloved Person, Love Deteriorates Into Domination And Possessiveness.

According To Me [sigmund ] Freud Did Not Notice That The Dream Expresses The Inner Experiences In A Symbolic Form,resembling In That, Poetry Or Other Art Forms.

We Are Not On The Way To Greater Individualism, But Are Becoming An Increasingly Manipulated Mass Civilization.

We Are Not Only Less Reasonable And Less Decent In Our Dreams... We Are Also More Inteligent, Wiser And Capable Of Better Judgment When We Are Asleep Than When We Are Awake.

Actually, If You Take The Average American, And Studies Have Shown That, He Is Really Concerned Only With Private Affairs; That Is To Say, With His Health, His Money And Family Affairs.

There Can Be No Real Freedom Without The Freedom To Fail.

Giving Is More Joyous Than Receiving, Not Because It Is A Deprivation, But Because In The Act Of Giving Lies The Expression Of My Aliveness.

If We Begin To Say, "well, Maybe We Can Cope Better With The Russians If We Also Transform Ourselves Into A Managed Society, If We, As Somebody Put It The Other Day, Train Our Soldiers To Be Like The Turks, Who Have Fought So Bravely In Korea, If We Are Willing To Change Our Whole Way Of Life For The Sake Of So-called "survival," Then I Think We Do Exactly That Which Threatens Our Survival.

To Love One Person Productively Means To Be Related To His Human Core, To Him As Representing Mankind. Love For One Individual, In So Far As It Is Divorced From Love For Man, Can Refer Only To The Superficial And To The Accidental; Of Necessity It Remains Shallow.

Jewish Legend Says That The World Rests On 36 Just Men: Only Thirty Six, But Their Moral Strength Is Immense.

Only In Being Productively Active Can Man Make Sense Of His Life.

You Have To Stop In Order To Change Direction.

Freedom Is The Fundamental Condition For Any Growth.

One Cannot Fall In Love, Really; One Has To Be In Love.

Falling In Love

The Hoarders, Who Are Anxiously Worried About Losing Something, Are, Psychologically Speaking, The Poor Impoverished People, Regardless Of How Much They Have. Whoever Is Capable Of Giving Of Themselves Is Rich.

Human History Begins With Man's Act Of Disobedience Which Is At The Same Time The Beginning Of His Freedom And The Development Of His Reason.

To Respect A Person Is Not Possible Without Knowing Him; Care And Responsibility Would Be Blind If They Were Not Guided By Knowledge.

It Is Time To Cease To Argue About God , And Instead To Unite In The Unmasking Of Contemporary Forms Of Idolatry.

The Whole Life Of The Individual Is Nothing But The Process Of Giving Birth To Himself; Indeed, We Should Be Fully Born When We Die.

Freedom Is Not A Constant Attribute Which We Either "have" Or "have Not." In Fact, There Is No Such Thing As "freedom" Except As A Word And An Abstract Concept. There Is Only One Reality: The Act Of Freeing Ourselves In The Process Of Making Choices. In This Process The Degree Of Our Capacity To Make Choices Varies With Each Act, With Our Practice Of Life.

Most People Die Before They Are Fully Born. Creativeness Means To Be Born Before One Dies.

Reason Is Man's Faculty For Grasping The World By Thought, In Contradiction To Intelligence, Which Is Man's Ability To Manipulate The World With The Help Of Thought. Reason Is Man's Instrument For Arriving At The Truth, Intelligence Is Man's Instrument For Manipulating The World More Successfully; The Former Is Essentially Human, The Latter Belongs To The Animal Part Of Man.

Men Are Born Equal But They Are Also Born Different.

Knowing Means To Penetrate Through The Surface, In Order To Arrive At The Roots, And Hence The Causes; Knowing Means To "see" Reality In Its Nakedness. Knowing Does Not Mean To Be In The Possession Of The Truth; It Means To Penetrate The Surface And To Strive Critically And Actively In Order To Approach Truth Ever More Closely.

I Believe That If An Individual Is Not On The Path To Transcending His Society And Seeing In What Way It Furthers Or Impedes The Development Of Human Potential, He Cannot Enter Into Intimate Contact With His Humanity.

In The Sleeping State, Instead, One Is Much More Oneself, Even If Society Never Ceases To Intervene.

While We Teach Knowledge, We Are Losing That Teaching Which Is The Most Important One For Human Development: The Teaching Which Can Only Be Given By The Simple Presence Of A Mature, Loving Person.

Modern Man's Happiness Consists In The Thrill Of Looking At The Shop Windows, And In Buying All That He Can Afford To Buy, Either For Cash Or On Installments.

Beyond The Element Of Giving, The Active Characteristic Of Love Becomes Evident In The Fact That It Always Implies Certain Basic Elements, Common To All Forms Of Love. These Are Care, Responsability, Respect And Knowledge

Man Absolutely Cannot Live By Himself.

Let Your Mind Start A Journey Through A Strange New World. Leave All Thoughts Of The World You Knew Before. Let Your Soul Take You Where You Long To Be. Close Your Eyes, Let Your Spirit Start To Soar, And You’ll Live As You’ve Never Lived Before.

The History Of Man So Far Is Nothing To Brag About, From The Standpoint Of Our Ideas - And What I Mean Is, That In Comparison With Most Other Societies, Our Present-day American Society Has Achieved Things Which Are Remarkable: Material Wealth, Greater Than For Any Other Nation; A Relative Freedom From Oppression; A Relative Mobility; A Spreading Of Art, Of Music, Of Thought, Which Is Also Rather Unique.

What You Might Call The "symbol Pushers" - That Is To Say, All Of The People Who Deal With Figures, With Paper, With Men, Who Manipulate - To Use A Better Or Nicer Word - Manipulate Men And Signs And Words. All Those Today Have Not Only To Sell Their Service, But In The Bargain, They Have To Sell Their Personality, More Or Less. There Are Exceptions.

I Have Learnt To Appreciate The Clarity Of English Language.

Sanity Is Only That Which Is Within The Frame Of Reference Of Conventional Thought.

Frame Of Reference

It Takes A Moment To Tell Someone You Love Them, But It Takes A Lifetime To Prove It.

If One Is Not Productive In Other Spheres, One Is Not Productive In The Love Either.

. . . Freedom To Creat And Construct, To Wonder And To Venture. Such Freedom Requires That The Individual Be Active And Responsible, Not A Slave Or A Well-fed Cog In The Machine . . . It Is Not Enough That Men Are Not Slaves; If Social Conditions Further The Existence Of Automatons, The Result Will Not Be Love Of Life, But Love Of Death.

Psychoanalysis Is Essentially A Theory Of Unconscious Strivings, Of Resistance, Of Falsification Of Reality According To One's Subjective Needs And Expectations.

All Men Are In Need Of Help And Depend On One Another. Human Solidarity Is The Necessary Condition For The Unfolding Of Any One Individual.

All Great Art Is By Its Very Essence In Conflict With The Society With Which It Exists. It Expresses The Truth About The Existence Regardless Of Whether This Truth Serves Or Hinders The Survival Purpose Of A Given Society. All Great Art Is Revolutionary Because It Touches Upon The Reality Of Man And Questions The Reality Of The Various Transitory Forms Of Human Society.

One Of The Worst Forms Of Mental Suffering Is Boredom, Not Knowing What To Do With Oneself And One's Life. Even If Man Had No Monetary, Or Any Other Reward, He Would Be Eager To Spend His Energy In Some Meaningful Way Because He Could Not Stand The Boredom Which Inactivity Produces.

I Would Say Love Is Something Everybody Talks About, And The Need For Love Is One Of The Most Basic Needs Of Man, Namely The Experience Of Union With Another Being - Of Becoming One With Another Being.

There Is Perhaps No Phenomenon Which Contains So Much Destructive Feeling As Moral Indignation, Which Permits Envy Or To Be Acted Out Under The Guise Of Virtue.

The Most Important Factor For The Development Of The Individual Is The Structure And The Values Of The Society Into Which He Was Born.

Can One Have Love? If We Could, Love Would Need To Be A Thing, A Substance That One Can Have, Own, Possess. The Truth Is, There Is No Such Thing As Love. Love Is An Abstraction, Perhaps A Goddess Or An Alien Being, Although Nobody Has Ever Seen This Goddess. In Reality, There Exists Only The Act Of Loving. To Love Is A Productive Activity. It Implies Caring For, Knowing, Responding, Affirming, Enjoying: The Person, The Tree, The Painting, The Idea. It Means Bringing To Life, Increasing His/her/its Aliveness. It Is A Process, Self-renewing And Self Increasing.

The Aim Of Life Is To Be Fully Born, Though Its Tragedy Is That Most Of Us Die Before We Are Thus Born.

Reason Flows From The Blending Of Rational Thought And Feeling. If The Two Functions Are Torn Apart, Thinking Deteriorates Into Schizoid Intellectual Activity And Feeling Deteriorates Into Neurotic Life-damaging Passions.

I Am A Socialist. However, I Have To Add That What I Understand By Socialism Is Exactly The Opposite Of What Many People, Or Most People, Today Mean By Socialism.

I Want To Mention That Marx Shares Something, If You Don't Mind The Comparison, With The Old Testament: Many People Talk About Him, But Nobody Has Read Him.

Boredom Is Nothing But The Experience Of A Paralysis Of Our Productive Powers And The Sense Of Unaliveness. Among The Evils Of Life, There Are Few Which Are As Painful As Boredom, And Consequently Every Attempt Is Made To Avoid It.

We Can Express Ideas Without Being Afraid Of Being Killed Or Imprisoned.

That Is Not Quite Enough To Make One Happy, If One Spends Eight Hours A Day In Something Which In Itself Has No Meaning And Interest, Except That One Gains Money From It.

If It Is A Virtue To Love My Neighbor As A Human Being, It Must Be A Virtue - And Not A Vice - To Love Myself, Since I Am A Human Being Too.

There Is A Creative Pleasure, Which, For Instance, The Artisan In The Middle Ages, Or In A Country Like Mexico, Still Today Has - Namely The Pleasure Of Creating Something. You Find Quite A Few Skilled Workers Who Still Have That Pleasure: Maybe In A Steel Mill; Maybe A Worker Who Works With A Complicated Machine - He Has A Sense That He Is Creating Something.

A Person Who Has Not Been Completely Alienated, Who Has Remained Sensitive And Able To Feel, Who Has Not Lost The Sense Of Dignity, Who Is Not Yet 'for Sale', Who Can Still Suffer Over The Suffering Of Others, Who Has Not Acquired Fully The Having Mode Of Existence - Briefly, A Person Who Has Remained A Person And Not Become A Thing - Cannot Help Feeling Lonely, Powerless, Isolated In Present-day Society.

Suffering Of Others

In Our Enthusiasm To Dominate Nature And To Produce More Material Good - Goods - We Have Transformed Means Into Ends.

If It Is True, As I Have Tried To Show, That Love Is The Only Sane And Satisfactory Answer To The Problem Of Human Existence, Then Any Society Which Excludes, Relatively, The Development Of Love, Must In The Long Run Perish Of Its Own Contradiction With The Basic Necessities Of Human Nature.

Love Of Others And Love Of Ourselves Are Not Alternatives. On The Contrary, An Attitude Of Love Towards Themselves Will Be Found In All Those Who Are Capable Of Loving Others.

Our Contemporary Western Society, In Spite Of Its Material, Intellectual And Political Progress, Is Increasingly Less Conducive To Mental Health, And Tends To Undermine The Inner Security, Happiness, Reason And The Capacity For Love In The Individual; It Tends To Turn Him Into An Automaton Who Pays For His Human Failure With Increasing Mental Sickness, And With Despair Hidden Under A Frantic Drive For Work And So Called Pleasure.

I Believe That The Experience Of Love Is The Most Human And Humanizing Act That It Is Given To Man To Enjoy And That It, Like Reason, Makes No Sense If Conceived In A Partial Way.

Our Society Is Run By A Managerial Bureaucracy, By Professional Politicians; People Are Motivated By Mass Suggestion, Their Aim Is Producing More And Consuming More, As Purposes In Themselves.

By Equality, One Once Understood Equality In The Very Same Sense In Which The Bible Speaks Of Equality: That We Are All Equal, Inasmuch As We Are Created In The Image Of God.

Our Vitality, And The Vitality Of Each Nation, Rests On The Sincerity And Depth Of The Faith In The Ideas Which It Announces, Or Pronounces.

To Be Concentrated Means To Live Fully In The Present.

From My Personal Experience I Can Conclude That Many Dreams Are Clearly Written But There Are Some In Which One Meets Distortions To Decipher. And It Is Really In Knowing When One Must Prefer The One Or The Other Approach, Or A Combination Of The Two, That Remains One Of The Important Elements Of The Art Of Dream Interpretation.

If The Russians Claim They Are Socialist, This Is Just, I Would Say, A Lie. They Have No Socialism At All. They Have What I Would Call A State Capitalism.

In Fifty Years Activity As An Analyst I Have Witnessed Again And Again That A Dreamer After Having Met A Personage Regarded By All As Influential And Good,saw Him Again In A Dream With A Different Face.

Different Faces

Is Love An Art? Then It Requires Knowledge And Effort. Love Is Not A Spontaneous Feeling, A Thing That You Fall Into, But Is Something That Requires Thought, Knowledge, Care, Giving, And Respect. And It Is Something That Is Rare And Difficult To Find In Capitalism, Which Commodifies Human Activity.

There Is No Word In Our Language Which Has Been So Much Misused And Prostituted As The Word Love. It Has Been Preached By Those Who Were Ready To Condone Every Cruelty If It Served Their Purpose; It Has Been Used As A Disguise Under Which To Force People Into Sacrificing Their Own Happiness, Into Submitting Their Whole Self To Those Who Profited From This Surrender. [...] It Has Been Made So Empty That For Many People Love May Mean No More Than That Two People Have Lived Together For Twenty Years Just Without Fighting More Often Than Once A Week.

Love Is Not Primarily A Relationship To A Specific Person; It Is An Attitude, An Ordination Of Character Which Determines The Relatedness Of The Person To The Whole World As A Whole, Not Toward One Object Of Love

Love Is The Active Concern For The Life And The Growth Of That Which We Love.

Psychoanalysis , Which Interprets The Human Being As A Socialized Being, And The Psychic Apparatus As Essentially Developed And Determined Through The Relationship Of The Individual To Society, Must Consider It A Duty To Participate In The Investigation Of Sociological Problems To The Extent The Human Being Or His/her Psyche Plays Any Part At All.

Man Is Born As A Freak Of Nature, Being Within Nature And Yet Transcending It. He Has To Find Principles Of Action And Decision-making Which Replace The Principles Of Instincts.

Exclusive Love Is A Contradiction In Itself.

Society Must Be Organized In Such A Way That Mans Social, Loving Nature Is Not Separated From His Social Existence, But Becomes One With It.

Happiness Does Not Exclude Sadness - If A Person Responds To Life, He's Sometimes Happy And Sometimes Sad. What Matters Is He Responds.

While Every Human Being Has A Capacity For Love, Its Realization Is One Of The Most Difficult Achievements.

Having Lost Religious Faith And The Humanistic Values Bound Up With It, He [man] Concentrated On Technical And Material Values And Lost The Capacity For Deep Emotional Experiences, For The Joy And Sadness That Accompany Them.

A Vast Sector Of Modern Advertising... Does Not Appeal To Reason But To Emotion; Like Any Other Kind Of Hypnoid Suggestion, It Tries To Impress Its Objects Emotionally And Then Make Them Submit Intellectually.

I Believe Indeed That To Rescue The Humanist Tradition Of The Last Decades Is Of The Utmost Importance, And That Victor Serge Is One Of The Outstanding Personalities Representing The Socialist Aspect Of Humanism.

I Love In You Everybody, I Love Through You The World, I Love In You Also Myself.

Today It Is Not Alive. What, Then, Is This Experience Of Humanism? With The Above Survey I Have Tried To Show You That The Experience Of Humanism Is That — As Terence Expressed It — “nothing Human Is Alien To Me”; That Nothing Which Exists In Any Human Being Does Not Exist In Myself. I Am The Criminal And I Am The Saint. I Am The Child And I Am The Adult. I Am The Man Who Lived A Hundred Thousand Years Ago And I Am The Man Who, Provided We Don't Destroy The Human Race, Will Live Hundred Thousand Years From Now.

The Root Of The Word Education Is E-ducere, Literally, To Lead Forth, Or To Bring Out Something Which Is Potentially Present.

Man Can Only Know The Nagation, Never The Position Of Ultimate Reality.

That Millions Of People Share The Same Forms Of Mental Pathology Does Not Make These People Sane.

Man Unites Himself With The World In The Process Of Creation.

If An Individual Is Able To Love Productively, He Loves Himself, Too; If He Can Love Only Others, He Cannot Love At All.

You Have To Stop To Change Direction.

If I Love The Other Person, I Feel One With Him Or Her, But With Him As He Is, Not As I Need Him To Be As An Object For My Use. Respect Thus Implies The Absence Of Exploitation: It Allows The Other To Be, To Change And To Develop 'in His Own Ways.' This Requires A Commitment To Know The Other As A Separate Being, And Not Merely As A Reflection Of My Own Ego. According To Velleman This Loving Willingness And Ability To See The Other As They Really Are Is Foregrounded In Our Willingness To Risk Self-exposure.

A Society Whose Principles Are Acquisition, Profit, And Property Produces A Social Character Oriented Around Having, And Once The Dominant Pattern Is Established, Nobody Wants To Be An Outsider, Or Indeed An Outcast; In Order To Avoid This Risk Everybody Adapts To The Majority, Who Have In Common Only Their Mutual Antagonism.

To Hope Means To Be Ready At Every Moment For That Which Is Not Yet Born, And Yet Not Become Desperate If There Is No Birth In Our Lifetime.

I Think, To Be Specific, We Got Off The Track When We Concentrated More And More On Production Of Things. Thereby, We Created A Split Between Intellect And Emotion, Because, In Order To Produce A Modern Technique, You Have To Use Intellect, And We Have Created Men Who Are Very Brilliant, Who Are Very Clever, But Our Emotional Life Has Become Impoverished.

For [karl] Marx It Is Socialist Society Which Realizes "concretely" The Religious Principles Of Equality, Brotherly Love, And Freedom.

The Only Way Of Full Knowledge Lies In The Act Of Love; This Act Transcends Thought, It Transcends Words. It Is The Daring Plunge Into The Experience Of Union. To Love Somebody Is Not Just A Strong Feeling-it Is A Decision, It Is A Judgment, It Is A Promise.

Infantile Love Follows The Principle: "i Love Because I Am Loved." Mature Love Follows The Principle: "i Am Loved Because I Love." Immature Love Says: "i Love You Because I Need You." Mature Love Says: "i Need You Because I Love You.

Human History Began As An Act Of Disobedience, And It Is Not Unlikely That It Will Be Terminated By An Act Of Obedience. At This Point In History The Capacity To Doubt, To Criticize And To Disobey May Be All That Stands Between A Future For Mankind And The End Of Civilization.

The Real Opposition Is That Between The Ego-bound Man, Whose Existence Is Structured By The Principle Of Having, And The Free Man, Who Has Overcome His Egocentricity.

In The Dominant Western Religious System, The Love Of God Is Essentially The Same As The Belief In God, In God’s Existence, God’s Justice, God’s Love. The Love Of God Is Essentially A Thought Experience. In The Eastern Religions And In Mysticism, The Love Of God Is An Intense Feeling Experience Of Oneness, Inseparably Linked With The Expression Of This Love In Every Act Of Living.

The Spirit Of A Production-centered, Commodity-greedy Society Is Such That Only The Non-conformist Can Defend Himself Sufficiently Against It. Those Who Are Seriously Concerned With Love As The Only Rational Answer To The Problem Of Human Existence Must, Then, Arrive At The Conclusion That Important And Radical Changes In Our Social Structure Are Necessary, If Love Is To Become A Social And Not A Highly Individualistic, Marginal Phenomenon.

True Love Is Like A Pair Of Socks: You Gotta Have Two And They've Gotta Match.

...in Spite Of The Deep-seated Craving For Love, Almost Everything Else Is Considered To Be More Important Than Love: Success, Prestige, Money, Power-almost All Our Energy Is Used For The Learning Of How To Achieve These Aims, And Almost None To Learn The Art Of Loving. Could It Be That Only Those Things Are Considered Worthy Of Being Learned With Which One Can Earn Money Or Prestige, And That Love, Which "only" Profits The Soul, But Is Profitless In The Modern Sense, Is A Luxury We Have No Right To Spend Energy On?

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Frederick Reines

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