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As Aristotle somewhere put it: luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow.
As Santayana once put it: a lion must feel more secure that God is on his side than a gazelle.
Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.
What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food? Cynical deities, said the Greeks, who use man’s torments for their own amusement.
fascination with someone is basically a matter of … always trying to deliver us into the power of a partner who seems compounded of all the qualities we have failed to realize in ourselves.
unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall, by carefully analysing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.”
No wonder Rank could conclude that the love relationship of modern man is a religious problem.7
The subject is summed up succinctly in Pinel’s famous observation on how the Salpêtrière mental hospital got cleared out at the time of the French Revolution. All the neurotics found a ready-made drama of self-transcending action and heroic identity. It was as simple as that.
But we know that the universal and general cause for personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the person’s relationship to it as a symbolic animal who must find a secure place in it. All the analysis in the world doesn’t allow the person to find out who he is and why he is here on earth, why he has to die, and how he can make his life a triumph.
Masochism is thus a way of taking the anxiety of life and death and the overwhelming terror of existence and congealing them into a small dosage.
In an attempt to relieve his severe tension he struggled between the wish to be a dominant male, aggressive and sadistic toward his wife, and the desire to give up his masculinity, be castrated by his wife and thus return to a state of impotence, passivity and helplessness.
The avoidance of life and the terror of death become enmeshed in the personality to such an extent that it is crippled—unable to exercise the “normal cultural heroism” of other members of the society.
Commercial industrialism promised Western man a paradise on earth, described in great detail by the Hollywood Myth, that replaced the paradise in heaven of the Christian myth.
