Life Against Death Quotes

“Utopian speculations ... must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it is doing seems to be making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Jokes and folklore and poetic metaphor, the wisdom of folly, tell the secret truth.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure-seeking animal.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“The human ego must face the Dionysian reality, and therefore a great work of self-transformation lies ahead of it. For Nietzsche was right in saying that the Apollonian preserves, the Dionysian destroys, self-consciousness.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Involuted Eros and involuted aggression constitute the “autonomous self” or what passes for individuality in the human species.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Dreams are certainly an activity of the mind struggling to circumvent the formal-logical law of contradiction.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Man is distinguished from animals by having separated, ultimately into a state of mutual conflict, aspects of life (instincts) which in animals exist in some condition of undifferentiated unity or harmony”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment [Verhexung] of our intelligence by means of language.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Parental discipline, religious denunciation of bodily pleasure, and philosophic exaltation of the life of reason have all left man overtly docile, but secretly in his unconscious unconvinced, and therefore neurotic”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Thus prolonged infancy shapes human desires in two contradictory directions: on the one hand, on the subjective side, toward omnipotent indulgence in pleasure freed from the limitations of reality; on the other hand, on the objective side, toward powerless dependence on other people. The two tendencies come into conflict because the early experience of freedom and absorption in pleasure must succumb to the recognition of the reality-principle, in a capitulation enforced by parental authority under the threat of loss of parental love”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Consequently not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of one-self.… Not caution but rather a wise blindness.… Not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all shifting values.… This way of being has something naïve and instinctive about it and resembles that period of the unconscious best characterized by a joyous confidence: namely the period of childhood.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“But the legacy of the trauma is not an objective burden of guilt transmitted by an objective inheritance of acquired characteristics—as Freud actually postulated 39—and imposing repression on the organism from outside and from the past, but a fantasy of guilt perpetually reproduced by the ego so that the organism can repress itself. Freud’s myth of the Primal Crime still asserts the reality of the fantasy, and still maintains the repression; but an ego strong enough to live would no longer need to hallucinate its way out of life, would need no fantasies, and would have no guilt.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“We can begin, I think, to make sense of these paradoxes if we think of the Oedipal project as the causa sui (father-of-oneself) project, and therefore in essence a revolt against death generally, and specifically against the biological principle separating mother and child.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Here, and everywhere, psychoanalysis must take the paradoxical position that the Child is Father to the Man; that Primal Father was once a boy, and, if there is anything to psychoanalysis, owes his disposition to his boyhood.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“history of mankind consists in a departure from a condition of undifferentiated primal unity with himself and with nature,”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Art, by overcoming the inhibition and by activating the playful primary process, which is intrinsically easier and more enjoyable than the procedures of normal responsible thought, on both counts effects a saving in psychic expenditure and provides relief from the pressures of reason”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“The function of art—Freud says “wit”—is to help us find our way back to sources of pleasure that have been rendered inaccessible by the capitulation to the reality-principle which we call education or maturity—in other words, to regain the lost laughter of infancy”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Thus Freud’s clinical analysis, corrected, points to the conclusion that Eros is fundamentally a desire for union (being one) with objects in the world.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Compare Nietzsche’s doctrine of the necessary connection between suffering and art: “What must this people have suffered, that they might become thus beautiful.” 6”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Our repressed desires are the desires we had, unrepressed, in childhood; and they are sexual desires”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“The human libido is essentially narcissistic, but it seeks a world to love as it loves itself.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“It is thus a general law of the ego not strong enough to die, and therefore not strong enough to live, that its consciousness of both its own inner world and the external world is sealed with the sign of negation;13 and through negation life and death are diluted to the point that we can bear them. “The result is a kind of intellectual acceptance of what is repressed, though in all essentials the repression persists.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Words, says Freud, are a halfway house to lost things; and words are only one class of the sets of symbols that make up human culture. “If we could not have schizophrenics we also could not have cultures,” says LaBarre.21 Freud’s analysis of word-consciousness deepens our understanding not only of language as neurosis, but also of culture as neurosis and of culture as a “substitute-gratification,” a provisional arrangement in the quest for real enjoyment.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“If psychoanalysis is right, virtually the totality of what anthropologists call culture consists of sublimations.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“But the real point of the Freudian paradox is that, despite the social order and despite anatomical fact, the immortal wish of both sexes is the same. Penis-envy in women is the residue of the causa sui project in women, corresponding to the phallic ego in men. As long as mankind and culture are in flight from death, so long will penis fantasies confuse the erotic, familial, and social life of women, as they do for men.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man. They know this—hence arises a great part of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension. And now it may be expected that the other of the two “heavenly forces,” eternal Eros, will put forth his strength so as to maintain himself alongside of his equally immortal adversary. And perhaps our children will live to live a full life, and so see what Freud could not see—in the old adversary, a friend.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Negation is the primal act of repression; but it at the same time liberates the mind to think about the repressed under the general condition that it is denied and thus remains essentially repressed.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“The whole nature of the “dialectical” or “poetical” imagination is another problem urgently needing examination; and there is a particular need for psychoanalysis, as part of the psychoanalysis of psychoanalysis, to become conscious of the dialectical, poetical, mystical stream that runs in its blood.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“The human physical senses must be emancipated from the sense of possession, and then the humanity of the senses and the human enjoyment of the senses will be achieved for the first time.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History