Quotes from Norman O. Brown

I've been impressed by the extent to which one gets sentenced by one's own sentences. One explores certain things in play and then in a strange way they become commitments which one has to live. I have gained a deep respect for the demonic power of the word. Words are not idle. They have consequences.

The real deceivers are the literalists, who say, I cannot tell a lie.

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.

To be alive is to be burning

Jokes and folklore and poetic metaphor, the wisdom of folly, tell the secret truth.

The opposite of war, the true war, is poetry

The human libido is essentially narcissistic, but it seeks a world to love as it loves itself.

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.

Involuted Eros and involuted aggression constitute the "autonomous self" or what passes for individuality in the human species.

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

The alternative to dualism is dialectics: that is to say, love

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment [Verhexung] of our intelligence by means of language.

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

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

history of mankind consists in a departure from a condition of undifferentiated primal unity with himself and with nature,

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.

Our repressed desires are the desires we had, unrepressed, in childhood; and they are sexual desires

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.

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

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.

Freud was right in positing a death instinct, and the development of weapons of destruction makes our present dilemma plain: we either come to terms with our unconscious instincts and drives—with life and with death—or else we surely die.

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.

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

With the reference to the indispensable third person (an audience), Freud relates the demand for intelligibility to the demand for communication. The implication is that art has the function of making public the contents of the unconscious.