Quotes from Norman O. Brown

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.

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.

But in the unconscious the repressed dreams of omnipotent indulgence in pleasure persist, as the nucleus of man's universal neurosis and his restless discontent, the cor irrequietum of St. Augustine. The infantile conflict between actual impotence and dreams of omnipotence is also the basic theme of the universal history of mankind. And in both conflicts—in the history of the individual and the history of the race—the stakes are the meaning of love.

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.

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.

Wittgenstein, if I understand him correctly, has a position much closer to that of psychoanalysis; he limits the task of philosophy to that of recognizing the inevitable insanity of language. "My aim is," he says, "to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense." "He who understands me finally recognizes [my propositions] as senseless." 12

What is always speaking silently is the body.

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.

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.

If psychoanalysis is right, virtually the totality of what anthropologists call culture consists of sublimations.

But if the instinctual duality is Life and Death, our modification of Freud's ontology entails the hypothesis that Life and Death coexist in some undifferentiated unity at the animal level and that they could be reunified into some higher harmony in man

The death instinct is reconciled with the life instinct only in a life which is not repressed, which leaves no "unlived lines" in the human body, the death instinct then being affirmed in a body which is willing to die.