Sibling rivalry is a critical problem that reflects the basic human condition: it is not that children are vicious, selfish, or domineering. It is that they so openly express man’s tragic destiny: he must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, (Location 280)
The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death (Location 306)
the problem of heroics is the central one of human life, that it goes deeper into human nature than anything else because it is based on organismic narcissism and on the child’s need for selfesteem (Location 348)
Note: A fo motivacionk a bosiessegfe vao vagy. Az ad nekunk onbizalmat az onbizLmat pedig a szuksegleteink mevszerzesevel kajuk, azzl ha kimutatjuk hogy vlki tetszik nekumk es mi akarunk tole vlmit. A vagyaink es szuksegleteink kimutatasahoz onbizLom kell es pont ezek os adnK onbizLmat. Mindenki mashol szerz me hosiesseg erzetet es az onbizalmat de legtobben manpsag vasrlassal
historical religions addressed themselves to this same problem of how to bear the end of life. Religions like Hinduism and Buddhism performed the ingenious trick of pretending not to want to be reborn, (Location 396)
In other words, the fear of death must be present behind all our normal functioning, in order for the organism to be armed toward self-preservation. But the fear of death cannot be present constantly in one’s mental functioning, else the organism could not function. (Location 474)
The result was the emergence of man as we know him: a hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none. (Location 494)
ego: the child doesn’t have the sure ability to organize (Location 513)
Right now we can conclude that there are many ways that repression works to calm the anxious human animal, so that he need not be anxious at all. (Location 619)
The profound meaning of this is that there is no “perfect” way to bring up a child, since he “brings himself up” by trying to shape himself into an absolute controller of his own destiny. (Location 861)
No one has written about the problem of sexuality better than Rank in his stunning essay on “Sexual Enlightenment.” (Location 948)
Note: Elolvsni! Jojo gg
and the reason he had no authority was in the very nature of the way the human animal is shaped: all our meanings are built into us from the outside, from our dealings with others. This is what gives us a “self” and a superego. (Location 1062)
We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very same possibilities.4 (Location 1073)
We seek stress, we push our own limits, b u f^ ‘d o T t w it h our screen against despair and not with despair itself. We do it with the^toclc market, with sports cars, with atomic missiles, with the success ladder in the corporation or the competition in the university. (Location 1228)
Underneath this layer is the fourth and most baffling one: the “death” or fear-of-death layer; and this, as we have seen, is the layer of our true and basic animal anxieties, the terror that we carry around in our secret heart. Only when we explode this fourth layer, says Peris, do we get to the layer of what we might call our “authentic self” : what we reaJJy are without sham, without disguise, without defenses against fear. (Location 1253)
He understood psychology the way a contemporary psychoanalyst does: that its task is to discover the strategies that a person uses to avoid anxiety. (Location 1489)
Or, in words that are almost Kierkegaards: how is a person being enslaved by his characterological lie about himself? (Location 1491)
Just as Rousseau and Dewey, Kierkegaard is warning the parent to let the child do his own exploration of the world and develop his own sure experimental powers. (Location 1520)
This is a perfect description of the “automatic cultural man”—man as confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that hejhas an identity if he pays his insurance premium, that he has control of his life if he guns his sports car or works his electric toothbrush. (Location 1566)
To me he means that one of the great dangers of life is too much possibility, and that the place where we find people who have succumbed to this danger is the madhouse. (Location 1585)
Too much possibility is the attempt by the person to overvalue the powers of the symbolic self It reflects the attempt to exaggerate one half of the human dualism at the expense of the other. (Location 1601)
Note: dualism here means finitude over infinitude
But this is not important for us here, except to introduce the idea that the total person is a dualism of finitude and infinitude. (Location 1616)
depressed person avoids the possibility of independence and more life precisely because these are what threaten him with destruction and death. He holds on to the people who have enslaved him in a network of crushing obligations, belittling jjateraction, precisely because these people are his shelter, his strength, his pro-tectidn against the world. (Location 1690)
Note: We take on neccesaties like job and church to avoid the finitude to avoid our death
Most men figure out how to live safely within the probabilities of a given set of social rules. The Philistine trusts that by keeping himself at a low level of personal intensity he can avoid being pulled off balance by experience; (Location 1708)
this defiance gave us Hitler and Vietnam: a rage against our impotence, a defiance”of our animal condition, our pathetic creature limitations. If we don’t have the omnipotence of gods, we at least can destroy like gods. (Location 1782)
Mental health, in a word, is not typical, but ideal-typical. It is something far beyond man, something to be achieved, striven for, something that leads man beyond himself. (Location 1802)
To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics—what we might call “prison heroism” (Location 1816)
conditionfWhat does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to I have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, (Location 1822)
And this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost — he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. (Location 1857)
Consciousness of death is the primary repression, not sexuality. (Location 1992)
We know that all through history masses have followed leaders because of the magic aura they projected, because they seemed larger than life. (Location 2545)
Natural narcissism—the feeling that the person next to you will die, but not you—is reinforced by trusting dependence on the leader’s power. No wonder that hundreds of thousands of men marched up from trenches in the face of blistering gunfire in World War I. They (Location 2661)
the fear of emerging out of the family and into the world on one’s own responsibility and powers; the desire to keep oneself tucked into a larger source of power. It is these things that make for the mystique of “group,” “nation,” “blood,” “mother-or fatherland,” and the like. (Location 2682)
Note: Eric Fromm
For Erich Fromm transference reflects man’s alienation: In order to overcome his sense of inner emptiness and impotence, [man] . . . chooses an object onto whom he projects all his own human qualities: his love, intelligence, courage, etc. By submitting to this object, he feels in touch with his own qualities; he feels strong, wise, courageous, and secure. To lose the object means the danger of losing himself. (Location 2862)
Jung’s view was similar: 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. (Location 2867)
child does partly control his larger fate by it, but it becomes his new fate. He binds himself to one person to automatically control terror, to mediate wonder, and to defeat death by that person’s strength. But then he experiences “transference terror”; the terror of losing the object, of displeasing it, of not being able to live without it. (Location 2931)
The terror of his own finitude and impotence still haunts him, but now in the precise form of the transference object. (Location 2934)
Do we wonder why one of mans chief characteristics is his tortured dissatisfaction with himself, his constant self-criticism? It is the only way he has to overcome the sense of hopeless limitation j inherent in his real situation. (Location 3097)
We can now understand fully how wrong it would be to look at transference in a totally derogatory way when it fulfills such vital drives toward human wholeness. (Location 3115)
Note: Its not actuallg bad? But still its better to acknowledge it
Nature conquers death not by creating eternal organisms but by making it possible for ephemeral ones to procreate. (Location 3251)
When the parents give a straightforward biological answer to sexual questions, they do not answer the child’s question at all. He wants to know why k h e has a body, where it came from, and what it means for a selfi conscious creature to be limited by it. (Location 3275)
If you find the ideal love and try to make it the sole judge of good and bad in yourself, the measure of your strivings, you become simply the reflex of another person. You lose yourself irTthe other, just as obedient children lose themselves in the family. (Location 3310)
This is the reason for so much bitterness, shortness of temper and recrimination in our daily family lives. We get back a reflection from our loved objects that is less than the grandeur and perfection that we need to nourish ourselves. We feel diminished by their human shortcomings. (Location 3333)
You can ask the question: What kind of beyond does this person try to expand in; and how much individuation does he achieve in it? (Location 3393)
there is no way for the Artist to be at peace with his work or with the society that accepts it. The artist’s gift is always to creation itself, to the ultimate meaning of life, to God. (Location 3461)
If you feel vulnerable it is because you feel bad and inferior, not big or strong enough to face up to the terrors of the universe. You work out your need for perfection (Location 3594)
Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. (Location 3688)
When a man fails to draw the powers of his existence from the highest source, what is the cost to himself and those around him? (Location 4096)
as we saw in the last chapter: even the creative type should ideally surrender to higher powers than himself. (Location 4117)
mental illness is a way of talking about people who have lost courage, which is the same as saying that it reflects the failure of heroism. (Location 4179)
People hunger for immortality and get it where they can: in the small family circle or in the single love object. (Location 4226)
The depressed person uses guilt to hold onto his objects and to keep his situation unchanged. Otherwise he would have to analyze it or be able to move out of it and transcend it. (Location 4256)
As they had never learned any social role, trade, or skill outside of their work in the family, when the family no longer needed them they were literally useless. (Location 4277)
we cannot really expect people at large to emerge from their lifelong object-embeddedness and to attain self-reliance and self-sustaining power without some continued vehicle for heroism. Existence is simply too much of a burden; (Location 4329)
But when the body does present a massive threat to one’s self, then, logically, the species role becomes a frightening chore, a possibly annihilating experience. If the body is so vulnerable, then one fears dying by participating fully in its acts. I think this idea sums up simply what the fetishist experiences. (Location 4581)
who tucks himself naturally in a beyond of superior, awesome, all-embracing power. Sadism likewise is (Location 4872)
“Men can die without anxiety if they know that what they love is protected from misery and oblivion (Location 5213)
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides forhim (Location 5611)
Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. (Location 286)
to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life. (Location 322)