The analytic psychotherapist thus has a threefold battle to wage--in his own mind against the forces which seek to drag him down f...rom the analytic level; outside the analysis, against opponents who dispute the importance he attaches to the sexual instinctual forces and hinder him from making use of them in his scientific technique; and inside the analysis, against his patients, who at first behave like opponents but later on reveal the overvaluation of sexual life which dominates them, and who try to make him captive to their socially untamed passion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable, Nature.... It is difficult to conceive of a ...region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever,--to be the dwelling of man, we say,--so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,--not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,--no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there,--the home this, of Necessity and Fate. There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,--to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the fox has obtained the widest and most familiar reputation.... His recent tracks still gi...ve variety to a winter's walk. I tread in the steps of the fox that has gone before me by some hours, or which perhaps I have started, with such a tip-toe of expectation as if I were on the trail of the Spirit itself which resides in the wood, and expected soon to catch it in its lair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether h...ouse-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As the swimmer depends on water, so the writer depends on language. To swim well, we must let ourselves be enveloped by the water,... sink into it, become a part of it. To write well, we must similarly let ourselves be enveloped by the language, sink into it, become a part of it. In short, as swimmers, instead of fight ing the water to avoid drowning, we must learn to use our body-in-the-water so it will float effortlessly: then, we can start to swim. Similarly, as writers, instead of fighting the language to make it express our ideas, we must learn to use our mind-in-the-language so that our ideas-in-words will float effortlessly; then, we can start to write.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The two greatest enemies of the individual in the modern world are communism and psychiatry. Each wages a relentless war against t...hat which makes a person an individual: communism against the ownership of property, psychiatry against the ownership of the self (mind and body). Communists criminalize the autonomous use of capital and labor, and harshly punish those who "traffic" in the black market, especially in foreign currencies. Psychiatrists criminalize the autonomous use of the self, and harshly punish those who "traffic" in self-abuse, especially in self-medication and self-destruction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »