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Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity in doubt.

Alexander Lowen

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Alexander Lowen
Age: 97 †
Born: 1910
Born: December 23
Died: 2008
Died: October 28
Psychotherapist
New York City
New York
Play
Putting
Sanity
Roles
Rebel
Question
Insanity
Doubt
Beneath
Values
Depression
Lives
Illness
Fear
Rational
Exterior
Live
Dare
Seemingly

More quotes by Alexander Lowen

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Mature love is not a surrender of the self but a surrender to the self. The ego surrenders its hegemony of the personality to the heart, but in this surrender it is not annihilated. Rather it is strengthened because its roots in the body are nourished by the joy that the body feels.
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Life is not a mixture of matter and energy but energy in matter, bound in such a way that dissociation is impossible so long as the living process continues.
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I would describe a hero as a person who has no fear of life, who can face life squarely.
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Bioenergetics is an adventure in self-discovery. It differs from similar explorations into the nature of the self by attempting to understand the human personality in terms of the human body. Most previous explorations focused their investigations on the mind.
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The repression of the memory is dependent upon and related to the suppression of feeling, for as long as the feeling persists, the memory remains vivid.
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Everyone who becomes a psychotherapist eventually adopts a theory that suits his needs.
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Because we are afraid of life, we seek to control or master it.
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In my opinion the hectic and almost frantic pace of modern living is a clear sign of the fear we have of being and of life. And as long as this fear exists in a person's unconscious, he will run faster and do more so as not to feel his fear.
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Power seems to confer on its possessor a mantle of superiority, specialness, and sexual potency, which the envious person desperately wants because he feels himself on some level to be inferior, unimportant, and impotent.
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A person does not choose his or her fate he or she only fulfills it. We are bound by our fate as long as we accept the values that determine it.
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The modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person. He belongs rightly to the action generation whose motto is do more but feel less.
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Change is possible, but it must start with self-acceptance.
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The feeling of love is a rich feeling, but the expression of love in word or deed is a joy.
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If the ego is inflated it must be gradually deflated.
Alexander Lowen
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Not to fear a person with power--to profess, instead, one's love--is to deny that that person has power.
Alexander Lowen
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Above all, faith is grounded in one's body, in one's humanity, and in one's animal nature. It is an biological phenomenon and not a psychic creation
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Sustenance for the infant and child is more than alimentary nourishment. The child needs love, security, narcissistic supplies -- however one may describe it.
Alexander Lowen
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A person with faith does not question its roots, for he knows that if he subjected it to the critical examination of his intellect, he would end up without faith. The same thing can be said of any feeling. You can analyze any feeling to death, but when you do that, you end up without feeling and without a meaninful life.
Alexander Lowen
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The only way you can make a marriage work is as free, independent people. It needs to be based on the good feelings that you have for each other, not on need.
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Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.
Alexander Lowen