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The ego exists as a powerful force in Western man that cannot be dismissed or denied. The therapeutic goal is to integrate the ego with the body and its striving for pleasure and sexual fulfilment.

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
Force
Sexual
Cannot
Ego
Fulfilment
Body
Exists
Dismissed
Men
Strive
Integrate
Western
Integrating
Pleasure
Therapeutic
Powerful
Striving
Goal
Denied

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Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.
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Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.
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If the ego is inflated it must be gradually deflated.
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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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Not to fear a person with power--to profess, instead, one's love--is to deny that that person has power.
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Fear is another emotion that is strongly suppressed. We cannot afford to be afraid, and so we don't allow ourselves to sense and feel the fear within us. We lower our brows to deny it, set our jaws to defy it, and smile to deceive ourselves. But inwardly we remain scared to death.
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Sexuality is not a leisure or part-time activity. It is a way of being.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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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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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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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Everyone who becomes a psychotherapist eventually adopts a theory that suits his needs.
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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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We live in an ocean of air like fish in a body of water. By our breathing we are attuned to our atmosphere. If we inhibit our breathing we isolate ourselves from the medium in which we exist. In all Oriental and mystic philosophies, the breath holds the secret to the highest bliss.
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Change is possible, but it must start with self-acceptance.
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No one is exempt from the rule that learning occurs through recognition of error.
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The path to joy leads through despair.
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It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.
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