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If the ego is inflated it must be gradually deflated.

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
Deflated
Inflated
Gradually
Ego
Must

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Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.
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Sexuality is not a leisure or part-time activity. It is a way of being.
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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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I would describe a hero as a person who has no fear of life, who can face life squarely.
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The path to joy leads through despair.
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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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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 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.
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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.
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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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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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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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Death is the fate no one can escape. The question, then, is, How does one die? A person can die like a hero or like a coward. The difference is that the hero can face death without fear, whereas the coward can't.
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What happened to me is that as I grew up, I found that I was smart. My mother had insisted on that you see. Oh, but I loved to play ball. I loved the physical aspect. So you have one leg in one field, and one leg in the other and you're nowhere.
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Love is the feeling that emanates from the heart and extends through the blood to every cell of the body.
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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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A person who doesn't breathe deeply reduces the life of his body. If he doesn't move freely, he restricts the life of his body. If he doesn't feel fully, he narrows the life of his body. And if his self-expression is constricted, he limits the life of his body.
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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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The single factor most responsible for the disruption of the family is the automobile. Its full effect cannot be assessed. Modern life, as we know, would be impossible without the ubiquitous motorcar. It broke up the old family and community.
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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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