Quote

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.

Alexander Lowen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alexander Lowen
Age: 97 †
Born: 1910
Born: December 23
Died: 2008
Died: October 28
Psychotherapist
New York City
New York
Feelings
Need
Needs
Work
Way
Independent
Make
Based
Good
Marriage
People
Free

More quotes by Alexander Lowen

Image
Despair is the only cure for illusion.
Alexander Lowen
Image
Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.
Alexander Lowen
Image
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.
Alexander Lowen
Image
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.
Alexander Lowen
Image
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.
Alexander Lowen
Image
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.
Alexander Lowen
Image
I would describe a hero as a person who has no fear of life, who can face life squarely.
Alexander Lowen
Image
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.
Alexander Lowen
Image
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.
Alexander Lowen
Image
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.
Alexander Lowen
Image
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.
Alexander Lowen
Image
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.
Alexander Lowen
Image
Not to fear a person with power--to profess, instead, one's love--is to deny that that person has power.
Alexander Lowen
Image
If the ego is inflated it must be gradually deflated.
Alexander Lowen
Image
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.
Alexander Lowen
Image
Everyone who becomes a psychotherapist eventually adopts a theory that suits his needs.
Alexander Lowen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Alexander Lowen
Image
The path to joy leads through despair.
Alexander Lowen