Alexander Lowen Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.

Alexander Lowen

#4. Narcissists are neither carefree nor innocent. They have learned to play the power game, to seduce and to manipulate. They are always thinking about how people see and respond to them. And they must stay in control because loss of control evokes their fear of insanity.

Alexander Lowen

#5. 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.

Alexander Lowen

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. We believe it is bad or dangerous to be carried away by our emotions. We admire the person who is cool, who acts without feeling.

Alexander Lowen

#10. To sell out the kingdom of heaven for power is a devil's bargain. It is the bargain that the narcissist makes.

Alexander Lowen

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. You will stay in therapy as long as you feel it is worth the time, effort and money you invest.

Alexander Lowen

#14. When wealth occupies a higher position than wisdom, when notoriety is admired more than dignity, when success is more important than self-respect, the culture itself overvalues "image" and must be regarded as narcissistic.

Alexander Lowen

#15. Everyone who becomes a psychotherapist eventually adopts a theory that suits his needs.

Alexander Lowen

#16. If the ego is inflated it must be gradually deflated.

Alexander Lowen

#17. 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

#18. Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.

Alexander Lowen

#19. The feeling of love is a rich feeling, but the expression of love in word or deed is a joy.

Alexander Lowen

#20. 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.'

Alexander Lowen

#21. Because we are afraid of life, we seek to control or master it.

Alexander Lowen

#22. Happiness is the consciousness of growth. [ ... ] If my definition has validity, it suggests that most people come to therapy because they sense their growth has been arrested. Certainly many patients look to therapy to reinstitute the growth process. (33)

Alexander Lowen

#23. No one is exempt from the rule that learning occurs through recognition of error.

Alexander Lowen

#24. 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

#25. I would describe a hero as a person who has no fear of life, who can face life squarely.

Alexander Lowen

#26. Love is the feeling that emanates from the heart and extends through the blood to every cell of the body.

Alexander Lowen

#27. The path to joy leads through despair.

Alexander Lowen

#28. 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.

Alexander Lowen

#29. Change is possible, but it must start with self-acceptance.

Alexander Lowen

#30. Therapy takes us backward into a forgotten past, but this was not a safe and secure time, else we would not have emerged from it scarred by battle wounds and armoured in self-defense.

Alexander Lowen

#31. Sexuality is not a leisure or part-time activity. It is a way of being.

Alexander Lowen

#32. 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

#33. Not to fear a person with power
to profess, instead, one's love
is to deny that that person has power.

Alexander Lowen

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. Mabel Elsworth Todd,The Thinking Body,

Alexander Lowen

#40. 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