Dan Holan

“Consequently not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of one-self.… Not caution but rather a wise blindness.… Not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all shifting values.… This way of being has something naïve and instinctive about it and resembles that period of the unconscious best characterized by a joyous confidence: namely the period of childhood.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Involuted Eros and involuted aggression constitute the “autonomous self” or what passes for individuality in the human species.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Under the influence of the instinct of the ego for self-preservation it is replaced by the 'reality-principle ', which without giving up the intention of ultimately attaining pleasure yet demands and enforces the postponement of satisfaction, the renunciation of manifold possibilities of it, and the temporary endurance of 'pain' on the long and circuitous road to pleasure. The pleasure-principle however remains for a long time the method of operation of the sex impulses, which are not so easily educable, and it happens over and over again that whether acting through these impulses or operating in the ego itself it prevails over the reality-principle to the detriment of the whole organism.”
― Sigmund Freud, Beyond The Pleasure Principle

“We can begin, I think, to make sense of these paradoxes if we think of the Oedipal project as the causa sui (father-of-oneself) project, and therefore in essence a revolt against death generally, and specifically against the biological principle separating mother and child.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History