Alexander Lowen Quotes

Are we not witnessing a situation where children are conciously rejecting their parents’ value despite love and devotion given to them? The present situation has arisen because parents have failed to transmit a sustaining faith to their children. The basic reason for this failure is that the parents themselves lacked faith. Without faith, their love was an image not a reality, a statement of words not an expression of feelings

Faith is a quality of being: of being in touch with oneself, with life, and with the universe. It is a sense of belonging to one’s community, to one’s country and to the earth. Above all it is a feeling of being grounded in one’s body, in one’s humanity, and in one’s animal nature. It can be all of these things because it is a manifestation of life, an expression of the living force that unites all beings. It is a biological phenomenon and not a psychic creation.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Sustenance for the infant and child is more than alimentary nourishment. The child needs love, security, narcissistic supplies — however one may describe it.

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