Quotes from Alexander Lowen

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The primary nature of every human being is to be open to life and love. Being guarded, armoured, distrustful and enclosed is second nature in our culture. It is the means we adopt to protect ourselves against being hurt, but when such attitudes become characterological or structured in the personality, they constitute a more severe hurt and create a greater crippling than the one originally suffered.

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.

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)

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.

Few people in our culture have the courage to be themselves. Most people adopt roles, play games, wear masks, or put up facades.

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.

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.

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

One of the ways in which our culture fosters the narcissistic personality is by its exaggerated emphasis upon the importance of winning. There is a popular slogan that says winning is the only thing that counts. Such an attitude minimizes human values and subordinates the feelings of others to this one overriding goal to win, to be on top, to be number one. But

A tree grows taller to the degree that its roots go deeper and wider. If we wish to jump high, we must first bend close to the ground to get the impetus for the spring. Like a jet engine, we move forward by thrusting backward. In therapy each backward move provides the energy for the leap forward. Regression and progression go on side by side.

The more progress we make up the economic ladder the less freedom we have and without freedom, there is no joy. We can be fulfilled as human beings only when our lives are rooted in our bodies, our animal nature and the earth. Unfortunately, our technological culture cuts us off more and more from these fundamental connections.

Crying is the most primitive mechanism the body has to relieve tension and pain.

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.

The ability to contain excitation or feeling is self-possession. It is the third stage in the therapeutic program. The first two are self-awareness and self-expression. Self-possession is the stage in which the ego functions as the standard-bearer of a self that knows who it is and what it has to do. The self possesses an ego. It is the stage in which the self experiences its being as a fully mature man or woman.

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.

And we need to know what it is to be human, if we are to avoid becoming narcissists.

Many masochistic characters engage in the game of failure to cover an inner feeling of superiority.

The maintenance of a facade predisposes a person to somatic illness because it imposes a constant stress upon the body. One tries to be what one isn't which deforms the personality and the body. When the deformation (stress) persists long enough, the internal structure of the body breaks down.

below the hopelessness is faith, under the sorrow is joy, and beneath the spastic pelvic floor is the genital apparatus and the way to freedom.