Simone Weil Quotes

Transcendence of sex is a totally different phenomenon from the suppression of it. But suppression can give you the feeling that you have transcended.

When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.

If you never lived out your sexuality - it's a great force, and if you try to fight it, what does that create? Energy: positive and negative, self-loathing.

My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right.

I have always felt the basis of everything in life is sexual, and I will maintain that to my dying day.

Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well-something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.

Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure

In the name of celibacy, sex has been repressed for centuries and you have become just full of sexuality. Rather than transcending it you are boiling within.

It's sad that the most glorious of sexual experiences can make us feel guilty, ashamed, embarrassed, and abnormal.

I think it was Freud who said that we're all arrested at a certain age. For me, it was always 13.

Sexuality surrounds us like a dangerous aura. The same reverence that is given to the spirit is not given to the flesh. We have had a sexual revolution, but the sexual revolution only has made sex more pervasive. It hasn't granted the level of reverence and respect that it should have.

The one thing that is sort of sneered at and not really believed is bisexuality. Any bisexual man is just seen as a closeted gay man. That shows how narrow-minded people are. The other thing that's totally neglected and which nobody approves of is celibacy. People again assume that you're just repressing something.

If every time you engage in a sex act, you go into a confession box, you will never accept your own sexuality.

I never had any hang-ups about sex. As for being sexually repressed, nothing could be further from the truth. There are more hang-ups now than ever there were when I was growing up.

I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated.

I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can't explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?

From a psychoanalytical point of view, we start discovering the world through our mouths in the very first stage of our lives, when we're just born.

I've read everything printed in English that Freud has written. It helped me a great deal.

Throughout a lot of my 20s, my sexual allure and power was one of the most important things about me, my currency.

Fans are going to give you crap no matter what sexual orientation you are.

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister.

Sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general. No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.

Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression

I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.