Money Wisdom #349

"The striving for the right to have secrets from which the parents are excluded is one of the most powerful factors in the formation of the ego."

Norman O Brown Love's Body (1966) p. 149

Money Wisdom #348

"Possessive introjection is the basis of the ego; the soul is something that we can call our own. 'The ambitions of the Id, while that was the sole governing force, were towards being the thing at the other side of whatever relationship it established. When the Ego takes control of the Id's impulses, it directs them towards having.' The possessive orientation originates in what Freud calls instinctual ambivalence, i.e., the split between 'good' and 'bad', love and hatred, Eros and Thanatos. The aim of the possessive orientation is to keep the loved object entire and intact: to separate and keep the good, to separate and expel the bad. An either/or or undialectical attitude. What we desire to possess we fear to lose; it is a source of anxiety and we are ambivalent toward it, hate as well as love.

Brophy, Black Ship to Hell, 56
Cf. Klein and Riviere, Love, Hate and Redemption, 96-98.

I am what is mine. Personality is the original personal property.

Norman O Brown Love's Body (1966) p.145

Money Wisdom #347

"The body politic establishes absolute sovereignty in an orgasm, or death."

Norman O Brown Love's Body (1966) p.140

Money Wisdom #346

"God does not go for personalities; nor does the Last Judgement consist in the award of prizes to personalities for the performance of their parts. The performance principle must go; the show must not go on. The parts are not real: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus; he is not your personal Saviour. In the Last Judgement the apocalyptic fire will burn up the masks, and the theater, leaving not a rack behind. Freud came to give the show away; the outcome of psychoanalysis is not 'ego psychology' but the doctrine of 'anatta' or no-self; the ego is a 'me-fabrication' (ahamkara), a piece of illusion (Maya), which disintegrates at the moment of illumination: 'the self has been completely understood, and so ceases to be.' And with the doctrine of no-self goes the doctrine of non-action: action is proper only to an ignorant person, and doing nothing is, if rightly understood, the supreme action.

Cf Powell, Zen and Reality, 49, 69, Nikhilananda, Bhagavad Gita, 15, Durckheim, The Japanese Cult of Tranquility, 88-89. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 44, 75, 89. Mauss, 'La notion de personne,' 348."

Norman O Brown Love's Body (1966) p.105

Money Wisdom #345

"The incomprehensibility of the Athanasian Creed [ the equality of the three persons of the Trinity ] corresponds to our unconsciousness of the magic in personality. 'Where primitives have magic, we have the unconscious magic which is personality'. 'What we fail to recognize is that all symptoms, defense mechanisms, in fact, personality itself, are a form of magic... Primitives have magic in a conscious form, whereas with us it can function only (except in certain forms of neurosis or psychosis) if it is unconscious.' Except in certain forms of neurosis and psychosis: the insane are closer to the truth.

Roheim, Magic and Schizophrenia, 84; Gates of the Dream, 132.

Norman O Brown Love's Body (1966) p.108

Money Wisdom #344

"Copulation is uterine regression. 'The purpose of the sex act can be none other than an attempt to return to the womb.' 'The sex act achieves this transitory regression in a three-fold manner: the whole organism attains this goal by purely hallucinatory means, somewhat as in sleep; the penis, with which the organism as a whole has identified itself, attains it partially or symbolically; while only the sexual secretion itself possesses the prerogative, as representative of the ego and its narcissistic double, the genital, of attaining in reality to the womb of the mother.' "

Ferenczi, Thalassa, 18

Norman O Brown Love's Body (1966) p.47

Money Wisdom #343

"Without an understanding of the seamy side of sexuality there is no understanding of politics."

Norman O Brown Love's Body (1966) p.11

Money Wisdom #342

"The greater the role of money becomes in concentrating values - and this occurs not simply through the increase in its quantity, but through an extension of its function to more and more objects and the consolidation of even more diverse values in this form - the less it will need to be tied to a material substance; for the mechanical sameness and rigidity of a substance will become increasingly inadequate compared with the abundance, mutability and variety of values which are projected upon and consolidated in, the concept of money.

This process might be called the growing spiritualization of money, since it is the essence of mental activity to bring unity out of diversity. In the sensible world, things exist side by side; only in the sphere of the mind are they integrated. The elements of a concept form a unity, as do subject and predicate in a proposition; there is no equivalent in the world of directly perceived phenomena. The organism, as the bridge between matter and mind, is the first step towards such an equivalent; interaction merges its elements and it strives constantly for an unattainable perfect unity. Only in the mind, however, does interaction become real integration. The interaction of exchange brings about a mental unity of values. The spatially extended substance is only a symbol of money, because the disconnectedness of what exists as substance contradicts the nature of money as an abstract representation of interaction. Only to the extent that the material element recedes does money become real money, that is real integration and a point of unification of interacting elements of value, which only the mind can accomplish. "

Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money (1990 [1907]) p.198

Money Wisdom #341

"Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis"

Walter Benjamin The Origin of German Tragic Drama trans. John Osbourne (1998 [1928]) p.46 quoted in 

Nigel Dodd Goethe in Palermo: Urphänomen and Analogical Reasoning in Simmel and Benjamin Journal of Classical Sociology 2008; 8; 411

Money Wisdom #340

"An Englishman was a member of a bohemian group whose enjoyment in life consisted of his sponsorship of the wildest orgies, though he himself never joined in but always paid for everybody - he appeared, said nothing, paid for everything and disappeared. The one side of these dubious events - paying for them - must, in this man's experience, have stood for everything. One may readily assume that here is a case of one of those perverse satisfactions that has recently become the subject of sexual pathology. In comparison with ordinary extravagance, which stops at the first stage of possession and enjoyment and the mere squandering of money, the behaviour of this man is particularly eccentric because the enjoyments, represented here by their money equivalent, are so close and directly tempting to him. The absence of a positive owning and using of things on the one hand, and the fact on the other that the mere act of buying is experienced as a relationship between the person and the objects and as a personal satisfaction, can be explained by the expansion that the mere act of spending money affords to the person. Money builds a bridge between such people and objects. In crossing this bridge, the mind experiences the attraction of possession even if it does in fact not attain it."

Georges Simmel The Philosophy of Money (1907 [1990]) p.327