nyuuzyou/wikis huggingface dataset:
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/18

I advertise to everyone my Lipton’s. It can only mean trouble and yet I persist. Why? I think it may not be necessarily self-destructive. There is a vast appetite in me to go to the end, to experience the particular thing to the full, and against that, against my peculiarly boundless enthusiasm for everyone to explain themselves to everyone, (as if, there, can be brotherhood) considerations like caution have absolutely no reality to me. It is true that the person I’m talking to at a given moment seems more real to me, more “worth-while” than anything else, and so I’m perfectly capable of revealing the most disadvantageous things because of my bounteous faith that to reveal oneself to a person is to take away from them the desire to do one harm. I confess ten times as much to others as others confess to me.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/23

In the conc. camp novel, the German doctor could have gone very far, so far that he could talk sincerely of his love for children, even describe the wisdom of his child (note 17 this page), and the Major could finally kill him because the view offered by the German is so horrifying to his complacency that he must destroy the doctor or alter his own life.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/24

There may actually be such a separate entity as “society.” It may be the sum of that part of everybody’s unconscious which leads into action. Society is the sum of men’s actions, and beneath the surface of life may be that stratum of the collective unconscious which connects men in a net of actions, “social and productive relations independent of their will.” Marx is still perhaps the first and the only major psychologist.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/25

Every word sets up its opposite echo. “Overlook” means to stare and nakedly from above—it also means in its common use to disregard, to fail to see. So the real world, my phrase for the “material world” may actually be quite unreal and composed of illusion just as certainly as “action” referred to in (24) may actually be the reverse of action. So far as we “act” to fulfill the needs of society, we are actually no more than a part of the net with which society keeps men from developing. We have the illusion of action, of motion; in truth we are merely lines of cord in the net.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/26

Television may have some extraordinary quality apart from, or rather, far deeper than the “hypnotic” effect people ascribe to it. It may be some sort of anti-spasmodic like Lipton’s which opens one to the deeper “pulse” of life we all share. What confuses the character of it is that the values of the world are purveyed by it until the effect is headache—disturbance—one subsides more into the universe-world while more and more powerfully the real world beats upon us.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/28

Vomiting may be the orgasm of displeasure. It is even possible that it could be pleasurable too if one were able consciously to see it as a pleasurable action of the involuntary system. But indeed the sexual orgasm and the act of vomiting are proscribed by society as opposites, and all the weight of our consciousness pushes us to believe one pleasurable, the other painful. 
Perhaps this is even true of pain. I remember the time I was able to think in Reggie Moss’s dentist chair that my tooth being drilled was actually enjoying the sensation, and indeed I succeeded in finding it at least half-pleasant, admittedly half-unpleasant.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/29

No saint can be a teacher. If there is God, and one arrives at Him, one has passed far beyond words, for words which are polar to meaning are the chains of society. To attempt to teach what one has learned is to return to words, to submit oneself to enslavement again, and so for whatever hint one gives of the direction one also adds falsehood upon falsehood. That is why mystical writers write so badly. What they seek to communicate is simply incommunicable, and the distortion into language properly punishes them by banality. What this means is that everyone must reach God alone. Even more difficult is that one must take the trip alone once one has determined to begin it, one cannot read one’s way to Truth, nor talk one’s way, one can only contemplate. 
The great artists are saints manqué—they return to teach; they are half-way posts; so long as one has not thought at all about becoming a saint they startle one into considering more, into thinking more, possibly feeling more, and so they encourage large renunciations of the world. But once one feels the other universe, there is no longer any help, only confusion if one looks for aid in books or other people. It is not a very human perspective, but perhaps man, somewhere, has lost the right to reach heavens of truth by brotherhood because brotherhood has been so abused, has been enlisted to the service of the world, of society. So one must go alone. Obviously, I never will. I am a teacher and a talker.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/31

The saint and the psychopath are twins. Each are alone, each are honest or rather cannot bear dishonesty. The saint looks for truth in the immaterial world; the psychopath in the world. If the psychopath kills a man because they have quarreled for ten seconds over who was first in line to go through the subway turnstile, it is not so much because he is uncontrollable as because he cannot bear the absolute insanity and indignity of two men quarreling over so insignificant a thing. The saint seeks to lead people away from the world; the psychopath wishes to destroy the world; each has a vision of something else. The saint is aware of how insignificant is the fiction of each envelope, each “individual” who is part of the whole; the psychopath, less far along the route, merely feels that he is no one person, but becomes this person or that person, slipping from skin to skin as the real world presents new situations to him. No wonder that I who at bottom am both can control them only by the apparently silly compromise of an over-friendly anxious, boyish, Jewish intellectual—“seductive” and inhibited by turns.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/33

Medicine may be witchcraft as fully as psychoanalysis. There is still no understanding of why the germ flourishes in this human and not in that at any moment. To say that the resistance is low is merely a fancy, societal, and untruthful way of describing X. But the idea of “germs” accomplishes much—including other things, it gives intellectual backing to the sexual inhibitions which society must generate to protect itself .
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/34

The aggressive instinct, the destructive instinct, anger, rage, the furies of the unconscious, etc. etc. may all be myths. The id may contain no such things at all. They may be created in man because of his pain at how fantastic and unreasonable the world is. The idea of them is the greatest aid for maintaining society, for if everyone knew that really there is no terror to the unconscious, only peace and bliss and wide love, then men would live freely and society would disappear.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/35

Psychoanalysis, liberalism, etc. etc., are ways to reduce men to zombies. Perhaps Bob’s anger at lobotomies comes from the unconscious fear that with all his good will and his courage, perhaps he is making zombies of his patients too. Is psychoanalysis perhaps ideational to sever man completely from his deeper world, and leave him marooned, will-less, and adjusted (anger less) in the dead world of society. The sterile land of relating, of conformity, of proportion—what is it worth to lose one’s anger if we remember that anger is only the side result of frustrated vision. Children’s anger is always violent, for children have visions destroyed every instant of their existence.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/38

If the more saintly people (and perhaps the psychopaths too) were to retire from the world, the world could no longer function, for all of society’s most sensitive joints are filled with the abused and cruelly warped talents of the saints, the artists and the psychopaths (understanding the artist as the mixture of the two). The saint’s vision, the psychopath’s courage, and the artist’s illumination of the two are what give the rigidities of society its little necessary flexing and bending. Without them, the world would simply snap.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/39

In a Collier’s article, Mendes-France wrote about climbing a wall after he had studied it for six months from the window of his cell. Studying it that way he saw tiny crevices and cracks which would give him hand-holds up the vertical face. This is an active demonstration of the values of concentration, and the need to liberate oneself from the word. A “wall” means something one cannot climb. But suppose one approaches a wall with the idea that it is climbable. Immediately it is converted in meaning to its opposite—a road, an escape.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/42

I know nothing about semantics. They may be good, they may be dangerous. What I fear about them is that something bad, something ignoble, the worship of the word which would fall into disrepute if no attempt were made to save it, may in the future receive added worship—the Victorian chair becomes the foam rubber seat. We may accept the word again on the basis we are now beginning to loathe it—a question of good or bad taste.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/43

Talk with Rhoda L. We agreed that psychoanalysts are perhaps the greatest socially accepted psychopaths. The thing which characterizes the twentieth century is its absolute lack of common-sense, common-sense being finally the matter-of-fact understanding of a society (which is of course bad), but also is understandable. It is worldly sense, but worldly sense is no longer enough because the communication between individuals and society, the interrelation, is now broken. Society goes one way; men go another—but privately. 
So, the lack-of-sense of the twentieth century would never dream of asking what the common-sense of the 19thy century (as exemplified by my mother) would question immediately: “How can a man listen to another human being and be both completely involved and attentive, and yet personally unmoved, capable of shifting his attention in the next hour to some other human and performing the same involvement and detachment” The answer is that only a saint or a psychopath could do this. And since saints are not interested in their position in the world, which analysts most assuredly are, the answer I suspect with the most perfect glee is that the psychoanalyst is a psychopath masquerading as a quiet restrained “sensitive” mildly neurotic, middle-class-adjusted human being. No wonder they get nowhere.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/395

Word echoes. (I suppose what I’m really trying to do with word and consonant echoes is psychoanalyze language.) Anyway: A Liar. The verb: to lie. Which also means to lie down. I accept the identity completely. A liar is engaging in a passive activity—no matter how much action he may appear to set off. The fact of the matter is that a liar is invariably punished, and lies with the desire to be so punished. For the liar, afraid of his , is seeking the passive position where society will curb him. Like gossips, liars are adventurers afraid to begin. Their lying is their defense against action. Which is why it is so compulsive. Truly, there is a worse alternative—they will have to act, and that brings disaster.
Category:February 1, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/397

The Burglar again. All Herr Doktor wants to do is steal men’s souls. His absolute social dictum is “basic passive masochism,”—“Case closed.” Truly, he’s so full of shit. He wants to make all men and women passive, because he is terrified of his own aggression, and deeply ashamed at how he has denied the rebel in himself. For the core of man is not masochism and passivity—if it were, all the world would be India. The heart of man is something allied to love and aggression—it is what I choose to call thrust. It is the incapacity to accept stasis. As Bob wrote—and I quote him more or less accurately, it is the desire to affect the environment and change it.
Category:February 1, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/399

I suppose the last note is a filling-in on my reactions to Dissent and the Dissent meeting. What has to be said in favor of Dissent is that it is a magazine put out by socialists who have become—more or less consciously—deeply dissatisfied with Socialism. Dissent is their defense against an anarchist urge (rather than anarchist position) or what is the more real alternative, a return to bourgeois society and liberalism. So, there may be more than just the reluctance to engage in time-wasting correspondence behind my depression at the thought of quitting the magazine. Perhaps I feel the hope that the tolerance of Dissent’s editorial position—it is more tolerant than any Socialist magazine I can remember—is due to the fact that Howe and Coser created it because they truly wish to let someone (X) rant in their ear. Their depression is due to the fact that they are still waiting for X. Once in a while I think Howe suspects it may be me. But this could be sheer vanity.
Category:February 1, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/401

One addition to this. I have come to realize how much I am a leader. When I am depressed, I make others depressed. When I’m happy, people take on my mood, unless like Dan they are wrestling with me for their souls, or for Dan jabbing back. So I have a responsibility which I shun—that’s what keeps me from being a leader. For a leader must take in one fundamental way. He must take responsibility.
Category:February 1, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/403

A comment on the above. When a “mad killer” is on the prowl, probably nothing can work. Because at such moments all his tortured life force is finally expressing itself. His detestation of himself is so intense that the only time he can feel alive and “happy” is when he is in the act of committing some outrage. For while he worships the he also truly hates it with the part of himself which has always wanted to live. So, in the temporary suspending of his idea of S-retaliation, he feels great release, great joy, in the act of murdering he is truly living. At such times nothing can stop him, for mangled as this is, it is still an expression of the life-force, and nothing, short of death, can stop the unbearable tension-to-go-to-completion of the criminal who is usually so isolated from his sense of life. It is only when this has spent itself, or half-spent itself, that the strong approach can work. And indeed in practice it is only several days after the initial riot that the priests and ministers enter with their black robes.
Category:February 1, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/404

At the other end of the spectrum is the saint. The saint (that is the total saint) has no whatsoever, he is all -expression, and so he is all goodness, all sensitivity, all-accepting, all-forgiving. To kiss the feet of a whore, to tell a parable to his flock, to be unafraid of all worldly—that is, social—power is always the same thing to him, merely another part of the whole, as natural as breathing, weeping, defecating, fucking, comforting, etc. 
But, of course, in life, with perhaps the exception of Jesus, no total saint has ever appeared that I know about—certainly no sexual saint, unless it was some unknown tzaddik of the Chasidim, some wandering beggar in Asia, some illiterate frontiersman preacher of the West. But it is unlikely. Society would have ripped his arms and legs off, stuffed his genitals in his mouth, driven spikes through his belly, and eaten his eyes. 
The saints who have appeared (that is genuine saints, three-quarter saints say, like Gandhi, St. Francis perhaps, Lincoln???? How can one ever locate them in history for their works are so few, and the legends about them so distorted—it is safe to assume that most of the Catholic saints were bureaucrats, psychopaths, monsters and half-mystics). What one can say is that there have been three-quarter saints, men (or women) who somehow—and this is a mystery to me—were capable of expressing their unexpressed sexual urges in other ways. They were free of society, they had the happy grace—and what a revealing word is Grace—of the animal raised to human stature, and so they were good. But they were never totally good, nor totally saints—they suffered from Temptation. Of course. Somehow they managed to avoid most of the sex-vs-society exhaustion, but one cannot avoid sex entirely, not without turning one’s food to poison. One can only accept sex completely, and one day when there comes such a man, there will be a total saint. By which of course I don’t mean that he will be fucking all the time. Simply—and how difficult—he will fuck when he feels like it with whomever feels like it, and rest when he is done.
Category:February 1, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/405

The Catholic would argue, “You see, you admit a three-quarter saint who can do without sex. How do you account for that?” To which I would answer that it is a riddle although probably not insurmountable, but that it is certainly less of a riddle than that there is a God who gave Life but immediately ceded the dispensing of life and the life energies over to a Devil. That is the total contradiction on which rests, but it is so exhausting, so static, that until began to express itself as Reason in the early Renaissance, Western slumbered in shit—giving snores of torture.
Category:February 1, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/406

I may have a clue to the lack of sexual drive in the three-quarter saint. As I have gone through my self-analysis, perversions which once gave me great excitement now give less. They seem less dirty, more natural. Along with my general exaltation goes less sexual heat and less depression. It is the thing which has been worrying me. My sexual urge now seems to come out in the flow of ideas and the release of emotions. I don’t believe this is totally natural nor totally healthy, but it may be that all of us who were born under the weight of a society which denied sex except as the dirty, can feel saintly emotions—as occasionally I do—only when we have purged ourselves of sexual guilt. But we bear the scar. 
Sexual guilt was the catalyst which opened sex to us. In other words, in the process of growing up, the dirt-sex identification became so engraved upon us that to wash away the connotations of dirt was to wash away much of sex. Perhaps that is the answer to the three-quarter saints. They could accept the whore, they could accept the dirt, and so sexual urge diminished, perhaps even vanished. But the real saint, the saint-who-has-not-yet-appeared, would not even bear the scar. His sexual urge would be joyous, and how joyous. Once in my life I had a taste of full orgasm. It was my first, and it was incredibly lovely.
Category:February 1, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/410

The strength of the Church. I wonder if it is not due to the fact that the Church above all institutions is ready to accept the hatred of its flock. Mother Church is a rock, it says, throw mud at us, hammer upon us, we remain unchanging. (What a lie about remaining unchanging.) After all, like all institutions whose nature is to deprive, the Church excites hatred in its Catholics beneath the level of their love. But it is not afraid of that hatred. And when we feel hatred toward anyone or anything, and can recognize no fear in the hated one, we feel impotent, powerless, enslaved. (Which parenthetically is the heart of the dependent relation of analysand to analyst, and is why certain analysands are forever abusing the analyst. If they can arouse a response from the analyst—which for my money would not be a bad thing at all—the analysand would not feel so helpless, so useless, so dependent.) 
That is why the renegade Catholic can never shake off the hand of the Church—for although the Church hates back, it conceals its hatred by announcing and practicing its willingness to take back anyone, no matter what the crimes, or sacrileges, if they are only willing (just like an analyst). Indeed the Church is way ahead of Stalinism in this respect, although I ‘feel’ that Stalinism is beginning to borrow this technique. Perhaps with Tito it will. That is also why the Church catches so many homicidal psychopaths in their death cells—all of their life has been a preparation for this moment. In the ultimate sense, the Catholic who murders is the best Catholic material of them all. Which is why the Church has always had a soft spot for murderers.
Category:February 1, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/411

A note on my father. I have been acting like an analyst toward him, but I have taken a gamble no analyst would have taken. I have made the bet that he is more artist than psychopath, and so he will not gamble seriously again because I have given him my love. But there is a big danger. For if I have had a fundamental misapprehension of my father, and it is crucial to him to despise himself (which I do not believe, but may be possible) then, given my tolerance, he will have to attempt to destroy it by striking out, by gambling seriously. But my instinct told me the opposite, it told me that he was enough like me so that he cannot repel love but instead is drawn to it, needs it, respects it so basically that impotence for him as for me comes from the specter of wounding seriously someone we love. Like me, my father wounds people who love him only in passing, reluctantly, lightly, teasingly. He has no real desire to cut a hole or smash a head.
Category:February 1, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/412

And now I understand Monroe St. and the hammer I got on my head. When the hoodlums wanted to crash the party, I was wrong and the others were right. If I had taken a firm line (firm is pious in Yiddish I believe) and told them to get the fuck out of here—it was precisely the fuck which they wanted to introduce into my party—then they would either have fought immediately or gone away. But I took a tolerant compromising line and that was intolerable to them. They had to find out, destroy or be destroyed.
Just as in reverse, the time I followed Adele down the stairs at First Avenue and she was being whistled at/insulted by two teen-age hoodlums as I came out was a moment where angry at her, a little drunk, and feeling aggressive, I shouted at the hoodlums, “KNOCK OFF,” and to my amazement they did, one staying his distance, the other apologizing.
Category:February 1, 1955