nyuuzyou/wikis huggingface dataset:
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/502

This has all been a preface to note 499 and my reactions to it during lunch. It seemed over-simple to me. What must be added, and what the mechanical analogy of changing gears clouded completely, is that people being infinitely more complex than machines, do not have the limited option of a machine. It takes much more to strip sexual gears than to strip automobile gears, and so the refusal to shift into higher sexual gear is very often partial—so many men and women are “hangers.” They move from higher to lower gear and back again. 
There is a certain type of dame who for years is half-castrator half-wanton, castrating some men, being conquered by others, often doing both with the same man. One reason I fell so hard and so fast for Adele was that I sensed immediately how very little of the castrator she had in her, less than any woman I’ve ever known. And I with my delicate-wild (the opposition is consciously worded) sexual appetite am more than normally vulnerable to the castrating powers of women. 
Another man’s hot fuck is so often my psychic castrator because this is one part of women that I am incredibly sensitive to, although I’m more than blind to so much in women.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/503

At any rate, I still believe in the basic law or formulation. It is: A refusal to shift sexual gears drives a man into power conquests or impotence, and a woman into power castration needs and/or frigidity. One proof of this is that castrating women (and of course a great many of them can come which is what the vulgar psychiatric social worker or analyst never understands) always have a peculiarly characteristic sexual quality. I’ve never known a castrating woman yet who does not give off an aura of sexiness. It is usually glittering sex—they are the women who promise more than they deliver. And there’s a reason for this. The capacity to deliver exists in them, the sexual energy and awareness is there—only the ability to overcome the is lacking.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/504

And, of course, the little matter of social aims, ideals, values, etc. comes in here. A society like America’s with its suppressed worship of power, glamour, control, manipulation, etc. gives a great reinforcement to the —deeply, even forces begin to believe that one is better off being frigid-powerful (frigidity understood as comparative frigidity—the most important concept in these particular notes) than orgiastically bisexual. So the tendency to fix is hard to uproot, harder I would guess in women than in men because men have a reverse social need—to be a good lover. Which is why, in America, the war between the sexes deepends (deepens).
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/506

But what remains an enigma to me is what I called earlier life-force or life-energy or basic energy. And whether people are born with this—that is born unequally, or whether they develop it—that is, potentially, even actually, all infants or at least all sperm-ovule connections contain the same energy is almost impossible to even guess at. 
What I am afraid is true is that life-energy, shall we call it the lerve (libido I don’t like—Freud has id I-death running through everything) is already conditioned to a certain extent by the parents. It makes more sense to me. If the condition of the body is a reflection of the psyche which travels through a social arena, how can one assume that the sperm itself should be unaffected. 
But here we’re even closer to the mystery and so more ignorant. What is undeniable is that the lerve seems to be the determining thing in keeping people alive and functioning despite the heavy psychic armor they carry. A person with low lerve reaches the end of his or her possibilities much sooner, and so must take the next step or perish. Like myself. Paradoxically enough I probably have low lerve (comparatively, that is). But there is so much more lerve in all of us than we are ever able to use, that once we make even a little more available our energy becomes incredible—as mine is at the moment.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/510

I don’t have the patience to retrace my weekend, but what applies most directly is that Adele and I had a great fuck on Sunday night, just when each of us were beginning to worry about losing desire. And it was that—for we entered new territory, we shifted gears—which made me realize how so often in a couple who are right for each other sexually those little temporary slackening periods of a week or two (neutral) are invariably the coasting, the building up for an entrance into a new kind of sex. She was radiant yesterday, and indeed so was I. 
Dinner at my folks was again a genuine pleasure, and to my amazement Adele brought them a box of candy. Nothing she could have done would have been better proof to me that she loved me, for giving presents is still not natural nor easy for her, and especially to my folks. Barbara and Larry, however, did show up. They’re scared of me now. I know it. But so guilt-ridden. Larry had to call me to ask for some guy’s address. It is the trap of their lives. They can’t do anything the way they would like to. Aggression has to be smothered in the propitiatory act, love pinched by the gnawing doubt.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/511

Dynamo. Dine at mom’s. Eat at the Y. Cunt-lapping is dining at mom’s, and indeed the YMCA is nothing but a big empty formaldehydish mother for sad motherless young me. Also: mom—mome—home. I have a feeling that om is a kind of hidden clue sound for mother.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/513

Example: Formalize (Fuck of rage, man and love, eyes (I’S)). Now, actually formalize does not contain those meanings for intellectuals, it is not psychically anglo-saxonized by them, but for the common man it is—which is why jargon boomerangs so badly when one attempts to use it with the common man. 
Formalize can mean anything to him, often anything but its ridiculous Latin-derived meaning of “Formalize.” (And indeed who could define it?) But the peculiar misuse of certain words by demagogues and the masses response to those words may be an indication of the fucked-up quality of English today, and the reason the experts are becoming concerned more and more with the disadvantages of jargon even as they pyramid it, even as I in my small contribution here am pyramiding it. 
So, formalize, that dead cold word is full of fucking, anger, love, and self to the uneducated man. This may perhaps be not so bad—so long as the experts cannot communicate to the masses there’s still hope for the gears of society to become too badly fucked-up to have the really perfect dead super-state.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/514

From time to time I worry: What if my ideas should be published and take root. In time the state would appropriate parts of them to function better. But actually this need only be a half-worry and half-possibility. For nearly everybody I know would be repelled by most of these ideas (deaths?), and their spread would certainly lag for decades anyway behind the course of events.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/516

I have postulated unisexuality and bisexuality. It is enough in talking of people to communicate the idea that for life there is never a one, there is always at least a Two. But, actually, if I could carry it far enough, there would be a Three and a Four and so forth, until one could say people are potentially n-sexual or even ∞-sexual. 
As little examples, are the fragmentary sexual desires one senses vaguely at times toward animals, toward nature itself, and the concretions of nature. I know that to make love outdoors with the sun on my back is so exciting that I’m ready to come as soon as my pants are off. And it is not so much the illicitness of it as the sense of the sun and the space. Once, in the Army, alone on a guard post in the hills, I masturbated because I was so excited by the privacy, the isolation, and the presence of nature. So, shoe fetishists, and all the freaks, cranks, coocoos and queers in the pages of Ellis. Perhaps, poor bastards, they were more developed than us although in crippled ways given the total non-acceptance of .
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/519

But ‘rectal’ I’m sure is a Latin or Greek word. (Given my ignorance, one can always assume that I mean Latin-or-Greek when I use Latin). Perhaps that is why rectal which is not very r—l—ish in quality does have a fine sound. For example, compare it to rectum which is far less sensuous. But note the trick: erectile tissue and rectal tissue. (Your cock is a piece of shit. Oh, those doctors, and what they did to people’s nervous systems.)
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/522

An old cliché is called an old saw. An old saw no longer cuts, but the fact implied is that once it did. So, of a cliché, we must always recognize that there was a time when it expressed a deep insight into human nature, deep for its time. To go back over the clichés is worthwhile because the deeper one enters them the more is found.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/524

Acts of the body. Walk, talk, fuck, pluck, suck, cluck, balk, buck, cluck, duck ache—If I go on with this I’ll be busy for the rest of the day so many words open out. For example: fuck and fickle (the I in fucking who is never constant) suck and sickle (the I who does not speak while sucking but has nonetheless a sharp tongue). Some time when I’m worn out I’m going to play with all the simple variations of body verbs and the body nouns, and body actions like “bake” which come out of this.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/526

When an intelligent person comes up with a lousy idea it is the sure sign that the idea is a defense, a retreat, rather than a flaw of mind—and in a really intelligent person their lousiest ideas are the ones which leap ahead suddenly and become their big new ideas. I repeat: Thought like fucking is dialectic but directed. The ultimate end of the fuck like the ultimate end of thought is to comprehend the universe whole.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/527

Adele gets furious these days when I talk about bisexuality. Why don’t you become a homosexual, she flares at me, you want to anyway. The funny thing is that I don’t—I feel less homosexual tension than I have ever felt—neither homosexual desire which for that matter I’ve never felt consciously, but more important no homosexual anxiety. 
The other day in a homosexual clothing store the salesman was giving me a covert feel while measuring the length of the cuffs. A year ago I would have broken out into a sweat. This time I stood there unmoved but feeling tenderly humorous toward him. (The two is definitely in toward. We go from one toward two. The spelling conflicts with the basic instinctive pronunciation which is why so many illiterate people have a bitch of a time pronouncing that seemingly simple word.) 
Anyway, I felt no anxiety. Instead, I thought, “Well, my friend, congratulations.” A part of me always wanted to be a corset adjuster so I could cop quick feels (and isn’t that just the sexual quality of the cop—he always takes as a stranger) and get away with it. And you on your side of the fence have made it.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/528

Actually, there’s no contradiction here. I have deep bisexual love with Adele, my sexual habits are formed around women as the envelope-object of pleasure. So, to “go” homosexual would be merely a setback to me at this time. I wish to explore the mountain of sex from the high vista I now have. To change camps, to go over would be to have to start again with new equipment, new guides, new mistakes. Besides, I have the feeling that if I were to find equal sexual pleasure with men and with women, which I postulate as the sex characteristics of the future, the ideal future, I would lose the tension which now furnishes thought. 
Complete healthiness is very close to complete passivity of the guiltless sort—and one hardly lives in such a world. Actually, Adele is not worried about my going homosexual nor actively bisexual—what she’s afraid of is that if I take the dirt out of sex I will find her less attractive. She’s wrong on this I believe, but because we went along for years with that as the basic sexual starter in me—the dirty, I can hardly ask her to believe I am changing profoundly so quickly. And besides her despised idea of herself which diminishes every day can hardly believe that I would love her if I were healthy. So a part of her fights my ideas, a part of her accepts them. 
She also knows with her woman’s sense that a man must have furnished to him over and over the masculine comfort of having conquered a woman, be it in bed or in thought, but unless the woman resists there is no feeling of victory. Which, parenthetically, is Bill Styron’s trap. Rose—who is an enigma to me—is, at least on the surface, so accepting, so taking, so good, so loyal, so level, that poor Bill strangles in the rage he feels toward her which he feels would be monstrous to express. Or, maybe, I misread them completely.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/529

But this opens the peculiar understanding and lack of understanding of the analyst. Adele always yells at me, “If you talk about bisexuality so much, you must be feeling an awful lot of anxiety.” I’m not. I swear I’m not. If there’s anything I “feel” at fairly deep levels it’s when I’m anxious, uneasy, suspicious of my motives. Unless this anxiety is buried deeper than any I’ve known—which I suppose is possible—it is the part of Adele’s mind which is mired in analyst-concepts which is wrong. 
There is a paradox worth exploring in the analyst-patient relationship. As the patient free-associates, material comes up, () material. Only the patient actually knows the intensity and the complex mysterious character of the actual emotion(s). The analyst either draws a blank, puts a concept—an concept given their ideology—on the material, or empathizes. 
But the character of empathy is the most mysterious of all. For when we empathize we can never know if we’re right. The fact that we feel certain we are feeling the same thing as the other person cannot be verified. If they say yes, particularly in an analytic relationship, it may be for a variety of reasons and can even be an outright lie. If they say no, they may be unaware but actually feeling that, or again they may lie. The mystery of empathy is whether it is valid or not—I suspect it is—but it may be valid in peculiar ways—er-conscious for some, er-unconscious for others. So, the analyst, except for the more adventurous ones find that empathy is very undependable and dangerous—they can never know if they are right or wrong and they get into terrible deep accepting waters. For to empathize is to admit weakness in the social sense—one is saying, “Yes, I have had that terror too.” 
So, as a practical matter, empathy is in that dangerous illogical, irrational, socially and psychoanalytically condemned area bounded by paranoid projection and telepathy. Most analysts are frightened by it. Herbert Aldendorff is terrified by it because he has so much of it, and therefore Germanically, characteristically, he is resolutely passive in his analyses—his only defense outside of self-hatred from keeping him from taking a wild plunge off the Freudian board into the oceanic unconscious. 
Therefore, I would wager that most analysts, nearly all bad ones, and even most good ones depend upon S-concepts, -understandings of the patient’s er-deliveries. “I . . . er . . . want to say . . . er er er . . . you’re . . . er . . . good guys . . . errrrr”. (Maybe the Naa or the Hih or the Ugh would be better than the Sup as the opposite number to er—hich I’ve now decided is perfect.) (I just now wrote hich for which, leaving out the w. Maybe the hitch is the word for the sup. Ah, well.)
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/531

Excelsior: What I’m getting at is that some of the analysts understand their patients some of the time, and none of the analysts understand their patients all of the time. They can’t. Apart from the obvious human impossibility, there is a total conceptual barrier which is rarely passed, and in Freudian analyses, given the analyst as warden, taker, God, priest, no-give, there is the misery of a complex emotion which could lead one onward to discoveries being turned back by the analysts conceptual inversion of it. Which is why analysts so often mistake a patient’s legitimate situation-anxiety for an illusory anxiety. As viz Bob’s brother and the jealousy. So, too, the patient’s guilt at er sexual desires (invariably some permutation of the bisexual) is all too often misunderstood by the analyst as bonafide shame.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/532

Now, of course, an analyst tries not to convey his attitude to the patient. An analyst will drop dead at a cocktail party before he admits that he ever directs a patient. But the fact is that they do. The analyst in most cases is a rebel who retreated, and that is a very uncomfortable position—very power-obsessed but with no vocational sanction to wield power. 
So, truly, in many cases, the analyst is sitting in a hotter seat than the patient. And the patient suspects this but cannot bear to believe it. Mother-father-embodiment must be strong or there’s nothing left. Moreover, the super-sensitized relation of analyst-patient creates empathies, approaches to telepathy, and telepathy itself all the time. Like the wall of Mendes-France which was studied for six months and so became a ladder, the impassive face of the analyst or rather the impassive voice (for the analyst is seen usually only at the beginning and the end of the hour) reveals a whole gamut of reactions, and they are not all paranoid projections of the patient. 
The ridiculous assumption under Freudian practice is that the patient should be alone in a room talking to a dummy, a wax dummy. If the analyst “dummy” were actually a dummy there might be some justification to saying that all the patient’s material and interpretation of the analyst was a projection, but given a human being no matter how determinedly impassive, the hyper-acute sensitivity and NEED of the patient penetrates the façade. 
So, analyses are directed, and the analyst consciously and unconsciously, by his silences as much as his speeches, is constantly giving approval or disapproval. He believes he is taking, but his taking is the defense, the penance for his rebellious beginnings, and beware of ex-rebels who are penitents—nobody is more -directed. So, analyses go on, they go on interminably, the patients get better or they get worse, they deteriorate when the analyst expects success and vice versa, they also conform at times to the analyst’s expectation. The analysis is over and the analyst if he is honest has to wonder, “Just what the fuck did happen in there?” As indeed the patient wonders.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/533

Yet, we cannot deny it. There seems to be some kind of general over-all benefit to psychoanalysis. Probably, it is so difficult to determine, more people are benefited than are hurt. If this be true, I have an idea why. In the very absence of meeting, in the essential square peg to round hole, the misapplied and erroneous -concept of the analyst attached to the -released matter there is a liberty for the patient to come to his or her own conclusions. I suspect that when the patient makes a poor transference, there are often surprisingly good results. This, at least, for Freudian analysts. What happens is that a self-analysis with an essentially unimportant but nonetheless not-to-be-ignored chaperone has taken place. The analyst says, “Dependency drives, castration fantasies”—the patient feels: and feels beneath words: “I know what love is, I know what power is, I know (and this is private knowledge) that I am not as bad as I thought I was, but this I’m keeping to myself. If I give it to old Four-Eyes he’ll tack it on his article board, put it under glass, and give it a name.”
So, beneath the surface, a mighty ventilation takes place. On the surface there is guilt, hostility, pain, self-hatred—in the deep reaches of the er, there is shame, opening of rhythm, pleasure, self-love, and the suppressed H understanding and S admitting that one is not so bad after all. What characterizes the successful analysis is that the S has been dealt a blow, not the er. It isn’t that one learns to control one’s outrageous id, as Freudians would have it, but rather that the loses power, must take retreats, must admit some of its imposture. On the surface the analyst believes he has tamed the patient; what has happened is that the patient has out-foxed him. There was more than one girl I laid who said to me, “I’m not going to tell my analyst I’ve been sleeping with you until you leave town, because if I do, he’s going to fuck it up.”
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/538

The beggar-king and the king who becomes a beggar are interesting spectrums. What lies behind them is the deep wonder of people about freedom. What does one do, we are always asking ourselves, if we have total liberty. And only a king has it or a beggar—each because they are outside the laws of society. (Power-mad people have the illusion behind the drive to power that once they have all the power they can change sexual gears and get away with it).
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/539

The reason the common people read with such delight the stories and fables of unhappy kings is that it cozens them into accepting society. “Look,” they must think, “even if you have liberty, you’re still unhappy, so I’m not so bad off.” And that is why kings in their public pronouncements—even if they had to get their head out of their mistresses’ twat long enough to get dressed—always speak solemnly of the cares of state. There’d be revolution if they ever hinted they have a good time.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/540

And so the enigma of the King and Queen of England—they are always loved because they are always long-faced, sad, responsible, sober, industrious, unimaginative, in short the same as the gray lot of the English themselves. Get a ripper or a fag on the Throne of England and the PM starts the abdication apparatus.
Category:February 7, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/541

And that is why certain beggars act like kings, and thrown out of a bar they always turn around and curse, they bring down the curse of regal society, they say, “You fucking two-bit snot, I can buy and sell your place ten times over, I wouldn’t wipe my ass with your head, I wouldn’t condescend to eat here again.” It takes a beggar to understand a king. And there are the beggars who make their appeal by their long faces—they are always saying, “Look at me, I have nothing. I drank and sinned and look at the low state it brought me to.” Pious people tip these beggars. 
But there is the hipster beggar so prevalent in New York who comes up and says, “Hey, Mac, gimme a dime.” “What do you want a dime for?” “Well, if I had a dime, I could buy a cup of coffee, and while I’m there some society bitch might drip in, and I could give her a fast fuck, so hot she’d carry me in her pocket around the world and beg me to pinch her tits until I got tired with that and came back to this. So gimme because I want to take a trip around the world.” And the hipster beggar, the decadent beggar hits trade the conventional beggar never could. The other day I gave one a buck—he was a tall Irishman, and he said, “God Bless you.” Then, “Are you Jewish?” “Yes,” I said. “God bless you again,” he said.
Category:February 7, 1955