Helene Deutsch Quotes

There is probably an innate masochism in a lot of women that ends up disappointed if men don't ill-treat them.

Tranvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son.

There's something perverse about women...they're all masochists at heart.

Women can be vivacious. We are allowed more varieties of facial expression and gestures. Men must be rocklike.

I think there's some stuff that's at least photographically interesting. There are things I back off from trying to talk about.

Metaphors are an interesting example of creating magic in prose.

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the 'cortical homunculus' of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces

A major contributor to the present-day tendency to accept and encourage homosexuality is Dr. Sigmund Freud.

I enjoy photographing. It's always interesting, so I can't say one thing is more fun than another. Everything has it's own difficulties.

Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.

As I see it, our revolutionary task is to destroy phallic identity in men and masochistic non-identity in women--that is, to destroy the polar realities of men and women as we now know them so that this division of human flesh into two camps--one an armed camp and the other a concentration camp--is no longer possible. Phallic identity is real and it must be destroyed. Female masochism is real and it must be destroyed.

I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality... I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.

What a strange expression said the herbalist who would compare themselves to chopped liver in the first place? If you have to to choose an organ why not pick a gallbladder or a thymus gland instead? Much more interesting than a liver. Or what about chopped t-

I just always try to find an interesting story and tell it well. That's a hard enough thing to do, whether it's a piece of fiction or it's a small piece of reality. I just look for good story.

One thing about this face was very strange and startling. You could not look upon it in its most cheerful mood without feeling that it had some extraordinary capacity of expressing terror. It was not on the surface. It was in no one feature that it lingered. You could not take the eyes or mouth, or lines upon the cheek, and say, if this or that were otherwise, it would not be so. Yet there it always lurked-something for ever dimly seen, but ever there, and never absent for a moment.

It is interesting to note that poetry, a literary device whose very construct involves the use of words, is itself the word of choice by persons grasping to describe something so beautiful it is marvelously ineffable.

It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.

I'm always looking for something new and interesting to say. And it can't be something I'm directly experiencing.

I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write as a 13-year-old boy - it is freeing.

I'm happy to be a woman but much of it was learned over the course of life. Really thudded into me. You learn it. It's a kind of mastery and artistry. The deeper person underneath the scent of Diptyque Philosykos or whatever is much less gendered. Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I'm as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

I'm not putting any of this well. I am not and never have been an intellectual. I am not articulate, and the subjects that I am trying to describe and discuss are beyond my abilities. I am trying, however, the best I can, and will go back over this as carefully as possible when I am finished, and will make changes and corrections whenever I can see a way to make what I'm discussing clearer or more interesting without fabricating anything.

The sexual life of adult women is a "dark continent" for psychology.

I have also been invited to talk to psychologists and psychoanalysts and I liked that very much. Because, they are the ones who are bringing a lot of very, you know, problematic ideas about sexuality and gender into psychiatric and psychological settings. And I like having some influence there.

Creativity makes life more fun and more interesting.