Education of the Senses Quotes

“The true hypocrite knows what he is doing, and does it to his own advantage. The unconscious hypocrite is simply man in civilization.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“The ego is continuously, zealously, in search of the world. Compelled to navigate among beacons emitting conflicting and fragmentary signals and exposed to internal pressures of its own, it seeks to extract as much information from its sensations and perceptions as it can. It works to ward off dangers and to repeat pleasures. It organizes, with impressive efficiency, the individual's capacities for response and his encounters with men and things. It reasons, calculates, remembers, compares, thus equipping men to grope their way toward the future. Its appraisals are never beyond suspicion; they are bound to be distorted by conflicts and compromised by traumas. Thus the outside world never really enters the mind unscathed; the impressions with which the individual must work are so many mental representations of the real thing. But the ego, obeying its appetite for experience, bravely continues to determine what is and more difficult, what can be.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“Freud never questioned the powerful participation of objective realities in the very constitution of human experience. Love, as he put it late in life, seeks objects. So does hatred. And those objects are external, not internal, agents of experience.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“Both as unique event and as linked to others, an experience is thus more than a naked wish or a casual perception; it is an organization of passionate demands, persistent ways of seeing, and objective realities that will not be denied.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“Real situations are rarely clear-cut, real feelings often nests of ambivalence. This is something the adult learns to recognize and to tolerate, if he is fortunate; it is a strenuous insight from which he will regress at the first opportunity. That is why the liberal temper, which taught men to live with uncertainties and ambiguities, the most triumphant achievement of nineteenth-century culture, was so vulnerable to the assaults of cruder views of the world, to bigotry, chauvinism, and other coarse and simplistic classifications.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“All cultures, we know, place boundaries around the passions; they construct powerful defenses against murder and incest, to say nothing of derivative transgressions. In complex cultures like nineteenth-century Europe and America, these boundaries are sure to be complex as well, broken through by facilitating openings and strengthened by special obstructions. Segments of culture, like religious denominations or classes, add prohibitions of their own. These boundaries and these obstructions are far harder to map than self-appointed spokesmen for morality and restraint, the border guards of civilization, would make it appear; their regulations and their pronouncements tend to depict wishes rather than realities.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“Excellence was the best revenge.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“The notion that scientific truth directly fosters moral goodness — a legacy of gifted but in this respect misguided amateurs of science like Diderot and Goethe — was receding in the nineteenth century before positivistic procedures which sharply differentiated facts from values.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“The unmeasured hopes and fears of middle-class sufferers were often a none-too-subtle kind of transference. They invested the physician with all the attributes of a caring, all-knowing father, almost a manufactured deity, only to be disappointed over and over again. With them, expectations of the physician's omnipotence alternated with contempt for his impotence, and they irrationally idolized or irrationally execrated him.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“An experience is an encounter of mind with world, neither of these ever simple or wholly perspicuous. Often commonplace on the surface, experience shows itself, especially when we trace its roots to the remote domains of the unconscious, uncooperative, evasive, taciturn; the creature of ambiguous impulsions and unresolved conflicts, it often sows confusion and compels drastic misreadings. Far more than simply providing occasions for the stereotyped exercise of thoughts and action, experiences participate in creating the object of interest and passion; it gives form to the inchoate wishes and defends against besetting anxieties. ”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

“The need to live by secure, sharply etched classifications is buried deep in the human mind and one of its earliest demands; simplicity allays anxieties by defeating discriminations. Real situations are rarely clear-cut, real feelings often nests of ambivalence. This is something the adult learns to recognize and to tolerate, if he is fortunate; it is a strenuous insight from which he will regress at the first opportunity. That is why the liberal temper, which taught men to live with uncertainties and ambiguities, the most triumphant achievement of nineteenth-century culture, was so vulnerable to the assaults of cruder views of the world, to bigotry, chauvinism, and other coarse and simplistic classifications. "Every society," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in one of his most brilliant aphorisms, "has the tendency to degrade and, as it were, to starve out, its adversaries—at least in its perception." The criminal, he thought, was one victim of such a regressive process; so was the Jew. And "among artists, the 'philistine and bourgeois' becomes a caricature." And artists, the avant-gardes, Nietzsche might have added, only set the tone for the wider culture. Class consciousness, which emerged fitfully and then more and more fully and aggressively towards the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century, enshrined such a caricature: a mixture and social reality and unconscious needs.”
― Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud