“A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.”

“It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”

“The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called “doublethink,” and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call “dissociation.” It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .”

“عقدة أوديب”مرحلة في تطور الطفل بين ثلاث سنوات إالى ست سنوات تتميز برغبة الطفل في الاستئثار بأمه، لكنه يصطدم بواقع أنها ملك لأبيه، مما يجعل الطفل في هذه المرحلة من تطوره التي تمتد من السن الثالثة إلى التاسعة يحمل شعورا متناقضا تجاه أبيه: يكرهه ويحبه في آن واحد جراء المشاعر الإيجابية التي يشمل بها الأب ابنه. تجد عقدة أوديب حلها عادة في تماهي الطفل مع أبيه. لان الطفل لا يستطيع ان يقاوم الاب وقوته فانه يمتص قوانين الاب وهنا ياتى تمثل عادات وافكار وقوانين الاب في قالب فكرى لدى الطفل يرى فرويد أن السمات الأساسية لشخصية الطفل تتحدد في هذه الفترة بالذات التي تشكل جسر مرور للصغير من طور الطبيعة إلى الثقافة، لأنه بتعذر امتلاكه الأم يكتشف أحد مكونات القانون متمثلا في قاعدة منع زنا المحارم.لهذه العقدة رواية أنثوية إن جاز التعبير، يسميها فرويد بعقدة إلكترا تجتاز فيها الطفلة التجربة نفسها، لكن الميل يكون تجاه أبيها. كما للعقدة نفسها عند فرويد رواية جماعية تتمثل في أسطورة اغتيال الأب التي يعتبرها منشأ للعقائد والأديان والفنون والحضارة عموما.”