“All that is bad and dreaded is projected into the other, and all the anxiety is seen as the product of external attack rather than one's own subjective state . . . [which] the fear of the other's omnipotence as well as the need to retaliate by asserting one's own omnipotence.”

“[T]he psychoanalytic process should be understood as occurring betweensubjects rather than within the individual. Mental life is seen from an intersubjective perspective. Although this perspective has transformed both our theory and our practice in important ways, such transformations create new problems. A theory in which the individual subject no longer reigns absolute must confront the difficulty each subject has in recognizing the other as an equivalent center of experience…”

“In the most common fantasy of ideal love, [...], a woman can only unleash her desire in the hands of a man whom she imagines to be more powerful, who does not depend upon her for his strength. [...] The boundedness and limits within which one can surrender, and in which one can experience abandonment and creativity, are sought in the ideal lover. (p. 120)”

“all human beings have control over their own destiny. that is, after all, our purpose on this planet. not to interfere with the lives of others but to shape our own experiences.”

“Beauty belongs to the beloved who returns the gaze, in whose eyes we see the sun. But in this . . . beauty, in the mutual gaze, also lies the beginning of terror --awe, idealization, overstimulation, violation, loss.”

“Suicide is an attack on society--an attack on its omnipotence, on its denial of death, and on its own despair.”

“The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost. And since all States, ever since they came to exist upon the earth, have been condemned to perpetual struggle — a struggle against their own populations, whom they oppress and ruin, a struggle against all foreign States, every one of which can be strong only if the others are weak — and since the States cannot hold their own in this struggle unless they constantly keep on augmenting their power against their own subjects as well as against the neighborhood States — it follows that the supreme law of the State is the augmentation of its power to the detriment of internal liberty and external justice.”