My American Uncle (1980)

Henri Laborit: Self

Quotes 

• Henri Laborit : [First lines]  A being's only reason for being is being. In other words, to maintain its organic structure. It must stay alive. Otherwise, there is no being.

• Henri Laborit : The unconscious is a formidable instrument. Not only because it holds all that we have repressed, things too painful for us to express, because we'd be punished by society. But also because all that is authorized, even rewarded by society, has been placed in our brain since birth. We're unaware of its presence, and yet it guides our actions. This unconscious, not the Freudian unconscious, is the most dangerous. What we call the personality of an individual is built up from a grab bag of value judgments, prejudices and platitudes. As he grows older, they become more and more rigid, less and less subject to question. Take away one single stone from this edifice, and it all crumbles. The result is anguish. And anguish stops at nothing, neither murder, nor genocide, nor war, to express itself.

• Henri Laborit : We now begin to understand by what mechanism, why and how, throughout history and in the present, the hierarchies of dominance have been established. To go to the moon, we must know the laws of gravity. Knowing the laws of gravity doesn't make us free of gravity. It merely allows us to utilize it. Until we have shown the inhabitants of this planet the way their brain functions, the way they use it, until they know it has always been used to dominate others, there is little chance that anything will change.

• Henri Laborit : Above all, we must come to recognize that what affects our nervous system, starting at birth, perhaps even in the womb - the stimuli acting upon our nervous system come essentially from others. We are nothing but others.

• Henri Laborit : There is no proprietary instinct. Nor is there any instinct to dominate. The individual's nervous system has simply learned the necessity of keeping for the individual's own use, an object or person that is also desired, coveted by someone else. And he knows from experience that in the competition to keep that object or that person for himself, he must dominate.

• Henri Laborit : We have already said that we are nothing but others. A boy in the wild, abandoned far from other people, will not grow up to be a man. He'll never know how to walk or talk. He'll behave like a little animal. Through language, man has been able to pass on to succeeding generations, all the experience that has accumulated over millions of years. The time is long past when a person could ensure his own survival. He needs others in order to live.

• Henri Laborit : From infancy... the survival of the group is linked to teaching a youth what he must know to function in society. We teach him not to soil his pants, and to pee in his potty. Then very rapidly, we teach the child how to behave so as to maintain the cohesion of the group. We teach him what is beautiful, what is good, what is bad, what is ugly. We tell him what he must do and punish or reward him accordingly, no matter what his own pleasure dictates. He is punished or rewarded according to whether his behavior conforms to the survival need of the group.

• Henri Laborit : We can compare the unconscious to a deep sea. And what we call consciousness is the foam that appears sporadically on the crest of the wave. It is the most superficial part of that sea, buffeted by the wind.

• Henri Laborit : When we can't take out our aggressions on others, we can still take it out on ourselves.