Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/452
Action is one of the enigmas. I believe, very crudely, that we act always as a defense, we act in order to prevent more coming up, we act because the unconscious is about to deliver a knowledge of the self which is dangerous because it pits one against society. So we act to stop the revelation.
AP The car thief steals to prevent the self-understanding which is a clue, a step, to realizing he wished to fuck his mother—and by extension—fuck the whole world. Then he murders—he is close to the immediate, the direct understanding, that yes he does wish to fuck his mother. Society is so absolutely hideous to some people—people generally with intense life energy—that the urge to fuck their mother becomes unbearable. (A clue to understanding the bi-sexual who chooses homosexuality as his expression. The orgy and fuck-your-mother are parts of the same.) So prison is heaven for the criminal at the third level, even the second. (It is either the third or the second for any given criminal.) It prevents him from fucking his mother. Indeed our idea of heaven which society gives us (hell is ours, it is created by our imaginations.) is fuck-less. There, the great conflict is eased—one no longer gets into trouble because nobody in heaven fucks, so you cannot fuck your mother. Thus, the criminal accepts prison as heaven, but to live in it is hell for it is the complete denial of the H-needs. So, agony.