It is tempting to try to live without an underworld, without soul, and without concern for the mysterious elements that touch on the spiritual and the religious. Anxiety and fear have the same ontological root but they are not the same actuality. This is common knowledge, but it has been emphasized and overemphasized to such a degree that a reason against it may occur and wipe out not only the exaggerations but also the truth of the distinction. Fear, as opposed to anxiety has a definite object (as most authors agree), which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured. One can act upon it, and in acting upon it participate in it—even if in the form of struggle. In this way one can take it into one’s self-affirmation. Courage can meet every object of fear, because it is an object and makes participation possible. Courage can take the fear produced by a definite object into itself, because this object, however frightful it maybe, has a side with which it participates in us and we in it. One could say that as long as there is an object of fear, love in the sense of participation,can conquer fear. However, this is not so with anxiety, because anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phase, its object is the negation of every object. Therefore participation, struggle, and love with respect to it are impossible.One who is in anxiety is, insofar as it is mere anxiety, delivered to it without help. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

Helplessness in the state of anxiety can be observed in animals and humans alike. It expresses itself in loss of direction, inadequate actions, lack of intentionality (the being related to meaningful contents of knowledge or will). The reason for this sometimes striking behavior is the lack of an object on which the subject (in the state of anxiety) can concentrate.The only object is the threat is nothingness. Anxiety is a normal human emotion. Everyone experiences it. It is part of the opposition in all things,without which there would be no happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility. As such, this emotion serves us well. It is part of our emotional alarm system.It motivates us to prepare for important events. It causes us to protect ourselves when we feel threatened. It enhances performance. Anxiety can always help us make thoughtful decisions, solve problems, and prepare for challenges.It reveals what we care about. However, one might ask whether this threatening nothing is not the unknown, the indefinite possibility of an actual threat? Does not anxiety cease in the moment in which a known object of fear appears? Anxiety then would be fear of the unknown. However, this is an insufficient explanation of anxiety. For there are innumerable realms of the unknown, different for each  subject, and faced without any anxiety. It is the unknown of a special type which is met with anxiety. It is the unknown which by its very nature cannot be known, because it is nonbeing.  #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

Fear and anxiety are distinguished but not separated. They are immanent within each other: The sting of fear is anxiety, and anxiety strives toward fear. Fear is being afraid of something, a pain, the rejection by a person or a group, the loss of something or somebody, the moment of dying.However, in the anticipation of the threat originating in these things, it is not the negativity itself which they will bring upon the subject that is frightening but the anxiety about the possible implications of this negativity.The outstanding example—and more than an example—is the fear of dying. Insofar as it is fear its object is the anticipated event of being killed by sickness or an accident and thereby suffering agony and the loss of everything. Insofar as it is anxiety its object is the absolutely unknown after death, the nonbeing which remains nonbeing even if it is filled with images of our present experience. The dreams in Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” which we may have after death and which make cowards of us all are frightful not because of their manifest content but because of their power to symbolize the threat of nothingness, in religious terms of eternal death. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

The symbols of hell created by Dante produce anxiety not because of their objective imagery but because they express the nothingness whose power is experienced in the Inferno could be met by courage on the basis of participation and love. However, of course the meaning is that this is impossible; in other words they are not real situations but symbols of the objectless, of nonbeing. The fear of death determines the element of anxiety in every fear. Anxiety, if not modified by the fear of an object, anxiety in its nakedness, is always the anxiety of ultimate nonbeing. Immediately seen, anxiety is the painful feeling of not being able to deal with the threat of a special situation. However, a more exact analysis sows that in the anxiety about any special situation anxiety about the human situation as is implied. It is the anxiety of not being able to preserve one’s own being which underlies every fear and is the frightening element in it. In the moment, therefore, in which naked anxiety lays hold of the mind, the previous object of fear cease to be definite objects. They appear as what they always were in part, symptoms of human’s basic anxiety. As such they are beyond the reach of even the most courageous attack upon them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

This situation drives the anxious subject to establish objects of fear. Anxiety strives to become fear, because fear can be met by courage. It is impossible for a finite being to stand naked anxiety for more than a flash of time. People who have experienced these moments, as for instance some mystics in their visions of the night soul, or Luther under the despair of the demonic assaults have told of the unimaginable horror of it. This horror is ordinarily avoided by the transformation of anxiety into fear of something, no matter what. The human mind is not only a permanent factory of idols, it is also a permanent factory of fears—the first in order to escape God who is really God means facing also the absolute of nonbeing. The naked absolute produces naked anxiety; for it is the extinction of every finite self-affirmation, and not a possible object of fear and courage. However, ultimately,the attempts to transform anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing,cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself. If we do not resolve the distorted thinking common to adulthood, we become the slaves rather than the masters of our high standards, and we become vulnerable to extreme anxiety.#RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Since we are social beings, we need other people for sheer survival from the beginning of life. Once the physiological needs are met, we cultivate needs that still involve other people. These social needs are secondary motives in the sense that they are learned, not inborn. However, secondary is not equivalent to unimportant or peripheral. Most of us are heavily involved in meeting our social needs. We need others for love experiences. Solitary people usually do not even love themselves. People who love themselves in a healthy fashion are people who also love others. In fact they are people who love widely and deeply because they have been loved—by others and then by themselves—and are in continual cycle of re-experiencing. True self-love is self-respect,self-appreciation, and self-knowledge. The self-love that grasps and demands and exploits others is a false love called narcissism. Real self-love enables us to involve ourselves with others, fully, deeply, real-ly, and satisfyingly for all concerned. We do not possess al the resources necessary to satisfy ourselves. For supplementation we have to go to another person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

It is the realization that we need other people for supplementation that makes social intercourse, and intimacy, possible. We often find ourselves in the situation of experiencing emptiness or shallowness. We may have been too long alone with our own thoughts or feelings. We may have had too limited a social situation, knowing and experiencing a too limited or small group of others. At times we find it necessary to replenish our supply of social feeling or social interest. It is at these times that we are strongly pushed or pulled toward other people, new people, or familiar people in differing or new circumstances. “Charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endures forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last say, it shall be well with him,” reports Moroni 7.47. At times professional people find the company of colleagues to be tiring or uninspiring and are refreshed or stimulated by enjoying a meal or conversation with persons from other disciplines and academic levels. For those who may view this as using otherpeople, we would clarify. We all use other people: we pick their minds, we ask their opinions, we ask them to appraise our work, our looks, our ideas; we curry their favor. They, in turn, use us for the same kinds of things. This is simply wholesome, cooperative interaction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

There is also abuse of other people. A synonym for it is exploitation: to take advantage, uncaringly, of another person. Slavery is an obvious example, but far more subtle examples occur every day whenever someone takes something for another and does not give much back. Think of the adulation a movie star may take from a fan, without really giving much back. Psychotherapists often take from their patients the good feelings they have to give, and often do not give the patient something in return. This does not happen often, but there are good cases in point. Many therapists feel pleasure at the Godlike role into which their patents put them, and a few succumb to this and allow the patients to literally worship their every word, their very being. Then the patient gets very little that is real in return. When the healthy, self-actualizing person goes to another person, it is because there is a strong need for the presence and fellowship of that person. If one gets something from the involvement, one usually gives as much as one gets back. No contract is signed, no concern that the dividends will be absolutely equal to the investment! Between two people in the love that friends or lovers have there is no worry or greed. It is a continual round of sharing. When this happens, re-creation of each person takes place. It is again like two complementary halves making up an integrated whole.#RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Love is a re-freshment. It is a time and opportunity for newness and re-birth. There is so much to be gained from giving in the shared love relationships, not the least of which is growth of selfhood and of social feeling. One good turn deserves another way of saying that when one has experienced the growth of wholeness that comes from the being deeply involved with another human being, one wants to repeat the experience, time and time again. This feeling has been reported by many people as a phenomenon of any wholesome,satisfying social interaction and certainly seems to demonstrate the necessity of frequent and rewarding social contacts. Simple contacts, like casual conversation with strangers, apparently have beneficial and growth-producing effect. How many people get deeply involved in conversations wit perfect strangers!Taxi drivers, fellow drinkers at bars, bartenders, waiters, newsstand dealers,door-to-door salespeople, are literally invited into the lives of lonely people. It appears that there is greater hunger for human companionship or listeners.A few years ago, a group of New York City bartenders asked a psychotherapist to give them lessons in simple counseling because they were so often put into the role of counselor by their customers. The therapist reasoned that there might be some therapeutic advantage in helping these people to be effective listeners. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

The social experience is rewarding and regenerating because we know—whether we fully acknowledge it or not—that there is a strong bond among all human beings. Rugged individualist, cynical loners, bitter hermits may deny it, but most of us are more than willing to acknowledge that we feel a sense of kinship with other people, a fellow-feeling with all humankind, which is more like saying that all Homo sapiens are in the same boat. Some individuals identify so strongly with others that they emphatically experience sorrow with those in dire circumstances and joy with their happier fellows. All of these experiences of empathy are growth-producing. Cultivating a strong feeling of kinship adds to a personal sense of fulfillment and worth. In German, the word is Gemeinschaftsgefuhl. It means feeling-sense of community,in a meager literal translation. Social interest or sense of community with others is based on feelings of worth and is assisted by growth-producing interactions with other people. It is a very productive and satisfying circle:From satisfying self-feeling to satisfying group-feeling back to satisfaction with one’s selfhood. Humans are a creature and creator of humans. Come into the World a mewling helpless little creature, driven by diffuse strivings of a peculiar body one is totally dependent on human warmth and care to survive and be. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

At once humans are enmeshed in social life, at once begins to learn and share in culture. Dualities and paradox pervade one’s life:instincts and culture, the separate being and the vital social bones, the truly felt and the way to be, uniqueness of oneself and the sameness with all humankind. We are vastly various and laughably alike. Helpless yet vastly powerful,driven by irrational passions yet open to gigantic rationality, able at Olympian detachment and prone as well to boundaryless immersion in depths of oceanic feeling, of oneness with the heard or with ineffable mysteries of the Universe—all of these are human. Bodily female or bodily male, a part of oneself is the other gender, or no gender at all. The World of others, one’s bonds with them, are ordered and chaotic both. Human beings become a human personality only through the joys and pains of human contact, care and giving and taking, and only through learning the ways of that small portion of humankind that is one’s tribe or community or nation at a particular time in history. Our need for others may at times be compulsive (where we are driven by needs or motives we can hardly control) or impulsive (as when a spur of the moment sensation allows or unleashed certain behaviors). #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

We may plan our social involvements or we may just enjoy them as happenings. The very fact that every culture ever studied has had to make a place for social intercourse give us some appreciation for just how universal this behavior must be. The hermit, the lone wolf, the isolate, the alienated: these are deviant humans. We must assume that some painful interaction has caused their solitary behavior to become a way of life. So we go out from our own centers of being to touch the beings of others, partly to reassure ourselves of our sameness, our bonds of likeness, and partly to restore some of the social feelings we lose in our work or play or states of fear. It takes a drastic or traumatic series of events to convince us that it is unsafe or unwise to seek out others. It seems unlikely that any one event could sever our bonds with the rest of humankind. No single trauma or hurt can drive us away from each other. It must require dozens of intensely painful and frightening experiences of rejection to develop a hermit or a social isolate.#RandolphHarris 12 of 14

In our social interaction, then, is a play element. We use the social experiences to re-create aspects of our selfhood that we have lost,or that have become fatigued, or which we doubt. We go to another person to gain validation of our own selfhood, whether in conversation, love, affection, argumentation, nurturance, punishment, or competition. We play games with these people, not just to structure our time or keep them away from intimate knowledge of us, but to get them to declare something about us. In challenging someone to a game of chess or tag or political discussion, we hope that they will see in us some element of worth or challenge to which they can respond. Their response is a statement that we are worthy of their rime and effort. It is a form of stroking, or social response. Stroking may be used as a general term for intimate physical contact; in practice it may take various forms. Some people literally stroke an infant others hug or pat it, while some pinch it playfully or flip it with a fingertip. These all have their analogue sin conversation, so that it seems one might predict how an individual would handle a baby by listening to the infant talk. By extension of meaning,stroking may be employed colloquially to denote any act implying recognition of another’s presence. Hence a stroke may be used as the fundamental unit of social action. An exchange of strokes constitutes a transaction, which is the unit of social intercourse. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Each time we are acknowledged or recognized by another person it is as though we are being patted or told “Yes, I know you are there and I acknowledge your being.” You may think this is overdrawn, but them you might recall times when some people literally looked right through you and how you felt then. You may have felt the eerie sensation of doubting that you were visible. You may have felt diminished as a person, no matter who the other person was. If  person is ignored or looked through, it has the effect, whatever his ego strength, of making one feel smaller, less important, insignificant. That show important other people are to us. You know how effective silence or non-hearing of a person’s words can be in putting one down. If you agree or disagree with him, you have given him a stroke. You have at least acknowledged his presence. However, by not hearing him, you say, in effect, you are not even there! On the more optimistic side, we find that other people add to our dimensions of selfhood and in wholesome social intercourse this is a mutual, reciprocal event. We validate each other’s existences. Though this is not necessary all of the time, it seems to be important for all of us at some time. Healing best begins with sincere prayer asking our Father in Heaven for help. That use of our agency allows divine intervention. When we permit it, the love of the Savior will soften our hearts and break the cycle of abuse that can transform a victim into an aggressor. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14