Indeed people’s charms should not go to waste, that is my motto, may it never have dire consequences for the mortal World. As I have pointed out before, anonymous authority and automation conformity are largely the results of our mode of production, which requires quick adaptation to the machines, disciplined mass behavior, common taste and obedience without the use of force. Another facet of our economic system, the need for mass consumption, has been instrumental in creating a feature in the social character of modern mortals which constitutes one of the most striking contrasts to the social character twenty first century. I am referring to the principle that every desire must be satisfied immediately, no wish must be frustrated. The most obvious illustration of this principle is to be found in our system of buying on the installment plan. In the nineteenth century you bought what you needed, when you had saved the money for it; today you buy what you need, or do not need, on credit, and the function of advertising is largely to coax you into buying and to whet your appetite for things, so that you can be coaxed. You live in a circle. You buy on the installment plan, and about the time you have finished paying, you sell and you buy again—the latest model. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

The principle that desires must be satisfied without much delay has also determined sexual behavior, especially since the end of the First World War. A crude form of misunderstood Freudianism used to furnish the appropriate rationalizations; the idea being that neuroses result from repressed sexual strivings, that frustrations were traumatic, and the less you repressed the healthier you were. Even parents anxious to give their children everything they wanted lest they be frustrated, acquired a complex. Unfortunately, many of these children as well as their parents landed on the analyst’s couch, provided they could afford it. The greed for things and the inability to postpone the satisfaction of wishes as characteristic of modern mortals has been stressed by thoughtful observers, such as Max Scheler and Bergson. It as been given its most poignant expression by Aldous Huxley in the Brave New World. Among the slogans by which the adolescents in the Brave New World are conditioned, one of the most important ones is “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.” It is hammered into them, “two hundred repetitions, twice a week from fourteen to sixteen and a half.” This instant realization of wishes is felt as happiness. “Everybody’s happy nowadays” is another of the Brave New World slogans; people “get what they want and they never want what they can’t get.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

This need for the immediate consumption of commodities and the immediate consummation of sexual desires is coupled in the Brave New World as in our own. It is considered immoral to keep one love partner beyond a relatively short time. Love is short-lived sexual desire, which must be satisfied immediately. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much. There is no such thing as a divided allegiance; you are so conditioned that you cannot help doing what you ought to do. And what you out to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really are not any temptations to resist. This lack of inhibition of desires leads to the same result as the lack of overt authority—the paralysis and eventually the destruction of the self. If I do not postpone the satisfaction of my wish (and am conditioned only to wish for what I can get), I have no conflicts, no doubts; no decision has to be made; I am never alone with myself, because I am always busy—either working, or having fun. I have no need to be aware of myself as myself because I am constantly absorbed having pleasure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

 I am—a system of desires and satisfaction; I have to work in order to fulfill my desires—and these very desires are constantly stimulated and directed by the economic machines. Most of these appetites are synthetic; even sexual appetite is by far not as natural as it is made out to be. It is to some extent stimulated artificially. And it needs to be if we want to have people as the contemporary system needs them—people who feel happy, who have no doubts, who have no conflicts, who are guided without the use of force. Having fun consists mainly in the satisfaction of consuming and taking in; commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed. The World is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones—and the eternally disappointed ones. How can we help being disappointed if our birth stops at the breast of the mother, if we are never weaned, if we remain overgrown babes, if we never go beyond the receptive orientation? So people do worry, feel inferior, inadequate, guilty. They sense that they live without living, that life runs through their hands like sand. How do they deal with their troubles, which stem from the passivity of constant taking in? #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

By another form of passivity, a constant spilling out, as it were: by talking. Here, as in the case of authority and consumption, an idea which once was productive has been turned into its opposite. Who we are—what our identities will be—is not a given, not fully decided at birth. Newborn infants are not miniature adults or people seeds, that only require a sprinkling of water to grow to their fullest stature. On the other hand, as unlike the adults they will become that infants are, they are not wholly, either. Just how much of our identities are we born with? How much is nurtured through processes and forces outside of ourselves? Perhaps we can most accurately say that people are born with potentials that develop as they grow into adult human beings. The terms we use to describe the life process—changing, growing, evolving, transforming, unfolding, becoming, realizing, actualizing, blooming, blossoming, flowering—reveal this belief that at birth we both are and are not all that we will become. Many theorists have tried to describe the processes through which people develop. However, these detailed systems cannot explain the study of the human life cycle with certainty to all the questions arise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Too many questions of philosophy and cannot, at least now, be answered by science. They do, though, add important insight and knowledge to our study of the ways in which we grow into being. Most people live in the confidence that out technological developments have largely freed us from the risks of unchosen pregnancy and venereal disease and, therefore, ipso facto, the anxiety people used to feel about sex and love is now banished forever to the museum. The vicissitudes about which the novelists of previous centuries wrote—when a woman gave herself to a man, it meant illegitimate pregnancy and social ostracism, as in The Scarlet Letter; or the tragic break-up of the family structure and the experience of death by suicide, as in Anna Karenina; or venereal disease, as in the market place of social reality—have been outgrown. Now, thank God and science, we tell ourselves, we are rid of all that! The implication is that sex is free and that love is easy and comes in readily procurable packages like what the students call “instant Zen.” And any talk of the deeper conflicts which used to be associated with the tragic and daimonic elements is anachronistic and absurd. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

 However, I shall be impolite enough to ask, May there not be a gigantic extensive repression underlying all this? A repression not of sex, but of something underlying body chemistry, some psychic needs more vital, deeper, and more comprehensive than sex. A repression that is socially sanctioned, to be sure—but just for that reason harder to discern and more effective in its results. I am obviously not questioning contemporary medical and psychological advances as such: no one in his or her right mind would fail to be grateful for the development of contraceptives, estrogen, and cures for venereal disease. And I count it good fortune indeed to be born into this age with its freedom of possibilities rather than in the Victorian period with its rigid mores. However, that issue is fallacious and a red herring. Our problem is more profound and starkly real. We pick up the morning paper and read that there are a million illegal abortions in enlightened America each year; that premarital pregnancies are increasing on all sides. One girl out of six who is now thirteen will, according to present statistics, become illegitimately pregnant before she is twenty—two and half times the incidence of ten year ago. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

The increase is mainly among the girls of the proletarian classes, but there is enough increase among girls of middle and upper classes to prove that this is not a problem solely of disadvantage groups. Some people believe that we are what we are at birth. Nature, through heredity, determines everything. We look, act, feel, do, and believe what we do because of our genetic makeup. Others believe that regardless of what we are born with, it is the impact of our environment, of the way we are nurtured, that really determines who and what we become. What we learn or acquire through conditioning and experience makes up what we are. Most people now believe that both nature and nurture play important roles in shaping our behavior. We are confronted by the curious situation of the more birth control, the more illegitimate pregnancies. As the reader hastens to cry that what is necessary to change barbaric abortion laws and give more sex education, I would not disagree; but I could, and should raise a caveat. The blanket advising of more sex education can act as a reassurance by means of which we escape having to ask ourselves the more frightening question. May not the real issue be not on the level of conscious, rational intentions at all? May it not be in a deeper realm of what I shall later call intentionality? #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Some women use their sex to gain personal affirmation. They are desired, and that is almost enough…a child is a symbol that she is a woman, and she may gain from having something on her own. This struggle to prove one’s identity and personal worth may be more outspoken with less affluent young women, but it is just as present in middle-class young ladies who can cover it up better by socially skillful behavior. Let us take as an example a female patient from an upper middle-class background with whom I whom I worked. Her father had been a banker in a small city, and her mother a proper lady who has always assumed a Christian attitude toward everyone but who seemed, from the data which came up in therapy, to be usually rigid and had actually resented having this girl when she was born. My patient was well educated, already in her early thirties a successful editor in a large publishing house, and obviously was not the slightest deficient in knowledge of sex or contraception. Yet she had two illegitimate pregnancies in her mid-twenties several years before she began treatment with me. Both of these pregnancies gave her painful feelings of guilt and conflict, yet she went from one directly into another. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

She had been married for two years in her early twenties to a man who, an intellectual like herself, was emotionally detached, and each had tried by various kinds of aggressive-dependency nagging to get the other to infuse some meaning and vitality into an empty marriage. After her divorce, while she lived alone, she volunteered to do some evening reading to those who were visually impaired. She became pregnant by the young visually impaired man to whom she read. Though this, and its subsequent abortion, upset her greatly, she became pregnant again shortly after her first abortion. Now it is absurd to think that we can understand this behavior on the basis of sexual needs. Indeed, the fact tat she did not feel sexual desire was actually more influential in leading her into the sexual relations which caused the pregnancies. We must look to her image of herself and her ways of trying to find a meaningful place for herself in her World id we are to have any hope of discovering the dynamics of the pregnancies. She was, diagnostically speaking, what is called a typically contemporary schizoid personality: intelligent, articulate, efficient, successful in work, but detached in personal intercourse and afraid of intimate relationships. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

She had always thought of herself as an empty person who never could feel much on her own or experience anything lasting even when she took psychedelics—the kind of person who cries out to the World to give her some passion, some vitality. Attractive, she ad a number of men friends but the relationships with them also had a dried up quality and lacked the zest for which she fervently longed. She described sleeping with the one with which she was most intimate at the time as if they were two animals clinging together for warmth, her feeling being a generalized despair. She had a dream early in therapy which recurred in varying form, of herself in one room and her parents in the next room separated by a wall which went not quite up to the ceiling; and no matter how hard she knocked on the wall or cried out to them in the dream, she could not get them to hear her. She arrived for her therapy hour one day having just come from an art exhibit, to tell me she had discovered the symbol most accurately describing her feelings about herself: the lonely figures of Edward Hopper, in his paintings in which there is only one figure—a solitary girl usherette in a brightly lighted and plush but entirely empty theater; a woman sitting alone by an upper window in a Victorian house at the shore in the deserted off-season; a lone person in a rocking chair on a porch not unlike the house in the small city in which my patient grew up. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Edward Hopper’s paintings, indeed, give a poignant meaning to the quiet despair, the emptiness of human feeling and longing which is referred to by that cliché alienation. It is touching that her first pregnancy came in a relation with a human being who was visually impaired. We are impressed here by her elemental generosity in wanting to give him something and to prove something also to herself, but most of all we are struck by the aura of blindness surrounding the whole event of getting pregnant. She was one of the many person in our World of affluence and technological power who moved, humanly speaking, in a World of the blind, where nobody can see another and were our touching is at best a sightless fumbling, moving our fingers over the body of another trying to recognize him or her, but unable in our own self-enclosing darkness to do so. We could conclude that she became pregnant to establish her own self-esteem by proving somebody wants her—as her husband did not; to compensate for her feelings of emotional poverty—which pregnancy does quite literally by filling up the womb if we take the womb (hysteria) as a symbol of vacuum of emotions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Furthermore, the young lady may have wanted to get pregnant to expression her aggression against her mother and father and their suffocating and hypocritical middle-class background. All of the which goes without saying. However, what the deeper defiance required by, and indeed built into, the self-contradiction in her and in our society which belie our rational, well-meaning intentions? It is absurd to think that this girl, or any girl, gets pregnant simply because she does not know better. This woman lives in an age where, for upper-class and middle-class girls like her, contraceptives and sex knowledge were never more available, and her society proclaims on all sides that anxiety about sex is archaic and encourages her to be free of all conflict about love. What of the anxiety which comes precisely from this new born freedom? Anxiety which places a burden on individual consciousness and capacity for personal choice which, if not insoluble, is great indeed; anxiety which in our sophisticated and enlightened day cannot be acted out like the hysterical women of Victorian times (for everyone nowadays ought to be free and uninhibited) and therefore turns inward and results in inhibiting feelings, suffocating passion in place of the inhibition of actions of the nineteenth-century woman. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

The girls and women in this predicament are partial victims of a gigantic repression in themselves and in our society—the repression of eros and passion and the over availability of sex as a technique for repression. A corollary is that our dogmatic enlightenment contains elements within it which rob us of the very means of meeting this new and inner anxiety. We are experiencing a return of the repressed, a return of an eros which will not be denied no mater how much it is bribed on all sides by sex: a returned of the repressed in a primitive way precisely designed to mock our withdrawal of feelings. The same is found in out work with men. A young psychiatrist, in his training analysis, was preoccupied mainly with the fear that he was homosexual. Now in his middle twenties, he had never had sexual relations with a woman, and though he had not been a practicing homosexual, he had been approached by enough men to make him think that he emanated that “aura.” During his therapy, he became acquainted with a woman and in due course they begin having sexual relations. At least half the time they did not use contraceptives. Several times I brought to his attention the fact that the was fairly sure to get pregnant; he—knowing all about this from his medical training—would agree and thank me. #RandolpHarris 14 of 19

However, when he still had intercourse without contraception and once was very anxious when the woman missed her menstrual cycle, I found myself vaguely anxious, too, and irritated at how stupid her seemed to be. I caught myself up with the realization that, in my naivete, I was missing the whole point of what was going on. So I broke in, “It seems you want to make this woman pregnant.” He at first emphatically contradicted me, but then he paused to ponder the truth of my statement. All talk of methods and what they ought to do was of course irrelevant. In this man, who had never been able to feel himself masculine, some vital need was pushing him not just to prove himself a man—of which impregnating a woman is much more decisive than merely the capacity to have intercourse—but to get some hold on nature, experience a fundamental procreative process, give himself over to some primitive and powerful biological process, partake of some deeper pulsations in the cosmos. We shall not understand these problems except when we see that our patients have been robbed of precisely these deeper sources of human experience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

We observe in many of these illegitimate pregnancies—or their equivalent—a defiance of the very socially-ordered system which takes away affect, where technology is felt to be a substitute for feelings, a society which calls persons forth to an arid and meaningless existence and gives them, particularly the younger generation, an experience of personalization which is more painful than illegal abortion. No one who has worked with patients for a long period of time can fail to learn that the psychological and spiritual agony of depersonalization is harder to bear than physical pain. And, indeed, they often clutch at physical pain (or social ostracism or violence or delinquency) as a welcome relief. Have we become so civilized that we have forgotten that a girl can yearn to procreate, and can do so not just for psychobiological reasons but to break up the arid desert of feelingless existence, to destroy for one if not for all the repetitive pattern of fucking-to-avoid-the-emptiness-of-despair (“What shall we do tomorrow?” as T.S. Eliot has a rich courtesan cry, “What shall we ever do?”). Or that she can yearn to become pregnant because tee art is never fully converted to a passionlessness, and she is driven to an expression of that which is denied her and which she herself consciously denies in our age of the cool millennium. At least being pregnant is something real, and it proves to the girl and to the man that they are real. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

Alienation is felt as a loss of the capacity to be intimately personal. As I hear these people, they are crying, “We yearn to talk but our dried voices are birds feet over broken glass. We go to bed because we cannot hear each other; we go to bed because we are too shy to look in each other’s eyes, and in bed one can turn away one’s head.” It should not be surprising that a revolt is occurring against the mores which people think cause alienation; a defiance of social norms which promise virtue without trying, sex without risk wisdom without struggle, luxury without effort—all provided that they agree to settle for love without passion, and soon even sex without feeling. The denial of the daimonic means only that the Earth Spirits will come back to haunt us in a new guise; Gaea will be heard, and when the darkness returns the black Madonna will be present if there is no white. The error into which we have fallen obviously consists not of our scientific advances and enlightenment as such, but the using of these for a blanket allaying of all anxiety about sex and love. Marcuse holds that in a nonrepressive society, as sex develops it tends to merge with eros. It is clear that our society has done just the opposite: we separated sex from eros and then tried to repress eros. The passion which is one element of the denied eros then comes back from its repression to upset the person’s whole existence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

The significant self is one who has come through the ravages of an insignificance-producing technology, has learned to accept and know oneself, has come to appreciate one’s place in the scheme of things (nature and other people), and as learned how to integrate the various sides of oneself in an authentic and honest fashion. The person who is struggling to be oneself and know oneself and enjoy being alive ever comes back, full circle, to the beginning, to that vaguest of all concepts: Love. Love, more than being a mere feeling, idea, ideal, or notion, is the most complex experience in all human life. It is the cause of more joy and also more misery than anything else we can know. What do we mean by love? Do any two people mean the same thing by it? Look at the confusion engendered by the simple expression of “I love you”: Sometimes it means: I desire you or I want you sexually. It may mean: I hope you love me or I hope that I will be able to love you. Often it means: It may be that a love relationship can develop between us or even I hate you. Often it is a wish for emotional exchange: I want your admiration in exchange for mine or I give my love in exchange for some passion or I want to feel cozy and at home wit you or I admire some of your qualities. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

A declaration of love is mostly a request: I desire you or I want you to gratify me or I want your protection or I want to be intimate with you or I want to exploit your loveliness. Sometimes it is the need for security and tenderness, for parental treatment. It may mean: My self-love goes out to you. However, it may also express submissiveness: Please take me as I am or I feel guilty about you. I want through you to correct the mistakes I have made in human relations. It may be self-sacrifice and a masochistic wish for dependency. Saying I love you to someone may also be a way of saying good-bye to a person you have wronged, someone you have set up, when you know something is about to happen to them. However, it also may be a full affirmation of the other, taking responsibility for mutual exchange of feelings. It may be a weak feeling of friendliness, it may be the scarcely even whispered expression of ecstasy. “I love you,” wish, desire, submission, conquest: it is never the word itself that tells the real meaning here. “Wherefore, hear my voice and follow me, and you shall be a free people, and ye shall have no laws but my laws when I come, for I am your lawgiver, and what can stay my hand?” reports Doctrines and Covenants 38.22. It would be nice for people to recognize who one is and what one does, to recognize the individual as a person, and enjoy what we are sharing with them. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19