Heaven and Earth had been moved. It was sweeter than any rose in the Winter. The clothes and shoes make her very happy. She looked like Miss America. Most likely she had not been feeling well for so long that all her own clothes are gone. Who knows? If we want to define happiness by its opposite, we must define it not in contrast to sadness, but in contrast to depression. What is depression? It is the inability to feel, it is the sense of being dead, while our body is alive. It is the inability to experience joy, as well as the inability to experience sadness. A depressed person would be greatly relieved if one could feel sad. A state of depression is so unbearable because one is incapable of feeling anything, either joy or sadness. If we try to define happiness try to define happiness in contrast to depression, we have to define joy and happiness as that state of intensified vitality that fuses into one whole our effort both to understand our fellow mortals and be one with them. Happiness consists in our touching the rock bottom of reality, in the discovery of our self and our oneness with others as well as our differences from them. Happiness is a state of intense inner activity and the experience of the increasing vital energy which occurs in productive relatedness to the World and to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

A woman in late twenties had come for treatment because of sever lack of feeling, blockage in spontaneity—both of which made intimate relations a difficult problem for her husband and herself and a self-consciousness which at times paralyzed her. She was the daughter of one of the antiquated aristocratic American families of considerable stature, a family in which her masochistic mother and prestigious father and three senior brothers constituted a rigid structure in which she had to grow up. She had been forbidden to explore, to think or to wonder about pleasures of the flesh, and this crippled her capacity for passionate intimacy. Some will say that we are making too much of pleasures of the flesh, overlooking, platonic love relationships—the profound love mortals have expressed for ideals, country, race, humankind, God, and altruistic, self-sacrificing love. We are not intentionally overlooking any form of love except insofar as our emphasis is on the total expression of self. Many forms of love, beautiful as they may be, deny pleasures of the flesh—or try to. Between two people, an enormous amount of communication goes on. There are contact, moments of closeness, gestures, glances, intimations. True love is honestly and beautifully expressed through open communication. Love can be so deeply fulfilling and so beautiful that we wonder why anyone would want or need to minimize it, cheapen it, deny it.  #RandolpHarris 2 of 19

In therapy, the young lady learned—with her rational treatment—to inquire of herself the reason why she was emotionally paralyzed in this or that situation, what was occurring when she felt to passion for romantic intimacy, and she became able to experience and express her anger, passion for romantic intimacy, and other feelings with considerable freedom. This was assisted by a good deal of useful inquiry into her childhood, where Dr. Freud believes is where most problems stem from, and the difficult traumas she had sustained in this overtly-structured family, and it was accompanied by a beneficial effect on her practical living. However, at a certain stage, we hit a stalemate. She kept asking the reason why, but it no longer made any change in her; her emotions seemed to be their own reason for being. The session to which I shall now refer came during a period when she was working on the possibilities of a genuine love with her husband. She reported that the previous night she had felt flirtations with her husband and in that mood had asked him to reach down the back of her dress and take out a sales tag that was still there. Later in the evening when she was drafting checks at her desk, he unexpectedly threw his arms around her. She, furious at being interrupted, scratched a line across his face with her pen. In telling me about this, she tossed off some ready-at-hand explanations of her anger as due to her brothers’ having taken advantage of her as a child no matter what she was doing. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

When I questioned this by asking what she was using her feelings for in the incident, she flared up in anger: I was taking away her “free spontaneity.” Did I not see she must “trust her instincts?” Had we not spent a good deal of time helping her learn to feel, and so what did I mean by asking her what she was doing with her feelings? And what is more, the question sounded just like her family’s telling her to be responsible. She finished the attack with the expostulation, “Feelings are feelings!” We can readily see the contradiction she is caught in. She had effectively ruined the evening with her husband. Ostensibly seeking the possibilities of a genuine love between them, she had accomplished exactly the opposite. She pulls her husband toward her with one had and quickly draws him away with the other. She justifies this contradictory behavior by an assumption which is very common in our day, namely, that feeling is a subjective push from inside you, emotions (the term coming from e-movere, to move out) are forces which put you into motion, and so are to be emoted in whatever way you happen to feel at the moment. This is probably the most prevalent unanalyzed assumption about emotions in our society. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

The assumption that we all have built up emotions ready to explode at any moment takes it model from a kind of glandular hydraulics—we have an inner secretion of adrenalin and need to let off our angry, or gonadal excitement and must find an object to express our pleasures of the flesh. It fits the popularly accepted mechanical model of the body as well as the more sophisticated deterministic models that many of us were exposed to in our first courses in psychology and physiology. What we are not told—because practically nobody saw it—is that this is a radically solipsistic, schizoid system. It leaves us separated like monads, alienated, with no bridge to any persons around us. We can emote and have pleasures of the flesh from now until doomsday and never experience any real relationship with another person, only literally a doomsday. It does not decrease the horror of the situation to realize that a great many people, if not most in our society, experience their emotions in just this lonely way. To feel, then, makes their loneliness more painful rather than decreasing it, so they stop feeling. What is omitted in my patient’s (and our society’s) view is that emotions are not just a push from the rear but a pointing toward something, an impetus for forming something, a call to mold the situation. Feelings are not just a chance state of the moment, but a pointing toward the future, a way I want something to be. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Except in the most severe pathology, feelings always occur in a personal field, an experience of one’s self as personal and an imagining of others even if no one else is literally present. Feelings are rightfully a way of communicating with the significant people in our World, a reaching out to mold the relationship with them; they are a language by which we interpersonally construct and build. That is to say, feelings are intentional. The first aspect of emotions, as forces which push, has to do with the past and is correlated with causality and the determinism of one’s past experience, including the infantile and archaic. This is the regressive side of emotions about which Dr. Freud has taught us so much of lasting importance. In this respect, the investigation of the childhood of the patient, and the re-experiencing of it, as a sound and essential role in enduring psychotherapy. The second view, in contrast, starts in the present and points toward the future. It is the progressive aspect of emotions. Our feelings, like the artist’s paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the Word. Our feelings not only take into consideration the other person but are in a real sense partially formed by the feelings of the other persons present. We feel in a magnetic field. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

 A sensitive person learns, often without being conscious of doing so, to pick up the feelings of other persons around one, as a violin string resonates to the vibration of every other musical string in the room, although in such infinitesimally small degrees that it may not be detectable to the ear. Every successful lover knows this by instinct. It is an essential—if not the essential—quality of the good therapist. In dealing with the first aspect of emotions it is entirely sound and accurate to ask the reason why. However, the second aspect requires asking the purpose for. Dr. Freud’s approach is roughly correlated with the former, and he would, no doubt, have denied my use of purpose here. Plato’s and the Greek concept of eros is correlated with the second: emotion is attraction, a pulling toward; my feelings are aroused by virtue of goals, ideals, possibilities in the future which grasp me. The distinction is also made in modern logic; the reason is the consideration in the past which explains why you are doing this or that, and purpose, in contrast, is what you want to get out of doing it. The first concept is correlated with determinism. The second refers to your opening up to new possibilities. It is thus correlated with freedom. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

We participate in the forming of the future by virtue of our capacity to conceive of and respond to new possibilities, and to bring them out of imagination and try them in actuality. This is the process of active loving. It is the eros in us responding to the eros in others and in the World of nature. To return to my patient: She experienced a hopelessness in the above session, arising out of her dim awareness of the trap she was caught in. Two sessions later she was to say, “I have always looked for reasons I feel such and such towards Harry. I believed that was what was important—that process would lead to a nirvana. Now I have run out of reasons. Maybe there are not any.” It is interesting that her last phrase is more brilliant than she realized. For it is true, both in therapy and in life, when we get to the stage where our essential needs are mostly met and we are not need-drive, that “there are not any reasons” in the sense that reasons lose their relevancy. The conflict becomes stalemate and boredom on one hand, or on the other, the opening of one’s self to new possibilities, the deepening of consciousness, the choosing and committing of one’s self to new ways of life. The distinction between reason why and purpose clicked strongly with my patient and released in her several important insights. To her considerable surprise, one of these was a radical shift in the meaning she gave to responsibility. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Now she saw it not as merely the external and passively-received expectations from family, but as an active responsibility to herself in being aware of the power she was exerting that evening with her husband. Responsibility now consisted of her choosing what she wanted of her life with him and elsewhere. It is no doubt safe to say—again excepting severely pathological individuals—that all emotions, no matter how contradictory they appear on the surface, have some kind of unity in the Gestalt which constitutes the self. The clinical problem—as in the case of the anxious child who is forced to act lovingly toward parents who are actually hostile and destructive toward him—is that the person cannot or will not let himself be aware of what he feels or is doing with his feelings. When my patient was able to analyze her two contradictory acts that evening toward her husband, it turned out that both were motivated by anger toward him and men in general, she setting up the situation to prove the man is the villain. Both actions presuppose the man as the authority figure (which she was doing with me in the nirvana process of therapy). And, in the meantime, she remains the whim-directed, willful child. She could cope with men on the basis of the childhood pattern, but—as came out in pronounced anxiety in subsequent sessions—could she cope with them as an adult? #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

We have arrived in the Airbus A380 of eros, if I may put it so, at a new concept of causality. No longer are we forced to understand the human being in terms of a billiard-ball cause-and-effect, based solely on the explanations of reason why and susceptible to rigid prediction. Indeed, Aristotle believed that the motivation of eros was so different from the determinism of the past that he would not even call it causality. In Aristotle we find the doctrine of the universal eros, which drives everything towards the highest form, the pure actuality which moves the World not as a cause (kinoumenon) but as the object of love (eromenon). And the movement he describes is a movement from the potential to the actual, from dynamis to energeia. I am proposing a description of human beings as given motivation by the new possibilities, the goals and ideals, which attract and pull them toward the future. This does not omit the fact that we are all partially pushed from behind and determined by the past, but it unites this force with its other half. Eros gives us a causality in which reason why and purpose are united. The former is part of all human experience since we all participate in the finite, natural World; in this respect, each of us, in making any important decision, needs to find out as much as one can about the objective facts of the situation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

This realm is particularly relevant in problems of neurosis in which past events do exercise a compulsive, repetitive, chainlike, predictable effect upon the person’s actions. Dr. Freud was right in the respect that rigid, deterministic causality does work in neurosis and sickness. However, he was wrong in trying to carry this over to apply to all human experience The aspect of purpose, which comes into the process when the individual can become conscious of what he or she is doing, opens one to a new and different possibilities in the future, and introduces the elements of personal responsibility and freedom. It follows that happiness cannot be found in the state of inner passivity, and in the consumer attitude which pervades the life of the alienated mortal. Happiness is to experience fullness, not emptiness which needs to be filled. The average mortal today may have a good deal of fun and pleasure, but in spite of this, one is fundamentally depressed. Perhaps it clarifies the issues if instead of using the word depressed we use the word bored. Actually there is very little difference between the two, expect a difference in degree, because boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers and the sense of un-aliveness. Among the evils of life, there are few which are as painful as boredom, and consequently every attempt is made to avoid it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

It can be avoided in two ways; either fundamentally, by being productive, and in this manner experiencing happiness, or by trying to avoid its manifestations. The latter attempts seems to characterize the chasing after fun and pleasure in the average person today. One senses one’s depression and boredom, which becomes manifest when one is alone with oneself or with those closet to him or she. All our amusements serve the purpose of making it easy for one to run away from oneself and from the threatening boredom by taking refuge in the many ways of escape which our culture offers one; yet covering up a symptom does not do away with the conditions which produce it. Aside from the fear of physical infirmary, or of being humiliated by the loss of status and prestige, the fear of boredom plays a paramount role among the fears of modern mortals. In a World of fun and amusement, one is afraid of boredom, and glad when another day has passed without mishap, another hour has been killed without one having become aware of the lurking boredom. From the standpoint of normative humanism we must arrive at a different concept of mental health; the very person who is considered healthy in the categories of an alienated World, from the humanistic standpoint appears as the sickest one—although not in terms of individual sickness, but of the socially patterned defect. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Mental health, in the humanistic sense, is characterized by the ability to love and to create, by the emergence from the incestuous bonds to family and nature, by a sense of identity based on one’s experience of self as the subject and agent of one’s powers, by the grasp of reality inside and outside of ourselves, that is, by the development of objectivity and reason. The aim of life is to live it intensely, to be fully born, to be fully awakre. To emerge from the ideas of infantile grandiosity into the conviction of one’s real though limited strength; to be able to accept the paradox that every one of us is the most important thing there is in the Universe—and at the same time not more important than a bird or a leaf falling from a tree. To be able to love life, and yet to accept death without terror; to tolerate uncertainty about the most important questions with which life confronts us—and yet to have faith in our thought and feeling, in as much as they are truly ours. To be able to be alone, and at the same time one with a loved person, with every person on this Earth, with all that is alive; to follow the voice of our conscience, the voice that calls us to ourselves, yet not to indulge in self hate when the voice of conscience was not loud enough to be hear and followed. The mentally healthy person is the person who lives by love, reason and faith, who respects life, one’s own and that of one’s fellow mortals, animals, and other living an inanimate objects.  #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

The alienated person, as we have tried to describe, cannot be healthy. Since one experiences oneself as a thing, an investment, to be manipulated by oneself and by others, one is lacking a sense of self. This lack of self creates deep anxiety. The anxiety engendered by confronting one with the abyss of nothingness is more terrifying than even the tortures of Hell. In the vision of Hell, I am punished and tortured—in the vision of nothingness I am driven to the border of madness—because I cannot say I am any more. If the modern age has been rightly called the age of anxiety, it is primarily because of this anxiety engendered by the lack of self. Inasmuch as I am as you desire me—I am not; I am anxious, dependent on approval of others, constantly trying to please. The alienated person feels inferior whenever he or she suspected oneself of not being in line. Since one’s sense of worth is based on approval as the reward for conformity, one feels naturally threatened in one’s sense of self and in one’s self-esteem by any feeling, thought or action which could be suspected of being a deviation. Yet, inasmuch as one is human and not an automaton, one cannot help deviating, hence one must feel afraid of disapproval all the time. As a result one has to try all the harder to conform, to be approved of, to be successful. Not the voice of one’s conscience gives one strength and security but the feeling of not having lost the close touch with the herd. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Another result of alienation is the prevalence of a feeling of guilt. It is, indeed, amazing that in as fundamentally irreligious a culture as our, the sense of guilt should be so widespread and deep-rooted as it is. The main difference from, let us say, a Calvinistic community, is the fact that the feeling of guilt is neither very conscious, nor does it refer to a religiously patterned concept of sin. However, if we scratch the surface, we find that people feel guilty about hundreds of things; for not having worked hard enough, for having been too protective—or not protective enough for Mother, or for having been too kindhearted to a debtor; people feel guilty for having done good things, as well as for having done bad things; it is almost as if they had to find something to feel guilty about. What could be the cause of so much guilt feeling? It seems that there are two main sources which, though entirely different in themselves, lead to the same result. The one source is the same as that from which the feelings of inferiority spring. Not to be like the rest, not to be totally adjusted, makes one feel guilty toward the commands of the great It. The special private happiness of the free person comes from one’s ways that help one be present in what one is doing. When I feel most pressured, most unfree, it is usually because I am not there as me. I do not mean that I am not in what I am doing, necessarily. I mean that I am driving myself, treating myself as an object, a tool, an instrument. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

The other source of guilt feeling is mortal’s own conscience, one senses one’s gifts or talents, one’s ability to love, to think, to laugh, to cry, to wonder and to create, one senses that one’s life is the once chance one is given, and that if one loses this chance one has lost everything. One lives in a World with more comfort and ease than one’s ancestors ever knew—yet one senses that, chasing after more comfort, one’s life runs through one’s fingers like sand. One cannot help feeling guilty for the waste, for the lost chance. This feeling of guilt is much less conscious than the first one, but one reinforces the other. Thus, alienated mortals feel guilt for being themselves, and for not being oneself, for being alive and for being an automaton, for being a person and for being a thing. Alienated mortals are unhappy. Consumption of fun serves to repress the awareness of one’s unhappiness. One tries to save time, and yet one is eager to kill the time one has saved. One is glad to have finished another day without failure or humiliation, rather than to greet the new day with the enthusiasm which only the “I am I” experience can give. One is lacking the constant flow of energy which stems from productive relatedness to the World. Having no faith, being impaired from hearing the voice of conscience, and having a manipulating intelligence but little reason, one is bewildered, disquieted and willing to appoint to the position of a leader anyone who offers one a total solution. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

Can the picture of alienation be connected with any of the established pictures of mental illness? In answering this question we must remember that the mortal has two ways of relating oneself to the World. One in which one sees the World as one needs to see it in order to manipulate it or use it. Essentially this is sense experience and common-sense experience. Our eye sees that which we have to see, our ear hears what we have to hear in order to live; our common sense perceives things in a manner which enables us to act; both senses and common sense work in the service of survival. In the matter of sense and common sense and for the logic built upon them, things are the same for all people because the laws of their use are the same. The other faculty of mortals is to see things from within, as it were; subjectively, formed by my inner experience, feeling, mood. Ten painters paint the same tree in one sense, yet they paint ten different trees in another. Each tree is an expression of their individuality while also being the same tree. In the dream we see the World entirely from within; it loses its objective meaning and is transformed into a symbol of our own purely individual experience. The person who dreams while awake, that is, the person who is in touch only with one’s inner World and who is incapable of perceiving the outer World in its objective-action context, is insane. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

The person who can only experience the outer World photographically, but is out of touch with one’s inner World, with oneself, is the alienated person. Schizophrenia and alienation are complementary. In both forms of sickness one pole of human experience is lacking. If both poles are present, we can speak of the productive person, whose very productiveness results from the polarity between an inner and an outer form of perception. Our description of the alienated character of contemporary mortals is somewhat one-sided; there are a number of beneficial factors which I have failed to mention. There is in the first place still a humanistic tradition alive, which has not been destroyed by the in-human process of alienation. However, beyond that, there are signs that people are increasingly dissatisfied and disappointed with their way of life and trying to regain some of their lost selfhood and productivity. Millions of people listen to good music in concert halls or over the radio, an ever-increasing number of people paint, do gardening, build their own boast or houses, indulge in any number of do it yourself activities. Adult education is spreading, and even in business the awareness is growing that an executive should have reason and not only intelligence. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

However promising and real as all these trends are, they are not enough to justify an attitude which is to be found among a number of very sophisticated writers who claim that criticisms of our society, such as the one which has been offered ere, are dated and archaic; that we have already passed the peak of alienation and are now on our way to a better World. Appealing as this type of optimism is, it is nevertheless only a more sophisticated for of the defense of the status quo, a translation of the praise of the American Way of Life into the concepts of a cultural anthropology which, has been enriched and goes beyond to assure mortals that there is no reason for serious worry. “It’s raining, it’s pouring, a black sky is falling. It’s cold tonight. You gave me your answer. Goodbye. Now I am all on my own tonight. And when the big wheel starts to spin, you can never know the odds if you do not play to win. We were in Heaven you and I, when I lay with you and close my eyes, our fingers touch the sky. I’m sorry, baby. You were the Sun and Moon to me. I will never get over you, you will never get over me,” reports Sun and Moon by Above and Beyond. As self-acutalizers grow older, they tend to be more and more interested in cognitive (thinking/learning) and esthetic (art, music, literature, philosophy) activities. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19