Who missed the deep silence of so many past centuries? Who missed the deep darkness of the long ago pre-electric nights? Not me. We can no longer postpone the challenging question: How does one know that among that bedlam of voices which beset us all, one is really hearing one’s soul? Inner voices—experienced as actual or metaphorical ones—are notoriously untrustworthy; they can tell one anything. Many people hear voices, but there are few Joans Arc. The most important criterion which saves the soul from anarchy is dialogue. Almost every contemporary psychotherapist gains in importance and comes much more than a mere technique for dialogue implies that mortals exist in relationship. The fact that dialogue is possible at all—that it is possible, in favorable circumstances, for us to understand each other, stand where the other is standing—is, in itself, a remarkable point. Communication presupposes community which, in turn, means a communion between the consciousness of the persons in the community. This is a meaningful interchange which is not dependent upon the individual’s mere whim but is a built-in aspect of the structure of human intercourse. Human life is life in dialogue; we can know the self only in dialogue. As we move into times of accelerating change and deepening uncertainty, we need to get smart about how to talk to one another. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

We need to be able to overcome differences, find common ground, build meaning and purpose, be able to think together as groups, as teams, as committees, as communities and as citizens.  Consensual validation shows the enteral importance of dialogue, and has the merit of emphasizing the experiential side rather than mere discourse. The word logos (meaningful structure of reality) is the anchor of this term, dia-logos. If we can talk about the soul meaningfully, we already are in the process of integrating it into the structure of our lives. We find through dialogue the structure of experience and then each mortal is not cast adrift on one’s own. Ideas and reminiscence has to only be awakened and brought out. Understanding is possible, specially by the structure of language, and more generally by the structure of human relationships. Truth exists in the individual as well as in universal structures, for we ourselves participate in these structures. Logos speaks not only in objective laws but subjectively, through the individual person. The integrated soul pushes the person toward some universal structure of meaning, as shown in dialogue. To be guided by your own soul requires a fundamental humility. Your own convictions will always have an element of blindness and self-distortion; the one ultimate illusion is to operate under the conceit that you are free from illusion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Indeed, some scholars believe the original Greek phrase “know thyself” means “Know that thou art only a mortal.” This implies that what as to be surrendered or worked through, as we say psychoanalytically, is the tendency arising in human infancy to play god and the omnipresent demand to be treated as through we were god. Dr. Freud’s concepts of resistance and repression are descriptions of the profound difficulty of knowing thyself. The concept of bad faith and good faith is also an illustration—the dilemma of honesty with one’s self lying in the fact that there is always some element of self-distortion in our acts and beliefs. The mortal who thinks one is in good faith is at that point in bad faith, and the only way to be in good faith is to know that you are in bad faith, for instance, to know that there is some element of distortion and illusion in your perception. The moral problem is not simply a matter of believing in one’s convictions and acting on them, for people’s convictions can be as dominating and destructive, if not more so, than mere pragmatic positions. The moral problem is the relentless endeavor to find one’s own convictions and at the same time to admit that there will always ben in them an element of self-aggrandizement and distortion. Here is where the principle of humility is essential, for psychotherapists and for any moral citizen. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

The shift from independents (people who own their own businesses) to employees is in itself conducive to decreasing work satisfaction for the reason. The employed person, more than the independent one, works in an alienated position. Whether one is paid a lower or a higher salary, one is an accessory to the organization rather than a human being doing something for one’s self. There is one factor, however, which could mitigate the alienation of work, and that is the skill required in its performance. However, here too, development moves in the direction of decreasing skill requirements, and hence increasing alienation. While the managerial or professional groups have at least considerable interest in achieving something more or less personal, the vast majority sell their physical, or an exceedingly small part their intellectual capacity to an employer to be used for purposes of profit in which they have no share, for things in which they have no interest, with the only purpose of making a living, and for some chance to satisfy their consumer’s greed. Dissatisfaction, apathy, boredom, lack of joy and happiness, a sense of futility and a vague feeling that life is meaningless, are the unavoidable results of this situation. This socially patterned syndrome of pathology may not be in the awareness of people; it may be covered by a frantic flight into escape activities, or by a craving for more money, power, prestige. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

However, the weight of the latter motivations is so great only because the alienated person cannot help seeking for such compensation for one’s inner vacuity, not because these desires are the natural or most important incentives for work. Is there any empirical evidence that most people today are not satisfied with their work? It is evident from psychoanalytic experience that the sense of unhappiness and dissatisfaction can be deeply repressed; a person may consciously feel satisfied and only one’s dreams, psychosomatic illness, insomnia, and many other symptoms may be expressive of the underlying happiness. The tendency to repress dissatisfaction and unhappiness is strongly supported by the widespread feeling that not to be satisfied means to be a failure, unsuccessful, etcetera. (Thus, for instance, the number of people who consciously think they are happily married, and express this belief sincerely in answer to a questionnaire is by far greater than the number of those who are really happy in their marriage.) However, even the data on conscious job satisfaction are rather telling. In a study about job satisfaction on a national scale, satisfaction with and employment of their job was expressed by 85 percent of the professionals and executives, by 64 percent of the white-collar people, by 41 percent of the factory workers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

In another study, we find a similar picture: 86 percent of the professionals, 74 percent of the managerial, 42 percent of the commercial employees, 56 percent of the skilled, and 48 percent of the semi-skilled workers expressed satisfaction. We find in these figures a significant discrepancy between professionals and executives on the one hand, workers and clerks on the other. Among the former only a minority is dissatisfied—among the latter, more than half. Regarding the total population, this means, roughly, that over half of the total employed population is consciously dissatisfied with their work, and do not enjoy it. If we consider the unconscious dissatisfaction, the percentage would be considerably higher. Taking the 85 percent of satisfied professionals and executives, we would have to examine how many of them suffer from psychologically determined high blood pressure, ulcers, insomnia, nervous tension and fatigue. Although there are no exact data on this, there can be no doubt that, considering these symptoms, the number of really satisfied people who enjoy their work would be much smaller than the above figures indicate. As far as factory workers and office clerks are concerned, even the percentage of consciously dissatisfied people is remarkably high. Undoubtedly the number of unconsciously dissatisfied workers and clerks is much higher. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

This is indicated by several studies which show that neurosis and psychogenic illness are the main reasons for absenteeism (the estimates for the presence of neurotic symptoms among factory workers go up to about 50 percent). Fatigue and high labor turnover are other symptoms of dissatisfaction and resentment. The most important symptom from the economic standpoint, hence the best studied one, is the wide speared tendency of factory workers, not to give their best to the work, or work restriction as it is often called. In a recent poll conducted, 49 percent of all the manual workers questioned answered that when a person takes a job in a factory he or she should turn out as much as one can, but 41 percent answered that one should not do one’s best, but only turn out the average among. We see that there is a great deal of conscious, and even more unconscious dissatisfaction with the kind of work which our industrial society offers most of its members. One tries to counteract their dissatisfaction by a mixture of monetary and prestige incentives, and undoubtedly these incentives produce considerable eagerness to work, especially in the middle and higher echelons of the business hierarchy. However, it is one thing that these incentives make people work, and it is quite another thing whether the mode of this work is conducive to mental health and happiness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The discussion on motivation of work usually considers only the first problem, namely whether this or that incentive increases the economic productivity of the worker, but not the second, that of one’s human productivity. One ignores the fact that there are many incentives which can make a person do something, but which at the same time are detrimental to one’s personality. A person can work hard out of fear, or out of an inner sense of guilt; psychopathology gives us many examples of neurotic motives leading to overactivity as well as to inactivity. Most of us assume that the kind of work current in our society, namely, alienated work, is the only kind there is, hence that aversion to work is natural, hence that money and prestige and power are the only incentives for work. If we would use our imagination just a little bit, we could collect a good deal of evidence from our own lives, from observing children, from a number of situations which we can hardly fail to encounter, to convince us that we long to spend our energy on something meaningful, that we feel refreshed if we can do so, and that we are quite willing to accept rational authority if what we are doing makes sense. However, even if this is true, most people object, what help is truth to us? #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Industrial, mechanized work cannot, by its very nature, be meaningful; it cannot give any pleasure of satisfaction—there are no ways of changing these facts, unless we want to give up out technical achievements. Does the proposed way of acting make for the integration of the individual as a totality? Does it—at least potentially—make for the expansion of interpersonal meaning in one’s life? And in the lives of those persons significant to the individual? Would this way of acting, if adopted by other people (in principle, all of humankind), make for the increase of interpersonal meaning? It may help to see what happens when the soul is not experienced in dialogue. Examples of this can be seen in every nation at war. Unfaced within one’s self and one’s group, the soul is projected on the enemy. It is no longer seen as a nation which has its own security and power needs, but as the Evil One, the personification of the devil; one’s own soul tendencies are placed on it. The enemy becomes the carrier of the elements we repress in ourselves. We fight our adversaries little realizing that we are fighting our own selves, denied though it be. This projection requires assertion of self-righteousness on the part of the in group, which is what makes it almost impossible to negotiate: to negotiate with the devil is to admit him as an equal; you have, in principle then, already given in to him. This is exactly why the democrats do not want to negotiate with president Trump, but a nation divided amongst itself will fall. #RandolphHaris 9 of 17

The next step in war psychology is that imagination and vision are blocked. There comes out of the capital—of whatever nation—cliché after cliché, each one thinner than its predecessor, which people do not believe on one level but join together in a conspiracy to believe one another. They become rigid in their soul obsession. It is impossible for them even to conceive of any solutions. This process makes the soul impersonal again. It removes the whole area from our having control over it; the soul regresses to what it originally was—a blind, unconscious push unintegrated with consciousness. We now become not only nature’s tools but her blind tools. This is abetted by the vicious-circle mechanism, presented in nations as well as neurotics. We do not learn from experience; we make decision patently against our own interest, and wen they do not work we self-destructively make them all over again. Shrunken in vision and sensitivity, we move monolithically, straight ahead, like the ancient dinosaur who could not learn, blond even to out own dinosaurian movements. Indeed, anxiety may take all forms and intensities, for it is the human being’s basic reaction to a danger to his or her existence, or to some value one identifies with one’s existence. Fear is a threat to one side of the self—if a child is in a fight, one may get hurt, but that hurt would not be a threat to one’s existence; or the university student may be somewhat scared by a midterm, but one knows that the sky will not fall in if one does not pass it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

However, as soon as the threat becomes great enough to involve the total self, one then has the experience of anxiety. Anxiety strikes us at the very core of ourselves: it is what we feel when our existence as selves is threatened. It is the quality of an experience which makes it anxiety rather than the quantity. One may feel only a slight gnawing away in one’s stomach when a supposed friend passes one on the street and does not speak, but though the threat is not intense, the fact that the gnawing continues, and that one is confused and searches around for an explanation of why the friend snubbed one, shows the threat is to something basic in us. In its full-blown intensity, anxiety is the most painful emotion to which the human being is heir. Present dangers are less than future imaginings, and people have been known to leap out of a lifeboat and drown rather than face the greater agony of continual doubt and uncertainty, never knowing whether they will be rescued or not. The threat of death is the most common symbol for anxiety, but most of us in our civilized era do not find ourselves looking into the barrel of a crazed stalker’s gun nor in other ways specifically threatened with death very often. The great bulk of our anxiety comes when some value we hold essential to our existence as selves is threatened. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Tom, the man who will go down in scientific history because he had a hole in his stomach through which the doctors at New York Hospital could observe his psychosomatic reactions in times of anxiety, fear and other stress, gave a beautiful illustration of this. In a period when Tom was anxious about whether he could keep his job at the hospital or would have to go one relief, he exclaimed, “If I could not support my family, I would as soon jump off the dock.” That is, if the value of being a self-respecting wage-earner were threatened, Tom, like the salesman Willie Loman and countless other people in our society, would feel one no longer existed as a self, and might as well be dead. However, when God put a dream in your heart, he also set a date for completion, so never give up. Nonetheless, this illustrates what is true in one way or another for practically all human beings. Certain values, be they success or the love of someone, or freedom to speak the truth, one’s inner voice is believed in as the core of the person’s reason for living, and if such a value is destroyed, the person feels one’s existence as a self might as well be destroyed likewise. “Give me liberty or give me death,” is not just rhetoric nor is it pathological. Since the dominant values for most people in our society are being liked, accepted and approved of, much anxiety in our day comes from the threat of not being liked, being isolated, lonely or cast off. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Most examples of anxiety given above are normal anxiety, that is, anxiety which is proportionate to the real threat of the danger situation. In a fire, battle, or crucial examination in the university, for example, anyone would feel more or less anxiety—it would be unrealistic not to. Every human being experiences normal anxiety in many different ways as one develops and confronts the various crises of life. The more one is able to face and move through these normal crises—the weaning from mother, going off to school, independence from dad’s credit card, and sooner or later taking responsibility for his or her own vocation and marriage decisions—the less neurotic anxiety one will develop. Normal anxiety cannot be avoided; it should be frankly admitted to one’s self. However, most neurotic anxiety comes from such unconscious psychological conflicts. The person feels threatened, but it is as though by a ghost; one does not know where the enemy is, or ow to fight it or flee from it. These unconscious conflicts usually get started in some previous situation of threat which the person did not feel strong enough to face, such as a child’s having to deal with a dominating and possessive partner or having to face the fact that one’s family does not love him or her. The real problem is then repressed, and it returns later as an inner conflict bringing with it neurotic anxiety. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

The way to deal with neurotic anxiety is to bring out the original real experience one was afraid of, and ten to work the apprehension through as normal anxiety or fear. In dealing with any severe neurotic anxiety, the mature and wise step is to get professional psychotherapeutic help. However, our main concern is to understand how to use normal anxiety constructively. And to do that we need to make clearer one very important point, the relation between a person’s anxiety and one’s self-awareness. After a terrifying experience such as a battle or fire, people often remark, “I felt as though I were possessed.” This is because anxiety knocks out the props, so to speak, from our awareness of ourselves. Anxiety, like a torpedo, strikes underneath at the deepest level, or core, of ourselves, and it is on this level that we experience ourselves as persons, as subjects who can act in a World of objects. Thus anxiety in greater or lesser degree tends to destroy our consciousness of ourselves. When we are in a state of anxiety, or panic we become disoriented, and our clear knowledge of who we are and what is going on is temporarily wiped out, and it blurs our view of reality around us. This betwixting—this confusion as to who we are and what we should do—is the most painful thing about anxiety. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

However, the beneficial and hopeful side is that just as anxiety destroys our self-awareness, so awareness of ourselves can destroy anxiety. That is to say, the stronger our consciousness of ourselves, the more we can take a stand against and overcome anxiety. Anxiety, like fever, is a sign that an inner struggle is in progress. As fever is a symptom that the body is mobilizing its physical powers and giving battle to the infection, let us say the tuberculosis bacilli in the lungs, so anxiety is evidence that a psychological or spiritual battle is going on. We have noted above that neurotic anxiety is the sign of an unresolved conflict within us, and so long as the conflict is present, there is an open possibility that we can become aware of the causes of the conflict, and find a solution on a higher level of health. Neurotic anxiety is nature’s way, as it were, of indicating to us that we need to solve a problem. The same is true of normal anxiety—it is a signal for us to call up our reserves and do battle against a threat. As the fever in our example is a symptom of the battle between the bodily powers and the infecting germs, so anxiety is evidence of a battle between our strength as a self on one side and a danger which threatens to wipe out or existence as a self on the other. The more the threat wins, the more then our awareness of ourselves is surrendered, curtailed, hemmed in. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

However, the greater our self-strength—that is, the greater our capacity to preserve our awareness of ourselves and the objective World around us—the less we will be overcome by the threat. There is still hope for a tuberculous patient so long as he has a fever; but in the final stages of the infirmary, when the body has given up as it were, the fever leaves and soon the patient dies. However, they deserve the opportunity to pass naturally, because in the last few moments there could be a miracle and the patient could recover. Just so, the only thing which would signify the loss of hope for getting through our present difficulties as individuals and as a nation, would be a resigning into apathy, and a failure to feel and face our anxiety constructively. Our task, then, is to strengthen our consciousness of ourselves, to find centers of strength within ourselves which will enable us to stand despite the confusion and bewilderment around us. We must be committed to the recognition that all great changes are preceded by a vigorous intellectual reevaluation and reorganization. The sin of hubris may be avoided by showing that the creative process itself is not a free activity if by free we mean arbitrary, or unrelated to cosmic law. For the creative process in the human mind, the developmental process in organic nature and the basic laws of the inorganic realm may be but varied expressions of a universal formative process. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

The present period is one of exceptional tensions, but there is also at work an exceptional movement toward a compensating unity which refuses to violate the ultimate moral power at work in the Universe, that very power upon which all human effort must at last depend. In this way we may come to understand that there exists an inherent interdependence of spiritual and mental growth which, though conditioned by circumstances, is never determined by circumstances. In this way the great plethora of human knowledge may be correlated wit an insight into the nature of human nature by being attuned to the wide and deep range of human thought and human experience. It can be troublesome when we cannot filter out unwanted sensations. It is annoying to have static on your car radio or to walk into a building that smells like smoke or garlic. These sensations and perception can work against each other. Not only do we have competing sensations to wade through and sort out, we may also have to compete with our own expectations, assumptions, prejudices, or personal needs. “I am mindful of you always in my prayers, continually praying unto God the Father in the name of his Holy Child, Jesus, that he, through his infinite goodness and grace, will keep you through the endurance of faith on his name to the end,” reports Moroni 8.3. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17