I felt her strength recede, and her eyes misted. A great glowing fire was quelled, and I had done it, and an ever present grief enfolded it. A protective surge rose in me and the wild fantasies reigned again inside of me as if no one else was present. The goal for every human being is to become a person. Every organism has one and only one central need in life, to fulfill its own potentialities. The acorn becomes an oak, the puppy become a dog and makes the fond and loyal relations with its human family which befit the dog; and all that is required of the oak tree and the and the dog. However, if the human being’s task in fulfilling one’s nature is much more difficult, for one must do it in self-consciousness. That is, human development is never automatic but must be to some extent chosen and affirmed by oneself. Among the works of mortals, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and in beautifying, the first importance surely is mortals themselves. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. We should also mention that there is a tendency of the inward forces which make mortals a living thing, namely that mortals do not grow automatically like a tree, but fulfills their potentialities only as one in his own consciousness plans and chooses. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Fortunately the long protracted period of infancy and childhood in human life—in contrast to the condition of the acorn, which is on its own as soon as it falls to the soil, or of the puppy which must fend for itself after a few weeks—prepares the child for this difficult task. One is able to acquire some knowledge and inner strength so that as one must begin to choose and decide, one has some capability for it. Mortals, furthermore, must make their choices as an individual, for individuality is one side of one’s consciousness of one’s self. We can see this point clearly when we realize that consciousness of one’s self is always a unique act—I can never know exactly how you see yourself and you never can know exactly how I relate to myself. This is the inner sanctum where each mortal must stand alone. This fact makes for much of the tragedy and inescapable isolation in human life, but it also indicates again that we must find the strength in ourselves to stand in our own inner sanctum as individuals. And this fact means that, since we are not automatically merged with our fellows, we must through our own affirmation learn to love each other. If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick, just as your legs would wither away if you never walked. However, the power of your legs is not all you would lose. The flowing of your blood, your heart action, your whole organism would be the weaker. And in the same way if mortals do not fulfill their potentialities as a person, one becomes to that extent constricted and ill. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

This is the essence of neurosis—the person’s unused potentialities, blocked by hostile conditions in the environment (past or present) and by one’s own internalized conflicts, turn inward and cause morbidity. Neurosis does not deny the existence of reality, it merely tries to ignore it. Energy is Eternal Delight; one who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. In contrast, joy is the affect which comes when we use our powers. Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal for life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity, who is able to affirm one’s being, if need be, against all others beings and the whole inorganic World. This power in its ideal form is shown in the life of a Socrates, who was so confident in himself and his values that he could take his being condemned to death not as a defeat but as a greater fulfillment than compromising his beliefs. However, we do not wish to imply such joy is only for the heroic and the outstanding; it is as present qualitatively in anyone’s act, no matter how inconspicuous, which is done as an honest and responsible expression of one’s own powers. The way to love other people is to express what we feel—anger and love—without aiming to hurt feelings. Open but reverent communication is now to make love in our lives. “The Lord has poured out his Spirit and caused hearts to be filled with joy,” reports Mosiah 4.20.  #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

If we assumed a complete indeterminism, for instance, that we could make ourselves over in bland freedom by any New Year’s whim or resolution, no one would need to bother to come for psychotherapy. Actually, we find that people’s problems are stubborn, recalcitrant, and troublesome—but we find they can change. And so we need to look further for what changes them. Academic psychologists tended also, no matter what the individual psychologist oneself believed about one’s own ethical actions, to accept the position that as psychologists we are concerned only with what is determined and could be understood in a deterministic framework. This limitation of perception inevitably tended to put blinders on our perception; we made our person over into the image of what we let ourselves see. Psychologists tended to repress the problem of power, particularly irrational power. We took literally Aristotle’s dictum that mortals are a rational being by assuming that they are only that, and that irrationality is merely a temporary aberration to be overcome by right education of the individual or, if the pathology is somewhat more severe, by re-education of one’s maladjusted emotions. There is, of course, a psychological concern with power, has generally been taken as merely a subhead to one’s beliefs in society inferiority and the struggle for security. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Dr. Freud’s assumptions about primitive cannibalism and the aggressive instinct have the element of power in them. However, this also tends to be a rationalize away in that it is used in referring only to severe pathology. The repression of power enable psychology more readily to discard will and hold to a theoretical determinism, since the critical element of the soul and effects of determinism did not then come out into the open. However, in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, where therapists deal with living, suffering people, the problem of the undermining of will and decision become increasingly critical. For the theory and process of psychoanalysis and most other forms of psychotherapy inevitably play into the passive tendencies of the patient. There are built-in tendencies in psychoanalysis itself that sap its vitality and tends to emasculate not only the reality with which psychoanalysis deals but the power and inclination of the patient to change. In the early days of psychoanalysis, when revelations of the unconscious have an obvious shock value, this problem does not come out into the open as much. And in any case with hysterical patients, who formed the bulk of those Dr. Freud worked with in his early formative years, there does not exist a special dynamic in what Dr. Freud could call repressed libido, pushing expression. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

However, now, when most of our patients are compulsive of one for or another, and everybody knows about the Oedipus complex, and our patients talk about pleasures of the flesh with an apparent freedom which would have shocked Dr. Freud’s Victorian patients off the couch (and, indeed, talking about pleasures of the flesh is the easiest way of avoiding really making any decisions about love and passionate intimacy relatedness), the predicament resulting from the undermining of will and decision can no longer be avoided. The repetition compulsion, a problem that has always remained intractable and insoluble within the context of classical psychoanalysis, is in my judgment fundamentally related to this crisis of will. Other forms of psychotherapy do not escape the dilemma of psychoanalysis, namely that the process of psychotherapy itself has built-in tendencies which invite the patient to relinquish one’s position as the deciding agent. The very name “patient” proposes it. Not only do the automatic, supportive elements in therapy have this tendency, but so does the temptation, to which patient and therapist easily succumb, to search for everything else as responsible for one’s problems rather than one’s self. To be sure, psychotherapists of all stripes and schools realize that sooner or later the patient must make some decision, learn to take some responsibility for oneself; but the theory and the technique of most psychotherapy tends to be built on exactly the opposite premise. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

The freedom to make choices experienced by a human being has nothing whatever to do with free will as a principle governing human behavior but is a subjective experience which is itself causally determined. Freedom may presumably be an illusion. Choice and responsibility are illusions caused by prior states but, in turn, causal of future acts. However, here we arrive at the radical inconsistency—as therapists, the analysts could not help recognizing that the patient’s act of choosing is of central importance. Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to choose one way or the other. Toward the end of analysis the therapist may find oneself wishing that the patient were capable of more push, more determination, a greater willingness to make the best of it. Often this wish eventuates in remarks to the patient: People must help themselves; nothing worth while is achieved without effort; you have to try. Such interventions are seldom included in case reports, for it is assumed that they possess neither the dignity nor effectiveness of interpretation. Often an analyst feels uncomfortable about such appeals to volition, as though one were using something one did not believe in, and as though this would have been unnecessary had only one analyzed more skillfully. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Psychoanalysts then found themselves in the curious, anomalous position of believing that the patient must have an illusion of freedom in order to change, and they therefore must cultivate this illusion, or at least do obeisance to it. The paradox, for example, is as psychotherapy progress the experience of freedom encases, so that successfully analyzed people report experiencing more freedom in the conduct of their lives than they did prior to psychotherapy. If this freedom is illusory, the purpose of therapy, or at least the result of successful therapy, is to restore an illusion even though most therapists believe that successful therapy increases the accuracy with which the patient perceives oneself and one’s World. Some analysts, indeed, admit openly that they are engaged in the cultivation of an illusion, and undertake to rationalize this in their theory. Consider what this means. We are told that an illusion is most significant in effecting personality change; that truth is not is most significant in effecting personality change; that truth is not fundamentally (or is only theoretically) relevant to actions, but illusion is. Thus, we are to strive not for truth but for an illusion. We are to believe in definitions of the World by which we cannot live. Or, if we do try strictly to live by them, we shall slide back into passive impotence that leads to apathy and depression. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

I do not need to labor the point that this resolution of the dilemma is untenable. Even we analysts could not live by such an illusion—for how is it possible (without considerable pathology) to commit one’s self if one knows in advance one is committing oneself to an illusion? Furthermore, if patients need to believe in illusions, the possibilities of illusions are, unlike truth, infinite—who is to decide which illusions are, unlike truth, infinite—who is to decide which illusion which works? If so, then our concept of truth has been wrong; for if the illusion genuinely works, it cannot be entirely illusion. Indeed, the statement that the illusions is most decisive for change is essentially an antirational (and thus, anti-scientific) one, for it implies that at the level of behavior the truth or falsehood of a concept is irrelevant. This cannot be accepted; if it seems to be true, there must be some truth in what we call illusion and some illusion in what we call truth. Another solution has been proposed from a different angle. Recognizing that freedom and will have to be given some place in the psychoanalytic structure of personality, the later ego analysts have developed the concept of the autonomy of the ego. The ego, then, is assigned the function of freedom and choice. However, the ego is, by definition, a part of the personality; and how can a part be free? #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

When we consider the autonomy of the unconscious, and the autonomy of the body, each of these would have a partial truth. However, would not each also be importantly wrong? Neither the ego nor the body nor the unconscious can be autonomous, but can only exist as parts of a totality. And it is in this totality that will and freedom must have their base. I am convinced that the compartmentalization of the personality into ego, superego, and id is an important part of the reason why the problem of will has remained insoluble within the orthodox psychoanalytic tradition. We know in our practice of psychoanalysis that lack of freedom is shown in all aspects of the patient’s organism. It is shown in one’s body (muscular inhibitions) and in what is called unconscious experience (repression) and in one’s social relationships (one is unaware of others to the extent one is unaware of oneself). We also know experientially that as this person gains freedom in psychotherapy, one becomes less inhibited in bodily movements, freer in one’s dreams, and more spontaneous in one’s unthought-out, involuntary relations with other people. This means that autonomy and freedom cannot be the domain of a special part of the organism, but must be a quality of the total self—the thinking—feeling—choosing—acting organism. Will and decision are inseparably linked with is as well as ego and supergo, if we are to use Dr. Freud’s terms. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Something of profound significance is going on—in spontaneity, feeling, symbolic meanings—in each decision one makes prior to anything which might be termed an ego function. A strong ego is not the cause of decisions but the result. Dos not the concept of autonomy of the ego have the same difficulties as the old one of free will, in positing some special part or organ of the personality as the seat of choice? If we strip the concept of its sophisticated clothes, it become something akin to the place where the soul is located. To be sure, ego psychoanalysis has the positive aspect of reflecting the pressing concerns of contemporary mortals with one’s problems of autonomy, self-direction, and choice. However, it is also caught in the contradictions with which these problems inescapably confront us. Psychoanalysis and psychology, in all their representations, reveal, with the inconsistency and contradiction which lie therein, the dilemma of will and decision that Western mortals today experiences. It is a sign Dr. Freud’s usual honesty that he frankly states that he is trying to give the patient freedom to choose even tough he knows this is directly contradictory to his theory. He did not quail before contradiction nor leap to too easy a solution. However, as the culture has evolved since Dr. Freud, it has become less and less possible to survive in this contradiction. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

We must consider the fact that we have omitted a dimension of human experience which is important, indeed critical, to human will. Let us assume that I am an omnipotent physiologist with a complete knowledge of the physiology, chemistry, and molecular activities of your brain at any given moment. With this knowledge I can then predict precisely what you will do as a result of the operation of your brain’s mechanisms, since your behavior, including your conscious and verbal behavior, is completely correlated with your neural functioning. However, this only applies if I do not tell you my prediction. Suppose that I tell you what you will do as a result of my complete knowledge of your brain. In doing this I shall have changed the physiology of your brain by furnishing it with this information. This makes it possible for you then to behave in a way quite different from my prediction. If I were to try to allow beforehand for the effects of telling you my prediction, I would be doomed to an endless regression—logically chasing my own tail in an effort to allow for the effects of allowing for the effect of allowing for the effects, indefinitely. Human awareness and consciousness—that is, knowing—introduce unpredictable elements into our being. And mortals are the creature who obstreperously insists on knowing. The change of consciousness which this involves is both outside and inside, consisting of forces operating on the World and the attitude of the person who is attending to these forces. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

We can note that one’s awareness would involve such things as becoming aware of forgotten and buried events in such things as becoming aware of forgotten and buried events in childhood and other aspects of the depth experiences which emerge in therapy. This is—to predict our later discussion—the problem of intentionality in contrast to mere intention. Intentionality, in human experience, is wat underlies will and decision. It is not only prior to will and decision but makes them possible. Why it has been neglected in Western history is clear enough. Ever since understanding has been separated from will, science has proceeded on the basis of this dichotomy, and we tried to assume that facts about human beings could be separated from conation. Particularly since Dr. Freud, this is no longer possible—even though Dr. Freud, without full justice to his own discoveries, clung to the old dichotomy in scientific theory. Intentionality does not rule out deterministic influence, but places the whole problem of determinism and freedom on a deeper plane. The moral types of faith are characterized by the idea of the law. God is the God who has given the law as a gift and as a command. He can be approached only by those who obey the law. There are, of course, laws in the sacramental and mystical types of faith, and no one can reach the ultimate without fulfilling these laws. However, there is an important difference between the laws in the two types of faith. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

The law in the ontological types of faith demands subjection to ritual methods or ascetic practices. The law in the moral type demands moral obedience. The difference, certainly, is not absolute. For the ritual law includes moral conditions and the ethical laws includes ontological conditions. However, the difference is sufficient to make understandable the rise of the various great religions. They follow the one or the other type. One can distinguish the juristic, the conventional and the ethical in the mortal types of faith. The juristic type id most strongly developed in other countries; the ethical type is represented by Jewish prophets. The faith of a Christian is faith in revelation given by prophets in the Bible, and this revelation is the ultimate concern. The revelation preached by prophets are largely ritual, social, and spiritual laws. The ritual laws point to the sacramental stage out of which all religions and cultures have arisen. The social laws transcend the ritual elements and produce a holiness of what ought to be. And the spiritual laws teach us why it is important to keep our covenants with God. These laws permeate the whole life. Their source is a matter of ultimate concern, the prophet; their content is identical with God’s commands. The law is always felt as both a gift and a command. Under the protection of the law, life is possible and satisfying. This is true of the average person who believes in God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

When we love the spirit and letter of the law, the things of eternity can distill upon our souls like the dews from Heaven. With daily obedience and refreshing living water, we find answers, faith, and strength to meet everyday challenges and opportunities with gospel patience, perspective, and joy. This is possible through the covenant between God and the nation, and the ritual law in all its richness and abundance of sacramental activities. The law of justice is the way of reaching God. The divine law is of ultimate concern, as it is the central content of faith. As we keep the best of familiar patterns while seeking new and holier ways to love Go and help us and others prepare to meet him, it gives rules for a continuous actualization of the ultimate concern within the preliminary concerns of the daily life. The ultimate shall always be present and remembered even in the smallest activities of the ordinary life. On the other hand, all this is worth nothing if it is not united with obedience to the moral law, the law of justice, and righteousness. The final criterion for the relation of mortal to God is subjection to the law of justice. It is the greatest invitation from God and is full of love and possibility because Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

We are fighting for freedom from sacramentally consecrated bondage and for justice for every human being. It is faith that allows this superior power of reason to unite with justice and truth. This revolutionary movement gives the World tremendous power, as this type of faith is a state of ultimate concern and total devotion to this concern. The connections in the case of being are neither mechanical nor purely logical, but alive. In this assurance by God’s grace we may be perfected, experience peace, and promise that we will continue to flow forward with faith and confidence in the Lord even when things do not go as we hope, expect, or perhaps deserve, through no fault of our own, even after we have done our best. Remembering in the mode of being implies brining to life something one saw or heard before. Life can be filled with faith, joy, happiness, hope, and love when we exercise the smallest amounts of real faith in Christ. This will allow people to respond spontaneously and productively; they forget about themselves, about the knowledge, the positions they have. Their pride does not stand in their way, and it is precisely for this reason that they can fully respond to other people’s and their ideas. They give birth to new ideas, because the are not holding onto anything, but faith in God, and this can produce and give. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

While the having (material) persons rely on what they possess, the being persons rely on their faith in God and that fact that they are, that they are alive and that something new will be born if only they have the courage to let go and to respond. They come fully alive in the conversation, because they do not stifle themselves by anxious concern with what they have. Their own aliveness is infections and often helps the other person to transcend self-importance. Thus the conversation ceases to be an exchange of commodities (information, knowledge, status) and becomes a dialogue in which it does not matter any more who is right. The Lord helps us and blesses us and we learn to treasure our many precious gifts from God. God has enhanced our knowledge, culminated experience, rummaged our memories, enhanced our knowledge, and deepened our insight into human nature and we have gained knowledge of ourselves. We are inspired and come away with cultural property. When we are this deep in our faith, we are like a well-informed guide at a museum. We learn to hear so that we can distinguish when God speaks to our brains and hearts. “The Spirit of God, is also the spirit of freedom,” reports Alma 61.15. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17