And you have such a lovely French accent, oh, yes. Where is Reese right now, Monsieur Erich? What is the name of Heaven is going on? Why are you asking questions about Meghan? You think I do not know you are behind everything that is happening? Aaliyah and Ava think you are some sort of foreign prince, with your melodious French accent and your mind reading gifts and your exorcism to rid the house of ghost and spirits. And oh, yes, Aunt Diane absolutely adored you! However, you sound more like Rasputin to me! You cannot just steal Reese from me! You cannot! (a stinging hurt spread through me, over my face, my skin. I had never felt anything quite like it.) Tennessee was back there, in the shadows, laughing cruelly, collecting just a seam of the light along the edge of his face and form. Leo was on his feet and so was Justin.) I have told you all I know. Let me see you out. But is not the path to self-awareness fraught with more vicissitudes, more peaks and precipices of difficult and conflict than implied in the past? True; and we now turn to the more dynamic aspects of becoming a person. For most people, particularly adults trying to overcome the earlier experiences which have blocked them in becoming persons in their own right, achieving consciousness of self involves struggle and conflict. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

People find that becoming persons requires not only learning to feel, to experience and to want, as we pointed out in the past, but to fight against what prevents them from feeling and wanting. They discover that there are certain chains which hold them back. These chains, in essence, are the bonds which bind them to the parents, especially in our society to the mother. We have seen that the human being’s development is continuum of differentiation from the mass toward freedom as an individual. We have also noted that the potential person is originally a unity with the mother as a foetus in the womb, where it is fed automatically through the umbilical cord without any choice without any choice by mother or baby. When it is born and the physical umbilical cord is cut, it has become a physical individual, and feeding thereafter involves some conscious choice on the part of both parties—the infant can raise a howl in demand for food, and the mother can say Yes or No. However, the infant still is almost completely dependent on the parents, particularly the mother, who nurses him or her. One’s becoming an individual continues through an infinite number of steps—that emergence of consciousness of self with the rudimentary beginnings of responsibility and freedom, the movement out from the parental yard when one goes to school, the maturation into maturity at age of puberty, the struggles of going out on one’s own to college and in making vocational choices, the assuming of responsibility for a new family in marriage, and so on. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

All parents are imperfect. All parents, sometimes, are unjust. In some families, parent and child learn very early what acceptance of another person as oneself can bring and how forgiveness heals. In some families, the early lessons are forgotten and have to be learned anew much later. However, the point is that even when we were young children, dependence was not a one-way process. We needed much and were dependent on our parents. However, I question whether we needed more than they did. Even if they were not conscious of learning much or needing much from us, they did. And not the least of these needs was needing to be needed, needing to be able to give. All through life a person is engaged in this continuum of differentiation of oneself from the whole, followed by steps toward new integration. Indeed, all evolution can be described as the process of differentiation of the part from the whole, the individual from the mass, with the parts then relating to each other on a higher level. Since the human being, in contrast to a stone or a chemical compound, can fulfill one’s individuality only by conscious and responsible choice, one must become a psychological and ethical as well as a physical individual. In this forming of self-actualization, the newly formed self is motivated to try out new experiences, to “see what it can do.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Strictly speaking, the process of being born from the womb, cutting free from the mass, replacing dependency with choice, is involved in every decision of one’s life, and even is the issue facing one on one’s deathbed. For what is the capacity to die courageously expect the ultimate step in the continuum of learning to be on one’s own, to leave the whole? Thus every person’s life could be portrayed by a graph of differentiation—how far has one freed oneself from automatic dependencies, become an individual, able then to relate to one’s fellows on the new level of self-chosen love, responsibility and creative work? The baby becomes a physical individual when the umbilical cord is severed at one’s birth, but unless the psychological umbilical cord is also in due time cut, one remains like a toddler bound to a hemlock stake in one’s parents’ front yard. He can go no farther than the length of his tethered rope. His development is blocked, and the surrendered freedom for growth turns inward and festers in resentment and anger. These are the people who, though they may seem to get along tolerably well within the ranger of the toddler’s rope, are greatly upset when they confront marriage, or when they go off to work or eventually face death. In ever crisis they tend figuratively or literally to go back to mother. As one young husband put it, “I cannot love my wife enough because I love my mother too much.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

The young husband’s only error was in using the word “love” for his relation to his mother. Real love is expansive and never excludes loving others: it is only being tied to the mother which is exclusive and blocks one’s loving one’s wife. In our time the tendency to remain enchained is particularly strong, since when a society is so disrupted that it is no longer a “mother” in the sense of giving the individual minimal consistent support, he tends to cling much more closely to the physical mother of his childhood. There was once this gifted man of thirty and he was troubled with homosexual feelings, lack of any pleasurably feelings toward women but very great fears of them at the same time. He avoided intimacy with anyone, and also he was blocked in his completion of his doctoral dissertation for his graduate degree. An only child, he had developed a contempt for his father, who was weak and under the mother’s domination. The mother had often belittled the father in the boy’s presence; he once overheard her saying to the other in an argument, “You are worth more to us dead than alive, but you have always been a coward and you are afraid to take your own life.” The boy has been dressed carefully by his mother when he went to school, was not able to fight, and his mother would come to school when necessary to protect him from the rougher boys. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

When at school, the mother would intimately confide in the boy at length, telling him how much she suffered with the father, and required him to help her with her hair and make-up functions, a practice he did not enjoy. Even in college days when he returned for vacation he would be paralyzed with anxiety when hearing his mother coming up the stairs at night for fear she would come into his room when he was undressed. She had carried on an extramarital affair rather openly when he was a boy, which upset him greatly, and, as often happens in such situations, it made him much more jealous of her attentions. Later on in adolescence she tried to block his meeting girls but when he dated anyway, she endeavored to make dates for him with girls whose families could enhance her social position. When he was a boy, much was made of his piano playing and recitations in school and Sunday school. One time he greatly embarrassed his parents at Sunday-school exercises by being unable to recite the commandment “Honor thy mother and father”; and when his mother would have him play the piano at ladies’ meetings, he would forget the piece no matter how well he had known it beforehand. He was a very bright boy and had many successes in school and later gained some prestige in the armed forces, but these were treated by his mother as ways of enhancing her own prestige in the community. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The reader has no doubt already noticed that his blockage in completing his doctoral work had much in common with his forgetting the piano solo; both were rebellions against his mother’s exploitation of his success. For one way to defend yourself against someone’s exploiting your success is to accomplish nothing which the other could take away. The mother’s frequent letters to him at the time of his therapy were long complaints and descriptions of her minor heart attacks, together with outright requests that he come home and take responsibility for her and hints that she would have another attack if he did not show more interest. The problems of this young man, which we have described in a somewhat oversimplified way, are in several ways typical of many young men in our society. First, he suffered from lack of feeling, confusion of his role in pleasure of the flesh and a lack of potency—both for passionate adult intimacy and in his work. A second relatively typical aspect is the family pattern. It will be noted that this family is significantly different from the patriarchal families which Dr. Freud had in mind when he first formulated his Oedipus doctrine. In our young man’s family the mother was the dominating figure, the father was weak and pictured as somewhat contemptible to the son. Another aspect is the boy had been favored by the mother, made prince consort and placed in the father’s position, this preferential treatment to continue so long as the boy pleased the mother. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

However, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” The young man derived no real sense of security and power from his position on the throne, for he was there not because of his own strength but as a puppet of the mother. The classical Oedipus portrait is present in this case, to be sure, but with important differences: the boy is deathly afraid of castration (losing his power), but it is the mother who castrates him, not the father. The father is not much of a rival—the mother has seen to that. The son has had no figure of masculine strength to identify with, so he lacks that normal source of the experience of power for a growing boy. So, this is not really a classical Oedipus case, it seems to be one that the mother has tried to manufacture possible to make her son a homosexual. As a substitute for this lack of power he has only his mother’s adulation, pampering and domineering attention. As would be expected, such a young man had frequent dreams of being literally a prince. His narcissism was very great, for it had to compensate for his actual, inner feeling that he was almost completely powerless. He could rebel a little against his mother by not accomplishing things and by occasional verbal spats, but this was only the passive protest of a slave towards it master. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

It is not in the slightest surprising that this man should be deathly afraid of women; nor is it surprising that he should be in so much inward conflict that he would be able to move ahead in work, love, or any intimacy with person. What is the way out of such a morbid intertwining? Of course a child can temporarily withdraw, seeking to protect oneself from exploitation by making oneself as little as possible, and thus try to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. One young man, looking back on a boyhood in which he was caught in the cross fire between a weak, alcoholic father and a dominating, martyr-type mother described in a poem how he saw himself in those early years, “You stand there by the table, still clutching your teddy bear…making it so small they will fail to find it. Then you are left alone to defend what they did not want—not being able to find it.” Or—and this generally occurs later—he can try to take arms against a sea of troubles, and struggle actively to achieve his freedom as a person in his own right. I wish now to give some examples from psychoanalysis of the problem of intentionality. Take the fascinating instance of a patient who cannot perceive some obvious thing not because anything is wrong with his eyes or his neurological functioning or anything of that sort, but because the intentionality in which he is trapped makes it impossible for him to see. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

A patient of mine presented data the very first session that his mother tried to end her pregnancy with him before he was born, that she then gave him over to a midwife aunt to raise the first two years of his life, after which she left him in an orphan’s home promising to visit him every Sunday, but rarely putting in an appearance. Now if I were to say to him—being naïve enough to think it would do some good—“Your mother hated you,” he would hear the words but they might well have no meaning whatever for him. Sometimes a vivid and impressive thing happens—such a patient cannot even hear the word, such as hate, even though the therapist repeats it. Supposed my patient is a psychologist or psychiatrist. He might then remark, “I realize all of this seems to say my mother did not want me, did not love me, but those are simply foreign words to me.” He is not prevaricating or playing a gam of hide-and-seek with me. It is simply a fact: the patient cannot permit himself to perceive the trauma until he is ready to take a stand toward it. This experience is surely not foreign to anyone: we sense that we shall be fired from our job, that someone we love will die imminently. However, what goes on is a curious inner conversation with ourselves, “I know I will be able to see this later on, but I cannot see it now.” This is simply a way of saying, “I know it is true, but I cannot yet permit myself to see it.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The World can be too overwhelming if we are not able to take a stand toward a traumatic happening but also are unable to escape seeing it. Schizophrenia is one reaction to such a dilemma. Sometimes the therapist makes the mistake of setting out to drum into the patient’s head an obvious truth which the patient has not been able to admit—for example, telling a woman that she does not love her baby. What often happens then is that the patient, is she does not quit therapy, develops some other, probably worse, block between herself and reality. Intentionality presupposes such an intimate relationship with the World that we would not be able to go on existing expect if we could block the World out at times. This should not be called simply by the condemnatory term resistance. I do not doubt the reality of resistance, as Dr. Freud and others elucidated it, but I am emphasizing here a broader, structural phenomenon. That is, every intention is an attention, and attention is I-can. We are, therefore, unable to give attention to something until we are able in some way to experience an “I-can” with regard to it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The same principle is evident, also in exceedingly interesting ways, in memory. Patients often need one or two years of analysis before they can remember some obvious events in their childhood. When they suddenly do recall the event, has their memory gotten better? Of course not. However, what has happened is a change in the patient’s relation to one’s World, generally by way of one’s increased capacity to trust the therapist and, accordingly, oneself, or there is a reduction of one’s neurotic anxiety for other reasons. One’s relation to intentionality—in contrast to one’s mere conscious intention, which was assumedly there to being with—has changed. Memory is a function of intentionality. Memory is like perception in this regard; the patient cannot remember something until one is ready to take some stand toward it. Recovery of childhood memories is not the cause but the result of analysis. All of this hinges on the inseparability of knowing and willing, of cognition and conation, which we see nowhere more clearly than in psychotherapy. Patients some for therapy because they are aware that they cannot actin their lives because they do not know—are not aware of drives from their unconscious, do not know their own mechanisms, have never become conscious of the childhood genesis of these mechanisms, and so on. However, if this is the only approach, the patient will be possessed by the couch for eight or nine years, never acting because one does not yet know enough; and psychoanalysis becomes systematic training in indecision. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

However, it is also an error for therapy to reach in the opposite direction, as several schools have done of late, and insist that the function of the therapist is to clarify reality for the patient and get one to act accordingly. This makes the therapist the psychic police force of the society, whose job is to help the patient conform to the mores of our particular historical period—about which it can only be said that, if they are still viable at all, they are of exceedingly dubious merit. Our only way to avoid both errors is to move the problem to the deeper plane of intentionality. My thesis here is that the function of psychoanalysis should be to push intention toward the deeper, wider, organic dimension of intentionality. Has it not been always the function of psychoanalysis to demonstrate that there is a purely conscious intention, that we—whether we literally are murderers or not—are always pushed by the irrational, soul, dynamic forces of the dark side of life? Deliberation has been dethroned as the motive for actions. Whatever we do, infinitely more than our rational reasons and justification is involved. Psychoanalysis gives the data that makes the necessary distinction, as well as the necessary connection, between intention and intentionality. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

We must now pause to distinguish intentionality from purpose or voluntarism. Intentionality is a form of epistemology, which neither purpose nor voluntarism are. Intentionality involves response, which neither purpose nor voluntarism do. Not solipsistic, intentionality is an assertive response of the person to the structure of one’s World. Intentionality gives the basis which makes purpose and voluntarism possible. A patient’s voluntary intention, so far as one is aware of it, may be to get one’s hours with me on time, to tell me this or that important thing that has happened to one, to relax and be completely honest. However, one’s unconscious intentions, in contrast, my well be to please me by playing the role of the good patient, or to impress me with how brilliant one’s free links are, or to force my unconditioned attention by describing what catastrophic things one may do to oneself and others. Intention is a psychological state; I can set myself voluntarily to do this or that. Intentionality is what underlies both conscious and unconscious intentions. It refers to a state of being and involves, to a greater or lesser degree, the totality of the person’s orientation to the World at that time. And what is most interesting is the times in psychotherapy when strong voluntary intention—correlated with will power—blocks the way to the person’s intentionality, and is just what keep the patient from communicating with the deeper dimensions of one’s experience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Our William James, struggling there in bed with his Victorian will power and remaining paralyzed for as long as he struggled, is an engaging example. And as long as he struggled in that way, we could be sure that he would remain paralyzed. “You should work out your salvation with fear before God, and do not deny the coming of Christ; Contend no more against the Holy Ghost, but you receive it, and take upon you the name of Christ; that you humble yourselves even to the dust, and worship God, in whatsoever place you may be in, in spirit and in truth; and that you live in thanksgiving daily, for the many mercies and blessings which he does bestow upon you. Be watchful unto prayer continually, that you may not be led away by the temptation of the devil, that he may not overpower you, that you may not become his subjects at the last day; for behold, he rewards you no good thing. And now my beloved people, I would exhort you to have patience, and that you bear with all manner of affliction that you do not revile against those who do cast you out because of your exceeding poverty, lest you become sinners like unto them; but that you have patience, and bear with those afflictions, with a firm hope that you shall one day rest from all your afflictions,” reports Alma 34.37-41. Intentionality, as I am using the term, goes below levels of immediate awareness, and includes spontaneous, bodily elements and other dimension which are usually called unconscious. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The fact that intention can reach down to the unconscious has beneficial as well as negative implications. For example, my intention at this moment is to put these ideas, which seem important to me, into readable form and to finish this essay in the not-too-distant future. However, unless I am participating in an intentionality which is more than that—for instance, unless I am committed to writing as good and true an essay as I can—I shall accomplish only a pedestrian job. I shall produce nothing of genuine significance or originality. For in my pressure to get the assignment done, I will be blocking off new ideas which might well up in me, new insights and forms emerging from the preconscious and unconscious dimensions of experience. Intention goes with conscious purpose. However, the gift of psychoanalysis is the depth dimension, a contribution which vastly enlarges intention, and indeed pushed it from a conscious purpose to the more total, organic, feeling and wishing mortal, the mortal who is the product of one’s past as well as moving toward the future. Psychoanalysis will not let intention rest as simple intention, but pushes it to the deeper, wider, organic plane of intentionality. “You cannot hide your crimes from God; and except you repent they will stand as a testimony against you at the last day. Repent and forsake your sins, and go no more after the lusts of your eyes,” reports Alma 39.8-9. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

We have said that intentionality gives the underlying structure for wishing and willing. Speaking psychoanalytically, intentionality gives the structure within which repression and the blocking off of conscious intention takes place. Dr. Freud made it undeniably clear, in his use of free association, that associations which seem merely random are not at all random. In free association, the thoughts and memories and fantasies take their form, their pattern, their meaningful theme (which the patient, or any one of us engaging in free association not on the couch but in normal thinking and creativity, may not at all catch at the moment) from the fact that they are his fantasies, his manifestations, coming out of his way of perceiving the World and his commitments and problems. It is only afterwards that the person himself can see and absorb the meaning that has been in these apparently random, disconnected things he is say. Free association is a technique of going beyond mere conscious intention and giving oneself over to the realm of intentionality. It is in the basic, more inclusive realm of intentionality that these deeper meanings lie; but it is also here where we find the patient’s reasons for his repression in the first place. I believe that the long-run impact of Dr. Freud and psychoanalysis will be to deepen and enlarge our understanding of intentionality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The report of my death is grossly exaggerated. After each of these death-notices, psychoanalysis has gained new followers and co-workers and had created for itself new organs. Surely to be reported dead is an advance over being treated with dead silences! The motive for the circumstances is already there, a few investigators who, without being physicians, have made the application of psychoanalysis to the mental sciences their lifework. This hint began those investigations about myths. And naturally, opposition was not lacking from those who are not acquainted with analysis, and expressed itself with the same lack of understanding and passionate rejection as on the native soil of psychoanalysis. It never occurred to some to rail against a few unworthy individuals, fortune hunters and plunders, such as in time of war are always found on both sides. For I knew how to account for the behavior of these opponents and had besides discovered that psychoanalysis brings light to the worst in every mortal. I sang the song of the tall ones, the long-extinct ones, come again to form a colony, lost somewhere in the modern World. Gentle beings, out of time, out of place, and maybe out of luck. And of such tragic important to my fledgling and her human kindred. Do not make me say so much that other immortals might gather up my intent and use it to bad ends. Envision bowers of love, places of Divine safety foreordained beyond Good and Evil, where coveted one’s can dwell. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18