The turbulence inside her was unreadable, indeed, unknowable, and if I caught anything definitive it was a high pitch of terror that hearkened back to things which had befallen her in the past. I could not fathom it, there was not time for such mental mining, and her confusion was putting up too much of a fight. I had to go on. Our fear of emotional intimacy is such a pervading factor in our existence that it has tremendous influence on our personalities and our relationships with others. This is true because we most often express our fear of love by maintaining emotion distance from others. Many symptoms of personality illness appear to serve the purposes of achieving and perpetuating this distance. In one form of severe emotional illness, for example, the patient will remain for hours at a time in one position. Often the position is unusual and even grotesque, almost as if one were saying, “I am different, I am unapproachable.” If you did speak to such a person there would probably be no visible response. And you might have the eerie feeling at the moment that you were not in the presence of another person. In a way you would be right, for such an individual has gone about as far as possible to absent oneself emotionally from others. The fear of closeness with its risk of hurt is so intense that one has built an almost impenetrable wall between oneself and the World. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11

Most of us have not suffered so much emotional damage that we have had to go to such extremes to remain distant from others. However, we have all experienced enough hurt and are sufficiently frightened that we build walks of one kind or another between ourselves and others. Churches often provide illustrations of wall-building on an institutional level. No doubt one reason many people are attracted to churches is that they hope to experience the love for each other that religion talks about. Yet the church frequently appears bent on creating only the appearance of helping people to know each other. So Erich Good and Olivia Good, newcomers to the community, may sit for many weeks in church services among strangers who nod self-consciously to the Goods and to each other as they leave at the end of the hour. They may attend church suppers or couples’ groups and discover that they learn only the most banal superficialities about those around them. They may become involved in activities and committee meetings and find that they are mostly business and that the pleasant chats before and after meetings center around safe topics—jobs, vacation, sports, the children, and the weather. So churches, which are made up of individuals, of course, seem at least as frightened as the rest of us in doing anything to break through our walls of isolation despite the skill with which they may depict our need for love. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

So important is this wall-building in our lives that much will be said of the various ways we have of separating ourselves from others. All of us probably engage to some to some extent in the wall-building device of storing up resentments. Someone irritates us, but we do not express our resentment—at any rate not all of our anger. That would be very direct and open, and therefore much too frightening. Instead we cling to our resentment like a long-lost brother, storing it away so we can feel sullen when we are in danger of recognizing and expressing our love for the person. Many a woman, for example, has clung to knowledge of an extramarital infatuation on the part of her husband and used it in this way for years. And whenever he says, “I love you!” she can reply, “Well, you should have thought of that before you fooled around with that woman!” The martyr role is another very efficient way of building walls. One college student’s mother was a master at it. He left for school each morning, not bothering to tidy up his room, because he was content to live amid some disorder. Each day his mother went in and straightened and cleaned it. When he returned in the evening, she reminded him with wounded voice of her sacrifice and how he “could at least show some appreciation after causing me all that work.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 11

Then the boy, when he played by the rules of the game, would feel guilty about his dereliction of duty and his unexpressed anger about her martyrdom. For who has a right to feel angry at such a self-scarifying mother? The effect of this daily household drama was to keep both of them in a constant state of tension in their relationship with each other. As long as they could perpetuate this ritual, they were quite safe from experiencing and expressing their love for each other, love that must have been quite frightening to both of them. Every marriage counselor is familiar with the “he loves me, he loves me not!” games that men and women often play. Every bit of negative behavior on the partner’s part is interpreted as evidence of the lack of love. A husband may react to a cluttered house with the feeling, “If she really loved me, she would do her share and keep the house picked up. It is the least she can do!’ A wife may feel, “He must not love me very much. He is constantly forgetting anniversaries and other things he knows are important to me.” Or we may be critical of the quality of our own love by using similar standards. “Surely, if I really loved him,” we may say to ourselves, “I would be more considerate to his feelings” or “more tolerant of his kooky friends.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

Such tallying up of evidences of love is usually completely meaningless, for it is based on the unreasonable assumption that when we love a person we act that way. Unfortunately we human beings are not so rational as all that! For to express live is frightening to us. One woman had been separated from her husband for a number of weeks when she appeared at her weekly therapy session with an account of new developments in her relationship with her husband. She said, “He was back home every night this week. Then about the middle of the week we fell out and I thought he was going to quit me again. However, for the first time when I really gotten angry, he did not walk out on me. And when it was over, we began to feel pretty lose to each other. And that frightened me when I began to see that things might really work out for us. I guess I am afraid to let myself get involved with him again for fear I will just get to enjoying it and he will walk out again. So, do you know what I did? I have just now figured it out. I went back into the past and dug up all kinds of stuff that I could bitch at him about. Just to foul things up, so I would not let myself know how much I love him!” Judging by our behavior, one might begin to conclude that our love ebbs and flows like an ocean. Love does not come and go, but our experience of love and our expression of love is intermittent. And the satisfying moments of giving and receiving love are followed by times of withdrawal of one kind or another, because the experience of life is frightening. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

Language is an important factor in fortifying the having orientation. The name of a person—and we all have names (and maybe numbers if the present-day trend toward depersonalization continues)—creates the illusion that he or she is a final, immortal being. The person and the name become equivalent; the name demonstrates that the person is a lasting, indestructible substance—and not a process. Common nouns have the same function: for instance, love, pride, hate, joy give the appearance of fixed substances, but such nouns have no reality and only obscure the insight that we are dealing with processes going on in a human being. However, even nouns that are names of things, such as table or lamp, are misleading. The words indicate that we are speaking of fixed substances, although things are nothing but a process of energy that causes certain sensations in our bodily system. However, these sensations are not perceptions of specific things like table or lamp; these perceptions are the result of a cultural process of learning, a process that makes certain sensations assume the form of specific percepts. We have naively believed that things like tables and lams exists as such, and we fail to see that society teaches us to transform sensation into perception that permit us to manipulate the World around us in order to enable us to survive in a given culture. Once we have given such percepts a name, the name seems to guarantee the final and unchangeable reality of the percept. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

The need to have has still another foundation, the biologically given desire to live. Whether we are happy or unhappy, our body impels us to strive for immortality. However, since we know by experience that we shall die, we seek solutions that make us believe that, in spite of the empirical evidence, we are immortal. This wish has taken many forms: the belief of the Pharaohs that their bodies enshrined in the pyramids would be immortal; many religious fantasies of life after death, in the happy hunting grounds of early hunter societies; the Christian paradise. In contemporary society since the eighteenth century, history and the future have become the substitutes for the Christian Heaven: fame, celebrity, even notoriety—anything that seems to guarantee a footnote in the record of history—constitutes a bit of immortality. The craving for fame is not just secular vanity—it has a religious quality for those who do not believe in the traditional hereafter any more. (This is particularly noticeable among political leaders.) Publicity paves the way to immortality, and the public relations agents become the new priests. However, perhaps more than anything else, possession of property constitutes the fulfillment of the craving for immortality, and it is for this reason that the having orientation has strength. If my self is constituted by what I have, then I am immortal if the things I have are indestructible. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

From Ancient Egypt to today—from physical immortality, via mummification of the body, to mental immortality, vis the last will—people have remained alive beyond their physical/mental lifetimes. Via the legal power of the last will the disposal of our property is determined for generations to come; through the laws of inheritance, I—inasmuch as I am an owner of capital—become immortal. A helpful approach to understanding the mode of having is to recall one of Dr. Freud’s most significant findings, that after going through their infant phase of mere passive receptivity followed by a phase of aggressive exploitative receptivity, all children, before they reach maturity, go through a phase where their character and energy is mainly focused having, saving, and hoarding money and material things as well as feelings, gestures, words, energy. It is the character of the stingy individual and is usually connected with such other traits as orderliness, punctuality, stubbornness, each to a more than ordinary degree. An important aspect of Dr. Freud’s concept is the symbolic connection between money and the unmentionable—gold and dirt—of which he quotes a number of examples. His concept of the money is just a way of saying people place too much importance on money when their spiritual life, nature and humanity are more important. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

The predominant orientation is possession and occurs in the period before the achievement of full maturity and is pathological if it remains permanent. For Dr. Freud, in other words, the person exclusively concerned with having and possession is a neurotic, mentally sick person; hence it would follow that the society in which most of the members are of possessive character is a sick society. Normal, constructive anxiety goes with becoming aware of and assuming one’s potentialities. Intentionality is the constructive use of normal anxiety. If I can have some expectations and possibility of acting on my powers, I move ahead. However, if the anxiety becomes overwhelming, then the possibilities for action are blotted out. Pronounced neurotic anxiety destroys intentionality, destroys our relationship to meaningful contents of knowledge or will. This is the anxiety of nothingness. Without intentionality we are indeed nothing. Mortal’s vitality is as one’s intentionality: they are interdependent. This makes mortals the most vital of all beings. One can transcend any given situation in any direction and this possibility drives one to create beyond oneself. Vitality is the power of creating beyond oneself without losing oneself. The more power of creating beyond itself a being has the more vitality it has. The World of technical creations is the most conspicuous expression of mortal’s vitality and its infinite superiority over animal vitality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11

Only mortals have complete vitality because one alone has complete intentionality. If the correlation between vitality and intentionality is rightly understood one can accept the biological intentionality of courage within the limits of its validity. Overwhelming anxiety destroys the capacity to perceive and conceive one’s World, to reach out toward it so form and re-form it. In this sense, it destroys intentionality. We cannot hope, plan, promise or create in severe anxiety; we shrink back into a stockade of limited consciousness hoping only to preserve ourselves until the danger is past. Intentionality and vitality are correlated by the fact that mortal’s vitality shows itself not simply as a biological force, but as a reaching out, a forming and re-forming of the World in various creative activities. The degree of one’s courage. This is a combination of strength and value, with moral nobility. Vitality and intentionality are united in this ideal of human perfection, which is equally removed from barbarism and from moralism. Taking a final lead from the origin of the World itself, we can go further and relate intentionality to intensity of experience, or to the degree of intentness in life. There have been a number of attempts to identity what we mean by vitality in the psychological sphere: such words as aliveness and so on are used, but without anyone’s having much conviction that one has said anything. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11

Does not intentionally give us a criterion for defining psychological vitality? The degree of intentionality can define the aliveness of the person, the potential degree of commitment, and one’s capacity, if we are speaking of a patient, for remaining at the therapeutic task. Without an ultimate concern as its basis every system of morals degenerates into a method of adjustments to social demands, whether they are ultimately justified or not. And the infinite passion which characterizes a genuine faith evaporates and is replaced by a cleaver calculation which is unable to withstand the passionate attacks of an idolatrous faith. This is a description of what has happened on a large scale in Western civilization. It is concealed only by the fact that in many representatives of humanist faith, moral strength was and is greater in members of a religiously active community. However, this is a transitory stage. There is still faith in these mortals, ultimate concern about human dignity and personal fulfillment. There is religious substance in them, which, however, can be wasted in the next generation if the faith is not renewed. This is possible only in the community of faith under the continuous impact of its mythical and cultic symbols. “And behold, it is wisdom in God that we should obtain these records, that we may preserve unto our children the language of our fathers,” 1 Nephi 3.19. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11