There was this woman in Beethoven’s time who lost her child. She was bereft. Beethoven would come into her house, unannounced, and he would play the piano for her. She would be laying upstairs, distraught, and she would hear him playing down there in the drawing room, and the piano music was his gift to her, to comfort her. It was thought that he was parting the gates of Heaven with his music. Nothing is ever wasted in the Kingdom of God. Not one tear, not all our pain, not the unanswered question or the seemingly unanswered prayers. Nothing will be wasted if we give our lives to God. And if we are willing to be patient until the grace of God is made manifest, whether it takes nine years or ninety, it will be worth the wait. You may be in pain today. Maybe you have suffered a loss, been through a disappointment, but that is not the end. God still have a plan. Do not sit around nursing your wounds. Do not let bitterness and discouragement set the tone for your life. God wants you to arise, wipe away your tears and keep being a productive member of the community. When you become weary and feel like quitting, there is a way to have your strength renewed—wait on the Lord. God is going to make the rest of your life the best of your life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Freedom never occurs in a vacuum; it is not anarchy. The self-consciousness of the child is born in the structure of one’s relations with one’s parents. And the psychological freedom of the human being develops not as though one were a Robinson Crusoe on a desert island, but in a continual interaction with the other significant persons in one’s World. Freedom does not mean trying to live in isolation. It does mean that when one is able to confront one’s isolation, one is able consciously to choose to act, with some responsibility, in the structure of one’s relations with the World, especially the World of other persons around one. Personal soundness is taken to mean integrity, stability, and coherence of the individual personality, as those qualities show themselves socially. All-round soundness as a person refers to the soundness, balance, and degree of maturity which the individual shows in one’s relations with other persons. Integrity and stability of the of the home refers, first of all, to the continuing presence of father and mother with their children within the same four walls during most of the years of the subject’s childhood. The lows in the soundness tend to be the products of homes broken by death, divorce, or illness, or by frequent absence of the father. A part of the picture is the economic security of the family and the stability of the community itself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

In addition to the tangible stability evidenced by the fact of continuing presence of both parents and the tendency of the family to live for long periods in one house, there were of course more subtle, and perhaps actually more determinative, emotional and qualitative evidences of family integrity. When there is absence of marked family friction, the children tend to be more stable. This adds up to, for the child, an outer certainty which provides the psychological basis for the creation of the most important inner certainty: that both the World and oneself are stable and worthy of trust. Imagery of the father as a respected, successful person tend to produce children who display a high level of soundness. These children almost always speak of their fathers as individuals whom they seek to emulate, and who are on the whole much respected in the community. A number of the lows either do not know their father or know him as a pronounced failure: the father was abandoned by the mother in favor of another man. Another factor to having children who are not well adjusted is if one of the parents suffers from psychosis. In highly sound individuals what seems to be important here is that they had throughout their childhood the continuing presence of a model on which they could base their own conception of potent masculinity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

When people have an idea of what good masculinity represents, they are able to form some image of successful manhood which they themselves can realize in their own persons in adulthood. The low subjects, on the other hand, are unable, simply for lack of the significant experience of it, to adopt in imagination the role of the respected man of the house. If it is true that  adult personality is largely a realization and synthesis of the possibilities that are given in childhood, then we shall have to say that the lows are unable to take over the adult masculine role largely because no image of it existed for them to emulate; in a sense, adult masculinity was never one of the potentialities which they expected themselves to realize. Highly sound subject were closely controlled at home; but the general picture was of a mother who was loving without being seductive, and solicitous without being demanding or overprotective. Parents may be too restrictive of a child’s freedom, betraying their only slightly disguised hostility. One mother, for no apparent reason, forbade her four-year-old from leaving his yard or playing with other children on the block. Such stern and unnecessary limitations on a child, sometime bordering on cruelty, tend to choke out the child’s ability to be spontaneous and open in one’s activities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

These rather direct forms of rejection are hard for a child to handle. He or she is confused by all the hostility coming his way, for one does not know what he or she has done to deserve such treatment, since in fact one has not deserved it. These experiences are particularly damaging, of course, if they are not offset in part by genuine expressions of love by the parents. While these forms of rejection are very difficult for the child, there are others that are as emotionally unsettling. Perhaps they are even harder for children to cope with because they are subtle and are disguised as expressions of love. Often they involve some form of overprotection on the part of the parents, and tend to prevent the child from becoming an individual in his or her own right. Parents who place a great deal of emphasis on religion may be particularly prone to overprotective forms of rejection. Often they feel that the direct expression of anger is wrong; so they do not get angry at the children, but, without realizing it, they express their hostility in subtle ways such as overcontrolling the child’s life. These parents may also be frightened about the dangers they feel exist for the child if he or she is allowed unrestricted contact with other children and adults who are not part of the religious community. As a result, they may limit the child’s opportunities to learn and grow through encountering people of diverse backgrounds. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

These masquerades of love have sometimes been called smother love because they tend to smother the child in one’s attempts to become a person. This can lead to a child having a panicky feeling in crowds of people, feelings of being engulfed and smothered. Also, some people can grow into a low level of mental soundness when every wish as a child is answered. This is another subtle counterfeit of love that conceals underlying hostility. Instead of expressing hostile feelings directly, some parents feel so guilty about their feelings that they will go overboard in the other direction, lavishing gifts upon the child, giving him or her everything he or she asks for, and solving any problems for the child when their behavior gets them into trouble. As a result, a child may enter adult life immature in many ways and with reduced discernment, unable to assume responsibilities, since he or she has never been encouraged to assume any growing up. So there are many way in which children experience rejection, and all of us have had some taste of it. It is a matter of degree. The human personality appears to be very sensitive to feelings of rejection. This is particularly true for the child, for one has not learned to develop defenses foe warding off such feelings and is relatively helpless to fight back in any way. It is inevitable that when the child feels rejected the one will experience some emotional reaction to this rejection. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

It should be emphasized that it is difficult to describe an emotion experience in words, which are, of course, primarily intellectual. The young child has not developed the intellectual capacity to think in terms we must use to describe an experience. Whatever process the child uses, however, it seems undeniable that one experiences feelings of rejection and feelings of being loved at every early age. As a matter of fact, it is likely that the child can sense how one’s parents feel about him or her before the child can understand any of the words they say. Later, of course, the child encounters other experiences that are interpreted as rejection and that contribute to and reinforce these earlier feelings of rejection. The characteristic reaction of the child to these feelings is a growing sense of worthlessness. Children who are highly sound typically have some break from the house, such as being part of a sports team or a club and have good relations with the siblings. This factor seems psychologically important for somewhat the same reasons as the presence of a successful father: what is involved here is the presence in childhood of models for later adult experience and adult roles. The family is a community in microcosm, and fullest participation in the larger community in later life should be facilitated by richness of interpersonal experience and flexibility in role-taking, determined in large part by the roles available in the family circle. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

 Even in the groups who have a high mental soundness, it should be noted that on one was especially blessed; the luckiest of lives in the study had their full share of difficulty and private despair. Still, some individual were able to communicate a high seriousness of purpose and an ethical purity which was truly impressive, and which lead them to displaying a comprehensive picture of mental soundness. Psychopathology is always with us, and soundness is a way of reacting to problems, not an absence of them. Additional, within the population of subjects of ordinary physical and psychological integrity, soundness is by no means exclusively determined by circumstances but may be considered in the nature of an unintended—and perhaps largely unconscious—personal achievement. Our high soundness subjects are beset, like all other persons, by fears, unrealizable desires, self-condemned hates, and tensions difficult to resolve. They are sound largely because they bear with their anxieties, hew to a stable course, and maintain some sense of the ultimate worthwhileness of their lives. Thinking people all through the ages have sought to describe in different ways some structure: and every individual assumes, consciously or unconsciously, some structure in which one acts. Most people tend to assume certain rules which arise from the conscious conformity to what is expected by the society. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Self-affirmation and self-assertion, obvious aspects of will, are essential to love, and crucial to the personal lives of all of us, as well as specifically to psychotherapy. Both love and will are conjunctive forms of experience. That is, both describe a person reaching out, moving toward the other, seeking to affect him or her or it—and opening oneself so that one may be affected by the other. Both love and will are ways of molding, forming, relating to the World and trying to elicit a response from it through the persons whose interest or love we covet. Love and will are interpersonal experiences which bring to bear power to influence others significantly an to be influenced by them. The interrelation of love and will is shown, furthermore, by the fact that each loses it efficacy when it is not kept in right relation to the other; each can block the other. Will can block love. This can be seen particularly in the will power of the inner-directed type of mortal. These are typically people who are often the powerful captain of industry and finance. These are people who boast about the unconquerable soul, and proclaim they are the captain of their fate. However, if my soul is really unconquerable, I shall never fully love; for it is the nature of love to conquer all fortresses. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

And if I must cling to being the master of my fate, I shall never be able to let myself go in passion; for passionate love always has tragic possibilities. Love can break the limbs of strength and overpower the intelligence in all its shrewd planning. An example of will blocking love can be seen in the father of a young student-patient of mine, who was the treasure of a large corporation. He telephoned me to talk about maximizing the effectiveness of his son’s treatment exactly as though we were at his company board-meeting. When the son became sick with a minor illness in college the father immediately flew to the scene to take charge; the same father became furious when his son held hands and kissed his girl friend on the front lawn of their resort home. At dinner, the father told how he had entered into negotiation to buy the company of a friend of the son’s but, having become irritated over the slowness of the negotiations, had called up the would-be partners and told them to forget the whole thing. He showed no awareness that he was sending another company into bankruptcy with the snap of his fingers. This father was a public-spirited citizen, the chairman of several committees for civic betterment; and he could not understand why, when he had been treasurer of an international corporation, his subordinates secretly referred to him as the “hardest S.O.B. in Europe.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

The strong will power which the father thought solved all his problems, actually served at the same time to block his sensitivity, to cut off his capacity to hear other persons, even, or perhaps especially, his own son. It is not surprising that this exceedingly gifted son failed in his college work for several years, went through a beatnik period, and ultimately had a tortuous time permitting himself to succeed in his own profession.  Typical of the inner-directed genre, the father of my patient could always take care of others without caring for them, could give them his money but not his heart, could direct them but could not listen to them. This kind of will power was a transfer into interpersonal relationships of the same kind of power that had become so effective in manipulating railroad cars, stock transactions, coal mines, and other aspect of the industrial World. The human of will power, manipulate oneself, did not permit oneself to see why one could not manipulate others in the same way. This identifying of will with personal manipulation is the error that sets will in opposition to love. It is a sound hypothesis, based on a good deal of evidence in psychotherapeutic work, that the unconscious guilt which parents like this carry because they manipulate their children leads them to be overprotective and over permissive toward the same. These are the children who are given electric motor cars and paper straws but not moral values, who pick up sensuality but are not taught sensitivity in life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

The parents seem vaguely aware that the values on which their will power was based are no longer efficacious. However, they can neither find new values nor give up the manipulative will. And the fathers often seem to act on the assumption that their will therefore has to do for the whole family. This overemphasis on will, which blocks love, leads sooner or later to a reaction to the opposite error, love which blocks will. This is typically seen in the generation made of the children of parents like the father we described above. The love proposed in our day by the hipster movement seems to be the clearest illustration of this error. Hipster love is indiscriminate, all you have to do is swipe a certain way on an application, which is connected to a mobile device, and this is a common principle within the movement. Hipster love emphasizes immediacy, spontaneity, and the emotional honesty of the temporary moment. These aspects of hipster love are not only entirely understandable reaction against the manipulative will of the previous generation, but are values in their own right. The immediacy, spontaneity, and honesty of the relationship experienced in the vital now are sound and telling criticisms of contemporary bourgeois love and pleasures of the flesh. The hipster revolt helps destroy the manipulative will power which undermines human personality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

However, love also requires enduringness. Love grows in depth by virtue of the lovers experiencing encounter with each other, conflict and growth, all over a period of time. These cannot be omitted from any lasting and viable experience of love. They involve choice and will under whatever names you use. Generalized love, to be sure, is adequate for generalized, group situations; but I am not honored by being loved simply because I belong to the genus “man.” The love which is separated from will, or the love which obviates will, is characterized by a passivity which does not incorporate and grow with its own passions; such love tends, therefore, toward dissociation. It ends in something which is not fully personal because it does not fully discriminate. Such distinctions involve willing and choosing, and to choose someone means not to choose someone else. This is overlooked among the hipsters; the immediacy of love in the hipster development seems to end in a love that is fugitive and ephemeral. We cannot content ourselves by painting the old building a new color; it is the foundations which are destroyed, and the resolutions, by whatever name we may call them, require new ones. What is necessary for resolutions is a new consciousness in which the depth and meaning of personal relationship will occupy a central place. Such an embracing consciousness is always required in an age of radical transition. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Lacking external guides, we shift our morality inward; there is a new demand upon the individual of personal responsibility. We are required to discover on a deeper level what it means to be human. If I appear to be kind while my kindness is only a mask to cover my exploitativeness—if I appear to be courageous while I am extremely vain or perhaps suicidal—if I appear to love my country while I am furthering my selfish interests, the appearance, for instance, my overt behavior, is in drastic contradiction to the reality of forces that motivate me. My behavior is different from my character. My character structure, the true motivation of my behavior, constitutes my real being. My behavior may partly reflect my being, but it is usually a mask that I have and that I wear for my own purposes. Behaviorism deals with this mask as if it were a reliable scientific datum; true insight is focused on the inner reality, which is usually neither conscious nor directly observable. This concept of being as unmasking is to understand the discrepancy between behavior and character, between my mas and the reality it hides. Often times what people repress are early and later traumatic desires and fears; the way to recovery from symptoms or from a more general malaise is possessed in uncovering this repressed material. In other words, what is repressed are the irrational, infantile, and individual elements of experience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

On the other hand, the common-sense views of a normal, socially adapted, citizen were supposed to be rational and not in need of depth analysis. However, this is not at all true. Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance, albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking process attempts to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of logic and plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life. This false map is not repressed. What is repressed is the knowledge of reality, the knowledge of what is true. If we ask, then: What is unconscious? The answer must be: Aside from irrational passions, almost the whole knowledge of reality. The unconscious is basically determined by society, which produces irrational passions and provides its members with various kinds of fiction and thus forces the truth to become the prisoner of the alleged rationality. Stating that the truth is repressed is based, of course, on the premise that we know the truth and repress this knowledge; in other words, that there is unconscious knowledge. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

My experience in psychoanalysis—of others and of myself—is that it is indeed truth that there is an unconscious knowledge. We perceive reality, and we cannot help perceiving it. Just as our senses are organized to see, hear, smell, touch when we are brought together with reality, our reason is organized to recognize reality, for instance, to see things as they are, to perceive the truth. I am not of course referring to the part of reality that requires scientific tools or methods in order to be perceived. I am referring to what is recognizable by concentrated seeing, especially the reality in ourselves and in others. We know when we meet a dangerous person, when we meet somebody we can fully trust; we know when we are lied to, or exploited, or fooled, when we have sold ourselves a bill of goods. We know almost everything that is important to know about human behavior, just as our ancestors has a remarkable knowledge about the movements of the stars. However, while they were aware of their knowledge and used it, we repress our knowledge immediately, because if it were conscious it would make life too difficult and, as we persuade ourselves, too dangerous. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

The proof of this statement is easy to find. It exists in many dreams in which we exhibit a deep insight into the essence of other people, and of ourselves, which we completely lack in the daytime. It is evidenced in those frequent reactions in which we suddenly see somebody in an entirely different light, and then feel as if we had had this knowledge all the time before. It can be found in the phenomenon of resistance when the painful truth threatens to come to the surface: in slips of the tongue, in awkward expressions, in a state of trance (ASOT 900 XXL), or in instances when a person something, as in an aside, that is the very opposite of what he or she always claimed to believe, and then seems to forget this aside a minute later. Indeed, a great deal of our energy is used to hide from ourselves what we know, and the degree of such repressed knowledge can hardly be overestimated. A Talmudic legend has expressed this concept of the repression of the truth, in a poetic form: when a child is born, Angel touches its head, so that it forgets the knowledge of the truth that it has at the moment of birth. If the child did not forget, its life would become unbearable. Therefore, being refers to the real, in contrast to the falsified, illusionary picture. In this sense, any attempt to increase the sector of being means increased insight into the reality of oneself, of others, of the World around us. We have to overcome greed and hate and penetrate through the surface and insight into reality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17