I shut off the overhead chandelier immediately and switched on two of the smaller corner lamps. It was softly dim now, but not uncomfortably so, and I directed everyone to sit down. To day of the moment of genuine encounter—the vitalizing transaction, as I have called it—that it may be as frail as love or blessedness is perhaps to out too much emphasis on the fragility of the live and growing thing that psychotherapy is designed to nourish. Certainly many psychotherapists take a hardier view. In fact, psychotherapeutic patience aims to overcome precisely the febrile quality of the state of being in love and the disillusion that time brings if there is no capacity for such growth and change in the relationship. Recall Housman’s poem in A Shropshire Lad: “Oh, when I was in love with you, then I was clean and brave, and miles around the wonder grew how well did I beave. But now the fancy passes, and noting shall remain, and miles around they will say that I am quite myself again.” The fact of the matter is that psychotherapy properly practiced is a discipline of considerable technical complexity, and diagnosis is by no means either name-calling or even labeling or pigeon-holding. Diagnosis itself is, if really well done, a form of relationship calling for a fineness of empathic understand and, a genuine encounter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The interest in psychotherapy is in the general problem of describing people in their relationships with other people as much as it is in exploring the special case of two person who talk to each other for the express purpose of inducing changes in behavior of one of them. The goal is concerned with understanding the conditions that make personal interactions mutually satisfying, constructive, and on-going, on the one hand, and antagonizing, destructive, and stultifying, on the other. Space-time coordinates are not necessarily accurate determinates of the form of personal interaction for almost any two people, Monday morning at work in the office can be very different from Friday afternoon after work in a bar. Even in the same place and at the same time, two men are likely to interact differently from two women, or from a man and a woman. People who bear a superior-subordinate relation to one another will interact differently from those whose relation to one another is coordinate. Such differences as older and younger, stronger and weaker, not as aware and intelligent, rich and poor, psychotic and sane, will make a difference too in the form of personal interactions. Related to such differences as these, but not entirely co-extensive with them, are the need-structures of the persons involved. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

 There are some persons whose needs are so intense that they force almost all their personal interactions into the same for, thus limiting greatly the range of possible response on the part of the other person. Such a necessitous and undifferentiated character may be given to all interactions by the orally deprived person, who strives desperately and incessantly to get from others, fearing starvation and abandonment if one is not immediately fed (love, or admiration, or applause in some form). So one with needs for order and balance may react frantically to interaction with a person who is seen as threatening to upset things, or who flaunts various derivative forms on rigid indiscipline. There are, of course, many less compelling and theoretically unclaimed needs for which satisfaction is sought, and generally found in personal interaction. From other person one may get information, entertainment, helpful criticism, praise, blame, money for services rendered, inspiration, pleasures of the flesh, food, transportation, votes, and even psychotherapy. Which brings us to the special case tat is the focus of this investigation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Psychotherapy is for private patients who have some disturbance in interpersonal relations but are not sick enough to require hospitalization generally takes place in the office of a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and usually accompanied, more or less immediately, by the payment of a fee. It is begun at the behest of the patient, who has come to the opinion that his or her mind is not working properly, or who at least knows that one’s body is not working properly and that medical men and women have told one that the cause lies in one’s mind. Imagine if our minds where they powerful that they control our bodies and our environments. That is compelling because it indicates through enough education and training, we should be able to heal our own bodies, minds, and have better control over our environment. So anyway, the patient is usually very unhappy, and one’s personal interactions in the past have been unsuccessful in satisfying one’s needs (some of which, indeed, one may not be aware of). Therapist are supposed to gain a certain amount of gratification to be had from being a person of power and wisdom, to whom other come from help. However, besides monetary motives and others, it sometimes happens that the therapist is also quite unsuccessful in other personal interactions, and doing psychotherapy is one of the few ways in which one can really get into contact with other people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Humans can look before and after. One can transcend the immediate moment, can remember the past and plan for the future, and thus choose a good which is greater, but will not occur till some future moment in preference to a lesser, immediate one. By the same token one can feel oneself into someone else’s needs and desires, can imagine oneself in the other person’s place, and so make one’s choices with a view to the good of one’s fellows as well as oneself. This is the beginning of the capacity, however imperfect and rudimentary it may be in most people, to love thy neighbor and to be aware of the relation between their own acts and the welfare of the community. The human being not only can make such choices of values and goas, but one is the being who must do so if one is to attain integration. For the value—the goal one moves toward—serves one as a psychological center, a kind of core of integration which draws together one’s powers as the core of a magnet draws the magnet’s lines of force together. Knowing what one wants is essential for the beginnings of the child’s and young person’s capacity for self-direction. Knowing what one wants is simply the elemental form of what in the maturing person is the ability to choose one’s own values. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

The mark of the mature being is that one’s living is integrated around self-chosen goals: one knows what one wants, no longer simply as the child wants ice cream but as the grown person plans and works toward a creative love relationship or toward business achievement or what not. One loves the members of one’s family not because one has been thrown together with them by the fate of birth but because one finds them loveable and chooses to love them; and one works not merely from automatic routine, but because one consciously believes in the value of what one is doing. Anxiety, bewilderment and emptiness—the chronic psychic infirmary of modern mortals—occurs mainly because one’s values are confused and contradictory, and one has no psychic core. We can now add that the degree of an individual’s inner strength and integrity will depend on how much one believes in the values one lives by. Many people want to know how a person can maturely and creatively choose and affirm such values? In the first place, one’s values and the difficulty in affirming them depend very much on the age we live in. The beliefs and traditions handed down in society tend to become crystalized into rigid forms which suppress individual vitality. For example, many people still believe that America is supposed to accept poor huddled masses from anywhere, but the gold rush is over, and many Americans cannot afford their cars, mortgage and rent. In fact, 7.1 million Americas are 90 days overdue on their care loans. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

America is also suffering from a housing crisis, record debt, and high insurance costs. What happens in such a time is that vitality gets divorced from tradition, and tends to become diffuse rebelliousness which loses its power like water flowing in every direction on the ground. Are we not caught between authoritarian trends on one side and directionless vitality on the other? In times of social upheaval, like our own, people suffer from feelings of rootlessness and tend to cling to authority and established institutions as a source of security in the storm. Most people are incapable of tolerating change and uncertainty in all sectors of life at once. So many people will turn toward a more conservative authoritarian belief in economics and politics, more rigid moral attitudes, and will join in increased numbers the conservative, fundamentalist rather than liberal ideologies. However, people who are confused and bewildered and in a panic about what to believe will grab at destructive and demonic values. Communism comes in to fill the vacuum of faith caused by those who seek rebellion. For rebels, it provides a sense of purpose which heals internal agonies of anxiety and doubt as they feel helpless to help themselves. However, we many not be afraid that this nation will go communistic—as I am not—but the seizing upon destructive values shows itself in other ways. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

There are clear signs that liberal, reactionary trends are growing—in religion, in politics, in education, in philosophy, and in tendencies toward ridged doctrines in science. Same sex marriage is accepted by many churches, democrats refuse to allow the president to protect our country, schools want to start teaching kids about homosexuality and transgender in second grade, and people really believe that humans evolved from apes. Japan has been a very conservative country, but recently to women from Japan, who had been inflicted by rebellious Californians went on the Japanese news a declared they wanted same sex marriage. Such a reactionary trend and declaration is unheard of on traditional Japanese culture. When people feel threatened and anxious, they sometimes become more liberal, and when in doubt they may lose their heritage, identity and culture; and then they lose their own vitality. They use manifestations of popular culture and rebellion to build new values and create a wide spread kaleidoscope deviant behavior which is now acceptable because everyone is doing it; or they make an outright panicky retreat into the past. However, many are discovering that the flight to the past does not work. Difficult as it is, we must accept ourselves and our society where we are, and find our ethical center through a deeper understanding of ourselves as well as through a courageous confronting of our historical situation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

In the last few years another movement has been growing which is very different from the return to religion. Many intellectuals and other sensitive persons have become more and more aware of their loss in being cut off from the religious and ethical traditions of the culture, and that those who were not familiar with the thought of Moses, Isaiah, Job, Jesus, Buddha, Lao-tzu, Dr. Freud were missing something of crucial significance in an age where mortals must rediscover their values. They have turned with a new interest to the ethical and religious wisdom of the past, not necessarily the ways and customs. To the extent that this trend is not a product merely of the anxiety of our day—as in its best exemplars it certainly is not—it is indeed salutary. However, the danger lies in the fact that some intellectuals, being newcomers to the field and therefore less able to differentiate at the moment, are apt to seize on the more obvious and vocal but less sound aspects of the cultural tradition. If the interest of the intellectuals in politics chiefly contributes to the growth of liberalism and whatever goes and reaction, we are the more lost. The real problem, thus, is to distinguish what is healthy in ethics, politics, and religion, and yields a security which increases rather than decreases personal worth, responsibility and freedom. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

Not to move forward, to stay where we are, to regress, or to become lawless and lackadaisical, in others words to rely on what we have, is very tempting, for what he have, we know; we can old onto it, feel secure in it. We fear and consequently avoid, taking a step into the unknown, the uncertain; for, indeed, while the step may not appear risky to us after we have take it, before we take that step the new aspects beyond it appear very risky, and hence frightening. Only the only the cold, the tired, is safe; or so it seems. Every new step contains danger of failure, and that is one of the reasons people are so afraid of freedom. Obviously, this reveals a neurotic problem which has to be resolved. Mortal’s task is to unite love and will. They are not united by automatic biological growth but must be part of our conscious development. In society, will tends to be set against love. The backdrop of human existence implied in every myth of the Garden of Eden, every story of paradise, every “Golden Age”—a perfection which is deeply embedded in mortal’s collective memory. Our needs are met without self-conscious effort on our part, this is the first freedom, the first yes. However, this first freedom always breaks down. And it does so because of the development of human consciousness. We experience our difference from conflict with our environment and the fact that we are subjects in a World of objects. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

This is the separation between self and World, the split between existence and essence. This first freedom is inadequate because one cannot remain in it if we are to develop as human beings. And though we experience our separation from it as guilt, we must nevertheless go through with it. However, it remains the source of all perfection, the backdrop of all utopias, the perpetual feelings that there ought to be paradise someplace, and the efforts—forever creative but forever doomed to disappointment—that make us try to recreate a perfect state. We cannot—not because of something God does, or some chance accident, or some happenstance that might have been different. We cannot because of the simple development of the human consciousness. However, nevertheless, we still always seek, as when we write a good paragraph or do a good work of art. We fall anew, but we remain ready to arise and pit ourselves anew against our fate. This is why human will, in its specific form, always begins in a “no.” We must stand against the environment, be able to give a negative; this inheres in consciousness. All will has its source in the capacity to say “no”—a “no” not against the parents (although it shows itself in coming out against them, representatives of the personal authoritative Universe as they are). #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

The “no” is a protest against a World we never made, and it is also an assertion of one’s self in the endeavor to remold and reform the World. Willing, in this sense, always begins against something—which generally can be seen as specifically against the first union with the World. Small wonder that this is done with guilt and anxiety, as in the Garden of Eden, or with conflict, as in normal development. However, the child individual has to go through with it, for it is the unfolding of one’s own consciousness which prods the individual. And small wonder that, though one affirms it on one level, on another one regrets it. The lesson is to give up fighting and assimilate, take your soul in as part of your own strength, and, as a result, become more affirmative as a person. This is why the reuniting of will and love is such an important task and achievement for mortals. Will must come in to destroy the bliss, to make possible a new level of experience with other persons and the World; to make possible, freedom in the mature sense, and consequent responsibility. Will comes in to lay the ground work which makes a relatively mature love possible. No longer seeking to re-establish a state of infancy, the human being now freely takes responsibility for one’s choices. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

Will destroys the first freedom, the original union, not in order to fight the Universe forever—even through some of us do stop at that stage. With the first bliss of physical union broken, mortal’s task is now the psychological one of achieving new relationships which will be characterized by the choice of which people to love, which groups to devote oneself to, and by the conscious building of those affections. Hence, I speak of the relating of love and will not as a state given us automatically, but as a task; and to the extent it is gained, it is an achievement. It points toward maturity, integration, wholeness. None of these is ever achieved without relation to its opposite; human progress is never one dimensional. However, they become touchstones and criteria of our response to life’s possibilities. God is our perfect Father. He loves us beyond our capacity to understand. He knows what is best for us. God sees the end from the beginning. He wants us to act to gain needed experience. When God answers yes, it is to give us confidence. When God answers no, it is to prevent error. When God withholds an answer, it is to have us grow through faith in him, obedience to his commandments, and a willingness to act on truth. We are expected to assume accountability by acting on a decision that is consistent with his teachings without prior confirmation. We are not to sit passively waiting or to murmur because the Lord has not spoken. We are to act. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13