It was an engine of great and continuous healing. However, what drew her through the World were project yet unrevealed for which she had the wealth, the knowledge, the laserlike vision, the nerve and the personal energy. Some people tend characteristically to isolate affect and avoid psychological self-examination; they tend to be strangers in their own life. This, indeed, has implications for social communities as well as individuals, inasmuch as it suggests that the organization that fosters prejudice might well be forfeiting the kind of emotional flexibility that is necessary if time of crisis it is to cure its own ills. Everyone alive has troubles and problems, and as we learned from our studies of sound individuals, the most important consideration in determining personal effectiveness is not the amount of trouble or misfortune (within limits) a person encounters, but how one responds to the vicissitudes and challenges of life. This capacity to meet problems without being dismayed or overwhelmed, to endure suffering and face great loss without foundering, is an aspect of psychological strength and vitality that deserves special study. Believe it or not there are people who envy the mental salubrity of psychoneurotic patients who are about to improve. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

That is because the greater vividness of psychopathology often tends to obscure the egosynthetric or constructive forces in the behavior of a psychologically disturbed individual, so that a prognostic evaluation is generally more difficult to make than a diagnostic evaluation. From time to time, people give in to madness as if it were strong drink, drawing in memories of guilt, all judgment and sense of proportion last, murmuring confessions of unworthiness and half-explored plots of escape that would seal them off from all expectations. Nevertheless, in spite of the saliency of psychopathology in the clinical picture, it may be presumed that the patient has certain latent strengths which will gradually show themselves, particularly as the psychological crisis that brings one to therapy subsides. What the item content of the prediction generally ascribed to a well-functioning ego, ad that latent egostrength is the most important determinant (within the patient) of response to brief psychotherapy. At precious moments people regard their sanity as their State of Grace, and the therapist is the Demon who has brought them back to it. Another tendency which is nourished by religious dependency is that of getting one’s feeling of worth, prestige and power through identifying with someone else. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

This usually takes form of identifying with an idealized figure of minister, priest, rabbi, bishop, or whoever above one in the hierarchy as prestige and power. Again this tendency is not confined to religion; it is present in business, politics and other aspects of community life. It is a regular phenomenon in psychotherapy called transference, and shows itself, among other ways, in the patient’s needing to build the therapist up and to get the prestige from the fact that the therapist is well known. However, in therapy it is regarded as a problem to be eventually worked though so that the individual will come to see one’s therapist as the real person one is, and obtain one’s own feelings of worth and prestige from one’s own activities rather than the therapist’s. This tendency in religion seems to rest on a deeper level than in some other areas of social living. It of course receives reinforcement from deteriorated interpretations of vicarious suffering and atonement. It is as though everyone were trying to live vicariously through someone else, until no one knows where he or she him or herself is. It is amazing how easily the Christian teaching of love can deteriorate into everyone’s agreeing, “If you take responsibility for me, I will for you.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

The neurotic uses of religion have one thing in common: they are devices by which the individual avoids having to face one’s loneliness and anxiety. God is made into a cosmic papa. Religion in this form is a rationalization for covering up the realization—a realization which contains a good deal of terror for those who take it seriously—that the human beings is in the depths of one’s self basically alone, and that there is no recourse from the necessity of making one’s choices ultimately alone. However, if the need to escape terror and loneliness are the main motives for turning to God, one’s religion will not help one toward maturity or strength; and it will not even give one security in the long run. Despair and anxiety can never be worked through until one confronts them in their stark and fully reality. Tis truth is obviously just as valid psychologically. Maturity and eventual overcoming of loneliness are possible only as one courageously accepts one’s aloneness to begin with. It often occurs to me that the reason Dr. Freud was able to work with such courage and unswerving purpose throughout the last forty years of his life was that he won the battle of being able to grow and work alone in the first solitary ten years, when, after he had separated from Dr. Breuer, he pursued his explorations into psychoanalysis with neither colleague nor co-worker. Dr. Freud was so prolific that many believed he was a prophet of the Lord. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

It seems to me, further, that what Dr. Freud went through is the battle the creative ethical figures like Jesus win in the wilderness, that the real meaning of the temptations with which Jesus wrestled was not in the desire for bread or power, but in the temptation, as put in the words of the Devil in the story, to throw himself down from the mountain to prove that God was protecting him: He will give his Angels charge of you; they will bear you on their hands, lest you strike your foot against a stone. When one has been able to say “No” to the need that one be “borne up,” when, in other words, one is able not to demand one be taken care of, when one has the courage to stand alone, one can then speak as one with authority. And did not Spinoza’s refusing to flee from excommunication by his church and community mean his winning the same inner battle of integrity, the same struggle for the power not to be afraid of aloneness, without which the noble Ethics, certainly one of the great works of all tie, could not have been written? “So powerful was the Spirit of God; and thus it had wrought upon them” reports 1 Nephi 17.52. The person knows that virtue is happiness, not a claim check for it; the love of God is its own reward, and beauty and truth are to be loved because they are good, and not because they will redound to the credit of the artist or scientist or philosopher who loves them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Spinoza of course does not at all mean to imply the martyr-like, sacrificial, masochistic attitude for which his sentence might be mistake. He rather is stating in its most unequivocal form the basic characteristic of the objective, mature, creative person (in hos words the blessed and joyful person), namely the capacity to love something for its own sake, not for the sake of being taken care of or gaining a counterfeit feeling of prestige and power. Certainly loneliness and anxiety can be constructively met. Though this cannot be done through the deus ex machina of a cosmic papa, it can be achieved through the individual’s conforming directly the various crises of one’s development, moving from dependence to greater freedom and higher integration by developing and utilizing one’s capacities, and relation to one’s fellows through creative work and love. This does not imply that there is no such thing as authority in religion or any other field. It does not imply that the question of authority should first be put the other way around, that is, as the question of personal responsibility. For authoritarianism (the neurotic form of authority) grows in direct proportion to the degree in which the individual is trying to avoid responsibility for meeting one’s problems one’s self. In therapy, for example, it is precisely the times when the patient feels some special or overpowering anxiety that one seeks to make an authority of the therapist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

And the fact that at these times one tends to identify the therapist with God and one’s parent presents another proof for the contention above: that one is searching for someone to whom one can hand one’s self over for care. Fortunately it is not difficult to demonstrate that the therapist is not God—and it is a red-letter day in a patient’s therapy when one discovers this fact and is not frightened. Instead of trying to argue with one’s self or others on the merits of various authorities, therefore, it is better initially to confront one’s self, in self-scrutiny, with the question: “What anxiety makes me now wish to run to the wings of an authority, and what problem of my own am I trying to evade?” The upshot of this discussion is that religion is constructive as it strengthens the person in one’s own dignity and worth, assists one in one’s confidence that one can affirm values in life, and helps one in the use and development of one’s own ethical awareness, freedom and personal responsibility. Thus religious faith or practices like prayer cannot be called good or bad in themselves. The question is, rather, how much one’s freedom, a way of becoming less of a person; or how much it is a way of strengthening one in the exercise of one’s own responsibility and ethical power. The person praised in Jesus’ parable in Matthew was not the one who was afraid and buried one’s talent, but the persons who courageously used their talents; and these, the good and faithful persons, were given more power. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

One of our most deep-rooted ideals is our desire for freedom, both at a personal and a collective level. Words such as those from the New Testament—“You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” (John 8.32)—strike a deeply emotional chord in most of our hearts. Yet, while all of us pay lip service to freedom and our desire for it, we are also very much afraid of it. We talk about personal freedom, but we tend to shy from it. Amanda was married to a man who had always tended to be exceedingly critical of her. He made unreasonable demands of her and attempted to dominate her entire life. She in turn tended to play a weak, helpless role in relationship to him. In general, she did little to oppose his bullying attitudes. When he was around, at least, she was the obedient slave; and he was the ruthless tyrant. Things began to change, however, after Amanda sought help through psychotherapy. Out of a growing sense of her own value as a person she began to stand on her own feet. She started doing things she did not think he would tolerate. She refused to accept unjust criticism. When he falsely accused her, she fought back. To her amazement he did not react with the brutality that she expected. Instead he showed that he felt more respect and warmth toward her than he ever had when she was so compliant. As her self-respect grew, his respect for her also appeared to grow. Gradually, she became aware of the exhilarating fact that she was not enslaved. She was much more free to do as she wished than she ever thought she could be. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

However, at this point Amanda had a very interesting reaction. When she spoke of it, she said, “You know, I have the funniest feeling. Now that I have this freedom to do everything I have ever wanted to do, I do not know what to do with it. I guess I am frightened. It is almost as though I needed him to criticize me, and act like t dictator, and make me feel trapped!” Maybe Amanda was codependent or suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. The conclusion that we are afraid of freedom seems inescapable when we examine the lengths to which we go to enslave ourselves. For example, men and women who see a therapist for help with personal or family problems often spend much time trying to convince their counselor and themselves that they are not free to do what they want to do. Listen to what some of them say, and you will probably recognize some of you own feelings. A mother says, “I can’t do the thing I’d really like to do. I feel it’s my duty to spend my free time with my youngsters.” A husband says, “If I were ever really myself and told my wife how I really feel about her, she would leave me in a minute.” Nearly everyone says, “If I said the things I really want to say to people, no one would like me. Or, “I can’t let people see what I’ like because then they wouldn’t have anything to do with me.” And everyone says, “I have so many things I just have to do, that I’m never free to do the thing I want to do.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

A working wife says, “I’d like to quit my job, but I don’t see how we could get along.” A nonworking wife (an unemployed wife, that is!) says, “I really want to work, but I feel it’s my duty to stay at home.” Perhaps it can be summed up by stating that we all have a tendency to say in one way or another, “Poor me, I’m just a helpless victim of circumstances.” My, how we kid ourselves! For when we are realistic about it, we have to recognize that there are few if any things that we have to do. We do what we do and avoid doing what we do not do because we choose it that way. We always have alternatives. So it is with the trapped feeling in marriage. One man said to his wife, “If it weren’t for you and the kids, I’d go to the beach and become a surfer.” He was considerably shook up when his wife replied, “Well, if that’s what you want, why don’t you want, why don’t you go ahead. Nothing’s really preventing you!” Later, in telling about it, he said, “You know, she was right! If I really wanted to, I could leave her and head for the beach. But when I no longer felt trapped, I realized I don’t really want to be a beach bum. In fact, the whole idea is rather distasteful!” As long as he could maintain the fantasy that he was trapped, this man could ignore the frightening fact that he loves his wife and children and is staying married by choice rather than because he must. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

The old cliché is true. We do not have to do anything but die and pay taxes. (And, of course, we can refuse to do the latter if we are willing to suffer the consequences!) We always have alternative courses of action, but we constantly try to convince ourselves otherwise. We must be terribly frightened of discovering that we are free to do pretty much what we want to do. Our fear of freedom expresses itself in many ways. Our resistance to change is probably one such expression. For example, during the times recorded in the New Testament early Christians apparently found it very difficult to give up the old ceremonial laws that had been traditional with Judaism for centuries. One would think that this would have been easy for Christians to do. They had embraced a young faith that said it was no longer necessary to perform the many daily ritualistic laws that virtually enslaved those who seriously tried to follow them. The reluctance to give up such observances seems hard to understand unless we see that it must have been terribly frightening o people suddenly to have almost unlimited freedom. And no doubt the same sort of thing happens constantly today in both our institutional and our personal lives. In religious, political, educational, economic, and social life, we probably cling to many time-consuming rituals and customs that no longer have any relevance to life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

These irrelevant rituals and customs probably serve mainly to keep our daily lives somewhat predictable and provide the security of a self-limited freedom. Much of the tension between generations likely results from the resistance to change that parents express. Most changes, like the more extensive use of the BMW M5, for example, seem to us parents to be in the direction of granting our children more freedom. We are frightened of freedom for ourselves; we are also afraid of our children having it. Religious impulses contribute the energy necessary to move men and women to accomplish drastic social change, hence, that a new society can be brought about only if a profound change occurs in the human heart—if a new object of devotion takes the place of the present one. The starting point of these reflections is the statement that the character structure of the average individual and the socioeconomic structure of the society of which he or she is a part are interdependent. I call the blending of the individual psychical sphere and the socioeconomic structure social structure. The socioeconomic structures of a society molds the social character of its members so that they wish to do what they have to do. Simultaneously, the social character influences the socioeconomic structure of society, acting either as cement to give further stability to the social structure or, under special circumstances, as dynamite that tends to break up the social structure. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

You will have some promptings of the Spirit that will be unusual for you. The reason that will happen is because all of God’s children are precious to the Lord Jesus Christ. Do not be afraid of the future. Do not let anything that is going on in the World, that is happening now, slow you down from our progress in mortality. Everything may not by lined up like you expect, but fret not. Always remember that God—the Creator of the Universe, the architect of our salvation is in control. We should replace fear with faith—Faith in God and the power of the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. Face the future with optimism. I believe we are standing on the threshold of a new era of growth, prosperity, and abundance. Many of the amazing discoveries made in communication, medicine, energy, transportation, physics, computer technology, and other fields of endeavor were the result of the Spirit whispering insights into and enlightening the mind of truth-seeking individuals and these innovations will continue to happen in the future. With these discoveries and advances will come new employment opportunities and prosperity for those who work hard and especially for those who strive to keep the commandants of God. This has been the case in other significant periods of national and international economic growth. Many of these discoveries will happen on a divine timetable and will quicken the World of God in building his kingdom.  #RandolphHarris 13 of 13