Her expression remained placid, though she looked away, her inner focus gathering. The situation is not encouraging when men and women attempt to cling to old patters of male dominated relationships. For the woman this often means that she takes great pride in being feminine and, perhaps, protests too much that she enjoys being just a housewife who devotes her life to home and children and is dependent on her husband for economic support, direction, and decision-making. Very often, particularly in a World where the position of women has changed, the woman has more hostility about this subordinate role than she admits, even to herself. Frequently this rage expresses itself in a helpless role played by the woman, which in reality gives her a powerful tool for controlling those around here. One such woman seemed helpless in many ways. She was frightened of driving into the nearby metropolitan area from the suburbs in which she lived. So whenever she needed to go it was up to her husband to take her. Her housework and shopping often seemed like overwhelming tasks, so her husband had to out. She depended heavily on him to take over with the children. Then, in the throes of marital difficulties, the husband moved out. However, she found to her surprise that se could function perfectly well without him. When she needed to go to the city, she drove without a qualm. She organized her housework and shopping around a job schedule and had things running more smoothly than they had ever been when he husband was around to help. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11

After a few weeks of separation, the husband moved back home to give it another try. Immediately she slipped back into the helpless role. She suddenly was unable to do what she had been doing so nicely. Finally she was able to see that she had been playing this dependent role hoping thereby to hold on to her husband because she needed him so much and could not get along without him, although in reality the role made her seem an incompetent nag toward whom the husband reacted with irritability and criticism. The man who maintains a dominant role in the home and reserves important decision-making to himself may, if he is a benevolent dictator and his wife does not mind, have a relatively successful and happy relationship. Nevertheless, the role of superiority always creates some emotional distance. You cannot have it both ways, a superior-subordinate relationship and a full partnership. And probably only in the latter can the fullest intimacy be achieved. Little needs to be said, of course, about those situations in which men attempt to maintain a dominant position in the home by physical or psychological brutality. Emotional intimacy is absent, and if the relationship continues indefinitely the woman who tolerates it must either be too weak to institute a change or have a need for punishment. Perhaps the central characteristic of the relations that have been described is that each of them involves a denial and suppression of parts of the self. The person may have some awareness of this, or it may occur with little or no conscious thought. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

This denial of the self is the symptom of distrust and hate of one’s self. The individual not only does not accept as a legitimate part of himself that which he denies and suppresses; he also assumes it will not be accepted by those whose love he most desires. Furthermore, he lacks confidence in his ability to handle the situation if he were to express all of his feelings and then encounter the hurt he fears. Thus, although one woman may never see what she is doing clearly enough to admit it even to herself, her relationship to her husband may be summed up as follows: “Even though I long to be loved and protected, I dare not let him see that I am warm and soft and full of need for him. Even if he responds at the moment, he would see my vulnerability and weakness and would inevitably hurt me and use me more than I could bear. I would be in his power.” On another woman’s life may suggest that she is saying: “I have to tiptoe carefully through life and not let my husband see I have a mind of my own. I have good ideas about what should be done in our home and family life, but if I let him know directly about these things he will think I am trying to ruin his life. There are ways I have of getting things I want out of him, but I could never discuss them with him directly. If I did not keep him thinking I am pretty helpless and that he is the he-man around there, he would probably leave.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 11

And one man’s life may sounds something like this: “I have all kinds of feelings, but I cannot afford to let her see many of them. Sometimes I feel lonely and frightened—like I did often as a kid. And maybe I would like to put my head on her lap and cry a little and be confronted. However, I would not let myself do that—let her see my little-oy feelings. I would seem weak to her, and she would despise me even though she might make a show of comforting me at the time. In fact it is even hard for me to show my tenderness and love for her most of the time, for I just feel in my bones that she would get around to taking advantage of my weakness.” The tone of another man’s life may be: “I would like to be more significant to my wife and family than I am. And sometimes I feel angry both at myself and at her because I am not. I have some pretty definite ideas, too, about how things should be run around here, but often they seem to run counter to what she wants. However, I guess it makes sense to let her do things her way. If I did not there would probably be everlasting bickering and the marriage might not survive. I guess it is just better to get most of my satisfactions outside of the home.” Involved in all of these lives is an almost paradoxical relationship between independence and dependence. None of the persons described is truly independent; that is, they lack self-acceptance and confidence in their ability to stand alone if need be. There is, therefore, a deep-rooted insecurity about relationships and a fear that they will be abandoned by those who are important to them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

Without full awareness of what is happening they dedicate their lives to the proposition that half a loaf is better than none. In other words, they settle for a partial relationship rather than risk no relationship at all. Since they do not feel truly independent, they cannot risk letting others see their dependency—their need for love. Or they feign a dependency that in reality is simply a new means of controlling the other person and seducing him to staying around. What it comes to is that our fear of manhood or womanhood is, above all else, a fear of being ourselves. For society today, if we only could grasp it, has probably opened the door more widely than ever before to the possibility of creative relationships between men and women. The answer lies in the direction of the disarmingly simple but very complex matter of being our total selves in relationship with the opposite gender. Concerning the general relationship of emotional conflict to creativity, much more needs to be said. To get some perspective on the dynamics involved, we must consider the problem in some of its formal aspects. To begin with, conflict, taken in the most general sense, describes a state of affairs in which one force, or a complex of forces acting in relative unity, meets another force or complex of forces similarly organized. Forces in the stars and forces in the atom are prototypical physical examples in which conflict may produce explosion and enormous destruction. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

Conflict is one aspect of all natural phenomena; it is an indispensable part of life, of change, of the development of new forms. Forces change one another, just as people, who are forces, do; and we are changed by what we change. Conflict would cease only if the Universe itself in its totality came to a state of perfect equilibrium, in which case it would be dead. Like itself, in this interpretation, is a vehicle for the maintenance of disequilibrium. Life is a stone thrown uphill against the downward rush of matter. A bit cheerlessly, I thought, and inaccurately, life is a detour on the road to death. The physical theory that the material Universe is tending toward a state in which there will be no motion and no conflict. In this view, life itself is a force that offers challenge to the inanimate. Conflict is thus a Universal in all of nature and is in some sense disembodied; genuine emotional conflicts can be lively things and often we can thank our lucky stars when we get a good one to grapple with. They can have in them the makings of something better. Conflict is in many instances generative of new solutions rather than a disabling form of stasis. The real question is this: can an internal dialogue take place between conflicting forces in such a fashion that the speakers do not simply repeat themselves but that occasionally something new gets said? #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

Let us consider for a moment the more common case, in which the dialogue is forever repeated and opposing forces in the conflict, quite undeterred by tedium, reassert their position over and over again in an intrapsychic equivalent of cold war. Dr. Freud gave the name “repetition compulsion” to the universal human tendency to get into the same jam time after time. Usually the situation that is repeated is one which it its most primitive form occurred in early childhood. As the brain develops, however, and the capacity for complex symbolization increases, the situations tend to get fancier and fancier so far as content is concerned, so that in extreme cases, such as the delusional system of a paranoid schizophrenic, the entire cosmos becomes involved, complete with people from outer space armed with ray guns, and private conversations with divine personages and the celebrated dead. A well-worked-out psychoneurosis may be equally elegant, however, and I think it not too much to suggest that many events of great importance in World history had their beginnings in infantile disasters or conquests which individuals of unusual personal force caused to find re-enactment, with the World itself as stage. Whether the re-enactment is momentous for others or hardly noticed at all by them, the point is that these repetitions are essentially static in character and have the smell of death about them. Forces in the unconscious are blind, they are locked in upon themselves, they do not change one another because essentially there is never a mutual confrontation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

Moreover, the histrionic in which they involve the individual and those with whom one one’s self is involved in the external World are generally grade B or C melodramas. If viewed from the outside and if viewed without sympathy, they are like nothing so much as the kind of television film that is regularly re-run. Psychoneurosis in this view is the most tedious thing under the Sun, and banality is its essence. What depth psychotherapy attempts to do is to alter the deadly stasis of unconscious conflict by bringing the conflicting forces into consciousness, where they will have a chance to look at one another and hear what the other has to say. The hard necessity in depth therapy is to permit regression to occur, a little bit at a time, concurrently with efforts at increasing the strength of the ego, so that the patient may allow to come back into consciousness some painful feeling or severely tabooed impulse which had earlier been repressed. When this happens, the conflict can come out into the open, elements in it can be discriminated and criticized, and genuine confrontation with consequent decision may ensure. This sort of constructive meeting of opposing forces may occur without psychotherapy, of course. People were working hard at know themselves long before Dr. Freud cast into the form of a theoretical system and a technique of therapy hos own particular way of getting to know himself. Socrates long ago took self-knowledge as his goal, and judging from the Platonic dialogues he seems to have progressed well. Many of the philosophers and artists of the World have exemplified in their person the same process. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

The artist transforms material from the unconscious into a social communication; he gives it reality involving discrimination, selection, technique, purpose, and understanding both of the material itself and of its potential audience. In saying this, let me make it plain, I am not saying that the artist is usually neurotic or that his neurosis is being expressed in his art. Artists indeed seem to have more than their share of troubles, at least troubles of a certain sort, but we certainly need not say that because a person is troubled he has a psychoneurosis. Could it not be that individuals of unusual sensibility and symbolic scope are at once more prone to despair, disgust, forlornness, and rage at the tragedy, to use Yeats’ vivid expression, of consciousness harnessed to a dying animal and yet at the same time ore capable of transcending these universal human bonds through metaphor and through identification with natural processes? Fear, anger, guilt, and despair are perfectly natural and appropriate emotions for all of us at times, and people who experience life most intensely are likely to feel such emotions most extremely (as well, let it be said, as joy, love, and freedom of spirit). So, if they are artists, they will seek to express their image of life and their relation to it in the cultural language of which they have most command, and thus invite others to test the reality of their perceptions and, in a sense, to join them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11

Whatever is neurotic in them then becomes a part of the content, symbolically expressed, of their creative activity, and not simply a part of themselves that inhibits construction. Many creative people offer to psychoanalysis when it is proferred them a fundamental objection which for them is perhaps right. Although by not accepting it they may thus be left with their woes, there is yet the chance that as they struggles with their problems they may out of their distress make a testament to their belief in the ultimate intelligibility and significance of not only their own lives, but the lives of others. And for this, of course, there are great rewards. However, one need not be an artist or philosopher or even just a singularly valiant person to do the work of getting a conflict out in the open. An individual who decides to enter upon a psychoanalysis formally, for instance, with benefit of couch and analyst (or, to put it another way, makes a systematic practice of going to bed twice, and at least once by himself, on certain days) has usually already begun the work himself. Moreover, when the analysis is, as they say, terminated, he almost invariably continues it by himself, using the techniques he has learned. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11

These consist usually in paying attention to small signs in himself that something is going on within him that he does not quite does not quite know about his feelings and ideas come out even when they do not seem sensible, and paying attention to his dreams and reveries. It certainly is not easy, but it can be done. I might add, however, that psychoneurosis, in addition to being essentially stereotyped, is also rather shiftless and usually avoids work whenever possible, so that it is not a bad idea to have a schedule of appointments and some monetary inducement for keeping them. Some are always ready to obey any order, whatever it may be. However, one must know what righteousness is. Should one joyfully obey the order to go to the very center of hell and to remain there eternally. I do not have a preference for orders of this nature. I am not perverse like that. So many things are outside Christianity, so many things that I love and do not want to give up, so many things that God loves, otherwise they would not be in existence. In all the history now known there has never been a period in which souls have in such peril as they are today in every part of the globe. The bronze serpent must be lifted up again so that whoever raises his or her eyes to it may be saved. The heart has to be transported, forever, I hope, into the Blessed Sacrament exposed on the altar. You see that I think most people are very far from the thoughts of hell, with the best of intentions, attributed to society. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11