I told you. Such stories always come into our hands. Satanism, vampirism, voodoo, witchcraft, sightings of werewolves; it all comes across my desk. Most of it goes into the trash, obviously. However, Godsmack produced a great song called “Voodoo,” which is about Resurrection.  I know the grain of truth when I see it. In daily life the question of identity arises when we want to claim something from the post office, or when we want to pay by check in a store where we are not known, or in crossing a border. On such occasions we are asked: “Who are you, so that I can know for sure that it is you and nobody else?” And we establish our identity by showing a driver’s license or a passport or some similar document which tells our name, our address, the date of our birth, and perhaps some physical characteristics. Together, these will tell us apart from anybody else and will also establish that we are the same person that was born on such and such a date. We have papers to establish our identity, and this paper-identity is something fixed and definite. This is also the meaning of the word “identity,” as applied to people, for the average person. Such paper-identity seems far removed, at first glance, from the current concern of psychoanalysts, philosophers, and other students of the contemporary scene, with a being’s search for and doubt in one’s identity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

However, actually paper-identity is quite central for a person’s search of oneself. It is a telling symbol of alienated identity. It is a kind of identity which is the product of bureaucratic needs of commerce or administration. It is most gruesome and tragic manifestations occurred in our time when being’s identities were reduced to numbers on plantations and or in the penal system, and when countless people fleeing from the terror of the totalitarian states were shunned from country to country because they did not have the right paper-identities. In the case of paper-identities, the person who demands and examines one’s papers is the one who, in one’s role as an official, is alienated from the other person as a human being. Similarly, the guards on the plantations were alienated from their victims. However, many of these victims systematically robbed of any meaningful purpose and dignity in their lives, succumbed to their tormentors and lost their sense of identity long before they lost their lives. In our own and many other societies the loss of identity takes place without the terror of the plantation in more insidious ways. Many beings in our time tend to think of their lives as though they were answering the kind of questionnaire that one has to fill out when, for example, applying for a passport. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Most beings tend to accept the paper-identity as their real identity. It is tempting to do so because it is something fixed and definite and does not require the person be really in touch with oneself. The paper-identity corresponds to the logical propositions concerning identity: A = A, and A is not non-A. However, beings are not a logical proposition, and the paper-identity does not answer the question who this person, identified by some scrap of paper, is as a person. This question is not simple to answer. It has haunted many people increasingly in the last hundred and seventy years. They no longer feel certain who they are because in modern industrial society, they are alienated from nature, alienated from others and from the World around us. The problem of identity and alienation from the self came to the attention of psychoanalysts in the last one hundred years when they observed its role in an increasing number of patients. Many beings suffer in one form or another from the lack of a sense of identity. This may take the form of feeling like an imposter—in their work or in relation to their background, their past, or to some part of themselves that they repress or consciously want to hide because they feel ashamed or guilty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Or else some feel that they ought to have something they ought to have something they lack or imagine they lack, such as material possession, prestige, or certain personal qualities or traits; or they feel that a different husband or wife, or friends different from those they have, would give them the status they want and thereby, miraculously, transform them into full-blown persons. When the lack of a sense of identity becomes conscious, it is often experienced—probably always—as a feeling that compared with others one is not fully a person. Among adults one can observe two frequent reactions to the conscious or unconscious feeling of not being fully a being, of not having found an identity acceptable to oneself. One is an anxious retreat or depressive resignation, or a mixture of these. The other is a more or less conscious effort at disguise, at playing a role, at presenting an artificial façade to the World. These reactions are not mutually exclusive. They usually occur together, one of them being more emphasized or closer to consciousness than the other. The fear or exposure is present in both, but especially strong in people who rely on a façade. They tend to feel that they travel with a forged passport, under an assumed identity. When their disguise and the reasons for it have been analyzed, the sense of a lack of identity often comes to the fore as strongly as in those who, to begin with, have been aware of and suffered from the feeling of not really or fully being a person with a meaningful place in life. Both then to feel that they do not really know who they are, what they want, or how they feel about other people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

When these people consult an analyst, they often expect, implicitly or explicitly, that one will tell them who they are or who they should be. Their wish and search is for a definite, fixed identity. They want to be a personality. Often these are people who suffer from over-adaptation to whatever situation they are in, and to whomever they are dealing with at the moment. They have been described pointedly in several pays and stories by Pirandelio. They long for a definite, fixed, circumscribed personality. Having such a personality, as one has a possession, they hope will solve their dilemma. Having such a personality, they feel, is good; not having it, bad. Their wish is to possess a definite identity does not and cannot solve the problem of their alienation from themselves, because it actually is the continuation of alienation. They want to substitute a fixed, reified personality for the on-going process of living, feeling, acting, and thinking in which alone they could find themselves. They search for a definite, stable shell called personality to which they want to cling. Their quest is self-defeating, because what they search for is an alienated concept of a thing, rather than a living, developing person. Their wish is a symptom, not a cure. In this symptom, however, both the malady of alienation and the longing for more meaningful life find expression, even thought in a way which perpetuates the ill form which they seek to escape. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

The self-conscious preoccupation with this wished-form magic object called personality interfere with the actual experience for living. In calling the object of these people’s search an alienated concept of identity, I do not mean a scientific or even an explicit concept. I am describing an implicit concept, which becomes apparent only in the analysis of the underlying, often not conscious, assumptions that direct this kind of search. This applies equally to the following examples of alienated concepts of identity. Talking of fears and defenses, I am afraid that by this time many being will have become impatient about such an extensive discussion of so simple a question as what constitutes a neurosis. In defending myself I may point out the psychic phenomena are always intricate, that while there are seemingly simple questions there is never a simple answer, that the predicament we meet here at the beginning is no exceptional one, but will accompany us throughout the essay, whatever problems we shall tackle, The particular difficulty in the description of a neurosis is possessed in the fact that a satisfactory answer can be given neither with psychological nor with sociological tools alone, but that they must be taken up alternately, first one and then the other, as in fact we have done. If we should regard a neurosis only from the point of view of its dynamics and psychic structure we should hypostatize a normal human being: one does not exist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

We run into more difficulties as soon as we pass the borderline of our own country or of countries with a culture similar to our own. And if we regard a neurosis only from the sociological point of view as a mere deviation from the behavior pattern common to a certain society, we neglect grossly all we know about the psychological characteristics of a neurosis, and no psychiatrist of any school or country would recognize the results as what one is accustomed to designate a neurosis. The reconcilement of the two approaches is possessed in a method of observation that considers the deviation both in the manifest picture of the neurosis and in the dynamics of the psychic processes, but without considering either deviation as the primary and decisive one. The two must be combined. This in general is the way we have gone in pointing out that fear and defenses are one of the dynamic centers of a neurosis, but constitutes a neurosis only when deviating in quantity or quality from the fears and defenses patterned in the same culture. We have to go one step father in the same direction. There is still another essential characteristic of a neurosis and that is the presence of conflicting tendencies of the existence of which, or at least of the precise content of which, the neurotic oneself is unaware, and for which one automatically tires to reach certain compromise solutions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

It is this latter characteristic which in various forms Dr. Freud has stressed as an indispensable constituent of neuroses. What distinguishes the neurotic conflict from those commonly existing in a culture is neither their content nor the fact that they are essentially unconscious—in both respects the common cultural conflicts may be identical—but the fact that in the neurotic the conflicts are sharper and more accentuated. The neurotic person attempts and arrives at compromises solutions—not inopportunely classified as neurotic—and these solutions are less satisfactory than those of the average individual and are achieved at great expense to the whole personality. Reviewing all these considerations, we are not yet able to give a well-rounded definition of a neurosis, but we can arrive at a description: a neurosis is a psychic disturbance brought about by fear and defenses against these fears, and by attempts to find compromise solutions for conflicting tendencies. For practical reasons only if it deviates from the pattern common to the particular culture, then is it advisable to call this disturbance a neurosis. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

Some perceive their World as boring and their stature as lowly, and these beings long to break away from their predicament, to soar—but in the quickest, most inexpensive way. The devil can provide beings with a mirror on this longing and immerses one in its consequences. Some of these consequences are delightful—as they are for most overachievers—but many of them disastrous. In the end, most are able to reassess their expansiveness, appreciate the value of one’s limitations, and thus become a more enriched and deliberate person. One must think of what life can be—its temptations, its catastrophes, and its joys. What is life and what are damnation and salvation? What does it mean to be a human being? God is the occult of the Universe. God created humans in his own image and likeness. I suspect that is the key. Nobody knows what it really means, you know. God is a creative force. And so are we. He told Adam to “Increase and multiply.” That is what the first organic cells did, increased and multiplied. Not merely changed shape but replicated themselves. God is a creative force. He made the whole Universe out of himself through cell division. That is why the devils are so fully of envy—the bad Angels, I mean. They are not creative creatures; they have no bodies, no cells, they are spirit. And I suspect it was not envy so much as a form of suspicion—that God was making a mistake in making another engine of creativity in Adam, so like himself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

The Angels probably felt the physical Universe was bad enough, with all these replicating cells, but thinking, talking beings who could increase and multiply? They were probably outraged by the whole experiment. That was their sin. God has a body and always did. The secret of cell dividing life lies within God. And all living cells have a tiny part of God’s spirits in them, that is the missing piece as to what makes life happen in the first place, what separates it from nonlife. It is exactly like Anne Rice’s vampiric genesis. The first spirit of Amel—one evil entity—infused the bodies of all the vampires. Well, the humans share in the spirit of God in the same way. People yearn to believe that the God of progress—our great machines, our vast technology, our supernational corporations, now even our nuclear weapons—all these, we yearn to believe, will have a beneficent effect upon us and will bring us vast gains to humanity. It is indeed thrilling to realize that out of the same milieu of strive, intense activity, even cruelty, came our political proclamation: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We now living in a person when vast numbers of people are dedicated to interpreting evil in such a way that it will eventuate in good. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Power is the ability to cause or prevent change. It has two dimensions. One is power as potentiality, or latent power. This is power that has not yet been fully developed; it is the ability to cause a change at some future time. We speak of this future change as possibility, a word which comes directly from the same root as power, namely posse, “to be able.” The other dimension is power as actuality. It is to this aspect of power I shall be referring in this chapter. Ancient Greek philosophers define power as being—that is to say, there is no being without power. And since power is the ability to chance, being is in continual flux. This definition has come down the mainstream and tributaries of philosophy through the ages to contemporary ontological thinkers like Paul Tillich, who describes power similarly as “the power of being.” The philosopher of life, such as Nietzsche with his will to power emphasize the element of power in all living things. Power is for them an expression of life. No teaching can be a final complete and exhaustive one. The Universe may yield its secret but being’s minds are not the World-Mind; it cannot put into finite words what is greater than itself. When we attempt to identify power with the life process itself, there can be danger. This would lead us astray. There are many things in the life process—such as consciousness, desire, curiosity—which may be allied with power but are not to be identified with it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

If a being claims to know what God is in the same way that God knows it, one is talking nonsense, and falling into the sin of spiritual pride. No one can penetrate this irreducible mystery expect in one’s own imagination, speculation, or psychic fantasy. No human effort can plumb the depth of the ultimate power. No human being has found the truth in all its angles, nor uttered the last word upon it. Whatever knowledge a mystic may acquire through trance or intuition, it will always be limited. The World-Mind’s knowledge is always absolute. The circumferences of these two circles can never coincide. Power and love can be allied, but they also can be contrasted; the distinction between them must be kept clear. Power can be identified only with the original power of being itself, from which beings gets its start. Beware of professionalism in this field, of the professional expounder of truth and the professional seeker of it. Both Way and Goa are far simpler than most of them seem to think it is, and markedly unlike the impression left by many writings and lectures, books and teachings, whether ancient or modern. First at the beginning of the Long Path, and again at the beginning of the Short Path a master, a spiritual guide, is really required. However, outside of these two occasions an aspirant had better walk alone. The teacher oneself has to go to this inner source for one’s own enlightenment, why not go to it directly yourself? #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

It may be slower but it will be much safer, present-day conditions being what they are, to teach oneself and liberate oneself. Something more is needed than what books or even gurus can give one. This can only be found within oneself. The courage needed for such a standpoint must also be found, and can be, within oneself. For curious reason we are shy about sharing the things that matter most. Hence people short-circuit the more dangerous building of a relationship by leaping immediately into bed. After all, the body is an object and can be treated mechanically. However, intimacy that begins and remains on the physical level tends to become inauthentic, and we later find ourselves fleeing from the emptiness. Authentic social courage requires intimacy on the many levels of the personality simultaneously. Only by doing this one can overcome personal alienation. No wonder the meeting of new persons brings a throb of anxiety as well as the joy of expectation; and as we go deeper into the relationship each new depth is marked by some new joy and new anxiety. Each meeting can be a harbinger of an unknown fate in store for us but also a stimulus toward the exciting pleasure of authentically knowing another person. “I am mindful of you always in my prayers, continually praying unto God the Father in the name of his Holy Child, Jesus, that he, through his infinite goodness and grace, will keep you through the endurance of faith on his name to the end,” reports Moroni 8.3.  #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

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