I arrived quite early in the evening for I had gone backwards in time against the turning of the World. It was cold and crisp, but not cruelly so, though a bad norther was on its way. The sky was without a cloud and fully of small and very distinct stars. I went at once to my beautiful house at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. It has an intimate view of the greenbelt and its is a beautiful community. It was not until tomorrow night that Mr. Raglan James meant to meet me. And impatient as I was for this meeting, I found the schedule comfortable, as I wanted to find Louis right away. But first I indulged in the mortal comfort of a hot shower, and put on a fresh suit of black velvet, very trim and plain, rather like the clothes I had worn in Miami, and a new pair of black boots. And ignoring my general weariness—I would have been asleep in the Earth by now, had I been still in Europe—I went off, walking like a mortal, through the town. The person living with an alienated and reified, negative identity concept of oneself closely resembles the hypochondriacal patient, except that one’s unhappy preoccupation concerns not a physical ailment but a reified physical or psychic quality that has become the focal point of one’s self-image. The relief one gains from one’s burdensome preoccupation is due to the fact that the reified bad quality no longer is viewed as part of the on-going process of living and of goal-directed thought and action. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The perceived reified bad quality has been severed from the “I” that acts with foresight and responsibility and is looked upon as an inherent, unalterable, unfortunate something an ossified part of oneself that no longer participates in the flux, growth, and development of life. It is experienced as an unchangeable fate whose bearer is doomed to live and die with it. The relief this brings is that the person no longer feels responsible for the supposed consequences of this fixed attribute; one is not doing anything for which one can be blamed, even though one may feel ashamed and unacceptable for being such and such. The preoccupation with the reified identity directs attention away from what one does to what one supposedly is. Furthermore, one no longer has to do anything about it because, obviously, one cannot do anything about it. Thus, the anxiety, fear, and effort that would be connected with facing and acting upon the real problem is avoided by putting up with the negative, fixed identity which, in addition, may be used to indulge self-pity and to enlist the sympathy of others. Kind of like how in Anne Rice’s The Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat is so lonely that he considers killing himself by going into the Sun, but David tells him not to, and he does it anyway and only gets darker. And also when Lestat considers letting the body thief take his body, but David tells him, “You’re going to make another ghastly mistake!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

So far we have discussed mainly negative self-images. However, alienated identity concepts may be beneficial as well as negative. Alienated identity of the beneficial variety occurs in vanity, conceit and—in its more pathological form—in delusions of grandeur, just as in its negative counterpart the “I” of the vain person is severed from a fixed attribute on which the vanity is based. The person feel that one possesses this quality. It becomes the focal point of one’s identity and serves as its prop. Beauty, masculinity or femininity, being born on the right side of the river, success, money, prestige, or being good may serve as such a prop. While in the negative identity feeling a reified attribute haunts the person, such an attribute serves the beneficial self-image as a support. Yet it is equally alienated from the living person. This is expressed nicely in the phrase “a stuffed shirt.” It is not the person in the shirt but some dead matter, some stuffing that is used to bolster and aggrandize the self-feeling. It often becomes apparent in the behavior of the person that one leans on this real or imagined attribute, just as it often is apparent that a person feel pulled down by the weight of some alienated negative attribute. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

When one is weighed down by some alienated negative attribute, it could be similar to how Reglan James behaves in Anne Rice’s novel The Tale of the Body Thief. “David, that’s what’s wrong with him! I’ve been trying to figure it since I saw him on the beach in Miami,” says Lestat. “That isn’t his body! That’s why he can’t use its musculature or its…its height. That’s why he almost falls when he runs. He can’t control those long powerful legs. Good God, that man is in someone else’s body. And the voice, David, I told you about his voice. It’s not the voice of a young man. Oh, that explains it!” Instead of being possessed by another entity or being, people’s negative emotions give off such a vibe that they do not seem normal. The way they talk, the way they move, the things they say, it indicates something is wrong with them. They are possessed by darkness. The reliance on an identity, on a self-image based on the prop of some reified attribute remains precarious even where is seems to work, after a fashion, as it does in the self-satisfaction of the vain. This precariousness is inevitable since the beneficial self-evaluation of such a person does not rest on a feeling of wholeness and meaningfulness in life, in thought, feeling, and deed. One is always threatened with the danger of losing this thing, this possession, or which one’s self-esteem is based. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Today, especially in this country where youth has become a public fetish, many thousands try to preserve its alienated mask while terrified by the prospect of suddenly growing old, when the mask can no longer be worn or will become grotesque. The beautiful picture of youth can alienate beings from their actual life, which effects the internal markup of the being, marking their aura over with years of cruelty, selfishness, and greed, as they advance in age. Their true character is a secret threat that they feel when be exposed as they age because they are superficial and have no substance to go with their beauty. All beauty and no brains. In ever case of alienated identity concepts, there is a secret counterimage. Very often the hidden self announces its presence merely in a vague background feeling that the person would be lost, would be nothing if it were not for the alienated, reified quality on which the feeling of being something, somebody, or the feeling of vanity, is based. In this feeling both a truth and an irrational anxiety find expression. The truth is that no being who looks upon oneself as a thing and bases one’s existence on the support of some reified attribute of this thing has found oneself and one’s place in life. The irrational anxiety is the feeling that without the prop of such an attribute one could not live. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Similarly, in the negative alienated identity concepts there usually is a beneficial counterimage. It may take a generalized, vague form: If it were not for such and such (the reified attribute forming the focus of the negative identity), I would be all right, successful, wonderful, and so forth. Or it may take the more concrete form of some grandiose, exaggerated fantasy about one’s beneficial qualities. These artificial beneficial counterimages, too, express both an irrational hope and a truth. The irrational hope is that one may have some magical quality which will transport one into a state of security, or even superiority, because then one will possess that attribute which, instead of haunting one, will save one. However, actually it is nothing but the equally reified counterpart of what at present drags one down. The truth is that beings have potentialities for overcoming their alienation from oneself and for living without the burden and the artificial props of alienated, reified identity concepts. There is a distinction between helpful self-awareness and futile and self-torment rumination. We should oppose the ascetic interpretation we find among our modern hypochondrists and those who turn their vengeance against themselves. Instead, one sees the real meaning of self-knowledge in taking notice of oneself and becoming aware of one’s relation to other people and to the World. The pseudo self-knowledge against which one speaks foreshadows the widespread present-day self-preoccupation which is concerned, fruitlessly, with an alienated, negative sense of identity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

A productive self-knowledge is to pay attention to what one is actually doing in one’s relation to others, to the World and to oneself. A complete understanding of a neurosis is not possible without tracing it back to its infantile conditions, I believe that the genetic approach, if used one-sidedly, confuses rather than clarifies the issue, because it leads then to a neglect of the actually existing unconscious tendencies and their functions and interactions with other tendencies that are present, such as impulses, fears and protective measures. Genetic understanding is useful only as long as it helps the functional understanding. Proceeding on this belief I have found in analyzing the most varied kinds of personalities, belonging to different types of neuroses, differing in age, temperament and interests, coming from different social layers, that the contents of the dynamically central conflict and their interrelations were essentially similar in all of them. My experiences in psychoanalytical practice have been confirmed by observations of persons outside the practice and of characters in current literature. If the recurring problems of neurotic persons are divested of the fantastic and abstruse character they often have, it cannot escape our attention that they differ only in quantity from the problems bothering the normal person in our culture. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

The great majority of us have to struggle with problems of competition, fears of failure, emotional isolation, distrust of others and of our own selves, to mention only a few of the problems that may be present in a neurosis. The fact that in general the majority of individuals in a culture have to face the same problems suggests the conclusion that these problems have been created by the specific life conditions existing in that culture. That they do not represent problems common to human nature seems to be warranted by the fact that the motivating forces and conflicts in other cultures are different from ours. Hence in speaking of a neurotic personality of our time, I not only mean that there are neurotic persons having essential peculiarities in common, but also that these basic similarities are essentially produced by the difficulties existing in our time and culture. As far as my sociological knowledge allows me I shall show later on what difficulties of our culture are responsible for the psychic conflicts we have. The validity of my assumption concerning the relation between culture and neurosis ought to be tested by the combined efforts of anthropologist and psychiatrists. The psychiatrists would not only have to study neuroses as they appear in definite cultures, as has been done from formal criteria such as frequency, severity or type of neuroses, but particularly they should study them from the point of view of what basic conflicts are underlying them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

The anthropologist would have to study the same culture from the point of view of what psychic difficulties its structure creates for would have to study the same culture from the point of view of what psychic difficulties its structure creates for the individual. One way in which the similarity of attitudes open to surface observer can discover without the tools of psychoanalytic technique, concerning persons with whom one is thoroughly familiar, such as oneself, one’s friends, members of one’s family or one’s colleagues. There is a curious relationship between our society’s attitude toward power on one hand and sexuality on the other. This is partially seen in our own day with pornography, our sexy commercialism, our advertising built on luscious blondes and shapely brunettes. If they could, people would mold magic gold into gigantic phallus to shock the ladies and gentlemen. In the Industrial Revolution there began the radical separation between the product of the worker’s hands and one’s relation with the persons who use one’s product. Indeed, the worker normally saw nothing at all of the product one helped produce except one’s own little act. The alienation of labor added to the alienation of persons from themselves and from other people. Their personhood is lost. With the growth of industry and the bourgeoisie, pleasures of the flesh becomes separated from the beings; one’s pleasures of the flesh are bought and sold, as is the product of one’s hands. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

There are some situations of power when force, or coercion, or compulsion is an integral part of power. War is one of them. With sick persons or children, compulsion or coercion has to be used in proportion to the lack of capacity of knowledge of the other person. When my son was three years old, I kept a firm grip on his hand as we walked across Broadway, a condition that was relaxed as he grew and earned the intricacies of traffic enough to be able safely to take on the responsibility of crossing himself. However, there are ultimate limits to the application of force. If a species of animal uses its superior force to kill off all the other animals in its vicinity, it obviously will not have them for food when it needs them. This balance of nature is a delicate interweaving of the force of various animals and plants in relation to each other. When this balance is upset, we are faced with fearful prospects, indeed—as we are learning to our sorrow in modern ecology. Thus, to keep from self-destruction, power can be allied with force only up to the point where it might destroy the identity of the other. In a gun battle of the West, to destroy the identity of the enemy is precisely the goal of shooting. Hence I cite this as an example of the self-destructive effect of power allied with force. The one who is killed, obviously losing one’s being, is no longer present to give what one can to the community, no longer a person to whom to relate; and we are the poorer thereby. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Also the spontaneity of the other person cannot be destroyed without a loss to the destroyer as well. This is the danger in extreme forms of coercion and compulsion in brainwashing, conditioning, and hypnosis. If the person is transformed into something resembling a mechanism, one may still preserve some spontaneity; but if he is transformed into a complete mechanism, one ceases to be a person in the process. Power, therefore, ought to move with the affirmation of the spontaneity of the person it encounters; this will assure it most success in the long run. This is why I permitted Mercedes, an individual with practically no sense of her own power or spontaneity or choice to start with, to decide wen she wished to come to her psychotherapy sessions and when she chose not to. It was a process not only of letting her use her own spontaneity but requiring her to use it. While it is utopian to try to divorce power completely from force, compulsion, and coercion, it is cynical to identity all kinds of power with them. Is a tiny rain drop the same rainstorm? Can it cause a dam to burst as a rain storm? No—although the two are of the same nature, they are not of the same identity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

For any being to say “I am God” is incorrect, unless one understands the statement to refer only to the nature of one’s innermost being and only in this way, that one is but an insignificant drop of God with all the limitations that belong to a spark. We have to find our own self before we can find that of God’s. Hence there is real need of the higher self tenet. We are not entitled to aspire towards union with the wholeness of God so long as we still have not attained union with the godlikeness in beings. The mystical quest does not open the inner mysteries of God to our gaze. It opens the inner mysteries of beings. It leads them to one’s own divinity, not to God’s. There was once a less affluent Russian painter who could scarcely get enough money to buy bread for his wife and children. When the artist is on his death bed, his best friends finds the canvas on which the painter was working. It I blank except for one word, unclearly written and in very small letters, that appears in the center. The word can either be solitary—being alone; keeping one’s distance from events, maintaining the peace of mind necessary for listening to one’s deeper self. Or it can be solidarity—living in the market place; solidarity, involvement, or identifying with the masses. Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

There is no contradiction between advising aspirants at one time to seek a master and follow the path of discipleship, and advising them to seek within and follow the path of self-reliance at another time. The two counsels can be easily reconciled. For if the aspirant accepts the first one, the master will gradually lead one to become increasingly self-reliant. If one accepts the second one, one’s higher self will lead one to a master. When this craving for a guru becomes excessive, inordinate, it is a sign of weakness, an attempt to escape one’s own personal responsibility and to place it squarely on somebody else’s shoulders, a manifestation of inferiority complex such as we are accustomed to see in faces that have long been enslaved by others. Although it is true that one must find one’s own way to the goal, one need not do so as if one exists alone on this planet. One may be helped by drawing creatively on the experience gained by others even while one critically judges it. “And they did land upon the shore of the promised land. And when they had set their feet upon the shores of the promised land they bowed themselves down upon the face of the land, and did humble themselves before the Lord, and did shed tears of joy before the Lord, because of the multitude of God’s tender mercies over them. And it came to pass the they went forth upon the face of the land, and began to till the Earth,” reports Ether 6.12-13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13