A perfect World, or a World destroyed, one or the other—someday will come the end of Hell. And then I shall go back to Heaven, content to stay there for the first moment of my existence, since the beginning of Time. The same factors which have thus coalesced into the exactness and minute precision of the form of life have coalesced into a structure of the highest impersonality; on the other hand, they have promoted a highly personal subjectivity. There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which has been s unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as the blasé attitude. The blasé attitude results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves. From this, the enhancement of metropolitan intellectuality, also, seems originally to stern. Therefore, uneducated people who are not intellectuality alive in the first place usually are not exactly blasé. A life in boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all. In the same way, through the rapidity and contradictoriness of their changes, more harmless impressions force such violent responses, tearing the nerves so brutally hither and thither that their last reserves of strength are spent; and if one remains in the same milieu they have no time to gather new strength. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

An incapacity thus emerges to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy. This constitutes that blasé attitude which, in fact, every metropolitan child shows when compared with children of quieter and less changeable milieus. This physiological source of the metropolitan blasé attitude is joined by another source which flows from the money economy. The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived, as is the case with halfwit, but rather that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and gray tone; no one object deserves preference over any other. This mood is the faithful subjective reflection of the completely internalized money economy. By being the equivalent to al the manifold things in one and the same way, money becomes the most frightful leveler. For money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of “how much?” Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably in hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

All things are possessed on the same level and differ from one anther only in the size of the area which they cover. In the individual case this coloration, or rather discoloration, of things through their money equivalence may be unnoticeably minute. However, through the relations of the rich to the objects to be had for money, perhaps even through the total character which the mentality of the contemporary public everywhere imparts to these objects, the exclusively pecuniary evaluation of objects has become quite considerable. The large cities, the main seats of money exchange, bring the purchasability of things to the fore much more impressively than do smaller localities. That is why cities are also the genuine locale of the blasé attitude. In the blasé attitude the concentration of men and women and things stimulates the nervous system of the individual to its highest achievement so that it attains its peak. Through the mere quantitative intensification of the same conditioning factors this achievement is transformed into its opposite and appears in the peculiar adjustment of the blasé attitude. In this phenomenon the nerves find in the refusal to react to their stimulation the last possibility of accommodating to the contents and form of metropolitan life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The self-preservation of certain personalities is bought at the price of devaluating the whole objective World, a devaluation which in the end unavoidably drags one’s own personality down into a feeling of the same worthlessness. Whereas the subject of this form of existence has to come to terms with it entirely for oneself, one’s self-preservation in the face of the large city demands from one a no loses negative behavior of a social nature. This mental attitude of metropolitans toward one another we may designate, from a formal point of view, as reserve. If so many inner reactions were responses to the continuous external contacts with innumerable people as are those in the small town, where one knows almost everybody one meets and where one have a beneficial relation to almost everyone, one would be completely atomized internally and come to an unimaginable psychic state. Partly this psychological fact, partly the right to distrust which beings have in the face of the touch-and-go elements of metropolitan life, necessitates our reserve. As a result of this reserve we frequently do not even know by sight those who have been our neighbors for years. And it is this reserve which in the eyes of the small-town people makes us appear to be cold and heartless. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

 Indeed, if I do not deceive myself, the inner aspect of this outer reserve is not only indifference but, more often than we are aware, it is a sight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion, which will break into hatred and fight at the moment of a closer contact, however caused. The whole inner organization of such an extensive communicative life rests upon an extremely varied hierarchy of sympathies, indifferences, and aversions of the briefest as well as of the most permanent nature. The sphere of indifference in this hierarchy is not as large as might appear on the surface. Our psychic activity still responds to almost every impression of somebody else with a somewhat distinct feeling. The unconscious, fluid and changing character of this impression seems to result in a state of indifference. Actually this indifference would be just as unnatural as the diffusion of indiscriminate mutual suggestions would be unbearable. From both these typical dangers of the metropolis, indifference and indiscriminate suggestibility, antipathy protects us. A latent antipathy and the preparatory stage of practical antagonism effects the distances and aversions without which this mode of life could not at all be led. The extent and this mixture of this style of life, the rhythm of its emergence and disappearance, the forms in which it is satisfied—all these, with the unifying motive in the narrower sense, from the inseparable whole of the metropolitan style of life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

What appears in the metropolitan style of life directly as dissociation is in reality only one of its elemental forms of socialization. This reserve with its overtone of hidden aversion appears in turn as the form or the cloak of a more general mental phenomenon of the metropolis: it grants to the individual a kind and an amount of personal freedom which has no analogy whatsoever under other conditions. The metropolis goes back to one of the large developmental tendencies of social life as such, to one of the few tendencies for which an approximately universal formations found in historical as well as in contemporary social structures is this: a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles. However, this circle is closely coherent and allows its individual members only a narrow field for the development of unique qualities and free, self-responsible movements. Political and kinship groups, parties and religious associations begin in this way. The self-preservation of very young associations requires the establishment of strict boundaries and a centripetal unity. Therefore they cannot allow the individual freedom and unique inner and outer development. From this stage social development proceeds at once in two different, yet corresponding, directions. To the extent to which the group grows—numerically, spatially, in significance and in content of life—to the same degree the group’s direct, inner unity loosens, and the rigidity of the original demarcation against others is softened through mutual relations and connections. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The confidence that one has wort is normally picked up first from the attitudes of a mother or mother-surrogate toward the infant, and is then cultivated in the family by loyalty to the infant. As the child grows this initial feeling is reinforced by persons outside the family in their appreciation for one and one’s potentialities. Later, the more mature human being seems to keep within one’s memories, to refer to in difficult times, the images of those people who have believed in one. When I was in college I found the experience of having some adult believing in me crucially important; and at times thereafter in my life when I was faced with fateful decisions, I found myself casting about to fasten upon one of these persons. It was not that he or she would, in my memory, tell me what to do. It was rather that at such a time it was important for my own psychological security to find somebody who believed in me. This “belief” included his or her liking me, although it was not chiefly that; it included one’s confidence in my abilities and other qualities which the reader can experience through one’s own treasuring of such persons in memory better than through my attempt at enumeration. Part of the aim of psychotherapy is to help the individual in the steady, often long-term building up of one’s own self-affirmation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

With Leo the building up of his own day-to-day affirmations of himself, less dramatic (so that they rarely get into our notes, and then into case histories) and often hesitantly made, in every session. His dreams began to show a small amount of awareness of his own power: “I was climbing a ladder in which the rungs were weak, but I kept it working by holding the sides together.” Again: “I tamed some horses named Nacho and Peaches.” Or: “I wish I could do such and such.” Or: “I think I can accomplish it.” I would always make sure he knew I had heard such statements by responding in some way. Perhaps at the time I did not believe he could so the thing he wished (if I would take it he would in some way sense it), but I would affirm him by saying: “I too hope that someday you can do it” or “I do not see why you cannot do it eventually.” One way of avoiding this less dramatic but necessary step is shown in Leo’s approach to one of his dreams. That morning he had come in saying three times in three sentences: “It is hard.” Talking in a soft voice he related the following: “I was with my brother Max in a rowboat on the Okanogan River—then we, or rather I, lost the oars. We were then swimming upstream. I said to my brothers: ‘Why do you not rest on my shoulders?’ He put his hands on my shoulders and I began to sink. Then I cried out, think this was not a good idea, and he got off. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

“We landed. Then he wanted to keep swimming. I said: ‘No, the river is polluted.’ He acted as though it did not matter, and he swam down to north central Washington. I asked about the dirt in the river, and he said: ‘No, there was not much, just a little around the shore. My father was waiting for him.” Whatever the exoteric meaning of the dream, the purpose of Leo’s dreaming seemed eminently practical. He put his brother Max into it, the most down-to-Earth member of the family, who had at least worked out a plan. Why not take the chances his brother took? The fact that he dreamed it at all shows he was considering the idea. It is, of course, easier to preserve his innocence by shifting the discussion to cosmic, grandiose levels; but I believe Leo should be kept to the concrete, realistic consideration first. The fact that a human being can be self-conscious vastly increases his need for self-affirmation. We can know we affirm ourselves; or we can experience the lack of self-affirmation and feel shame. In a being, nature and being are not identical. However, for my bird Alex and Mimi, romping around the house, nature and being are identical—it becomes a bird regardless of what it does about it. A bird does not bear the burden of self-consciousness or of knowing that it knows; and while it escapes the guilt of this experience, it is also bereft of its glory. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

In the Tsuga mertensiana, known as the mountain hemlock, nature and being are also right; and it is not burdened with thinking about it or even knowing it. Consciousness is the intervening variable between nature and being. It vastly enlarges the human being’s dimensions; it makes possible in one a sense of awareness, responsibility, and a margin of freedom proportionate to tis responsibility. The reflective nature of human consciousness accounts for the fact that studies of terrestrial behavior cast only peripheral light on human aggression. The human being can be infinitely more cruel and can destroy for the sadistic pleasures of it—a privilege that is denied animals. All of this follows from the fact that in the human being nature and being are not identical. What about the souls who shrink in bitterness, who never flower as the heels of warriors walk over them, what about the souls warped and twisted by unspeakable injustice, who go into eternity cursing, what about a whole modern World which is personally angry with God, angry enough to curse Jesus Christ and God himself as Luther did, as Dora did, as you have done, as all have done. People in your modern World of the twenty first century have never stopped believing in God. It is that they hate God; they resent God; they are furious with God. They feel superior to God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

I cannot make them care by telling them God came here in the flesh as Jesus Christ to try to persuade human beings to live righteously and condemn the wicked. I cannot show them God’s wounds in Hell. That is not going to win them over, these victims, these grieving, furious sufferers of pain beyond God’s imagining. For souls to have free will and obtain Heaven, suffering was never necessary, the full understanding and receptivity to God never required a fast, a scourging, a crucifixion, a death. I know that the human soul transcended Nature, and needed no more than an eye for beauty to do this! Job was Job before he suffered! Just as after! What did the suffering teach Job that he did not know before? Thus beings become a self only as one participates in one’s development and throws one’s weight being this or that tendency, no matter how limited this choice may be. The self never develops automatically; beings become a self only to the extent that one can know it, affirm it, assert it. This why many continually proclaim the need for commitment and dedication. And this is why a being is more infinitely more educable than most animals and the rest of nature, as far as we know. There are other beings on this planet we know nothing about and have no power over. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Being less instinctually guided, one can, through one’s own awareness, influence to some extent one’s own evolution. Therein is possessed the collective shame and bewilderment of a being a human, and therein also is possessed the greatness of being one. We arrive finally in analyzing the creative act in terms of the question What is this intense encounter with? An encounter is always a meeting between two poles. The subjective pole is the conscious person in the creative act itself. However, what is the objective pole of this dialectical relationship? I shall use a term that will sound too simple: it is the artist’s or scientist’s encounter with one’s World. I do not mean World as environment or as the sum total of things; nor do I refer at all to objects about a subject. World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates. It has objective reality, to be sure, but it is not simply that. World is interrelated wit the person at every moment. A continual dialectical process goes on between World and self and self and World; one implies the other, and neither can be understood if we omit the other. This is why one can never localize creativity as a subjective phenomenon; one can never study it simply in terms of what goes on within the person. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

The pole of World is an inseparable part of the creativity of an individual. What occurs is always a process, a doing—specifically a process interrelating the persons and his or her World. How artists encounter their World is illustrated in the work of every genuinely creative painter. Out of the many possible examples of this, I shall choose the superb exhibition of the paintings of Mondrian shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1957-58. From his first realistic works in 1904 and 1905, all the way to his later geometrical rectangles and squares in the 1930s, one can see him struggling to find the underlying forms of the objects, particularly trees, that he was painting. He seems to have loved trees. The paintings around 1910, beginning somewhat like Cezanne, move further and further into the underlying meaning of tree-the trunk rises organically from the ground into which the roots have penetrated; the branches curve and bend into the trees and hills of the background in cubistic form, beautifully illustrative of what the underlying essence of tree is to most of us. Then we see Mondrian struggling more and more deeply to find the ground forms of nature; now it is less tree and more the eternal geometric forms underlying all reality. Finally we see him pushing inexorably toward the squares and rectangles that are the ultimate form of purely abstract art. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Impersonal? To be sure. The individual self is lost. However this is not precisely a reflection of Mondrian’s World—the World of the decades of the twenties and thirties, the World in the period of emerging fascism, communism, conformism, military power, in which the individual not only feels lost, but is lost, alienated from nature and others as well as oneself? Mondrian’s paintings express creative strength in such a World, an affirmation in spite of the lostness of the individual. In this sense his work is a search for the foundation of individuality that can withstand these anti-human political developments. Anxiety in general results not so much from a fear of our impulses as from a fear of our repressed impulses. Anxiety may result from every impulse of which the expression would incur an external danger. Pleasures of the flesh may certainly be for this kind, but only so long as a strict individual and social taboo resting on them renders them dangerous. From this point of view the frequency with which anxiety is generated by pleasures of the flesh is largely dependent on the existing cultural attitude toward pleasures of the flesh. I do not see that pleasures of the flesh as such is a specific source of anxiety. I do believe, however, that there is such a specific source in hostility, or more accurately repressed hostile impulses. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Whenever I find anxiety or indications of it, the questions that come to my mind are, what sensitive spot has been hurt and has consequently provoked hostility, and what accounts for the necessity of repression? My experience is that a search in these directions often leads to a satisfactory understanding of anxiety. Anxiety is not only generated in childhood. There is no doubt that persons whom we call neurotic remain infantile in their attitude towards danger, and have not grown out of antiquated conditions for anxiety. Being educated by the curriculum of misfortune intimates in this challenging passage, may be the paramount education that one receives. The more one is shaken, the more one is introduced to possibilities that would not otherwise be available to one. While these possibilities may seem repellent at first, they could eventually prove far superior to one’s former prospects and instill a far more enduring faith. The loss of a parent, for example, can challenge a client to become more independent in one’s life, more capable. Fear can awaken humility in some clients and a renewed appreciation for limits. Anger can fuel hope, power, and accomplishment. Depression can fuel sensitivity. The question, of course, is how to promote these discoveries and how to sustain them over an extended period. The answer is possessed in the faith one acquires by assimilating one’s anxiety. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

There is a moment in the career of the seeker when one may have to face the problem of joining some special organization. Here we can deal only with the general question itself. For most beginners, association with such an organization may be quite helpful, but for most intermediates it will be less so, and for all proficients it will be definitely detrimental. Sooner or later the seeker will discover that in accepting the advantages of such association one has also to accept the disadvantages, and that the price of serving its interests is partnership in its evils. One discovers in time that the institution which was to help one reach a certain end, becomes itself that end. Thus the true gal is shut out of sight, and a false one is substituted for it. One can keep one’s membership in the organization only by giving up something of one’s individual wholeness of mind and personal integrity of character. The organization tends to tyrannize over one’s thoughts and conduct, to weaken one’s power of correct judgment, and to destroy a fresh, spontaneous inner life. One will come in time to refuse to take any organization at its own valuation for one see that it is not the history behind it but the service it renders. The only worthwhile enlightenment is the one which lasts all through the year and every year. It is the difference between visiting a palace (the glimpse) and coming to live permanently in one. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16