He had lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers of the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold observer, looking on humankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crimes as were demanded for his study. Aggression emerges on the spectrum at that point where overt conflict also emerges. Although conflict may be faintly detected in self-affirmation and may be even slightly more noticeable in self-assertion, on those levels it is typically directed inward. There is a conflict within me, for example, when I get m nerve up to assert myself before a large audience to ask a question of the speaker; the conflict may then be invisible to the outside World. However, in aggression there is no question about the overt conflict. There occurs a pitting of interest against interest, and the aggressive act is an endeavor to come to some resolution in this conflict. A Pandora’s box of moral maladies is opened if, following the habit in America, we condemn aggression as evil as soon as it shows its head. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

To that kind of thinking, the power of the status quo is automatically beneficent and God-given, whether it be the state troopers going in to slaughter at Garlic Festival or the police quelling a Sacramento riot; just as automatically the rebel is seen as evil. Thus we have the tendency to label one act as aggressive and, therefore, to be condemned when performed by those out of power, and to label the exact same act as good when performed by those in power (or vice versa). The reason aggression terrifies people so much is that it involves the potentiality of force. The force in aggression can take away our lives in the physical, intellectual, or spiritual sense. Physical force is understood well enough. Intellectual aggression may have the same compelling quality, as in abrasive argument—especially argumentum ad hominem. Or the coercion may be spiritual, as in the threat of ostracism or excommunication. That is last can be a great threat is shown by the phenomenon known as “voodoo death.” A condemned person who is “cut dead” in primitive society, as a punishment, say, for breaking one of the taboos, falls to the ground; one’s pulse becomes thready; one pants and breathes hard; and in a few hours one dies. Even in advanced societies “cutting one dead” is an aggressive act that is both psychological and spiritual and produces potent results. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

The Janus-faced nature of aggression can be seen in that word’s Latin root aggredi, which means “to go forward, to approach.” Primarily, this means to “approach someone for counsel or advice.” Second, it means “to move against” or “to move with intent to hurt.” In other words, aggression in origin is pure conjecture, a reaching out, a making contact either for friendly affirmation of yourself and another or for hostile purposes the way a bear hug is part f a puglist’s technique. The opposite of aggression is not loving peace or consideration or friendship, but isolation, the state of no contact at all. This is actually the state of the person—the understanding of whom may be obtained by looking within one’s self and not necessarily observing in a mental hospital—who can brook no rebuke of what one does or thinks; soon one can accept no correction; and, finally, no comment at all. One becomes totally isolated from other persons. As so often happens in psychotherapy, when the patient expresses some negation—“I feel you are attacking me. I cannot stand that…”—or when the therapist says: “What you are saying makes me angry; let us see why,” both together can explore what sensitive spot was hit. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

When these aspects of aggression are worked though, there is not only a clearing of the air but both arrive at a new and deeper understanding of the other and, generally—since we love people for their faults as well as their virtues—a greater affection for the other too. The constructive forms of aggression include cutting through barriers to initiate a relationship; confronting another without intent to hurt but wit the intent to penetrate into one’s consciousness; waring off powers that threaten one’s integrity; actualizing one’s own self and one’s own ideas in hostile environments; overcoming the barriers to healing. Love-making and fighting are very similar neurophysiologically in human beings. Lovers’ quarrels often end up in pleasures of the flesh. There is a strange relationship between the fighter and the lover: the knight rescuing the maiden from the dragon and enjoying pleasures of the flesh with are part of the same fable. In fighting there is a vivid intimacy, a closeness that partakes of both hate and love, an intimacy held off by hatred but an intimacy nevertheless, and it can blossom into affection or love. An example of this is seen in Armand the Vampire by Anne Rice when Armand has a one night encounter of the pleasures of the flesh with Lord Harlech. Lord Harlech tries to kill him, but Armand escapes. Only for Lord Harlech to track him down, break into his house, and kill two of the boys. Armand is so upset that he refuses to hide and goes after Lord Harlech to take his life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

The two of them get into a fight and Lord Harlech cuts Armand, then Armand slashes his throat, but he did not die. As the battle continues, Lord Harlech expresses his feelings. “You horrid damnable little devil,” he said. “You made me adore you so you could draw and quarter me at your pleasure. You promised me you would come back!” The Armand says that, Lord Harlech “kept up this sort of verbal barrage the entire time we fought. He seemed to need it, rather like a goading battle drum and fife.” “Come on, you despicable little Angel, I will tear your wings off!” Lord Harlech said. This battle proves that there is a strange relationship between fighting and love. Because Lord Harlech could not get the love he wanted and had an obsession, he fighting Armand was the only way he could get close to him, but it blossom into affection, as Armand and Riccardo ended Lord Harlech’s life, and Lord Harlech poisoned Armand. So I guess it pays to be careful who you fight with. The negative side of aggression is what is normally referred to in our society and thus does not require much definition here. It consists essentially of contact with another with intent to injure or give pain, taking power from the other for one’s self-protection or simply to increase one’s own power. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Why has the beneficial side of aggression been so consistently repressed and the negative side so emphasized? One obvious reason is that we have been terrified of aggression, and we assume—delusion though it is—that we can better control it if we center all our attention on its destructive aspects as though that is all there is. This identification of a word with only its negative meanings (such as expletives and devil) is one of the oldest misuses of the diamonic. In so doing we proscribe the whole area by labeling it off limits, so that anyone who talks about the devil is already under his power. Another reason we tend to emphasize only the negative side of aggression is that it carries with it anxiety and guilt. We think we can better avoid that anxiety and guilt if we call Prometheus a fanciful legend and posit ourselves as saved from anxiety and guilt by the second Adam, Christ. When this is done through rigid and strict doctrines, as it is by many fundamentalists, it does give the individual a certain amount of control. However, the system of control is shaky at best. Its value is grossly outweighed by the harm it does in truncating consciousness and blocking off sensitivity and understanding of others. The truth is that practically everything we do is a mixture of positive and negative forms of aggression. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

Before I give a lecture, I find myself getting in the mod of “If anyone foes to sleep, my voice and ideas will be so importunate that I will wake him up” (which is positive aggression). Sometimes I defiantly feel: “If anyone tries to interrupt me by heckling, I will shut one up by making one look silly” (which is negative aggression). There is a hypothesis that people have a predisposition toward anxiety to the degree which they had been rejected by their mothers. However, it is only true 50 percent of the time because people who are forced out of their houses by their mothers, many of them simply make their friends among other youngsters on the street. Hence, there was not the predisposition to anxiety we would have expected according to what we know in psychology. How could this be? Had the rejected young women who had not experienced anxiety become hardened, apathetic, so that they did not feel rejection? The answer to that seemed clearly no. Were they psychopathic or sociopathic types, who also do not experience anxiety? Again, no. I felt myself caught by an insoluble problem. Late one day, putting aside my books and papers in the little office I used in that shelter house, I walked down the street toward the subway. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

I was tired. I tried to put the whole troublesome business out of my mind. About fifty feet away from the entrance to the Brighton Station, it suddenly struck me out of the blue, as the not-unfitting expression goes, that those young women who did not fit my hypothesis were all from the proletarian class. And as quickly as that idea struck me, other ideas poured out. I think I had not taken another step on the sidewalk when a whole new hypothesis broke loose in my mind. I realized my entire theory would have to be changed. I saw at that instant that it is not rejection by the mother that is the original trauma which is the source of anxiety; it is rather rejection that is lied about. The proletarian mothers rejected their children, but they never made any bones about it. The children knew they were rejected; they went out on the streets and found other companions. There was never any subterfuge about their situation. They knew their World—bad or good—and they could orient themselves to it. However, the middle-class young women were always lied to in their families. They were rejected by mothers who pretended they loved them. This was really the source of their anxiety, not the sheer rejection. I saw, in that instantaneous way that characterizes insights from these deeper sources, that anxiety comes from not being able to know the World you are in, not being able to orient yourself in your own existence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

I was convinced there, on the street—and later thought and experienced only convinced me the more—that this is a better, ore accurate, and more elegant theory, than my first. The helplessness of a child is often considered merely as a biological fact. Though the child is for long years factually dependent on its environment for the fulfillment of its needs—having less physical strength and less experience than the grown-ups—there is nevertheless too much emphasis on the biological aspects of the question. After the first two or three years of life there is a decided change from the prevailingly biological dependence to a kind of dependence that includes mental, intellectual and spiritual life of the child. This continues until the child matures into early adulthood and is able to take life into its own hands. There are great individual differences, though, in the degree to which children remined dependent on their parents. It all depends on what the parents try to achieve in the education of their offspring: whether the tendency is to make a child strong, courageous, independent, capable of dealing with all sorts of situations, or whether the main tendency is to shelter the child, to make it obedient, to keep it ignorant of life as it is, or in short to infantilize it up to twenty years of age or longer. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

In children growing up under adverse conditions helplessness is usually artificially reinforced by intimidation, by babying or by bringing and keeping the child in a stage of emotional dependence. The more helpless a child is made the less will it dare t feel or show opposition, and the longer will such opposition be delayed. In this situation the underlying feeling—or what we may call the motto—is I have to repress my hostility because I need you. Fear may be aroused directly by threats, prohibitions and punishments, and by outbreaks of temper or violent scenes witnessed by a child; it may be aroused also by indirect intimidation, such as impressing this child with the great dangers of life—germs, street cares, strangers, uneducated children, climbing trees. The more apprehensive a child is made the less will it dare to show or even to feel hostility. Here the motto is: I have to repress my hostility because I am afraid of you. Love may be another reason for repressing hostility. When genuine affection is absent there is often a great verbal emphasis on how much the parents love the child and how they would sacrifice for one up to the last drop of their blood. A child, particularly if otherwise intimidated, may cling to this substitute for love and fear to be rebellious lest it lose the reward for being docile. In such situations the motto is: I have to repress hostility for fear of losing love. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

Thus far we have discussed situations in which a child represses his hostility against the parents because he is afraid that any expression of it would spoil his relations to the parents. He is motivated by plain fear that these powerful giants would desert him, withdraw their reassuring benevolence or turn against him. In addition, in our culture a child is usually made to feel guilty for any feelings or expressions of hostility or opposition; that is, he is made to feel unworthy or contemptible in his own eyes if he breaks the rules set up by them. These two reasons for feelings of guilt are closely interrelated. The more a child is made to feel guilty about trespassing on forbidden territory the less will be dare to feel spiteful or accusatory toward the parents. In our culture the sphere of pleasures of the flesh is the one in which guilt feelings are most frequently stimulated. Whether prohibitions are expressed by audible silence or by open threats and punishment, a child frequently comes to feel not only that pleasures of the flesh and curiosity about pleasures of the flesh are activities that are forbidden and they feel they are dirty and despicable if they indulge in them. If there are any fantasies and wishes concerning pleasures of the flesh, they are to remain unexpressed as a result of the forbidding attitude toward sexuality in general, and of course it makes a youth feel guilty. In this situation the motto is: I have to repress hostility because I would be a bad child if I felt hostile. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

In various combinations any of the factors mentioned may bring a child to repress one’s hostility and eventually produce anxiety. However, does every infantile anxiety necessarily lead ultimately to a neurosis? Our knowledge is not advanced enough to answer this question adequately. My belief is that infantile anxiety is a necessary factor but not a sufficient causes for the development of a neurosis. It seems that favorable circumstances, such as an early change of surroundings or counteracting influences of any sort, may forestall a definite neurotic development. If, however, as frequently happens, living conditions are not of a kind to diminish the anxiety, then not only may this anxiety persist, but—as we shall see later—it is bound gradually to increase and to set in motion all the processes which constitute a neurosis. Among the factors that may influence the further development of infantile anxiety there is one that I want to consider especially. It makes a great difference whether the reaction of hostility and anxiety is restricted to the surroundings which forced the child into it, or whether it develops into an attitude of hostility and anxiety toward people in general. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

If a child is fortunate enough to have, for example, a loving grandmother, an understanding teacher, some good friends, one’s experience with them may prevent one from expecting nothing but bad from everybody. However, the more difficult are one’s experiences in the family, the more will a child be inclined to develop not only a reaction of hatred toward the parents and other children but a distrustful or spiteful attitude toward everyone. The more a child is isolated and deterred from making other experiences of one’s own, the more such a development will be fostered. And finally, the more a child covers up one’s grudge against one’s own family, as for instance by conforming with one’s parents’ attitudes, the more one projects one’s anxiety to the outside World and thus becomes convinced that the World in general is dangerous and frightening. The general anxiety concerning the World may also develop or increase gradually. A child who has grown up in this kind of atmosphere described will not dare in one’s own contacts with others to be as enterprising or pugnacious as they. One will have lost the blissful certainty of being wanted and will take even a harmless teasing as a cruel rejection. One will be wounded and hurt more easily than others and will be less capable of defending oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

The condition that is fostered or brought about by the factors I have mentioned, or by similar factors, is an insidiously increasing, all-pervading feeling of being lonely and helpless in a hostile World. The acute individual reactions to individual provocations crystallize into a character attitude. This attitude as such does not constitute a neurosis but it is the nutritive soil out of which a definite neurosis may develop at any time. Because of the fundamental role this attitude plays in neuroses I have given it a special designation: the basic anxiety; it is inseparably interwoven with a basic hostility. The answer to those who defend group work by quoting Jesus’ single statement, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I, in the midst of them,” is that it contradicts his repeated statement, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” and is more likely to be interpolated than authentic. Within the exclusivity of a sect one’s power to think forcefully, creatively, and originally is lost. One is forced into a narrow area, deprived of the stimulating results of World-search. There is neither the wish nor the will to step outside the imposed borders of one’s own sect and measure other ideas, test other ideals, and benefit by other insights. There is a pathetic acceptance of mental captivity. No organized church likes individual revelations to supplant its own authority. One may work toward enlightenment and inner freedom, to the aspiration which draws one most. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14