And you have such a lovely French accent, oh, yes. Where is Reese right now, Monsieur Erich? What is the name of Heaven is going on? Why are you asking questions about Meghan? You think I do not know you are behind everything that is happening? Aaliyah and Ava think you are some sort of foreign prince, with your melodious French accent and your mind reading gifts and your exorcism to rid the house of ghost and spirits. And oh, yes, Aunt Diane absolutely adored you! However, you sound more like Rasputin to me! You cannot just steal Reese from me! You cannot! (a stinging hurt spread through me, over my face, my skin. I had never felt anything quite like it.) Tennessee was back there, in the shadows, laughing cruelly, collecting just a seam of the light along the edge of his face and form. Leo was on his feet and so was Justin.) I have told you all I know. Let me see you out. But is not the path to self-awareness fraught with more vicissitudes, more peaks and precipices of difficult and conflict than implied in the past? True; and we now turn to the more dynamic aspects of becoming a person. For most people, particularly adults trying to overcome the earlier experiences which have blocked them in becoming persons in their own right, achieving consciousness of self involves struggle and conflict. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

People find that becoming persons requires not only learning to feel, to experience and to want, as we pointed out in the past, but to fight against what prevents them from feeling and wanting. They discover that there are certain chains which hold them back. These chains, in essence, are the bonds which bind them to the parents, especially in our society to the mother. We have seen that the human being’s development is continuum of differentiation from the mass toward freedom as an individual. We have also noted that the potential person is originally a unity with the mother as a foetus in the womb, where it is fed automatically through the umbilical cord without any choice without any choice by mother or baby. When it is born and the physical umbilical cord is cut, it has become a physical individual, and feeding thereafter involves some conscious choice on the part of both parties—the infant can raise a howl in demand for food, and the mother can say Yes or No. However, the infant still is almost completely dependent on the parents, particularly the mother, who nurses him or her. One’s becoming an individual continues through an infinite number of steps—that emergence of consciousness of self with the rudimentary beginnings of responsibility and freedom, the movement out from the parental yard when one goes to school, the maturation into maturity at age of puberty, the struggles of going out on one’s own to college and in making vocational choices, the assuming of responsibility for a new family in marriage, and so on. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

All parents are imperfect. All parents, sometimes, are unjust. In some families, parent and child learn very early what acceptance of another person as oneself can bring and how forgiveness heals. In some families, the early lessons are forgotten and have to be learned anew much later. However, the point is that even when we were young children, dependence was not a one-way process. We needed much and were dependent on our parents. However, I question whether we needed more than they did. Even if they were not conscious of learning much or needing much from us, they did. And not the least of these needs was needing to be needed, needing to be able to give. All through life a person is engaged in this continuum of differentiation of oneself from the whole, followed by steps toward new integration. Indeed, all evolution can be described as the process of differentiation of the part from the whole, the individual from the mass, with the parts then relating to each other on a higher level. Since the human being, in contrast to a stone or a chemical compound, can fulfill one’s individuality only by conscious and responsible choice, one must become a psychological and ethical as well as a physical individual. In this forming of self-actualization, the newly formed self is motivated to try out new experiences, to “see what it can do.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Strictly speaking, the process of being born from the womb, cutting free from the mass, replacing dependency with choice, is involved in every decision of one’s life, and even is the issue facing one on one’s deathbed. For what is the capacity to die courageously expect the ultimate step in the continuum of learning to be on one’s own, to leave the whole? Thus every person’s life could be portrayed by a graph of differentiation—how far has one freed oneself from automatic dependencies, become an individual, able then to relate to one’s fellows on the new level of self-chosen love, responsibility and creative work? The baby becomes a physical individual when the umbilical cord is severed at one’s birth, but unless the psychological umbilical cord is also in due time cut, one remains like a toddler bound to a hemlock stake in one’s parents’ front yard. He can go no farther than the length of his tethered rope. His development is blocked, and the surrendered freedom for growth turns inward and festers in resentment and anger. These are the people who, though they may seem to get along tolerably well within the ranger of the toddler’s rope, are greatly upset when they confront marriage, or when they go off to work or eventually face death. In ever crisis they tend figuratively or literally to go back to mother. As one young husband put it, “I cannot love my wife enough because I love my mother too much.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

The young husband’s only error was in using the word “love” for his relation to his mother. Real love is expansive and never excludes loving others: it is only being tied to the mother which is exclusive and blocks one’s loving one’s wife. In our time the tendency to remain enchained is particularly strong, since when a society is so disrupted that it is no longer a “mother” in the sense of giving the individual minimal consistent support, he tends to cling much more closely to the physical mother of his childhood. There was once this gifted man of thirty and he was troubled with homosexual feelings, lack of any pleasurably feelings toward women but very great fears of them at the same time. He avoided intimacy with anyone, and also he was blocked in his completion of his doctoral dissertation for his graduate degree. An only child, he had developed a contempt for his father, who was weak and under the mother’s domination. The mother had often belittled the father in the boy’s presence; he once overheard her saying to the other in an argument, “You are worth more to us dead than alive, but you have always been a coward and you are afraid to take your own life.” The boy has been dressed carefully by his mother when he went to school, was not able to fight, and his mother would come to school when necessary to protect him from the rougher boys. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

When at school, the mother would intimately confide in the boy at length, telling him how much she suffered with the father, and required him to help her with her hair and make-up functions, a practice he did not enjoy. Even in college days when he returned for vacation he would be paralyzed with anxiety when hearing his mother coming up the stairs at night for fear she would come into his room when he was undressed. She had carried on an extramarital affair rather openly when he was a boy, which upset him greatly, and, as often happens in such situations, it made him much more jealous of her attentions. Later on in adolescence she tried to block his meeting girls but when he dated anyway, she endeavored to make dates for him with girls whose families could enhance her social position. When he was a boy, much was made of his piano playing and recitations in school and Sunday school. One time he greatly embarrassed his parents at Sunday-school exercises by being unable to recite the commandment “Honor thy mother and father”; and when his mother would have him play the piano at ladies’ meetings, he would forget the piece no matter how well he had known it beforehand. He was a very bright boy and had many successes in school and later gained some prestige in the armed forces, but these were treated by his mother as ways of enhancing her own prestige in the community. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The reader has no doubt already noticed that his blockage in completing his doctoral work had much in common with his forgetting the piano solo; both were rebellions against his mother’s exploitation of his success. For one way to defend yourself against someone’s exploiting your success is to accomplish nothing which the other could take away. The mother’s frequent letters to him at the time of his therapy were long complaints and descriptions of her minor heart attacks, together with outright requests that he come home and take responsibility for her and hints that she would have another attack if he did not show more interest. The problems of this young man, which we have described in a somewhat oversimplified way, are in several ways typical of many young men in our society. First, he suffered from lack of feeling, confusion of his role in pleasure of the flesh and a lack of potency—both for passionate adult intimacy and in his work. A second relatively typical aspect is the family pattern. It will be noted that this family is significantly different from the patriarchal families which Dr. Freud had in mind when he first formulated his Oedipus doctrine. In our young man’s family the mother was the dominating figure, the father was weak and pictured as somewhat contemptible to the son. Another aspect is the boy had been favored by the mother, made prince consort and placed in the father’s position, this preferential treatment to continue so long as the boy pleased the mother. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

However, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” The young man derived no real sense of security and power from his position on the throne, for he was there not because of his own strength but as a puppet of the mother. The classical Oedipus portrait is present in this case, to be sure, but with important differences: the boy is deathly afraid of castration (losing his power), but it is the mother who castrates him, not the father. The father is not much of a rival—the mother has seen to that. The son has had no figure of masculine strength to identify with, so he lacks that normal source of the experience of power for a growing boy. So, this is not really a classical Oedipus case, it seems to be one that the mother has tried to manufacture possible to make her son a homosexual. As a substitute for this lack of power he has only his mother’s adulation, pampering and domineering attention. As would be expected, such a young man had frequent dreams of being literally a prince. His narcissism was very great, for it had to compensate for his actual, inner feeling that he was almost completely powerless. He could rebel a little against his mother by not accomplishing things and by occasional verbal spats, but this was only the passive protest of a slave towards it master. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

It is not in the slightest surprising that this man should be deathly afraid of women; nor is it surprising that he should be in so much inward conflict that he would be able to move ahead in work, love, or any intimacy with person. What is the way out of such a morbid intertwining? Of course a child can temporarily withdraw, seeking to protect oneself from exploitation by making oneself as little as possible, and thus try to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. One young man, looking back on a boyhood in which he was caught in the cross fire between a weak, alcoholic father and a dominating, martyr-type mother described in a poem how he saw himself in those early years, “You stand there by the table, still clutching your teddy bear…making it so small they will fail to find it. Then you are left alone to defend what they did not want—not being able to find it.” Or—and this generally occurs later—he can try to take arms against a sea of troubles, and struggle actively to achieve his freedom as a person in his own right. I wish now to give some examples from psychoanalysis of the problem of intentionality. Take the fascinating instance of a patient who cannot perceive some obvious thing not because anything is wrong with his eyes or his neurological functioning or anything of that sort, but because the intentionality in which he is trapped makes it impossible for him to see. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

A patient of mine presented data the very first session that his mother tried to end her pregnancy with him before he was born, that she then gave him over to a midwife aunt to raise the first two years of his life, after which she left him in an orphan’s home promising to visit him every Sunday, but rarely putting in an appearance. Now if I were to say to him—being naïve enough to think it would do some good—“Your mother hated you,” he would hear the words but they might well have no meaning whatever for him. Sometimes a vivid and impressive thing happens—such a patient cannot even hear the word, such as hate, even though the therapist repeats it. Supposed my patient is a psychologist or psychiatrist. He might then remark, “I realize all of this seems to say my mother did not want me, did not love me, but those are simply foreign words to me.” He is not prevaricating or playing a gam of hide-and-seek with me. It is simply a fact: the patient cannot permit himself to perceive the trauma until he is ready to take a stand toward it. This experience is surely not foreign to anyone: we sense that we shall be fired from our job, that someone we love will die imminently. However, what goes on is a curious inner conversation with ourselves, “I know I will be able to see this later on, but I cannot see it now.” This is simply a way of saying, “I know it is true, but I cannot yet permit myself to see it.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The World can be too overwhelming if we are not able to take a stand toward a traumatic happening but also are unable to escape seeing it. Schizophrenia is one reaction to such a dilemma. Sometimes the therapist makes the mistake of setting out to drum into the patient’s head an obvious truth which the patient has not been able to admit—for example, telling a woman that she does not love her baby. What often happens then is that the patient, is she does not quit therapy, develops some other, probably worse, block between herself and reality. Intentionality presupposes such an intimate relationship with the World that we would not be able to go on existing expect if we could block the World out at times. This should not be called simply by the condemnatory term resistance. I do not doubt the reality of resistance, as Dr. Freud and others elucidated it, but I am emphasizing here a broader, structural phenomenon. That is, every intention is an attention, and attention is I-can. We are, therefore, unable to give attention to something until we are able in some way to experience an “I-can” with regard to it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The same principle is evident, also in exceedingly interesting ways, in memory. Patients often need one or two years of analysis before they can remember some obvious events in their childhood. When they suddenly do recall the event, has their memory gotten better? Of course not. However, what has happened is a change in the patient’s relation to one’s World, generally by way of one’s increased capacity to trust the therapist and, accordingly, oneself, or there is a reduction of one’s neurotic anxiety for other reasons. One’s relation to intentionality—in contrast to one’s mere conscious intention, which was assumedly there to being with—has changed. Memory is a function of intentionality. Memory is like perception in this regard; the patient cannot remember something until one is ready to take some stand toward it. Recovery of childhood memories is not the cause but the result of analysis. All of this hinges on the inseparability of knowing and willing, of cognition and conation, which we see nowhere more clearly than in psychotherapy. Patients some for therapy because they are aware that they cannot actin their lives because they do not know—are not aware of drives from their unconscious, do not know their own mechanisms, have never become conscious of the childhood genesis of these mechanisms, and so on. However, if this is the only approach, the patient will be possessed by the couch for eight or nine years, never acting because one does not yet know enough; and psychoanalysis becomes systematic training in indecision. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

However, it is also an error for therapy to reach in the opposite direction, as several schools have done of late, and insist that the function of the therapist is to clarify reality for the patient and get one to act accordingly. This makes the therapist the psychic police force of the society, whose job is to help the patient conform to the mores of our particular historical period—about which it can only be said that, if they are still viable at all, they are of exceedingly dubious merit. Our only way to avoid both errors is to move the problem to the deeper plane of intentionality. My thesis here is that the function of psychoanalysis should be to push intention toward the deeper, wider, organic dimension of intentionality. Has it not been always the function of psychoanalysis to demonstrate that there is a purely conscious intention, that we—whether we literally are murderers or not—are always pushed by the irrational, soul, dynamic forces of the dark side of life? Deliberation has been dethroned as the motive for actions. Whatever we do, infinitely more than our rational reasons and justification is involved. Psychoanalysis gives the data that makes the necessary distinction, as well as the necessary connection, between intention and intentionality. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

We must now pause to distinguish intentionality from purpose or voluntarism. Intentionality is a form of epistemology, which neither purpose nor voluntarism are. Intentionality involves response, which neither purpose nor voluntarism do. Not solipsistic, intentionality is an assertive response of the person to the structure of one’s World. Intentionality gives the basis which makes purpose and voluntarism possible. A patient’s voluntary intention, so far as one is aware of it, may be to get one’s hours with me on time, to tell me this or that important thing that has happened to one, to relax and be completely honest. However, one’s unconscious intentions, in contrast, my well be to please me by playing the role of the good patient, or to impress me with how brilliant one’s free links are, or to force my unconditioned attention by describing what catastrophic things one may do to oneself and others. Intention is a psychological state; I can set myself voluntarily to do this or that. Intentionality is what underlies both conscious and unconscious intentions. It refers to a state of being and involves, to a greater or lesser degree, the totality of the person’s orientation to the World at that time. And what is most interesting is the times in psychotherapy when strong voluntary intention—correlated with will power—blocks the way to the person’s intentionality, and is just what keep the patient from communicating with the deeper dimensions of one’s experience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Our William James, struggling there in bed with his Victorian will power and remaining paralyzed for as long as he struggled, is an engaging example. And as long as he struggled in that way, we could be sure that he would remain paralyzed. “You should work out your salvation with fear before God, and do not deny the coming of Christ; Contend no more against the Holy Ghost, but you receive it, and take upon you the name of Christ; that you humble yourselves even to the dust, and worship God, in whatsoever place you may be in, in spirit and in truth; and that you live in thanksgiving daily, for the many mercies and blessings which he does bestow upon you. Be watchful unto prayer continually, that you may not be led away by the temptation of the devil, that he may not overpower you, that you may not become his subjects at the last day; for behold, he rewards you no good thing. And now my beloved people, I would exhort you to have patience, and that you bear with all manner of affliction that you do not revile against those who do cast you out because of your exceeding poverty, lest you become sinners like unto them; but that you have patience, and bear with those afflictions, with a firm hope that you shall one day rest from all your afflictions,” reports Alma 34.37-41. Intentionality, as I am using the term, goes below levels of immediate awareness, and includes spontaneous, bodily elements and other dimension which are usually called unconscious. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The fact that intention can reach down to the unconscious has beneficial as well as negative implications. For example, my intention at this moment is to put these ideas, which seem important to me, into readable form and to finish this essay in the not-too-distant future. However, unless I am participating in an intentionality which is more than that—for instance, unless I am committed to writing as good and true an essay as I can—I shall accomplish only a pedestrian job. I shall produce nothing of genuine significance or originality. For in my pressure to get the assignment done, I will be blocking off new ideas which might well up in me, new insights and forms emerging from the preconscious and unconscious dimensions of experience. Intention goes with conscious purpose. However, the gift of psychoanalysis is the depth dimension, a contribution which vastly enlarges intention, and indeed pushed it from a conscious purpose to the more total, organic, feeling and wishing mortal, the mortal who is the product of one’s past as well as moving toward the future. Psychoanalysis will not let intention rest as simple intention, but pushes it to the deeper, wider, organic plane of intentionality. “You cannot hide your crimes from God; and except you repent they will stand as a testimony against you at the last day. Repent and forsake your sins, and go no more after the lusts of your eyes,” reports Alma 39.8-9. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

We have said that intentionality gives the underlying structure for wishing and willing. Speaking psychoanalytically, intentionality gives the structure within which repression and the blocking off of conscious intention takes place. Dr. Freud made it undeniably clear, in his use of free association, that associations which seem merely random are not at all random. In free association, the thoughts and memories and fantasies take their form, their pattern, their meaningful theme (which the patient, or any one of us engaging in free association not on the couch but in normal thinking and creativity, may not at all catch at the moment) from the fact that they are his fantasies, his manifestations, coming out of his way of perceiving the World and his commitments and problems. It is only afterwards that the person himself can see and absorb the meaning that has been in these apparently random, disconnected things he is say. Free association is a technique of going beyond mere conscious intention and giving oneself over to the realm of intentionality. It is in the basic, more inclusive realm of intentionality that these deeper meanings lie; but it is also here where we find the patient’s reasons for his repression in the first place. I believe that the long-run impact of Dr. Freud and psychoanalysis will be to deepen and enlarge our understanding of intentionality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The report of my death is grossly exaggerated. After each of these death-notices, psychoanalysis has gained new followers and co-workers and had created for itself new organs. Surely to be reported dead is an advance over being treated with dead silences! The motive for the circumstances is already there, a few investigators who, without being physicians, have made the application of psychoanalysis to the mental sciences their lifework. This hint began those investigations about myths. And naturally, opposition was not lacking from those who are not acquainted with analysis, and expressed itself with the same lack of understanding and passionate rejection as on the native soil of psychoanalysis. It never occurred to some to rail against a few unworthy individuals, fortune hunters and plunders, such as in time of war are always found on both sides. For I knew how to account for the behavior of these opponents and had besides discovered that psychoanalysis brings light to the worst in every mortal. I sang the song of the tall ones, the long-extinct ones, come again to form a colony, lost somewhere in the modern World. Gentle beings, out of time, out of place, and maybe out of luck. And of such tragic important to my fledgling and her human kindred. Do not make me say so much that other immortals might gather up my intent and use it to bad ends. Envision bowers of love, places of Divine safety foreordained beyond Good and Evil, where coveted one’s can dwell. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

Now a miracle had happened. He did not need to know who had worked the miracle. Having knowledge is taking and keeping possession of available knowledge (information); knowing is a functional and serves only as a means in the process of productive thinking. Our understanding of the quality of knowing in the being mode of existence can be enhances by the insights of as the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, Mater Eckhart, Dr. Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Paul Tillich, Erich Fromm, John H. Brennecke and Robert G. Amick. In their view, knowing begins with awareness of the deceptiveness of our common-sense perceptions, in the sense that our picture of physical reality does not correspond to what is really real and, mainly in the sense that most people are half-awake, half-dreaming, and are unaware that most of what they hold to be true and self-evident is illusion produced by the suggestive influence of the social World in which they live. Knowing, then, begins wit the shattering of illusions, with disillusionment (Ent-tauschung). Knowing means to penetrate through the surface, in order to arrive at the roots, and hence the causes; knowing means to see reality in its genuine form. Knowing does not mean to be in possession of the truth; it means to penetrate the surface and to strive critically and actively in order to approach the truth every more closely. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

However, it is helpful to dream sometimes, and, if nothing else, it can be enjoyable. Who knows what creative processes such dreaming can trigger in you who may be theorists and psychologists tomorrow? One community relations expert we know says that of the thousands of problems he encounters in his work, eighty percent of the problems are in human relations. So we have not wasted your time or ours in laying these problems out and in exploring ways in which you can find your own part in the problems and the solutions. If we want to understand the dark forces within ourselves, we must give up the haughty idea that we are unique in all creation. This creative penetration is expressed in the Hebrew prophets appeal to the people to wake up and know that their idols are nothing but the work of their own hands, are illusions. Jesus declares, “The truth shall make you free!” Master Eckhart expressed his concept of knowing many times; for instance, when speaking of God he says: “Knowledge is not disinterested and runs naked to God, until it touches him and grasps him. (“Nakedness and “naked” are temporary, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing.) According to Marx, one needs to destroy illusion in order to create the conditions that make illusions in order to create the conditions that make illusions unnecessary. Dr. Freud’s concept of self-knowledge is based on the idea of destroying illusions (“rationalizations”) in order to become aware of the unconscious reality. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

All the Enlightened thinkers, Dr. Freud can be called a revolutionary thinker, were concerned with human salvation; they were all critical of socially accepted thought patterns. To them the aim of knowing is not the certainty of absolute truth, something one can feel secure with, but the self-affirmation process of human reason. Ignorance, for the one who knows, is as good as knowledge, since both are part of the process of knowing, even though ignorance of this kind is different from the ignorance of the unthinking. Optimum knowledge in the being mode is to know more deeply. In the having mode it is to have more knowledge. Our education generally tries to train people to have knowledge as a possession, by and large commensurate with the amount of property or social prestige they are likely to have in later life. The minimum they receive is the amount they will need in order to function proper in their work. In addition they are each given a luxury-knowledge package to enhance their feeling of worth, with the size of each such package being in accord with the person’s probable social prestige. #RandolphHarris 2.1 of 20

The school are the factories in which these overall knowledge packages are produced—although schools usually claim they mean to being the students in touch with the highest achievements of the human mind. Many undergraduate colleges are particularly adroit in nurturing these illusions. Form Indian thought and art to existentialism and surrealism, a vast smorgasbord of knowledge is offered from which students pick a little here, a little there, and in the name of spontaneity and freedom are not urges to concentrate on one subject, not even ever to finish reading an entire book. These facts we mentioned may arise in the reader’s mind in questions like these: “Ought we not to try to forget ourselves? Does not consciousness of one’s self make one self-conscious in the sense of being shy, embarrassed and socially inhibited?” Some questioners would no doubt mention the famous centipede, who came to grief because of too much thinking which leg came after which, and so lay distracted in the ditch. The moral of the centipede, obviously is see what happens to you if you get too conscious of what you are doing. Before answering these objections we must point out how unfortunate it is that self-consciousness is identified in this country with morbid introspection, shyness and embarrassment. Naturally, the last thing in the World anyone would want, then, to be is self-conscious. However, our language plays tricks on us. The German language is more accurate in this regard: the word for self-consciousness also means self-confident, which is as it should be. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

An example will make clear that what we are talking about is just the opposite to shyness, embarrassment and morbid introversion. A young man came for psychotherapy because, though he was intellectually very competent and seemed superficially to be very successful, his spontaneity was almost completely blocked. He could not love anyone and he got no real enjoyment from human companionship. These problems were accompanied by a good deal of anxiety and recurrent depressions. It had always been his habit to stand outside himself, looking at himself, never letting himself go, until the self-concern became exceedingly painful. In listening to music, he was so concerned with how well he was listening that he would not hear the music. Even in pleasures of the flesh, it was as though he were standing outside, watching himself and asking, “How am I doing?” As could be imagined, this put quite a crimp in his style. He was afraid, when he entered psychotherapy and discovered that he would have to become more aware of what was going on within himself, that he would become more self-conscious and therefore his problems would become worse. He was the only child of anxious parents who had very much overprotected him, never going out at night, for example, because of their hesitancy to leave him alone. Though the parents were ostensibly liberal and rational in all dealings with the son, he could never remember in all his childhood that he every once talked back to them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The parents would brag about their son’s achievement in school to relatives, cutting clippings about his successes from the papers and taking pride in the fact that he was brighter than his cousins: but they rarely expressed real appreciation directly to him. Thus already as a child he was unable to develop a feeling of his own independent power and worth, and used as a substitute an overconcern for the praise which came, at least indirectly, from winning prizes in school. Add to this that we spent his early teens in Hitler Germany, where he was exposed continuously to propaganda about his supposed worthlessness as a Jewish person. Thus his standing off and continually looking at himself as an adult was like counting to cut clippers from the paper, judging and measuring himself, trying to prove to himself that the Nazis were not right, and trying to get genuine affirmation of himself as a person from his parents. This case is very much oversimplified, to be sure. We wish only to illustrate that this person’s morbid self-consciousness and his inability to be spontaneous and wholehearted were connected precisely with the lack of consciousness of himself, precisely the lack of the experience that he was the acting “I.” To be merely an observer of one’s self. The famous centipede is generally a renationalization used by those who do not wish to go through the difficult process of enlarging consciousness of themselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Furthermore, the centipede story is not an accurate fable. The less aware you are of how to drive a car, for example, or of the traffic conditions you are driving through, the more tense you are and the firmer hold you have to keep on yourself. However, on the other hand the more experienced you are as a driver and the more conscious you are of the traffic problems and what to do in emergencies, the more you can relax at the wheel with a sense of power. You have the awareness that it is you who are doing the driving, you are in control. Consciousness of self actually expands our control of our lives, and with that expanded power comes the capacity to let ourselves go. This truth behind the seeming paradox, that the more consciousness of one’s self one has, the more spontaneous and creative one can be at the same time. To be sure, the advice to forget the childish self, the infantile self, is good advice. However, it rarely does any good. It is true, furthermore, that one does in one sense forget one’s self in creative activity. When we consider the terms will power and free will they are dubious, to say the least, and perhaps no longer even helpful if they were available. Will power expressed the arrogant efforts of Victorian mortals to manipulate their surroundings and to rule nature with an iron hand, as well as to manipulate oneself, rule one’s own life in the same way as one would an object. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

The kind of will that is used as an element of control was set over against wish and used as a faculty by which wish could be denied. Victorian mortals sought, as Ernest Schachtel has put it, to deny that he ever been a child, to repress his irrational tendencies and so-called infantile wishes as unacceptable to his image of himself as a grown-up and responsible man. Will power, then, was a way of avoiding awareness of bodily and urges of pleasures of the flesh and of hostile impulses which did not fit the picture of the controlled, well-managed self. I have not infrequently observed in patients that the emphasis on will power is a reaction formation against their own repressed passive desires, a way of fighting off their wishes to be taken care of; and the likelihood is that this mechanism had much to do with the form that will took in Victorianism. Will was used to deny wish. Speaking in clinical terms, this process results in a greater and greater emotional void, a progressive emptying of inner contents. This impoverishes imagination and intellectual experience as well; it stultifies and suffocates longings and yearnings as well as wishes. No one needs to remind us of the great stores of resentment, inhibition, hostility, self-rejection, and related clinical symptoms which can develop as a result of this repressive kind of will power. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

A woman in her late twenties—since we shall refer back to her, we shall give her a name, Victoria Grayson—informed me at the beginning of her therapeutic treatment that her motto had always been, “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” This motto seemed to fit her executive job, which required a lot of routine as well as serious decision, and her respectable New England background in a typically upper middle-class family. She gave the impression at first of being a strong-willed person. The only trouble was that one of her most pronounced symptoms was compulsive, promiscuous pleasures of the flesh; she seemed incapable of saying no. Whatever the cause, this symptom—no doubt assisted by the fact that she was a pretty girl—was directly contradictory to her will power, as she could easily see. She would also wolf down food, occasionally eating everything like it was an eating competition, paying the price of a stomach ache and later struggling to diet to keep her figure. Her job revealed similarly driven patterns—she would work for fourteen hours at a stretch but never seem any farther ahead. It soon came out, with a good deal of painful weeping, that, despite her superficial social success, she was a profoundly lonely and isolated person. She talked of longings for her mother expressed in the half-fantasy, half-memory of sitting with her in the Sun when she was a little girl, and a recurrent dream of wanting to be encircled again by waves of the ocean. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Victoria dreamt that she went home and knocked on the door, but her mother, on opening the door, did not recognize her and closed the door in her face. The historical fact was that her mother had suffered a serious depression and had been hospitalized in mental institutions for a good deal of the several years after the girl’s birth. So what we see in our patient is a lonely, pathetic infant, overcome with longing for what she never had. It seemed clear that the great stress of will power was a frantic reaction formation, a desperate endeavor to compensate for the symptoms of her unfulfilled infantile needs, a strategy of living on despite these painful early longings. It is not surprising—such is the irony and balance of the complex processes of human consciousness—that her symptoms were of the compulsive, driven type. This is precisely will gone awry; will turned self-destructive, directed against the person herself. Life is saying to her—if we may put it figuratively, in terms of her motto—where there are such longings and unfulfilled needs, will is exactly not the way. We note, furthermore, that her problem was not mere defiance of her parents, as we normally see it in adolescent behavior. That would show the will still present and active, though negative, and a situation not too difficult to deal with. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Our patient’s problem was more serious—an emptiness, a vacuity, a longing to fill something which from infancy had always been empty. This kind of pattern can lead to critical problems of apathy if the will breaks down before the dependent longings have been brought to consciousness and to some degree integrated. The early trauma taught Victorian as an infant that she must renounce her wishes, for they carried a degree of despair which would have probably sent her into psychosis. Will power was the means by which she accomplished this. However, the neurosis then takes revenge exactly in the area in which the problem originated. Whatever theory of personality we used to understand or explain who we are, we need some understanding of how important our assumptions are. Each of us does have a personality theory, or our own individual philosophy of life. How we think of ourselves, other people, and life in general are the bases for our own personal or intrinsic (inner means, within, or essential) personality theories or self-concepts. “What do you want out of life?” If you have strong, beneficial feelings about yourself, you may answer that you want (and deserve) a good marriage or love relationship, a satisfying occupation, a feeling of freedom—whatever you think of as the highest good for you. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

On the other hand, if you have a poorly developed, negative, or inferior self-concept, as Victoria had developed, you may expect very little for yourself. You may settle for second- or third-best, for instance, hoping that you can just get some sort of job or find someone who cares about you a little. You would not dare to hope you could choose a job or person you really love. As you already can see, parents have the initial and probably the strongest influence on the development of a child’s self-concept. Most psychologists think the first give years of life—when children are influenced almost exclusively by their families—are the most critical for the development of self-concept. If children are encouraged by their parents and helped to gain a feeling of self-worth, dignity, and respect, children will, generally speaking, grow up to be adults with beneficial self-concepts. Children whose parents call them stupid, no good, or delinquent—or act as if they were those thing (which produces the same effect)—may grow up to feel worthless. This effect can be overcome only through positive feedback from other people. Feedback refers to what other people say to you, how they act toward you (or ignore you)—all kinds of interaction that lets you know how they feel about you. Feedback can be either beneficial or negative. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

When people are expected to behave in specific ways or are told that they are stupid or bright or ugly or lovable, they often begin to act in these ways. This is called a self-fulfilling prophecy. These expectations may come from parents and other authority figures, but they can come from peers. In childhood, and especially in adolescence, peer pressure and peer evaluation become very important. It would be better to take words like stupid and dumb or mark and fairy out of the vocabulary you use with any child. In our culture, which places a premium on intelligence, a person who is called stupid often enough is very unlikely to take risks or do anything challenging. (“Why try? I’m cursed. I’m so dumb I can’t do it. I’m nobody.”) Often students who do not speak out in class fear that what they have to say may sound stupid, and the instructor and other students may laugh at or ridicule them. So these students sit, mute, in class and fearing the entire time the teacher will call on them. They are so scared that they are not even absorbing the enrichment material. We adults destroy most of the intellectual and creative capacity of children by the things we do to them or make them do. We destroy this capacity above all by making them afraid, afraid of not doing what other people want, of not pleasing, of making mistakes, of failing, of being wrong. Therefore, we our children have passions, we should encourage them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

On an episode of American Housewife, Katie Otto is not supportive of her son, Oliver Otto’s decision to go to dance school. And since Oliver is a minor, Katie will not sign his permission slip to allow him to enroll in his special school. Oliver starts acting our because he feels his mother is repressing his talent. However, when Katie goes to her son’s school to pick him up, she sees him doing ballet and how well he is at it and decided to let him go to the school of his dreams. In the past, parent-modeling was an even stronger influence than it is today—to the extent that a boy whose father was a doctor expected to go to the same medical school and perhaps even take over his father’s practice. Even though this is no longer so true, most people today receive strong parental messages about which jobs are acceptable and which are not. This can work in either of two ways. A young adult may select a job or profession from among those which are at least similar to his or her parents’ (a girl whose mother is a doctor may feel she also should enter some profession rather than be a sale or factory workers). Or, if a strong enough break has occurred between parents and young adult, it may be important to the child to find a job that is opposite in type from his or her parents’. Still many people are just happy that their children are working. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

God does not always take us ahead in normal increments. There are time where God takes us little by little. We have to be faithful day in and day out, but when you experience a miraculous blessing, incredible power is released due to your faith. Obviously, of the meaning of faith is misunderstood, faith and reason exclude each other. If, however, faith is understood as the state of being ultimately concerned, no conflict exists. All spiritual elements of humans, in spite of their distinct character, are within each other. This is true also of faith and reason. Therefore, it is not enough to asset that the state of being ultimately concerned is in no conflict with the rational structure of the human mind. One also must show their actual relationship, namely, the way in which they lie within each other. In which sense, one must ask first, is the word reason used when confronted with faith? It is meant, as in most periods of Western culture, in the sense of the source of meaning, of structure, of norms and principles? In the first case, reason gives the tools for recognizing and controlling reality, and faith gives the direction in which this control may be exercised. One could call this kind of reason technical reason, providing for means but not for ends. Reason in this sense concerns the daily life of everybody and is the power which determines the technical civilization of out time. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

In the second case, reason is identical with the humanity of mortals in contrast to all other beings. It is the basis of language, of freedom, of creativity. It is involved in the search for knowledge, the experience of art, the actualization of moral commands; it makes a centered personal life and a participation in community possible. If faith were the opposite of reason, it would tend to dehumanize mortals. This consequence has been drawn, theoretically and practically, in religious and political authoritarian systems. A faith which destroys reason abolishes itself and the humanity of mortals. For only a being who has the structure of reason is able to be ultimately concerned, to distinguish ultimate and preliminary concerns, to understand the unconditional commands of the ethical imperative, and to be aware of the presence of the holy. All this is valid only if the second meaning of reason is presupposed: reason as the meaningful structure of mind and reality; and not the first meaning: reason as a technical tool. Reason is the precondition of faith; faith is the act in which reason reaches ecstatically beyond itself. This is the opposite side of their being within each other. Mortal’s reason is finite; it moves within finite relations when dealing with the Universe and with mortals. All cultural activities in which mortals perceives one’s World and those in which one shapes one’s World have this character of finitude. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Therefore, cultural activities are not necessarily matters of infinite concern. However, reason is not bound to its own finitude. It is aware of it and, in so doing, rises above it. Mortals experiences a belonging to the infinite which, however, is neither a part of one’s self nor something in one’s power. It must grasp one, and if it does, it is a matter of infinite concern. Mortals are finite, and mortal’s reason lives in preliminary concerns; but mortals are also aware of one’s potential infinity, and this awareness appears as one’s ultimate concern, as faith. If reason is grasped by an ultimate concern, it is driven beyond itself; but it does not cease to be reason, finite reason. The ecstatic experience of an ultimate concern does not destroy the structure of reason. Ecstasy is fulfilled, not denied, rationality. Reason can be fulfilled only if it is driven beyond the limits of its finite, and experiences the presence of the ultimate, the holy. Without such an experience reason exhausts itself and its finite contents. Finally, it becomes filled with irrational or demonic contents and is destroyed by them. The road leads from reason fulfilled in faith through reason without faith to reason filled wit demonic-destructive faith. The second stage is only a point of transition, since there is no vacuum in the spiritual life, as there is none in nature. Reason is the presupposition of faith, and faith is the fulfillment of reason. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Faith as the state of ultimate concern is reason in ecstasy. There is no conflict between the nature of faith and the nature of reason; they are within each other. On this point theology will ask several questions. It will ask whether the nature of faith is not distorted under the conditions of human existence, for example, if demonic-destructive forces get hold of it—as indicated before. And theology will ask whether the nature of reason is distorted with mortal’s estrangement from one’s self. Finally, it will ask whether the unity of faith and reason and the true nature of both of them must not be re-established by what religion calls revelation. And—theology will continue—if this is the case, is reason in its distorted stage not obliged to subject itself to revelation and is not this subjection to the contents of revelation the true sense of the term faith? The answer to these questions, asked by theology, is the matter of a whole theology itself. It must be acknowledged that mortals are in a state of estrangement from their true nature. Thus the use of their reason and the character of their faith are not what they essentially are and, therefore, ought to be. This leads to actual conflicts between a distorted use of reason and an idolatrous faith. The solution we give with respect to the true nature of faith and the true nature of reason cannot be applied without this fundamental qualification to the actual life of faith and reason under the conditions of human existence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

The consequence of this qualification is that the estrangement of faith and of reason in themselves and in their mutual relationships must be overcome and their mutual relationship must be overcome and their true nature and relation must be established within the actual life. The experience in which this happens is a revelatory experience. The term revelation has been misused so much that it is difficult to use it at all, even more so than the term reason. Revelation is popularly understood as a divine information about divine matters, given to prophets and apostles and dictated by the divine Spirit to the writers of the Bible, or the Koran, or other sacred books. Acceptance of such divine informations, however absurd and irrational they may be, is then called faith. Every word of the present discussion contradicts this distortion of the meaning of revelation. Revelation is first of all the experience in which an ultimate concern grasps the human mind and creates a community in which this concern expresses itself in symbols of action, imagination and thought. Wherever such a revelatory experience occurs, both faith and reason are renewed. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Their internal and mutual conflicts are conquered, and estrangement is replaced by reconciliation. This is what revelation means, or should mean. It is an event in which the ultimate becomes manifest in an ultimate concern, shaking and transforming the given situation in religion and culture. In such an experience no conflict between faith and reason is possible; for it is man’s total structure as a relational being which is grasped and changed by the revelatory manifestation of an ultimate concern. However, revelation is revelation to mortals in their state of corrupted faith and corrupted rationality. And the corruption, although broken in its final power, is conquered but not removed. It enters the new revelatory experience as it has entered the old ones. It makes faith idolatrous, confusing the bearer and the manifestations of the ultimate with the ultimate itself. It deprives reason of its ecstatic power, of its tendency to transcend itself in the direction of the ultimate. In consequence of this dual distortion, it distorts the relation of faith and reason, reducing faith to a preliminary concern which interferes with the preliminary concern which interferes with the preliminary concerns of reason, and elevates reason to ultimacy in spite of its essential finitude. Out of this double corruption there arise new conflicts between faith and reason and with them the quest for a new and superior revelation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The history of faith is a permanent fight with the corruption of faith, and the conflict with reason is one of its most conspicuous symptoms. The decisive battles in this fight are the great revelatory events, and the victorious battle would be a final revelation in which the distortion of faith and reason is definitely overcome. Christianity claims to be based on this revelation. Its claim is exposed to the continuous pragmatic test of history. Jesus Christ is the source of all healing, peace, and eternal progress. Many people have accepted the challenge and been blessed. With the gift of Christ’s Atonement, which includes the gifts of redemption and resurrection, we are able to repent, change, and progress eternally. Because of the power Christ gives us as we are obedient, we are able to become more than we ever could on our own. We may not understand faith completely, but each of us who has felt faith in Christ increase has also received a greater understanding of our divine identity and purpose, leading us to make choices that are consistent with that knowledge. “Never regret. If it is good, it is wonderful. If it is bad, it is experience. I wanted to learn more of love—that is built not on the shifting ands of violent passion but on the steady rock of deep and abiding affection. We are born, we suffer, we love, we die, but the waves continue to beat upon the rocks; the seed time and the harvest come and go, but the Earth remains,” reports Victoria Holt. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20As far as scientists know, small babies have no conscious awareness of “I” or self. During infancy, babies spend most of their rime asleep. They wake when their body needs nourishment; after they are fed, they usually go back to sleep (probably remember what it was like in Heaven). Babies seem to be aware only of their own needs and discomforts and what people want from them, like a smile, but not aware of themselves as independent beings.