If you think that I am going to explain to you how this was done, or anything about it, you are wrong. Psychologists have traditionally been much more interested in psychological illness than in psychological health. Many people focus heavily on mental illness, but few shed light on what a picture of mental health looks like. People do not seem to really be interested of dealing with mental health, but they tend to love to focus on mental illness more. Of course, this greater attention to disease and malfunction is not just an oddity of the psychological profession. Most of us pay little attention to our health when it is good, just as we pay little attention to our automobile as long as it is running well. It is when we are physically ill tat our body comes to our notice, and it is usually when we are a bit upset and anxious that we become self-conscious; wen we are just being our natural self we are in good health mentally. In brief, disease is more vivid and more noticeable than efficient functioning, and consequently has had more scientific attention paid to it. This natural tendency to give more notice to the pathological resulted in a relative neglect in psychological theory of the conditions and characteristics that define psychological health. However, we should also look at the more heroic human reactions to terrible stress and look at the beneficial sides of human nature and the unusual vitality of human beings rather than just focusing on disease. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10

Psychological health has always been defined so negatively, in terms of what is present when health is absent. Clearly ineffective persons usually possess traits which display confusion and uncertainty. However, people who are competent tend to be conscientious, well-behaved, and responsible. Effective subjects are also independent and fair-minded. However, we must avoid any implication that the healthy person psychologically must necessarily be a good person morally. For the most part it is probably a healthy thing to be well behaved, and as a rule we are in better health when we are cool and collected than when we are agitated. However, there are times when it is a sign of greater health to be unruly, and an implication of greater inner resources to be able to upset one’s own balance and to seek a new order of selfhood. The ability to permit oneself to become disorganized is in my judgment quite crucial to the development of a very high level of integration. Because we are capable of reflecting upon ourselves, we are committed, willy-nilly, to an artistic enterprise in the creation of our own personality. By our very nature as intelligent beings, we are compelled to make an image of ourselves which will be coherent and of enduring recognizability, to us and others. One judges the degree of success of this inevitable reflective act by precisely the criteria with which one judges a work of art, or a scientific theory at that level of generality where science and art alike are concerned with problems of universal validities. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10

A person may be said to be most elegant, and most healthy, when one’s awareness includes the broadest possible aspects of human experience, and the deepest possible comprehension of them, while at the same time one is most simple and direct in one’s feelings, thoughts, and actions. Certain fact concerning temporary upset and agitation in especially healthy or potentially healthy persons can this be explained in terms of the creative act necessary in order to achieve integration at the most complex level. A certain amount of discord and disorder must be permitted into the perceptual system if a more complex synthesis is to result. Usually, of course, some discord is brought in by new experiences that are common to all of us. At some time in life there arises also what might he called the crisis in belief, in which it becomes necessary to re-examine the basis of one’s religious or philosophical beliefs, and to come to some sort of explanation for oneself of what the Universe is all about and what life itself signifies. The choice of a life work and the choice of a life mate are two other nearly Universal crises. The more energy a person has at one’s disposal, the more fully will one become committed to the most complex possible integration. In this connection I think it is important to remember that intelligence is a form of energy. The capacity to symbolize, to create a valid image of reality, is the peculiarly human energy, the triumphant form of energy in the living World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10

The image of the self is a complicated pattern, an artistic endeavor, as I have suggested, to which we are committed whether we will or no. In psychological sickness our image of ourself blurs, the colors run, it is not integrated or beautiful.  We become conscious of its existence momentarily, and hence awkwardness ensures. However, in health there is no awkwardness, for the moment of health is the moment of conscious creative synthesis, when without thinking about it at all we know that we make sense to ourselves and to others. In the most elegant cases, this synthesis involves a tremendous interpenetration of symbols, drawn from pleasures of the flesh, our philosophy, and the meaning of our work, with complex overdetermination of actions and feelings which are themselves expressively simple. When such simplicity and complexity has been achieved, I think that two new and mist important affects come into existence in the individual’s experience. One of these is the feeling that one is free and that life and its outcome are in one’s own hands. The other is a new experience of the passage of time, and a deeper sense of relaxed participation in the present moment. All of experience is consequently permanent at the very moment of its occurrence, and life ceases to be a course between birth and death and becomes instead a fully realized experience of change in which every single state is as valid and as necessary as every other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10

It is one of the more puzzling facets of human existence that we often avoid those experiences that we most desire. We long to give and receive expressions of love, but at the critical moment we frequently back away. And in a similar way we frustrate ourselves in many of our strongest desires, such as our wish to be free and spontaneous in our actions. Our avoidance of longed-for experiences is rooted in fear. We are, as we shall see, afraid of freedom, afraid of pleasures of the flesh, and afraid of being ourselves with other people. And the most basic of all these fears is our fear of emotional closeness with others; in a word, live. Most of us would like to find more satisfaction and less frustration in our personal and family lives. If we can become more aware of our fear of love, the role it plays in our loves, and where it came from, this awareness can help us begin to move in that direction where we find more satisfaction in life. If we can discover that our other fears are the handmaidens of our fear of love, adding and abetting our avoidance of the experience of intimacy, it will also help us to return to an equilibrium. At the first glance the idea that we are afraid to love does not seem to make sense. And while it may not be easy to understand it intellectually, it is even more difficult for many of us to become emotionally aware of this fear within us. Yet there seems to be no better explanation for the fact that moments of feeling very close to another person are rare and short-lived. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10

Sometimes the previous warmth may be replaced by emotional distance, and could even appear to have been supplanted by coldness. Why do such experiences occur? The answer appears to be that the experience of love frightens us, even though we may not be aware of our fear. This fear of closeness is felt so intensely and is present in all of us, although some of us are less frightened than others. And if we can become aware of the fear of intimacy within ourselves, a good deal will have been accomplished, for awareness of ourselves and of our fear of love is a step in the direction of emotional health because it opens the door to the possibility of dealing creatively with the fear rather than being blindly enslaved to it. Why does emotion closeness to others frighten us? The explanation is possessed in the fact that caring always involves vulnerability. When we open ourselves and permit another person to know that we love him or her, we risk being hurt. And because we know how it feels to be hurt, this risk is frightening. Everyone has probably experienced feelings similar to those of someone in throes of marital difficulties who declares, “I do not ever want to care for anyone that much again! It just hurts too much.” The vulnerability of the lover is inescapable in every sphere of human relationships. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10

So striking is the relationship between love and vulnerability that it can be stated almost mathematically. The closer we are emotions to another human being and the more openly we express our caring, the more open we are to the possibility of being hurt by that person and the more intensely the hurt will be felt. And it is this possibility that frightens us and keeps us wary about establishing close relationships. The probabilities are that we will experience some of the hurt that we fear when we risk love. If we established significant and close relationships, we will sometimes be disappointed by those we life. If we share confidences, we will sometimes be betrayed. If we count on people, they will sometimes let us down. If we express warmth, others will sometimes seem indifferent or even cold. It works the other way, too, of course. It is inevitable that we will sometimes hurt those who love us, even though we also love them. Sometimes we will be fully aware of what we are doing and yet seem unable to stop ourselves. At other times we will not recognize, at the moment at least, the fact that we are inflicting hurt. What it comes down to is that all of us appear unable to enjoy very long periods of closeness. The vulnerability of it is so frightening that one or the other of us finds some way of interrupting it. At such times it is almost as though at some deep level of our beings we find it necessary to say, “Sooner or later I am going to be hurt by this one whom I love, therefore I must hurt first!” #RandolphHarris 7 of 10

We of course do not mean that hatred or resentment in themselves are good things, or that the mark of the healthy person is how much one hates. Nor do we mean that the goal of development is that everyone hates one’s parents or those in authority. Hatred and resentment are destructive emotions and the sign of maturity is to transform them into constructive emotions. However, the fact that the human being will destroy something—generally in the long run oneself—rather than surrender one’s freedom proves how important freedom is. Because hatred and resentment do not fit the ideal picture of the benign, self-controlled, ever-poised, well-adjusted bourgeois citizen, as a consequence, these emotions are generally repressed. Now it is a well-known psychological tendency that when we repress one attitude or emotion, we often counterbalance it by acting or assuming an attitude on the surface which is just the opposite. You may, for example, often find yourself acting especially politely toward the person you dislike. If you are relatively free from anxiety, you may be saying to yourself in this formal politeness, quoting from St. Paul, I treat my enemy well in order to heap coals of fire on one’s head.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 10

However, if you are a less secure person who has to confront more difficult problems in development, you may try to persuade yourself that you love this very person you hate. It is not unusual that a person who is excessively dependent upon a dominating person or authority figure, for example, will act toward the other as through one loved the individual to cover up one’s hatred. Like a boxer in a clinch, one clings to the very one who is the enemy. In real life one does not get rid of hatred and resentment this way; one generally displaces the emotions on other people, or turns them inward in self-hate. It is thus crucial that we be able to confront our hatred openly. And it is even more essential that we face our resentment, since that is the form hatred generally takes in polite and civilized life. Most people in our society, on looking into themselves, may not be aware of any particular hatred, but they no doubt will find a good deal of resentment. Perhaps the reason that resentment is such a common, chronic corrosive emotion in this age for information of individual competitiveness is that hatred has been so generally suppressed. Furthermore, if we do not confront our hatred and resentment openly, they will tend sooner or later to turn into the one affect which never does anyone any good, namely self-pity. Self-pity is the reserved form of hatred and resentment. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10

One can then nurse one’s hatred, and retain one’s psychological balance by means of feeling sorry for oneself, confronting oneself with the thought of what a tough lot has been one’s, how much one has had to suffer—and refrain from doing anything about it. Many people rebel against the denial of freedom but never can get fully beyond the stage of rebellion. Middle classes are shot through with suppressed resentment, and it emerges indirectly in the form of morals. Resentment is at the core of our morals. Anyone in our day who wishes an illustration of so-called morality motivated by resentment need look no farther than gossip in small town. No one can arrive at real love or morality or freedom until one has frankly confronted and worked through one’s resentment. Hatred and resentment should be used as motivations to re-establish one’s genuine freedom: one will not transform those destructive emotions into constructive ones until one does this. And the first step is to know whom or what one hates. To take, for an example, people under dictatorial government, the first step in their revolt to regain freedom would be their shifting back their hatred to the dictatorial powers themselves. Hatred and resentment temporarily preserve the person’s inner freedom, but sooner or later one must use the hatred to establish one’s freedom and dignity in reality, else one’s hated will destroy oneself. The aim is to hate in order to win the new. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right. We have seen that becoming a person means going through several stages of consciousness of oneself. The first is that of the innocence of the infant before consciousness of self is born. The second is the stage of rebellion, when the person is trying to become free to establish some inner strength in one’s own right. This stage is most clearly seen in the child of two of three or the adolescent, and may involve defiance and hostility. In greater or lesser degree rebellion is a necessary transition as one cuts old ties and seeks to make new ones. However, rebellion is not to be confused with freedom. The third stage we may call the ordinary consciousness of self. In this stage a person can to some extent see one’s errors, make some allowance for one’s prejudices, use one’s guilt feelings and anxiety as experiences to learn from, and make one’s decisions with some responsibility. This is what most people mean when they speak of a healthy state of personality. However, there is a fourth stage of consciousness which is extraordinary in the sense that most individuals experience it only rarely. This stage is most clearly illustrated when one gets a sudden insight into a problem—abruptly, seemingly from nowhere, pops up an answer for which one has struggles in vain for days. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11

Sometimes insights we are struggling for come in dreams, or at moments of reverie when one is thinking about something else: in any case, we know that the answer emerges from what are called subconscious levels in the personality. Such consciousness may occur in scientific, religious or artistic activity alike; it is sometimes popularly called dawning of ideas or inspiration. As all students of creative activity make clear, this level of consciousness is present in all creative work. What shall this level be called? Objective self-consciousness because of the glimpses it affords into objective truth? Or self-surpassing consciousness? Or self-transcending consciousness in the ethical-religious tradition? All of these terms distort as well as clarify. I propose a term which is less dramatic but perhaps, for our day, more satisfactory, creative consciousness of self. The classical psychological term for this awareness is ecstasy. The word literally means to stand outside of oneself, that is, to catch a view of, or experience something, from a perspective outside one’s usual limited viewpoint. Ordinarily what a person sees in the objective World around one is always more or less distorted and clouded by the fact that one sees it subjectively. As human beings, what we see is always through personal eyes, and interpreted by each person through one’s own private World; we see a dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

This fourth level of consciousness cuts below the split between objectivity and subjectivity. Temporarily we can transcend the usual limits of conscious personality. Through what is called insight, or intuition, or the other only vaguely understood processes which are involved in creativity, we may get glimpses of objective truth as it exists in reality, or sense some new ethical possibility in, let us say, an experience of unselfish love. The immediate expression of love is action. Faith implies love and the expression of love is action. The mediating link between faith and works is love. Only God can reunite the estranged with oneself. However, love is an element of faith if faith is understood as ultimate concern. Faith implies love, loves lives in works: in this sense faith is actual in works. Where there is ultimate concern there is the passionate desire to actualize the content of one’s concern. Concern in its very definition includes the desire for action. The kind of action is, of course, dependent on the type of faith. Faith of the ontological type drives toward elevation about the separation of being from being. Faith of the ethical types drives toward transformation of the estranged reality. In both of them love is working. Mystical love united by negation of self. Ethical love is predominantly formative. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11

To be, rather, turned outward means to pierce in imagination beyond what one knows at the moment. Mortals in fulfilling themselves goes through a process of transcending oneself. This is simply one side of the basic characteristics of growing, healthy human being, that from moment to moment one is enlarging one’s awareness of oneself and one’s World. Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself, it is the ultimate power behind faith and love. If all life does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, and human existence is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation. This creative self-consciousness is a stage that most of us achieve only at rare intervals; and none of us, except the satins, religious or secular, and the great creative figures, live very much of our lives on this level. However, it is the level which gives meaning to our actions and experiences on the lesser levels. Many people may have experienced this consciousness in some special moment, let us say, in listening to music, or in some new experience of love or friendship which temporarily takes them out of the usual walled-in routine of the lives. It is as though for a moment one stood on a mountain peak, and viewed one’s life from that wide and unlimited perspective. One gets one’s sense of direction from one’s view from the peak and sketches a mental map which guides one for weeks of a patient plodding up and down the lesser hills when effort is dull and inspiration is conspicuous by its absence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

For the fact that at some instant we have been able to see truth unclouded by our own prejudices, to love other persons without demand for ourselves, and to create in the ecstasy that occurs when we are totally absorbed in what we are doing—the fact that we have has these glimpses gives a basis of meaning and direction for all of our later actions. This fourth level is what is meant in such statements as those in the Bible about losing one’s life for the sake of the values one believes in. Thus it is true that there is a kind of self-forgetting on this level of consciousness. However, the word self-forgetting is a poor term; this consciousness in another sense is the most fulfilled state of human existence. One cannot demand the awareness we are discussing, and as we have said it often occurs in moments of receptivity and relaxation rather than action. Nonetheless the evidence in studies of creative people is that they get their important insights on those particular problems on which they have wrestled with perseverance and diligence, even though insight itself may come at a moment of lull. One cannot command one’s dreams, for example, but one gets fruitful insights from them to the extent that one is actively concerned with doing so, and can train oneself to be vigilant in one’s sensitivity to one’s dreams. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

The person who has creative self-consciousness are disciplined into wholeness, one has created oneself. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that in the whole all is redeemed and affirmed—one does not negate any more. In the having mode, we have to keep in mind the object is not permanent: it can be destroyed, or it can be lost, or it can lose its value. Speaking of having something permanently rests upon the illusion of a permanent and indestructible substance. If I seem to have everything, I have—in reality—nothing, since my having, possessing, controlling an object is only a transitory moment in the process of living. There is no alive relationship between me and what I have. It and I have become things, and I have it, because I have the force to make it mine. However, there is also a reverse relationship: it has me, because my sense of identity, for instance, sanity, rests upon my having it (and as many things as possible). The having mode of existence is not established by an alive, productive process between subject and object; it makes things of both object and subject. The relationship is one of deadness, not aliveness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

Victorian mortals used this will to push down and suppress what one called lower bodily desires. However, one surely cannot be a mortal of decision without taking bodily desires into considerations. Our discussion of which indicates that bodily wished must be brought into integration with will, or else the one will block the other. The body consists of the muscular, neurological, and glandular correlates of intentionality, such as increased adrenalin secretion when we are enraged and want to strike something, increased speed of heart beat when we are anxious and want to run, engorgement of the sexual organs when we are excited by pleasures of the flesh. In therapy, when a patient in a given hour is blocked off from one’s wishes and intentionality in general, a good place to start is for the therapist simply to help the patient become aware of one’s bodily feelings and one’s bodily state at that moment. Many people in the Victorian era were coming to terms with their body from which their culture has alienated them. Each dealt with the body as a tool, an instrument, unaware that this is an expression of the very alienation one sought to overcome. When people are sick, they find their inherited will power may be strangely ineffective. Many find that listening to their body is of critical importance in getting well. When one can be sensitive to their body, heat that is it fatigued and need to rest more, or sense that their body is strong enough to increase exercise, they are more likely to get well. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

 We find awareness of our body blocked off (a state similar to what patients have in analysis when they say they are not with it), several people get worse. This may seem like a poetic and mystical viewpoint for someone seriously ill to be indulged in, but actually it is a hard-rock, empirical issues of whether one will live or die. As far as I can judge, this is true for other patients as well. This bodily awareness sometimes comes spontaneously, but by no means necessarily so. Will is a listening, which brings to mind particularly the listening to the body. In our society, it often requires considerable effort to listen to the body—an effort of sustained openness to whatever cues may come from one’s body. In recent years, the work of the body re-educationalist, the teachers of exercise and of Yoga, have brought out the significant interrelation between the capacity to listen to the body and psychological well-being. The presence of volition is betrayed in the phrases we use, such as I “accept” fatigue, I “agree” to rest, I “consent” to follow my physician’s (or teacher’s) recommendation, I “adopt” a regimen. There is, therefore, a willing which is not merely against bodily desires but with the body, a willing from within; it is willing of participation rather than opposition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

Will moves through desire. The fact that my desires are felt and experiences in my body, with all the glandular changes that go therewith—the fact that they are embodies desires—means that I cannot escape taking some stand in regard to them. That is to say, if I have a wish, I cannot avoid willing about it, even if only to deny that I have the wish. Pure detachment works only if we can disengage our bodies. Hence, the outright denial of awareness of wishes generally involves doing violence to one’s body. My body is an expression par excellence of the fact that I am an individual. Since I am a body, separate from others as an individual entity, I cannot escape putting myself on the line in some way or other—or refusing to put myself on the line, which is the same issue. One may try to conform to someone else psychologically, be an imprint of the other in ideas; but Siamese twins bodily are very rare. The patient who cannot experience oneself as bodily separate from another, say one’s mother, is generally representative of serious pathological illness, often of the schizophrenic kind. The fact that my body is an entity in space, has this motility and this particular relation to space which my movements give it, makes it a living symbol of the fact that I cannot escape in some way or other taking a stand. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11

Will is embodied will. Thus, so many words having to do with will refer to our physical place—taking a position, accepting a viewpoint, choosing an orientation. Or we say, that someone is upright, straight, or the opposite, prone, cringing, ducking, all referring to will and decision as shown through the position of the body. One can never become an individual self so long as one follows the spirit of someone else and goes around, walking crooked; one can achieve some selfhood only when one walks straight through, in the stance of the mortal of single-minded will. Even more interesting is the body as a language of intentionality. It not only expresses intentionality; it communicates it. When a patient comes in the door of my consulting room, intentionality is expressed in one’s way of walking, one’s gestures; does one lean toward me or away? Does one talk with a half-closed mouth; and what does one’s voice say when I stop listening to the words and listen only to the tone? Not only in the therapeutic hour but in real life as well our communication has, much more than we are aware of it, the subtle character of the dance, the meaning communicated by virtue of the forms we continuously create by our bodily movements. You can tell a lot about a person by the flutter of their eyes at moments of fear, in the tremor of their mouth hovering in the verge of crying or smiling, in all these expressions, there is a language which can be more significant, and is surely more eloquent, than most spoken words. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11

Obviously, body language communicates much more than the bright intellectualized talking of the sophisticated patient who chatters for months in order to avoid awareness of one’s own underlying feelings. There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect. “O Lord, wilt thou encircle me around in the robe of thy righteousness! O Lord, wilt thou make my path straight before me! Wilt thou not place a stumbling block in my way—but that thou wouldst clear my way before me, and hedge not up my way, but the ways of mine enemy. O Lord, I have trusted in thee, and I will trust in thee forever. I will not put my trust in the arm of flesh; for I know that cursed is one that putteth one’s trust in a mortal or maketh flesh one’s arm. Yea, I know that God will give liberally to one that asketh. Yea, my God will give me, if I ask not amiss; therefore I will lift up my voice unto thee; yea, I will cry unto thee, my God, the rock of my righteousness. Behold my voice shall forever ascend unto thee, my rock and mine everlasting God. Amen,” reports 2 Nephi 4.33-35. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11

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