One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant people, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The professional actor has a modest say over how the stage is assembled, the props selected, and the other characters positioned, as well as a say over his or her own presence in the play. This is also true in private life. In both cases the person is locus of the acting process. However, something more operates when institutions are involved, for within institutions various elements of acting are taken away from the individual and replaced by institutional mechanisms. The locus of acting, of emotion management, moves up to the level of the institution. Many people and objects, arranged according to institutional rule and custom, together accomplish the act. Companies, prisons, schools, churches—institutions of virtually any sort—assume some of the functions of a director and alter the relation of actor to director. Officials in institutions believe they have done things rights when they have established illusions that foster the desired feelings in workers, when they have placed parameters around a worker’s emotion memories, a worker’s use of the as if. It is not that workers are allowed to see and think as they like and required only to show feeling (surface acting) in institutionally approved ways. The matter would be simpler and less alarming if stopped there. However, it does not. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Some institutions have become very sophisticated in the techniques of deep acting; they suggest how to imagine and thus how to feel. As a farmer puts blinders on his or her workerhorse to guide its vision forward, institutions manage how we feel. We commonly assume that institutions are called in when individual controls fail: those who cannot control their emotions are sent to mental hospitals, homes for disturbed children, or prisons. However, in looking at the matter this way, we may ignore to shape feeling. We might ask instead what sort of church, school, or family influence was unavailable to the parents of institutionalized patients, who presumably tired to make their children into adequate emotion managers. One of the ways we guide visions into progression is by prearranging what is available to the worker’s view. A teaching hospital, for example, designs the stage for medical students facing their first autopsy. Seeing the eye of a dead person might call to mind a loved one or oneself; to see this organ coldly violated by a knife might lead a student to faint, or flee in horror, or quit medicine then and there. However, this seldom happens. The immaculate, brightly lit appearance of the operating room, and the serious professional behavior required, justify and facilitate a clinical and impersonal attitude toward death. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Certain parts of the body are kept covered, particularly the face and genitalia, and the hands, which are so strongly connected with human, personal qualities, are never dissected. Once the vital organs have been taken out, the body is removed from the room, bringing the autopsy down to tissues, which are more easily depersonalized. The deft touch, skill, and professional attitude of the prosector makes the procedure neater and more bloodless than might otherwise be the case, and this increases intellectual interest and makes it possible to approach the whole thing scientifically rather than emotionally. Students appear to avoid talking about the autopsy, and when they do talk about it, the discussion is impersonal and stylized. Finally, whereas in laboratory dissection humor appears to be a widespread and effective emotional control device, it is absent in the autopsy room, perhaps because the death has been too recent and [humor] would appear too insensitive. Covering the corpse’s face and genitalia, avoiding the hands, later removing the body, moving fast, using white uniforms, and talking in uniformed talk—these are customs designed to manage the human feeling that threatens order. Institutions arrange their front stages. They guide the way we see and what we are likely to feel spontaneously. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Consider the inevitable institutional halls, especially those near the areas where people wait. Often in medical, academic, and corporate settings we find on the walls a row of photographs or oil paintings of persons in whom we should have full confidence. In the waiting room of the psychiatrist: With crossed legs you claim repose, tranquility. Everything is under control. With the straight shoulder you say dignity, status. No matter what comes up, this guy has nothing to fear, is calmly certain of his worth and of his ability. With the head turned sharply to the left you indicate that someone is claiming his attention. No doubt hundreds of people would like this guy’s attention. He was engrossed in his book, but now he is being interrupted. And what was he reading? Reader’s Digest? Architectural Digest? The Bible? Oh, no; he is into something heavy. We cannot see the title, but we know it is plenty important. Usually it is Osler’s Principles and Practice of Medicine. And the finger marking his place? Why he is been at it so intently, so diligently, he is already halfway through. And the other hand, lying so lightly, so gracefully, on the book. That shows intelligence, experience, mastery. He is not scratching his head trying to figure out what the hell the author is getting at. Anytime you knock on this guy’s door, you will find him just like that, dressed to the nines, tie up tight in his buttoned-down collar, freshly pressed jacket, deeply immersed in one of these heavy tomes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The professional’s office, of course, should be done in a pleasant but impersonal décor, not too messy and colorful but not too cold and bare; it should reflect just the amount of professional warmth the doctor or lawyer or banker himself or herself ought to show. Home is carefully distinguished from office, personal flair from professional expertise. This stage setting is intended to inspire our confidence that the service is, after all, worth paying a lot for. Airlines seem to model “stage sets” on the living rooms seen on daytime television serials: the Muzak tunes, the TV and movie screens, and the smiling flight attendants serving drinks are all calculated to make you feel at home. Even follow passengers are considered part of the stage. At American Airlines, for example, flight attendants in training are advised that they can prevent the boarding of certain types of passengers who pose a security threat. One’s effect on the emotion memory of other money-paying passengers might he all wrong. Sometimes props are less important than the influential directors. Institutions authorize stage directors to coach the hired cast in deep acting. Buttressed with the authority of a high office or a specialized degree, the director may make suggestions that are often interpreted at lower levels as orders. The director’s role may be simple and direct, as in the case of a group of college students training to be clinicians in a camp for emotionally disturbed children. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
These students, who composed the junior staff, did not know at first how they were supposed to feel or think about the wild behavior of disturbed children. However, in the director’s chair sat the senior counselors, advising them on how to see the children: “They were expected to see the children as victims of uncontrollable impulses somehow related to their harsh and depriving backgrounds, and in need of enormous doses of kindliness and indulgence in order to break down their images of the adult World as hateful and hostile. They were also taught how to feel properly toward them: The clinician must never respond in anger or with intent to punish, although one might sometimes have to restrain or even isolate children in order to prevent them from hurting themselves or one another. Above all, the staff were expected to be warm and loving and always to be governed by a clinical attitude. To be warm and loving toward a child who kicks, screams, and insults you—a child whose problem is unlovability—requires emotion work. The art of it is passed down from senior to junior counselor, as in other settings it passes from judge to law clerk, professor to graduate student, boss to subordinate. The professional worker will implicitly frown on certain uses of emotion memory. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The senior counselor of disturbed children will not allow one’s self to think, “Brett reminds me of a terrible brat I had to babysit when I was thirteen, and if he is like that I will end up hating him.” Instead, one will reconceive Mark in another way: “Brett is really like the other kid I used to babysit when I was fourteen. He was difficult, but I got to like him, so I expect I will get to like Brett despite the way he pushes me away suspiciously.” A proper way to experience the child, not simply a proper way to seem to feel, was understood by everyone as part of the job. And the young caretakers did admirably: To an extraordinary degree they fulfilled these expectations, including, I am convinced, the expectations that they feel sympathy and tenderness and love toward their charges, despite their terrestrial-like behavior. The speed with which these college students learned to behave in this way cannot be easily explained in terms of gradual learning through a slow process of internalization. In more circuitous ways, too, the formal rules that prop up an institution set limits to the emotional possibilities of all concerned. Consider, for example, the rules that guard access to information. Any institution with a bit of hierarchy in it must suppress democracy to some extent and thus must find ways to suppress democracy to some extent and thus must find ways to suppress envy and resentment at the bottom. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Often envy is suppressed by enforcing a hierarchy of secrets. The customary rule of secrecy about pay is a case in point: those at the bottom are almost never allowed to know how much money those at the top get each month, nor, to the fullest extent, what privileges they enjoy. Also kept secret are deliberations that determine when and to what level an individual is likely to rise or fall within the organization. As one University of California administrative memorandum explained: “Letters concerning the disposition of tenure review cases will be kept confidential, in order that those involved not hold grudges or otherwise harbor resentment toward those unfavorably disposed in their case.” In this situation, where the top depends upon being protected from the middle and the bottom—from those involved as the memo put it—leaks can cause panic. Finally, drugs of various sorts can be used to stimulate or depress mood, and companies are not above engineering their use. Just as the plow displaced manual labor, in some reported instances drug use seems to be displacing emotion labor. The labor that it takes to withstand stress and boredom on the job can be performed, some workers have found, by Darvon and Valium. Workers at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, for example, found that nurses in its medical department used to give out Valium, Darvon, codeine, and other drugs for free and without prescription. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
There are a number of ways, some of them company-sponsored, to “have a nice day” on the job, as part of the job. The stage actor makes the finding and expressing of feeling one’s main professional task. In Stanislavski’s analogy, he seeks it with the dedication of a prospector for precious metal. He comes to see feeling as the object of painstaking internal mining, and when he finds it, he processes it like gold. In the context of the theater, this use of feeling is considered exciting and honorable. However, what happens when deep and surface acting become part of a day’s work, part of what we sell to an employer in return for a day’s wage? What happens when our feelings are processed like raw ore? A lot of people who deal with others, especially when dealing with customers, engage in some acting. If a worker pretends he or she is feeling really up, sometimes they actually get into it. The customer will then respond to the individual as though he or she were really friendly, and then more of the employee responds back [surface acting]. Sometimes one will purposely take some deep breathes. Try to relax one’s neck muscles [deep acting with the body]. One may just talk to one’s self: “Watch it. Do not let him get to you. Do not let him get to you. Do not let him get to you.” And then one will talk to one’s partner and she will say the same thing to one. After a while, the anger foes away [deep acting, self-[prompting]. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
One has to try to remember if a customer is drinking too much, he or she is probably scared of something. It might help to think to yourself, “he’s a little child.” Really, that is what he is. And when you see him that way, you will not get mad that the customer is yelling at you. He is like a child yelling at you. [deep acting, Method acting]. Surface and deep acting in a commercial setting, unlike acting in a dramatic, private, or therapeutic context, make one’s face and one’s feelings take on the properties of a resource. However, it is not a resource to be used for the purpose of art, as in drama, or for the purposes of self-discovery, as in therapy, or for the pursuit of fulfillment, as in everyday life. It is a resource to be used to make money. Outside of Stanislavski’s parlor, out there in the American marketplace, the actor may wake up to find oneself actually operated upon. In spite of—or perhaps because of—the fact that instinctivists and behaviorists share certain similarities in their respective pictures of humans and their philosophical orientation, they have fought each other with a remarkable fanaticism. Nature or nurture, instinct or environment became flags around which each side rallied, refusing to see any common ground. In recent years there has been a growing tendency to overcome the sharp alternatives of the instinctivist-behaviorist war. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
One solution to the instinctivist-behaviorist war is to change the terminology; some tended to reserve the term “instinct” for the lower animals and to speak instead of “organic drives” when discussing human motivations. In this way some developed such formulations as “most of Human’s behavior is learned, whereas mist of a bird’s behavior is not learned.” This latter formulation is characteristic of the new trend to replace the old “either/or” by a “more-or-less” formulation, thus taking account of gradual change in the weight of the respective factors. The model for this view is a continuum, on the one end of which is (almost) complete innate determination, on the other end (almost) complete learning. Perhaps a more serious weakness in the present psychological handling of instinct is possessed in the assumption that a two-class system is adequate for the classification of complex behavior. The implication that all behavior must be determined by learning or by heredity, neither of which is more than partially understood, is entirely unjustified. The final form of any response is affected by a multiplicity of variables, only two of which are genetical and experiential factors. It is to the identification and analysis of all these factors that psychology should address itself. When this task is properly conceived and executed there will be no need nor reason for ambiguous concepts of instinctive behavior. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Because learning plays a more important role in the behavior of higher than in the behavior of lower forms, the natively determined behavior pattern of higher forms become much more extensively modified by experience than those of lower forms. It is through such modification that the animal may become adjusted to different environments and escape from the narrow bounds the optimum condition imposes. Higher forms are therefore less dependent upon specific external environmental conditions for survival than are lower forms. Because of the interaction of acquired and innate factors in behavior it is impossible to classify many behavior patterns. Each type of behavior must be separately investigated. Yet, there are more important problems from the standpoint of this study and that is the difference between organic drives (food, fight, flight, sexuality—formerly called instincts), whose function it is to guarantee the survival of the individual and the species, and nonorganic drives (character-rooted passions), which are not phylogenetically programmed and are not common to all beings: the desire for love and freedom; destructiveness, narcissism, sadism, masochism. Often these nonorganized drives that form being’s second nature are confused with organic drives. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
A case and point is the sexual drive. It is a psychoanalytically well-established observation that often the intensity of what is subjectively felt as sexual desire (including its corresponding physiological manifestations) is due to nonsexual passions such as narcissism, sadism, masochism, the wish for power, and even anxiety, loneliness, and boredom. For a narcissistic male, for instance, the sight of a woman may be sexually exciting because he is excited by the possibility of proving to himself how attractive he is. Or a sadistic person may be sexually excited by the chance to conquer a woman (or as the case may be, a man) and to control her or him. Many people are bound for years to each other emotionally just by this motive, especially when the sadism of one fits the masochism of the other. It is rather well known that fame, power, and wealthy makes is possessor sexually attractive if certain physical conditions are present. In all these instances, the physical desire is mobilized by nonsexual passions which thus find their satisfaction. Indeed, it is anybody’s guess how many children owe their existence to vanity, sadism, and masochism, rather than to genuine physical attraction, not to speak of love. However, people, especially men, prefer to think that they are “oversexed” rather than that they are “overvain.” The same phenomenon has been clinically studied minutely in cases of compulsive eating. This symptom is not motivated by physiological but by psychic hunger, engendered by the feeling of being depressed, anxious, empty. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Therefore, destructiveness and cruelty are not instinctual drives, but passions rooted in the total existence of humans. They are one of the ways to make sense of life; they are not and could not be present in the animal, because they are by their very natures rooted in the human condition. The main error many instinctivists have made is that they have confused the two kinds of drives, those rooted in instinct, and those rooted in character. A sadistic person who waits for the occasion, as it were, to express one’s sadism, looks as if he or she fitted the hydraulic model of a dammed-up instinct. However, only people with a sadistic character wait for the opportunity to behave sadistically, just as people with a loving character wait for the right opportunity to express their love. imagine an absolutely material World, containing only physical and chemical fact, and existing from eternity without a God, without even an interested spectator: would there by any sense in saying of that World that one of its states is better than another? Or if there were two Worlds possible, would there be any rhyme or reason in calling one good and the other bad—good or bad absolutely, I mean, and apart from the fact that one might relate itself better than the other to the philosopher’s private interests? However, we must leave these private interests out of the account, for the philosopher is a mental fact, and we are asking whether goods and evils and obligations exist in physical facts per se. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Surely there is no status for good and evil to exist in, in a purely insentient World. How can one physical fact, considered simply as a physical fact, be better than another? Betterness is not a physical relation. It its mere material capacity, a thing can no more be good or bad than it can be pleasant of painful. Good for what? Good for the production of another physical fact, do you say? But what in a purely physical Universe demands the production of that other fact? Physical facts simple are or are not; and neither when present or absent, can they be supposed to make demands. If they do, they can only do so by having desires; and then they have ceased to be purely physical facts, and have become facts of conscious sensibility. Goodness, badness, and obligation must be realized somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic nature of things can realize them. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no World composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a World to which ethical propositions apply. The moment one sentient being, however, is made a part of the Universe, there is a chance for goods and evils really to exist. Moral relations now have their status, in that being’s consciousness. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
So far as one feels anything to be good, one makes it good. It is good, for one; and being good for one, is absolutely good, for one is the sole creator of values in that Universe, and outside of one’s opinion, things have no moral character at all. In such a Universe as that it would of course be absurd to raise the question of whether the solitary thinker’s judgments of good and ill are true or not. Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker to which one must confirm; but here the thinker is a sort of divinity, subject to no higher judge. Let us call the supposed Universe which one inhabits a moral solitude. In such a moral solitude it is clear that there can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble the god-like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of one’s own several ideals with one another. Some of these will no doubt be more pungent and appealing than the rest, their goodness will have a profounder, more penetrating taste; they will return to haunt one with more obstinate regrets if violated. So the thinker will have to order one’s life with them as its chief determinants, or else remain inwardly discordant and unhappy. Into whatever equilibrium one may settle, though, and however one may straighten out one’s system, it will be a right system; for beyond the facts of one’s own subjectivity there is nothing moral in the World. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The enlightened being can condemn nobody, can regard none as outside one’s range of compassion, and can find a place in one’s heart for the worst sinner. One knows that duality is but a dream and discovers oneself anew in all sentient creatures. One knows that the World’s woe arises out of its false and fictitious sense of separateness. One receives too many confidences ever to be surprised by any of them, too many confessions ever to be shocked. However, even if one had never heard or read a single one, one would receive them just as calmly. For one’s compassions and insight, one’s tolerance and realism embrace the whole range of human feeling or human behavior. One is always oneself, without pose, without pretense, and without self-consciousness. It is not the studied poise of good breeding but a natural poise upwelling from within. One’s uniqueness extends through body, feelings, thoughts, character, outlook—it is total. The ordinary being see only one’s personal objective, but the illumined being sees simultaneously both the objective and the person pursuing it. One’s silence bravely takes its stand on the fact that truth is a reality, is a power, is invincible. One knows the proper value to stamp on fame, position, and wealth, and the proper place to assign them. One neither rejects them with harsh ascetic scorn nor seeks them with hard self-centered ambition. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The strength with which he has conquered both oneself and life will be evident to those who are sensitive to more than merely commonplace things. In every affair one knows where one stands, but more in the sense than one listens and obeys the higher guidance than in any other. Blessed be the Lord God, Who cometh in the Name of the Lord, and hath dawned upon us; Whose Coming hath redeemed us, Whose Nativity hath enlightened us; Who by His Coming hath sought out the lost, and illuminated those who sat in darkness. Grant, therefore, O Father Almighty, that we celebrating with pious devotion the day of his Nativity, may find the day of judgement a day of mercy; that as we have known His benignity as our Redeemer, we may feel His gentle tenderness as out Judge. We give Thee thanks, O Lord our God, and bless Thee from day to day, Who hast been pleased to bring us to this Thy holy solemnity. Vouchsafe us, with Thy faithful people, in peace and quietness through many succeeding years to welcome Christ, through Thy mercy. “And they did pray unto the Lord their God continually, insomuch that the Lord did bless them, according to his word, so that they did wax strong and prosper in the land,” reports Alma 62.51. One learns from within, intuitively, much more than from without, the full teaching to which other beings or their books have led them. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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“It is easy for us to make beings like you. We do it all the time. There is nothing to it. We can easily replace you. Understand, all the mental and physical equipment we have given you is for a purpose.” At this point, I knew my first real fear. I was afraid they were going to do away with Derek then and there. I could not bear it. The pain in me was so all-consuming that it took all the strength I possessed to stand by and say nothing. However, I did not feel that there was anything that I could do to prevent whatever the Parents would now do to Derek. What deep-seated fears and needs underly Derek’s delusional system? We were long in finding out, for Derek’s preventions effectively concealed the secret of his autistic behavior. In the meantime we dealt with his peripheral problems one by one. During his first year with us Derek’s most trying problem was toilet behavior. This surprised us, for Derek’s personality was not “anal” in the Freudian sense; his original personality damage had antedated the period of his toilet-training. Rigid and early toilet-training, however, had certainly contributed to his anxieties. It was our effort to help Derek with this problem that led to his first recognition of us as human beings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
And think of all the things you did, waking that ancient one Akasha and almost loosing her on humanity. As if we do not have enough monsters created by evolution. And then your adventure with the Body Thief. Coming into the flesh again, having that chance, and rejecting it for what you were before. You know your friend Gretchen is a stain in the jungles, do you not? Well, do not believe what you have read in the papers. Gretchen lost her mind; she is fixed in a state of hysteria and you believe it is your fault. I did not place judgement upon the incident. If we can go back to what I was saying. I was saying that you did everything but ask me to come! You challenged every form of authority; you sought every experience. You have buried yourself alive twice, and once tried to rise into the very Sun to make yourself a cinder. In simple situation neuroses the basic anxiety is lacking. Individuals are constituted by neurotic reactions to actual conflict situations on the part of people whose personal relations are undisturbed. The following may serve as another example of these cases as they frequently occur in a psychotherapeutic practice. A woman of twenty-five complained about heart pounding and anxiety states at night, with profuse perspiration. There were no organic findings, and all the evidence suggested that she was a healthy person. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Cans. Beer cans. Glinting on the verges of a million miles of roadways, lying in scrub, grass, dirt, leaves, sand, mud, but never hidden. Piel’s, Rheingold, Ballantine, Schaefer, Schlitz, shinning in the Sun, or picked by Moon or the beam of headlights at night; washed by rain or flattened by wheels, but never dulled, never buried, never destroyed. Here is the mark of savages, the testament of wasters, the stain of prosperity. These wise souls contemplated their past lives in a long wrathless reverie, and sought to answer prayers from below as I have said. They watched over their kindred, their clansmen, their own nations; they watched over those who attracted their attention with accomplished and spectacular displays of religiosity; they watched with sadness the suffering of humans and wished they could help and tried to help by thought when they could. However, who are these beings who defile the grassy borders of our roads and lanes, who pollute our ponds, who spoil the purity of our ocean beaches with the empty vessels of their thirst? Who are the beings who make these vessels in millions and then say, “Drink—and discard”? What society is this that can afford to cast away a million tons of metal and to make of wild and fruitful land a garbage heap? #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Randolph Harris II International Institute 