I shut off the overhead chandelier immediately and switched on two of the smaller corner lamps. It was softly dim now, but not uncomfortably so, and I directed everyone to sit down. To day of the moment of genuine encounter—the vitalizing transaction, as I have called it—that it may be as frail as love or blessedness is perhaps to out too much emphasis on the fragility of the live and growing thing that psychotherapy is designed to nourish. Certainly many psychotherapists take a hardier view. In fact, psychotherapeutic patience aims to overcome precisely the febrile quality of the state of being in love and the disillusion that time brings if there is no capacity for such growth and change in the relationship. Recall Housman’s poem in A Shropshire Lad: “Oh, when I was in love with you, then I was clean and brave, and miles around the wonder grew how well did I beave. But now the fancy passes, and noting shall remain, and miles around they will say that I am quite myself again.” The fact of the matter is that psychotherapy properly practiced is a discipline of considerable technical complexity, and diagnosis is by no means either name-calling or even labeling or pigeon-holding. Diagnosis itself is, if really well done, a form of relationship calling for a fineness of empathic understand and, a genuine encounter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The interest in psychotherapy is in the general problem of describing people in their relationships with other people as much as it is in exploring the special case of two person who talk to each other for the express purpose of inducing changes in behavior of one of them. The goal is concerned with understanding the conditions that make personal interactions mutually satisfying, constructive, and on-going, on the one hand, and antagonizing, destructive, and stultifying, on the other. Space-time coordinates are not necessarily accurate determinates of the form of personal interaction for almost any two people, Monday morning at work in the office can be very different from Friday afternoon after work in a bar. Even in the same place and at the same time, two men are likely to interact differently from two women, or from a man and a woman. People who bear a superior-subordinate relation to one another will interact differently from those whose relation to one another is coordinate. Such differences as older and younger, stronger and weaker, not as aware and intelligent, rich and poor, psychotic and sane, will make a difference too in the form of personal interactions. Related to such differences as these, but not entirely co-extensive with them, are the need-structures of the persons involved. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There are some persons whose needs are so intense that they force almost all their personal interactions into the same for, thus limiting greatly the range of possible response on the part of the other person. Such a necessitous and undifferentiated character may be given to all interactions by the orally deprived person, who strives desperately and incessantly to get from others, fearing starvation and abandonment if one is not immediately fed (love, or admiration, or applause in some form). So one with needs for order and balance may react frantically to interaction with a person who is seen as threatening to upset things, or who flaunts various derivative forms on rigid indiscipline. There are, of course, many less compelling and theoretically unclaimed needs for which satisfaction is sought, and generally found in personal interaction. From other person one may get information, entertainment, helpful criticism, praise, blame, money for services rendered, inspiration, pleasures of the flesh, food, transportation, votes, and even psychotherapy. Which brings us to the special case tat is the focus of this investigation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Psychotherapy is for private patients who have some disturbance in interpersonal relations but are not sick enough to require hospitalization generally takes place in the office of a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and usually accompanied, more or less immediately, by the payment of a fee. It is begun at the behest of the patient, who has come to the opinion that his or her mind is not working properly, or who at least knows that one’s body is not working properly and that medical men and women have told one that the cause lies in one’s mind. Imagine if our minds where they powerful that they control our bodies and our environments. That is compelling because it indicates through enough education and training, we should be able to heal our own bodies, minds, and have better control over our environment. So anyway, the patient is usually very unhappy, and one’s personal interactions in the past have been unsuccessful in satisfying one’s needs (some of which, indeed, one may not be aware of). Therapist are supposed to gain a certain amount of gratification to be had from being a person of power and wisdom, to whom other come from help. However, besides monetary motives and others, it sometimes happens that the therapist is also quite unsuccessful in other personal interactions, and doing psychotherapy is one of the few ways in which one can really get into contact with other people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Humans can look before and after. One can transcend the immediate moment, can remember the past and plan for the future, and thus choose a good which is greater, but will not occur till some future moment in preference to a lesser, immediate one. By the same token one can feel oneself into someone else’s needs and desires, can imagine oneself in the other person’s place, and so make one’s choices with a view to the good of one’s fellows as well as oneself. This is the beginning of the capacity, however imperfect and rudimentary it may be in most people, to love thy neighbor and to be aware of the relation between their own acts and the welfare of the community. The human being not only can make such choices of values and goas, but one is the being who must do so if one is to attain integration. For the value—the goal one moves toward—serves one as a psychological center, a kind of core of integration which draws together one’s powers as the core of a magnet draws the magnet’s lines of force together. Knowing what one wants is essential for the beginnings of the child’s and young person’s capacity for self-direction. Knowing what one wants is simply the elemental form of what in the maturing person is the ability to choose one’s own values. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The mark of the mature being is that one’s living is integrated around self-chosen goals: one knows what one wants, no longer simply as the child wants ice cream but as the grown person plans and works toward a creative love relationship or toward business achievement or what not. One loves the members of one’s family not because one has been thrown together with them by the fate of birth but because one finds them loveable and chooses to love them; and one works not merely from automatic routine, but because one consciously believes in the value of what one is doing. Anxiety, bewilderment and emptiness—the chronic psychic infirmary of modern mortals—occurs mainly because one’s values are confused and contradictory, and one has no psychic core. We can now add that the degree of an individual’s inner strength and integrity will depend on how much one believes in the values one lives by. Many people want to know how a person can maturely and creatively choose and affirm such values? In the first place, one’s values and the difficulty in affirming them depend very much on the age we live in. The beliefs and traditions handed down in society tend to become crystalized into rigid forms which suppress individual vitality. For example, many people still believe that America is supposed to accept poor huddled masses from anywhere, but the gold rush is over, and many Americans cannot afford their cars, mortgage and rent. In fact, 7.1 million Americas are 90 days overdue on their care loans. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
America is also suffering from a housing crisis, record debt, and high insurance costs. What happens in such a time is that vitality gets divorced from tradition, and tends to become diffuse rebelliousness which loses its power like water flowing in every direction on the ground. Are we not caught between authoritarian trends on one side and directionless vitality on the other? In times of social upheaval, like our own, people suffer from feelings of rootlessness and tend to cling to authority and established institutions as a source of security in the storm. Most people are incapable of tolerating change and uncertainty in all sectors of life at once. So many people will turn toward a more conservative authoritarian belief in economics and politics, more rigid moral attitudes, and will join in increased numbers the conservative, fundamentalist rather than liberal ideologies. However, people who are confused and bewildered and in a panic about what to believe will grab at destructive and demonic values. Communism comes in to fill the vacuum of faith caused by those who seek rebellion. For rebels, it provides a sense of purpose which heals internal agonies of anxiety and doubt as they feel helpless to help themselves. However, we many not be afraid that this nation will go communistic—as I am not—but the seizing upon destructive values shows itself in other ways. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
There are clear signs that liberal, reactionary trends are growing—in religion, in politics, in education, in philosophy, and in tendencies toward ridged doctrines in science. Same sex marriage is accepted by many churches, democrats refuse to allow the president to protect our country, schools want to start teaching kids about homosexuality and transgender in second grade, and people really believe that humans evolved from apes. Japan has been a very conservative country, but recently to women from Japan, who had been inflicted by rebellious Californians went on the Japanese news a declared they wanted same sex marriage. Such a reactionary trend and declaration is unheard of on traditional Japanese culture. When people feel threatened and anxious, they sometimes become more liberal, and when in doubt they may lose their heritage, identity and culture; and then they lose their own vitality. They use manifestations of popular culture and rebellion to build new values and create a wide spread kaleidoscope deviant behavior which is now acceptable because everyone is doing it; or they make an outright panicky retreat into the past. However, many are discovering that the flight to the past does not work. Difficult as it is, we must accept ourselves and our society where we are, and find our ethical center through a deeper understanding of ourselves as well as through a courageous confronting of our historical situation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
In the last few years another movement has been growing which is very different from the return to religion. Many intellectuals and other sensitive persons have become more and more aware of their loss in being cut off from the religious and ethical traditions of the culture, and that those who were not familiar with the thought of Moses, Isaiah, Job, Jesus, Buddha, Lao-tzu, Dr. Freud were missing something of crucial significance in an age where mortals must rediscover their values. They have turned with a new interest to the ethical and religious wisdom of the past, not necessarily the ways and customs. To the extent that this trend is not a product merely of the anxiety of our day—as in its best exemplars it certainly is not—it is indeed salutary. However, the danger lies in the fact that some intellectuals, being newcomers to the field and therefore less able to differentiate at the moment, are apt to seize on the more obvious and vocal but less sound aspects of the cultural tradition. If the interest of the intellectuals in politics chiefly contributes to the growth of liberalism and whatever goes and reaction, we are the more lost. The real problem, thus, is to distinguish what is healthy in ethics, politics, and religion, and yields a security which increases rather than decreases personal worth, responsibility and freedom. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Not to move forward, to stay where we are, to regress, or to become lawless and lackadaisical, in others words to rely on what we have, is very tempting, for what he have, we know; we can old onto it, feel secure in it. We fear and consequently avoid, taking a step into the unknown, the uncertain; for, indeed, while the step may not appear risky to us after we have take it, before we take that step the new aspects beyond it appear very risky, and hence frightening. Only the only the cold, the tired, is safe; or so it seems. Every new step contains danger of failure, and that is one of the reasons people are so afraid of freedom. Obviously, this reveals a neurotic problem which has to be resolved. Mortal’s task is to unite love and will. They are not united by automatic biological growth but must be part of our conscious development. In society, will tends to be set against love. The backdrop of human existence implied in every myth of the Garden of Eden, every story of paradise, every “Golden Age”—a perfection which is deeply embedded in mortal’s collective memory. Our needs are met without self-conscious effort on our part, this is the first freedom, the first yes. However, this first freedom always breaks down. And it does so because of the development of human consciousness. We experience our difference from conflict with our environment and the fact that we are subjects in a World of objects. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
This is the separation between self and World, the split between existence and essence. This first freedom is inadequate because one cannot remain in it if we are to develop as human beings. And though we experience our separation from it as guilt, we must nevertheless go through with it. However, it remains the source of all perfection, the backdrop of all utopias, the perpetual feelings that there ought to be paradise someplace, and the efforts—forever creative but forever doomed to disappointment—that make us try to recreate a perfect state. We cannot—not because of something God does, or some chance accident, or some happenstance that might have been different. We cannot because of the simple development of the human consciousness. However, nevertheless, we still always seek, as when we write a good paragraph or do a good work of art. We fall anew, but we remain ready to arise and pit ourselves anew against our fate. This is why human will, in its specific form, always begins in a “no.” We must stand against the environment, be able to give a negative; this inheres in consciousness. All will has its source in the capacity to say “no”—a “no” not against the parents (although it shows itself in coming out against them, representatives of the personal authoritative Universe as they are). #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The “no” is a protest against a World we never made, and it is also an assertion of one’s self in the endeavor to remold and reform the World. Willing, in this sense, always begins against something—which generally can be seen as specifically against the first union with the World. Small wonder that this is done with guilt and anxiety, as in the Garden of Eden, or with conflict, as in normal development. However, the child individual has to go through with it, for it is the unfolding of one’s own consciousness which prods the individual. And small wonder that, though one affirms it on one level, on another one regrets it. The lesson is to give up fighting and assimilate, take your soul in as part of your own strength, and, as a result, become more affirmative as a person. This is why the reuniting of will and love is such an important task and achievement for mortals. Will must come in to destroy the bliss, to make possible a new level of experience with other persons and the World; to make possible, freedom in the mature sense, and consequent responsibility. Will comes in to lay the ground work which makes a relatively mature love possible. No longer seeking to re-establish a state of infancy, the human being now freely takes responsibility for one’s choices. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Will destroys the first freedom, the original union, not in order to fight the Universe forever—even through some of us do stop at that stage. With the first bliss of physical union broken, mortal’s task is now the psychological one of achieving new relationships which will be characterized by the choice of which people to love, which groups to devote oneself to, and by the conscious building of those affections. Hence, I speak of the relating of love and will not as a state given us automatically, but as a task; and to the extent it is gained, it is an achievement. It points toward maturity, integration, wholeness. None of these is ever achieved without relation to its opposite; human progress is never one dimensional. However, they become touchstones and criteria of our response to life’s possibilities. God is our perfect Father. He loves us beyond our capacity to understand. He knows what is best for us. God sees the end from the beginning. He wants us to act to gain needed experience. When God answers yes, it is to give us confidence. When God answers no, it is to prevent error. When God withholds an answer, it is to have us grow through faith in him, obedience to his commandments, and a willingness to act on truth. We are expected to assume accountability by acting on a decision that is consistent with his teachings without prior confirmation. We are not to sit passively waiting or to murmur because the Lord has not spoken. We are to act. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The milk can work a cure in humans. Research must be objective, but to be objective may be simply the worst thing in the World from the point of view of psychotherapy, or of any creative activity. The artist has a perfect right to say to the critic, “Go away and leave me alone,” for in fact whatever the artist does one must do alone. You have got to cross that lonesome valley. You have got to cross it by yourself. There is no one going to cross it for you. You have got to cross it by yourself. What has emerged most clearly from my own research on creativity is the fact that the creative person is able to find in the developmentally more primitive and less reasonably new insight, even though at first this may be only intuitively and dimly grasped. One is willing to pay heed to vague feelings and intimations which on the grounds of good sense are put aside hastily by most of us. Characteristically, the creative individual refuses to be content with the most easily established perceptual schemata or perceptual constancies, even such obviously adaptive ones as the discrimination between what is inside the self versus what is outside the self, or the conviction that there are things in the World that are absolutely unmoving, or the notion that all effects have causes, or that time passes moment by moment in succession of states rather than in an unstoppable flux. You will recognize these of course as the basis of what we usually call a sane mind, a clear sensorium, a sense of reality, and so on. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
However, creative people sometimes do without these and without many other basic constancies, leading them at times, as you might imagine, to give an impression of psychological imbalance. There is reason to believe that many creative individuals deliberately induce in themselves an altered state of consciousness in which the ordinary structures of experience are broken down. The ordinary World may thus be transcended: in mystical states, in feelings of being possessed, in prolonged trances of deep reveries, and even at times in psychosis. These deviations from perceptual constancies my permit a more inclusive and more valid perception, once the stress involved in extending the boundaries is relieved. In brief, a kind of transcendence of apparently adaptive but in some sense crippling limits may thus be achieved. Something of this sort is necessary if neurosis is to be cured, for the constancies there are properly called compulsive and imprisoning. When exposed to insensitivity, it is inevitable that a child would feel rejected. And these feelings undermine whatever feelings of value the child may have had and gradually feelings of worthlessness develop. Perhaps the emotional logic of the child is something like this: “The most significant people in my life—that is, my parents—do not appear to consider me to be of personal worth, therefore I must be worthless.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
As the child becomes older, he or she may or may not be aware of feelings of worthlessness. Some people are quite aware of such feelings. There is probably no counselor who has spent time working with people who has not had individuals say something like this: “All of my life I have never felt I really mattered to anyone. And I have always felt there must be something wrong with me.” There are others who have been somewhat successful in keeping their feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness out of their conscious thoughts by the means of various kinds of psychological defenses. However, it is a universal experience. All of us have some of these feelings within us. When the child begins to have these feelings of worthlessness as a result of feeling that one has been rejected, the next step in one’s emotional development seems to take the form of self-hate, as follows: feelings of rejection lead to feelings of worthlessness which turn into feelings of self-hate. Again we can imagine the emotional logic that takes place within the child. Probably it is something like this: “I seem to be worthless. I appear inferior to my parents and other people around me. I cannot respect myself, since they do not seem to respect me. Since I am worthless, I hate myself.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
These feelings of self-hate may be maintained on a largely unconscious level. In fact there is every reason to think that the child would do everything possible to avoid bringing these feelings into awareness, no matter how strong they might be. To really hate oneself is a repelling, frightening idea, so much so that it is almost intolerable. Perhaps the best example of extreme self-hatred that is at least partly conscious is the person in a suicidal depression. The self-hate is so strong and so intolerable that the only out for the person appears to one to be the murder of one’s self, an act of extreme self-hate. Because hate of one’s self is so intolerable and is so threatening to the very roots of the person’s being, most persons react with psychological defenses of one kind or another. We find some kind of escape hatch by which to avoid the full force of this terrible feeling that we are worthless and the object of our own hatred. A strong case can be made for believing that it is this feeling of hatred toward one’s self that lies at the root of most, if not all, personality difficulties and family problems that are not caused by a brain injury or some other physical malfunction. For the things that people do and say that result in their being described as having personality problems and that causes them difficulty in relationships with others can be seen as ways of escaping from self-hatred. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Before some of these ways of escape are examined in detail, it is well to note the principle that now comes in focus. As we shall see as we examine these escape hatches, each of them seems to have built into it the tendency to set up a negative reaction in other people that will lead to further feelings of rejection and therefore increase the individual’s feelings of worthlessness and self-hate. This cyclical process might be illustrated: Feelings of rejection, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape hatch, further feelings of rejection, and feelings of worthlessness. This rancorous cycle continues. And this is how some people become bullies. Because they feel rejected, usually because they have done something deviant, they will try to escape from feelings of worthlessness and self-hatred by bullying someone they know. Or perhaps an individual will switch to some other ways of avoiding one’s feelings about oneself. One might attempt to escape by becoming a show-off or braggart. “See that you do not boast in your own wisdom,” reports Alma 38.11. Here, too, sooner or later, even though it may seem cute at first, people will get tired of the boasting, and one will feel further feelings of rejection. One has been caught in a cycle of rejection. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
The question might be asked here, “Is not the person who is a bully or a braggart the one who loves oneself or things too highly of oneself, rather than the one who hates oneself?” Further thought makes it clear, however, that is the child had genuine feelings of worth and value as a person, it would not be necessary for one to try to prove oneself more powerful than others or better than others by bullying or boasting. One is attempting to escape from the nagging, haunting feeling that one is worthless by attempting to prove to others—and most of all to oneself—that one is an individual or worth. Unfortunately, because of one’s own feelings about the unsatisfactory ways in which one trues to prove one’s worth, one sinks more deeply into feeling self-worthlessness. Feelings of rejection lead to feelings of worthlessness, which spawn self-hate, then the escape is to bully or bragging, that creates further rejection (“Nobody likes a bully or a braggart”). Lest the picture appears too much darkness, it should be emphasized that every child from time to time goes through these experiences. It is not single isolated incidents that cripple personalities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
When trends are established in relationships with parents, and when there is little to mitigate these trends, then serious problems can develop. These situations are not unique to childhood nor children, we also see these same patterns in fully grown adults. It is important, however, to see that even minor incidents which cause feelings of rejection undermine to some degree a person’s feelings of self-worth. We are again reminded that we are all caught in this human dilemma. It is not a question of whether we have feelings of rejection. However, accepting a bully and allowing them to be part of the community without punishment for their bad behavior is a mistake because it is rewarding them for the bad things they have done and their deviant behavior will only get worse. The only question is, “How much self-hate do I have, and how much crippling effect does it have on my life?” Humans are generally ethical beings—ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. One’s capacity for ethical judgment—like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being—is based upon one’s consciousness of oneself. They form so-called revolutionary groups and expect to save the World by acts of terror and destruction, not seeing that they are only contributing to the general tendency to violence and inhumanity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
They have lost their capacity to love and have replaced it with the wish to sacrifice their lives. (Self-sacrifice is frequently the solution for individuals who ardently desire to love, but who have lost the capacity to love and see in the sacrifice of their own lives an experience of love in the highest degree). However, these self-sacrificing young people are very different from the loving martyrs, who want to live because they love life and who accept death only when they are forced to die in order not to betray themselves. Our present-day self-sacrificing young and mature people are the accused, but they are also the accusers, in demonstrating that in our social system some of the very best people become so isolated and hopeless that nothing but destruction and fanatism are left as a way out of their despair. The human desire to experience union with others is rooted in the specific conditions of existence that characterize the human species and is one of the strongest motivators of human behavior. By the combination of minimal instinctive determination and maximal development of the capacity for reason, we human beings have lost our original oneness with nature. In order not to feel utterly isolated—which would, in fact, condemn us to insanity—we need to find a new unity: with our fellow beings and with nature. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
This human need for unity with others is experiences in many ways: in the symbiotic tie to mother, an idol, one’s tribe, one’s nation, one’s class, one’s religion, one’s fraternity, one’s professional organization. Often, of course, these ties overlap, and often they assume an ecstatic form, as among members of certain religious sects or of a political mob, or in the out bursts of national hysteria in the case of war. The outbreak of the First World War, for example, occasioned one of the most drastic of these ecstatic forms of union. Suddenly, from one day to the next, people gave up their lifelong convictions of pacifism, antimilitarism; scientist threw away their lifelong training in objectivity, critical thinking, and impartiality in order to join the big We. The desire to experience union with others manifests itself in the lowest kind of behavior, for instance, in acts of sadism and destruction, as well as in the highest: solidarity on the basis of an ideal or conviction. It is also the main cause of the need to adapt; human beings are more afraid of being outcasts than even of dying. Crucial to every society is the kind of union and solidarity it fosters and the kind it can further, under the given conditions of its socioeconomic structure. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
These considerations seem to indicate that both tendencies are present in human beings: the one, to have—to possess—that owes its strength in the last analysis to the biological factor of the desire for survival; the other, to be—to share, to give, to sacrifice—that owes its strength to the specific conditions of human existence and the inherent need to overcome one’s isolation by oneness with others. For these two contradictory strivings in every human being it follows that the social structure. These considerations seem to indicate that both tendencies are present in human beings: in one, to have—to possess—that owes its strength in the last analysis to the biological factor of the desire for survival; the other, to be—to share, to give, to sacrifice—that owes its strength to the specific conditions of human existence and the inherent need to overcome one’s isolation by oneness with others. From these two contradictory strivings in every human being it follows that the social structure, its values and norms, decides which of the two becomes dominant. Cultures that foster the greed for possession, and thus the having mode of existence, are rooted in one human potential; cultures that foster being and sharing are rooted in the other potential. We must decide which of these two potentials we want to cultivate, realizing, however, that out decision is largely determined by the socioeconomic structure of our given society that inclines us toward one of the other solution. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
From my observations in the field of group behavior my best guess is that the two extreme groups, respectively manifesting deeply ingrained and almost unalterable types of having and of being, form a small minority; that in the vast majority both possibilities are real, and which of the two becomes dominant and which is repressed depends on environmental factors. This assumption contradicts a widely held psychoanalytic rigid doctrine that environment produces essential changes in personality development in infancy and early childhood, but that after this period the character is fixed and hardly changed by external events. This psychoanalytic dogma has been able to gain acceptance because the basic conditions of their childhood continue into most people’s later life, since in general, the same social conditions continue to exist. However, numerous instances exist in which a drastic change in environment leads to a fundamental change in behavior, for instance, when the negative forces cease to be fed and the beneficial forces are nurtured and encouraged. The frequency of intensity of the desire to share, to give, and to sacrifice are not surprising if we consider the conditions of existence of the human species. What is surprising is that this need could be so repressed as to make acts of selfishness the rule in industrial (and many other) societies and acts of solidarity the exception. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
However, paradoxically, this very phenomenon is caused by the need for union. A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism. As a consequence of the dominant attitude of selfishness, the leaders of our society believe that people can be motivated only by the expectation of material advantages, for instance, by rewards, and that they will not react to appeals for solidarity and sacrifice. Hence, expect in times of war, these appears are rarely made, and the chances to observe the possible results of such appeals are lost. Only a radically different socioeconomic structure and a radically different picture of human nature could show that bribery is not the only way (or the best way) to influence people. Sometimes, like an immature person, we misbehave, act unwisely, and feel we cannot approach God with a problem. When we receive an impression in our heart, we can use our mind either to rationalize it away or to accomplish it. Be careful what you do with an impression from the Lord. Drink your spiritual milk and become cured. Remember that without faith you can do nothing; therefore ask in faith with confidence in our holy Father. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Ahhhhh, gambling debts, millions, how does one do that, but it was only the tip of it, she had been in much deeper, flying back and forth to Europe, stashing the wealth for the wrong man. When she fired a gun, she emptied it. Making a living. Her partner had vanished. She knew she was next. Did not care anymore. All that money gone to waste. Lots of there there, but who cares? Sometimes dark dreams no doubt have many meanings, but certainly their chief mood and meaning are disillusion. Disillusions pass just as illusions do, and often both illusion and disillusion are necessary steps in our understanding of reality. The dream might tell sometimes one is feeling and that is reflected in an aspect of the current reality. Out of this feeling came a recognition of the urgent need for some research, with its own particular sort of siren song: “Let us get some facts to go on.” It has been discovered the people with a strong sense of pride in themselves and in their heritage, at the beginning of therapy, even thought obscured by the usual clinical overlay of anxiety and depression, are usually better off and are predicted to display improvement by the end of therapy. These same patients, however, even if they are just on the list and do not receive psychotherapy, will still show improvement. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The reason being is it is predicted that they have a favorable reaction to stress and challenge in many different situations. Many behaviors that appear to change as a result of psychotherapy are actually influenced little or not at all by the therapy, and the observed changes are produced by endogenous processes of a counteractive sort which are set in motion within the reasonably strong individual after some trauma has produced a temporary regression. To say this, however, is by no means to say, as some psychologists have said in interpreting these results and others like them, that “psychotherapy is no blessed good,” or words to that effect. Science by its method limits itself to appearances of a public or potentially public sort, and in the interests of verification insists upon objectification. This works quite so well, yet well enough for many purposes—even when the objects do have feelings. However, if the questions I am asking myself is “Why was I ever born?” or “Why live?” there are no objective answers that can be satisfying to me within the realm of science. The “question” is a feeling which cannot be “answered,” but which can only give way to another feeling, “How good it is to be alive!” And the human transaction that enables the one feeling to give way to the other is a transaction between subjects, the objective indices of which are extremely subtle and highly valuable at best. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
One can make tape-recordings, take motion pictures, count heart beats, measure muscle potentials, note the number of minutes spent together, ask questions (True-False questions, open-ended questions, questions in disguise), get interpretations of inkblots, or do any number of those tricks of the trade with which we are all familiar. They avail little, for the vitalizing transaction is a matter of feeling, having an existence and known only in the subject, or, as I prefer to say, in the realm of my spirit. For instance, once, I told a therapist I want a really big house so I could spend all day cleaning it. She assumed my house was a mess. The actual reason is because have you notice how many miles you walk in a standard size 2,000 square foot house when you are cleaning it? Sometimes, by the time I was done cleaning I had walked between 3-7 miles inside the house. So, if I had a house three times that size, chances are I would get even more exercise in the safety of my home. And there is always something in a house that needs to be cleaned from the base boards, the walls, light switches, tile and wood floors, the carpets need to be vacuumed, laundry always needs to be done, closets and drawers need to be organized. In the cleanest houses in America, there is always work to do, but in a one bedroom apartment, most are so small there is not much room to walk around. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
People you talk to and vent to cannot always understand what you are saying because they have filters, and even though the privacy laws prevent therapist from sharing or disclosing your information, can you really trust anyone with details of your lives when you know nothing about them, their record and the professional standards? And there is no telling what they are compiling in their notes about you after you leave their office, and I would just hate from the information to land up in a newsroom or a police station when it is someone’s interpretation anyway. We are not really living in the most ethical times and everyone is looking to make money anyway they can. People are willing to sacrifice their careers, families, freedom and homes to become famous, even if it is through illegal means because they figure the payoff is much more worth what they are enduring at the time, which makes one wonder….how much do people really love their families, God, and having a good reputation is the allure of money is more appealing? One of the troubles of the sometimes scientist who is also sometime psychotherapist is that one’s sentiments are mixed, and are especially mixed when one undertakes to do research on psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
From the point of view of the subject, then, the essence of the beneficence that psychotherapy may bring is entirely of the spirit. The appearances that may accompany such spiritual beneficences are variable and elusive, and the superficies of adjustment to any given cultural norm may yield a rather bad fit to the behavior of the person who has benefited from psychotherapy. And to make matters even more difficult for thee research psychologist, the moment of genuine encounter, the vitalizing transaction, may pass almost unnoticed at the time. It is ephemeral, as frail as love or blessedness, as passing as the moment of grace or the beginning of creation, the fecundating act; it has its begin in the imagination and the spirit, while the dull machinery of routine thought chugs monotonously along and the inertia that makes us think the same thought in just the same way so many thousands of times over continues its hebetudinous reign. In almost all appearance we remain the same, even though we are different. To put the matter commonly, I have never known any case, no matter how successful, with treatment both thorough and inspired and with real movement felt by the patient and therapist, in which at the conclusion of the work the patient was not readily recognized by friends and neighbors, and in a million ways, some of them measured by the best psychological tests, just about the same. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained at a single bound; it must be achieved each day. The basic step in achieving inward freedom is choosing one’s self. This is the stage of affirming one’s responsibility for oneself and one’s existence. It is the attitude which is opposite to blind momentum or routine existence: it is an attitude of aliveness and decisiveness; it means that one recognizes the one exists in one’s particular spot in the Universe, and one accepts the responsibility for this existence. This is what is mean by the will to live—not simply the instinct for self-preservation, but the will to accept the fact that one is oneself, and to accept responsibility for fulfilling one’s own destiny, which in turn implies accepting the fact that one must make one’s basic choices oneself. We can see more clearly what choosing oneself and one’s existence means by looking at the opposite—choosing not to exist, that is to commit suicide. The significance of suicide lies not in the fact that people actually experience death by suicide in any large numbers. It is indeed a very rare occurrence except among those who are usually extremely distressed. However, psychologically and spiritually the thought of suicide has a much wider meaning. There is an such thing as psychological suicide in which one does not take one’s own life by a given act, but dies because one has chosen—perhaps without being entirely aware of it—not to live. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
There have been cases were people are going through so much hardship and they have been told that they are going to die and they make up their mind not to live and let go and shortly after they pass away. There have been other cases where the lives of persons who have dedicated themselves to certain tasks, such as taking care of a sick loved one or finishing an import film or work. They keep going under difficult circumstances as though they had determined they had to live; and then when the task is completed, when success is attained, they proceed to die as though by some inner decision. Soren Kierkegaard wrote twenty books in fourteen years, completed them at the early age of forty-two, and then—we almost say in conclusion—he took to his bed and died. Aaliyah did in interview at the age of 22, on MTV Diaries, talking about how she wanted to be remembered after she died, and a few months later her plane crashed and she died. These ways of choosing not to live show how crucial it can be to choose to live. I think that is why people do not like to think about death, talk about it, or speak ill of the dead. It makes them feel that they become more vulnerable and could be the next on the grim reaper’s list. It is doubtful whether anyone really begins to live, that is, to affirm and choose one’s own existence, until one has frankly confronted the terrifying fact that one could wipe out one’s existence but chooses not to. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Since one is free to die, one is also free to live. The mass patterns of routine are broken: one no longer exists as an accidental result of one’s parents having conceived one, of one’s growing up and living as an infinitesimal item on the treadmill of cause-and-effect, marrying, begetting new children, growing old and dying. Since one could have chosen to die but chose not to, every act thereafter has to some extent been made possible because of that choice. Every act then has its special element of freedom. People often actually go through the experience of experiencing death by psychological suicide in some sector of their lives. For instance, a woman believes she cannot live unless a certain man loves her. When he marries someone else, she contemplates suicide. In the course of her meditating on the idea for some days, she fantasies, “Well, assume I do it.” However, then, she suddenly thinks, “After I have done it, it would still be good to be alive in other ways—the Sun still shines, water is still cool to the body, one can still make things,” and the suggestion creeps in that there may still be other people to love. So she decides to live. Assuming the decision is made for beneficial reasons rater than just the fear of dying or inertia, the conflict may actually have given her some new freedom. It is as though the part of her which clung to the man did not experience death by suicide, and as a result she can begin life anew. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Or a young man feels he can never be happy unless he gains some fame. He begins to realize that he is competent and valuable, let us say as an assistant professor; but the higher he gets on the ladder the clearer he sees that there are always persons above him, that many are called but few are chosen, that very few people gain fame anyway, and that he may end up just a good and competent teacher. He might then feel that he would be as insignificant as a grain of sand, his life meaningless, and he might as well not be alive. The idea of experiencing death by suicide creeps into his mind in his more despondent moods. Sooner or later he, too, thinks, “All right, assume I have done it—what then?” And it suddenly dawns on him that, if he came back after the death by suicide, there would be a lot left in life even if one were not famous. He then chooses to go on living, as it were, without the demand for fame. It is as though the part of him which could not live without fame does experience death by suicide. And in killing the demand for fame, he may also realize as a byproduct that the thing which yield lasting joy and inner security have very little to do with external and fickle standards of public opinion anyway. He may then appreciate the more then flippant wisdom of Ernest Hemingway’s remark, “Who the hell wants fame over the week-end? I want to write well.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
And finally, as a result of the partial suicide, he may clarify his own goals and arrive at more of a feeling for the joy which comes from fulfilling his own potentialities, from finding and teaching the truth as he sees it and adding his own unique contribution arising from his own integrity. In contemporary society the having mode of existing is assumed to be rooted in human nature and, hence, virtually unchangeable. The same idea is expressed in the dogma that people are basically lazy, passive by nature, and that they do not want to work or to do anything else, unless they are driven by the incentive of material gain, or hunger, or the fear of punishment. This rigid doctrine is doubted by hardly anybody, and it determines our methods of education and work. However, it is little more than an expression of the wish to prove the value of our social arrangements by imputing to them that they follow the needs of human nature. To the members of many different societies of both past and present, the concept of innate human selfishness and laziness would appear as fantastic as the reverse sound to us. The truth is that both the having and the being modes of existence are potentialities of human nature, that our biological urge for survival tends to further the having mode, but that selfishness and laziness are not the only propensities inhere in human beings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
We human beings have an inherent and deeply rooted desire to be: to express our faculties, to be active, to be related to others, to escape the prison cell of selfishness. The truth of this statement is proven by so much evidence. We would emphasize again that the actual process of these partial psychological studies is much more complex than these illustrations imply. Actually some people—perhaps most people—move in the opposite direction when they have to renounce a demand: they retreat, constrict their lives and become less free. However, we wish only to make clear that there is a beneficial aspect to partial suicide, and that the dying of one attitude or need may be the other side of the birth of something new (which is a law of growth in nature not at all limited to human beings). One can choose to terminate a neurotic strategy, a dependency, a clinging, and then find that one can choose to live as a freer self. The woman in our example would no doubt find with clearer insight that her so-called live for the man for whom she would have experienced death by suicide was really not love at all, but clinging parasitism balanced by desire to have power over the man. A dying to part of oneself is often followed by a heightened awareness of life, a heightened sense of possibility. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
When one has consciously chosen to live, two other things happen. First, one’s responsibility for oneself takes on a new meaning. One accepts responsibility for one’s own life not as something with which one has been saddled, a burden forced upon one: but as a something one has chosen oneself. For this person, oneself, now exists as a result of a decision he or she, oneself, has made. To be sure, any thinking person realizes in theory that freedom and responsibility go together: if one is not free, one is an automaton and there is obviously no such thing as responsibility, and if one cannot be responsible for oneself, one cannot be trusted with freedom. However, when one has chosen oneself, this partnership of freedom and responsibility become more than a nice idea: one experiences it on one’s own pulse; in one’s choosing oneself, one becomes aware that one has chosen personal freedom and responsibility for oneself in the same breath. The other thing which happens is that discipline from the outside is changed into self-discipline. One accepts discipline not because it is commanded—for who can command someone who has been free to take one’s own life?—but because one has chosen with greater freedom what one wants to do with one’s own life, and discipline is necessary for the sake of the values one wishes to achieve. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
This self-discipline can be given fancy names—it is loving one’s fate and obedience to the laws of life. However, whether bedecked by fancy terms or not, it is, I believe, a lesson everyone progressively learns in one’s struggle toward maturity. We cannot will potency; we cannot will to love. However, we can will to open ourselves, participate in the experience, allow the possibility to become a reality. The belief that people do not want to make sacrifices is notoriously wrong. When Churchill announced at the beginning of the Second World War that what he had to demand from the British was blood, sweat, and tears, he did not deter them, but on the contrary, he appealed to their deep-seated human desire to make sacrifices, to give of themselves. The reaction of the British—and of the Germans and the Russians as well—toward the indiscriminate bombing of population centers by the belligerents proves that common suffering did not weaken their spirit; it strengthened their resistance and proved wrong those who believed terror bombing could break the morale of the enemy and help finish the war. It is a sad commentary on our civilization, however, that war and suffering rather than peacetime living can mobilize human readiness to make sacrifices, and that the times of peace seem mainly to encourage selfishness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Fortunately, there are situations in peacetime in which human striving for giving and solidarity manifest themselves in individual behavior. The workers’ strikes, especially up to the period of the First World War, are an example of such essentially nonviolent behavior. The workers sought higher wages, but at the same time, they risked and accepted severe hardships in order to fight for their own dignity and the satisfaction of experiencing human solidarity. The strike was as much a religious as an economic phenomenon. While such strikes still do occur even today, most present-day strikes are for economic reasons—although strikes for better working conditions have increased recently. The need to give and to share and the willingness to make sacrifices for others are still to be found among the members of certain professions, such as nurses, physicians, lawyers, fire fighters, law enforcement, ambulatory care. The goal of helping and sacrificing is given only lip service by many, if not most, of these professionals; yet the character of a goodly number corresponds to the values they profess. We find the same needs affirmed and expressed in many communities throughout the centuries, whether religious, capitalist, or humanist. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
We find the wish to give in the people who volunteer their blood (without payment), in the many situations in which people risk their lives to save another’s. We find the manifestation of the will to give in people who genuinely love. False love, for instance, shared mutual selfishness make people more selfish (and this is the case often enough). Genuine love increases the capacity to love and to give to others. The true lovers live the whole World, in his or her live for a specific person. Conversely, we find that not a few people, especially younger ones, cannot stand the luxury and selfishness that surround them in their affluent families. Quite against the expectations of their elders, who think that their children have everything they wish, they rebel against the deadness and isolation of their lives. For the fact is, they do not have everything they wish and they wish for what they do not have. Some people can no longer stand the life of idleness and injustice they have been born into, these young people leave their families and join the poor, living with them, and helped to lay one of the foundations to help them establish communities. However, out of the backlash to their luxury lives, some of these idealistic and sensitivity young, lacking in tradition, maturity, experience, and political wisdom, become desperate, narcissistically overestimate their own capacities and possibilities, and try to achieve the impossible by the use of force. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
There was this woman in Beethoven’s time who lost her child. She was bereft. Beethoven would come into her house, unannounced, and he would play the piano for her. She would be laying upstairs, distraught, and she would hear him playing down there in the drawing room, and the piano music was his gift to her, to comfort her. It was thought that he was parting the gates of Heaven with his music. Nothing is ever wasted in the Kingdom of God. Not one tear, not all our pain, not the unanswered question or the seemingly unanswered prayers. Nothing will be wasted if we give our lives to God. And if we are willing to be patient until the grace of God is made manifest, whether it takes nine years or ninety, it will be worth the wait. You may be in pain today. Maybe you have suffered a loss, been through a disappointment, but that is not the end. God still have a plan. Do not sit around nursing your wounds. Do not let bitterness and discouragement set the tone for your life. God wants you to arise, wipe away your tears and keep being a productive member of the community. When you become weary and feel like quitting, there is a way to have your strength renewed—wait on the Lord. God is going to make the rest of your life the best of your life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Freedom never occurs in a vacuum; it is not anarchy. The self-consciousness of the child is born in the structure of one’s relations with one’s parents. And the psychological freedom of the human being develops not as though one were a Robinson Crusoe on a desert island, but in a continual interaction with the other significant persons in one’s World. Freedom does not mean trying to live in isolation. It does mean that when one is able to confront one’s isolation, one is able consciously to choose to act, with some responsibility, in the structure of one’s relations with the World, especially the World of other persons around one. Personal soundness is taken to mean integrity, stability, and coherence of the individual personality, as those qualities show themselves socially. All-round soundness as a person refers to the soundness, balance, and degree of maturity which the individual shows in one’s relations with other persons. Integrity and stability of the of the home refers, first of all, to the continuing presence of father and mother with their children within the same four walls during most of the years of the subject’s childhood. The lows in the soundness tend to be the products of homes broken by death, divorce, or illness, or by frequent absence of the father. A part of the picture is the economic security of the family and the stability of the community itself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
In addition to the tangible stability evidenced by the fact of continuing presence of both parents and the tendency of the family to live for long periods in one house, there were of course more subtle, and perhaps actually more determinative, emotional and qualitative evidences of family integrity. When there is absence of marked family friction, the children tend to be more stable. This adds up to, for the child, an outer certainty which provides the psychological basis for the creation of the most important inner certainty: that both the World and oneself are stable and worthy of trust. Imagery of the father as a respected, successful person tend to produce children who display a high level of soundness. These children almost always speak of their fathers as individuals whom they seek to emulate, and who are on the whole much respected in the community. A number of the lows either do not know their father or know him as a pronounced failure: the father was abandoned by the mother in favor of another man. Another factor to having children who are not well adjusted is if one of the parents suffers from psychosis. In highly sound individuals what seems to be important here is that they had throughout their childhood the continuing presence of a model on which they could base their own conception of potent masculinity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
When people have an idea of what good masculinity represents, they are able to form some image of successful manhood which they themselves can realize in their own persons in adulthood. The low subjects, on the other hand, are unable, simply for lack of the significant experience of it, to adopt in imagination the role of the respected man of the house. If it is true that adult personality is largely a realization and synthesis of the possibilities that are given in childhood, then we shall have to say that the lows are unable to take over the adult masculine role largely because no image of it existed for them to emulate; in a sense, adult masculinity was never one of the potentialities which they expected themselves to realize. Highly sound subject were closely controlled at home; but the general picture was of a mother who was loving without being seductive, and solicitous without being demanding or overprotective. Parents may be too restrictive of a child’s freedom, betraying their only slightly disguised hostility. One mother, for no apparent reason, forbade her four-year-old from leaving his yard or playing with other children on the block. Such stern and unnecessary limitations on a child, sometime bordering on cruelty, tend to choke out the child’s ability to be spontaneous and open in one’s activities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
These rather direct forms of rejection are hard for a child to handle. He or she is confused by all the hostility coming his way, for one does not know what he or she has done to deserve such treatment, since in fact one has not deserved it. These experiences are particularly damaging, of course, if they are not offset in part by genuine expressions of love by the parents. While these forms of rejection are very difficult for the child, there are others that are as emotionally unsettling. Perhaps they are even harder for children to cope with because they are subtle and are disguised as expressions of love. Often they involve some form of overprotection on the part of the parents, and tend to prevent the child from becoming an individual in his or her own right. Parents who place a great deal of emphasis on religion may be particularly prone to overprotective forms of rejection. Often they feel that the direct expression of anger is wrong; so they do not get angry at the children, but, without realizing it, they express their hostility in subtle ways such as overcontrolling the child’s life. These parents may also be frightened about the dangers they feel exist for the child if he or she is allowed unrestricted contact with other children and adults who are not part of the religious community. As a result, they may limit the child’s opportunities to learn and grow through encountering people of diverse backgrounds. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
These masquerades of love have sometimes been called smother love because they tend to smother the child in one’s attempts to become a person. This can lead to a child having a panicky feeling in crowds of people, feelings of being engulfed and smothered. Also, some people can grow into a low level of mental soundness when every wish as a child is answered. This is another subtle counterfeit of love that conceals underlying hostility. Instead of expressing hostile feelings directly, some parents feel so guilty about their feelings that they will go overboard in the other direction, lavishing gifts upon the child, giving him or her everything he or she asks for, and solving any problems for the child when their behavior gets them into trouble. As a result, a child may enter adult life immature in many ways and with reduced discernment, unable to assume responsibilities, since he or she has never been encouraged to assume any growing up. So there are many way in which children experience rejection, and all of us have had some taste of it. It is a matter of degree. The human personality appears to be very sensitive to feelings of rejection. This is particularly true for the child, for one has not learned to develop defenses foe warding off such feelings and is relatively helpless to fight back in any way. It is inevitable that when the child feels rejected the one will experience some emotional reaction to this rejection. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
It should be emphasized that it is difficult to describe an emotion experience in words, which are, of course, primarily intellectual. The young child has not developed the intellectual capacity to think in terms we must use to describe an experience. Whatever process the child uses, however, it seems undeniable that one experiences feelings of rejection and feelings of being loved at every early age. As a matter of fact, it is likely that the child can sense how one’s parents feel about him or her before the child can understand any of the words they say. Later, of course, the child encounters other experiences that are interpreted as rejection and that contribute to and reinforce these earlier feelings of rejection. The characteristic reaction of the child to these feelings is a growing sense of worthlessness. Children who are highly sound typically have some break from the house, such as being part of a sports team or a club and have good relations with the siblings. This factor seems psychologically important for somewhat the same reasons as the presence of a successful father: what is involved here is the presence in childhood of models for later adult experience and adult roles. The family is a community in microcosm, and fullest participation in the larger community in later life should be facilitated by richness of interpersonal experience and flexibility in role-taking, determined in large part by the roles available in the family circle. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Even in the groups who have a high mental soundness, it should be noted that on one was especially blessed; the luckiest of lives in the study had their full share of difficulty and private despair. Still, some individual were able to communicate a high seriousness of purpose and an ethical purity which was truly impressive, and which lead them to displaying a comprehensive picture of mental soundness. Psychopathology is always with us, and soundness is a way of reacting to problems, not an absence of them. Additional, within the population of subjects of ordinary physical and psychological integrity, soundness is by no means exclusively determined by circumstances but may be considered in the nature of an unintended—and perhaps largely unconscious—personal achievement. Our high soundness subjects are beset, like all other persons, by fears, unrealizable desires, self-condemned hates, and tensions difficult to resolve. They are sound largely because they bear with their anxieties, hew to a stable course, and maintain some sense of the ultimate worthwhileness of their lives. Thinking people all through the ages have sought to describe in different ways some structure: and every individual assumes, consciously or unconsciously, some structure in which one acts. Most people tend to assume certain rules which arise from the conscious conformity to what is expected by the society. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Self-affirmation and self-assertion, obvious aspects of will, are essential to love, and crucial to the personal lives of all of us, as well as specifically to psychotherapy. Both love and will are conjunctive forms of experience. That is, both describe a person reaching out, moving toward the other, seeking to affect him or her or it—and opening oneself so that one may be affected by the other. Both love and will are ways of molding, forming, relating to the World and trying to elicit a response from it through the persons whose interest or love we covet. Love and will are interpersonal experiences which bring to bear power to influence others significantly an to be influenced by them. The interrelation of love and will is shown, furthermore, by the fact that each loses it efficacy when it is not kept in right relation to the other; each can block the other. Will can block love. This can be seen particularly in the will power of the inner-directed type of mortal. These are typically people who are often the powerful captain of industry and finance. These are people who boast about the unconquerable soul, and proclaim they are the captain of their fate. However, if my soul is really unconquerable, I shall never fully love; for it is the nature of love to conquer all fortresses. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
And if I must cling to being the master of my fate, I shall never be able to let myself go in passion; for passionate love always has tragic possibilities. Love can break the limbs of strength and overpower the intelligence in all its shrewd planning. An example of will blocking love can be seen in the father of a young student-patient of mine, who was the treasure of a large corporation. He telephoned me to talk about maximizing the effectiveness of his son’s treatment exactly as though we were at his company board-meeting. When the son became sick with a minor illness in college the father immediately flew to the scene to take charge; the same father became furious when his son held hands and kissed his girl friend on the front lawn of their resort home. At dinner, the father told how he had entered into negotiation to buy the company of a friend of the son’s but, having become irritated over the slowness of the negotiations, had called up the would-be partners and told them to forget the whole thing. He showed no awareness that he was sending another company into bankruptcy with the snap of his fingers. This father was a public-spirited citizen, the chairman of several committees for civic betterment; and he could not understand why, when he had been treasurer of an international corporation, his subordinates secretly referred to him as the “hardest S.O.B. in Europe.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
The strong will power which the father thought solved all his problems, actually served at the same time to block his sensitivity, to cut off his capacity to hear other persons, even, or perhaps especially, his own son. It is not surprising that this exceedingly gifted son failed in his college work for several years, went through a beatnik period, and ultimately had a tortuous time permitting himself to succeed in his own profession. Typical of the inner-directed genre, the father of my patient could always take care of others without caring for them, could give them his money but not his heart, could direct them but could not listen to them. This kind of will power was a transfer into interpersonal relationships of the same kind of power that had become so effective in manipulating railroad cars, stock transactions, coal mines, and other aspect of the industrial World. The human of will power, manipulate oneself, did not permit oneself to see why one could not manipulate others in the same way. This identifying of will with personal manipulation is the error that sets will in opposition to love. It is a sound hypothesis, based on a good deal of evidence in psychotherapeutic work, that the unconscious guilt which parents like this carry because they manipulate their children leads them to be overprotective and over permissive toward the same. These are the children who are given electric motor cars and paper straws but not moral values, who pick up sensuality but are not taught sensitivity in life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
The parents seem vaguely aware that the values on which their will power was based are no longer efficacious. However, they can neither find new values nor give up the manipulative will. And the fathers often seem to act on the assumption that their will therefore has to do for the whole family. This overemphasis on will, which blocks love, leads sooner or later to a reaction to the opposite error, love which blocks will. This is typically seen in the generation made of the children of parents like the father we described above. The love proposed in our day by the hipster movement seems to be the clearest illustration of this error. Hipster love is indiscriminate, all you have to do is swipe a certain way on an application, which is connected to a mobile device, and this is a common principle within the movement. Hipster love emphasizes immediacy, spontaneity, and the emotional honesty of the temporary moment. These aspects of hipster love are not only entirely understandable reaction against the manipulative will of the previous generation, but are values in their own right. The immediacy, spontaneity, and honesty of the relationship experienced in the vital now are sound and telling criticisms of contemporary bourgeois love and pleasures of the flesh. The hipster revolt helps destroy the manipulative will power which undermines human personality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
However, love also requires enduringness. Love grows in depth by virtue of the lovers experiencing encounter with each other, conflict and growth, all over a period of time. These cannot be omitted from any lasting and viable experience of love. They involve choice and will under whatever names you use. Generalized love, to be sure, is adequate for generalized, group situations; but I am not honored by being loved simply because I belong to the genus “man.” The love which is separated from will, or the love which obviates will, is characterized by a passivity which does not incorporate and grow with its own passions; such love tends, therefore, toward dissociation. It ends in something which is not fully personal because it does not fully discriminate. Such distinctions involve willing and choosing, and to choose someone means not to choose someone else. This is overlooked among the hipsters; the immediacy of love in the hipster development seems to end in a love that is fugitive and ephemeral. We cannot content ourselves by painting the old building a new color; it is the foundations which are destroyed, and the resolutions, by whatever name we may call them, require new ones. What is necessary for resolutions is a new consciousness in which the depth and meaning of personal relationship will occupy a central place. Such an embracing consciousness is always required in an age of radical transition. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Lacking external guides, we shift our morality inward; there is a new demand upon the individual of personal responsibility. We are required to discover on a deeper level what it means to be human. If I appear to be kind while my kindness is only a mask to cover my exploitativeness—if I appear to be courageous while I am extremely vain or perhaps suicidal—if I appear to love my country while I am furthering my selfish interests, the appearance, for instance, my overt behavior, is in drastic contradiction to the reality of forces that motivate me. My behavior is different from my character. My character structure, the true motivation of my behavior, constitutes my real being. My behavior may partly reflect my being, but it is usually a mask that I have and that I wear for my own purposes. Behaviorism deals with this mask as if it were a reliable scientific datum; true insight is focused on the inner reality, which is usually neither conscious nor directly observable. This concept of being as unmasking is to understand the discrepancy between behavior and character, between my mas and the reality it hides. Often times what people repress are early and later traumatic desires and fears; the way to recovery from symptoms or from a more general malaise is possessed in uncovering this repressed material. In other words, what is repressed are the irrational, infantile, and individual elements of experience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
On the other hand, the common-sense views of a normal, socially adapted, citizen were supposed to be rational and not in need of depth analysis. However, this is not at all true. Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance, albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking process attempts to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of logic and plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life. This false map is not repressed. What is repressed is the knowledge of reality, the knowledge of what is true. If we ask, then: What is unconscious? The answer must be: Aside from irrational passions, almost the whole knowledge of reality. The unconscious is basically determined by society, which produces irrational passions and provides its members with various kinds of fiction and thus forces the truth to become the prisoner of the alleged rationality. Stating that the truth is repressed is based, of course, on the premise that we know the truth and repress this knowledge; in other words, that there is unconscious knowledge. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
My experience in psychoanalysis—of others and of myself—is that it is indeed truth that there is an unconscious knowledge. We perceive reality, and we cannot help perceiving it. Just as our senses are organized to see, hear, smell, touch when we are brought together with reality, our reason is organized to recognize reality, for instance, to see things as they are, to perceive the truth. I am not of course referring to the part of reality that requires scientific tools or methods in order to be perceived. I am referring to what is recognizable by concentrated seeing, especially the reality in ourselves and in others. We know when we meet a dangerous person, when we meet somebody we can fully trust; we know when we are lied to, or exploited, or fooled, when we have sold ourselves a bill of goods. We know almost everything that is important to know about human behavior, just as our ancestors has a remarkable knowledge about the movements of the stars. However, while they were aware of their knowledge and used it, we repress our knowledge immediately, because if it were conscious it would make life too difficult and, as we persuade ourselves, too dangerous. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
The proof of this statement is easy to find. It exists in many dreams in which we exhibit a deep insight into the essence of other people, and of ourselves, which we completely lack in the daytime. It is evidenced in those frequent reactions in which we suddenly see somebody in an entirely different light, and then feel as if we had had this knowledge all the time before. It can be found in the phenomenon of resistance when the painful truth threatens to come to the surface: in slips of the tongue, in awkward expressions, in a state of trance (ASOT 900 XXL), or in instances when a person something, as in an aside, that is the very opposite of what he or she always claimed to believe, and then seems to forget this aside a minute later. Indeed, a great deal of our energy is used to hide from ourselves what we know, and the degree of such repressed knowledge can hardly be overestimated. A Talmudic legend has expressed this concept of the repression of the truth, in a poetic form: when a child is born, Angel touches its head, so that it forgets the knowledge of the truth that it has at the moment of birth. If the child did not forget, its life would become unbearable. Therefore, being refers to the real, in contrast to the falsified, illusionary picture. In this sense, any attempt to increase the sector of being means increased insight into the reality of oneself, of others, of the World around us. We have to overcome greed and hate and penetrate through the surface and insight into reality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
We did not think they would simply disappear. We could not imagine it. Human vitality is as great as their intentionality: they are interdependent. This makes mortals the most vital of all beings. They can transcend any given situation in any direction and this possibility drive one to create beyond oneself. Freedom is the recognition of necessity. Humans are distinguished by their capacity to know that one is determined, and to choose one’s relationship to what determines him or her. One can and must, unless one abdicated one’s own consciousness, choose how one will relate to necessity, such as death, old age, limitations of intelligence, and the conditioning inescapable in one’s own background. Will one accept this necessity, deny it, fight it, affirm it, consent to it? All these words have an element of volition in them. And it should, by now, be clear that mortals do not simply stand outside in their subjectivity, like a critic at the theater, and look at necessity and decide what one thinks of it. We can face fate directly, know it, dare it, toy with it, challenge it, quarrel with it—and love it. And though it is arrogance to say we are the masters of our fate, we are saved from the need to e the victims of it. We are indeed co-creators of our fate. We are involved in these relationships of pleasure, love, beauty, trust. Therefore, anyone has the possibility of changing one’s own behavior to make them more possible. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
Psychoanalysis requires that we should not rest with intentions, or conscious rationalizations, but must push on to intentionality. Our consciousness can never again be the simple one, based on the belief that because we think something consciously, it is necessarily true. Consciousness is an immediate experience, but its meaning must be mediated by language, science, poetry, religion, and all other aspects of the bridges of mortal’s symbolism. The huge World that girdles us about puts all sorts of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. Some of the tests we meet by actions that are easy, and some of the questions we answer in articulately formulated words. However, the deepest question that ever asked admits of no reply but the dump turning of the will and tightening of our heartstrings as we say, “Yes, I will even have it so!” The World thus finds in the heroic mortal its worthy match and mate; and the effort which one is able to put forth to hold oneself erect and keep one’s heart unshaken is the direct measure of one’s worth and function in the journey of human life. One can stand this Universe. One can still find zest in it, not by ostrich-like forgetfulness but by pure inward willingness to face the World [despite all the] deterrent objects there. “Will you or will you not have it so?” we are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical things. We answer by consents or non-consents and not by words. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
What wonder that those dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things! What wonder if the amount which we accord of it be the one strictly underived and original contribution which we make to the World! In nonalienated activity, I experience myself as the subject of my activity. Nonalienated activity is a process of giving birth to something, of producing something and remaining related to something, of producing something and remaining related to what I produce. This also implies that my activity and the result of my activity are one. I call this nonalienated activity productive activity. Productiveness is a character orientation all human beings are capable of, to the extent that they are not emotionally crippled. Productive persons animate whatever they touch. They give birth to their own faculties and bring life to other persons and to things. Our minds acts at time and at times suffers: in so far as it has adequate ideas, it necessarily acts: and in so far as it has inadequate ideas, it necessarily suffers. Freedom is mortal’s capacity to take a hand in one’s own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves. Freedom is the other side of consciousness of self: if we were not able to be aware of ourselves, we would be pushed along by instinct or the automatic march of history, like bees or mastodons. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
However, by our power to be conscious of ourselves, we can call to mind how we acted yesterday or last month, and by learning from these actions we can influence, even if so little, how we act today. And we can picture in imagination some situation tomorrow—say a dinner date, or an appointment for a job, or a Board of Directors meeting—and by turning over in fantasy different alternative for acting, we can pick the one which will do best for us. Consciousness of self gives us the power to stand outside the rigid chain of stimulus and response, to pause, and by this pause to throw some weight on either side, to cast some decision about what the response will be. That consciousness of self and freedom go together is shown in the fact that the less self-awareness a person has, the more one is unfree. That is to say, the more one is controlled by inhibitions, repressions, childhood conditionings which one has consciously forgotten but which still drive one unconsciously, the more one is pushed by forces over which one has no control. When persons first come for psychotherapeutic help, for example, they generally complain that they are driven in any number of ways: they have sudden anxieties or fears or are blocked in studying or working without any appropriate reason. They are unfree—that is, bound and pushed by unconscious patterns. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
It may be after some months of psychotherapeutic work little changes begin to appear. The person begins to recall one’s dreams regularly; or in one session one takes the initiative in stating that one wants to change the subject on hand and get some help on a different problem; or one day ne can say that one felt angry when the therapist said such and such; or one is able to cry when previously one could never feel much of anything, or suddenly one laughs with spontaneity and wholeheartedness, or is able to state one does like Mary with whom he has been conventional friends for years but does like Carolyn. In such ways, slight as they may seem, one’s emerging self-awareness goes hand in hand with one’s enlarging power to direct one’s own life. As the person gains more consciousness of self, one’s range of choice and one’s freedom proportionately increase. Freedom is cumulative; one choice made with an element of freedom makes greater freedom possible for the next choice. Each exercise of freedom enlarges the circumference of the circle of oneself. We do not mean to imply that there are not an infinite number of deterministic influences in anyone’s life. If you wished to argue that we are determined by our bodies, by our economic situation, by the fact that we happened to be born into this twenty-first century in America, and so on, I would agree with you; and I would add many more ways in which we are psychologically determined, particularly by tendencies of which are unconscious. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
However, no matter how much one argues for the deterministic viewpoint, one still must grant that there is a margin in which the alive human being can be aware of what is determining one. And even if only in a very minute way to begin with, one can have some say in how one will react to the deterministic factors. Freedom is thus shown in how we relate to the deterministic realities of life. If you set out to write a sonnet, you run up against all kinds of recalcitrant realities in the laws of rhyme and scanning, and in the necessities of fitting words together; or if you build a house, you confront all kinds of determining elements in bricks and mortar and lumber. It is essential that you know your material and accept its limits. However, what you say in the sonnet is uniquely yours. The pattern and the style in which you build your house are products of how you, with an element of freedom, use the reality of the given materials. “For we know it is by the grace that we are saved, after all we can do,” reports 2 Nephi 25.23. Obedience leads to true freedom. The more we obey revealed truth, the more we become liberated. Obedience to the Word of Wisdom keeps us from addictions so we do not become slaves to alcohol, drugs, or tobacco. Our bodies will be healthy and our minds clear because the promises associated with this principle is that all saints who remember to keep and do these sayings, walking in obedience to the commandments, shall receive health in their navel and marrow to their bones. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
An additional promise in the relation says we shall find wisdom and great treasures of knowledge, even hidden treasures. So by obedience we also gain knowledge. Obedience brings peace in decision making. If we have firmly made up our minds to follow the commandments, we will not have to redecide which path to take when temptation comes our way. That is how obedience brings spiritual safety. The arguments of freedom versus determinism are on a false basis, just as it is false to think of freedom as a kind of isolated electric button called free will. Freedom is shown in according one’s life with realities—realities as simple as the needs for rest and food, or as ultimate as death. When we are thwarted, it is our own attitude that is out of order. Freedom is involved when we accept the realities not by the blind necessity but by choice. Acting out is a transmuting of an impulse (or intent) into overt behavior in order to avoid insight. To see the full implications of a desire or intention, to get insight about its meaning, typically upsets one’s self-World relationship more and is, therefore, more anxiety-creating and painful than to act out the desire physically, even if one gets rebuffed or hurt in the latter process. At least, if one can keep the whole problem on the level of muscular behavior, one does not have to face the more difficult threat to one’s self-esteem. This is why acting out is rightly associated with infinite, psychopathic and sociopathic character types. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
Acting out occurs not on the level of consciousness, but on the level of awareness which, is the capacity that the human being shares with animals, the more primitive developmental level prior to consciousness. In adult patients, acting out is generally an endeavor to discharge the desire or intention without having to transmute it into consciousness. It is not easy to live with intentionality without acting it out; to live in a polarity of intent and act means to live with one’s anxiety. Hence, if patients cannot escape into the act, they try to avoid the tension by doing the opposite, be denying the whole intention itself. This means that the acceptance of limitations need not at all be a giving up, but can and should be a constructive act of freedom; and it may well be that such a choice will have more creative results for the person than if one had not had to struggle against any limitation whatever. The mortal who is devoted to freedom does not waste time fighting reality; instead, one extols reality. There is all the difference in the World in how persons relate to the reality of situations. Some people give up when they face a challenge. Others do what they are supposed to do, but they continually resent the fact that they are faced with such a situation and though they outwardly obey they inwardly rebel against the rules. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
Some people sink into consciousness through plentiful hours of contemplation as they reflect on how to progress in their lives and solve problems. They seek in their consciousness of self to understand what is wrong in their lives beforehand that they should have succumbed to a particular situation, and use this deterministic fact as an avenue to new self-knowledge. This allows individuals to affirm their elemental freedom to know and to mold deterministic events; they meet a severely deterministic fact with freedom. It is doubtful whether anyone really achieves freedom who does not responsibly choose to be free, and whoever does so choose becomes more integrated as a person by virtue of having faced a challenge. Through the power to survey one’s life, mortals can transcend the immediate events which determine them. Whether one has faced hardship, one can still in one’s freedom choose how one will relate to these facts. And how one related to a merciless realistic fact like death can be more important for one than the fact of death itself. Freedom is most dramatically illustrated in heroic actions rather than compromise; but even more significant is the undramatic, steady day-to-day exercise of freedom on the part of any person developing toward psychological and spiritual integration in a distraught society like our own. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
Thus freedom is not just the matter of saying “Yes” or “No” to a specific decision: it is the power to mold and create ourselves. Freedom is the capacity, to become what we truly are. Freedom and liberty are precious gifts that come to us wen we are obedient to the laws of God and the whisperings of the Spirit. If we are to avoid destruction, fences or guardrails must be built beyond which we cannot go. The fences which we must stay within are the principles of revealed truth. Obedience to them makes us truly free to reach the potential and the glory which our Heavenly Father has in store for us. Belief in God is great, it lets us know that there is light, hope, love, progression, harmony, peace, and prosperity waiting for us, and that we are not just trapped in an everlasting game of darkness and stress. Freedom thus obtained—that is, by obedience to the law of Christ—is freedom of the soul, the highest form of liberty. And the most glorious thing about it is that is it within the reach of every one of us, regardless of what people about us, or even nations do. Beautify your gardens, your houses, your farms; beautify the city. This will make us happy, and produce plenty. There should be no doubt what our task is today. If we truly cherish the heritage we have received, we must maintain the same virtues and the same character of our stalwart forbears—faith in God, courage, industry, frugality, self-reliance, and integrity. Our opportunity and obligation for doing so is clearly upon us. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
We have time so things do not happen all at once. For the longest time she did not answer. I felt I could say no more. My heart ached as much as it had ever ached. We lay so near to one another, so bound in one another’s limbs, so warm and belonging to each other that the night had gone quiet of all its random sounds for us. At last she stirred ever so faintly, ever so tenderly. Although there are many theories concerning personality development, there is rather general agreement on at least one important point—the significance of early family life. The emotional environment created by parents (or parent substitutes) is of crucial importance. And although there may be great disagreements as to details, there is general consensus that in families that are relatively healthy in their emotional attitudes, children generally develop a high degree of their potential, while in relatively unhealthy families children are likely to realize less of their potential and often tend to develop personality problems. Thinking in opposite extremes is always risky, and so it is ere. There are, of course, no completely healthy or unhealthy families. Rather we might think of a long life or scale along which families could theoretically be places as relatively healthy or unhealthy. And no family would be found at either extreme. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
This discussion will probably be most meaningful to us if we think of it as it applies to our own personal lives. For must of us it will be helpful to think of ourselves in two roles. One role is that of one’s own childhood: “What effects did the family situation in which I lived as a child have upon my personality? How are these influences affecting my relationships with other people, including my own family, now?” The second role that might well be kept in mind is our relationship to our children (or future children): “Am I emotionally equipped to be an effective parent? How can I become better able to meet the emotional needs of my children?” While it is important to see that our childhood family had a profound influence on our present degree of maturity, which in turn will have a great deal to do with the quality of our relationships with our children, it is also important to know that we can change and reach higher levels of maturity. If this were not true, there would be little purpose in discussing personal and family life; and the future would look bleak indeed. Every family tends to develop repeated patterns of behavior. The parent will do something to which the child’s response by repeating his or her original action in an ever more forceful way. Like a snowball rolling downhill, this circular pattern gains size and momentum with each repetition of the cycle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
One is tempted to use the phrase vicious circles in regard to many of these patterns, for it is most easy to see them in operation in negative aspects of personality development and in the growth of our fear of love, but as we shall see later there can be healthy cycles also. Unhealthy cycles begin with feelings of rejection in family life. Since parents are the primary influence in the family, it is basically the relationship of children with their parents that is under consideration, even though children often feel rejected by brothers or sisters. It can be safely assumed, however, that in early childhood the existence of such feelings can be traced back to the parents, for it is they who establish the emotion tone of the home. It is no accident that the phrase feeling of rejection rather than simply the word rejection is used. There is an important distinction, for while it can be shown that children often experience feelings of rejection it often remains a question whether the rejection really exists. There are probably a few parents who are so hostile and unfeeling in their relation to their children that they do not want to express feelings of affection. More often parents are crippled by personality problems, are frightened of their love, and so are unable to communicate their love freely. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
When parents have emotion damage of their own to work through, they behave toward their children in ways that appear to be rejecting. Unfortunately, feelings of rejection are damaging even though the parent does not mean to be rejecting. First of all, every child experiences some feelings of rejection from parents or, in those instances where the child is not reared by his or her natural parents, from those who become substitute parents and who are primarily responsible for the child’s early experiences. A child reared in an orphanage and foster homes, for example, may have frequently changing series of parents, a process that in itself may feel like abandonment and rejection to the child. However, whatever our family circumstances were, each one of us experienced some of these feelings of rejection, and our children will experience some from us. This is only to ay that no parent is perfect. As we discuss these cycles of rejection we are talking about all of us, and we are talking about our children. The degree to which children feel rejected will vary, of course, for parents differ in their maturity and in their ability to express love. However, every one of us is involved, for feelings of rejection are part of the universal dilemma of being human and rearing child in an imperfect World. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Secondly, there are many kinds of rejection that children encounter. Perhaps the most easily recognizable is that which is accompanied by open hostility toward the child. Most of us have known parents who could not speak to a child without speaking in anger. One such couple seemed unable even to call their children in from playing in the backyard without using a tone of voice seething with hostility. Such parents are often overly severe in punishment and no doubt take out on the child their feelings of frustration in other areas of life. More basically, they are so frightened of genuine emotional involvement that they seem unable to experience their love for their children. We can understand more clearly what freedom is if we first look at what it is not. Freedom is not rebellion. Rebellion is a normal interim move toward freedom: it occurs to some extent when the little child is trying to exercise his or her muscles of independence through the power to say “No”; it occurs more clearly when the adolescent is trying to become independent of parents. In adolescence (as possibly in other stages too) the strength of the rebelliousness against what the parents stand for is often excessive because the young person is fighting one’s own anxiety at stepping out into the World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
When parents say, “Don’t” the child often must scream defiance at them, because that “don’t” is exactly what one feels the craven side of oneself is saying, the side of oneself which is tempted to take refuge behind the walls of parental protection. However, rebellion is often confused with freedom itself. It becomes a false port in the storm because it gives the rebel a delusive sense of being really independent. The rebel forgets that rebellion always presupposes an outside structure of rules, laws, expectations—against which one is rebelling; and one’s security, sense of freedom and strength are dependent actually on this external structure. They are borrowed, and can be taken away like a bank loan which can be called in at any moment. Psychologically many persons stop at this stage of rebellion. Their sense of inner moral strength comes only from knowing what moral conventions they do not live up to; they get an oblique sense of conviction by proclaiming their atheism and disbelief. Many adults are against external compulsions on love, against rigidly curtailing free development of children. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
And some people think the parent should not interfere with what their children are doing, and, in the extreme forms of their doctrines, the child must be allowed to do anything he or she wished. It was not seen, at one time, that such structureless living actually increased children’s anxiety. It also was not see that the parent must obviously take a good deal of responsibility for the child’s actions, and that absolute freedom consists of the parent’s doing this in the context of a genuine respect for the child as a person, actually and potentially, that one gives all realistic room for the potentialities of the child to develop, and that one cannot require the child to falsify one’s wants and emotions. Since the rebel gets his or her sense of direction and vitality from attacking the existing standards and mores, one does not have to develop standards of one’s own. Rebellion acts as a substitute for the more difficult process of struggling through to one’s own autonomy, to new beliefs, to the state were one can lay new foundations on which to build. The negative forms of freedom confused freedom with license, and overlooked the fact that freedom is never the opposite of responsibility. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Another common error is to confuse freedom with planlessness. Some individuals these days argue that if the system of economic laisse-faire is so successful and working in California (which boasts of being the World’s fifth largest economy has a budget surplus of $14 billion)—letting everyone do as they wish—were altered as history marches on, our freedom would vanish with it. The argument goes like this: Freedom is like a living thing. It is invisible. And if the individual’s right to own the means of production is take away, one no longer has the freedom to earn one’s living in one’s own way. Then one can have no freedom at all. Well, if these writers were right it would indeed be unfortunate—for who then could be free? Not you nor I nor anyone else except a very small group of persons—for in this day of giant industries, only the minutest fraction of citizens can own the means of production anyway. Laissez-faire was a great idea, as we have seen, in earlier centuries: but times change, and almost everyone nowadays earns their living by virtue of belonging to a large group, be it an industry, or a university, or a corporation, or a club. It is a vastly more interdependent World, this “One World” of our twentieth century, than the World of the entrepreneurs of earlier centuries or of our own pioneer days; and freedom must be found in the context of economic community and the social value of work, not in everyone’s setting up own’s own factory or university. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Fortunately, if we keep our perspective, this economic interdependence need not destroy freedom. The pony express was a great idea, also, back in the days when sending a letter from coast to coast was an adventure. Also, keep in mind that new inventions do not always replace the old one. Although we now have vacuums, the old fashion straw broom with a sturdy wooden handle is still thriving. However certainly we are thankful—complain as we may about mail service these days—that now when we write a letter to a friend on the coast, we do not have to give more than a passing thought to its method of travel; we drop it in the box with an air-mail stamp and forget about it. We are free, that is, to devote more time and concern to our message to our friend, our intellectual and spiritual interchange in the letter, because in a World made smaller by specialized communication we do not have to be so concerned to our message to our friend, our intellectual and spiritual interchange in the letter, because in a World made smaller by specialized communication we do not have to be so concerned about how the letter gets there. We are more free intellectually and spiritually precisely because we accept our position in economic interdependence with our fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
I have often wondered why there is such anxiety and such an outcry that freedom will be lost unless we preserve the old laissez-faire practices. Is not one of the reason the fact that modern mortals have so thoroughly surrendered inward psychological and spiritual freedom to the routine of their work and to the mass patterns of social conventions that one feels the only vestige of freedom left to one is the opportunity for economic aggrandizement? Has one made the freedom to compete with one’s neighbor economically a last remnant of individuality, which therefore must stand for the whole meaning of freedom? That is to say, if the citizen of the suburbs could not buy a new car each year, build a Mc Mansion, and paint it a slightly different color from his or her neighbor’s, might one feel that one’s life would have to purpose, and that one would not exist as a person? The great weight placed on competitive, laissez-faire freedom seems to me to show how much we have lost a real understanding of freedom. To be sure, freedom is indivisible: and this is precisely why one cannot identify it with a particular economic doctrine or segment of life, least of all a segment of the past; it is a living thing, and its life comes precisely from how the whole person relates oneself to the community of one’s fellow people. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Freedom means openness, a readiness to grow; it means being flexible, ready to change for the sake of greater human values. To identify freedom with a given system is to deny freedom—it crystallizes freedom and turns it into a rigid doctrine. To cling to a tradition, with the defensive plea that is we lose something that worked well in the past we will have lost all, neither shows the spirit of freedom nor makes for the future growth of freedom. We shall keep faith with those courageous mortals, the pioneer industrialists, the mortals of the commerce and the capitalists of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in the Western World, as well as with the independent frontiers people of our own country, if we emulate their courage, dare to think boldly as they did, and plan the most effective economic measures for our day as they did for theirs. Mortals have always lived in a social World, and that World conditions our psychological health. We simply propose that our social and economic ideal be that society which gives the maximum opportunity for each person in it to realize oneself, to develop and use one’s potentialities and to labor as a human being of dignity giving to and receiving from one’s fellow mortals. The good society is, thus, the one which gives the greatest freedom to its people—freedom defined not negatively and defensively, but absolutely, as the opportunity to realize ever greater human values. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Freedom follow that collectivism, as in fascism and communism and socialism, is the denial of the values we recognize as freedom, and must be opposed at all costs. However, we shall successfully overcome them only as we are devoted to absolute ideals which are better, chiefly the building of a society based on a genuine respect for persons and their freedom. The living human being is not a dead image and cannot be described like a thing. In fact, the living human being cannot be described at all. Indeed, much can be said about me, about my character, about my total orientation to life. This insightful knowledge can go very far in understanding and describing my own or another’s psychical structure. However, the total me, my whole individuality, my suchness that is as unique as my fingerprints are, can never be fully understood, not even by empathy, for no two human beings are entirely alike. Only in the process of mutual alive relatedness can the other and I overcome the barrier of separateness, inasmuch as we both participate in the dance of life. Yet our full identification of each other can never be achieved. Even a single act of behavior cannot be fully described. One could write pages of descriptions of the Mona Lisa’s smile, and still the pictured smile would not have been caught in words—but not because her smile is so mysterious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Everybody’s smile is mysterious (unless it is the learned, synthetic smile of the marketplace). No one can fully describe the expression of interest, enthusiasm, biophilia, or of hate or narcissism that one may see in the eyes of another person, or the variety of facial expressions, of gaits, of postures, of intonations that exists among people. The mode of being has as its prerequisites independence, freedom, and the presence of critical reason. Its fundamental characteristic is that of being active, not in the sense of outward activity, of busyness, but of inner activity, the productive use of our human powers. To be active means to give expression to one’s faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which—though in varying degrees—every human being is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated personality, to be interested, to list, to give. Yet none of these experiences can be fully expressed in words. The words are vessels that are filled with experience that overflows the vessels. The words point to an experience; they are not the experience. The moment that I express what I experience exclusively in thought and words, the experience has gone; it has dried up, is dead, a mere thought. Hence being is indescribable in words and is communicable only by sharing my experience. It the structure of having, the dead word rules; in the structure of being, the alive and inexpressible experience rules. (Of course, in the being mode there is also thinking that is alive and productive.) #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Perhaps the being mode may best be described in a symbol. A blue glass antique Victorian chandelier appears to be blue when light shines through it because it absorbs all other colors and this does not let them pass. This is to say, we call the chandelier blue precisely because it does not retain the blue waves. It is named not for what it possessed but for what it gives out. Only to the extent that we decrease the mode of having, that is of nonbeing, for instance, stop finding security and identity by clinging to what we have, by sitting on it, by holding onto our ego and our possessions—can the mode of being emerge. To be requires giving up one’s selfishness, by humbling oneself before God. However, most people find giving up their having orientation too difficult; any attempt to do so arouses their intense anxiety and feels like giving up all security, like being thrown into the ocean when one does not know how to swim. They do not know that when they have given up their attachment to solely focusing on the material World, they can begin to use their own proper forces and walk by themselves with full faith in the Lord. What holds people back is the illusion that they cannot walk by themselves, they have would collapse if they were not supported by the things they have. However, the reason we are alive today is because God willed it to be. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
People who do not walk in faith are like children who are afraid that they will never be able to walk, after they have fallen for the very first time. However, nature and human help prevent human beings from becoming lost. Those who believe that they would collapse without using the crutches of having also need human help, in addition to God’s guidance. When one is caught in a whirlpool of emotion, it is difficult to find a way out alone. When answers to urgent prayer do not seem to come, it can be that we do not understand some truths about prayer, or because we do not recognize answers when they come. Our Heavenly Father did not put us on Earth to fail but to succeed gloriously. It may seem paradoxical, but that is why recognizing answers to prayer can sometimes be very difficult. Some face life with only their own experience and capacity to help them. Others, seek, through prayer, divine inspiration to know what to do. When required, they qualify for power beyond their own capacity. Communication with our Heavenly Father is a scared privilege. It is based upon unchanging principles. When we receive help from out Heavenly Father, it is in response to faith, obedience, and the proper use of agency. We are here on Earth to gain experience we can obtain in no other way. We are given the opportunity to apply the truth so we can grow, develop, and gain spiritual maturity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
The turbulence inside her was unreadable, indeed, unknowable, and if I caught anything definitive it was a high pitch of terror that hearkened back to things which had befallen her in the past. I could not fathom it, there was not time for such mental mining, and her confusion was putting up too much of a fight. I had to go on. Our fear of emotional intimacy is such a pervading factor in our existence that it has tremendous influence on our personalities and our relationships with others. This is true because we most often express our fear of love by maintaining emotion distance from others. Many symptoms of personality illness appear to serve the purposes of achieving and perpetuating this distance. In one form of severe emotional illness, for example, the patient will remain for hours at a time in one position. Often the position is unusual and even grotesque, almost as if one were saying, “I am different, I am unapproachable.” If you did speak to such a person there would probably be no visible response. And you might have the eerie feeling at the moment that you were not in the presence of another person. In a way you would be right, for such an individual has gone about as far as possible to absent oneself emotionally from others. The fear of closeness with its risk of hurt is so intense that one has built an almost impenetrable wall between oneself and the World. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
Most of us have not suffered so much emotional damage that we have had to go to such extremes to remain distant from others. However, we have all experienced enough hurt and are sufficiently frightened that we build walks of one kind or another between ourselves and others. Churches often provide illustrations of wall-building on an institutional level. No doubt one reason many people are attracted to churches is that they hope to experience the love for each other that religion talks about. Yet the church frequently appears bent on creating only the appearance of helping people to know each other. So Erich Good and Olivia Good, newcomers to the community, may sit for many weeks in church services among strangers who nod self-consciously to the Goods and to each other as they leave at the end of the hour. They may attend church suppers or couples’ groups and discover that they learn only the most banal superficialities about those around them. They may become involved in activities and committee meetings and find that they are mostly business and that the pleasant chats before and after meetings center around safe topics—jobs, vacation, sports, the children, and the weather. So churches, which are made up of individuals, of course, seem at least as frightened as the rest of us in doing anything to break through our walls of isolation despite the skill with which they may depict our need for love. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
So important is this wall-building in our lives that much will be said of the various ways we have of separating ourselves from others. All of us probably engage to some to some extent in the wall-building device of storing up resentments. Someone irritates us, but we do not express our resentment—at any rate not all of our anger. That would be very direct and open, and therefore much too frightening. Instead we cling to our resentment like a long-lost brother, storing it away so we can feel sullen when we are in danger of recognizing and expressing our love for the person. Many a woman, for example, has clung to knowledge of an extramarital infatuation on the part of her husband and used it in this way for years. And whenever he says, “I love you!” she can reply, “Well, you should have thought of that before you fooled around with that woman!” The martyr role is another very efficient way of building walls. One college student’s mother was a master at it. He left for school each morning, not bothering to tidy up his room, because he was content to live amid some disorder. Each day his mother went in and straightened and cleaned it. When he returned in the evening, she reminded him with wounded voice of her sacrifice and how he “could at least show some appreciation after causing me all that work.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
Then the boy, when he played by the rules of the game, would feel guilty about his dereliction of duty and his unexpressed anger about her martyrdom. For who has a right to feel angry at such a self-scarifying mother? The effect of this daily household drama was to keep both of them in a constant state of tension in their relationship with each other. As long as they could perpetuate this ritual, they were quite safe from experiencing and expressing their love for each other, love that must have been quite frightening to both of them. Every marriage counselor is familiar with the “he loves me, he loves me not!” games that men and women often play. Every bit of negative behavior on the partner’s part is interpreted as evidence of the lack of love. A husband may react to a cluttered house with the feeling, “If she really loved me, she would do her share and keep the house picked up. It is the least she can do!’ A wife may feel, “He must not love me very much. He is constantly forgetting anniversaries and other things he knows are important to me.” Or we may be critical of the quality of our own love by using similar standards. “Surely, if I really loved him,” we may say to ourselves, “I would be more considerate to his feelings” or “more tolerant of his kooky friends.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
Such tallying up of evidences of love is usually completely meaningless, for it is based on the unreasonable assumption that when we love a person we act that way. Unfortunately we human beings are not so rational as all that! For to express live is frightening to us. One woman had been separated from her husband for a number of weeks when she appeared at her weekly therapy session with an account of new developments in her relationship with her husband. She said, “He was back home every night this week. Then about the middle of the week we fell out and I thought he was going to quit me again. However, for the first time when I really gotten angry, he did not walk out on me. And when it was over, we began to feel pretty lose to each other. And that frightened me when I began to see that things might really work out for us. I guess I am afraid to let myself get involved with him again for fear I will just get to enjoying it and he will walk out again. So, do you know what I did? I have just now figured it out. I went back into the past and dug up all kinds of stuff that I could bitch at him about. Just to foul things up, so I would not let myself know how much I love him!” Judging by our behavior, one might begin to conclude that our love ebbs and flows like an ocean. Love does not come and go, but our experience of love and our expression of love is intermittent. And the satisfying moments of giving and receiving love are followed by times of withdrawal of one kind or another, because the experience of life is frightening. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
Language is an important factor in fortifying the having orientation. The name of a person—and we all have names (and maybe numbers if the present-day trend toward depersonalization continues)—creates the illusion that he or she is a final, immortal being. The person and the name become equivalent; the name demonstrates that the person is a lasting, indestructible substance—and not a process. Common nouns have the same function: for instance, love, pride, hate, joy give the appearance of fixed substances, but such nouns have no reality and only obscure the insight that we are dealing with processes going on in a human being. However, even nouns that are names of things, such as table or lamp, are misleading. The words indicate that we are speaking of fixed substances, although things are nothing but a process of energy that causes certain sensations in our bodily system. However, these sensations are not perceptions of specific things like table or lamp; these perceptions are the result of a cultural process of learning, a process that makes certain sensations assume the form of specific percepts. We have naively believed that things like tables and lams exists as such, and we fail to see that society teaches us to transform sensation into perception that permit us to manipulate the World around us in order to enable us to survive in a given culture. Once we have given such percepts a name, the name seems to guarantee the final and unchangeable reality of the percept. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
The need to have has still another foundation, the biologically given desire to live. Whether we are happy or unhappy, our body impels us to strive for immortality. However, since we know by experience that we shall die, we seek solutions that make us believe that, in spite of the empirical evidence, we are immortal. This wish has taken many forms: the belief of the Pharaohs that their bodies enshrined in the pyramids would be immortal; many religious fantasies of life after death, in the happy hunting grounds of early hunter societies; the Christian paradise. In contemporary society since the eighteenth century, history and the future have become the substitutes for the Christian Heaven: fame, celebrity, even notoriety—anything that seems to guarantee a footnote in the record of history—constitutes a bit of immortality. The craving for fame is not just secular vanity—it has a religious quality for those who do not believe in the traditional hereafter any more. (This is particularly noticeable among political leaders.) Publicity paves the way to immortality, and the public relations agents become the new priests. However, perhaps more than anything else, possession of property constitutes the fulfillment of the craving for immortality, and it is for this reason that the having orientation has strength. If my self is constituted by what I have, then I am immortal if the things I have are indestructible. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
From Ancient Egypt to today—from physical immortality, via mummification of the body, to mental immortality, vis the last will—people have remained alive beyond their physical/mental lifetimes. Via the legal power of the last will the disposal of our property is determined for generations to come; through the laws of inheritance, I—inasmuch as I am an owner of capital—become immortal. A helpful approach to understanding the mode of having is to recall one of Dr. Freud’s most significant findings, that after going through their infant phase of mere passive receptivity followed by a phase of aggressive exploitative receptivity, all children, before they reach maturity, go through a phase where their character and energy is mainly focused having, saving, and hoarding money and material things as well as feelings, gestures, words, energy. It is the character of the stingy individual and is usually connected with such other traits as orderliness, punctuality, stubbornness, each to a more than ordinary degree. An important aspect of Dr. Freud’s concept is the symbolic connection between money and the unmentionable—gold and dirt—of which he quotes a number of examples. His concept of the money is just a way of saying people place too much importance on money when their spiritual life, nature and humanity are more important. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
The predominant orientation is possession and occurs in the period before the achievement of full maturity and is pathological if it remains permanent. For Dr. Freud, in other words, the person exclusively concerned with having and possession is a neurotic, mentally sick person; hence it would follow that the society in which most of the members are of possessive character is a sick society. Normal, constructive anxiety goes with becoming aware of and assuming one’s potentialities. Intentionality is the constructive use of normal anxiety. If I can have some expectations and possibility of acting on my powers, I move ahead. However, if the anxiety becomes overwhelming, then the possibilities for action are blotted out. Pronounced neurotic anxiety destroys intentionality, destroys our relationship to meaningful contents of knowledge or will. This is the anxiety of nothingness. Without intentionality we are indeed nothing. Mortal’s vitality is as one’s intentionality: they are interdependent. This makes mortals the most vital of all beings. One can transcend any given situation in any direction and this possibility drives one to create beyond oneself. Vitality is the power of creating beyond oneself without losing oneself. The more power of creating beyond itself a being has the more vitality it has. The World of technical creations is the most conspicuous expression of mortal’s vitality and its infinite superiority over animal vitality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
Only mortals have complete vitality because one alone has complete intentionality. If the correlation between vitality and intentionality is rightly understood one can accept the biological intentionality of courage within the limits of its validity. Overwhelming anxiety destroys the capacity to perceive and conceive one’s World, to reach out toward it so form and re-form it. In this sense, it destroys intentionality. We cannot hope, plan, promise or create in severe anxiety; we shrink back into a stockade of limited consciousness hoping only to preserve ourselves until the danger is past. Intentionality and vitality are correlated by the fact that mortal’s vitality shows itself not simply as a biological force, but as a reaching out, a forming and re-forming of the World in various creative activities. The degree of one’s courage. This is a combination of strength and value, with moral nobility. Vitality and intentionality are united in this ideal of human perfection, which is equally removed from barbarism and from moralism. Taking a final lead from the origin of the World itself, we can go further and relate intentionality to intensity of experience, or to the degree of intentness in life. There have been a number of attempts to identity what we mean by vitality in the psychological sphere: such words as aliveness and so on are used, but without anyone’s having much conviction that one has said anything. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
Does not intentionally give us a criterion for defining psychological vitality? The degree of intentionality can define the aliveness of the person, the potential degree of commitment, and one’s capacity, if we are speaking of a patient, for remaining at the therapeutic task. Without an ultimate concern as its basis every system of morals degenerates into a method of adjustments to social demands, whether they are ultimately justified or not. And the infinite passion which characterizes a genuine faith evaporates and is replaced by a cleaver calculation which is unable to withstand the passionate attacks of an idolatrous faith. This is a description of what has happened on a large scale in Western civilization. It is concealed only by the fact that in many representatives of humanist faith, moral strength was and is greater in members of a religiously active community. However, this is a transitory stage. There is still faith in these mortals, ultimate concern about human dignity and personal fulfillment. There is religious substance in them, which, however, can be wasted in the next generation if the faith is not renewed. This is possible only in the community of faith under the continuous impact of its mythical and cultic symbols. “And behold, it is wisdom in God that we should obtain these records, that we may preserve unto our children the language of our fathers,” 1 Nephi 3.19. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
I have guests here! Where exactly did you come from? It is once in a blue moon a boat ties up at my dock. However, you are most welcome. We are very private here, you understand, I cannot invite you to stay. If a person’s freedom were entirely and literally taken away, what would happen to the individual? One evening a king of a far land was standing at his window, vaguely listening to some music drifting down the corridor from the reception room in the other wing of the palace. The king was wearied from the diplomatic reception he had just attended, and he looked out of the window pondering about the ways of the World in general and nothing in particular. Hos eye feel upon a man in the square below—apparently an average man, walking to the corner to take the tram home, who had taken that same route five nights a week for many years. The king followed this man in his imagination—pictured him arriving home, perfunctorily kissing his wife, eating his late meal, inquiring whether everything was right with the children, reading the paper, going to bed, perhaps engaging in the love act with his wife or perhaps not, sleeping, and getting u and going off to work again the next day. And a sudden curiosity seized the king which for a moment banished his fatigue, “I wonder what would happen if a man were kept in a cage, like the animals at the zoo?” #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
So the next day the king called in a psychologist, told him of his idea, and invited him to observe the experiment. Then the king caused a cage to be brought from the zoo, and the average man was brought and placed therein. At first the man was simply bewildered, and he kept saying to the psychologist who stood outside the cage, “I have to catch the tram, I have to get to work, look what time it is, I will be late for work!” However, later on in the afternoon the man began soberly to realize what was up, and then he protested vehemently, “The king cannot do this to me! It is unjust, and against the laws.” His voice was strong, and his eyes full of anger. During the rest of the week the man continued his vehement protests. When the king would walk by the cage, as he did every day, the man made his protests directly to the monarch. However, the king would answer, “Look here, you get plenty of food, you have a good bed, and you do not have to work. We take good care of you—so why are you objecting?” Then after some days the man’s protests lessened and then ceased. He was silent in his cage, refusing generally to talk, but the psychologist could see hatred glowing like a deep fire in his eyes. However, after several weeks the psychologist noticed that more and more it now seemed as if the man were pausing a moment after the king’s daily reminder to him that he was being taken good care of—for a second the hatred was postponed from returning to his eyes—as though he were asking himself what the king said were possibly true? #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
And after a few weeks more, the man began to discuss with the psychologist how it was a useful thing if a mortal were given food and shelter, and that mortal has to live by one’s fate in any case and the part of wisdom was to accept one’s date. So when a group of professors and graduate student came in one day to observe the man in the cage, he was friendly toward them and explained to them that he had chosen this way of life, that there are great values in security and being taken care of, that they would of course see how sensible his course was, and so on. “How strange!” thought the psychologist, and how pathetic—why is it he struggles so hard to get them to approve of his way of life? In the succeeding days when the would walk through the courtyard, the mortal would fawn upon him from being the bars in his cage and thank him for the food and shelter. However, when the king was not in the yard and the man was not aware that the psychologist was present, his expression was quite different—sullen and morose. When his food was handed to him through the bars by the keeper, the man would often drop the dishes or dump over the water and then be embarrassed because of his stupidity and clumsiness. His conversation because increasingly one-tracked: and instead of the involved philosophical theories about the value of being taken care of, he had gotten down to simple sentences like “It is fate,” which he would say over and over again, or just mumble to himself, “It is.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
It was hard to say just when the last phase set in. However, the psychologist became aware that the mortal’s face seemed to have no particular expression: his smile was no longer fawning, but simply empty and meaningless, like the grimace a baby makes when there is gas on its stomach. The man ate his good, and exchanged a few sentences with the psychologist from time to time; his eyes were distant and vague, and though he looked at the psychologist, it seemed that he never really saw him. And not the man, in his destiny conversations, never used the word “I” any more. He had accepted the cage. He had no anger, no hate, no rationalization. However, he was not insane. That night the psychologist sat in his parlor trying to write a concluding report. However, it was very difficult for him to summon up works, for he felt within himself a great emptiness. He kept trying to reassure himself with the words, “They say that nothing is ever lost, that matter is merely changed to energy and back again.” However, he could not help feeling something had been lost, something had been taken out of the Universe in the experiment, and there was left only a void. Hatred surges up in a person when one realizes on is captive. The fact that such a great amount of hatred is generated when people have to give up their freedom proves how essential a value freedom is for them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
Often the person in actual life who has had to surrender much of one’s freedom, usually in one’s childhood when one can do nothing about, and to give up some of one’s right and room to exist as a human being, may seem on the surface to have accepted the situation and adjusted to the surrender. However, we do not need to penetrate far under the surface to discover that something else has come in to fill the vacuum—namely hatred and resentment of those who have forced the individual to give up his or her freedom. And usually this smoldering hatred is in direct proportion to the degree in which the person’s right to exist as a human being has been taken away from one. To be sure that hatred is repressed; for the person enslaved is not permitted to express hating thoughts toward the masters; but it is there nonetheless, and may come out, the cases of children for example, in symptoms like the child’s failing in school, or excessive physical sickness, or bed-wetting prolonged beyond the early years, and so on. Indeed it is not possible for a human being to give up one’s freedom without something coming in to restore the inner balance—something arising from inner freedom when one’s outer freedom is denied—and this something is hatred for one’s conqueror. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
Hating or resenting is often the person’s only way from committing psychological or spiritual suicide. It has the function of preserving some dignity, some feeling of one’s own identity, as though the person—or persons, in the case of nations—were to be saying silently to their conquerors, “You have conquered me, but I reserve the right to hate you.” In cases of severe neurotics or psychotics, it often exceedingly clear that the person, driven to the wall by earlier unfortunate conditions, has kept in one’s hatred an inner citadel, a last vestige of dignity and pride. Such contempt for the conquerors keeps the person still an identity in one’s own right even though outward conditions deny one the essential rights of the human being. In cases in therapy, furthermore, where a person who has been drastically curtailed in the exercise of one’s powers as a human being is unable, after a period of time, to feel or bring out one’s hatred and resentment, prognosis is less good. Just at the capacity of the little child to stand over against one’s parents was essential to one’s being born as a free person, so the harmed person’s capacity eventually to hate of feel anger is a mark of one’s inner potentialities for standing against one’s oppressors. Another proof of the fact that s people surrender their freedom they must hate is seen in fact that totalitarian governments must provide for their people some object for the hatred which is generated by the government’s having take away their freedom. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
As shown so vividly in the novel 1984, if a government sets out to take away people’s freedom, it must siphon off their hatred and direct it towards outside groups—otherwise the people would revolt, or go into collective psychosis, or become psychologically dead and inert, no good as people or as a fighting force. One way to deal with intense anger, pain, suffering, and hatred is to drown it out by focusing on something that in individual feels will help their life to progress, while they are enduring the situation. Many people turn to religion, psychology, writing, or some other hobby that will increase their understanding and tolerance. It might also be helpful to study human beings and human behavior to see that many people in society are fractured and are not really who they are they are. As long as one is becoming educated or learning a skill, they are growing, and that is surely productive. The tendency to grow in terms of one’s own nature is common to all living beings. Hence we resist any attempt to prevent our growing in the ways determined by our structure. In order to break this resistance, whether it is conscious or not, physical or mental force is necessary. Inanimate objects resist control of their physical composition in various degrees through the energy inherent in their atomic and molecular structures. However, they do not fight against being used. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
The use of heteronomous force with living beings (for instance, the force that tends to bend us in directions contrary to our given structure and that is detrimental to our growth) arouses resistance. This resistance can take all forms, from overt, effective, direct, active resistance to indirect, ineffectual, and, very often, unconscious resistance. We cannot regress, we can only move forward. Only the achievement of inner independence is conducive to freedom and ends the need for fruitless rebellion. Human beings have a specific structure—like any other species—and can grow only in terms of this structure. Freedom does not mean freedom from all guiding principles. It means the freedom to grow according to the laws of the structure of human existence (autonomous restrictions). It means obedience to the laws that govern optimal human development. Any authority that future this goal is rational authority when this furtherance is achieved by way of by helping to mobilize one’s activity, critical thinking, and faith in life. It is irrational authority when it imposes on one’s heteronomous norms that serve the purpose of authority, but not the purposes of the individual’s specific structure. The having mode of existence, the attitude centered on property and profit, necessarily produce the desire—indeed the need—for power. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
To control other living human beings we need to use power to break their resistance. To maintain control over private property we need to use power to protect it from those would take it from us because they, like us, can never have enough. We cannot always sense the will and intent of other people, no matter how charming they may seem to be. We cannot predict the future and it is best to get to know a person. Will and intentionality are intimately bound up with the future. Both meanings—simple future, something will happen; and personal resolve, I will make it happen—are present in varying degrees in each statement of intentionality. “I will come to New York in September” may have very little resolve and be almost entirely a simple statement of the future. However, “I will get married” or “I will write a poem” are much less a comment on the future and mostly a statement of resolve. The future does not consist of simply a state of time which is going to occur, but contains that the element, “I will make it so.” Power is potentiality, and potentiality points toward the future: it is something to be realized. The future is the tense in which we promise ourselves, we give a promissory note, we put ourselves in line. Humans are the only beings that can make promises, and this gives us the ability to put ourselves in the future. We are saying, “Let it be so.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
The community of faith constitutes itself through ritual symbol and interprets itself in mythical symbols. The hopelessness of many patients, which may be expressed in depression, despair, feelings of “I can’t,” and related helplessness, can be usefully seen, from one point of view, as the inability to see or construct a future. Love is an implication of faith, namely, we are putting hope and trust into the future. And to digress for a moment, after studying sociology, it becomes clear why so many people are hard on law enforcement, whether it is fair or not. Nonetheless, people, especially those who have been victims of crimes realize if this person, as they are usually guilty of many crimes, had been caught, then the individual and their families would have never been a victim of a crime. Some people really just seem to slip through the system no matter how hard the system is working to contain them. Then, there is another side of it, people feel like if they were doing the things that these criminally oriented people were doing that they would have been caught, which may or may not be true. It also could be that some people have a higher sense of righteousness and their conscience would not allow them to engage in certain behaviors, but it is also clear that the threshold of punishment is higher for some for whatever reasons. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
However, just keep in mind people are people no matter what they look like and take things slowly. It may not be a good idea to be so eager to meet new people. Enjoy the friends you have, make the best of life. Sometimes it is very hard to shake a person, even after just hanging out with the person once, and you do not want them feeling like they have a lifetime pass to access your life. It can be hard to escape from people, much more difficult than one can imagine. Thank God for the battle verses in the Bible. We go into the unknown every day of our lives, outwardly and inwardly in the unseen life of the spirit, which is often by far the sternest battlefield for our souls. Either way, the Lord your God goes before you. He shall fight for you. One of the most powerful ways to pray is to find a promise in the Scripture and remind God what he said about you. If you present your case before God, the good news is that Jesus is called our Advocate. Another word for advocate is lawyer. In the courtroom of Heaven, imagine Jesus is our lawyer. God is the judge. Do not tell God why you cannot be successful. Present your cause based on God’s Word and you cannot lose. He will be faithful and true to his Word. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
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
Randolph Harris II International Institute 