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If You Want the Prizes of Life, You Must Elevate Your Thoughts
If he who suffers from the hallucination—for usually it is nothing less—that an ideal existence can be found by emigrating to some distant spot turns, himself into a different man, then it may be turned into a reality. Our higher nature bids us aspire to inner growth, development, self-control, and ennoblement. It goes further and seeks freedom from enslavement by the passions, thus lifting the human nature above the animal. Animal ties to the World are given, mediated by his instincts. Man, set apart by his self-awareness and the capacity to feel lonely, would be a helpless bit of dust driven by the winds if he did not find emotional ties which satisfied his need to be related and unified with the World beyond his own person. However, in contrast to the animal, he has several alternative ways thus to be tied. As in the case of his mind, some possibilities are better than others; but what he needs most in order to his sanity is some tie to which he feels securely related. The one who has no such tie is, by definition, insane, incapable of any emotional connection with his fellow man. The discontent with a spiritually unfulfilled life has a twofold origin—from personal experiences of the World outside and from vaguely felt pressures by the Soul within for the man to surpass himself. There is thus a reciprocal working of negative and positive feelings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The easiest and most frequent form of man’s relatedness is his “primary ties” to where he comes from—to blood, soil, clan, to mother and father, or, in a more complex society, to his nation, religion, or class. These ties are not primarily of pleasures of the flesh, but they fulfill the longing of a man who has not grown up to become himself, to overcome the sense of unbearable separateness by continuing what “primary ties”–which are natural and necessary for the infant in his relationship to his mother—is obvious when we study the primitive cults of worship of the soil, of lakes, of mountains, or of animals, often accompanied by the individual’s symbolic identification with these animals (totem animals). We see it in the matriarchal religions in which the Great Mother and the goddess of fertility and of the soil are worshipped. There seems to be an attempt to overcome these primary ties to mother and Earth in the patriarchal religions, in which the great father, the god, king, tribal chief, law, or state are objects of worship. However, although this step from the matriarchal to the patriarchal cult in society is a progressive one, the two forms have in common the fact that man finds his emotional ties to a superior authority, which he blindly obeys. By remaining bound to nature, to mother or father, man indeed succeeds in feeling at home in the World, but he pays a tremendous price for this security, that of submission, dependence, and a blockage to the full development of his reason and his capacity to love. When he should become an adult, he remains a child. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Today the many individual cases of “mother fixation” are explained by orthodox psychoanalysts as a result of an undissolved tie to the mother. This explanation ignores the fact that the tie to mother is only one of the possible answers to the predicament of human existence. The dependent individual of the twenty-first century, living in a culture which in its social aspects expects him to be independent, is confused and often neurotic because his society does not provide him—as do more primitive societies—with the social and religious patterns to satisfy need for dependency. This fixation to mother is a personal expression of one of the answers to human existence which some cultures have expressed in religious forms. It is an answer, though one which conflicts with the full development of the individual. If only man finds a higher form of feeling at home in the World, if not only his intellect develops, but also his capacity to feel related without submitting, at home without being imprisoned, intimate without being stifled, only then can the primitive forms of incestuous ties to mother, soil, etcetera, of benign and of malignant ecstasies disappear. On a social scale, this new vision was expressed from the middle of the second millennium B.C. to the middle of the first millennium—one of the most remarkable periods in human history. The solution to human existence was no longer sought in the return to nature nor in blind obedience to the father figure, but in a new vision that man can again feel at home in the World and overcome his sense of frightening loneliness; that he can achieve this by the full development of his human powers, of his capacity to love, to use his reason, to create and enjoy beauty, to share his humanity with all his fellow men. Christianity proclaimed this new vision. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The new bond which permits man to feel at one with all men is fundamentally different from that of the submission-bond to father and mother; it is the harmonious bond of brotherhood in which solidarity and human ties are not vitiated by restriction of freedom, either emotionally or intellectually. This is the reason why the solution of brotherliness is not one of subjective preference. It is the only one which satisfied the two needs of man: to be closely related and at the same time to be free, to be part of a whole and to be independence. It is a solution which has been experienced by many individuals and also by groups, religious or secular, which were and are able to develop the bonds of solidarity together with unrestricted individuality and independence. In order to understand fully the human predicament and the possible chocies man is confronted with, we must understand that there is another conflict inherent in human existence. Inasmuch as man has a body and bodily needs essentially the same as those of the animal, he has built-in striving for physical survival, even though the methods he uses do not have the instinctive, reflexlike character which are more developed in the animal. Man’s body makes him want to survive regardless of circumstance, even of happiness or unhappiness, slavery of freedom. As a consequence of the will to survive, man must work or force other to work for him. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
In the past history of man, most of man’s time was spent on food gathering. With the animal, it essentially means gathering the food in the quantity and quality his instinctive apparatus suggest to him. In man there is much greater flexibility in the kind of food he can choose; but more than this, man, once he begins the process of civilization, works not only to gather food but to make clothes, to build shelters, and, in the more advanced cultures, to produce the many things which are not strictly necesary for his physical survival but which have developed as real needs forming the material basis for a life which permits the development of culture. If man were satisfied to spend his life by making a living, there would be no problem. Although he does not have the instinct of ants, an antlike existence would nevertheless be perfectly tolerable. However, it is part of the human condition that man is not satisfied with being an ant, that aside from this sphere of biological or material survival, there is a sphere characteristic of man which one can all the trans-survival or trans-utilitarian sphere. What does this mean? Precisely because man has awareness and imagination, and because he has the potential of freedom, he had an inherent tendency not to be dice thrown out of the cup. He wants not only to know what is necesary in order to survive, but he wants to understand what human life is about. He is the only case of life being aware of itself. He wants to make use of those faculties which he has developed in the process of mere biological survival. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Hunger and pleasures of the flesh, as purely physiological phenomena, belong to the sphere of survival. (Dr. Freud’s psychological system suffers from the main error which was part of the mechanistic materialism of his time and which led him to build a psychology on those drivers which serve survival.) However, man has passions which are specifically human and transcend the function of survival. Nobody has expressed this more clearly than Marx: “Passion is man’s faculties striving to obtain their own object.” In this statement, passion is considered as a concept of relation or relatedness. The dynamism of human nature inasmuch as it is human is primarily rooted in this need of man to express his faculties in relation to the World rather than in his need to use the World as a means for the satisfaction of his physiological necessities. This means: because I have eyes, I have the need to see; because I have ears, I have the need to hear; because I have a mind, I have the need to think; and become I have a heart, I have the need to feel. In short, because I am a man, I am in need of man and the World. Marx makes very clear what he means by “human faculties” which relate to the World in a passionate way: “His human relationships to the World—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, observing, feeling, desiring, acting, loving—in which all the organs of his individuality are the…expression (Betaetigung) of human reality…In practice I can only relate myself in a human way to a thing when the thing is related in a human way to man.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Philosophy does not believe that any man is doomed to continue to sin, but that every man is capable of rising to a life higher than that which he has previously lived. It believes, too, in the forgiveness of sins and in the truth of hopefulness. It is not pessimistic but reasonably optimistic in its long-range views. Whatever within himself keeps a man from seeing the Real and knowing the True must be got rid of, or rectified. And whatever he lacks within himself and also keeps him away from them must be acquired. The struggle to attain these things may not interest most people, whose desire for self-improvement is not strong enough to move their will: but it is well worthwhile. There is a devilish cunning in the human ego, animalistic beastliness in the human body, angelic sublimity in the human soul. However, this is only the appearance of things. All three conditions are really mental conditions. They pertain, after all, to the mind. We must root out the evil or foster the good there and there alone. Occult power should not be sought until the battle for self-mastery has been largely won. The nobler part of his self may exist in a man even though he has not yet come to awakening. There are three activities which he needs to keep under frequent examination and constant discipline—his thoughts, his speech, and his action. The quester who wants to keep his integrity in a corrupt World may not be able to live up to his ideal but at least he need not abandon it. The direction in which he is moving does still count. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
It is not his business to reform others while he himself remains as he is. The attack on them will only provoke them to answering attack. Temptation is easiest cast out at first thought. As the number of thoughts grow, control grows harder too. A year ago at New Year’s I was talking with a Navajo man who had said “Happy New Year” to me. I asked him if he thought the New Year would be good for him or if it would be like my own life, “I think there is no end to being down—and then things change. They go alone well, and I think ‘now at last, everything is all right’–and then it isn’t.” He nodded, and said simply, “Just like us.” There was complete acceptance that life was the same for both of us, even though I had never been hungry as he had, had never been in jail as he had, and had never been forced to submit to the imposition of another culture as he had. That this is true, I know through listening to a woman talk for seventeen hours, in three days, about her life. Her life had been as “different” from mine as mine from the Navajo’s. We had very little. This woman had been born to Old Masters, a yacht with a crew of twenty-eight men, and everything that went with that. The more I listened, the more I mew that there had been no difference between the lives of the Princess and the Pauper. The innerness the same. Sometimes it is clearly the mainstream of a person’s life even though smaller streams confuse it. Other times, it has showed only briefly in a person when through stress or ease the barriers went down. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
This used to be a puzzle to me: which was the person? Other people said that what a person was most of the time was what he was, and this confused me, because it seemed reasonable and yet—what the person was at times in privacy seemed so much more vibrant, living, real. Sometimes his pouring out of it was almost more than I could bear, the agony of man’s knowing his inability to be what he knew himself to be. Sometimes it was gentle and tender, this knowing and so sad. Which is the person? A woman told me that one day she was at a football game waving a pennant and cheering, when suddenly the hand holding the pennant fell to her lap, and with all the excited mob around her she thought, “Why am I doing this? I haven’t enjoyed it for fifteen years.” Which was real—the fifteen years or the moment? The knowing of the realness in another person—his desperate desire to be non-hurtful, loving, responsive, constructive (or creative), at one with others—seems to me to explain why one person sometimes stays with another against all reason, and not necessarily with good judgment. A very simple “ignorant” woman, who had every reason to hate her being to know this, “He wants to be good.” Mothers often know this in their children and defend them—not their behaviour—when they are destructive. Observations, and the associations and question they arose, are the raw material. However, work on them takes time, as does every analysis. In a professional analysis, a definite hour is set apart every day or every other day. This arrangment is expedient but it also has certain intrinsic values. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Patients wiith mild neurotic trends can, without disadvantage, see the analyst merely when they are in trouble and want to discuss their difficuties. However, if a patient in the clutches of a severe neurosis were advised to come only when he really wanted to, he would probably play hooky whenever he had strong subjective reasons for not going on, that is, whenever he developed a “resistance.” This means that he would stay away when actually he needed the most help and when the most constructive work could be done. Another reason for regularity is the necessity to preserve some measure of continuity, which is the very essence of any systematic work. Both reasons for regularity—the trickiness of resistances and the necessity to maintain continuity—apply, of course, to self-analysis as well. However, here I doubt whether the observance of a regular hour would serve these purposes. The differences between professional analysis and self-analysis should not be minimized. It is much easier for anyone to keep an appointment with an analyst than with himself, because in the former instance he has a greater interest in keeping it: he does not want to be impolite; he does not want to expose himself to the reproach that he stayed away because of a “resistance”; he does not want to lose the value that the hour might have for him; he does not want to pay for the time reserved for him without having utilized it. These pressures are lacking in self-analysis. Any number of things that apparently or actually permit of no delay would interfere with the time set apart for analysis. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
A regular, predetermined time for self-analysis is unfeasible also because of inner reasons—and these quite apart from the subject of resistances. A person might feel like thinking about himself during a spare half hour before dinner but resent it as a nuisance at a prearranged time before he leaves for his office. Or he may not find any time during the day but have the most illuminating associations while taking a walk at night or while falling asleep. In this respect, even if his zest to express himself is diminished, even the regular appointment with the analyst whenever he feels a particular urge or willingness to talk with him, but must appear at the analyst’s office at the arranged time. Because of external circumstances this disadvantage can scarcely be eliminated, but there is no good reason why it should be projected into self-analysis, where these circumstances are not present. Still another objection to rigid regularity in self-analysis lies in the fact that this process should not become a “duty.” The connotation of “have to” would rob it of its spontaneity, its most precious and most indispensable element. If a person forces himself to his daily exercises when he does not feel like taking them, there is no great harm done, but in analysis listlessness would make him lame and unproductive. Again, this danger may exist also in professional analysis, but there it can be overcome by the analyst’s interest in the patient and by the very fact of the common work. In self-analysis a listlessness produced by overstressed regularity is not so easily dealt with, and it may well cause the whole undertaking to peter out. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Thus in analysis regularity of work is not an end in itself but is rather a means that serves the two purposes of preserving continuity and combating resistances. The patient’s resistances are not removed because he always appears for his appointment at the analyst’s office; his coming merely enables the analyst to help him understand the factors at play. Nor is consistent punctuality any guarantee that he will not jump from one problem to another and gain only disconnected insights; it is an assurance of continuity only for the work in general. In self-analysis, too, these requirements are essential. Therefore, they do not demand a rigid schedule of appointments with oneself. If a certain irregularity in work should make a person shirk a problem, it will catch up with him. And even at the expense of time it is wiser to let it slide until he himself feels that he had better go after it. Self-analysis should remain a good friend to fall back upon rather than a shcoolmaster pushing us to make our daily good marks. Needless to say, this warning against compulsive regularity does not imply taking things easy. If we want it to be a meaningful factor in our life, just a friendship must be cultivated. If we take it seriously, only then can analytical work at ourselves can yield its benefits. Finally, no matter how genuinely a person regards self-analysis as a help toward self-development rather than as a quick panacea, there is no use in his determining to pursue this work consistently from now until the day he dies. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
In pursuing its preventive and therapeutic aims, and especially in arousing the interest and support of the public, the mental hygiene movement (which has become the mental health movement) has of necessity communicated in overly simplified terms about mental illness and mental health. The ways of seeking mental health are not always clearly distinguished from the ways to avoid mental illness. Mental health is most readily (though not most helpfully) defined as the absence of mental illness. Mental illness is defined in terms of certain symptoms, and the specifications of those symptoms has been a primary responsibility of psychiatrists. As the mental health movement has gained momentum the psychiatrist has found himself increasingly on call to speak out to the public about mental health (rather than illness) and it is only human of him to react to his enhanced prestige by relinquishing the smaller role of expert pathologist-therapist for the smaller role of expert pathologist-therapist for the larger role of arbiter of social values. In this role, the psychiatrist has frequently expanded the domain of mental illness to include all degrees and kinds of psychological distress, failing to appreciate that human suffers some pains not because he is sick but because he is human. Invitation to the role of “expert” in an area in which society has suddenly developed intense interest is always a seductive one. (Note the number of chemists and physicists who have become “social” scientists since World War II!) #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
If he occasionally failed to note that as an authority on values, the psychiatrist well may be forgiven; the meaning of existence, and how to live he is at best on par with other learned and thoughtful men. The psychologists and social workers have not been noticeably less susceptible to the sacerdotal appeal, but have been called less frequently to the altar than have the psychiatrists. The mental health movement together with psychiatry suffers from imprecision in the definition and delineation of psychopathology. The subjectivity of diagnosis, especially where neurotic behaviour is in question, coupled with expansive or inclusive trends in the diagnostician, creates particular problems when by broadcast methods the public is being encouraged to self-examination and to the seeking of “preventive” therapy. The insufficiency of therapeutic resources to meet the legitimate needs of truly neurotic patients is seriously exacerbated when uncritical enthusiasm encourage persons with the non-neurotic frustrations common to all inhabitants of a less-than-perfect World to seek expert therapy, and when ambiguous nosology encourages the therapist to a nondiscriminating investment of his expensively acquired skills. There is a historical parallel to this problem which has been noted in the earlier period of the mental hygiene movement: “Indeed, so great was the enthusiasm over mental hygiene, that it led for a long time to a dangerous overemphasis on the mental factors in problems of social work. The important sociological factors were lost sight of while psychological factors were given almost exclusive attention. Mental Hygiene was being ‘oversold’ by over-enthusiastic adherents.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
As long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest of man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. This crystallization of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up to now. In handicraft and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool; in the factory the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instruments of the machines that he must follow. In manufacture, the workmen are part of a living mechanism; in the workmen are part of a living appendage. Or (education of the future will) combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings. Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, on the penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of today, crippled by lifelong repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of man, by the fully developed individual…to whom the different social functions he performs are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers. Alienation is the sickness of man. Since it starts necessarily with the beginning of division of labour, that is, of civilization transcending primitive society, it is not a new sickness; it is most strongly developed in the working class, yet it is a sickness from which everybody suffers. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
When it has reached its peak, only then can the sickness be cured; only the totally alienated man can overcome the alienation—he is forced to overcome his alienation since he cannot live as a totally alienated man and remain sane. Man has to become the conscious subject of history, experience himself as the subject of his powers and thus emancipate himself from the bondage to things and circumstances. With his development the realm of natural necessity expands, because his wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production increase, by which these wants are satisfied. The freedom in this field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; that they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Many people admire firefighters. It is a very normal thing for one to become a firefighter. A firefighter we will call “Dieter” shares with us his account. “I wanted to be one so bad, I just wished that I could be done with high school, with all of the crap, and have it over with. When you’re a fourteen-year-old and you’re going down and riding with squads, all the other things—high school football games, dances, and stuff like that—are anticlimactic. I was seeing what real men do. And when I got a little older, I was actually doing a man’s job. I was strong for a high school kid, and when I would go to the firehouse, they’d let me work as a firefighter. That was in a suburb. I see these jokers getting off the train. You ask a kid in a school, ‘What does your dad do for a living?’ They say, ‘I don’t know, he goes to some office.’ Well, I knew what my old man did for a living. I knew why we were eating and why we had a roof over our heads. It’s because my old man was busting his backside as a fireman, freezing in the wintertime and having rocks thrown at him in the summertime. I knew what he was doing. Other people, they take the train and they commute back and forth to the city, and I thought to myself, ‘That’s not for me. I want to do something that’s important, that’s vital. If these jokers did not go to work, nobody would miss them.’ Of course, now that I’m a little bit more mature, I realize everybody’s job is just as important. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
“I don’t think firemen are supermen, by any means. At the time, I thought, ‘Hey, firemen are strong, and they’re doing an important job, and people’s lives depend upon them being here.’ Other jobs are not like that, and the police did not appeal to me. I didn’t want to be a doctor. Anyhow, I was working for this town in California, waiting to get called by the Sacramento Fire Department. I was still single, going with my future wife, and her dad was a big mucky, muck at construction company. I came down on vacation, and I took the fire test here. I didn’t even know if I wanted the job, and I didn’t think I could get it. Well, for the first time in something like six years, they took guys right off the top of the list. So as a result, we got a bunch of guys who were schoolteachers, guys with engineering degrees, and all kinds of real sharp guys in our class. Take the time to get to know the Sacramento Fire Department, and be sure them to thank them for keeping our community safe. Also, out of the kindness of your heart, please be sure to make a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. If you are dissatisfied with yourself abandon yourself! You can make a start by abandoning its negative ideas, its animal passions, and its sharp critiques of others. You are responsible for them: it is you who must get rid of them. He must refuse to allow himself to become emotionally overwhelmed by an unthinking majority or intellectually subservient to an unworthy convention. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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If Man Has Entered the Gates of Hell, He Has Left Behind His Own Humanity
Human nature comprises some deep characteristics which yearn to satisfy particular needs and impulses, such as aggression, the ego that drives him towards pleasurable experiences, the need for love, and avoidance of pain in all areas of life. When considering as an essential factor in the functioning of the social system, this undertaking goes beyond what is called “psychology.” It should more properly be called a “science of man,” a discipline which deals with the data of history, sociology, psychology, theology, mythology, physiology, economic, and art, as far as they are relevant to the understanding of man. Man was—and still is—easily seduced into accepting a particular form of being human as his essence. To the degree to which this happens, man defines his humanity in terms of the society with which he identifies himself. However, while this had been the rule, there have been exceptions. There were always men who looked beyond the dimensions of their own society—and while they may have been called fools or criminals in their time, they are the roster of great men as far as the record of human history is concerned—and visualized something which can be called universally human and which is not identical with what a particular society assumes human nature to be. There were always men who were bold and imaginative enough to see beyond the frontiers of their own social existence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Man has been defined as Homo faber—the tool maker. Indeed, man is a tool maker, but our ancestors before they were fully human were tool makers too. Man has been defined as Homo sapiens, but in this definition all depends on what is meant by sapiens. To use thought for the purpose of finding better means for survival and ways to achieve what we want—this capacity animals also have, and there is at best a quantitative difference been men and animals as far as this kind of achievement is concerned. If, however, one means by sapiens knowledge in the sense of thought which tries to understand the core of phenomena, thought that penetrates from the deceptive surface to what is “really real,” thought the purpose of which is not to manipulate but to comprehend, then Homo sapiens would, indeed, be a correct definition of man. Man has been defined as Homo ludens—man the player, play meaning nonpurposeful activity transcending the immediate needs for survival. Indeed from the time of the creators of the cave paintings to the present day, man has indulged in nonpurposeful activities. There are two other definitions of man that we should add. One: Homo negans—man who say “no,” although most men say “yes” when their survival or their advantage requires it. From a statistical standpoint on human behaviour, man should be called, rather, the yes-man. However, from the standpoint of the human potential, man is distinguished from all other animals by his capacity to say “no,” by his affirmation of truth, love, integrity, even at the expense of physical survival. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Another definition of man would be Homo eperans—the hoping man. To hope is an essential condition of being human. If man has given up all hope, he has entered the gates of hell—whether he knows it or not—and he has left behind his own humanity. Perhaps the most significant definition of the species characteristic of man has been given by Marx, who defined it as “free, conscious activity.” Probably more such definitions could be added to the ones just mentioned, but they still do no justice to the question: What does it mean to be human? They emphasize only certain elements of being human without trying to give a more complete and systematic answer. Any attempt to give an answer will immediately meet with the objection that at the very best such an answer is no more than metaphysical speculation, perhaps poetic, but at any rate the expression of subjective preference rather than a statement of any definitely ascertainable reality. These last words call to mind the theoretical physicist who might speak of his own concepts in terms of an objective reality and yet disclaim any final statement he might make about the nature of matter. Indeed, even if human evolution were to far transcend the present point of history, in which man has hardly begun to be fully human, no final statement about what is means to be human can be made now: it is possible that it may never be made. However, a skeptical attitude toward the possibility of making final statements about the nature of man does not mean that a number of statements cannot be made which have a scientific character, that is to say, which draw conclusions from observing the facts, conclusions which are correct in spite of the fact that the motivation to find the answer was the wish for a happier life. On the contrary, the function of Reason is to promote the art of life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
What knowledge can we draw on in order to answer the question, what does it mean to be human? The answer cannot lie in the direction which such answers have often taken: that man is good or bad, loving or destructive, gullible or independent, et cetera. Obviously, man can be all this just as he can be musical or tone-deaf, sensitive to painting or colour-blind, a saint or a rascal. All these and many other qualities are various possibilities of being human. In fact, they are all within each one of us. To be fully aware of one’s humanity means to be aware that, “Homo sum, nil humani a me alienum puto” (I am a man and nothing human is alien to me); that each one carries all of humanity within himself—the saint as well as the criminal: as Goethe put it, that there is no crime of which one cannot imagine oneself to be the author. All these manifestations of humanity are not the answer to what does it mean to be human. They are only answering the question, how different can we be and yet be human? If we want to know what it means to be human, we must be prepared to find answers not in terms of different human possibilities, but in terms of the very conditions of human existence from which all these possibilities spring as possible alternatives. These conditions can be recognized as a result not of metaphysical speculation but of the examination of the data of anthropology, history, child psychology, individual and social psychopathology. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The hopeless pessimist who asserts that men cannot improve their inborn character, that they will be exactly the same faulty creatures at sixty that they were at twenty, may be right about some men but is certainly wrong about others. Every Quester who tries hard enough proves him wrong. Character may be bettered by bettering conduct, which is visible, just as it may by bettering feeling, which is not. If the check to a weakness, a shortcoming, an undesirable impulse, or a negative emotion is given instantly, if retreat from it is made before it has time to swell and strengthen, victory is very largely assured. He need not be too ashamed because he has felt these things, provided he pulls himself together. They are what he has inherited from past births, plus what he has picked up in the present one, and it is inevitable or “natural” that he should experience them. Even the saints have endured them repeatedly, but those who conquered in the end knew this trick instantly outwitting the enemy. He will undergo periods of purification, when the animal appetites such as lust and gluttony, and the animal passions such as wrath and hate, will have to be brought under better control. The discipline involved is both a kind of penance for past sins and a preparation for future enlightenment. It may be that these baser attributes need to be pushed up out of latency near the surface, in order to deal with them more effectually. If so, this will come about through some sort of crisis. He need not be distressed for it will be ultimately beneficent. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The ability to throw negative thoughts out of his mind is so valuable that a deliberate and daily effort to cultivate it is well worthwhile. This is as true of one’s self-originated thought as of those picked up from outside, whether unwittingly from other persons, or absorbed through susceptibility from environments. Anyone can go on living but not everyone can go on living worthily. We are all imperfect and the making of mistakes is to be expected. The mishandling of problems need not surprise us and the yielding to weaknesses is a common experience. Let us grant all this, but it does not excuse us from being bereft of the desire for self-improvement, of the aspiration for self-ennoblement, or of the search for self-enlightenment. Man has an animal body, shared certain instinctive reactions, desires, and passion with other animals. However, mentally and morally there are creative impulses, functions, ideas, and ideals which increasingly separate him from them as he develops and put him on a higher plane. The ethical standards of the disciple are, or should be, as far beyond those of conventional good men, as their standards are beyond those of evil men. He may have to pass successively through the three stages of intemperate idealism, disappointed idealism, and philosophic idealism. The last is as balanced and discerning as the first is not. The faults of character and defects in personality which bar advancement in the quest will also bar advancement in other spheres of human life. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Being in him, these advancements will inevitably bring their results on the physical plane in the time of course. They will manifest themselves in his business or career, his home or social relations. It is not too much to say, therefore, that the self-improvement brought about by the quest’s discipline will be to his advantage in other ways. In persons who are moving toward greater openness to their experiencing, there is an organismic commonality of value directions. These common value directions are of such kinds as to enhance the development of the individual himself, of others in his community, and to make for the survival and evolution of his species. It has been a striking fact of my experiences that in therapy, where individuals are valued, where there is greater freedom to feel and to be, certain value directions seem to emerge. These are not chaotic directions but instead have a surprising commonality. This commonality is not dependent on the personality of the therapist, for I have seen these trends emerge in the clients of therapists sharply different in personality. This commonality does not seem to be due to the influences of any one culture, for I have found evidence of these directions in cultures as divergent as those of the United States of America, Holland, France, and Japan. I like to think that this commonality of value directions is due to the fact that we all belong to the same species—that just as a human infant tends, individually, to select a diet similar to that selected by other human infants, so a client in therapy tends, individually, to choose value directions similar to those chosen by other clients. If they were genuinely free to choose, as a species there may be certain elements of experience which tend to make for inner development and which would be chosen by all individuals. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
A few of the values I see in my clients as they move in the direction of personal growth and maturity: They tend to move away from facades. Pretenses, defensiveness, putting up a front, tend to be negatively values. They tend to move away from “oughts”. The compelling feeling of “I ought to do or be thus and so” is negatively valued. The client moves away from being what he “ought to be,” no matter who has set that imperative. They tend to move away from meeting the expectations of others. Pleasing others, as a goal in itself, is negatively valued. Being real is positively valued. The client tends to move toward being himself, being his real feelings, being what he is. This seems to be a very deep preference. Self-direction is positively valued. The client discovers an increasing pride and confidence in making his own choices, guiding his own life. One’s self, one’s own feelings come to be positively valued. From desiring some fixed goal, clients come to prefer the excitement of being a process of potentialities being born. Perhaps more than all else, the client comes to vaule an openness to all of his inner and outer experience. To be open to and sensitive to his own inner reactions and feelings, the reactions and feelings of others, and the realities of the objective World—this is a direction which he clearly prefers. This openness becomes the client’s most valued resource. Sensitivity to others and acceptance of others is positively valued. The client comes to appreciate others for what they are as he has come to appreciate himself for what he is. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Finally, deep relationships are positively valued. To achieve a close, intimate, real, fully communicative relationship with another person seems to meet a deep need in every individual, and is vey highly valued. These then re some of the preferred directions which I have observed in individuals moving toward personality maturity. Though this list is inadequate and to some degree perhaps inaccurate, it holds exciting possibilities. I find it significant that when individuals are prized as persons, the values they select do not run the full gamut of possibilities. I do not find, in such a climate of freedom, that one person comes to value fraud and murder and thievery, while another values a life of self-sacrifice, and another values only money. Instead there seems to be a deep and underlying thread of commonality. I dare to believe that when the human being is inwardly free to choose whatever he deeply values, he tends to value those objective, experiences and goals which make for his own survival, growth, and development, and for the survival and development of others. I hypothesize that it is characteristic of the human organism to prefer such actualizing and socialized goals when he is exposed to a growth-promoting climate. In any culture, given a climate of respect and freedom in which he is valued as a person, the mature individual would tend to choose and prefer these same value directions. This is a highly significant hypothesis which could be tested. Though the individual of whim I am speaking would not have a consistent or even stable system of conceived values, the valuing process within him would lead to emerging value directions which would be constant across cultures and across time. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Another implication I see is that individuals who exhibit the fluid valuing process I have tried to describe, whose value directions are generally those I have listed, would be highly effective in the ongoing process of human evolution. If the human species is to survive at all on this globe, the human being must become more readily adaptive to new problems and situations, must be able to select that which is valuable for development and survival out of new and complex situations, and if he is to make such selections; he must be accurate in his appreciation of reality. The psychologically mature person, I have described has the qualities which would cause him to value those experiences which would make for the survival and enhancement of the human race. He would be a worthy participant and guide in the process of human evolution. Finally, it appears that we have returned to the issue of universality of values, but by a different route. Instead of universal values “out there,” or a universal value system imposed by some group—philosophers, rulers, or priests—we have the possibility of universal human value directions emerging from the experiencing of the human organism. Evidence from therapy indicates that both personal and social values emerge as natural, and experienced, when the individual is close to his own organismic valuing process. If he can learn again to be in touch with it, the suggestion is that though modern man no longer trusts religion or science or philosophy nor any system of beliefs to give him his values, he may fund an organismic valuing base within himself, and it will prove to be an organized, adaptive and social approach to the perplexing value issues which face all of us. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
With the existence of three apparently different kinds of psychotherapists, we may ask if the different processions provide a range of backgrounds in respect to social class origins sufficient to make possible “natural understanding” across the full range of cultural variables represented in the client population. A second, closely related question is: Does there appear to be evidence of a meaningful division of labour, or assortative mating, such that the differential backgrounds of clients show some degree of appropriate relationship to the differential backgrounds of therapists? With a view to the possibilities suggested by these questions, this we investigated the distribution of certain biographical and sociocultural factors in samples representative of psychiatrist, psychologist, and social workers. Mental illness is a cultural universal. Persons who show recognizable patterns of deviant behaviour are found in every culture. A pattern is recognized as a set of behaviours that are deviant with respect to the modal behaviours of the individual’s group and that are repeated in different members of the group. The level of complexity of social organization or the degree of civilization achieved may vary widely; the society may be urban or rural, industrial or agrarian, nomadic or settled—but in every carefully studied sociocultural group (defined as a collection of persons having functional membership in a community and out of that membership deriving common and interdependent responsibility and shared interests) the sometime occurrence of one or more patters of deviant behaviour has been noted. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The specific content and detailed form of the “insanity” reflects peculiarities of the particular culture in which it occurs. In respect to content, mental illness can be seen easily to have the quality of cultural relativity. It is in part this act of the cultural relativity of the content of emotional disorder that leads some authorities to claim that “mental illness” is not a scientific concept but rather a “convenient myth” which “has outlived whatever usefulness it might have had.” Cultural relativity in the definitions of what is conforming behaviour and what is sick (id est, non-conforming) behaviour does not negate the universality of the phenomenon of disordered behaviour; as a broad phenomenon which appears repeatedly within all cultures it is accessible to scientific inquiry. The amount of awareness of emotionally based disturbances in personality has varied over time and varies today from culture to culture. In earliest history apparently only the most deranged behaviours achieved sufficient attention to be recorded. As civilizations have prospered and as the arts of inquiry have become more sensitive, there has been growing recognition of more subtle expressions of psychological disorder. With the extension of the domain of mental illness there have been a parallel increase in the complexity and sophistication of explanations of emotional symptomatology. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
When considering neurosis, we look at a case study of a man called Tom. Tom was a medical assistant to a great clinician. He was deeply interested in his work and was favoured by his chief. A genuine friendship had developed between them, and they often lunched together. Once after such a luncheon Tom had a mild stomach upset which he ascribed to the food, without giving it further attention. After the next luncheon with the chief he felt nauseous and faint, considerably worse than the first time. He had his stomach examined but there was no pathological finding whatever. Then the disturbance occurred a third time, now with a painful sensitivity to smells. Only after the third luncheon did it strike him that all these upsets had occurred when he was eating with the director. As a matter of fact he had felt constrained with the director recently, sometimes not knowing what to talk about. And he knew the reason. His research work had led him in a direction which was opposite to the direction which was opposite to the director’s convictions. In recent week he had become more firmly convinced of his own findings. He had wanted to talk with the chief but somehow never got around to doing it. He was aware of procrastinating but the old man was rather rigid in scientific matters and did not easily tolerate dissension. Tom have showed aside his concern by telling himself that a good talk would solve everything. If the stomach upset had to do with fears, he reasoned, then his fears must be much greater than he had admitted to himself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
He sensed that this was so and simultaneously had two proofs of it. One was that while having these thoughts he suddenly started to feel ill, just as he had felt after the luncheons. The other was that he realized just as suddenly what had started his reaction. During the luncheon in which the illness had first developed the director had made derogatory remarks about the ingratitude of Tom’s predecessor. He had expressed his resentment against these young fellas, who learned much from him and then left and did not even bother to keep in touch with him on scientific matters. All that Tom felt consciously at that moment was sympathy for the chief. He had repressed his knowledge that actually what the director could not tolerate was that the predecessor had gone his own independent way. Thus Tom became aware that he has closed his eyes to an existing danger, and he also recognized the extent of his fears. His work was creating a real danger to his good relationship with the director, and thereby a danger to his career. The old man might really turn against him. He felt somewhat panicky at this thought and wondered if it might be better for him to check his findings once more—or even forget about them. It was only a brief thought, but it showed him a flash that this was a conflict between his scientific honesty and the immediate exigencies of his career. By repressing his fears he had pursued an ostrich policy, the purpose of which was to avoid having to make a decision. With that insight he felt free and relieved. He knew it was a hard decision but did not doubt that it would be in favour of his conviction. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
This story was not an example of self-analysis but merely an example of how great the temptation sometimes is not to be straight with oneself. Tom was a friend of mine, an unusually well-balanced fellow. Even though it is possible that he had certain hidden neurotic tendencies, such as a need to deny any fears, these did not make him a neurotic person. It might be objected that the very fact of his unconsciously shirking a decision was an expression of a deeper neurotic disturbance. However, there is certainly no sharp borderline between healthy and neurotic, and therefore it seems preferable to leave it as a matter of emphasis and regard Tom for all practical purposes as a healthy person. This episode would then represent a situational neurosis, that is, a neurotic upset caused primarily by the difficulties in a particular situation and lasting only so long as the conflict is not consciously faced and solved. Despite the fact that a critical estimate has been given of the results attained in each of these examples, they might, when regarded together, elicit an overoptimistic impression about the potentialities of occasional self-analysis, an impression that one can easily stumble over an insight and pick up something precious. A who feels helplessly caught in his neurotic entanglements tends to hope against hope for a miracle. It should be understood clearly that it is impossible to cure a severe neurosis, or any essential part of it, by occasional self-analysis. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The neurotic personality is not a piecemeal conglomeration—to use the expression of Gestalt psychologists—of disturbing factors, but has a structure in which each part is intricately interrelated to each other part. It is possible through occasional work at oneself to grasp an isolated connection here or there, to understand the factors immediately involved in an upheaval and to remove a peripheral symptom. However, to bring about essential changes it is necessary to work through the whole structure, that is, it requires a more systematic analysis. This occasional analysis, by its very nature, contributes but little to comprehensive self-recognition. Each problem that is clarified automatically introduces a new one. If these leads that offer themselves are not picked up the insights necessarily remain isolated. As a therapeutic method occasional self-analysis is entirely adequate for the situational neurosis. Also in mild neuroses it can yield very satisfactory results. However, in more intricate neuroses it is little more than a leap in the dark. At the very best it can do no more than release a tension here or there, or illuminate at random the meaning of one or another disturbance. Furthermore, while most people lie at least a few times each day, it is not those little white lies that hurt others. It is the big morbid ones that cause pain and destruction that we need to think about. Some deceptions occur to keep from hurting someone’s feelings. Other deceptions can change your life. We all also have lies that we tell to ourselves. Sometimes we tell lies to help us try harder at things in life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Now, historical materialism is not at all a psychological theory; its main postulate is that the way in which man produces determines his practice of life, his way of living, and this practice of life determines his thinking and the social and political structure of his society. Economy in this context refers not to a psychic drive, but to the mode of production; not to a subjective psychological but to an objective socioeconomic factor. Marx’s idea that man is formed by his practice of life was not a new as such. However, in Marx’s system what was new is that he analyzed in detail what these institutions are, or rather, that the institutions themselves were to be understood as part of the whole system of production which characterizes a given society. Various economic conditions can produce different psychological motivations. One economic system may lead to the formation of ascetic tendencies, as early capitalism did; another economic system to the preponderance of the desire to save and hoard, as nineteenth century capitalism did; still another, to the preponderance of the desire for spending and for ever-increasing consumption, as twenty-first capitalism does. There is only one quasi-psychological premise in Marx’s system: man must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before he can purse politics, science, art, religion, etcetera. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given society, form the foundation upon which social and political institutions, and even art and religion, have been evolved. Man himself, in each period of history, is formed in terms of the prevailing practice of life which in turn is determined by his mode of production. All this does not mean, however, that the drive to produce or consume is man’s main motivation. On the contrary, Marx’s main criticism of capitalist society is precisely that this society makes the wish to “have” and to “use” into the most dominant desire in man; Marx believed that a man who is dominated by the desire to have and to use is a cripped man. His aim was a socialist society organized in such a way that not profit and private property, but the free unfolding of man’s human powers are man’s dominate aims. Not the man who has much, but the man who is much is the fully developed, truly human man. Where the Overself lives fully in man, he will not need to consider whether an act is righteous or not. Righteous acts will flow spontaneously from him and no other kind will be possible. However, for a beginner to practise prematurely such nonresistance to his impulses would be dangerous and foolish. Woman have a greater power in possessing the power of love. She can lift and redeem men, succor and save them, or degrade and destroy them. However, with this power comes great responsibility. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Being a firefighter also comes with great responsibility. However, many people do not know much about the lives of firefighters. One firefighter says he lived in a small apartment with his parent growing up. The bathtub was in the kitchen, and the fire escape in the front, a small yard with a clothesline, no washing machines or dryers in those days. When he was twelve, he spotted a car on fire. He pulled the firebox and waited for the apparatus to come. When the fire was out, he talked with the firemen, and they invited him to the firehouse. As a result, he had been associating with the fire service since he was a pre-teen. He never got in trouble, never had a police record, no drugs. His mother and father both worked, and so hi grandfather took care of him. He really did not have much family life, and spent most of his time at the firehouse. The firefighters helped him with his homework, and would make sure he got home before curfew. After he grew up a little, the fire department would let him come with them to put fires out. During the summer, he would go to camp and run cross-county, and learn how to swim. He eventually became a lifeguard and joined the swim team, winning All-American for two consecutive years. Then he joined the Navy and became a Navy diver and even trained for the Olympics. Eventually he wound up going to the Military Olympics, but could not compete because he and three other guys came down with food poisoning. His father worked in a manufacturing plant where grain was processes and would have to carry hundred-pound sacks from the factor down to the river, over a ramp, and load them on the barges. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The young man felt sorry for his father because he had to work so hard. His mother work at an electrical equipment factory wiring sockets and other things. She used to come home at night and tears and he could not understand why until he saw her hands. She had pin holes all over them from the wires that penetrated her fingers. The firefighters became so attached to the young man that they would let him sleep over at the firehouse on weekends. He started listening to fire calls on the radio, and one night they heard a third alarm on Broadway. He ran over to the firehouse as use used to do. It was raining and it was cold, and he helped the Engine pack some hose in the truck. The lieutenant would give him a ride home sometimes, and other firehouses would invite him to come and hang out with them. Although it was against rules and regulations, they stuck their neck out for the young man and did their best to look out for him and made sure he was safe and well cared for. He really enjoyed shining the brass on the old engine and would help out around the house. The men at the firehouse became like fathers to him, and treated him with respect. However, sometimes the guys would blow him off and his feelings would get hurt. When he grew up, he took care of two boys as well as the firefighters took care of him. He would take them home, contribute to their lives, and helped keep them out of trouble and away from drugs. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
As a result, the two boys are doing good. Other guys saw what he was doing and got involved with the same kids, taking them home, taking them to picnics, taking them to amusement parks. Times were different and there was a lot of compassion in the city, a lot of morale, a lot of unity. So, the young man the fire department took, not only mentored two boys, but he stayed out of trouble because he wanted to be a firefighter and figured a police record would disqualify him from the job. He did not have many friends his age, only a couple. One night, he did not go out with his friends, and went to the firehouse instead. A really good friend of his was killed that night by a hit-and-run car. He jumped off a crane into the street, and a car hit him and kept going. He reflected on how it might have been him. He attributes a lot of his staying out of trouble to hanging around the firehouse. The Sacramento Fire Department has been serving the community of Sacramento since the mid-1800, please be sure to make a donation to them. They really care about the community and the people in it. Honour a man not for his possession alone; honour him most for the use he makes of them. When a man departs this World, neither silver nor gold, nor precious stones accompany him; he is remembered only for his love of learning and his good need. Happy is the man who is rich in good deeds, for he shall be honoured in life, and be remembered along afterwards for his goodness. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it Stands, one Nation, Under God, Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
The Winchester Mystery House
In The Winchester Mystery House there are connecting stairs and a “secret rest room” once used by Mrs. Winchester, which had long been walled up in the many structural changes in the historical mansion. Only the window of the walled-up room is still visible from the outside. It is in this area that psychics feel that the restless spirit of Mrs. Winchester is trapped. They believe she sleeps during the day and close to the premises for roaming and night. In the spring of 1968, the ghost of Mrs. Winchester made her initial appearance in the mansion. It was a warm night, and the caretakers were leaving. Suddenly, they were shocked at the amount of light coming from the skylight, they judged the time to be about midnight. They had the uncanny feeling of not being alone in the room. As their eyes got used to the darkness, they clearly distinguished the figure of a petite woman, gliding across the floor. Behind her, there was a man staring at a cabinet. Then he opened the cupboard, looked in it, and closed it again. Getting hold of himself, one of the caretakers noticed that the woman wore a black dress of the kind worn in the last century, and the man a white shirt and dark cravat of the same period. It never occurred to him that they were anything but people; he thought they were actors dressed as Mr. and Mrs. Winchester.
The woman then turned to her companion as if to say something, but did not, and walked off toward the dark room at the other end of the hallway. Then man then went back to the cabinet and leaned on it, head in hand. By now, the caretakers regained their wits and thought the intruders must be burglars, although they could not figure out how they entered the mansion, since it had been locked from the inside! Making a fist, one of the caretakers struck at the stranger, yelling, “Put your hands up!” His voice could be heard clearly along the corridors. Nursing his injured wrist, he realized that his visitors had dissolved into thin air. There was no one in the dark room. The door was securely locked. The skylight, on the third floor, could not very well have served as an escape route to anyone human. By now, the care takers knew Mr. Winchester and Mrs. Winchester had paid them a visit. Come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Here We Ascend from Earth to Heaven
From time to time man’s higher self will show him his own moral face as in a glass. However, it will only show him that side of it which is the worst as well as the least-known one. He will have to look at what is thus exposed to him in all its stark fullness and hidden reality, only because he has to reeducate himself morally to a degree far beyond the ordinary. The experience may be painful, but it must be accepted. He has involved the Overself, now its light has suddenly been thrown upon him. He has invoked the Overself, now its light has suddenly been thrown upon him. He is now able to see his ego, his lower nature, as it has not hitherto shown itself to him. All its uglinesses are lit up and revealed for what they really are. By thus showing up its true nature and evil consequences, this experience is the first step to making the ego’s conquest possible. He should begin with the belief that his own character can be markedly improved and with the attitude that his own efforts can lessen the distance between its present condition and the ideal before him. It is a prime rule that quality of character and education of conscience are more important than nature of belief. And this is much more applicable to would-be philosophers than to would-be religionists. Many students are haunted by a bad idea of undesirable character, and should try five methods for expelling it: attend to an opposing good idea; face the danger of the consequences of letting the bad idea emerge in action; become inattentive to the bad idea; analyse its antecedents and so paralyze the sequent impulse; coerce the mind with the assistance of bodily tension. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
However, philosophy does not trust to developed reason alone to control emotion and subjugate passion. It trusts also to psychological knowledge and metaphysical truth, to developed will and creative meditation, to counter-emotions and the prayer for Grace. All these different elements are welded into one solid power working for him. Just as the writer turns his experiences of society to writing use and creates art out of the best and worst of them, so the disciple turns his experiences of life to spiritual use and creates wisdom or goodness out of them. And just as it is harder for the author to learn to live what he writes than learn to write what he lives, so it is harder for the disciple to convert his studies and meditations, his reflections and intuitions, into practical deeds and beneficial accomplishments than to receive these thoughts themselves and make them his own. The valuing process which seems to develop in this more mature person is in some ways very much like that in the infant, and in some ways quite different. It is fluid, flexible, based on this particular moment, and the degree to which this moment is experienced as enhancing and actualizing. Values are not held rigidly, but are continually changing. The painting which last year seemed meaningful now appears uninteresting, the way of working with individuals which was formerly experienced as good now seems inadequate, the belief which then seemed true is now experiences as only partly true, or perhaps false. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
It is not so much that we have to change ourselves as to give up ourselves. We are so imperfect and faulty, so selfish and weak, so sinful and ignorant, that giving up our own selves means being more than willing to part with what is not worth keeping. However, to what are we to give them up and how are we to do it? We are to invoke the higher self, request it daily to take possession of our hearts, minds, and wills, and to strive actively to purify them. Much of our striving will be in the form of surrendering egoistic thoughts, impulses, and feelings by crushing them at the moment of birth. In that way we slowly give up our inner selves and submit the conduct of our outer selves to a higher will. If he fails to pass a test, or if he succumbs to a temptation, he should realise that there must be a defect in character or mentality which made such a failure possible. Even though the test or temptation has been provided by the adverse powers, he ought not to lay the blame upon them but upon himself. For then he will seek out and destroy the defect upon which the blame really rests. After all, there must have been a corresponding inner weakness in him to have permitted him to become the victim of a temptation. Consequently it is often better not to ask for protection against the temptation. This simply hides and covers over the weakness and permits it to remain in his mental makeup. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
It is better to ask for the strengthening of his own willpower, to cultivate it through a creative meditation excecise special directed to the purpose: he should picture the arousal and hardening of this willpower during the very moments of temptation by seeing himself emerge victorious by his own forces. As my class of prospective teachers learned, general principles are not as useful as sensitive discriminating reactions. One says, “With this little boy, I just felt I should be very firm, and he seemed to welcome that, and I felt good that I had been. But I’m not that way at all with the other children most of the time.” She was relying on her experiencing of the relationship with each child to guide her behaviour. I have already indicated, in going through the examples, how much more differentiated are the individual’s reactions to what were previously rather solid monolithic introjected values. In another way the mature individual’s approach is like that of the infant. The locus of evaluation is again established firmly within the person. It is his own experience which provides the value information or feedback. This does not mean that he is not open to all the evidence he can obtain from other sources. However, it means that this is taken for what it is—outside evidence—and is not as significant as his own reactions. Thus he may be told by a friend that a new book is very disappointing. He reads two unfavourable reviews of the book. Thus his tentative hypothesis is that he will not value the book. Yet if he reads the book his valuing will be based upon the reactions it stirs in him, not on what he has been told by others. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
There is also involved in this valuing process a letting oneself down into the immediacy of what one is experiencing, endeavouring to sense and to clarify all its complex meanings. I think of a client who, toward the close of therapy, when puzzled about an issue, would put his head in his hands and say, “Now what is it that I’m feeling? I want to get next to it. I want to learn what it is.” Then he would wait, quietly and patiently, trying to listen to get close to himself. In getting close to what is going on within himself, the process is much more complex than it is in the infant. In the mature person, it has much more scope and sweep, for there is involved in the present moment of experiencing the memory traces of all the relevant learnings from the past. This moment has not only its immediate sensory impact, but it has meaning growing out of similar experiences in the past. It has both the new and the old in it. So when I experience a painting or persons, as well as the new impact of this particular encounter. Likewise the moment of experience contains, for the mature adult, hypotheses about consequences. “I feel now that I would enjoy a drink, but past learnings indicate that I may regret it in the morning.” “It is not pleasant to express forthrightly my negative feelings to this person, but past experience indicates that in a continuing relationship it will be helpful in the long run.” Past and future are both in this moment and entering into the valuing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
I find that in the person I am speaking of (and her again we see a similarity to the infant) the criterion of the valuing process is the degree to which the object of the experience actualizes the individual himself. Does it make him a richer, more complete, more fully developed person? This may sound as though it were a selfish or unsocial criterion, but it does not prove to be so, since deep and helpful relationships with others are experienced as actualizing. Like the infant, too, the psychologically mature adult trusts and uses the wisdom of his organism, with the difference that he is able to do so knowingly. If he can trust all of himself, he realizes his feeling and his intuitions may be wiser than his mind, that as a total person he can be more sensitive and accurate than his thoughts alone. Hence he is not afraid to say—“I feel that this experience (or this thing, or this direction) is good. Later I will probably know why I feel it is good.” He trusts the totality of himself. It should be evidence from what I have been saying that this valuing process in the mature individual is not an easy or simple thing. The process is complex, the choices often very perplexing and difficult, and there is no guarantee that the choice which is made will in fact prove to be self-actualizing. However, because whatever evidence exists is available to the individual, and because he is open to his experiencing, errors are correctable. If a chosen course of action is not self-enhancing this will be sensed and he can make an adjustment or revision. He thrives on a maximum feedback interchange, and thus, like the gyroscopic compass on a ship, can continually correct his course toward becoming more of himself. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
One example that first set me to considering the possibility of self-analysis was Erich. Erich was a physician who came to me for analysis because of attacks of panic, which he tried to allay by taking morphine and cocaine; also he had spells of exhibitionistic impulses. There was no doubt that he had a severe neurosis. After some months of treatment, he went away on a vacation, and during this time he analysed by himself an attack of anxiety. The beginning of this piece of self-analysis was accidental, as it was in the case of John, whom we discussed in the previous reports. The starting point for Erich was a severe attack of anxiety, apparently provoked by a real danger. Erich was climbing a mountain with his girl. It was strenuous climbing but not dangerous as long as they could see clearly. It became perilous, however, when a snowstorm arose and they were enveloped in a thick fog. Erich then became short of breath, his hear pounded, he became panicky and finally had to lie down to rest. He did not give the incident any thought but vaguely ascribed the attack to his exhaustion and to the actual danger. If we want to be, this is an example, by the way, of how easily we may be satisfied with wrong explanations, for Erich was physically strong and anything but a coward in the face of an emergency. The next day they went on a narrow path hewn into the steep, rocky wall of the mountain. The girl went ahead. The heart pounding started again when Erich caught himself at a thought or impulse to push her down the cliffs. That naturally startled him, and, besides, he was devoted to her. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Erich thought first of Dreiser’s American Tragedy, in which the boy drowns hi girl in order to get rid of her. Then he thought of the attack of the previous day and barely recaptured a similar impulse he had checked it as it as it arose. He remembered clearly, however, a mounting irritation against the girl before the attack, and a sudden wave of hot anger, which he had pushed aside. This, then, was the meaning of the attack of anxiety: an impulse of violence born out of a conflict between a sudden hatred on the one hand, and, on the other, his genuine fondness for the girl. He felt relieved, and also proud for having analysed the first attack and stopped the second. Erich, in contrast to John, went a step farther, because he felt alarmed by his recognition of hatred and a murderous impulse toward the girl he loved. While continuing to walk he raised the question why he should want to kill her. Immediately a talk they had had the previous morning recurred to him. The girl had praised one of his colleagues for his clever dealing with people and for being a charming host at a party. That was all. And that could not have aroused this much hostility. Yet when thinking about it, he felt a rising anger. Was he jealous? However, there was no danger of losing her. This colleague, though, was taller than he, and non-Jewish (on both points he was hypersensitive), and he did have a clever tongue. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
While Erich’s thoughts were meandering along these lines, he forgot his anger against the girl and focused his attention on comparing himself with the colleague. Then a scene occurred to him. He was probably four or five years old, and had tried to climb a tree but could not. His older brother had climbed it with ease and teased him from above. Another scene came back vividly when his mother praised this brother and he was left out. The older brother was always ahead of him. It must have been the same thing that infuriated him yesterday: he still could not stand to have any man praised in his presence. With this insight he lost his tenseness, could climb easily, and again felt tender toward the girl. Compared with the first example, the second achieved in one way more and in another less. Despite the greater superficiality of John’ self-analysis, he did take one step that Erich did not take. When John had accounted for the only particular situation, he did not rest satisfied: he recognised the possibility that all his headaches might result from a repressed anger. Erich did not go beyond the analysis of the one situation. It did not occur to him to wonder whether his finding had a bearing on other attacks of anxiety. On the other hand, the insight that Erich arrived at was considerably deeper than John’s. The recognition of the murderous impulse was a real emotional experience; he found at least an inkling of the reason for his hostility; and he recognized the fact that he was caught in a conflict. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
In the second incident, too, one is astonished at the number of questions not touched upon. Granting that Erich became irritated at praise of another man, whence the intensity of the reaction? If that praise was the only source of his hostility, why was it such a threat to him as to arouse violence? Was he in the grip of an excessively great and excessively vulnerable vanity? If so, what were the deficiencies in him that needed so much covering up? The rivalry with the brother was certainly a significant historical factor, but insufficient as an explanation. The other side of the conflict, the nature of his devotion to the girl, is entirely untouched. Did he need her primarily for her admiration? How much dependency was involved in his love? Were there other sources of hostility toward her? What are the motivating forces which make man act in certain ways, the drives which propel him to strive in certain directions? It seems as if the answer to this question Marx and Dr. Freud find themselves furthest apart and that there is an insoluble contradiction between their two systems. Marx’s “materialistic” theory of history is usually understood to mean that man’s main motivation is his wish for material satisfaction, his desire to use and to have more and more. This greed for material things as man’s essential motivation is then contrasted with Dr. Freud’s concept according to which it is man’s appetite for pleasures of the flesh which constitutes his most potent motivation for action. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The desire for property on the one hand and the desire for satisfaction involving pleasures of the flesh on the other seem to be the two conflicting theories as far as much motivation is concerned. That this assumption is an oversimplifying distortion as far as Dr. Freud is concerned follows from what has been already said about this theory. Dr. Freud sees man as motivated by contradictions; by the contradiction between his striving for pleasures of the flesh and his striving for survival and mastery of his environment. When Dr. Freud later posited another factor which conflicted with the one’s already mentioned—the super-ego, the incorporated authority of the father and the norms he represented, this conflict became even more complicated. For Dr. Freud, then, man is motivated by forces conflicting with each other and by no means only by the desire for satisfactions of pleasures of the flesh. Dr. Freud again thought in terms of contradiction, that between the “life instinct” and the “death instinct” as the two forces battling constantly within man and motivating his actions. The cliché of Marx’s theory of motivation is even more drastic distortion of his thinking than the cliché of Dr. Freud’s. The distortion begins with the misunderstanding of the term “materialism.” This term and its counterpart, “idealism,” have two entirely different meanings, depending on the context in which they are applied. When applied to human attitudes, one refers to the “materialist” as one who is mainly concerned with the satisfaction of material strivings, and to the “idealist” as one who is motivated by an idea, that is, a spiritual or ethical motivation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
However, “materialism” and “idealism” have entirely different meanings in philosophical terminology, and “materialism” must he used in this meaning when one refers to Marx’s “historical materialism” (a term which, in fact, Marx himself never used). Philosophically, idealism means that one assumes ideas form the basic reality, and that the material Word which we perceive by means of our senses has no reality as such. For the materialism prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century matter was real, not ideas. Marx, in contrast to this mechanical materialism (which was also underlying Dr. Freud’s thinking), was not concerned with the causal relationship between matter and mind but with understanding all phenomena as results of the activity of real human beings. “In direct contrast to German philosophy,” Marx wrote, “which descends from the Heaven to Earth, here we ascend from Earth to Heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men imagine, conceive, in order to arrive at man in the flesh. We set out from real active men and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process.” Marx’s “materialism” implies that we begin our study of man with the real man as we find him, and not with his ideas about himself and the World by which he tries to explain himself. In order to understand how this confusion between personal and philosophical materialism could have arisen in the case of Marx, we must proceed further and consider Marx’s so-called “economic theory of history.” This term has been misunderstood to mean that, according to Marx, only economic motives determine man’s actions in the historical process; in other words, the “economic” factor has been understood to refer to a psychological, subjective motive, that of economic interests. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
In government policy and strategy, the ideal is that foreign policy—and that means also military planning—are freed from the arbitrariness of the human will an entrusted to a computer system, which tells the “truth” since it is not fallible like men, nor has it any ax to grind. The ideal is that all foreign policy and military strategy are based on computer decision, and this implies that all the facts are known, considered, and made available to the computer. With this method, doubt becomes excluded, although disaster is by no means necessarily avoided. However, if disaster does happen after the decisions are made on the basis of unquestionably “facts,” it is like an act of God, which one must accept, since man cannot do more than make the best decision he knows how to make. It seems tome that these considerations are the only terms in which one can answer this puzzling question: How is it possible for our policy and strategy planners to tolerate the idea that at a certain point they may give orders the consequences of which will mean the destruction of their own families, most of America, and “at best” most of the industrialized World? If they rely on the decision the facts seem to have made for them, their conscience is cleared. However dreadful the consequences of their decisions may be, they need not have qualms about the rightness and legitimacy of the method by which they arrived at their decision. They act on faith, not essentially different from the faith on which the actions of the inquisitors of the Holy Office were based. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, some may even be tragic figures who cannot act differently, because they seen o other way of being certain that they do the best they can. The alleged rational character of our planners is basically not different from the religiously based decisions in a prescientific age. There is one qualification that must be made: both the religious decision, which is a blind surrender to God’s will and the computer decision, based on the faith in the logic of “facts,” are forms of alienated decisions in which man surrenders his own insight, knowledge, inquiry, and responsibility to an idol, be it God or the computer. The humanist religion of the prophets knew no such surrender; the decision was man’s. He had to understand his situation, see the alternatives, and then decide. True scientific rationality is not different. The computer can help man in visualizing several possibilities, but the decision is not made for him, not only in the sense that he can choose between the various models, but also in the sense that he must use his reason, relate to and respond to the reality with which he deals, and elicit from the computer those facts which are relevant from the standpoint of reason, and that means from the standpoint of sustaining and fulfilling man’s aliveness. The blind and irrational reliance on computer decision becomes dangerous in foreign policy as well as strategic planning when done by opponents, each of whom works with his own data-processing system. He anticipates the opponent’s moves, plans his own, and constructs scenarios for the X possibilities of moves on both sides. #RanolphHarris 14 of 20
He can construct his game in many ways: that of his side winning, a stalemate, or both losing. However, if either “wins” it is the end of both. While the purpose of the game is to achieve a stalemate, the rules of the game make a stalemate unlikely. Both players, by their methods and their need for certainty, give up the way which has been that of precomputer diplomacy and strategy: the dialogue—with its possibility of give and taken, open or veiled withdrawal, compromise, or even surrender when that is the only rational decision. With the present method, the dialogue, with all its possibilities for avoiding catastrophe, is ruled out. The action of the leaders is fanatical because it is pursued even to the point of self-destruction, although in a psychological sense they are not fanatics, because their actions are based on an emotion-free belief in the rationality (calculability) of the computer methods. There is a correlation with job of the psychologist. The clinical psychologist is exposed didactically (and casually, like any sentient person, through a myriad of cultural media) to the Freudian theory of psychopathology and to Freudian principles of psychoanalysis. If we focus too heavily on computer-based information and decision making, we risk alienating ourselves from our humanity and becoming psychopaths. This is why psychology focuses on the human relationships and communication. The goal is to help people become fully human. The psychologist, unlike the social worker and psychiatrist, is more likely to have his Freudian garden sprinkled from the watering cans of the dozen or so recognized variations on the theme, but the exfoliation does not serve to weaken his appreciation of Dr. Freud’s discoveries or his recognition of the fundamental principles of analytic therapy. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
And, in the quiet of the consulting room, face-to-face with a candidate for therapeutic conversation, there are multiple reasons (ranging from the sheer pertinence and richness of the psychopathological concepts to the broadly social “prestige” of analytically oriented therapy) that cause the psychologist to tend to think and behave, in that moment of truth, more like a psychiatrist or social worker, and less like a psychologist. There are a few striking general consequences of the over-arching role of psychoanalytic doctrine in the preparation of current psychotherapists: a belief that psychoanalysis is the most powerful of all forms psychotherapy and that its primary limitation and restriction as the “therapy of choice” for psychoneurosis is a function of its cost and limited supply, not of its general appropriateness; a belief that distinctly psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy is the next best to psychoanalysis; a belief that truly effective psychotherapy must be intensive, id est, it must entail frequent therapeutic sessions (usually weekly) over a long period of time; a belief that the gaining of insight by the patient is a primary goal and result of therapy; a belief that the major mechanism of therapy is in the nature of the therapist-patient relationship; a belief that the prognosis for psychotherapy rests upon the suitability of the patient which is defined generally in the same term as the good candidate for psychoanalysis. These generally accepted orientations, stemming from a shared theoretical bias, lead to common administrative and therapeutic practices on the part of psychiatrist, psychologist, and social worker. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
There is a common preference to do “intensive” psychotherapy and there are common predilections (leading possibly to subtle therapeutic attitudes and maneuvers of which the therapist may be aware) to keep the patient “in treatment.” A fascinating side-effect of this peculiar bias has been a cluster of studies by psychologists which aim to identify at the outset jut which patients will remain in treatment and which will break off. The purpose of such studies could be to identify the short-term client with a view to providing a specific therapeutic experience for him. Generally, however, the implicit assumption in these studies is that patients who break off after only a few sessions are “failures” and could not possibly have derived any benefit from their limited exposure. The goal appears to be to find ways of selecting “good” patients for therapy, id est, those who come back interminably. (Contrary to what many experts might predict, the sudden administrative termination of “interminable” psychotherapy cases does not appear to precipitate acute disintegration.) If such psychological studies should achieve a high level of predictive accuracy, it would become possible for an increasing portion of psychotherapeutic time to be devoted to a decreasing number of patients! (Perhaps this is a rare example of an instance in which we may be thankful that the accuracy of psychometric prediction is not greater.) #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Another result of the common theoretical bias is that all of these expert therapists have a marked preference to provide their services to the same sample (a very small portion of the total population of persons in need of psychological assistance). These “ideal” patients are not prominent among the clients of public clinics and hospitals. By contrast, the typical supplicant to a community psychiatric facility may present a set of attributes (such as level of education and verbal facility) that discourage the “depth-oriented” therapist from feeling that he can either effectively (or usefully?” establish a really therapeutic relationship. As a consequence, they are apt with such patients to effect the sort of brief and “incomplete” therapy of which they are disdainful. During therapy sessions, many patients often ask “How do I say no and mean it?” The basic rule here is to never go back on your answer of no. And the secret to this is not to allow anyone to continue to ask the same question you have already given the answer of no to. The way to enforce this is to add a consequence to asking the same question again. With a child, it is easy. “Ask again, you will not get any dessert after dinner.” An adult might be a little harder. If you put your mind to it, I am sure you can think of something they would not want to give up just so they could bug you about your answer. It has been said that ideas rule mankind. This is but a half-truth, but be as it may, it can be unhesitantly asserted that ideals rule the traveler on the quest. If they do not, then he is not embarked on the quest. However, an ideal is only an abstract conception. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Unselfishness, freedom, goodness, and justice are intangibles, and their practical application has altered from age to age according to the conditions prevailing in different times and places. An ideal must have a concrete shape or it becomes sterile. The Sacramento Fire Department has many ideals that are concrete. One person cannot rise in the ranks through the fire department without the support and respect of a large group of people. They do not let political opportunism interfere with the running of the fire department or the running of their lives. The Sacramento Fire Department has had a great line of chiefs of department. The chief of department is the highest uniform position, a competitive civil service position, and once an individual makes it, he or she is secure in the job and outside the authority of the mayor’s office. He or she represents safety of the city’s public. In critical situations the chief of the department is the person with responsibility. There is something that happens to a person when one becomes a firefighter. That something is that one begins to care about what one is doing, about the person one works with, and about the department’s reputation in ways that surprises, a depth of feeling that is entirely new. It is what feeling that enables people to enter burning buildings, and it is that feeling that will preserve the histories of fire departments throughout the land. It becomes a part of the human being, and part of every action. Any intelligent person can see that a firefighter is on the street to help people. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
In a car accident, if you pull the alarm the fire engines usually come faster than the ambulance. The firefighter will pull somebody out of the car, it does not matter what kind of a mess the victim is in. One is well trained in emergency situations. The firefighter knows how to deal with people. One knows when to move an injured person and when not to, when to put on a splint and when not to. One is trained to make a fast assessment of an emergency situation. When a firefighter arrives at a fire and sees people on the fire escape in the front of the building, one automatically knows there will be people on the back fire escape and in trouble inside the building. One knows to think about what is not immediately seen. One is there only to help, and one is asked to help in all kinds of situations—not only fires but accidents, drug overdoses, shootings, knifings, injuries from whatever cause. So a young person coming out of high school sees all this, and asks oneself, “What is it that I really want to do?” And the fire department winds up getting the best people. Be sure to make a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department to ensure they receive the necessary resources. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, Under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
The Winchester Mystery House
Kaefer lived in upstate New York. In 2007 a friend showed him a brochure concerning The Winchester Mystery House, and the house intrigued him. Since he was traveling to the Silicon Vallery, he decided to pay The Winchester Mystery House a visit. With his family, he drove to the house and parked the car in the parking lot. At that moment he had an eerie feeling that something was not right. Mind you, Kaefer had not been to the house before, had no knowledge about it, nor any indication that anything unusual occurred in it. The group of visitors was quite small. In addition to him and his family, there were two young college boys and one other couple. Even though it was a sunny day, Kaefer felt cold. “I felt a presence before we entered the house and before we heard the story from the guide,” he explained. “If I were a host there, I wouldn’t stay there alone for two consecutive minutes.” Kaefer had been to so many old houses and restorations before but had never felt as he did at The Winchester Mystery House.
It is not surprising the Sarah L. Winchester should be the subject of a number of psychic accounts. Probably the best known (and most frequently misinterpreted) story concerns Mrs. Winchester’s vision which came to her during the late 1800s. Mrs. Winchester was in the habit of meditating in her Blue Séance Room at times and saying her prayer when she was quite alone. On one of those occasions, she returned to the Daisy Bedroom more worried than usual. As she busied herself with her papers, she had the feeling of a presence in the room. Looking up, she saw opposite her a singularly handsome man. Since she had given orders not to be disturbed, she could not understand how he had gotten into the room. Although she questioned him several times, the visitor would not reply. As she looked at the apparition for what it was, she noticed it was her late husband and became more and more entranced with him, unable to make any more. Finally, she heard a voice saying, “Sarah, I love you.” At the same time, William Winchester extended his arm toward the east, and Mrs. Winchester saw what to her appeared like a blue mist at some distance.
As the mist dissipated, she saw various new additions to her mansion, a wide veranda and generous use of expansive windows and French doors, which offered views in every direction. A raised foyer directly overlooking the formal dining room and the living area. Special features like fireplaces with mini bricks, built-in shelves, a morning room, a door that opened to a two story fall into the garden, a staircase leading to an option third-floor area. And an exterior that boasts delicately turned rails and decorated upside-down columns. A unique gazebo projection off the covered porch to the north of the plan. She then noticed a dark, shadowy angel standing in the room of the witches’ cap, taking gold flakes out of water and sprinkling them on the wall. Then a dark cloud rose from the ground and enveloped her home. Sharp flashes of lightening became visible at intervals in the cloud. At the same time, Mrs. Winchester heard the anguished cries of departed souls. Next, William showed her an Observational Tower and legions of legions of angels descended from the Heavens, and William faded away.
Come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
You are Not the Problem!
Life on Earth did not happen by mistake. You are here as part of God’s plan of happiness for all of us. Little by little, in tranquil moments or in deliberate meditation, there will come to one the revelation of errors in conduct and thought which, until then, one did not know were errors. Values refer to the tendency of any living beings to show preference in their actions, for one kind of object or objective rather than another. This preferential behaviour is called “operative values.” It need not involve any cognitive or conceptual thinking. It is simply the value of choice which is indicated behaviourally when the organism select one object, rejects another. When the earthworm, placed in a simple Y maze, chooses the smooth arm of the Y, instead of the path which is paved with sandpaper, he is indicating an operative value. A second use of the term might be called “conceived values.” This is the preference of the individual for a symbolized object. Usually in such a preference there is anticipation of foresight of the outcome of behaviour directed toward such a symbolized object. Usually in such a preference there is anticipation or foresight of the outcome of behaviour directed toward such a symbolized object. A choice such as “Honesty is the best policy” is such a conceived value. A final use of the term might be called “objective value.” People use the word in this way when they wish to speak of what is objectively preferable, whether or not it is in fact sensed or conceived of as desirable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The living human being has, at the outset, a clear approach to values. He prefers some things and experiences, and rejects others. We can infer from studying his behaviour that he prefers those experiences which maintain, enhance, or actualize his organism, and rejects those which do not serve this end. What him for a bit: Hunger is negatively valued. His expression of this often comes through loud and clear. Food is positively valued. However, when he is satisfied, food is negatively valued, and the same milk he responded to so eagerly is now spit out, or the breast which seemed so satisfying to the infant is now rejected as he turns his head away from the nipple with an amusing facial expression of disgust and revulsion. He values security, and holding and caressing which seem to communicate security. He values new experience for its own sake, and we observe this in his obvious pleasure in discovering his toes, in his searching movements, in his endless curiosity. He shows a clear negative valuing of pain, bitter tastes, sudden loud sounds. All of this is commonplace, but let us look at these facts in terms of what they tell us about the infant’s approach to values. It is first of all a flexible, changing, valuing process, not a fixed system. He likes food and dislikes the same food. He values security and rest, and rejects it for new experience. What is going on seems best described as an organismic valuing process, in which each element, each moment of what he is experiencing is somehow weighed, and selected or rejected, depending on whether, at this moment, it tends to actualize the organism or not. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
This complicated weighing of experience is clearly an organismic, not a conscious or symbolic function. These are operative, not conceived values. However, this process can none the less deal with complex value problems. I would remind you of the experiment in which young infants had spread in front of them a score of more of dishes of natural (that is, unflavoured) foods. Over a period of time they clearly tended to value the foods which enhanced their own survival, growth, and development. If for a time a child gorged himself on starches, this would seen be balanced by a protein “binge.” If at times he chose a diet deficient in some vitamin, he would later seek out foods rich in this very vitamin. He was utilizing the wisdom of the body in his value choices, or perhaps more accurately, the physiological wisdom of his body guided his behavioural movements, resulting in what we might think of as objectively sound value choices. Another aspect of the infant’s approach to value is that the source of locus of the evaluating process is clearly within himself. Unlike many of us, he knows what he likes and dislikes, and the origin of these value choices lies strictly within himself. He is the center of the valuing process, the evidence for his choices being supplied by his own senses. He is not at this point influenced by what his parents think he should prefer, or by what the church says, or by the opinion of the latest “expert” in the field, or by the persuasive talents of an advertising firm. It is from within his own experiencing that his organism is saying in non-verbal terms, “This is good for me.” “That is bad for me.” “I like this.” “I strongly dislike that.” He would laugh at our concern over values, he could understand it. How could anyone fail to know what he liked and disliked, what was good for him an what was not? #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
What happens to this highly efficient, soundly based valuing process? By what sequence of events do we exchange for the more rigid, uncertain, inefficient approach to value which characterizes most of us as adults? The infant needs love, wants it, tends to behave in ways which will bring repetition of this wanted experience. By this brings complications. He pulls baby sister’s hair, and finds it satisfying to hear her wails and protests. He then hears that he is a “naughty, bad boy,” and this may be reinforced by a time out. He is cut off from affection. As this experience is repeated, and many, many others like it, he gradually learns that what “feels good” is often “bad” in the eyes of others. Then the next step occurs, in which he comes to take the same attitude toward himself which the others have taken. Now, as he pulls his sister’s hair, he solemnly intones, “Bad, bad boy.” He is introjecting the value judgment of another, taking it has his own. He has deserted the wisdom of his organism, giving up the locus of evaluation and is trying to behave in terms of values set by another, in order to hold love. Or take another example at an older level. A boy senses, though perhaps not consciously, that he is more loved and prized by his parents when he thinks of being a doctor than when he thinks of being an artist. Gradually he introjects the values attached to being a doctor. He comes to want, above all, to be a doctor. Then in college he is baffled by the fact that he repeatedly fails in chemistry, which is absolutely necessary to becoming a physician, in spite of the fact that the guidance counselor assure him he has the ability to pass the course. Only in counseling interviews does he begin to realize how completely he has lost touch with his organismic reactions, how out of touch he is with his own valuing process. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Let me give another instance from a class of mine, a group of prospective teachers. I asked them at the beginning of the course, “Please list for me the two or three values which you would most wish to pass on to the children with whom you will work.” They turned in many value goals, but I was inspired by some of the items. Several listed such things as “to speak correctly,” “to use good English, not to use work like ain’t.” Others mentioned neatness—“to do things according to instructions”; one explained her hope that “When I tell them to write their own names in the upper right-hand corner with the date under it, I want them to do it that way, not in some other form.” I confess I was somewhat appalled that for some of these girls the most important values to be passed on to pupils were to avoid bad grammar, or meticulously to follow teacher’s instructions. I felt baffled. Certainly these behaviours had not been experienced as the most satisfying and meaningful element in their own lives. The listings of such values could only be accounted for by the fact that these behaviours had gained approval—and thus had been introjected as deeply important. Perhaps these several illustrations will indicate that in an attempt to gain or hold love, approval, esteem, the individual relinquishes the locus of evaluation which was his in infancy, and places it in others. He learns to have a basic distrust for his own experiencing as a guide to his behaviour. He learns from others a large number of conceived values, and adopts them as his own, even though they may be widely discrepant from what he is experiencing. Because these concepts are not based on his own valuing, they tend to be fixed and rigid, rather than fluid and changing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
To analyze oneself occasionally comparatively easy and sometimes productive of immediate results. Essentially it is what every sincere person does when he tries to account for real motivations behind the way he feels or acts. If anything, without knowing much about psychoanalysis, a man who has fallen in love with a particularly attractive or wealth girl could raise with himself the question whether vanity or money plays a part in his feeling. A man who has ignored his better judgement and given in to his wife or his colleagues in an argument could question in his own mind whether he yielded because he was convinced of the comparative insignificance of the subject at stake or because he was afraid of an ensuing fight. I suppose people have always examined themselves in this way. And many people do so who otherwise tend to reject psychoanalysis entirely. The principal domain of occasional self-analysis is not the intricate involvements of the neurotic character structure, but the gross manifest symptoms, the concrete and usually acute disturbance which either strikes one’s curiosity or commands one’s immediate attention because of its distressing character. Thus the examples reported in this report concern a functional headache, an acute attack of anxiety, a lawyer’s fear of public performances, an acute functional stomach upset. However, a startling dream, the forgetting of an appointment, or an inordinate irritation at a taxidriver’s trivial cheating might just as well elicit a wish to understand oneself—or, more precisely, to discover the reasons responsible for that particular effect. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
This latter distinction may seem hairsplitting, but actually is expresses an important difference between occasional grappling with a problem and systematic work at oneself. The goal of occasional self-analysis is to recognize those factors that provoke a concrete disturbance, and remove them. The broader incentive, the wish to be better equipped to deal with life in general, may operate here too, but even if it plays some role it is restricted to the wish to be less handicapped by certain fears, headaches, or other inconveniences. This is in contrast to the much deeper and more beneficial desire to develop to the best of one’s capacities. One of the greatest factors of the importance for the understanding of man’s behaviour in present society: man’s need for certainty. Man is not equipped with a set of instincts that regulate his behaviour quasi-automatically. He is confronted with choices, and this means in all-important matters with grave risks to his life if his choices are wrong. The doubt that besets him when he must decide—often quickly—causes painful tension and can even seriously endanger his capacity for quick decisions. As a consequence, man has an intense need for certainty; he wants to believe that there is no need to doubt that the method by which he makes his decisions is right. In fact, he would rather make the “wrong” decision and be sure about it than the “right” decision and be tormented with doubt about its validity. This is one of the psychological reasons for man’s belief in idols and political leaders. They all take out doubt and risk from his decision making; this does not mean that there is not a risk for his life, freedom, etcetera, after the decision has been made, but that there is no risk that the method of his decision making was wrong. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
For many centuries certainty was guaranteed by the concept of God. God, omniscient and omnipotent, had not only created the World but also announced the principles of human action about what which there was no doubt. The church “interpreted” these principles in detail, and the individual, securing his place in the church by following its rules, was certain that, whatever happened, he was on the way to salvation and to eternal life in Heaven. In the Luteran-Calvinistic branch of Christian theology, man was taught not to be afraid of the risk of using false criteria for his decision making in a paradoxical way. Luther, belittling man’s freedom and the role of his good works, taught that they only decision man has to make is to surrender his will totally to God, and thus to be released of the risk of making decisions on the basis of his own knowledge and responsibility. In Calvin’s concept, everything is predestined, and man’s decision does not really matter; yet his success is a sign that he is one of then chosen. With the beginning of the scientific approach and the corrosion of religious certainty, man was forced into a new search for certainty. At first, science seemed to be capable of giving a new basis for certainty. This was so for the rational man of the last centuries. However, with the increasing complexities of life, which lost all human proportions, with the growing feeling of individual powerlessness and isolation, the science-oriented man ceased to be a rational and independent man. He lost the courage to think for himself and to make decisions on the basis of his full intellectual and emotional commitment to life. He wanted to exchange the “uncertain certainty” which rational thought can give for an “absolute certainty”: the alleged “scientific” certainty, based on predictability. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
This certainty is guaranteed not by man’s own unreliable knowledge and emotions but by the computers which permit prediction and become guarantors of certainty. Take as an example the planning of the big corporation. With the help of computers, it can plan ahead for many years (including the manipulation of man’s mind and taste); the manager does not have to rely any more on his individual judgment, but on the “truth” that is pronounced by the computers. The manager’s decision may be wrong in its results, but he need not be distrustful of the decision-making processes. He feels that he is free to accept or reject the result of computer prognostication, but for all practical purposes, he is as little free as a pious Christian was to act against God’s will. He could do it, but he would have to be out of his mind to take the risk, since there is not a greater source of certainty than God—or the computerized solution. This need for certainty creates the need of what amounts to blind belief in the efficacy of the method of computerized planning. The managers are relieved from doubt, and so are those who are employed in the organization. It is precisely the fact that man’s judgment and emotions allegedly do not interfere with the process of decision making that gives the computer-based planning its godlike quality. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. However, they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet served the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellow man in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exit only when development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low state, and when, therefor, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man and between man and nature, are correspondingly narrow. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex of the real World can, in any case, only then finally vanish when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellow men and to nature. The life-process of material production does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material groundwork or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development. Man, as a race, slowly emancipates himself from mother nature through the process of work, and in this process of emancipation he develops his intellectual and emotional powers and grows up, becomes an independent and free man. When he will have brought nature under his full and rational control, and when society will have lost its antagonistic class character, “prehistory” will have ended, and a truly human history will begin in which free men plan and organize their exchange with nature, and in which the aim and end of all social life is not work and production, but the unfolding of man’s powers as an end in itself. This is the realm of freedom in which man will be fully united with his fellow men and with nature. The problem of human evolution is an essentially tragic one. Whatever man did, it ended in frustration; if he should return to become a primitive again, he would have pleasure, but no wisdom; if he goes on as a builder of ever more complicated civilizations, he becomes wiser, but also unhappier and sicker. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Clearly, evolution is an ambiguous blessing, and society does as much harm as good. History is a march toward man’s self-realization; society, whatever the evils produced by any given society may be, is the condition for man’s self-creation and unfolding. The “good society” becomes identical society of good men, that is, of fully developed, sane, and productive individuals. When it comes to psychologist, they even study the theory of theories and are provided at least with a modest ability to differentiate between “good” theories and “poorer” theories, qua theories. The impact of his exposure to methods for investigation of psychological phenomena, within the context of multiple theories that overlap only partially, should fit him with a generally critical orientation toward any univocal explanation of the mysteries of the human personality. And in seminars, in publications, in case conferences it is typically the psychologist, not the social worker or psychiatrist, who is dubious that an orthodox psychoanalytic formulation either truly accounts for the observed pathology or necessarily points to the optimal treatment. This is a generalization about psychologists as students of behaviour theory and personality. It must be recognized that there are some graduate departments of psychology in which the training of the clinical psychologist is as theoretically biased, id est, psychoanalytically oriented, as is that of the average psychiatrist or social worker. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Contrary to what the manipulator wants you to think, you are not the problem. You might be their problem as you will not conform to what they want you to, but you are not the problem. However, it is hard to deal with abusers and other types of manipulators because they are masters at blame-shifting. Somehow, in any argument, they are adamantly more capable of convincing victims that they are at fault, than victims are at realizing they are the victims of the entire debacle. Victim blaming is a manipulative tactic used by abusers to convince themselves and their victims that the problems lie with the other person, not with them. The ploy is very clever and effective. Beware of the tendency to play the game of “Find the bad guy,” in your intimate relationships. It is never healthy to use someone as a scapegoat for your problems. If you are in a relationship with someone needs to make you the “bad guy,” then be aware of what is going on and do not allow yourself to accept that mantle. The best way to understand victim blaming is to realize that two concepts are at play: Projection and judgmentalism. Projection occurs when one person displaces his or her own characteristics onto another person. An abusive person will “project” his or her own attributes on to the other person, particularly in a conflict. The main reason victims get in fights or arguments with abusers is because the abusers cause the problem in the first place by saying or doing something that engenders a negative emotional reaction in another person. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The abuser may be rude, hurtful, hostile, or act in some other relationship-destroying manner. It takes superhuman strength to keep from being triggered by the anger-provoking tactics of an abusive or manipulative person. Once you have been triggered by the abuser, you may make one small mistake in speaking, or you may even commit the heinous crime of yelling back and defending yourself! Heavens forbid you have a reaction to a hostile instigation! And once you do react supposedly inappropriately you have just given the abuser a gift. He can now capitalize on your reaction and use it as the evidence that the problem resides with you. Therefore, do not take the bait. The abuser is trying to flip the script. Reminder yourself that you do not need to defend yourself because you did not do anything wrong. The other concept, along with projection, that your abuser is using is judgmentalism. When people use judgmentalism as a strategy, they are trying to make you a subordinate. Abusers are incapable of healthy human connections. They suffer from attachment issues, and true to form, they must sabotage any semblance of healthy attachment. This is why the term “interpersonal violence” is sued to describe domestic violence. It is abuse of an interpersonal relationship. Victim blaming keeps the abuser emotionally safe by projecting his interpersonal problems on to the other person, preventing insight and potential growth (not to mention resolution of the problem at hand.) It also helps the abuser feel personally superior and smug as he believes that it is his role to judge the victim. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Ideas influence their thinker himself; thoughts react on their generator if they are intensely held, deeply felt, and frequently born. Thus they help to form tendencies and shape character. The aspirant can take advantage of this truth. His moral thought and metaphysical ideation will be so deep and earnest that they will converge upon his emotional feeling, when that has been sufficiently purified, and coalesce with it. Thus they become part of his inner being. If he is to realize his higher purpose in life, each aspirant has to struggle with the demon inside himself. Nature seeks to achieve its own ends, which renders it indifferent to all personal ends. It considers no man’s feelings but only his level of development, that he might be raised to a higher one. The only greatness he may rightfully seek is a secret one. It is not power over others that he should strive for, but power over himself. He will have to grow into this higher consciousness. No other way exists for him. He has not only to be brave enough to accept the aloneness that comes with every serious advance in the quest, but also strong enough to endure it. If it is wrong in ethical theory, how can anything be right in Worldly practice? The value of such study is immense. It involves a re-education of the whole mind of man. It strikes at the root of his ethical ignorance and destroys the selfishness and greed which are its malignant growths. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Mentally, man can do what no animal can do. He can consider conduct from a purely ethical standpoint; he can struggle at heart between right and wrong, self and selflessness. Every man betrays himself for what he is. He can hide his thoughts and dissemble his feelings, but he cannot hide his face. Therein are letters and words which tell plainly what sort of a man he really is. However, few there be who can read in this strange language. Character can be changed. As if by magic, he who habitually contemplates such exalted themes finds in time that his whole outlook is altered and expanded. The new outlook will gradually strongly establish itself within him. As a man thinks in his hear so is he. As is one’s thoughts, so one becomes; this is the eternal secret. What is to be done where a weakness becomes abnormally strong, overpowering the will and forcing him to do what his better nature rejects? The cure in the end must be based on his willingness to regard it as something not really part of himself, something alien and parasitic. If there is to be any way out toward freedom from it, he must stop identifying himself with the weakness. The key to right conduct is to refuse to identify himself with the lower nature. The hypnotic illusion that it is really himself must be broken: the way to break it is to deny every suggestion that comes from it, to use the will in resisting it, to use the imagination in projecting it as something alien and outside, to use the feelings in aspiration towards the true self, and the mind in learning to understand what it is. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The Sacramento firefighters like going to work, and there are few jobs at any level of pay about which this can be said with such certainty. They have to learn building laws, and the different types of building construction—frame, brick, steel, and the old cast-irons. Firefighters learn about the different kinds of windows—regular windows, casement windows, and the nonopening ones in skyscrapers—and the different locks people use to secure themselves from the harsh realities of the outside World—standard bolt locks, digital locks, police locks that lock on either side of the door, and fox locks, which have bars going down into the floor life flying buttresses. They have to learn the multitudinous knots used for moving equipment and people, and a whole communications system, the signals and alarms, the differences between “ten-four” and “ten-twenty-two.” They studied water hydraulics, the laws that govern the movement of water rushing through a two-and-a-half-inch hose and coming out of a one-inch nozzle. Outdoors, they learned about tools, everything from how to swing an ax to how to pull a hook and how to use your weight on a battering ram. They learned about the motorized tools, the power saw, the pneumatic tools and jacks used in collapse situations. Then there was the practical work of fighting the fire itself in controlled situations, where firefighters had to crawl into a room and pull out an inanimate 150-pound synthetic human being and carry it down six flights of stairs after taking a beating from the smoke. Later in the afternoon they had to carry ladders from one side of the street to the other. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
On one call, there was a fire on the third floor of a tenement building, going really goodly. It had evidently been cooking for a long time, because by the time the fire department got there the fire fully involved this apartment of five or six rooms. There was this long hallway, and the firefighters ran in crouching positions into the fire with an inch-and-a-half hose. They got to the end of the hallways, one of the firefighters opened up the hose and led the way into the room there. Immediately, a large part of the ceiling came down on one of them, knocking his helmet off. Embers went down his neck and back, and he was burned pretty severely. So, with the nozzle still in his hand, he shut it off, made a complete U-turn, and started back out of the room. When he got out into the hall, the embers had died out, and he had a lifetime three-inch burn down his neck from hairline to shoulder blade. The interesting thing is, he hardly mind getting hurt in the fire. A gash on his arm that took twelve stitches, a burn on his neck, a broken wrist, to him it was just a badge of courage that reinforced the things he believed about firefighting and reinforced his confidence in himself to do a tough, challenging, and dangerous job. Once this firefighter got hurt pulling a hose over a barbed wire fence. He had to tug so hard that he pulled a ganglion, or nerve center, in his back. It was one of the most painful things that he ever experienced. It was difficult to treat. He had to lie on his stomach in bed for three months, doing everything in that position, eating, reading, writing notes, watching television. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Finally a doctor shot a whole bunch of cortisone into his back, which completely relived the pain, and finally he was able to go back to work. The cortisone never disappeared, though, and still moves around. He still feels the pain from time to time, especially when he is tired. There is an overriding awareness of the possibility of getting badly hurt, because they see it around them all the time. Firefighters see people getting disabled permanently, and they learn not to take even the smallest fire for granted. Be sure to open your hearts to the Sacramento Fire Department and let them know the community is thankful by making a donation. Also, assembly member Kevin McCarty is running for mayor of Sacramento, he is endorsed by the Sacramento Fire Department, and two of his goals are creating more affordable housing and getting homeless people into homes. A vote for McCarty is a way of showing support for the City of Sacramento and the Sacramento Fire Department. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Be wise not only in words, but in deeds; mere knowledge is not the goal, but action. Know the God of your fathers, and serve Him by your deeds. Let not your wisdom exceed your deeds, least you be like a tree with many branches but few roots. If the thoughts of your heart be pure, it is likely that so will be the words of your hand. Accustom yourself to do good; before long it will become your chief delight. One good deed leads to another, as every evil deed leads to more wrong-doing. If others do good through you, their deeds will be accounted to you as your own. #RanolphHarris 18 of 18
The Winchester Mystery House
A caretaker was hire to work at The Winchester Mystery House. Although she had never been to the mansion before, she was recruited for her skills in architecture and historical preservation. As she entered the library and explained that the beautiful ask paneling had been taken from trees that once surrounded the estate, she became restless. She knew very well that it was the kind of feeling that forewarned her of some sort of psychic event. As she was looking over toward a fireplace, farmed by two candelabra, she suddenly saw a very tall, white-haired man in a long black frock coat standing next to it. One elbow rested on the mantel, and his head was in his hand, as if he were pondering something very important. The caretaker was not at all emotionally involved with the house. In fact, the guided tour bored her, and she would have preferred to be outside in the stables, since she had a great interest in horses and nature. Her imagination did not conjure up what she saw: she knew in an instant that she was looking at the spirit of William Wirt Winchester. Because of the restless feelings that came over her while working in the mansion almost induced her to go into a trance several times, she decided to quit her job in a hurry.
Come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Divine at the Center but Slightly Devilish at the Circumference
If it requires great and constant effort to model his character will not interest man, but to the quester it is an obligation. And this is so without his having to believe in all the windy rhetoric about the perfectibility of man. The reformation and even transformation of character is as much a sector of philosophy as the practice of concentration and the study of mind. The virtue which develops from disciplining thoughts and controlling self removes obstacles and gives power to truth’s pursuit. The ethical ideals of philosophy are lofty but nobody is asked or expected to jump to their realization, only to understand their direction; the ret of this inner work must develop at its own pace according to hi individual possibilities. Is it entirely useless to point out an ethical height to which very few can soar? No—the usefulness lies in the sense of right direction which it gives, in the inspiring love of truth and hope of self-betterment which it arouses. If we persist in holding it before us in aspiration, however unrealizable the ideal may be in all its perfection, we shall certainly approach it more closely in action. And the effort will give us more faith in life, make us more sensitive to its finer rhythms. If the lower self disturbs you, silence it by invoking it intellectually through declarations of spiritual truth and emotionally through genuflection in humble prayer. Do not accept the suggestion which drags you down, but instead seek for the pressure which lifts you up. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
To the extent that he purifies and ennobles himself, he qualifies himself for the reception of superior insight. If the aspirant will take care to fill his mind with thoughts that are always elevating, always beneficial, and always constructive; if he will be vigilant to keep out all thoughts that are degrading and destructive, this simple technique will keep his mind so continuously filled with the right kind of thought and feeling that he will unconsciously and little by little completely overcome the wrong kind. Thus his character will change and approach his ideals. As if man were nothing else but a divine being, we must not talk about this as the mystics do. We are philosophical students and should not be so one sided. We must tell men the whole and not a half-truth, which means we must tell them that they are a mixed lot, divine at the center but slightly devilish at the circumference; altruistic in their potential nature but somewhat selfish in their actual one. Everything that strengthens his better nature is useful and acceptable. Everything that weakens it is not. So difficult is true self-mastery that nothing in the World’s literature about it can overrate the accomplishment. When the beast in man will bow in homage before the intelligence in man, when the ideal of perfected being set up for him by the serene figure of the Sphinx shall be recognized, accepted, and striven for, then indeed will he become a conscious collaborator with the universal Mind. Whoever knows how ad where to look can find in himself the assurance of this ultimate victory. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
There should be no space in his mind for negative thoughts, no time in his heart for base feelings. It is not enough to repress a negative trait like jealousy or self-pity. One must also replace it by a positive trait. His spiritual progress will be measured not so much by his meditational progress as by his moral awakening. Not merely when he can understand it intellectually, but also when he can accept it emotionally, the truth will become truth for him, and still more when he can incorporate it into his behaviour patterns. He must look within himself for the impurities and falsities, the malice and envy, the prejudice and bitterness which belong to his lower nature. And he must work with all his willpower and thinking power to cast them out. He must walk towards the highest with every part of his being, with his whole psyche matured and balanced. He must not only seek to intuit what is real, but also to will what is good. It is when men come face-to-face with a real crisis, a real temptation, or a real hardship that they show their real character, not only their self-imagined or publicly reputed one. It must be remembered always that mere intellectual study is not so essential as the building of worthwhile character, which is far more important in preparing for the great battle with the ego. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The tendency to install technical progress as the highest value is linked up not only with our overemphasis on intellect but, most importantly, with a deep emotional attraction to the mechanical, to all that is not alive, to all that is man-made. This attraction to the non-alive, which is in its more extreme form an attraction to death and decay (necrophilia), leads even in its less drastic form to indifference toward life instead of “reverence for life.” Those who are attracted to the non-alive are the people who prefer “law and order” to living structure, bureaucratic to spontaneous methods, gadgets to living beings, repetition to originality, neatness to exuberance, hoarding to spending. They want to control life because they are afraid of its uncontrollable spontaneity; they would rather kill it than to expose themselves to it and merge with the World around them. They often gamble with death because they are not rooted in life; their courage is the courage to die and the symbol of their ultimate courage is the Russian roulette. The rate of our automobile accidents and preparation for thermonuclear war are a testimony to this readiness to gamble with death. And who would not eventually prefer this exciting gamble to the boring unaliveness of the organization man? One symptom of the attraction of the merely mechanical is the growing popularity, among some scientists and the public, of the idea that it will be possible to construct computers which are no different from man in thinking, feeling, or any other aspect of functioning. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
It is possible to manufacture computers synthetically which are completely undistinguishable from human beings produced in the usual manner. There is no reason to suppose machines have any limitations not shared by man. The main problems, it seems to me, is not whether such a computer-man can be constructed; it is rather why the idea is becoming so popular in a historical period when nothing seems to be more rational, harmonious, and peace-loving being. One cannot help being suspicious that often the attraction of the computer-man idea is the expression of a flight from life and from humane experience into the mechanical and purely cerebral. When the majority of men are like robots, then indeed there will be no problem in building robots who are like men. The idea of the manlike computer is a good example of the alternative between the human and the inhuman machines. The computer can sever the enhancement of life in many respects. However, the idea that it replaces man and life is the manifestation of the pathology of today. The fascination with the merely mechanical is supplemented by an increasing popularity of conceptions that stress the animal nature of man and the instinctive roots of his emotions or actions. Dr. Freud’s was such an instinctive psychology; but the importance of his concept of libido is secondary in comparison with his fundamental discovery of the unconscious process in waking life or in sleep. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Many experts stress instinctual animal heredity, and have not offered any new or valuable insights into the specific human problem as Dr. Freud has done; they satisfy the wish of many to look at themselves as determined by instincts and thus to camouflage their true bothersome human problems. The dream of many people seems to be to combine the emotions of a primate with a computerlike brain. If this dream could be fulfilled, the problem of human freedom and of responsibility would seem to disappear. Man’s feelings would be determined by his instincts, his reason by the computer; man would not have to give an answer to the question his existence asks him. Whether one like the dream or not, its realization is impossible; the naked ape with the computer brain would cease to be human, or rather “he” would not be. Among the technological society’s pathogenic effects upon man, two more must be mentioned: the disappearance of privacy and of personal human contact. “Privacy” is a complex concept. It was and is a privilege of the middle and upper classes, since its very basis, private space, is costly. This privilege, however, can become a common good with other economic privileges. Aside from this economic factor, it was also based on a hoarding tendency in which my private life was mine and nobody else’s, as was my house and any other property. It was also a concomitant of cant, of the discrepancy between moral appearances and reality. Yet when all these qualifications are made, privacy still seems to be an important condition. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
First of all, because privacy is necessary to collect oneself and to free oneself from the constant “noise” of people’s chatter and intrusion, which interferes with one’s own mental processes. If all private data are transformed into public data, experiences will tend to become more shallow and more alike. People will be afraid to feel the “wrong thing”; they will become more accessible to psychological manipulation which, through psychological testing, tries to establish norms for “desirable,” “normal,” “healthy” attitudes. Considering that these tests are applied in order to help the companies and government agencies to find the people with the “best” attitudes, the use of psychological tests, which is by now an almost general condition for getting a good job, constitutes a severe infringement on the citizen’s freedom. Unfortunately, a large number of psychologists devote whatever knowledge of man they have to this manipulation in the interest of what the big organization considers efficiency. Thus, psychologists become an important part of the industrial and governmental system while claiming that their activities serve the optimal development of man. This claim is based on the rationalization that what is best for the corporation is best for man. It is important that the managers understand that much of what they get from psychological testing is based on the very limited picture of man which, in fact, management requirements have transmitted to the psychologists, who in turn give it back to management, allegedly as a rest of an independent study of man. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
It hardly needs to be said that the intrusion of privacy may lead to a control of the individual which is more total and could be more devastating that what totalitarian states have demonstrated thus far. It is of vital importance to distinguish between a psychology that understands and aims at the well-being of man and a psychology that studies man as an object, with the aim of making him more useful for the technological society. There are factors that make it easy for a person to see his peculiarities in the course of his relationship with the analyst than in his association with others. His disturbing character traits—his diffidence, dependency, arrogance, vindictiveness, his tendencies to withdraw and freeze up at the slightest hurts, or whatever they may be—are always contrary to his best self-interests, not only because they render his associations with others less satisfactory but also because they make him dissatisfied with himself. This fact is often blurred, however, in his customary relations with others. He feels that he will gain something by staying dependent, by taking revenge, by triumphing over others, and therefore he is less willing to recognize what he is doing. The same traits displayed in analysis work so blatantly against his self-interest that he can scarcely fail to see their injurious character, and hence the urge to blindfold himself against them is considerably lessened. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
However, while it is not easy it is entirely within the range of possibility for a person to overcome the emotional difficulties involved in studying his behaviour toward others. Our past case study of Clare, we analyzed the intricate problem of her morbid dependency by scrutinizing her relation with her lover. And she succeeded in spite of the fact that both the difficulties mentioned above were present to a high degree: the disturbances in the personality of her lover were at least as great as her own; and certainly she had a vital interest, from the viewpoint of her neurotic expectations and fears, not to recognize that her “love” was actually a need for dependency. The other aspect of the relationship with the analyst is the explicit and implicit human help he extended to the patient. Whereas the other assistance he gives is replaceable to a greater or lesser extent, the merely human help is, by definition, entirely lacking in self-analysis. If the person who is working by himself is fortunate enough to have an understanding friend with whom he can discuss his findings, of if he can check up on them with an analyst from time to time, he will feel less alone in his work. However, neither expedient could wholly substitute for all the intangible values of working out his problems in close co-operation with another human being. The absence of this help is one of the factors that makes self-analysis the harder road. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
There is a great deal of concern today with the problem of values. Youth, in almost every country, is deeply uncertain of its value orientation; the values associated with various religions have lost much of their influence; sophisticated individuals in every culture seem unsure and troubled as to the goals they hold in esteem. The reasons are not far to seek. The World culture, in all its aspects, seems increasingly scientific and relativistic, and the rigid, absolute views on values which come to us from the past appear anachronistic. Even more important perhaps, is the fact that the modern individual is assailed from every angle by divergent and contradictory values claims. It is no longer possible, as it was in the not too distant historical past, to settle comfortably into the value system of one’s forebears or one’s community and live out one’s life without ever examining the nature and the assumptions of that system. In this situation it is not surprising that value orientations from the past appear to be in a state of disintegration or collapse. Men question whether there are, or can be, any universal values. It is often felt that we may have lost, in our modern World, all possibility of any general or cross-cultural basis for values. One natural result of this uncertainty and confusion is that there is an increasing concern about, interest in, and a searching for, a sound or meaningful value approach which can hold its own in today’s World. I share this general concern. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
I have also experienced the more specific value issues which arise in my own field, psychotherapy. The client’s feelings and convictions about values frequently change during therapy. How can he or we know whether they have changed in a sound direction? Or does he simply, as some claim, take over the value system of his therapist? Is psychotherapy simply a device whereby the unacknowledged and unexamined values of the therapist are unknowingly transmitted to an unsuspecting client? Or should this transmission of values be the therapist’s openly held purpose? Should he become the modern priest, upholding and imparting a value system suitable for today? And what would such a value system be? There has been much discussion of such issues, ranging from thoughtful and empirically based presentations such as that of D. D. Glad, to more polemic statements. As is so often true, the general problem faced by the culture is painfully and specifically evident in the cultural microcosm which is called the therapeutic relationship. I have observed changes in the approach to values as the individual grows from infancy to adulthood. If he is fortunate, I have observed further changes when he continues to grow toward true psychological maturity. Many of these observations grow out of my experience as a therapist, where I have had the rich opportunity of seeing the way in which individuals move toward a richer life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
From these observations, I believe I see some directional threads emerging which might offer a new concept of the valuing process, more tenable in the modern World. I have made a beginning by presenting some of these ideas partially in previous writings; I am speaking from my experience of the functioning human being, as I have lived with him in the intimate experience of therapy, and in other situations of growth, change, and development. A decisive step from primitive to civilized history lies in the rebellion of sons against the father, and the murder of the hated father. The sons then create a system of society based on a covenant which excludes further murder among the rivals and provides for the establishment of morality. The evolution of the child follows a similar path. The little boy at the age of five or six is intensely jealous of his father and represses murderous wishes against him only under the pressure of the castration threat. In order to liberate himself from continuous fear, he internalizes the incest taboo, and builds the nucleus around which his “conscience” is to grow (superego). Later on, the prohibitions and commands voided by other authorities and by society are added to the original taboos voiced by father. History is determined in its course by continuous contradictions. The productive forces grow and thus conflict with the older economic, social, and political forms. This conflict (for instance, between the steam engine and the previous social organization of manufacturing) leads to social and economic changes. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The new stability, however, again is challenged by further development of the productive forces (for instance, from the steam engine to the use of gasoline, electricity, atomic energy), leading to new social forms which correspond better to the new productive forces. Together with the conflict between productive forces and sociopolitical structures goes the conflict between social classes. The feudal class based on older forms of production is in conflict with the new middle class of small manufacturers and businessmen; this middle class finds itself fighting, at some later point, against the working class as well as the leaders of big monopolistic enterprises which tend to strangle the earlies and smaller forms of enterprise. In the beginning of history, man is completely dependent on nature. In the process of evolution, he makes himself more and more independent of nature, begins to rule and transform nature in the process of work, and in transforming nature man transforms himself. Man’s dependence on nature limits his freedom and his capacity for thought; he is in many ways like a child. He slowly grows up, and only when he has fully mastered nature and thus become an independent being can he develop all his intellectual and emotional faculties. A socialist society is the one in which the grownup man begins to unfold all his powers. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The monolithic orientation of social work schools, and the particular use of psychiatrists or analysts to instruct in personality theory, has contributed to a generally stable entente cordiale between social workers and psychiatrists. Certainly the resulting facilitation of communication and coordination is apparently in the best interests of the patient. However, like the peace pacts between nations which successful avert war, there is no correlated impetus to make discoveries or achieve maximal efforts. At least one voice has expressed concern for the impact of this indoctrination on the specific contribution of the social worker: “Social problems are social problems, and you cannot psychoanalyze them out of existence. Psychiatric social service…is indispensable. However, psychiatric social service is increasingly becoming psychoanalytic social service, and more and more even the ‘social’ is being left out until only psychoanalytic service remains. That does not help people with real social family problems.” The psychologist in his formal training is exposed to a variety of truly psychological conceptualizations of the human mind, personality, and behaviour. He studies theories of learning, of perception, of motivation, of communication, of decision making, and so on. He studies scientifically accumulated information (as contrasted with retrospective clinical formulations based upon the pathology of adults) as to how the social, conceptual, and emotional equipment and behaviour dispositions of the human organism unfold, develop, integrate, and disintegrate from earliest infancy through adulthood to senility. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
We are bombarded with all sorts of persuasion daily. It is coming at us from all sides. The Internet, radio, television, your computer, your mobile phone, the people around you, it is all too much! In this day and age, we have much more persuasive action coming at us than ever before. That is because there are not only more ways to persuade people, but there are more things to persuade them about. The in-you-face persuasion is not so bad. You can take it or leave it, and at least you know what is happening. It is the dark persuasive tactics that you might not even be aware of that matter. First things first, your fundamental rights as a human being. This might seem like a thing that is understood by most people, but that is not always the case. So, we are going to go over what is unequivocally yours. Knowing what your rights are, gives you that line you can let people know you will not allow being crossed. We have to have lines—all of us do. As children, we learned to test our boundaries. If our parents had little to no boundaries, then we learned little until we became school age. Our peers and teachers would then set the boundaries our parents did not. Society will always let you know how far you can and cannot go. So, letting people know that you know what the socially accepted boundaries are is essential in your role as a citizen of the World. Another thing that needs to be pointed out about your rights is the fact that you do not have to answer questions anyone asks you about why you feel you have these rights. You have them, end of subject. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
If someone feels they have to ask you about your rights, they are only trying to get into your head to make you believe you do not actually have the right you are trying to uphold. Let us talk about your right to life. Not only do you have this right, but you have got the right to live your life in a way that is healthy and happy. If someone is infringing your life that is causing you to be or feel unhealth or unhappy, you have the unquestionable right to get away from them or make them get away from you—by force if necessary. What about respect? Do you have the right to be treated with respect by everyone? You are do. You should be treated with respect by anyone you first encounter. That is until you do something to lose that respect. The thing is that everyone is given respect in the first place. It is up to you if you can maintain that respect or not. And sometimes, you have got to try to earn it, once it has been lost. You also have the right to protect yourself from things that threaten to harm you in physical, mental, and emotional ways. This means that is a person is about to punch you in the face, you do not have to stand there and take it. You have got many possibilities for your recourse. You can hit back. You could dodge the punch. Or you can simply walk away—or run if you feel that threatened. And you can seek help if you feel like you cannot face a threat on your own. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Physical violence is easy to see how you have got the right to get away from a person who is threatening to harm you in that way. However, what about emotional and mental harm? Of course, you have the right to get away from anyone who is threatening or actually harming you in those ways. Again, you can do this on your own, or you might need help. Ask for help if you need it and stay away from the person who tried to or did cause you harm in any of these aspects. The things you want, the things you have opinions about, and how you feel are also rights that you have. Regardless if anyone else agrees with your or not, you also have the right to have all of these things. Your opinion might be yours alone. Others might have conflicting opinions. Just as you have a right to your opinion, they have the right to theirs as well. You also have a right to make your own priorities. What matters to you the most might not matter to someone else as much or at all. If someone thinks your priorities are not in line with what they want, that makes no difference. You need to believe in your priorities and stand by them. Do not allow anyone to influence what matters the most to you. A case in point for this is that your boss thinks you should focus more on your job instead of your family. He wants you to change your priorities. You know better than that now, do you not? It is your right to have your own priorities; no one can make you change them. Again, if you need help getting someone in authority over you to understand and accept this about you, then get the help you need to accomplish that. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
If you pay for something, do you feel that you have the right to have it? You sure do what that right. If you pay for gas before going back outside to pump it and there is no gas left to give you, you expect to get your money back, do you not? And if they refuse to give your money back, you know there are things you can do to get it back. And we are not talking about getting violent here. There are authorities to help you get what you paid for. If you need it, use that help. And here is a right that many of us do not know that we have. We all have the right to say no. That is all. We also have the right not to feel even an ounce of guilt for saying, no. Not even an ounce! That is right. You can say no, and you do not have to say another word after that. You do not have to explain a thing. As a matter of fact, if you want to shut the person bothering you up, simply tell that that it is your right to say no and you are exercising it. Smile, be happy about it. You said, no. And you do not feel bad about doing it either. When a negative reaction impulsively shows itself before you have been able to prevent it, make as your second thought a deliberate replacement or substitution of it, by the opposed beneficial one. For instance, a reaction of envy at someone’s good fortune should be substituted by the thought of appreciation of the good qualities or services which may have led it. When emotion is no longer able to cloud reason, when intellect is no longer able to dry up the feeling of conscience, a better judgment of affairs and a clearer perception of truth becomes possible. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
It takes a dedicated, committed, and courageous person to enter the blind, boiling darkness of a building on fire, to crawl through poisonous smoke, to confront the threat of the flames. The economic benefits of being a firefighter are not really great. The time off is fairly decent. Work schedules vary widely from place to place, but generally speaking firefighters have more time off in a consecutive way than most people. At the same time, many of them work forty-eight and sixty hours a week. When you go to work, you know you are going to sit in the firehouse kitchen with people who are interesting, funny, and worthy of your attention. Another benefit of being a firefighter is your sense of self-worth. You go out on a job, you eat some soke, you take a little heat, and you get the great satisfaction of confronting the flames and defeating them. You know you are doing a good job, and that is a very valuable benefit. There is not much money for the paid firefighters. Only the bosses get paid well. The fire commissioner of Sacramento gets paid more than many mayors. However, the ordinary firefighter is almost always paid less than a schoolteacher, generally on a parity with police officers—and he works more hours. The trouble is that seldom their time off is in sync with the rest of the World. When their kids are starring in the school play, they are working. If there is a rare family reunion at Thanksgiving, they are working. And when you should be celebrating the baby’s first Christmas, they are working. That is a minus. And that is the breaks. Please be sure to show love to the Sacramento Fire Department and make a donation. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Witchcraft is treated as a curious by-lane of history, a superstition long since dead, having no existence among, nor bearing upon, the affairs of the present day. It is a field of folk-lore, where one may gather strange flower and noxious weeds. Again, we often recognize the romantic treatment of Witchcraft. ‘Tis the Eve of S. George, a dark wild night, the pale moon can but struggle thinly through the thick massing clouds. The witches are abroad, and hurtle swiftly aloft, a hideous covey, borne headlong on the skirling blast. In delirious tones they are yelling foul mysterious words as they go: “Har! Har! Har! Altri! Altri!” To some peak of the Broken or lonely Cevennes they haste, to the orgies of the Sabbat, the infernal Sacraments, the dance of Acheron, the sweet and fearful fantasy of evil, “Vers les stupres impurs et lest baisers immondes.” Hell seems to vomit its foulest dregs upon the shrinking Earth’ a loathsome shape of obscene horror squats huge and monstrous upon the ebon throne; the stifling air reeks with filth and blasphemy; faster and faster whirls the witches’ lewd lavolta; shriller and shriller the cornemuse screams; and then a wan gray light flickers in the Eastern sky; a moment more and there sounds the loud clarion of some village chantieleer; swift as thought the vile phantasmagoria vanishes and is sped, all is quite and still in the peaceful dawn.
However, both the antiquarian and romanticist reviews of Witchcraft may be deemed negligible and impertinent so far as the present research is concerned, however entertaining and picturesque such treatment proves to many readers affording not a few pleasant hours, whence they are able to draw highly dramatic and brilliantly coloured pictures of old time sorceries, not to be taken too seriously, for these things never were and never could have been. The rationalist historian and the sceptic, when inevitably confronted with the subject of Witchcraft, chose a charmingly easy way to deal with these intensely complex and intricate problems, a flat denial of all statements which did not fit, or could not by some means be squared with, their own narrow prejudice. What matter the most irrefragable evidence, which in the instance of any other accusation would unhesitatingly have been regarded as final. What matter the logical and reasoned belief of centuries, of the most cultured peoples, the highest intelligences of Europe? Any appeal to authority—save his own. Such thing could not be. We must argue from that axion, and therefore anything which is impossible to explain away by hallucination, or hysteria, or auto-suggestion, or any other vague catch-word which may chance to be fashionable at the moment, must be uncompromisingly rejected, and a note of superior pity, to candy the so suave yet crushingly decisive judgment, has proved of great service upon more occasion than one.
Why examine the evidence? It is really useless and a waste of time, because we know that the allegations are all idle and ridiculous; the “facts” sworn to by innumerable witnesses, which are repeated in changeless detail century after century in every country, in every town, simply did not take place. How so absolute and entire falsity of these facts can be demonstrated the sceptic omits to inform us, but we must unquestioningly accept his infallible authority in the face of reason, evidence, and truth. Come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
I Could Use Some Peace and Quiet in My Life
It is only through free, independent, truth-seeking research that there is any hope of success in this Quest for ultimate truth. Naturally, each vested interest tries to limit the search to its own fold for obvious reasons, but he should refuse to limit his studies to any single school. By remaining open to truths from different sources, and fitting them together like mosaics, we get eventually some sort of a pattern. The technetronic society may be the system of the future, but it is not yet here; it can develop from what is already here, and it probably will, unless a sufficient number of people see the danger and redirect our course. In order to do so, it is necessary to understand in greater detail the operation of the present technological system and the effect it has on man. What are the guiding principles of this system as it is today? It is programed by two principles that direct the efforts and thoughts of everyone working in it: Th first principle is the maxim that something ought to bedone because it is technically possible to do it. If it is possible to build nuclear weapons, they must be built even if they might destroy us all. If it is possible to travel to another galaxy, it must be done, even if at the expense of many unfulfilled needs here on Earth. This principle means the negation of all values which the humanist tradition has developed. This tradition said that something should be done because it is needed for man, for his growth, joy and reason, because it is beautiful, good, or true. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Once the principle is accepted that something ought to be done because it is technically possible to do it, all other values are dethroned, and technological development becomes the foundation of ethics. The, feasibility, which is a strategic concept, becomes elevated into a normative concept, with the result that whatever technological reality indicates we can do is taken as implying we must do it. The second principle is that of maximal efficiency leads as a consequence to the requirement of minimal individuality. If individuals are cut down to purely quantifiable units whose personalities can be expressed on punched cards, the social machine works more efficiently, so it is believed. These units can be administered more easily by bureaucratic rules because they do not make trouble or creation friction. In order to reach this result, men must be de-individualized and taught to find their identity in the corporation rather than in themselves. The question of economic efficiency requires careful thought. The issue of being economically efficient, that is to say, using the smallest possible amount of resources to obtain maximal effect, should be placed in a historical and evolutionary context. The question is obviously more important in a society where real material scarcity is the prime fact of life, and its importance diminishes as the productive powers of a society advance. An ideal helps to hold a man back from his weakness, a standard gives him indirectly a kind of support as well as, directly, guidance. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
A second line of investigation should be a full consideration of the fact that efficiency is only a known element in already existing activities. Since we do not know much about the efficiency or inefficiency of untired approaches, one must be careful in pleading for things as they are on the grounds of efficiency. Furthermore, one must be very careful to think through and specify the area and time period being examined. If the time and scope of the discussion are broadened, what may appear efficient by a narrow definition can be highly inefficient. In economics there is increasing awareness of what are called “neighbourhood effects”; that is, effects that go beyond the immediate activity and are often neglected in considering benefits and costs. One example would be evaluating the efficiency of a particular industrial project only in terms of the immediate effects on this enterprise—forgetting, for instance, that waste materials deposited in nearby streams and the air represent a costly and a serious inefficiency with regard to the community. We need to clearly develop standards of efficiency that take account of time and society’s interest as a whole. Eventually, the human element needs to be taken into account as a basic factor in the system whose efficiency we ty to examine. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Dehumanization in the name of efficiency is an all-too-common occurrence; exempli gratia, giant telephone systems employing Brave New World techniques of recording operators’ contacts with customers and asking customers to evaluate workers’ performance and attitudes, etcetera—all aimed at instilling “proper” employee attitude, standardizing services, and increasing efficiency. From the narrow perspective of immediate company purposes, this may yield docile, manageable workers, and thus enhance company efficiency. In terms of the employees, as human beings, the effect is to engender feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and frustration, which may lead to either indifference or hostility. In broader terms, even efficiency may not be served, since the company and society at large doubtless pay a heavy price for these practices. Another general practice in organizing work is to constantly remove elements of creativity (involving an element of risk or uncertainty) and group work by dividing and subdividing tasks to the point where no judgment or interpersonal contact remains or is required. Workers and technicians are by no means insensitive to this process. Their frustration is often perceptive and articulate, and comments such as “We are human” and “The work is not fit for human beings” are not uncommon. Again, efficiency in a narrow sense can be demoralizing and costly in any individual and social terms. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
If we are only concerned with input-output figures, a system may give the impression of efficiency. If we take into account what the given methods do to the human being in the system, we may discover that they are bored, anxious, depressed, tense, etcetera. The result would be a twofold one: (1) Their imagination would be hobbled by their psychic pathology, they would be uncreative, their thinking would be routinized and bureaucratic, and hence they would not come up with new ideas and solutions which would contribute to a more productive development of the system; altogether, their energy would be considerably lowered. (2) They would suffer from many physical ills, which are the result of stress and tension; this loss in health is also a loss for the system. Furthermore, if one examines what this tension and anxiety do to them in their relationship to their wives and children, and in the functioning as responsible citizens, it may turn out that for the system as a whole the seemingly efficient method is most inefficient, not only in human terms but also as measured by merely economic criteria. Efficiency is desirable in any kind of purposeful activity. However, it should be examined in terms of the larger systems, of which the system under study is only a part; it should take account of the human factor within the system. Eventually efficiency as such should not be a dominant norm in any kind of enterprise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The other aspect of the same principle, that of maximum output, formulated very simply, maintains that the more we produce of whatever we produce, the better. The success of the economy of the country is measured by its rise of a total production. So is the success of a company. Ford may lose several hundred million dollars by the failure of a costly new model, like the Edsel, but this is only a minor mishap as long as the production curve rises. The growth of the economy is visualized in terms of ever-increasing production, and there is no vision of a limit yet where production may be stabilized. The comparison between countries rests upon the same principle. China is surpassing the United States of America by accomplishing a more rapid rise in economic growth. Not only industrial production is ruled by the principle of continuous and limitless acceleration. The educational system has the same criterion: the more college graduates, the better. The same in sports: every new record is looked upon as progress. Even the attitude toward the weather seems to be determined by the same principle. It is emphasized that this “the hottest day in the decade,” or the coldest, as the case may be, and I suppose some people are comforted for the inconvenience by the proud feeling that they are witnesses to the record temperature. One could go on endlessly giving examples of the concept that constant increase of quantity constitutes the goal of our life; in fact, that it is what is meant by “progress.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Few people raise the question of quality, or what all this increase in quantity is good for. This omission is evident in a society which is not centered around man any more, in which one aspect, that of quantity, has choked all others. It is easy to see that the predominance of this principle of “the more the better” leads to an imbalance in the whole system. If all efforts are bent on doing more, the quality of living loses importance and activities that once were means become ends. If we explore this idea of a larger and larger model of systems, we may be able to see in what sense completeness represents a challenge to reason. One model that seems to be a good candidate for completeness is called an allocation model; it views the World as a system of activities that use resources to “output” usable products. The process of reasoning in this model is very simple. One searches for a central quantitative measure of system performance, which has the characteristic: the more of this quantity the better. For example, the more profit a firm makes, the better. The more qualified students a university graduates, the better. The more food we produce, the better. It will turn out that the particular choice of the measure of system performance is not critical, so long as it is a measure of general concern. We take this desirable measure of performance, and relate it to the feasible activities of the system. The activities may be the operations of various manufacturing plants, of schools and universities, of farms, and so on. Each significant activity contributes to the desirable quantity in some recognizable way. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The contribution, in fact, can often be expressed in the amount of the desirable quantity. The more sales of a certain product, the higher the profit of a firm. The more we teach, the more graduates we have. The more fertilizer we use, the more food. If the overriding economic principle is that we produce more and more, the consumer must be prepared to want—that is, to consume—more and more. Industry does not rely on the consumer’s spontaneous desires for more and more commodities. By building in obsolescence it often forces him to buy new things when the old ones could last much longer. By changes in styling of products, dresses, durable goods, and even food, it forced him psychologically to buy more than he might need or want. However, industry, in its need for increased production, does not relay on the consumer’s needs and wants but to a considerable extent on advertising, which is the most important offensive against the consumers right to know what he wants. The spending of $364 billion dollars on direct advertising in 2023 (in newspapers, magazines, Internet, radio, TV) may sound like an irrational and wasteful use of human talents, of paper, and print. However, it is not irrational in a system that believes that increasing production and hence consumption is a vital feature of our economic system, without which it would collapse. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
If we add to the cost of advertising the considerable cost for restyling of durable goods, especially cars, and of packaging, which partly is another form of whetting the consumer’s appetite, it is clear that industry is willing to pay a high price for the guarantee of the upward production and sales curve. The anxiety of industry about what might happen to our economy if our style of life changed is expressed in this brief quote by a leading investment banker: “Clothing would be purchased for its utility; food would be bought on the basis of economy and nutritional value; automobiles would be stripped to essentials and held by the same owner for 10 to 15 years of their useful lives; homes would be built and maintained for their characteristics of shelter, without regard to style or neighbourhood. And what would happen to a market dependent upon new models, new styles, new ideas? The transformations effected by this inner work seem, when stabilized, to be a natural maturity. In dealing with resistance from a patient, an analysis may assume the lead. He may be struck by a realization that despite much work done, much insight gained, nothing changes in the patient. In such cases he must desert his role as interpreter and confront the patient openly with the discrepancy between insight and change, possibly raising the question as to unconscious reservations that the patient may have which prevent him from letting any insight really touch him. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Thus far the analyst’s work is of an intellectual character: he puts his knowledge into the service of the patient. However, even if he is not aware of offering more than hi technical skill, this helps extend beyond what he can give on the basis of his specific competence. In the first place, by his very presence, he gives the patient a unique opportunity to become aware of his behaviour toward people. In other relationships the patient is likely to focus his thinking primarily on the peculiarities of others, their injustice, their selfishness, their defiance, their unfairness, their unreliability, their hostility; even if he is aware of his own reactions he is inclined to regard them as provoked by the other. In analysis, however, this particular personal complication is almost entirely absent, not only because the analyst has been analyzed, and continues to analyze himself, but also because his life is not entangled with the patient’s life. This detachment isolates the patient’s peculiarities from the befogging circumstances that ordinarily surround them. And in the second place, by his friendly interest, the analyst gives the patient a good deal of what may be called general human help. To some extent this is inseparable from the intellectual help. Thus the simple fact that the analyst wants to understand the patient implies that he takes him seriously. This in itself is an emotional support of primary importance, especially at those times when the patient is harassed by emerging fears and doubts, when his frailties are exposed, his pride attacked, his illusions undermined, for the patient is often too alienated from himself to take himself seriously. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
That statement may sound implausible, because most neurotic persons have an inordinate sense of their own importance, either in regard to their unique potentialities or in regard to their unique needs. However, to think ourselves as all important is radically different from taking ourselves seriously. The former attitude derives from an inflated image of the self; the latter refers to the real self and its development. A neurotic person often rationalizes his lack of seriousness in terms of “unselfishness” or in a contention that it is ridiculous or presumptuous to give much thought to oneself. This fundamental disinterest in the self is one of the great difficulties in self-analysis, and, conversely, one of the great advantages of professional analysis is the fact that it means working with someone who through his own attitude inspires the courage to be on friendly terms with oneself. This human support is particularly valuable when the patient is in the grip of an emerging anxiety. In such situations the analyst will rarely reassure the patient directly. However, the fact that the anxiety is tackled as a concrete problem, which can be solved eventually, lessens the terror of the unknown, regardless of the content of the interpretation. Similarly, when the patient is discouraged and inclined to give up the struggle the analyst does more for him than merely interpreting: his very attempt to understand this attitude as the outcome of a conflict is a greater support to the patient than any patting on the back or any effort to encourage him in so many words. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
There are also the times when those fictitious foundations upon which the patient has built up his pride become shaky, and he starts to doubt himself. It is good to lose harmful illusions about oneself. However, we must not forget that in all neuroses solid self-confidence is greatly impaired. Fictitious notions of superiority substitute for it. However, the patient, in the midst of struggle, cannot distinguish between the two. To him an undermining of his inflated notions means a destruction of his faith in himself. He realizes that he is not as saintly, as loving, as powerful, as independent as he had believed, and he cannot accept himself bereft of glory. At that point he needs someone who does not lose faith in him, even though his own faith is gone. The human help that the analyst gives the patient is similar to what one friend might gives to another: emotional support, encouragement, interest in his happiness. This may constitute the patient’s first experience of the possibility of human understanding, the first time that another person has bothered to see that he is not simply a spiteful, suspicious, cynical, demanding, bluffing individual, but, with a clear recognition of such trends, still likes and respects him as a striving and struggling human being. And if the analyst has proved to be a reliable friend, this good experience may help the patient also to retrieve his faith in others. There is no doubt that the observations of a trained outsider will be more accurate than our observation of ourselves, particularly so since concerning ourselves we are far from impartial. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Against this disadvantage, however, stand the fact, already discussed, that we are more familiar with ourselves than any outsider can be. If they are bent on understanding their own problems, experience gained in psychoanalytic treatment shows beyond any doubt that patients can develop an amazing faculty of keen self-observation. There are obvious differences in patterns and some of the contents of the full professional training of the psychiatrist, clinical psychologist, and social worker. If we ask what specific knowledges or skills are unique to each of them, constituting a basis on which each is able to make a contribution to the psychiatric patient that cannot be duplicated by the others, these can be best appreciated. The psychiatrist’s unique competence is his medical knowledge and training—he alone is qualified to appraise the medical-physical status of the patient (although any physician can do this as well—possibly better), and he alone is qualified to prescript and administer medical (physiochemical) treatments; no one else can do this. An additional prerogative of the psychiatrist as a physician is a legal authority (existing by virtue of long historical precedent and beginning to show signs of appropriate impress of modern concepts and techniques) to be responsible for certain administrative operations (as contrasted with clearly medical procedures), for example, to hospitalize a patient, to discharge a patient, and so on. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
The long-standing authority of the physician as the final and sole authority on “insanity” or mental disease within the law is beginning to show appropriate decay. The quality of a recent brief filed by the American Psychiatric Association speaks eloquently for the inevitable erosion of the physician’s role as ultimate arbiter in this area. The clear responsibility of the hospital psychiatrist for medical care of patients has historically extended to a quasi-legal responsibility (final authority) for such psychological procedures as prescribing changes in activity programs, giving or withholding passes, allowing or disallowing visitors. However, increasingly, partly as a function of the team approach and partly as a function of administrative leadership, such decisions are becoming a group responsibility (in many instances of the responsibility of the patient’s peers) or transferred to the psychologist. The clinical psychologist’s unique contribution to the individual patient comes in his competence to select, administer, score, interpret, and integrate the results of a variety of psychological tests and examination procedures that provide the only truly standardized and reliable source of data as to the patient’s mental ability and personality. He alone is a skilled diagnostician in the sense of having facility with a set of instruments specifically designed to overcome the errors and inadequacies of notoriously fallible clinical appraisal of complex phenomena. Beyond the application of his diagnostic tools to the individual patient, the psychologist alone has a thorough knowledge of the psychometric theory underlying these instruments and, accordingly, he can truly appreciate their limitations. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Aside from this contribution to the individual patient, the psychologist’s grounding in the methodology of behavioural research, especially measurement of personality and the behavioural correlates of personality types, affords him the capacity to design instruments for appraisal of changes, specifically of changes in major dimensions of personality. Measurement of such changes, and of related criterion variables, lies at the heart of the appraisal of the effectiveness of any psychotherapeutic or other psychiatric therapy. Skill in such personality research at the molar of behavioural level (as contrasted with study of physiological functions) is another capacity unique to the clinical psychologist. The social worker has knowledge of the network of city, county, and state welfare agencies, their personnel, equipment, and services and their administrative patterns and relationships, which is not shard by others member of the psychiatric team. She is sensitive to community structure and to the ways in which that structure can naturally facilitate or impede the recovery of a patient. She is experienced in the relevance of subculture memberships for pattens of psychopathology and for accessibility or resistance to personal intervention. She is skilled in the elicitation and correlation of life history data from relatives and other informants. She is cognizant of the economic problems of various family structures. She is expert in preparation of the patient to accept and profit from such referrals. These are among the skills of the case workers in the old-fashioned sense, and they are not shared by psychiatrist of psychologist. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
A few psychiatrists have also received full graduate training in psychology, some psychologists were previously social workers, and occasionally a social worker successfully pursues the study of medicine or psychology. Each of these professionals has some unique areas in the background of general education which he brings to his graduate training and differences in the core emphasis of his specialized graduate preparation. The professions of psychiatry, clinical psychology and social work are presently providing the great bulk of formal psychotherapy in this country. However, the members of no one of these three professions are selected and trained primarily to be skilled psychotherapists. The variation in the cost of training each of these experts and the time required for this training, in light of the proportional relevance of their respective programs as preparation for the specific conduct of psychotherapy, has obvious social implications. It must be recognized that psychotherapy is neither the primary not unique skill of any one of these professions. The psychiatrist, psychologist, and social worker each does possess specialized and unique competence. Can our society afford a significant reduction in the application of these unique skills in a “shotgun” effort to meet the manpower shortage resulting from the increasing demand for therapeutic conversation? #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Man is conceived as a machine, driven by a relatively constant amount of sexual energy called “libido.” This libido causes painful tension, which is reduced only by the act of physical release; to this liberation from painful tension Dr. Freud gave the name of “pleasure.” After the reduction of tension, libidinal tension increases again due to the chemistry of the body, causing a new need for tension reduction, that is, pleasureful satisfaction. This dynamism, which leads from tension to release of tension to renewed tension, from pain to pleasure to pain, Dr. Freud called the “pleasure principle.” He contrasted it with the “reality principle,” which tells man what to seek for and what to avoid in the real World in which he lives, in order to secure his survival. This reality principle often conflicts with the pleasure principle, and a certain equilibrium between the two is the condition for mental health. On the other hand, if either one of these two principles is out of balance, neurotic or psychotic manifestations are the result. I, for one, am a fan of the silent treatment. The quieter it is, the more I like it. If you have someone who does this to you, then let them shut you out. Let them remain quiet because of something you did or said made them angry with you. Relish that silence. It is so much better than their ongoing griping and ridiculing. People use silence as a tactic to get to you, to make you feel bad. They want you to miss their presence, miss their acceptance of you. Do not give them what they want. And do not let it get to you. If they keep pulling themselves away and shutting people out, it is not your loss. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
If you look at what they are doing, they are shutting everyone out, removing themselves from the World. It is really a very self-sabotaging thing to do. When you do not allow yourself to get upset by their actions and really take a look at what they are doing to themselves in a vain attempt to hurt you, you will realize that. If a man cannot find in society or surroundings that standards which suit his character, then he must find his own. It is this that makes him a quester. To some people, it might seem foolhardy to charge into the flames to rescue someone you never saw before and may never see again. It is not that the Sacramento Fire Department does not think about the danger. They are human and do not want to die, just like everyone else. However, unlike most everyone else, they do what has to be done despite their fears. Firefighters have ignored pleas from their partners and low-crawled through a blazing apartment, risking death, while desperately groping in the dense smoke for a child who was assumed dead. Another firefighter leaped into a smoke-filled elevator shaft of a burning high-rose and shinnied down a cable to a red-hot elevator in a valiant rescue attempt. While another firefighter jumped fifteen feet down into a pit of fire without a plan of escape because to do nothing meant certain death for a trapped victim. Gripping acts of heroism can happen anywhere at any time in Sacramento. Please make a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department to ensure they receive adequate resources. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
One night while closing The Winchester Mystery House a caregiver had accidentally dropped his mobile phone, and began to read a text message after he picked it up; after when he looked at his watch to ascertain the time. In taking his eyes from his watch, they became riveted upon the door-to-nowhere which he distinctly saw open, and also saw the figure of a female attired in grayish garments, with the head inclined downwards, and one hand pressed upon the chest as if in pain, and the other—the right hand—extended towards the ground with the index finger pointing downwards. It advanced with an apparently cautious step across the floor towards him. Immediately as it approached another caregiver, who was relaxing, its right hand extended toward her. He then rushed at it, giving at the same time a most awful yell, but, instead of grasping it, he fell upon his friend. I recollected nothing distinctly for nearly three hours afterward. However, he learned that he was carried downstairs in agony of fear and terror. The female caregiver added to the account with the detail of “sounds” being heard from an adjacent room. “His horrible shouts. He seems to have fainted in her arms. She instantly laid him down and went into the room from whence the last sound was heard. However, nothing was there and the door-to-nowhere had not been opened. Other employees came quickly to their assistance, and found the young caregiver trembling in the most acute mental agony.
Come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Where are We Headed?
It is difficult to locate our exact position on the historical trajectory leading from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century industrialism to the future. It is easier to say where we are not. We are not on the way to free enterprise, but are moving rapidly away from it. We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization. We are not on the way to the places toward which our ideological maps tell us we are moving. We are marching in an entirely different direction. Some see the direction quite clearly; among them are those who favour it and those who fear it. However, most of us look at maps which are as different from reality as was the map of the World in the year 500 B.C. It is not enough to know that our mas are false. If we are able to go in the direction we want to go, it is important to have correct maps. The most important feature of the new map is the indication that we have passed the stage of the first Industrial Revolution and have begun the period of the second Industrial Revolution. The first Industrial Revolution was characterized by the fact that man had learned to replace live energy (that of animals and men) by mechanical energy (that of steam, oil, electricity, and the atom). These new sources of energy were the basis for a fundamental change in industrial production. Related to this new industrial potential was a certain type of industrial organization, that of a great number of what we would call today small or medium-sized industrial enterprises, which were managed by their owners, which competed with each other, and which exploited their workers and fought with them about the share of the profits. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The member of the middle and upper class was the master of his enterprise, as he was the master of his home, and he considered himself to be the master of his destiny. Ruthless exploitation of nonwhite populations went together with domestic reform, increasingly benevolent attitudes toward the poor, and eventually, in the first half of this century, the rise of the working class from abysmal poverty to a relatively comfortable life. The first Industrial Revolution is being followed by the second Industrial Revolution, the beginning of which we witness at the present time. It is characterized by the fact not only that living energy has been replaced by mechanical energy, but that human thought is being replaced by the thinking of machines. Cybernetics and automation (“cybernation”) make it possible to build machines that function much more precisely and much more quickly than the human brain for the purpose of answering important technical and organizational questions. Cybernation is creating the possibility of a new kind of economic and social organization. A relatively small number of mammoth enterprises has become the center of the economic machine and will rule it completely in the not-too-distant future. The enterprise, although legally the property of hundreds of thousands of stockholders, is managed (and for all practical purposes managed independently of the legal owners) by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. The alliance between private business and government is becoming so close that the two components of this alliance become ever less distinguishable. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
The majority of the population in America used to be well fed, well housed, and well amused, and the sector of “underdeveloped” Americans who live under substandard conditions will is increasing well into the foreseeable future. We continue to profess individualism, freedom, and faith in God, but our professions are wearing thin when compared with the reality of the organization man’s obsessional conformity guided by the principle of hedonistic materialism. If society could stand still—which it can do as little as an individual—things might not be s ominous as they are. However, we are headed in the direction of a new kind of society and a new kind of human life, of which we now see only the beginning and which is rapidly accelerating. Our individual thoughts are patterned after the ideas any given society develops, and these ideas are determined by the particular structure and mode of functioning of the society. A watchful, skeptical, doubting attitude toward all ideologies, ideas, and ideals, is characteristic for Marx. He always suspected them as veiling economic and social interests, and his skepticism was so strong that he could hardly ever use words like freedom truth, justice—precisely because of the fact that they lend themselves to so much misuse, and not because freedom, justice, truth, were not the supreme values for him. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Dr. Freud thought in the same “critical mood.” His whole psychoanalytic method could be described as “the art of doubting.” Having been impressed by certain hypnotic experiments which demonstrated to what extent a person in a trance can believe in the reality of what is obviously not real, he discovered that most of the ideas of persons, who are not in a trance also do not correspond to reality, and that on the other hand most of that which is real is not conscious. Marx thought the basic reality to be the socioeconomic structure of society, while Dr. Freud believed it to be the libidinal organization of the individual. Yet they both had the same implacable distrust of the clichés, ideas, rationalizations, and ideologies which fill people’s minds and which from the basis of what they mistake for reality. This skepticism toward “common thought” is insolubly connected with a belief in the liberating force of truth. Marx wanted to liberate man from the chains of dependency, from alienation, from slavery to the economy. What was his method? Not, as is widely believed, force. He wanted to win the minds of the majority of the people. While force, according to him, might he use if the minority were to resist b force the will of the majority, the main question for Marx was not the mechanism of how to attain power in the state, but how to win the minds of the people. In his “propaganda,” Marx and his legitimate successors used the opposite method from the one used by all other politicians, whether bourgeois, fascist, or communist. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
He wanted to influence not by demagogic persuasion, creating semi-hypnotic states supported by fear of terror, but by an appeal to the sense of reality, by truth. The assumption underlying Marx’s “weapon of truth” is the same as with Dr. Freud: that man lives with illusions because these illusions make the misery of real life bearable. If he can recognize the illusions for what they are, that is to say, if he can wake up from the half-dream state, then he can come to hi senses, become aware of his proper forces and powers, and change reality in such a way that illusions are no longer necessary. “False consciousness,” that is to say, the distorted picture of reality, weakens man. Being in touch with reality, having an adequate picture of it, makes him stronger. Hence Marx believed that his most important weapon was truth, the uncovering of the reality behind the illusions and ideologies which cover it. In this lies the reason for a unique feature of Marxist propaganda: it is an emotional appeal for certain political aims, blended with a scientific analysis of social and historical phenomena. The best-known example for this blend is, of course, the Communist Manifesto. This contains in a brief form a brilliant and lucid analysis of history, of influence of economical factors, of class relations. And at the same time, it is a political pamphlet ending with a fervently emotional appeal to the working class. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The fact that the political leader must be at the same time a social scientist and a writer was demonstrated not only by Marx. Engels, Bebel, Jaures, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and many other leaders of the socialist movement were writers and students of social science and politics. (Even Stalin was forced to write books or to have them written in his name in order to prove his legitimacy of Marx’s and Lenin’s successor.) In fact, however, under Mr. Stalin, this aspect of socialism completely changed. Since the Soviet system must not be the subject matter of scientific analysis, the Soviet social scientists have become apologists for their system and have a scientific function only in technical matters dealing with production, distribution, organization et cetera. While for Marx, truth was a weapon to induce social change, for Dr. Freud it was the weapon to induce individual change; awareness was the main agent in Dr. Freud’s therapy. If, so Dr. Freud found, the patient can gain insight into the fictitious character of his conscious idea, if he can grasp the reality behind these ideas, if he can make the unconscious conscious, he will attain the strength to rid himself of his irrationalities and to transform himself. Dr. Freud’s aim, “Where there is ID, there shall be Ego,” can be realized only through the effort of reason to penetrate fictions and to arrive at the awareness of reality. It is precisely this function of reason and truth which gives psychoanalytic therapy its unique feature among all forms of therapy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Each analysis of a patient is a new and original venture of research. If it were applied, while it is true, of course, that there are general theories and principles which can be applied, there is no pattern, no “formula” which could be applied to the individual patient or be helpful to him. Just as for Marx, the political leader mut be a social scientist, so for Dr. Freud the therapist must be a scientist capable of doing research. For both, truth is the essential medium to transform, respectively, society and the individual; awareness is the key to social and individual therapy. Marx’s statement, “The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions,” also could have been made by Dr. Freud. Both wanted to free man from the chains of his illusions in order to enable him to wake up and to act as a free man. The third basic element common to both systems is their humanism. Humanism in the sense that each man represents all of humanity; hence, that there is nothing human which could be alien to him. Marx was rooted in this tradition, of which Voltaire, Lessing, Herder, Hegel, and Goethe are some of the most outstanding representatives. Dr. Freud expressed his humanism primarily in his concept of the unconscious. He assumed that all men share the same unconscious strivings, and hence that they can understand each other once they dare to delve into the underworld of the unconscious. He could examine the unconscious fantasies of his patient without feeling indignant, judgmental or even surprised. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The “stuff from which dreams are made” as well as the whole World of the unconscious became an object of investigation precisely because Dr. Freud recognized its profoundly human and universal qualities. Doubt and the power of truth and humanism are the guiding and propelling principles of Marx’s and Dr. Freud’s work. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, Hegelian philosophy has ben a dead issue for a long time so that the dynamic approach of Marx and Dr. Freud is not readily understood. Let us begin with a few examples, both from the realm of psychology and that of sociology. Let us assume a man who has been married three times. The pattern is always the same. He falls in love with a good-looking young lady, marries her, and is ecstatically happy for a short time. Then he begins to complain that his wife is domineering, that she curtails his freedom et cetera. After a period alternating between quarrels and reconciliation, he falls in love with another girl—in fact, one very similar to his wife. He gets a divorce and marries his second “great love.” However, with slight modifications the same cycle takes place, and again he falls in love with a similar type of girl, and again he gets divorced and married a third “great love.” Again, the same cycle occurs, and he fall in love with a fourth girl, being convinced that this time it is the true and real love (forgetting that he was convinced of that every time in the past), and wants to marry her. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
If she asked us our opinion about the chances for a happy marriage with him, what would we say to the last girl? There are several approaches to the problem. The first one is a purely behaviouristic one; the method of this approach is to conclude from past behaviour, the future behaviour. This argument would run: since he already has left a wife three time, it is quite likely that he will do it a fourth time, hence it is much too risky to marry him. This approach, empirical and sober, has much to be said for it. However, the girl’s mother, when using this approach, might find it difficult to answer one argument of her daughter’s. This argument says that while it is perfectly true that he did act in the same way three time, it does not follow that he will do so again this time. Either, so this counter-argument will say, he has changed—and who can say that a person may not change? Or the other women were not really the kind he could love deeply, while she, the last one, is really congenial to him. There is no convincing argument the mother could use against this reasoning. In fact, once she sees the man and notices that he is very much enraptured with her daughter, and that he walks with great sincerity about his love, even the mother might change her mind and be won over to the daughter’s position. The mother’s and the daughter’s approaches are both undynamic. They either make a prediction based on past performance, or one based on present words and actions, yet they have no way of proving that their predictions are better than guesswork. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
What is, in contradiction, the dynamic approach? The essential point in this approach is to penetrate through the surface of past or present behaviour and to understand the forces which created the pattern of past behaviour. If these forces still exist, it is to be assumed that the fourth marriage will end not differently from the previous ones. If, on the other hand, there has been a change in the forces underlying his behaviour, one would have to admit the possibility or even the likelihood of a different outcome, in spite of the past behaviour. What are the forces we speak of here? They are nothing mysterious, nor figments of abstract speculation. If one studies the behaviour of the person in the proper way, they are recognizable empirically. We may assume, for instance, that the man had not cut the tie to his mother; that he is a very narcissistic person with a deep doubt of his own manliness; that he is an overgrown adolescent in constant need of admiration and affection, so that once he has found a woman who fulfills these needs, he get bored with her soon after the conquest is made; he needs new proofs of his attractiveness and hence must look for another woman who can reassure him. At the same time, he is really dependent on women, afraid of them; and hence any prolonged intimacy makes him feel imprisoned and chained. The forces at work here are his narcissism, his dependence, his self-doubt producing needs which lead to the kind of action we have been describing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
These forces are by no means the result of abstract speculation. One can observe them in many ways: by examining dreams, free association, fantasies, by watching his facial expression, his gestures, his way of speaking, and so forth. Yet they are often not directly visible but must be inferred. Furthermore, they can be seen only within the theoretical frame of reference in which they have a place and meaning. Most importantly these forces are not only not conscious as such, but they are in contradiction to the conscious thought of the person involved. He is sincerely convinced that he will love the girl forever, that he is not dependent, that he is strong and self-assured. Thus, the average person thinks: if a man truly feels he loves a woman how can one predict that he will leave her after a short time, just by referring to such mythical entities as “fixation to mother,” “narcissism,” and so on? Are one’s eyes and ears not better judges than such deductions? Interpretations are suggestions as to possible meanings. They are by nature more or less tentative, and the patient’s reactions to them vary. If an interpretation is essentially right, it may strike home and stimulate associations showing its further implications. Or the patient may test it our and gradually qualify it. Even when it is only partly right, it may thus give rise to new trends of thought, provided the patient is co-operating. However, an interpretation may also provoke anxiety or defensive reactions. Whatever the reactions are, the analyst’s task is to understand them and learn from them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Psychoanalysis in its very essence is co-operative work, both patient and analyst bent on understanding the patient’s difficulties. The latter tries to lay himself open to the analyst and, as we have seen, the analyst observes, tries to understand, and, if appropriate, conveys his interpretation to the patient. He then makes suggestions as to possible meanings and both try to test out the validity of the suggestions. They try to recognize, for instance, whether an interpretation is right only for the present context or is of general importance, whether it has to be qualified or is valid only under certain conditions. And as long as such a co-operative spirit prevails, it is comparatively easy for the analyst to understand the patient and to convey to him his findings. The real difficulties arise when, in technical terms, the patient develops a “resistance.” Then, in tangible or intangible ways, he refuses to co-operate. He is late or forgets the appointment. He wants to take some days or weeks off. He loses interest in the common work and mainly wants the analyst’s love and friendship. His associations become shallow, unproductive, and evasive. Instead of examining suggestion made by the analyst, he resent them and feels attacked, hurt, misunderstood, humiliated. He may reject every attempt to help with a rigid feeling of hopelessness and futility. Fundamentally the reason for this impasse is that certain insights are not acceptable to the patient; they are too painful, too frightening, and they undermine illusions that he cherishes and is incapable of relinquishing. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Therefore he fights them off in one way or another, though he does not know that he is attempting to ward off painful insights: all he knows, or thinks he knows, is that he is misunderstood or humiliated or that work is futile. I do not care how much anyone laughs, ugly things someone says about you hurts—and it sticks with you for a very long time. You will experience this, and you might even dish this kind of humour out at times. It does not make it right. As humans, we like to make people laugh. When everyone around you is in good spirits, because of something you said, even when that something might be hurting someone else’s feelings, it feels good to some people. However, being disrespected by a joke someone is making is not fun. Even when the individual being insulted is laughing, too, they are not immune to the condescending remarks and negative words. People who do these kinds of things, do not find it funny when someone roasts them. When older try to speaking to you in a condescending way, or make fun of your life, just tell them about the highlights that you deal with, and tell them that it may sound bad to them, but you enjoy your life. You can also tell them that you understand their situation may not be exactly the way they like it to be. That should get them to stop harassing you without seeming like a mental case or telling them off. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
The clinical psychologist holds the Ph.D. degree in psychology. This means that he had completed a minimum of three years of graduate instruction in psychology from a major university. Before admission to such graduate study, he had completed a four-year college degree in a liberal arts program with emphasis upon the humanities and the social sciences. His graduate work will encompass study of personality theory, abnormal psychology (psychopathology), methods of psychological measurement, and psychometric theory, statistical methods and research design. Clinical diagnostic tests and techniques, principles of interviewing, and theories and techniques of psychotherapy. These constitute his major program; he will probably also complete a program of minor didactic studies in an appropriate related field such as sociology, anthropology, or psychiatry. The psychologist’s graduate program includes both didactic instruction and supervised clinical practice in interviewing, testing, and the like. As a major requirement for the doctoral degree, he must design, carry out, and write up an original research investigation in an appropriate problem area. Finally, like the M.D., he must complete a full year’s internship in a psychiatric facility having a full complement of professional staff. This total program of instruction, supervised training, and research is completed by the average clinical psychologist in slightly over five years. (The range of years from matriculation to degree completion is from a minimum of four to an upper limit of nine or ten years, this variation being primarily a function of the amount of time required for completion of the doctoral dissertation.) #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Thus, typically, some nine to ten years following high-school graduation, at an average age of 27-plus years, the psychologist is qualified to begin his professional career as a clinician and, if he chooses (and an increasing number do), to specialize in psychotherapy with outpatient neurotics. Both psychiatry and clinical psychology have “specialty boards” which examine and aware “certification” in the respective specialty. To be eligible for such examination, the psychiatrist must have two years of appropriate experience after completion of his residency. The psychologist must have at least four years of suitable experience following receipt of the Ph.D. Mental health affect our thoughts, emotions, behaviour, and relationships. Those who develop mental health challenges or illness can be impaired in their ability to cope with the routines and demands of daily life. Such conditions are often emotionally draining and confusing for the individual as well as for loved ones and leaders attempting to minister to the afflicted person. Those who are not mental health professions are not expected or encouraged to diagnose or provide treatment to individuals struggling with mental health issues. When individuals do not seem to respond to normal attempts by leaders to be helpful, no one should be offended by their lack of response. Instead, leaders should seriously consider encouraging the individual to get a mental health assessment from a qualified provider. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
As you discuss mental health concerns, make sure to show love and empathy as the Saviour would. If the person has reached out for help, thank her or him for asking for help. Because every situation is different and each person’s circumstances vary, prayerfully consider asking the person questions like these and then listen to the Spirit to help you better understand his or her concerns and discern his or her needs: Have you ever been diagnosed with a mental health condition? If so, how long have you had the condition? How does it affect your employment and family relationships? What are your greatest concerns or worries right now? What (if any) care are you receiving from a mental health care provider? Are you following the instructions from your provider, and are you comfortable with the care you are receiving? Do you feel you mental health condition is improving, staying the same, or getting worse? How are you coping with your condition? How do your family member handle your condition? Have they suggested anything you are not currently doing that you think maybe helpful? Have you received insights from Heavenly Father about your condition? If so, what were those insights? With the individual’s permission, and being respectful of the individual’s feelings, consider contacting family members for further insight into the issue. As you help the individual understand how their challenges are affecting their lives, consider reassuring the person that Heavenly Father love her or him and that the Saviour understands his or her challenges. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Help the person understand that mental illness is not a punishment from God. Help the person realize that mental illness cannot be overcome by willpower alone. Mental illness does not indicate that a person lacks faith, character, or worthiness. Include the person in Church activities and appropriate service opportunities. Consult with the person, family members, and others who know the person well to be aware of the person’s strengths and limitations. Consider consulting with Family Services (where available) or local providers of mental health services to identify support and treatment options. Even with the best of care, be aware that some conditions can last a lifetime. Sometimes people who are deeply, deeply racist may act unpredictable around an individual from a group they hate. Therefore, it is a good idea to be aware of people who seem psychotic, and avoid them, especially when they are around sharp objects or other objects, they could use to harm you. Do not make any sudden moves, just be aware, and ease out of the situation. Those who are taking medication should not change or stop treatment without first consulting their health care provider. The person’s mental health challenges can also affect the lives of his or her family members and neighbours. Determine the impact on the person’s family, and show love and empathy as you work with family members. Encourage the family, extended family, and others involved to counsel together about the needs of the individual and potential resources available to help. And if you are feeling threatened, call the police immediately. Sometimes people seem okay, but then they go back to unpredictable and threatening behaviour and it may be dangerous to be around of them. Drug use can exacerbate mental illness and make a person violent. They may not be the same person you are used to, so be careful. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The Sacramento Fire Department has to continuously fright for better equipment, portable radios, training, facilities, and apparatus for their troops. A lot of fire departments do not have the funding for people and are fighting just to keep what they have and not lose anything. And they are wonderful department. Keep in mind, there are plenty of good fire chiefs and some good politicians, and they do their best. The people who control the resources must understand that the fire department also wants to make the job safer for their troops. The Sacramento Fire Department’s mission is to provide the best protection possible for those they have a sworn due to serve and to provide service to them, and they also want to promote family values. The fire service is made up of special people who value family. The goal is to treat people like family. Many of these fire fighters and emergency medical service members have a love for their jo, and their brothers and sisters, and an honour for the profession. Some people became fire fighters because their parents were on the job and they admired them. It does take a special person for this kind of work. It takes the kind of person who loves to help people and lives to be challenged. Be sure to open up your heart to the Sacramento Fire Department and kindly make a donation, it will help them do their jobs with an unshakable passion. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Be sure to vote for Kevin McCarty in the Sacramento Mayoral race, he is endorsed by the Sacramento Fire Department. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
At the beginning of December, Mrs. Winchester heard “singing” in one of the chimneys in the Hall of Fires, and from time to time, lights were to be seen in various parts of the house. It was a curious fact that during these manifestations, Zip could not be persuaded to move. One night, something was heard coming up the stairs, as if it had been one without shoes. The Door to Nowhere was opened and closed frequently as if half a dozen people had entered together. There were thumps coming from the nine story Observational Tower. This was on the same night that Mrs. Winchester’s bed was violently shaken and the curtains around the bed were hoisted up and down. The next night, Mrs. Winchester saw a female emerge from the wall at the head of her bed and lean over her.
Come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
The Process of the Hardening of the Heart
Happiness depends on our understanding of life, understanding depends upon the penetration of insight, insight depends upon right instructions received from a competent teacher. Closely related to the problem of seeing when the real decision is made is another one. Our capacity to choose changes constantly with our practice of life. The longer we continue to make the wrong decisions, the more our heart hardens; the more often we make the right decision, the more our heart softens—or better perhaps, becomes alive. A good illustration of the principle involved here is the game of chess. Assuming that two equally skilled players begin a game, both have the same chance of winning (with a slightly better chance for the white side, which we can ignore for our purposes here); in other words, each has the same freedom to win. After, say, five moves the picture is already different. Both still can win, but A, who has made a better move, already has a greater chance of winning. He has, as it were, more freedom to win than his opponent, B. Yet B is still free to win. After some more moves, A, having continued to make correct moves that were not effectively countered by B, is almost sure to win, but only almost. B can still win. After some further moves the game is decided. B, provided he is a skilled player, recognizes that he has no longer the freedom to win; he sees that he has already lost before he is actually checkmated. Only the poor player who cannot properly analyze the determining factors lives under the illusion that he can still win after he has lost the freedom to do so; because of this illusion he has to go on to the bitter end, and have his king checkmated. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
If it is the lost of a chess game, the outcome may not be so bitter. However, when it is the death of millions of human beings, because the generals have not the skill and objectivity to see when they have lost, the end is bitter indeed. Yet we have twice witnessed such a bitter end in the 20th century; first in 1917, then in 1943. Both times German general did not understand that they had lost the freedom to win, but continued the war senselessly, sacrificing millions of lives. The implication of the analogy of the chess game is obvious. Freedom is not a constant attribute which we either “have” or “have not.” In fact, there is no such thing as “freedom” except as a word and an abstract concept. There is only one reality: the act of freeing ourselves in the process of making choices. In this process the degree of our capacity to make choices varies with each act, with our practice of life. Each step in life which increases my self-confidence, my integrity, my courage, my conviction also increases my capacity to choose the desirable alternative, until eventually it becomes more difficult for me to choose the undesirable rather than the desirable action. On the other hand, each act of surrender and cowardice weakens me, opens the path for more acts of surrender, and eventually freedom is lost. Between the extreme when I can no longer do a wrong act and the other extreme when I have lost my freedom to right action, there are innumerable degrees of freedom of choice. In the practice of life, the degree of freedom to choose is different at any given moment. If the degree of freedom to choose the good is great, it needs less effort to choose the good. If it is small, it takes a great effort, help from others, and favourable circumstances. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
A classic example of this phenomenon is the biblical story of Pharaoh’s reaction to the demand to let the Hebrews go. He is afraid of the increasingly severe suffering brought upon him and his people; he promises to let the Hebrews go; but as soon as the imminent danger disappears, “his heart hardens” and he again decides not to set the Hebrews free. This process of the hardening of the heart is the central issues in Pharaoh’s conduct. The longer he refuses to choose the right, the harder his heart becomes. No amount of suffering changes this fatal development, and finally it ends in his and his people’s destruction. He never underwent a change of heart, because he decided only on the basis of fear; and because of this lack of change, his heart became ever harder until there was no longer any freedom of choice left in him. If we look at our own development and that of others, the story of the Pharaoh’s hardening of heart is only the poetic expression of what we can observe every day. Let us look at an example: A white boy of eight has a little friend, the son of a migrant maid. Mother does not like him to play with the migrant, and tells her son to stop seeing him. The child refuses; if he will only, mother promises to take him to the circus; he gives in. This step of self-betrayal and acceptance of a bribe has done something to the little boy. He feels ashamed, his sense of integrity has been injured, he had lost self-confidence. Yet nothing irreparable has happened. Ten years later he falls in love with a girl; it is more than infatuation; both feel a deep human bond which unites them; but the girl is from a lower class than the boy’s family. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
His parents resent the engagement and try to dissuade him; when he remains adamant. If he will only wait to formalize the engagement until his return, they promise him a six months’ trip to Europe; he accepts the offer. Consciously he believes that the trip will do him a lot of good—and, of course, that he will not love his girl less when he returns. However, it does not turn out this way. He sees many other girls, he is very popular, his vanity is satisfied, and eventually his love and his decision to marry become weaker and weaker. Before his return, he writes her a letter in which he breaks off the engagement. When was his decision made? Not, as he thinks, on the day he writes the final letter, but on the day when he accepts his parents’ offer to go to Europe. He sensed, although not consciously, that by accepting the bribe he had sold himself—and he has to deliver what he promised: the break. His behaviour in Europe is not the reason for the break, but the mechanism through which he succeeds in fulfilling the promise. At this point, he has betrayed himself again, and the effects are increased self-contempt and (hidden behind the satisfaction of new conquests, etcetera) and inner weakness and lack of self-confidence. Need we follow his life any longer in detail? He ends up in his father’s business, instead of studying physics, for which he has gifts; he marries the daughter of a rich friend of his parents, he becomes a successful business and political leader who makes fatal decisions against the voice of his own conscience because he is afraid of bucking public opinion. His history is one of a hardening of the heart. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
One moral defeat makes him more prone to suffer another defeat, until the point of no return is reached. At eight he could have taken a stand and refused to take the bribe; he was still free. And maybe a friend, a grandfather, a teacher, hearing of his dilemma, might have helped him. At eighteen he was already less free; his further life is a process of decreasing freedom, until the point where he has lost the game of life. Most people who have ended as unscrupulous, hardened men began their lives with a chance of becoming good men. A very detailed analysis of their lives might tell us what was the degree of hardening of the heart at any given moment, and when the last chance to remain human was lost. The opposite picture exists also; the first victory makes the next one easier, until choosing the right no longer requires effort. Our example illustrates the point that most people fail in the art of living not because they are inherently bad or so without will that they cannot live a better life; they fail because they do not wake up and see when they stand at a fork in the road and have to decide. They are not aware when life asks them a question, and when they still have alternative answers. Then with each step along the wrong road it becomes increasingly difficult for them to admit that they are on the wrong road, often only because they have to admit that they must go back to the first wrong turn, and must accept the fact that they have wasted energy and time. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
We all have the capacity to choose: awareness of those alternative choices which are real as against those alternatives which are impossible because they are not based on real possibilities. The position of determinism claims that there is in every situation of choice only one real possibility; the free man, according to Mr. Hegal, acts in awareness of this one possibility, that is, of necessity; the man who is not free is blind to it, and hence is forced to act in a certain way without knowing that he is the executor of necessity, that is, of reason. On the other hand, from the indeterministic standpoint there are at the moment of choice many possibilities and man is free to choose among them. However there is often not simply one “real possibility,” but two or even more. There is never any arbitrariness which leaves man with the choice among an unlimited number of possibilities. What is meant by “real possibility”? The real possibility is one which can materialize, considering the total structure of forces interacting in an individual or in a society. The real possibility is the opposite of the fictitious one which corresponds to the wishes and desires of man but which, given the existing circumstances, can never be realized. Man is a constellation of forces structured in a certain and ascertainable way. This particular structure pattern, “man,” is influenced by numerous factors: by environmental conditions (class, society, family) and by hereditary and constitutional conditions; studying these constitutionally given trends we can already see that they are not necessarily “causes” which determine certain “effects.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
A person with a constitutionally given shyness may become either overshy, retiring, passive, discouraged, or a very intuitive person, for example, a gifted poet, a psychologist, a physician. However, he who has no “real possibility” of becoming an insensitive, happy-go-lucky “go-getter.” Whether he follows the one or the other direction depends on other factors which incline him. The same principle holds true of a person with constitutionally given or early acquired sadistic component; in this case a person either may become a sadist or, through having fought against and overcome his sadism, may form a particularly strong mental “antibody” which makes him incapable of acting cruelly, and also makes him highly sensitive of any cruelty on the parts of others or himself; he can never become a person indifferent to sadism. Reactions to finding about ourselves cannot be fully understood, however, by thus cataloguing them as producing relief or fear or hopelessness. No matter what immediate reaction is provoked, am insight always means a challenge to the existing equilibrium. A person driven by compulsive needs had functioned badly. He has pursued certain goals at great expense to his genuine wishes. He is inhibited in many ways. He is vulnerable in large and diffuse areas. The necessity to combat repressed fears and hostilities saps his energy. He is alienated from himself and others. However, notwithstanding all these defects in his psychic machinery the forces operating within him still constitute an organic structure within which each factor is interrelated with others. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
In consequence, no factor can be changed without influencing the whole organism. Strictly speaking there is no such thing as an isolated insight. Naturally it often happens that a person will stop at one or another point. He may be satisfied with the result attained, he may be discouraged, he may actively resist going farther. However, in principle every insight gained, no matter how small in itself, opens up new problems because of its interrelation with other psychic factors, and thereby carries dynamite with which the whole equilibrium can be shaken. The more rigid the neurotic system, the less can any modification be tolerated. And the more closely an insight touches upon the foundations, the more anxiety will it arouse. “Resistance,” as I shall elaborate later on, ultimately springs from the need to maintain the status quo. Another task awaiting the patient is to change those factors within himself which interfere with his best development. This does not mean only a gross modification in action or behaviour, such as gaining or regaining the capacity for public performances, for creative work, for co-operation, for sexual potency, or losing phobias or tendencies toward depression. These changes will automatically take place in a successful analysis. They are not primary changes, however, but result from less visible changes within the personality, such as gaining a more realistic attitude toward oneself instead of wavering between self-aggrandizement and self-degradation, gaining a spirit of activity, assertion, and courage instead of inertia and fears, becoming able to plan instead of drifting, finding the center of gravity within oneself instead of hanging on to others with excessive expectations and excessive accusations, gaining greater friendliness and understanding for people instead of harbouring a defensive diffuse hostility. If changes like these take place, external changes in overt activities or symptoms are bound to follow, and to a correspond degree. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Many changes that go on within the personality do not constitute a special problem. Thus, if it is a real emotional experience, an insight may in itself constitute a change. If an insight is gained, for example, into a hostility hitherto repressed: the hostility is still there, and only the awareness of it is different, one might say that nothing has changed. This is true only in a mechanistic sense. Actually, if the person who had known only that he was stilted, fatigued, or diffusedly irritated recognizes the concrete hostility which, through its very repression, had generated these disturbances, it makes an enormous difference. One may feel like another human being in such a moment of discovery. And unless one manages to discard the recognition immediately it is bound to influence his relations with other people; it will arouse a feeling of surprise at himself, stimulate an incentive to investigate the meaning of the hostility, remove his feeling of helplessness in the face of something unknown, and make him feel more alive. There are also changes that occur automatically as an indirect result of an insight. The patient’s compulsive needs will be diminished as soon as any source of anxiety is diminished. As soon as a repressed feeling of humiliation is seen and understood, a greater friendliness will result automatically, even though the desirability of friendliness had not bene touched upon. If a fear of failure is recognized and lessened, the person will spontaneously become more active and take risks that he hitherto unconsciously avoided. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Thus far, insight and change appear to coincide, and it might seem unnecessary to present these two processes as separate tasks. However, there are situations during analysis—as there are in life itself—when despite an insight one may fight tooth and nail against change. Some of these situations have already been discussed. They may be generalized by saying that when a patient recognizes that he must renounce or modify his compulsive claims on life, if he wants to have his energies free for his proper development, a hard fight may begin in which he uses his last resources to disprove the necessity of the possibility of change. Another situation in which insight and change may be quite distinct arises when the analysis has led the person face to face with a conflict in which a decision must be made. Not all conflicts uncovered in psychoanalysis are of this nature. If contradictory drives are recognized between, for instance, having to control others and having to comply with their expectations, there is no question of deciding between the two tendencies. Both must be analyzed, and when the person has found a better relation to himself and others, both will disappear or be considerably modified. If a hitherto unconscious conflict emerges between material self-interest and ideals, it is a different matter, however. The issues may have been befogged in various ways: the cynical attitude may have been conscious while the ideals were repressed, or consciously refuted if they sometimes penetrated to the surface; or the wish for material advantages (money, prestige) may have been repressed while consciously the ideals were rigidly adhered to; other there my have been a continual crisscrossing between taking ideals in a cynical or in a serious way. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
However, when such a conflict comes out in the open, it is not enough to see it and to understand its ramifications. After a thorough clarification of all the problems involved the patient must eventually take a stand. He must make up his mind whether and to what extent he wants to take his ideals seriously, and what space he will allot to material interests. Here, then, is one of the occasions when a patient may hesitate to take the step from insight to a revision of his attitudes. It is certainly true, however, that the three tasks with which a patient is confronted are closely interrelated. His complete self-expression prepares the way for the insights, and the insights bring about or prepare for the change. Each step influences the others. The more he shrinks back from gaining a certain insight, the more his free associations will be impeded. The more he resists a certain chance, the more he will fight an insight. The goal, however, is change. The high value attributed to self-recognition is not for the sake of insight alone, but for the sake of insight as a means of revising, modifying, controlling the feelings, strivings, and attitudes. The patient’s attitude toward changing often goes through various steps. Frequently he starts treatment with unadmitted expectations of a magical cure, which usually means a hope that all his disturbances will vanish without his having to change anything or even without having to work actively at himself. Consequently he endows the analysts with magical powers and tends to admire him blindly. Then, when he realizes that this hope cannot be fulfilled, he tends to withdraw the previous “confidence” altogether. If the analyst is a simple human being like himself, he argues what good can he do him? #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
More important, his own feeling of hopelessness about doing anything actively within himself comes to the surface. If and only when his energies can be liberated for active and spontaneous work, can he finally regard his development at his own job, and the analyst as someone who merely lends him a helping hand. The task with which the patient in analysis is confronted are replete with difficulties and with benefits. To express oneself with utter frankness is hard, but it is also a blessing. And the same can be said about gaining insight and about change. To resort to analysis as one of the possible helps toward one’s own development is therefore far from taking the easy road. It requires on the part of the patient a good deal of determination, self-discipline, and active struggle. In this respect it is no different from other situations in life that help one’s growth. We become stronger through overcoming the hardships we meet on our way. The essential elements and processes of communication are shared alike by all schools, but the selection and emphasis of topics for conversation may well differ systematically. In accordance with one theory, the therapist may emphasize certain topics for exploration (and explanation) to the exclusion of others, and in a variety of ways restrict the therapeutic conversation to these topics. Another school will emphasize that the topics for discussion should be arrived at spontaneously and determined primarily by the patient. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Part of the ascendant status of the therapist is reflective of the fact that his client is supplicant. The patient, suffering and wanting to be helped, seeks out the therapist and comes to him. Almost all psychotherapy is to some degree disturbing to the patient because it is deflating to the ego to be so maladjusted that it becomes necessary to place oneself in the embarrassing position of having to admit failure and seek help from others. This subjectively experienced lowered status of the client has potential for effecting the therapeutic process beneficially at the beginning of treatment and negatively in later stages. In the beginning he may be more ready to accept the suggestions of the ascendant therapist while later on, when les acutely distressed, is persisting sensitivity to the status differential can motivate obstinacies that are too luxuriously interpreted as “transference” phenomena. Both the therapist and the patient from their respective positions have certain expectancies. The therapist honestly expects to be able to help his client; he knows the dimension of his status and from these dimensions (training, experience, membership) he expects to be helpful. From this underlying expectation his basic attitude is one of confidence and in a variety of ways his beneficial expectation and confidence are communicated to the patient. The patient expects to he helped because in seeking out the therapist, he is following the general recommendation of his society as to where he is to expect to be helped. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Some patients go reluctantly, even resentfully, to the therapist and without any preformed faith in the process. However, even these, since they are never literally forced, cannot be thoroughly convinced that nothing will happen. Increasingly in our society because of the improved education of the public the patient brings to his therapist a readiness to be helped and some faith in the process. Together these initial expectancies of the therapist and the patient provide a beneficial psychological atmosphere for the powerful healing effects of implicit suggestion. These implicit forces of suggestion are augmented by the social structuring of the on-going therapy as a series of controlled conversations in which, according to some theory that yields “formal consistency, the therapist seeks to persuade the patient (and the patient to be persuaded?) toward new views of himself, and of his problems. These status-derived forces of general suggestion and persuasion are common to all forms of psychotherapy. Some people are more likely to misuse dark psychology. Personality traits, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy are huge red flags in general. People with these traits tend to use darker manipulation techniques than those without the traits. The dark triad is a term that psychologist, law enforcers, and even business managers are sure to know. The dark triad refers to those three traits mentioned above. Knowing what type of person you are dealing with is essential in how you deal with them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Beforehand, professionals need to know the types of tactics people with these traits will use to undermine them. They have to know what to look for, what to avoid, and how to combat the things these people will do. If any–a narcissist does not have much empathy for others—this includes animals. They think they are smarter than everyone else. Inflamed egos, stern opinions, and a general lack of compassion go along with narcissism. They want people to think they are more than what they really are. The outward appearance is important to them. People need to think everything is above par with them and their family. They want their World to be considered perfect by outsiders. They love to be envied and strive for it. Narcissists are harsh judges, judging people harder than they judge themselves. As a matter of fact, they do not judge themselves. When one refused to self-reflect, it is hard to judge one’s self. Looking outward at everyone else gives no time to look inward to see anything about themselves that might need working on. You can spot a narcissist from a mile away—they make sure of it. They want to be the center of attention at any gathering; they refuse to sit back and be quiet. In their opinion, what they have to say is so much more important than what anyone else has to say, feel, or think. Machiavellianism is quite the opposite of narcissism. This term is named after the man who embodied this trait—Niccolo Machiavelli. Born in 1469, this Renaissance period Italian became a diplomat and writer. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Mr. Machiavelli wrote a book about being a prince. In this book, he put his beliefs down for all the World to read. Immortality and brutality were not wrong in his eyes. As a matter of fact, a person in power should use anything they have to, in order to win. And subjects should be treated harshly by their rulers, in his opinion. In the 1970s, a couple of psychologists made up a scale using the man’s name to assess a person’s personality. The Mach-IV test is used to gauge how many of traits of this personality disorder a person has, and it can be used to determine if they should be labeled with a disorder or not. People with this dark trait come off most of the time as charming and have an inner confidence that makes people feel confident in them. The person with this disorder needs to pull people in so that they can use them to get what they want. They cannot achieve it by themselves. As charming as this individual can be, one is hard to really know. And if you did get to know this type of individual, a sane person would not stay around him or her long. These individuals use people, stooping to the lowest levels to do it. Nothing is out of bounds with these people. They can be some of the most dangerous people you will ever meet. They too lack empathy. What huts you, mentally or physical, does not matter to them. People who have these traits have been known to use torture to get people to do what they want. People with Psychopathy show no remorse for their actions. Selfish, antisocial, and overall real jerks, these people do not think of others much at all. Making impulsive decisions, it does not matter what the outcome is. With no remorse, things are much easier for them to do, even terrible things that inflict harm, both mentally and physically on others. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
These types of individuals cannot change. No matter how much one thinks they can help a psychopath, one cannot. If one tries to fix people with these traits, one will only hurt oneself in the process. Psychopaths have no desire to change themselves. They only desire to change you, to make you do what will benefit them. If all they do is break you, or make you do something terrible, they are happy to have accomplished that. For some time now it has been on my mind to try to put into language some of the things which it has been my painful experience to witness, and pass through, in connection with the workings of the ultimate negative as an “angel of light,” but everything seems so complicated and confused. First: His attacks seem to be made upon the most spiritual souls—those who have made the fullest surrender to God, and who recognize a spiritual affinity which, they believe, if broke, mars the whole purpose of God. The lying spirit insists on one mind, and judgment, and one expression. These souls thus “joined” form the “Assembly,” so called, and claim. Everything is brought into the “Assembly” for decision, the assertion being that no individual soul can get the mind of the Lord. Hours were spent in bringing the tiniest details of daily life before the Lord. The leader spread each matter, asking that all might be brought to one mind. The response was then given by each one in some word of Scripture. The attitude taken to receive the supposed “word of the Lord,” was the RESISTENCE OF ANY THOUGHT OR REASON, and LETTING THE MIND BECOME A PERFECT BLANK. If anyone ventured to give an opinion—or any judgment—they were ruled out of fellowship; the fact of reasoning being the proof of the “flesh-life.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The discipline ministered to such was severe indeed. They were not allowed to speak to anyone, or to do any kind of work. In some cases, this lasted for weeks, and even months. The effect upon the mind was very terrible. The only way back was by making a statement in the “Assembly” which satisfied them that there was true repentance. Prayer and reading the Word—all adds to sin; consequently the soul is shut up in torment and despair, being excluded from all meetings. The “manifestation of the Spirit” in prophecy, prayer, and travel. One person would often pray for an hour, and sometimes two hours, without a break. Messages, too, would often last for two hours, and the whole meeting for eight or nine hours. Anyone yielding to sleep, or exhaustion was at once pronounced “in the flesh,” and a hindrance to the meeting. “Travail” was manifested by tears, groans, and twisting of the body; and with some it was exactly like hysterics, and would last for hours. This was greatly encouraged as the means whereby God would work for the deliverance of souls—and those who did not come under this manifestation were judged as preserving their own life, not willing to “let go”—lovers of themselves; and it was believed that when the whole company were unitedly under the so-called “manifestation of the Spirit” then God would break through in revival. I might say here, that all this began with a nightly prayer meeting for revival, with no limit as to time. The paralyzing fear of resisting God by any lack of submission, and evading the cross by an unwillingness to suffer, just sways the soul; and it dare not yield to one thought contrary to the “mind of Christ” in the “Assembly.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
The final type considers Christ as the transformer of culture. It maintains the dualist’s notion of the radical corruption of man’s works, but is more optimistic in its hope that culture can be converted to Christ. The conversionist does view creation as merely a necessary prologue to the atonement, but as a positive proof that culture has never been destitute of the directive power of Christ, even though it is shot through with sin. Culture must be converted to Christ, and this take place within the here-and-now of history where eschatology is a present demand instead of a promise of the future. The essential goodness of creation, its existential sinfulness, and its transformation within the historical dimension by the eschatological immediacy of grace is all of the Christ-and-culture components. In the separation of creation from the fall and in the view of history, this has constantly been upward movement. The notion of Kairos proves not all moments of history are equally important, but there are certain privileged intervals of grace. Furthermore, the here-and-now realization of the Kingdom of God is always subject to the ambiguities of its inner-historical character. The transformation of culture opens the door to its demonization, and thus there is greater need for the Protestant principle. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. The fire service is a very special organization and one that is second to none. At a time when the America family is struggling with divorce, abuse, and a lot of other problems, the fire service continues to serve as a role model for honesty. So many of our firefighters and officers have worked hard to get the fire service to where it is at today; for that very reason, we need to protect it. Please make a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. They are all about taking care of people. They are all about supporting and promoting family values. We need to protect what they are all about. #RandolphHaris 19 of 19
On 1 April 1973, a few caretakers saw a number of objects, previously seen in one of the kitchens, come tumbling down the stairs. They were subsequently followed by apriocts. On the following night, when the mansion was being closed, a caretaker was in the kitchen with another employee, a host of objects came flying down the stairs. The caretaker and employee, of course, rushed upstairs, but found nothing out of order. When they came back into the kitchen, a vase left on the mantelpiece flew into a corner of the room. When the caretaker put it back in its accustomed place, it repeated its flight into the corner. Moments later, they witnessed a basin and cream-jug rising from the floor on their own accord before they fell back and broke. Other objects flew about the room. On the following day, a clock in one of Mrs. Winchester’s bedrooms that had been silent for decades was heard to strike; then there was a crash, and, on investigation, it was discovered that the clock had somehow leapt over the bed and fallen on the floor. Throughout that day, in fact, common household objects were hurled about the room without any visible agency, and this seemed to happen in every room he would enter. The caretaker took this as a sign from the spirits that they wanted him to depart. Once he resigned, all the phenomena ceased.
Come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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I Could be Stringing Pearls for the Joy of Heaven
The great man knows he has limitations, he knows his defects and faults—but he is not afraid of them. The power of persuasion is one way to get what you want. And it is not that evil to persuade people to do things, is it? Advertisements are powerful persuasions. Everyone uses ads to get what they want. Politicians use them, and companies use the. So how bad can it be, really? When used for beneficial purposes, this power is not anything bad. However, when used for unethical, immoral, illegal, and dangerous things, persuasion can get people into real trouble. There are some errors, which have a major importance. One error lies in the habit of speaking of the freedom of choice of man rather than that of a specific individual. Choice, by definition, lies between alternatives. That an alternative is genuinely and psychologically open to choice can be supported by the observation that people have chosen it. That people have sometimes failed to choose it, has no tendency to show that it is closed to choice. As soon as one speaks of the freedom of man in general, rather than of an individual, one speaks in an abstract way which makes the problem insoluble; this is so precisely because one man has the freedom to choose—another has lost it. If applied to all men, we either deal with an abstraction, or with a mere moral postulate in the sense of Kant or of William James. Deception is something we have to deal with every day. Therefore, trusting what someone says about anything is not always the best practice. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Another difficulty in the traditional discussion of freedom seems to lie in the tendency, especially of the classical authors from Plato to Aquinas, to deal with the problem of good and evil in a general way, as if man had the choice between good and evil “in general,” and the freedom to choose good. This view greatly confuses the discussion because, when confronted with the general choice most men choose “good” as against “evil.” However, there is no such thing as the choice between “good” and “evil”—there are concrete and specific action that are means toward what is good, and others that are means toward what is evil, provided good and evil are properly defined. Our moral conflict on the question of choice arises when we have to make a concrete decision rather than when we choose good or evil in general. Still another shortcoming of the traditional discussion lies in the fact that it usually deals with freedom versus determinism of choice, rather than with the various degree of inclinations. The problem of freedom versus determinism is really one of conflict of inclinations and their respective intensities. Finally, there is confusion in the use of the concept of “responsibility.” “Responsibility” is mostly used to denote that I am punishable or accusable; in this respect it makes little difference whether I permit others to accuse me or whether I accuse myself. If I find myself guilty, I punish myself; if others find me guilty, they will punish me. There is another concept of responsibility, however, which has no connection with punishment or “guilt.” In this sense responsibility only means “I am aware that I did it.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
In fact, as soon as my deed is experienced as “sin” or “guilt” it becomes alienated. It is not I who did this, but “the sinner,” “the band one,” that “other person” who now needs to be punished; not to speak of the fact that the feeling of guilt and self-accusation creates sadness, self-loathing, and loathing of life. Whoever talks about and reflects upon an evil thing he has done, is thinking the vileness he has perpetrated, and what one thinks, therein is one caught—with one’s whole soul one is caught utterly in what one thinks, and so he s still caught in vileness. And he will surely not be able to turn, for his spirit will coarsen and his heart rot, and besides this, a sad mood may come upon him. What would you? Stir filth this way and that, and it is still filth. To have sinned or not to have sinned—what does it profit us in Heaven? In the time I am brooding on this, I could be stringing pearls for the joy of Heaven. That is why it is written: “Depart from evil, and do good”—turn wholly from evil, do not brood in its way, and do good. You have done wrong? Then balance it by doing right.” We become alive as we take, knowingly, fully responsibility for our own life and as we stop blaming circumstances. What then does it mean to be free? Freedom means to have matured to the full knowledge of our dangerously many responsibilities as a human being. We have learned that everything we do, and even say or think, has consequences. We realize that too long we have believed that we were victims of circumstances. In the Gospel of John, 8.32, we read that following: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
As we open our hearts to the message of God’s truth, as it was restored in our time, we begin to understand why there was, and still is, so much misery, pain, suffering, and even starvation. In the same dimension as we are learning to accept the revealed truth in our own life, our faith in the living Son of God will grow, and therefore we will receive spiritual gifts of heretofore unknown capacity. We will learn that nothing is impossible for those who believe in Jesus as the Christ. False bondages will be loosened. Narrow thinking born in tragedies of false traditions will disappear. The more our understanding of the vastness and the completeness of the plan of salvation is developing, the more we see ourselves in our smallness, in our incompleteness. And seeing ourselves in that humility, with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, will let us understand and finally accept this most sacred covenant with our Heavenly Father in the form of baptism. We gladly will submit ourselves into this covenant, knowing that there is a big difference between mere desire and covenant. When we just desire something, we will work towards achieving it only when convenient. However, when we are bound by a sacred covenant, like baptism, we are learning to overcome all obstacles through obedience, and in so doing we will be blessed with the presence of the Spirit and therefore eventually with achievement. One thing, of course, we know: having “freedom to” means that we have the potential of making wrong choices. Wrong choices have their merciless consequences, and when they are not stopped and corrected, they lead us into misery and pain. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
If not corrected, wrong choices will lead us to the ultimate possible disaster in each person’s life: to become separated from our Heavenly Father in the World to come. Jesus as the Christ wants to empower our lives, according to our own righteous choices, to that dimension that, through our faith and our doings, the circumstances whose prisoners we were in the past will eventually change. It is in the same spirit that the Old Testament word chatah, usually translated as meaning “sin,” actually means “to miss” (the road); it lacks the quality of condemnation which the words “sin” and “sinner” have. Similarly, the Hebrew word for “repentance” is teschubah, meaning “return” (to God, to oneself, to the right way), and it also lacks the implication of self-condemnation. This the Talmud uses the expression “the master of return” (“the repentant sinner”) and says of him that he stands even above those who have never sinned Assuming we agree that we speak of the freedom of choice between two specific courses of action which one specific individual is confronted with, then we might begin our discussion with one concrete, commonplace example: the freedom of choice between smoking or nor smoking. Let us take a heavy smoker who has read the reports on the health hazard of smoking and has arrived at the conclusion that he wants to stop smoking. He has “decided that he is going to stop.” This “decision” is no decision. It is nothing but the formulation of hope. He has “decided” to stop smoking, yet the next day he feels in too good a mood, the day after in too bad a mood, the third day he does not want to appear “asocial,” the following day he doubts that the health reports are correct, and so he continues smoking, although he had “decided” to stop. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
All these decisions are nothing but ideas, plans, fantasies; they have little or no reality until the real choice is made. This choice becomes real when he has a cigarette in front of him and has to decide whether to smoke this cigarette or not; again, later he has to decide about another cigarette, and so on. It is always the concrete act which requires a decision. The question in each situation is whether he is free not to smoke, or whether he is not free. Several questions arise here. Assuming he did not believe in the health reports on smoking or, even if he did, he is convinced that it is better to live twenty years less than to miss this pleasure; in this case there is apparently no problem of choice. Yet the problem may only be camouflaged. His conscious thoughts maybe nothing but rationalizations of his feelings that he could not win the battle even if he tried; hence he may prefer to pretend that there is no battle to win. However, whether the problem of choice is conscious or unconscious, the nature of the choice is the same. It is the choice between an action which is dictated by reason as against an action which is dictated by irrational passions. According to Spinoza, freedom is based on “adequate ideas” which are based on the awareness and acceptance of reality and which determine actions securing the fullest development of the individual’s psychic and mental unfolding. Human action, according to Spinoza, is casually determined by passions or by reason. When ruled by passions, man is in bondage; when by reason, he is free. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Irrational passions are those which overpower man and compel him to act contrary to his true self-interests, which weaken and destroy his powers and make him suffer. The problem of freedom of choice is not that of choosing between two equally good possibilities; it is not the choice between playing tennis or going on a hike, or between visiting a friend or staying at home reading. The freedom of choice where determinism or indeterminism is involved is always the freedom to choose the better as against the wore—and better or worse is always understood in reference to the basic moral question of life—that between progressing or regressing, between love and hate, between independence and dependence. Freedom is nothing other than the capacity to follow the voice of reason, of health, of well-being, of conscience, against the voices of irrational passion. In this respect we agree with the traditional views of Socrates, Plato, the Stoic, Kant. The freedom to follow the commands of reason is a psychological problem that can be examined further. Free associations do not work miracles, but if carried out in the right spirit they do show the way the mind operates, as X-rays show the otherwise invisible movements of lungs or intestines. And they do this in a more or less cryptic language. #Randolphharris 7 of 18
To associate freely is difficult for everyone. Not only does it contrast with our habits of communication and with conventional etiquette, but it entails further difficulties which differ with each patient. These may be classified under various headings though they are inevitably overlapping. In the first place, there are patients in whom the whole process of association arouses fears or inhibitions, because if they should permit free passage to every feeling and thought, they would trespass on territory that is tabu. The particular fears that will be touched off depend ultimately on the existing neurotic trends. A few examples may illustrate. An apprehensive person, overwhelmed since his early years by the teat of the unpredictable dangers of life, is unconsciously set upon avoiding risks. He clings to the fictitious belief that by straining his foresight to the utmost he can control life. Consequently, he avoids taking any step of which he cannot visualize the effects in advance: his uppermost law is never to be caught off guard. For such a person free association means the utmost recklessness, since it is the very meaning of the process to allow everything to emerge without knowing in advance what will appear and whither it will lead. The difficult is of another kind for a highly detached person who feels safe only when wearing a mask and who automatically wards off any intrusion into the precincts of his private life. Such a one lives in an ivory tower and feels threatened by any attempt to trespass into its vicinity. For him free association means an unbearable intrusion and a threat to his isolation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
And there is the other person who lacks moral autonomy and does not dare to form his own judgments. He is not accustomed to think and feel and act on his own initiative but, like an insect extending its feelers to rest out the situation, he automatically examines the environment for what is expected of him. His thoughts are good or right when approved by others, and bad or wrong when disapproved. He, too, feels threatened by the idea of expressing everything that comes into his mind, but in quite a different way from the others: knowing only how to respond, not how to express himself spontaneously, he feels at a loss. What does the analyst expect of him? Should he merely talk incessantly? Is the analyst interested in his dreams? Or in his sexual life? Is he expected to fall in love with the analyst? And what does the latter approve or disapprove of? For this person the idea of frank and spontaneous self-expression conjures up all these disquieting uncertainties, and also threatens an exposure to possible disapproval. And finally, a person caught within the traps of his own conflicts has become inert and has lost the capacity to feel himself as a moving force. He can proceed with an endeavour only when the initiative comes from the outside. He is quite willing to answer questions but feels lost when left to his own resources. Thus he is unable to associate freely because his capacity for spontaneous activity is inhibited. And, if he is one to whom success in all things is a driving necessity, this inability to associate may provoke in him a kind of panic, for he is likely then to regard his inhibition as a “failure.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
These examples illustrate how for some persons the whole process of free association arouses fears or inhibitions. However, if it is touched upon, even those who are capable of the process in general have in them one or another area that gives rise to anxiety. Thus in the example of Clare, who on the whole was able to associate freely, anything approaching her repressed demands on life aroused anxiety at the beginning of her analysis. Another difficulty lies in the fact that an unreserved expression of all feelings and thoughts is bound to lay bare traits that the person is ashamed of and that he is humiliated to report. As mentioned in the report on neurotic trend, the traits that are regarded as humiliating vary considerably. If he betrays idealistic propensities, a person who is proud of his cynical pursuit of material interests will be bewilder and ashamed. A person who is proud of his angelic façade will be ashamed to betray signs of selfishness and inconsiderateness. And the same humiliation will occur when any pretense is uncovered. The problem is not anxiety. The problem is what causes the person to experience anxiety and what determines the pattern of his reaction to the experience of anxiety. We do not presently possess a broadly based and reasonably detailed classification of the anxiety-generating problems of the twenty-first century man which cuts across all dimensions of our society. We know that problems of the very young man are different from those of the very mature, but this is hardly a sufficient differentiation on which to base selective approached to problem solutions. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Among adolescents, there are some who experience acute anxiety because of problems of school achievement. There are others who are greatly distressed by the complexities of heterosexual maturation. There are some who suffer from conflicts and frustrations in both of these areas. All of them may show comparable amounts and patterns of anxiety. However, anxiety is not the problem, and no single, uniform approach to the counseling of these youths is likely to prove equally effective with all. Experts in the mental health filed generally accept the professional platitude that one must not “treat the symptoms,” but rather one must attack the cause. There is also general acceptance of the motion that anxiety is only a symptom of an underlying pathology. However, the overwhelmingly predominant approach to the current psychotherapy of the neuroses is based on a theory in which anxiety plays a most central role and in which the basic source of anxiety is traced to the circumscribed sphere of psychosexual development. Furthermore, that theory evolved basically from clinical observations of a handful of upper-class patients from Dr. Freud’s late nineteenth-century Vienna. Elaborations and revisions of the basic Freudian theory while to some extent correcting for the differences between the culture of nineteenth-century Europe and twenty-first century U.S.A. have not significantly broadened the clinical observations on which the theory and the technique of treatment are based. It is still an orientation to etiology and treatment based on experience with middle-class and upper-class patients. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
In the absence of detailed information about the nature, frequency, and patterning of psychological problems across the complete range of those major demographic variables that we know are related to personality functioning, we cannot know what manner of psychological approach is most likely to prove effective. In turn, we cannot know what program of training is best adapted to the production of therapists who will be maximally effective either with the complete spectrum of psychoneurosis, if this is a reasonable goal, or with the dynamics of special forms of personality disruption which very well may prove to be particular to the members of certain subcultures. We have mentioned the peculiar ambiguities of diagnosis of mental illness. These ambiguities are especially troublesome in the diagnosis of the psychoneuroses, those forms of emotional disturbance for which psychological treatment is indicated. We have mentioned in the prevailing system of diagnosis by symptom pattern rather than by underlying problem. And we have indicated the extreme paucity of information about the psychological problems of people who represent the complete range of our population in regard to defining characteristics of major psychosocial classes—age, gender, and so on. Finally, we have commented on the absence of agreed upon “rules of exclusion.” All of these factors conjoin to create a situation in which the person who presents himself as a candidate for therapeutic conversation has made a self-diagnosis—and, significantly, he is most generally accepted on the basis of that diagnosis. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
This fact presents the possibility that out limited resources for psychotherapy may be overburdened in pat by the presence of individuals who in fact are not proper candidates for that type of therapeutic conversation which the major therapists of our present professional culture are equipped to give. This likelihood is enhanced by still other considerations. There is good reason to believe that the major impact of the mental hygiene movement has been on the members of the upper social classes. It is these persons whose education has made them psychologically sensitive and whose sophistication has made them socially receptive who, while not the prime target of the mental hygienists any more than any other social class, have the greatest readiness for self-referral. It is a corollary of the readiness for self-referral that the problems which the psychological sophisticate takes to the psychotherapist may be not only of lesser severity but may in fact be not focally psychoneurotic. Thus, any reasonably critical and honest therapist of long experience will have to confess that he has been confronted by some supplicants who have suffered not from anxiety nor from depression but rather from a loss of meaning in the lives, an absence of purpose, a failure of faith. Some of these persons suffer what has been termed “alienation.” Their condition has been characterized by one thoughtful clinician as a very special disturbance, that noogenetic neurosis. Frequently they are successful, effective, productive people. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
These individuals, together with many others who lack the customary symptomatic hallmarks of anxiety, depression, obsession, or compulsion yet who present themselves to the psychotherapist for help, might be uniformly described as unhappy. Their lives may be rewarding in a variety of ways and generally comfortable, but nonetheless joyless. They are responsive to certain implicit messages of the mental hygiene movement—namely, that unhappiness is a gorm of mental illness and that the psychiatrist or psychologist is an expert in treating unhappiness. It would be well for those who are responsible for programs of public mental health education to consider carefully whether or not there are any conditions of man’s psychic life which, while painful or distressing, do not constitute neurosis and are not in their essential nature responsive to the techniques of the psychotherapist. Our Declaration of Independence claimed as one of the rights of our citizens the “pursuit of Happiness.” However, freedom for this pursuit, like any other search, entails the possibility of failure. This possibility need be threatening only in an atmosphere which suggests that an absence of happy emotion is a sign of illness. Our capacity for introspection and our inwardly directed sensitivity to our own feelings can be major sources of satisfaction and of pleasure. From these same sources spring much of our most painful experiences. We cannot have the luxury of introspective sensitivity without the cost of self-questioning and doubt. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
When sensitive persons become stuck in an introspective rut of uncertainty, when they become immobilized by doubt, or when they are struggling against surrender to a conviction in an area in which all final convictions must necessarily be acts of faith, then they can be heled in their struggle by the challenge of perspectives elicited in the questions and suggestions of wise men. However, the wisdom needed to elicit such perspectives is hardly the exclusive possession of any existing professional group. Neither the psychiatrist nor the psychologist is trained to be wise. They should be trained to recognize those cases that call not for psychotherapy but for exposure to wise counsel. All the work of the ancient World in vain: I have no words to express my feelings about something so monstrous. And considering that its work was preliminary work, that the foundations for the work of millennia had just been laid with granite self-confidence, the entire meaning of the ancient World in vain! Wherefore Greeks? Wherefore Romans? All preconditions for a learned culture, all scientific methods were there already, the great, incomparable art of reading well had already been established—that precondition for a tradition of culture, for the unity of science; natural science, in concert with mathematics and mechanics, was moving along the best paths—the sense for facts, the ultimate and most precious of all senses, had its schools, its already centuries-old tradition! Do we understand this? #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Everything essential for moving forward with the work had been found—the methods, it must be said ten times, are precisely what is essential, and most difficult, and are what have for the longest time faced the obstacles of habit and laziness. What we today have reconquered, with incomparable self-mastery—for we all somehow still have bad instincts, Christian instincts in our bones—a clear view of reality, a careful hand, patience and seriousness, in the smallest matters, complete integrity in knowledge: it was already there! Already, more than two thousand years ago! And in addition good, subtle tact and taste! Not as brain training! Not as “German” education with loutish manners! However, as body, as gesture, as instinct—as, in word, reality…All in vain! Overnight, just memory! Greeks! Romans! The refinement of instinct, of taste, methodical research, the genius for organization and administration, the faith, the will to a future of man, the great Yes to all thing visible as an imperium Romanum, visible to all the senses, the grand style become not just art but reality, truth, life…And not buried overnight by natural events! Not crushed by Germanic tribes and others trampling them underfoot! However, done in by sly, sneaky, invisible, anemic vampires! Not vanquished—merely sucked dry! Covert vindictiveness, petty envy become master! Everything pathetic, suffering of itself, afflicted with bad feelings, the entire ghetto World of soul on top, all at once! #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
One need only read any Christian agitator, Saint Augustine, for example, in order to grasp, to grasp, to smell what sort of filthy hirelings have thereby risen to the top. One would be deceiving oneself in assuming any intellectual inferiority among the leaders of the Christian movement—oh, they are smart all right, smart to the point of saintliness, these gentle church fathers! What they lack s something altogether different. Nature has neglected them—she forgot to bestow upon them a modest dowry of respectable, decent, clean instincts. The self-actualized is to be able to stand against the wiles of the ultimate negative, and put on the whole armour for doing this. However, if he does not know what the wile is, how does man stand against a wile? There is a difference between the temptation and wiles—between the principles and working of the ultimate negative (and his emissaries) and their wiles; id est, they themselves are tempters. Temptation is not a while. A wile is the way they scheme to tempt. If one is able to stand against their wiles, of these wiles can be detected, then the ultimate negative’s objective can be frustrated and destroyed. The spiritual man needs the fullest concentration and sagacity of mind for reading quickly his spirit-sense, and detecting the active operations of the foe; he also requires alertness in using the message his spirit conveys to him. A spiritual believer ought to be able to read the sense of his spirit with the same instinctive adroitness as a person recognizes cold by his physical sense when he feels a draft, and then immediately uses his mental faculties for actively protecting himself from it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
So the spiritual man needs to use his spirit-sense in locating and dislodging the foe by prayer. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Do not be afraid of evil tidings; let your heart be steadfast, trusting in the Lord. Happy are they that keep justice, that do righteousness at al times. Happy are they that are upright in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord. Happy are they that keep His testimonies, that seek Him with their whole heart. Happy is the people that thus know Him, happy is the people whose God is the Eternal. It is important to keep in mind the heroism and hardships, sacrifices and brilliant achievements of the Sacramento Fire Department and their history of fighting and the development of fire prevention and fire control, which has become an exact science. When you stop to think of the loss of life, and that the fire losses in the United States of America alone, the cost of property fires in 2022 is estimated at $18 billion. Local fire departments responded to an estimated 1.5 million fires. These fires caused 3,790 civilian fire deaths, and 13,250 reported civilian fire injuries. You must realize how important it is for the Sacramento Fire Department to be efficient and have all the resources they need. You must know that insurance rates are based on fire loses, and no matter how great may be the care and skill exercised in construction of buildings to prevent fires, no matter what precautions may be taken, the need of efficient firemen and women is ever preset for the saving of life and property. In this poor economy, the Sacrament Fire Department is not receiving all of their resources, please make a donation to ensure they have adequate support. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The Winchester Mystery House
One afternoon in December of 2007, two caretakers were walking around the mansion with a guest. “As we were walking up the path to the Grand Ballroom,” he wrote, “I stopped and said,” ‘The organ is playing.’ My first though was that maybe the was a Christmas party. The other caretaker stopped and looked at me. He turned to beckon me with a smile, so I thought that he had found it was just someone practicing. To my amazement the Grand Ballroom was empty and silent. We sat down near the organ for a moment and he said, ‘Have you heard the story of the organ playing before?’ I assured him that I had not…We afterwards went up and down the hallway sever times to see if we could hear it again but could not. The whole event was over in half a minute, and it was absolutely impossible for anyone to have escaped in that time.” There have been many attempts at explanation or elucidation of the events surrounding The Winchester Mystery House. It has been calculated that the phenomena connected with the house and garden have been described by over three thousand separate witnesses. It has even been conjected that the witnesses themselves have been the agents of the unusual activity; unknow to themselves, some force draws their energies. This is true of many “ghost stories.” However, while one can be skeptical about any individual instance, the sum total presents a body of evidence that is impossible to ignore.
Take pleasure in the antiques, the gardens and experience the homemaking of Victorian times. Enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
The Hanging is Over—All that Remains is the Trial
One must delve into the sometimes-wicked minds of top management in Corporate America to understand the powerplay and politics in order to understand these executives. Whether you have always been one to see the best in this World or not, you will come to understand that every person may not be what they seem to be. If only to make them look better, many people are out not only to take something from you but to try to keep you down. These people try to make their evil deeds and use other to get in positions that they do not deserve. Many people in television news are being discredited by others for following the path of darkness. However, using negativity will only bring negativity upon you. It is possible to understand darkness without being part of it. Manipulation is the art of making people think they actually want to do or say something that they really do not. Using insidious tactics to turn a person’s mind around to benefit oneself is an unfair act that can leave a victim confused. Some people genuinely do not understand what made them say or do the thing they did. And all the while, the manipulator knows what they did wrong. Sometimes people say things that seem to support an individual to make the victim think on the terms they want them to. They try to seductively persuade a person to behave in a way that they usually would not or say things that they never would say. One might wonder how terrorist groups get any followers at all. When the people are able to conspire and use social engineering, they are able to assert themselves as authorities and use the threat of hell to keep their followers in line. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
It is always in your best interest to know and understand when people are trying to subtly use coercion. When people know that you can see through them, they will leave you alone. However, often these manipulative individuals are part of groups of others like them and think they are too intellectual for anyone to recognize their evil intentions. People who display an unhealthy level of narcissism pretend to empathize with others, but they actually have no care or concern about you. Their belief is that this is their World, and everyone in it is their servant. Machiavellianism is the practice of deceptive manipulation. These confidence men and women want to use—exploit people to serve them and their missions. They often times have no moral character nor the mortality people are typically born with, or are taught as they develop. Psychopathy is one of the most important character traits people use to become successful and it is often an attribute of people in television news. These people can pretend to be the most charming people you have ever met. However, the charm is not always there; it is used as a lure to get the victim into the presence where the suspect will impose their will on the victim once they are in a compromising or unsafe situation. Once a suspect has control over their victims, they will do things without caring about the outcome, or who might get hurt in the process. This is due to their selfish nature. The suspect with feel no guilt, embarrassment, or remorseful for the victim because they do not care. Therefore, do not allow people to bait you. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
People are often used, abused, and drained of all their emotional and financial resources because they are naïve or seeking love and these are traits monsters will take advantage of. Do not let someone ruin your World or the World of someone you love as the psychopath did in Tyler Perry’s film Acrimony. Do not become hard on yourself because you have fallen prey to a monster. However, do not seek revenge, it is best to accept that you have been taken advantage of and move on. Most everyone has fallen victim of some sort of crime in their lifetime. Learn from past mistakes. Know that in most cases people did not change. Everything happens for a reason. If you are naïve, then it is probably because you have a trusting nature and/or were brought up in a home and community where you did not see or experience a lot of evil. As an adult, it is important to watch for the signs that you are being victimized or manipulated. People you love and trust may even victimize for profit or to save themselves. When you are told or asked to do something you feel uncomfortable doing, unsafe doing, or that is not your responsibility to do, just say “No.” When questioned about why you will not do it, just say, “Because I do not want to.” If a person tries to convince or persuade you into making a bad decision, just let them know that you have to go. Say, “Goodbye.” It takes practice standing up for yourself, but it is better than ending up dead, losing something or someone you love, or going to prison. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Often times people will use love or loyalty to manipulate you. One way to respond to this is by saying, “I love your affection, but it is not something that you can use to control me.” When someone wants something from you, they will often lie. If you do not feel comfortable or do not want to, just let them know that you cannot get involved in that situation because it may be a violation of the law, your morals and/or ethics. Even if this person loves you, do not let them trap you into a situation because they may be trying to set you up after the fact. Be careful of people who withdraw from you and ignore you when you are not willing to do something you want. This is a tool they will use to manipulate you by telling you if you comply with you, they will give you the love they know you deserve. These manipulators want you to feel terrible for not complying with them. You have to remain strong and calm. Let them learn that they cannot manipulate you. A calm voice and reasonable response always helps to get someone’s attention. However, sometimes you just have to walk away from a situation. There are time when there is nothing you can do to escape the situation, so removing yourself from the equation may be the best thing to do. What holds true of groups holds true also of individuals. In ever person there is a potential of archaic forces which we have just discussed. Only the thoroughly “evil” and the thoroughly “good” no longer have a choice. Almost everybody can regress to the archaic orientation, or progress to the full progressive unfolding of one’s personality. In the first case we speak of the outbreak of severe mental illness; in the second case we speak of a spontaneous recovery from illness, or a transformation of the person into full awakening and maturing. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
It is the task of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and various spiritual disciplines to study the conditions under which the one or the other development occurs and, furthermore, to devise methods by which the favourable development can be furthered and the malignant development stopped. It is important for our problem to recognize that, aside from the extreme cases, each individual and each group of individuals can at any given point regress to the most irrational ad destructive orientations and also progress toward the enlightened and progressive orientation. Man is neither good nor evil. If one believes in the goodness of man as the only potentiality, one will be forced into rosy falsification of the fact, or end up in bitter disillusionment. If one believes in the other extreme, one will end up as a cynic and be blind to the many possibilities for good in others and in oneself. A realistic view sees both possibilities as real potentialities, and studies the conditions for the development of either of them. These considerations lead us to the problem of man’s freedom. Is man free to choose the good at any given moment, or has he no such freedom of choice because he is determined by forces inside and outside himself? A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
This is a radical mistake. I know of no subject less worn out, or in which incentive genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground—not, perhaps, of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assert, but of deepening our sense of what the issues between the two parties really is, and of what the ideas of fate and of free will really imply. Psychoanalytic experience may throw some new light on the question of freedom and thus permit us to see some new aspects. The traditional treatment of freedom has suffered from the lack of using empirical, psychological data, and thus has led to a tendency to discuss the problem in general and abstract terms. If we mean by freedom freedom of choice, then the question amounts to asking whether we are free to choose between, let us say, A and B. The determinists have said that we are not free, because man—like all other things in nature—is determined by causes; jut as a stone dropped in mid-air is not free not to fall, so man is compelled to choose A or B, because of motives determining him, forcing him, or causing him to choose A or B. determinism in this sense is to be distinguished from the kind of theory which is sometimes called “soft determinism” and according to which it is consistent to believe in determinism and in human freedom. While my position here is more akin to “soft” than “hard” determinism it is not that of the former either. The opponents of determinism claim the opposite; it is argued on religious grounds that God gave man the freedom to choose between good and evil—hence that man has this freedom. Second, it is argued that man is free since otherwise he could not be made responsible for his acts. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Third, it is argued, man has the subjective experience of being free, hence this consciousness of freedom is a proof of the existence of freedom. All three arguments seem unconvincing. The first requires belief in God, and a knowledge of His plans for man. The second seems to be born out of the wish to make man responsible so that he can be punished. The idea of punishment, which is part of most social systems in the past and in the present, is mainly based on what is (or is considered to be) a measure of protection for the minority of “haves” against the majority of “have nots,” and is a symbol of the punishing power of authority. If one wants to punish, one needs to have someone who is responsible. In this respect one is reminded of Mr. Shaw’s saying, “The hanging is over—all that remains is the trial.” The third argument, that the consciousness of freedom of choice proves that this freedom exists, was already thoroughly demolished by Mr. Spinoza and Mr. Leibniz. Mr. Spinoza pointed out that we have the illusion of freedom because we are aware of our desires, but unaware of their motivations. Mr. Leibniz also pointed out that the will is motivated by tendencies which are partly unconscious. It is surprising indeed, the most of the discussion after Mr. Spinoza and Mr. Leibniz has failed to recognize the fact that the problem of freedom of choice cannot be solved unless one considers that unconscious forces determine us, though leaving us with the happy conviction that our choice is a free one. However, aside from these specific objections, the arguments for the freedom of will seem to contradict everyday experience; whether this position is held by religious moralists, idealistic philosophers, or Marxist-leaning existentialists, it is at best a noble postulate, and yet perhaps not such a noble one, because it is deeply unfair to the individual. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Can one really claim that a man who has grown up in material and spiritual poverty, who has never experienced love or concern for anybody, whose body has been conditioned to drinking by years of alcoholic abuse, who has had no possibility of changing his circumstances—can claim that he is “free” to make his choice? Is not this position contrary to the facts; and is it not without compassion and, in the last analysis, a position which in the language of the twenty-first century reflects, like much of Sartre’s philosophy, the spirit of bourgeois individualism and egocentricity, a modern version of Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Unique One and His Property)? The opposite position, determinism, which postulates that man is not free to choose, that his decisions are at any given point caused and determined by external and internal events which have occurred before, appears at first glance more realistic and rational. Whether we apply determinism to social groups and classes or to individuals, have not Freudian and Marxist analysis shown how weak man is in his battle against determining instinctive and social forces? Has not psychoanalysis shown that a man who has never solved his dependency on his mother lacks the ability to act and to decide, that he feels weak and this is forced into an ever increasing dependency on mother figures, until he reached the point of no return? Does not Marxist analysis demonstrate that once a class—such as the lower middle class—has lost fortune, culture, and social function, its members lose hope and regress to archaic, necrophilic, and narcissistic orientations? #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Yet neither Marx or Dr. Freud were determinists in the sense of believing in an irreversibility of causal determination. They both believed in the possibility that a course already initiated can be altered. They both saw this possibility of change rooted in man’s capacity for becoming aware of the forces which move him behind his back, so to speak—and thus enabling him to regain his freedom. Both were—like Spinoza, by whom Marx was influenced considerably—determinists and indeterminists, or neither determinists nor indeterminists. Both proposed that man is determined by the laws of cause and effect, but that by awareness and right action he can create and enlarge the realm of freedom. It is up to him to gain an optimum of freedom and to extricate himself from the chains of necessity. For Dr. Freud the awareness of the unconscious, for Marx the awareness of socioeconomic forces and class interest, were the conditions for liberation; for both, in addition to awareness, an active will and struggle were necessary conditions for liberation. Basically the same position is taken in classic Buddhism. Man is chained to the wheel of rebirth, yet he can liberate himself from this determinism by awareness of his existential situation and by walking along the eightfold path of right action. The Old Testament prophets’ position is similar. Man has the choice between “blessing and curse, life and death” but he may arrive at a point of no return if he hesitates too long in choosing life. Certainly every psychoanalyst has seen patients who have been able to reverse the trends which seemed to determine their lives, once they become aware of them and made a concentrated effort to regain their freedom. However, one need not be a psychoanalyst to have this experience. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Some of us have had the same experience with ourselves or with other people: the chain of alleged causality was broken and they took a course which seemed “miraculous” because it contradicted the most reasonable expectations that could have been formed on the basis of their past performance. The traditional discussion on freedom will has suffered not only from the fact that Spinoza’s and Leibniz’s discovery of unconscious motivation did not find its proper place. There are also other reasons which are responsible for the seeming futility of the discussion. Self-analysis is an attempt to be patient and analyst at the same time, and therefore it is desirable to discuss the tasks of each of these participants in the analytic process. It should be borne in mind, however, that process is not only the sum of the work done by the analyst and the work done by the patient, but is also a human relationship. The fact that there are two persons involved has considerable influence on the work done by each. There are three main tasks that confront the patient. Of these the first is to express himself as completely and frankly as possible. The second is to become aware of his unconscious driving forces and their influence on his life. And the third is to develop the capacity to change those attitudes that are disturbing his relations with himself and the World around him. Complete self-expression is achieved by means of free association. It was Dr. Freud’s ingenious discovery that free association, hitherto used only for psychological experiments could be utilized in therapy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
To associate freely means an endeavour on the part of the patient to express without reserve, and in sequence in which it emerges, everything that comes into one’s mind, regardless of whether it is or appears trivial, off the point, incoherent, irrational, indiscreet, tactless, embarrassing, humiliating. It may not be unnecessary to add that “everything” is meant literally. It includes not only fleeting and diffuse thoughts but also specific ideas and memories—incidents that have occurred since the last interview, memories of experiences at any period of life, thoughts about self and others, reactions to the analyst or the analytical situation, beliefs in regard to religion, morals, politics, art, wishes, and plans for the future, fantasies past and present, and, of course, dreams. It is particularly important that the patient express every feeling that emerges, such as fondness, hope, triumph, discouragement, relief, suspicion, anger, as well as every diffuse or specific thought. Of course the patient will have objections to voicing certain things, for one reason or another, but he should express these objections instead of using them to withhold the particular thought or feeling. Free association differs from our customary way of thinking or talking not only in its frankness and unreservedness, but also in its apparent lack of direction. In discussing a problem, talking about our plans for the weekend, explaining the value of merchandise to a customer, we are accustomed to stick fairly closely to the point. From the diverse current that pass through our minds we tend to select those elements for expression which are pertinent to the situation. Even when talking with our closest friends we select what to express and what to omit, even though we are not aware of it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
In free association, however, there is an effort to express everything that passes through the mind, regardless of where it may lead. Like many other human endeavours, free association can be used for constructive or for obstructive purposes. If the patient has an unambiguous determination to reveal himself to the analyst his associations will be meaningful and suggestive. If he has stringent interest not to face certain unconscious factors, his association will be unproductive. These interests may be so prevailing that the good sense of free association is turned into nonsense. What results then is a flight of meaningless ideas having merely a mock resemblance to their true purpose. Thus the value of free association depends entirely on the spirit in which it is done. If the spirit is one of utmost frankness and sincerity, of determination to face one’s own problems, and of willingness to open oneself to another human being, then the process can serve the purpose for which it is intended. In general terms this purpose is to enable both analyst and patient to understand how the latter’s mind works and thereby to understand eventually the structure of his personality. There are also specific issues, however, which can be cleared up by free associations—the meaning of an attack of anxiety, of a sudden fatigue, of a fantasy or a dream, why the patient’s mind goes blank at a certain point, why he has a sudden wave of resentment toward the analyst, why he was nauseated in the restaurant last night, was impotent with his wife, or was tongue-tied in a discussion. The patient will then try to see what occurs to him when he thinks about the specific issue. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
To illustrate, a woman patient had a dream in which one element was a distress about something precious being stolen. I asked her what occurred to her in connection with this particular fragment of the dream. The first association that appeared was a memory of a maid who has stolen household goods over a period of two years; the patient had dimly suspected the maid, and she remembered the deep feeling of uneasiness she had before the final discovery. The second association was a memory of childhood fears of gypsies stealing children. The next was a mystery story in which jewels had been stolen from the crown of a saint. Then she remembered a remake she had overheard, to the effect that analysts are racketeers. Finally it occurred to her that something in the dream reminded her of the analyst’s office. The associations indicated beyond doubt that the dream was related to the analytical situation. The remark about analysts being racketeers suggested a concern about the fees, but this track proved to be misleading; she had always regarded the fees as reasonable and worthwhile. Was the dream a response to the preceding analytical hour? She did not believe that it could be, because she had left the office with a pronounced feeling of relief and gratitude. The substance of the precious analytical session was that she had recognized her periods of listlessness and inertia as a kind of subversive depression; that these periods had not appeared to her or others in this light because she had had no feelings of despondency; that actually she suffered more and was more vulnerable than she admitted to herself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The woman also had often repressed hurt feelings because she felt compelled to play the role of an ideally strong character who could cope with everything. Her relief had been similar to that of a person who at great expense to himself has lived above his means all his life and now understands for the first time that such a bluff is not necessary. This relief, however, had not lasted. At any rate, it now struck her suddenly that after the session she had been quite irritable, that she had had a slight stomach upset and had been unable to fall asleep. The most important clue proved to be the association of the mystery story: I had stolen a jewel out of her crown. The striving to give herself and other the impression of outstanding strength had been a burden, to be sure, but it had also served several important functions: it gave her a feeling of pride, which she badly needed as long as her real self-confidence was shaken; and it was her most powerful defense against recognizing her existing vulnerability and the irrational trends accounting for it. Thus the role she was playing was actually precious to her, and our uncovering the fact that it was merely a role constituted a threat to which she had reacted with indignation. Free association would be entirely unfit as a method for making an astronomical calculation or for gaining clarity as to the means of a political situation. These tasks require sharp and concise reasoning. However, free association constitutes a thoroughly appropriate method—according to our present knowledge, the only method—for understanding the existence, importance, and meaning of unconscious feelings and strivings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
However, the value of free association for self-recognition: it does not work magic. It would be wrong to expect that as soon as rational control is released all that we are afraid of or despise in ourselves will be revealed. We may be fairly sure that no more will appear this way than we are able to stand. Only derivatives of the repressed feelings or drives will emerge, and as in dreams they will emerge in distorted form or in symbolic expression. Thus in the chain of associations mentioned above the saint was an expression of the patient’s unconscious aspirations. Of course, unexpected factors will sometimes appear in a dramatic fashion, but this will happen only after considerable previous work on the same subject has brought them close to the surface. Repressed feelings may appear in the form of a seemingly remote memory, as in the chain of association already described. There the patient’s anger at me for having injured her inflated notions about herself did not appear as such; only indirectly she told me that I was like a low criminal who violated holy tabus and robbed values precious to others. There is another aspect of the diagnostic problem that contributes to the great heterogeneity of psychotherapy patients and makes even more frustrating our almost complete lack of specific information as to what kinds of persons they are, what manner of conflict they experience, what symptoms they suffer, and what assets and abilities they manifest. We have noted ambiguities of formal diagnoses in past reports and certain subtle operations of social class membership which impair the consistency of neurotic diagnoses. These very ambiguities plus the effects of spontaneous intraclass empathy create a situation in which large number of patients in therapy are self-diagnosed “neurotics.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Heterogeneity of patients in psychotherapy is increased by the absence of any adequate explicit treatment of the problem of identifying the individual who is not an appropriate candidate. This is not simply a question of prognostic differentiation. We do know some indictors from which we can predict whether psychotherapy is more or less likely to be effective with a particular neurotic. However, there is a general absence in our psychiatric and psychological texts and other professional literature of description of the quasi-neurotic, the person whose very real problem is nonetheless not neurotic and for whom psychotherapy as we ordinarily define it not an answer. We must ask if there are person who are in some way psychologically uncomfortable and maladjusted (or maladapted), who are neither psychotic nor neurotic, who would be likely to seek psychotherapeutic help, and for whom intensive psychotherapy is not indicated. The social worker knows better than the psychiatrist and psychologist the extremes of misery that the underprivileged members of our society must experience in the face of sheer physical deprivations and situational stresses. The mother who has inadequate clothing for her school-age children has a right to complain and to be depressed, but neither the fact of her complaint nor her depression makes her neurotic. The person with an alcoholic spouse is faced with a variety of torments and stresses; she deserves sympathy and counsel, but her need to evolve an adjustment to the very real problem of her chronically ill husband does not per se make her a neurotic. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The individual who has suffered through death the irremediable loss of a cherished companion has a painful emotional adjustment to make; it may require time and during that time he may show “symptoms” of despondency; he may need to seek emotional support, but neither his needing nor seeking is necessarily neurotic. The normal parents of a child with an intellectual disability will have emotional problems in their relations to each other and to their child; they may experience conflicts, insecurities, and frustrations; they will benefit from information and guidance, but they need not necessarily be candidates for intensive psychotherapy. These are but a few examples of very common situational stresses, with marked potential for normal emotional response and psychological discomfort. The persons suffering such stresses are very likely to respond to wise and restricted counsel. However, it is in the nature of the human personality to accept rather than reject offers of continued emotional support. If the counselor is more impressed with the symptoms of these unhappy persons than with the situation of stress which precipitate them, he can be induced to an inappropriately extended effort at psychotherapy of pseudoneuroses. Apart from the probable dissipation of time and skill needed in treatment of truly neurotic disorders, failure to give adequate attention to the circumstances underlying reactive emotional symptoms may result in failure to take steps to correct those reality factors. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Are there persons who suffer essentially from a failure to have learned “how to live” (without having learned necessarily a pattern of neurotic adjustment)? And, for such persons is the professional psychotherapist the best teacher? Yes and no. However, psychotherapists are generally not taught to recognize their own limitations or the possible existence of individuals who would seek their help without suffering a disturbance for which orthodox psychotherapy is in fact therapeutic. We lack detailed, thorough knowledge of what the persons who present themselves for psychotherapy are really like. We know best the more common symptoms for which they ask help. We do not know in any comprehensive way the patterning of the unsolved problems which generate their symptoms. We do not have basic information on the nature of the frustrated aspirations, the conflicts of impulse and inhibition, the particular stresses of daily reality, the confusion of goals or values, the particular frictions of their personal relationships that constitute the seedbed from which their symptoms flower. We do know that susceptibility to neurotic ruptures of personality is not limited by age, by gender, or by class membership. The apparent greater incidence of neuroses in the upper social classes is not likely to prove to stem from a greater constitutional susceptibility to anxiety, to conflict, or to depression. Rather, the social class differential in rate of neuroses appears directly related to the differences in extent and nature of education. The members of the upper social classes are more prone to self-examination, are more ready to label symptoms as “psychological,” are more accepting of the possibility of being “emotionally ill,” and are quicker to seek specialized professional help. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
As a symptom, the depression of the upper-class executive is not clinically different from the depression of the lower-class housewife. Feelings of hopelessness, loss of interest, a general slowing up of mental processes and physical activity, and tendencies to withdraw from social commerce are common to the depression of both. And if the depressive symptoms are sufficiently severe, it may happen that both the executive and the housewife will receive comparable somatic treatment (drugs, or electroconvulsive therapy) aimed at alleviation of the depression. However, the problem is not depression. The problem is whatever has caused the depression, and the causes of depression in the executive are likely to be very different from the factors that have generated the same symptoms in the house wife. There is little concrete evidence to support either the notion that anxiety is more prevalent in contemporary culture than in earlier periods of man’s history or the idea that there are more powerful, more widespread, and more omnipresent sources of anxiety in modern life. If it appears that anxiety is “too much with us, late and soon,” this is largely an artifact of a culture which has given a name to the phenomenon, defined its presence as the equivalent of deep-seated psychopathology, and suggested that it is a public health menace which can and must be eradicated. The true World attainable for the wise, the pious, the virtuous man—he lives in it, he is it. (Oldest form of the idea, relatively intelligent, convincing. Circumlocution for the proposition “I, Plato, am the truth.”) #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
True World, unattainable for now, but promised to the wise, the pious, the virtuous (“for the sinner who repents”). (Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, more insidious, more elusive—it becomes woman, it becomes Christian…) The true World, unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable, and yet conceived as a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (The old sun in the background but seen through mist and skepticism; the idea that has become sublime, pale, Nordic, Konign-bergian.) The true World—unattainable? In any case, unattained. And become unattained, also unknown. And consequently not consoling, redemptive, obligating: how could something unknow obligate us? (Gray morning. First yawn of reason. Cockcrow of positivism.) The “true World”—an idea that is no longer good for anything, no longer even obligating; an idea that has become useless, superfluous, consequently a refuted idea: let use dispense with it! (Broad daylight; breakfast, return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato’s blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.) We dispense with the true World: which World was left? The apparent one, perhaps? But no! With the true World we have also dispensed with the apparent one! (Midday; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; highpoint of mankind; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stand, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. The Sacramento Fire Department should be celebrated for their endurance, sacrifice, courage, and compassion that is characterized by their truly heroic deeds. To help them to continue to make brave choices every day, please make a donation to ensure that they have all of their resources and provide hope and show appreciation. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
The Winchester Mystery House
Mrs. Winchester went out into the hall one evening; to her surprise she discovered that all of the pictures had been taken from the walls of the staircase and had been deposited face down on the floor of the hallways itself. Walking sticks were seen to move. An emerald and gold ring was found outside the door of the bathroom. It belonged to no one in the house, but its hallmark showed it to have been made in Germany in 1743. The ring was gone the following day, and the house had become an echo chamber for the sounds of footsteps and doors slamming. On January 3, 1888, “The light was clear,” Mrs. Winchester wrote. “The footsteps continued, but there was no one near. I sensed someone passing me, there was a chilliness in the air, and I felt a slight pressure. Whatever it was, I knew and felt that it was essentially evil. I also knew that I resented in some way hearing and not seeing. I then heard the sound of a key in the lock, then the creak of the door hinges as the door opened. I heard the door close. A few seconds later I heard soft notes and chords from the organ in the Grand Ball Room.”
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 