by Paul Rosenfels

The book you hold in your hand is a time bomb.
Read it, and you risk overturning cherished assumptions
about human nature and psychological growth.
The author's ideas, while subtle, are infectious;
their implications are likely to stay with you
much longer than you expect.
If the unexamined life seems to you
the most prudent course in these difficult times,
best to put this book down now and move along.

The problem with the modern world, if we can be simple-minded for a moment, is that we don't understand it. And what is most perplexing, paradoxically, is our own human nature. None of our front line reporters or big city editors diminish in the least the incomprehensibility of man's inhumanity to man or his inability, on average, to lead a truly fulfilling life.

The reasons for this intractability are not obvious. Human nature is, after all, a subject most of us are closer to than, say, nuclear reactor technology, and hopefully a bit less complicated too. Anyone who begins to live the examined life learns soon enough that familiarity and understanding are not synonymous, of course, and that sometimes the only way to make sense of a subject is to step away from it so as to escape the seductions of its surface. This need for scientific insight is the motivation behind psychoanalysis, the New Age movement, and much of human progress in general. But why, in the midst of astonishing unifications of fields as diverse as quantum mechanics, molecular biology and global plate tectonics, is it still so difficult for thinkers to agree upon a starting point for a science of human nature?

One disappointment, for the nineteenth century at least, was learning that the tools of laboratory science were not suitable to a science of the mind. The contribution of Freud was not to knowledge so much as to methodology. He turned our attention again to the age-old discipline of introspection, giving us a research apparatus older than the compass. Psychological science seemed right back where it had started, in philosophy, but now at least "mental disease" could be identified without threatening the patient's destruction at the hands of the state. You didn't have to hate the diseased, said the scripture of science, to hate the disease.

The immediate stumbling block, especially for philosophers, has been sheer variety and richness in the form and content of human nature: it's too vast a canvas for the eye to know where to focus. As a point of honor, some thinkers refuse to agree on the very meanings of psychology's terms, let alone her first principles. Psychology was intended to produce prescriptive as well as descriptive insights, to give man the same access to wisdom as Prometheus had to fire, but a certain class of theorists -- who can't be accused of lacking "honesty" if they don't know what it means -- are so intimidated by their own fear of grammarians that they withdraw, heart in mouth, from the very subject matter of their science into a comforting closet of neologisms and footnotes. Psychology has become at best something that discusses what everybody knows in terms that no one can understand -- a discipline more to be believed in than used -- and at worst a giddy talk show segment requiring us to assume that a bleating ignoramus can roll out the solutions to our biggest problems in five minutes flat.

Early in this sad century, many thinkers either overspecialized and lost the big picture or else set up house in irrelevant sand castles of the mind. Love of wisdom now had two great enemies, the scientific specialist who knew more and more about less and less, and the metaphysical speculator who knew less and less about more and more, the latter of which aired endless conceit in the founding of schools of thought.

The very existence of schools is a dead giveaway, frankly. Only valley girls, hari krishnoids and balloonheads from Uranus fail to see that, where science is concerned, what's true for you is also true for me. Truth is one, and objective truth, once attained, becomes the property of all men. The perseverance of hunches and factions at this point merely shows that someone is in the dark. But where objective methods of truth-seeking do not exist -- and they do not in the human sciences -- men are forced to rely solely on how they feel about things, the emptiness of which guesswork attracts coloration by aesthetic prejudices far removed from anything like science. The traditional cure for this problem is dogma. Schools were invented for those who prize unanimity above truth, by fish.

And whatever content schools may accidentally be endowed with is quickly diluted by popularizers. Pop psychology -- and this includes the Freud industry -- has found it convenient, not to say fiscally smart, to focus on the surface blemishes of the human animal, ignoring the quietly desperate soul underneath the better to deify etiquette in its place -- degenerating thereby into a kind of psychodermatology. Overdone puns about erroneous zones, tabletop quarterbacking about games people play, and the ever-marketable fascination with sex have taken the place that science should have enjoyed.

In the same way that a finite series of integers can be generated by any number of mathematical functions, any finite set of data can be explained by a wide variety of theories. The test of a theory is not whether it explains the data -- phlogiston and epicycles do that well enough -- but whether its explanation leads to new questions which themselves are falsifiable and lead recursively to new truth. This fertility is demonstrated brilliantly by Darwinian science, for example, the repercussions of which have brought entire new continents of scientific inquiry into view, and not at all by Marxian pseudo-science, which to this day requires a smug army of state-planned economists to prop it up.

Another problem with all this -- the essential problem according to this book -- has been dishonesty among philosophers and psychologists about their inner lives, specifically the immanent homosexuality at the root of their own personalities. Dishonesty about anything so pivotal as sexuality invariably impairs the ability to love, without which there is no longer any motivation to seek psychological truth.

So it is that we find in the last days of the twentieth century that there are no books to turn to if you want a head start on becoming an expert in human science. You find the cataloging of symptoms, depraved word play that is either amusing or distressing depending on what you ate last night, and walloping dollops of editorializing. But science? The homily that science cannot be applied to human nature has become an obligatory hidden premise if you expect your textbook to be published or your tenure approved.

The fact is that professional psychology is just like commercial art -- or formal education for that matter. It isn't done for love -- that's left to the amateurs -- but for money. So it can't be too shocking if its practitioners measure the value of their services by the eagerness of the buyer to part with cash, rather than on any long-term beneficial effect it may have in a future context about which no statistics will be kept.

In this permissive age of official half-truths, a remarkable event has occurred. According to his students at least, a man named Paul Rosenfels has outlined a "science of human nature." What can these words possibly mean? Simply put, we're told, he has described the psychological dynamics of the human soul in a semantically consistent, substantially complete, and yet open-ended way.

Such a claim is, of course, absurd: human nature is too complicated; you can't measure it in a laboratory; psychologists are too subjective and don't agree on anything; biological and cultural evolution is changing our nature as we speak. Eminent graybeards assure us in national publications that "science, per se, doesn't deal with the complex quality called 'humanness' any more than it does with such equally complex concepts as love, faith or trust. Without experiments there is no science, no way to prove or disprove any idea. [We] maintain that concepts such as humanness are beyond the purview of science because no idea about them can be tested experimentally." (Dr. Leon Rosenberg, chairman of the department of human genetics at Yale University School of Medicine, quoted in the November 1981 issue of Life magazine.)

But there remains a very simple observation you can make for yourself, much too simple for the experts to have grasped. Ideas about human nature, it turns out, can be tested experimentally -- all that is required is a real need to know the outcome. Ask any five year old trying out her first friendship. The last refuge of the scoundrel, in the sciences at least, is to hide behind a redefinition of experiment that excludes his adversary's data. It's the same argument they used against Darwin.

A science of human nature is inevitable; we won't survive without it. But shouldn't others better qualified than ourselves be its judge? All those robed academicians would be the first to tell us if any important discovery were made, wouldn't they? Don't believe it for a minute. Science is just a Latin word for knowledge, and human nature is one of those fields whose data the experts can't impound. A science of human nature is something we all need, and can all judge.

Paul Rosenfels started out in life well-equipped to become a standard-bearer of conventional values. Born in 1909, he was raised in a large, upper-middle-class family in a Chicago suburb by a father who helped found Sears, Roebuck & Co. Great things were expected of the four children, but especially of the twins, Paul and Walter; according to one aunt's verse, one was destined for law, the other medicine. For many years, Paul adjusted his aspirations to the success-oriented world he found himself in. But it was probably the influence of his mother, a suffragist infused with the new humanism of Lincoln and Altgeld, that pricked his conscience when mediocre goals crowded his vista.

During some restless college years, he found that his deepest love was human psychology. His was no adolescent infatuation with hypnotism or the quirks of "mental phenomena," but a serious intention to apply scientific insights to the healing of men and nations. Yet it didn't take long to see that university training was designed largely to inhibit the conception of new ideas. Unlike the arena of free trade, in which industrial techniques were judged solely by the value of their end products, ideas in academia had to pass the grim scrutiny of capped and gowned judges whose authority was based more on seniority and political craft than anything they could actually claim to know.

The friendship of Harold Lasswell at the University of Chicago convinced him that the next advances in human science would come from the application of psychoanalysis to social pathologies like war, and on the older man's advice he decided to become a psychoanalyst. Even in those days the idea that anyone wanting to teach people how to live better should be forced into the ranks of the medical establishment was ridiculed -- especially by European analysts -- but Paul decided to follow the American pattern anyway, believing that he had enough inner strength to throw off its influence if it ever became entrapping.

For a while, this plan seemed to work. He became a Board-certified psychiatrist and went on to advanced training at Chicago's prestigious Institute for Psychoanalysis. Although he had been comfortable with a homosexual orientation from his sexually precocious adolescence, he tacitly agreed to put away what his analysts had ruled was a childish deviancy. He dutifully married a woman, and later fathered a son, named Dan.

Many of the insights, certainly much of the terminology, of psychoanalysis seemed useful to him, and in the employment of the tools at hand he quickly achieved recognition as a highly successful therapist, at least by the standards of the day, and especially with women. But the more he succeeded, the unhappier he became. He was not "reaching" his patients in the fundamentally radical way he had looked forward to. That they paid money for his time meant nothing to him, the reduction of their surface symptoms just slightly more. He'd wanted to start a revolution, not by helping timid creatures "adjust" to an immoral world -- certainly not by stirring up dust in the dry pages of academic journals -- but a revolution in the hearts of all men and women for whom life was less than it should be and who, furthermore, were not afraid to take up positions in the forefront of social change. Instead, he found to his dismay that he was slowly giving in to the depression of middle age, to a sense that it was time to compromise. He watched his childhood ideals dying.

Several years in the army during World War II interrupted, but did not cure, this dissatisfaction. Returning from the war, he made a strange decision: to give up everything he had built and walk away. He left his wife, his practice and its professional prestige -- even the son he adored -- and didn't stop till he reached California. It was the beginning of his wandering in the desert -- or more accurately his discovery of an oasis of sanity in the desert called civilization. The network of intriguing pseudo-truths by which schooling had dulled his senses were unimportant now. With freshly opened eyes he began to look at the world around him without preconception. It was electrifying.

He took on odd jobs and thought about life as audaciously as if he were a child again. He decided his analysts had been wrong about his homosexuality, which he embraced now for the first time as a healthy and deeply civilized component of his personality. Hand in hand with this conviction was a new acceptance of his psychological submissiveness, a tendency which expressed itself most acutely in his long-felt need to love another person.

It would be hard to say which deviation from normalcy had most been slighted by the world in which he'd been raised, but ironically it probably was easier to embrace homosexuality than what he now called his "psychological femininity." Freud, after all, had advocated honesty concerning sexuality. Paul's really deviant insights were that men and women could be feminine or masculine regardless of gender, that this character specialization begins in childhood and lasts a lifetime, and that the polarity between individuals of opposite character is the real basis for romantic love in civilization. Other thinkers had approached character polarity hesitantly, most notably Jung in his analysis of introversion and extroversion, but always retreated when the implications of psychological polarity became manifest. For if a man could polarize with another man as rightfully as he could with a woman, the last argument against homosexuality would crumble.

He met a young man named Ronnie and they became lovers for many years. He took notes every day about polarity and the mechanisms of the mated relationship they were building. It was field research of the highest order, and it set him on a path that allowed him not merely to rebuild his self-esteem, but to construct a consistent matrix of insights that would constitute the foundations of a long-sought science of human nature. His new ideas allowed him to peer deeply into hitherto insoluble mysteries of human psychology, to weave strand upon strand of insight into a fabric of comprehension that left no phenomenon unilluminated.

For a while he tested his ideas by becoming a prison psychiatrist, seeing in the raw humanity of homeless inmates a reservoir of beauty and goodness he swore never to disavow. But when it came time to publish, he found that he had strayed very far from anything that academic or commercial publishers could tolerate. So in 1962 his brother Walter contracted with a publisher of both royalty and subsidized books to bring out the first work himself.

Psychoanalysis and Civilization is the first great working out of the dynamics of psychological polarity and, like many another first work, bursts forth with an unforgettable vividness. As if it were a great sword, Paul uses the axiom of polarity to cut through age-old philosophical conundrums, describing -- as if for the first time in history -- the dynamics of love and power, honesty and courage, wisdom and strength, depth and vigor, faith and hope, as well as the more abstract categories of time and space, truth and right, tension and energy -- even "causes and effects" and "beginnings and endings." The entire canvas of human nature is described from a single viewpoint within a single semantics.

In his lifetime philosophers had had their windy say on everything from the structure of scientific revolutions to the meaning of meaning. Just what would or would not finally constitute a science of human nature had been debated by historians of science for decades. Yet even they knew that all the millions of words they had poured forth wouldn't be worth the first page of any book which actually delineated such a science. Psychoanalysis and Civilization was just such a book.

Yet Paul's new system of the world was greeted with a deafening silence rivaling the accolades of Copernicus. Trying to believe that the fault lay in the writing, he attempted in a new book to organize in more accessible format the material of the first. In Love and Power: The Psychology of Interpersonal Creativity (1966), his thoughts better organized, he started with a detailed and self-explanatory outline, which became the table of contents, and this time compiled the index himself.

By now he had ended his relationship with Ronnie and moved to New York, and was doing independent psychotherapy again for the first time in twenty years. The excitement he felt in seeing his ideas really work in the lives of patients softened the blow of the new book's failure. Although many of his new patients were heterosexual, and although he had been known in Chicago for being especially effective with women patients, his practice now gradually focused on gay men. In New York's Greenwich Village, Paul found a laboratory well-equipped to benchmark his earlier conclusions and open fresh avenues of inquiry.

Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process (1971) is the direct result of this decision to return to the practice of psychotherapy. While incorporating the earlier principles that would remain the foundation of his new science, it reported additional findings that arose from applying these ideas in the lives of real patients. Perhaps the most important insight -- one directly counter to intuition -- was the discovery that a son's personality always polarizes with his father's. A father, Paul would say, is really his son's first lover. He felt he could now understand his own father for the very first time. It was a great breakthrough.

The boldness of the third book's title, and the implication of its subtitle, were his way of "coming out" on the issue of gay liberation. Where the first two books exposed the failure of conventional heterosexuality in broad strokes, he was now in a position of authority to document the importance of homosexuality to the unfinished task of building Western civilization -- the same task which Mohandas Gandhi had once drily confided to a reporter "would be a good idea."

This time his words found a reading public. Yet although this book has sold steadily year after year, and is the most serious examination ever undertaken of homosexual psychology, it was never to see anything like unqualified acceptance even within the gay community of his adopted city. Its title appeared in not one gay studies bibliography, nor was its author so much as footnoted in any history of gay liberation. "I seem to be caught between two potential audiences," Paul later observed of those who found him unreadable, "thinkers who hate homosexuality, and homosexuals who hate to think." Late in life he was to say that the gay community's worst enemy was its own unique brand of homophobia.

But the late sixties were glorious. He started calling his patients students, spending their therapeutic hours in collegial discussions of the issues he was examining. At the time I entered his life he was already beginning to draw about him a band of brothers from numerous creative enclaves who were much more like friends and fellow philosophers than mewling wet kittens.

It would have been naive to expect unqualified success with everyone who walked into that office, of course, and sometimes getting his ideas across must have seemed as pointless as teaching entomology to ants. Some clients were on a different wavelength altogether, even if they did wear their hair long; looking at his larger landscape made their eyes hurt. But their longing for normalcy, even if sincere, was a goal Paul would never countenance. A few disputatious shrink-haters couldn't unplug their ears for love or money; shaking their heads at the surface complexity of his formulations, they decided that psychiatrists were just as crazy as ever.

He learned to spot quickly what kind of patient was open to what he now called his "kind of truth." Typically they were young radicals, though not of the political stripe. Many wanted to become psychotherapists themselves, not really knowing what this might entail. They were simply open to life, and he loved them for that.

Despite the fact that Paul worked best with peers -- men and women who believed in human science and wanted to help other people live higher-quality lives -- there was no professional stiffness to deal with in his office. You were more often than not greeted with a hug and a kiss, and if you took up the first five minutes with breathless scuttlebutt there were no demerits to be paid nor was the clock running. You could sit on the floor and eat lunch if you felt like it, and you didn't have to wonder why the hell Paul hid behind a stupid necktie: he didn't own any.

But the best thing about being Paul's student was not that he made you comfortable, but that when he made you uncomfortable -- when he "challenged your defenses" -- he always did it for your own good, didn't gloat over being right, and afterwards bent down to help pick up whatever pieces of your pride had been shattered in the encounter. Paul was something new for most of us, and it was hard all of a sudden to listen with all the attention that he deserved. When we finally did let down our guard and trust in ways long forgotten, it was like breathing for the first time. It was agony knowing he would not always be with us.

Rightly or wrongly, there is no way for hindsight to encapsulate this kind of therapy into a list of stratagems; oddly, he never wrote a word about it. Each student needed something special, and got it; their stories are different.

Gradually the students got to know one another, either because they brought their friends to Paul, or simply because he introduced them to one another. Two of them eventually decided to start a therapy group to teach psychological polarity on their own. As valuable as his insights were to each student personally, it is amusing to reflect that there would persist on the periphery of this world an irrepressible minority who continued to view Paul's contributions merely as a sort of "theory of gay liberation." It was common, in fact, for even the most likeable of these to use the less than tactful nickname "the Theory" when referring to what Paul by then considered to be a body of knowledge about as uncertain as the theory of gravity.

After counseling in New York for several years, Paul and his students felt the need to open some kind of center where they could interact more regularly, not only with one another but with new people as well, accelerating the learning process for everyone. Those of us who knew something of history could imagine how disturbing his semantics, not to mention his ideas, would seem to conventional minds, and were reluctant to expose ourselves to the prejudices of public scrutiny, even that of a gay public. But in 1973 a basement was rented on Ninth Street and, after days and weeks of cleaning and painting, Paul and his students began to hold regular "talk groups" -- the more common phrase "discussion group" seemed formal and not in the friendly spirit we wanted. In the same year a counseling service was started, a modest journal issued, and the first paperback edition of Homosexuality printed, to which Paul added a brilliant new Foreword.

Our agenda was much deeper than anything the journalistic clichés of that time could capture, but since it was easy to advertise our project as a gay liberation organization, a gay liberation organization we became. Since gays were more open to our kind of truth anyway, we didn't mourn for straight people who could have learned from us but who didn't want to be associated with sexual deviants.

What was remarkable about the Ninth Street Center was not how many people learned from Paul and his students, but how much Paul and his students continued to learn from the Center. One of the first lessons impressed upon us was that it was possible to try too hard, to change one's lifestyle and outlook too fast. Through a relentless ungluing of habit they'd assumed was mandatory, many of the more ambitious members became disoriented. In their eagerness to personify noble dissatisfaction, they learned that one could find fault with anything if one were critical enough -- even life itself. In so severe an atmosphere of what Paul would soon call "creativity poisoning," even suicide as a cure could not finally be ruled out.

So in those first months he taught us to moderate the level of our interpersonal stimulation, to "turn down the dial," in one student's phrase. As psychologically radical as we indeed were, each now found a personal way to tune in to the quiet background music of happiness and contentment with the simple pleasures of the here and now. We stopped judging ourselves and our friends so harshly merely for exhibiting the scars of having grown up in a sick society, and decided we would have all the time we needed. We started going to movies again, decorated our apartments finally, and took in pets with funny names.

New people who wandered into the Center had no way to know that we were sitting on a scientific revolution, and occasionally amused themselves with empty headed arguments. At first we were easily provoked into lengthy debates that only prolonged our misery. But Paul always had the best answer to sophistry. "We live in an ignorant and immoral world," he would say quietly, as if gently remonstrating us for expecting so much of people who couldn't even see how ignorant they were. It was the kind of easily over-looked truth he never tired of repeating, a kind that demonstrated that you didn't need a degree to know something important. From the high ground of such simple wisdom, his battle cry invited our enlistment in what he called the creative army of civilization, the only force that could lift man out of the dark ages.

For Paul, the early years of the Center stimulated an extremely creative period of intellectual workmanship. Every week, new aspects of psychological polarity were uncovered, always given paired names which he called "analogs." It was not uncommon for a new set of analogs that were coined on Monday to be passing hand to hand all over the East Village by Wednesday. It was all most of us could do just to keep up with him.

But in addition to fleshing out his system, Paul discovered a new dimension of psychology to probe. For it was one thing to record insights in a scientific language -- as if burying a time capsule of equations for wiser generations to decipher -- but quite another to convey an occasionally astringent principle to some ordinary person who had a legitimate need to make immediate sense of it. In the process of becoming a teacher again, Paul began filling out a new section of his canvas which he called applied psychology. Having patented a timeless clockwork of truth, he could now turn to a more practical task: the mechanics of learning.

That his system wasn't as self-evident as Euclid's was a great disappointment to many of us. Yet we knew it had to be that way, else ancient Greeks would have forged the philosophical synthesis that had been left to Paul to achieve. But trying to apply his psychological insights and failing was excruciating. He spent many a therapeutic hour explaining that episodic failures were the hallmark of the pioneer, that failure had to be viewed as a friend of the growth process rather than as evidence of irredeemability, of being "damaged goods." Kipling had said that success and failure were impostors equally; Paul finished the thought by teaching that -- as long as we were loyal to the higher goal of psychological development -- we had not only a right but a duty to flout them.

Paul began committing these new teachings to paper, and soon the Ninth Street Center Monographs were rolling off the presses sporting chewy titles like Psychic Exhaustion and the Growth Process, and The Relationship of Adaptation and Fun and Pleasure to Psychological Growth. Ever optimistic of sparking a grass-roots conflagration among the educated public, his students mailed complimentary copies to any author whose psychological depth they'd ever felt any real hope for. Occasionally Paul would be praised by these recipients -- for example Albert Ellis -- but more often studiously ignored. Otherwise cordial colleagues who had known him in Chicago almost certainly saw in him a black sheep who had betrayed their professional fraternity. One well-meaning anthropologist faulted his writing for departing from academic form, cautioning him not to omit corroborating footnotes in the next edition. "You know, I have a kind of sympathy with his point of view," Paul said, laughing. "Often when I read the Sermon on the Mount I wonder where the footnotes are." He had learned by then that the simplest way of saying truth was always the best.

By this time Paul's health was failing. His participation in the activities of the Center was to end just three years after it had begun, and, with the financial help of a few close friends, in 1978 he retired from active practice. Yet even then his mind was churning and he continued to write. The Nature of Civilization gave us a much needed introduction to the canon, while Freud and the Scientific Method allowed him to take a closer look at the failures of the man he'd once followed. Perhaps easiest of all to approach was his autobiography, A Renegade Psychiatrist's Story.

After a long illness, Paul Rosenfels died in the summer of 1985 at the age of seventy-six. Yet, of course, he is still with us. Samuel Butler in "Life after Death" says,

This book presents the subject of homosexuality as an aspect of the best in human nature, relating its existence to the creative side of civilized psychological development. In order to expound this viewpoint, I have found it necessary to defy majority opinions in both the homosexual and the heterosexual worlds. Many homosexuals want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to see homosexual capacity as socially valuable, healthy, and constructive, while at the same time justifying every promiscuous sexual event (between consenting adults) which exists in their world. In associating homosexuality with sex on the loose in the human psyche, they join forces with those institutions which have made a hidden place throughout recorded history for homosexual experience, namely male houses of prostitution, which in modern terms become the gay baths and the institution of cruising. The straight world, on the other hand, looks exclusively at the evidence of homosexual promiscuity and finds within this artificially limited view all the confirmation it needs for its frightened condemnation of the homosexual phenomenon. Those who are committed to sex on the loose are in truth vulnerable to psychic depression and neurotic symptoms, but this is equally true on the heterosexual side.

There is a great deal more in homosexuality than a simple release of new levels of sexual permissiveness. True psychological mating is not only possible between individuals of the same sex, it is actually the rule in human interactions (whether sexual or not). How can two men, biologically alike, find a true difference between them through which mating can occur? The answer is simple but profound in its implications: through character specialization. What this book says in effect is that character specialization is dominant over biological identity, and that therefore two men (or two women) can have a masculine-feminine interaction which can lay the basis for a true romantic union, pregnant with possibilities for creative self-development. The concept of masculinity and femininity, used in this way, has nothing to do with conventional masculine and feminine roles in our society. Such roles have social roots, not independent psychological ones.

If men and women are to find their true inner identity, set free from the sexist tyranny of their conventional social roles, there is no way to avoid passage through homosexual territory. The straight world adheres with stubborn tenacity to its idea of what a man or a woman should be, because it cannot believe that if men and women are set free to find what is best for themselves as individuals, they will be able to reach heterosexuality out of their own needs. What cynicism! The straight world adopts contradictory viewpoints. On the one hand, it says that homosexuality is hedonistic, superficial, and sick. On the other hand, it finds homosexuality to be both sinister and powerful, capable of mobilizing contagious tendencies which threaten to destroy mankind through self-imposed genocide.

This book undertakes to show where the real truth lies. It establishes first the basic scientific insights into civilized character differentiation and the associated mated capacities which are essential to the understanding of civilization itself. The book says that what the world really needs is more ability to love and more ability to take responsibility for each other. The deepening of man's psychic life and the broadening of his moral capacities is a number one priority. The promotion of this kind of human development justifies removing part of our population from the baby-making and rearing activities of family life. Without more truth and right in the world we are all lost victims of the destructive effect of a civilization whose technological development has outrun its human capacities.

Openness about homosexuality is essential to human creative development. Not only must sexism be left behind, but new goals of human devotion to truth and right must emerge, so that people find a way to be important to each other out of their genuine human resources and without help from conventional social roles. This revolutionary undertaking promises a world of contentment and happiness for all men. In such a world there can be no doubt that men and women will find the capacity to be attracted to each other for the purposes of child rearing and family life. When human beings have learned to make constructive relationships with someone of the same sex, they can learn to transfer this capacity to someone of the opposite sex, if they find it in their interest to do so. But this is for the future to show. In the twentieth century it is enough for men and women to demonstrate that their homosexual capacities can serve the interests of the creative development of all mankind. In this book I attempt to present the scientific basis for such a great human undertaking.

1

The goal of civilized living is to reach a state of contentment and happiness. Man can accept the complexities of his civilized world only when the intensity and scope of his pleasure and enjoyment is increased by his participation in its demands and opportunities. The reaching for an expanding world of pleasure and enjoyment is different from the making of a practical adaptation to the basic requirements of social maturity. It is a common misconception that personal happiness and contentment can be won by increasing the importance of the practical and adaptive aspect of living. Happiness is seen as an automatic product of social conformity in the area of making money, having a workable marriage, raising children, and taking advantage of socially accepted channels of indulgence and relaxation. The difficulty with this image of happiness is that it does not concern itself with the personal importance of the individual which can only come from involvement in a life that is always offering something more. The individual who has attained everything that he ever wanted can only become depressed if he can anticipate nothing more or better for himself.

The search for personal importance rests on the development of an inner identity and involves the individual in a growth struggle which has painful and disturbing qualities. It is easy to believe that thinking what you are supposed to think and doing what you are supposed to do in a structured civilized world will bring a fulfilled sense of individuality. The more the individual adapts himself to the institutionalized demands of society, the more he becomes aware of the essential emptiness of that kind of life. Continuing psychological growth is essential to an alive sense of participation in the human scene. The more the individual invests himself in the conventional patterns of maturity the less psychological novelty there is in his life.

Psychological growth implies the existence of goals which have not yet been attained. The attachment to these goals must be tenacious indeed if they are to remain operative for a lifetime and if they are to survive the sense of hardship which unfulfilled longings and unrealized ambitions entail. Growth takes it being in an atmosphere of dissatisfaction and incompleteness, but these potentially negative states are altered by the context in which they are experienced, a context characterized by faith and hope in ultimate fulfillment.

A good life requires the ability to rise above the circumstances of everyday practical considerations. The ability to be something within the self, separate and apart from success or failure in any particular human undertaking, hinges on the capacity for inner growth and development. The ability to add to psychological resources as the result of life experiences makes it possible to convert success or failure into a higher order of psychic event. The sense of self reaches its highest level of expression where practical and adaptive matters are least involved. The psychological capacities of the self which reach deepest into the sense of inner identity concern matters such as the ability to comprehend the truth and adhere to the right.

2

There are two great areas of psychic function which are concerned with inner identity and these are the love and power capacities. Love is a deep emotion which focuses the awareness of the individual on an external object. When a person loves something, he is not only aware of it at that moment with all of his existent capacities, but he accepts a continuing need for an expanding awareness and comprehension. The ability to love creates a gratifying self-awareness which is without pre-established limits. Each love experience becomes an instance or example of the love capacities, so that the ability to love is always bigger than any particular expression of it. The more the individual is able to love, the greater is the sense of access to inner identity and the potential growth it confers.

The power surplus is more difficult to describe because it is not intuitively perceived. Power is operational, expressing itself through action, and is existential in quality. The sense of personal power comes into being when the individual can do what he wants when he chooses. This unlimited willfulness depends for its existence on the environmental context in which the individual finds himself. His freedom depends on a sense of pride in ownership and nothing he does has destructive implications because the environment invites his euphoria and self-confidence. His only destiny for the moment is to express himself. For this purpose, he and his environment become one. He enters a mood of celebrative excitement. The celebrative mood is the analogue in the power realm of sexuality in the area of love. Both sex and celebration are biologically established channels of psychic surplus overflow. The ability to take a power stance in life, in those areas which are above and beyond the responsibilities of practical living, confers identity on the inner self and gives access to the psychological development on which growth rests.

The awareness of another which is the basis of love is a development of the biological capacity to receive information from the environment. The spontaneity and initiative which are utilized by personal power are derived from the biological capacity to control the environment. This biological polarized duality between submission and dominance, the receptive and the expressive, sensory and motor, introvert and extrovert, and feminine and masculine divides all life processes into two aspects. The adaptive experience of any living organism contains a mixture of these yielding and assertive elements, and they are utilized according to the natural predisposition of the organism to prefer one over the other, or according to their appropriateness to the particular circumstances. With the emergence of gender identity in the evolutionary process, a surplus of yielding potential becomes characteristic of the female and the assertive surplus becomes invested in the male. It is this biological sexual differentiation which established the first evolutionary basis of an inner identity.

3

The uniqueness of the individual depends on his patterns of giving to other people. His way of interacting with his world is capable of the greatest selectivity and refinement. He cannot develop this personal individuality, however, without an inner basis for a psychological surplus. The only way that a psychological surplus can be developed and maintained is through the establishment of a yielding or an assertive identity. In nature, the feminine-masculine differentiation is tied to the reproductive function. In the civilized world the psychological surplus becomes the basis of a creative relationship with society. Furthermore, the yielding or assertive identity is no longer tied to gender. There are yielding and assertive patterns among men, and equally so among women. The whole complex development of civilization hinges on the interacting contributions of its yielding and assertive elements. In general, the sensitive and conceptualizing yielding personality develops the pursuit of truth for its own sake, laying the basis for mankind's accomplishments in philosophy, science, and the spiritual aspects of living. The operational assertive personality takes the lead in setting up human cooperation and responsibility, expanding man's technical skills and moral qualities. The psychologically yielding male, if he were a tiger in the jungle, would be the female, but this does not in any way compromise his human masculinity, because masculinity in the civilized world is established through socially validated patterns of what masculinity is taken to be, rather than through primitive biological mechanisms. Any person who fulfills himself constructively and is biologically a man is accepted in society as a genuine masculine figure. The polarization of character among both men and women vastly increases the depth and range of human interactions.

In nature's reproductive interaction between male and female, submissive longings interact with dominant drives, each partner helping the other toward a reinforcement and fulfillment of their inner identities. The female finds her way through deep tensions bordering on pain, and the male develops spontaneous energies which are close to disorganizing restlessness. Through their union the extremes of their inner identities find a harmonious place, rewarded by fulfilling pleasure and enjoyment. Their polarized differences reach toward balance through the capacity of the female to arouse sexual excitement in the male, which he discharges orgastically in the sexual relationship, thus sparing him from the kind of continuing tension which is characteristic of a feminine identity. The masculine capacity for possessiveness establishes a domain to which the female can belong, thus stirring in her a mood of pride and releasing energies which remain channeled by altruism and devotion, since the goal of her energies is to satisfy his dominant masculine needs. This power awakening in the female does not become competitive or willful. The fulfillment of the power side of their relationship leads to a mood of celebration, in which her status is that of the one who has reached euphoria because she has submitted to his euphoric needs.

4

The inner surpluses which exist in civilized human beings are not specifically tied to the reproductive function. The assertive or yielding predisposition underlies character formation. The ability to retain a love or power surplus within the self becomes the basis of the creative capacities and all those qualities which confer a sense of uniqueness on the individual. Character is formed under the influence of family relationships until the arrival of adulthood, and then is further developed by the individual in selective relationships with his personal world. The development of character is a lifetime process. As the individual reacts with his world in a deeper and broader way, his character is further enriched and reinforced. The pairing of individuals of opposite polarity in a romantic union still employs the same basic biological mechanisms that are found in nature, but these mated experiences come to individuals whose identity is already established and operating. Family life is based on the institution of marriage which has no necessary connection with the mated union of lower animals. In fact, the socially reinforced stability of marriage may be hostile to the romantic spirit which in nature is always an integral part of a mated union.

Man is the only animal who keeps a surplus psychological life flowing continuously throughout a lifetime. In the lower animals the sexual and celebrative phase of a mated union ends when the young are ready to arrive. The love and power surplus which continues to operate is expended in the nurture and protection of the offspring. Human beings who maintain an expanding psychological life have continuing access to their sexual and celebrative capacities. Under these conditions, there is a tendency for a dislocation between the surplus and adaptive functions. The psychologically healthy individual must learn to separate the creative and the practical in a way that gives full expression to each, without either encroaching on the existence and development of the other.

In man's constantly reaching psychological world, sex and celebration tend to have an existence of their own, cut loose from the psychological moorings which the mated state provides in nature. Man has the psychological task of preventing his love feelings from automatically flowing into sexual expression, and of keeping his power attitudes from running loose in celebrative channels. If love is to lead to the ability to give more to human beings, it must learn to do work in human relationships. The workmanship of love is a matter of developing understanding and insight which better equips the individual to meet the needs of others. The power capacities are useless if they do not commit themselves to responsible relationships. Power is not constructive unless it builds, and it can only add new instrumentalities of the right if it is capable of genuine loyalty and commitment.

5

A man experiences love in the family in which he was raised and later uses this same ability to love in the family he establishes in his adulthood. Family love between parents and children and between siblings is desexualized love supported by the incest barrier. The desexualization of love among friends of the same sex gains support from the social prohibition against homosexuality. Between individuals of opposite sex, friendship brings problems in desexualization which is often handled by an avoidance of genuine closeness and involvement. Man depends heavily on the social supports of the marital institution in channeling his sexuality into marriage and away from other relationships.

It is impossible to love deeply without sexual feeling, and man learns to distinguish between sexual feeling and a readiness for the sexual act, which depends on a state of sexual excitement. The more the individual develops his love capacities in a creative direction, the less likely it is that he will be able to accept the external prohibitions established by social institutions. The more that love becomes a goal in itself, set free to pursue insight and understanding as a tool of giving to other people, the more necessary it becomes that there be internal guidelines within the individual for the regulation and expression of sexual capacity. If man is to find the ability to make a truly mated relationship with another person which is enduring in quality and faithful in sexual behavior, he must be able to employ the same mated mechanisms which produce enduring matings in nature. To reach this end, the simplistic viewpoint that the marriage of a man and woman is sufficient to guarantee a true psychological mating fails miserably to meet the needs of independent and growing personalities. Society cynically rejects the idea that fidelity is inherent in a true mated union and asks of its members that they accept fidelity on the basis of social rules, without counting the cost in the failures of inner growth which such a system brings.

Sexuality does not come to the individual because he is mated, but pre-exists mated capacity in the form of masturbation and its accompanying fantasies. It becomes the task of personal growth to bring sexuality within the scope of a mated union. The civilized world has never accepted sexuality as a phenomenon which the individual is capable of handling out of his personal psychological resources. Society attempts to decide through institutionalized pressures what normal sexuality is supposed to be. By this means, sexuality is detached from its psychological moorings and becomes an external thing subject to social rules and regulations. Since the individual is reared without insight into the nature of sexual feeling and its forms of expression, and without the expectation of a capacity for responsibility in the handling of sexual impulses, he finds himself extremely limited in his ability to explore the alterations in sexuality which come with personal growth. In spite of all man's scientific sophistication, he remains both ignorant and immoral in dealing with any facet of sexuality which lies outside the socially reinforced patterns accepted in the time and place in which he finds himself.

6

Masturbation is unattached sexuality. Since masturbatory fantasy has as its sole aim the encouragement of sexual excitement, there is little psychic experience to guide its development, save the shame and guilt associated with the deviation of sexual fantasy from the social norms. When the individual begins to make sexual contact with others, the real struggle begins to find a fulfilling sex life. If sex is pursued as a goal in itself, it becomes a perverse phenomenon. Under such conditions the search for elaborations of sensual feelings and sexual techniques further isolates sexual experience from the mated need to form a romantic union in an enduring relationship. Man cannot successfully ignore his biologically rooted mated needs, even though his capacity for dissociated sexuality suggests to him that he need not endure a growth struggle in order to make an acceptable place for his sexuality. The degree to which promiscuity is characteristic of civilized man is a clear indication of the extent of his disregard of the psychological structure of mating. Men find it convenient to believe that perversity consists of any deviation from the sexual patterns which society accepts as normal. The coital behavior of animals is taken to be a model of normal sexuality because it serves the interest of the socially reinforced heterosexual image, while the much more significant status of the love and power interaction between partners is largely ignored or misunderstood.

Society seeks to guide human celebrative behavior in the same way that it establishes norms for sexuality. The enjoyment of a sense of power for its own sake comes into being without any necessary relationship to real involvements with others. The capacity for play, in which the individual assumes roles chosen by himself for the sense of euphoria they bring, confers a dissociated sense of personal importance. The sense of freedom inherent in the celebrative mood cannot develop and grow until the individual begins to make attachments to others in which he is appreciated and loved. The sense of power takes its being in the capacity to possess others and use them constructively to advance the interests of the self. When the sense of freedom exists only because the individual avoids meaningful involvements, true opportunity is denied the growing personality. If freedom takes its entire being in an absence of restraint, restless wandering replaces the freedom to choose commitments, and the individual finds that he is running loose in a desert. True freedom is contingent on the ability to have continuing relationships, chosen by the individual for their appropriateness in developing his responsible capacity to control his personal world. This fusion of morality with freedom makes the mating of love and power possible. When the celebrative elements in the self cannot find a human world where euphoric outlets can expand, they become attached to isolated psychological events in which restraint can be ignored. The obsessive appetite for such experiences takes on an addiction pattern. Society sets up patterns of behavior to guide the individual away from addiction and delinquency through the reinforcement of automatic images of what constitutes a celebrative satisfaction. Men are taught to find euphoric enjoyment in the accumulation of money for its own sake, ostentatious demonstrations of competitive superiority, and the cultivation of vanity in general.

7

The conflict between the creative individual and society is not inevitable. Under political conditions in which there is a reasonable level of civil liberties the individual can develop his creative capacities provided that he can live up to the basic adaptive standards of his community. The struggle within the creative individual between creativity and conformity is an endogenous psychological matter. It is the shame and guilt brought into being by deviation from established social norms which place barriers in the way of psychological growth. If the individual is to leave social norms behind in those areas where he is free to be himself and in which basic adaptive matters are not involved, he must do it out of an independent awareness of psychological truth and a capacity for independent utilization of human skills, uninfluenced by established social beliefs and standards of behavior which he knows to be false and immoral. This degree of independence requires access to a body of knowledge about himself and others which only a science of psychology can provide. Unfortunately, the science of psychology in contemporary life lags so far behind the development of science in the non-human fields that the individual can derive little guidance from it when he faces the real impact of his growth problems. Most men do not understand their struggle for an inner identity, and when they cut themselves loose from the supports of their conventional social identity they risk exposure to disabling confusion and perplexity.

Psychological truth has no necessary connection with established social beliefs. The search for truth tends to take an ivory tower position, developing a kind of private philosophical or religious vocabulary. Throughout history those who search for truth in the deepest way have made a retreat from the give and take of the market place of everyday living. The so-called truths which guide the practical daily activities of men in the fields of politics, industry, and the relationship of the family to society are judged entirely by their practical value in reinforcing the status-quo. Of equal importance is the separation of the individual search for the right and what is accepted as right by the established forces of the practical world. Men who seek to express in their personal lives the higher levels of courage and morality have always tended to dissociate themselves from the commonplace in human affairs. Such men tend to live in the moment, seeking adventuresome outlets for their heightened energies, with increased mobility and the willingness to risk all they have for an all-impelling purpose.

Although society takes its identity from its stable qualities and resists change, it sets a high value on improvements in the social structure which accrue to the benefit of all. Periodically society accepts the reality of social change and progress. Since society cannot undermine itself, this progress can only come from the influence of creative individuals who demonstrate in their own lives that new truth and right are superior to the old. That which starts with revolutionary and heretical implications becomes the stable world of tomorrow.

Modern society has become immensely complex in the adaptive demands it makes on its members. The expansion of the influence of social institutions into new areas of human needs is related to the fact that science and industry have brought increasing resources for social interaction, including such functions as transportation, communication, and industrial productivity. There is no inherent reason why a more complex society should interfere with the creative individuality of man. Men who were comfortable with the horse and buggy might well have thought that the coming of the automobile posed a threat to their capacity to be themselves in a human way, but the automobile, far from being a threat to individuality, soon became a source of greater individual self-expression through the increased mobility it conferred. The real value of any increase in the complexity of man's social structure is the same as the building of any machine, namely to free mankind from adaptive burdens through the more efficient service of his basic and elementary needs. As those needs expand, the relationship between the individual and the social system in which he lives does not have to change. It is only when men pay undue homage to their adaptive advances,, expecting thereby to reach higher levels of individual self-fulfillment, that society begins to look like a monolithic threat to individuality. It is the failure of man's human capacities to keep pace with scientific and industrial advances which accounts for the fear of an expanding social system.

8

The institution of family life contains the greatest potential for conflict between the demands of social maturity and creative individuality. Family life in a changing and progressive society has the Herculean task of maintaining its stability and at the same time permitting the new generation to search for a higher level of truth and morality. The first task of the family is to provide for the basic survival needs of the offspring. This means that children must be reared in a relatively conventional fashion, accepting established social beliefs and practices, and at the same time be permitted to develop their personalities with enough potential individuality so that when the time comes for their mature independence they are capable of deviating in their own way for their own psychological purposes. The psychological tasks of the family are relatively simple in a culture where there can be a complete acceptance of social meanings and values from one generation to the next. In the modem world the new generation grows up aware of the disparities between avowed ideals and actual social conditions. The generation gap thus produced is not a simple product of youthful rebellion and heresy. It comes also from the older generation who look to their children to live better lives than they did. The family thus accepts the obligation to encourage the potential creativity of its children while resisting changes within the family which would be destructive of its ability to maintain its own stability.

Children are reared in a family world which is both dogmatic and authoritarian. The right of parents to set up such a system cannot be questioned if they are to perform their function of nurturing and protecting the immature offspring. Children cannot think and act for themselves in areas where their survival may come into question. Basic social controls in matters such as the restraint of violence, conformity to health rules, acceptance of minimum educational requirements, limitation of precocious sexuality, and the avoidance of dangers which the child cannot clearly evaluate provide the substance of the family's practical function. Family dogma and authority bear the same relationship to the inner psychological life of the child as adult dealings with social beliefs and institutions have to the creative life of the individual. It is the task of the family to limit the operation of its stable functions to those areas required by adaptive necessity. As soon as the practical considerations of family life overflow into the private and separate life of the child, his potential for contentment and happiness is in danger. No matter how well cared for a child may seem to be, a lack of opportunity to develop an inner identity renders him unable to function properly in expanding his relationships with the outside world. Many apparently model children only succeed in being so within the atmosphere of the family itself. Surplus elements in the psychological life of the child lean heavily on fantasy and play. Comparable surpluses in adult life are directed in romantic and creative channels. The child's great appetite for pleasure and enjoyment motivates him to a persistent exploration of the limits of the necessary conformities. Because of this need to conform only where necessary he is often in a transition area of potential heresy and rebellion. This is parallel to the psychological status of the creative adult who repeatedly explores the degree to which he must give himself to practical social requirements. If he takes social requirements too much for granted his personal identity will be effaced. Children want and need to be taken care of in a stable family world and at the same time to be given the opportunity to gain a maximum of personal pleasure and enjoyment outside the area of established thought and action patterns. As the child grows, the relationship between his inner personal life and his acceptance of external requirements repeatedly changes. Transitional periods are fraught with shame and guilt, and parental empathy and help at such times is required. Family life demonstrates its constructiveness only when it can be both stable and hospitable to inner change in its members. Children know that they cannot be happy through adaptive accomplishments alone. Adults who allow themselves to be overwhelmed by their need for social conformity and its rewards lose their comprehension of the nature of true happiness.

9

If the family has been established by a well mated pair of contrasting personalities, favorable conditions exist for the maintenance of creative surpluses in both parents. This is only possible where the marriage has taken its origin in a truly romantic attachment. The mature demands of marriage often overwhelm its romantic beginnings. The pattern of mated polarity remains, however, and is an essential element in the elaboration of an inner identity in the developing child. Children who see their parents as the exclusive embodiment of dogmatic and arbitrary family functions can only be seduced or intimidated by their parental identifications. The development of an inner identity by the child is dependent on his ability to identify surplus capacities in the parents, however neglected and unfulfilled these capacities may be. A sense of the goodness and beauty in the parental personalities, entirely apart from the mundane circumstances of everyday parental nurture and care, lays a basis for the child's anticipation of finding inspiration and enthusiasm in his developing life. Children endure frustrations remarkably well in practical matters, where family life is unable to provide for material rewards, provided that the parents remain an embodiment of the personal search for contentment and happiness. Conversely, depressed parents who provide, very well for all their children's practical needs nevertheless interfere significantly with the child's access to psychological growth. The growing child is tremendously resourceful in detecting and exploiting potential surplus elements in the parental personalities.

The child learns to make a selective identification with the parents. In practical matters, he is judged by the effectiveness of his performances, and in this area little selective identification is involved. It is when he seeks an expanding sense of inner identity that he begins to cut himself off from certain aspects of the parental thought and action patterns. These beginnings of the child's inner self are initiated by the need to protect himself from the depressive implications of parental dogma and authority. Character identity is motivated by the search for that kind of pleasure and enjoyment which exists above and beyond the circumstances of daily living. The key to the child's development of an inner identity lies in his ability to establish a private and separate self. Privacy hinges on the capacity for withdrawal, and separateness comes into being when the child succeeds in ignoring restrictions on his behavior. All play rests on such dissociated patterns, permitting complete involvement in the world set up by play, as if those aspects of reality which would interfere with his play world did not for the moment exist. The child chooses that pattern of inner identity which best serves his need to put psychic distance between him and the adaptive demands of family life. This choice of identity is governed by the usefulness of either a love or power status in relieving the depressive pressures which the institutionalized aspect of family life is creating.

10

The polarization of parental personalities provides the family with both yielding and assertive psychological capacities. As the child seeks to relieve himself of the burdens of family dogma and authority, he makes a partial identification with the appropriate parent. It is of the utmost importance to the psychological welfare of the child that he make this identification with the surplus capacities stemming from the inner identity of the parent. Selective identifications of this partial type are very difficult between son and father and between daughter and mother, because such direct identifications with the parent of the same sex tend to encompass the whole personality and are therefore influenced too much by the maturity functions of the parent. It is possible for the child to develop an independent personal identity only when the relationship with the parent of the same sex is polarized. A boy who wants very much to be like his father cannot find sufficient room to be a child.

The polarization between father and son begins at an early age and is assisted by the tendency of the father to utilize the relationship with the son as an expression of his own creative tendencies. In the civilized world, direct identifications between father and son remain relatively superficial, being guided primarily by socially reinforced adaptive patterns. There is little potential for psychological growth in the mature years for those who are closely identified with the parent of the same sex. Cultures which facilitate such identifications remain relatively rigid from generation to generation, with little or no need for social progress. The identification which carries the greater potential for an independent character development is that which the son makes with the inner character of the mother. As the son interacts with the father in a polarized way, the groundwork is laid for a strong inner identity and a capacity for continuing growth throughout adult life. Comparable mechanisms are at work in the formation of the daughter's character. The identification of the son with the mother has great advantages in the avoiding of reinforcement of conventional social roles since the adaptive aspect of the mother's function in the family is not the object of identification. The polarization of the father-son relationship rests on their mutual capacity for either idealization or constructive exploitation. It is a love and power interchange with a high investment of surplus feeling and a sense of belonging. To protect this investment there is often a diminution in practical domestic interaction between father and son, and in some cases little substantial relationship at all, but even under such circumstances polarized patterns are preserved in fantasy and play. The love and power interchange reduces the tendency to competition and jealousy which Freud thought was the core of the father-son relationship. If Freud were right about his evaluation of the primacy of the Oedipus complex, there would be no basis for the independent character development on which creativity rests. It is not surprising that Freud was so poorly equipped to understand the psychological growth of the adult.

11

The complex social world which civilized man has created is never far from warfare with his creative potentials. The confrontation between these two psychological elements is not out in the open. The stable elements of society utilize seduction and intimidation against the potentially revolutionary quality of independent human insight and personal mastery. The creative forces, on the other hand, use withdrawal, known in contemporary terms as dropping out, or an enlistment in obstructionistic group activities of a provocative nature in which a challenge is offered to the dishonesty and immorality of the stable social system. If a constructive confrontation were possible between the stable social world and its opponents, each would find its own area of operation, but as long as society depreciates its creative elements because of their inability to replace dogma and authority with a different stable system, and as long as dissidents see society in terms of its inability to seek truth and right as goals in themselves, warfare rather than constructive interaction becomes inevitable.

The strongest weapon which society uses to undermine the creative identity of individuals is to be found in the socially reinforced patterns of the masculine and feminine roles. Living up to the social image of what a real man and a real woman are supposed to be in society has little or nothing to do with inner identity. Whereas in nature the male and female come to a mated relationship without pre-existing images and patterns of action to guide their mutual approach, finding union through the inherent yielding or assertive tendencies which they reinforce in each other, the inherent yielding or assertive tendencies of civilized human beings are already well developed before a permanent type of union is attempted. Because this is true, the human male and female cannot count on the primitive mechanisms of nature to bring them together. It is characteristic of civilized society that it trains its members to believe in the automatic quality of the attraction between male and female. Insofar as developing boys and girls are taught what their characteristics are supposed to be on a gender basis, inner psychological development is obstructed. Adults are constantly bombarded with socially supported images and patterns of their gender role, and these influences become powerful forces, operating through shame and guilt, in restricting creative development. Man arrives at his heterosexual status through a process characterized by socially reinforced brainwashing and programmed automaticity. Since the surplus outlets in sexuality and celebration are inherently gratifying, the vividness of these psychic rewards is utilized to cover up the lack of genuineness in their origin. It may be said that as long as society controls the patterns by which men arrive at their sexual and celebrative outlets, it need have no fear that the individual will attain a truly independent status in his inner psychological life. If the conventional social supports of civilized man's heterosexuality are laid aside, it soon becomes clear that only a genuine psychological need between a man and a woman can develop an impelling heterosexuality, and this need must rest upon a true mating coming from a polarization of inner identities.

12

With the coming of puberty and the formation of mature sexual capacity in masturbatory patterns, the growing adolescent finds his sexuality separated and in some way alien to his developing inner personality. His beginning efforts to integrate sexuality into his capacity for romance are rendered difficult because sexuality will not wait for the maturation of his mated capacities. The automatic quality of socially supported sexual feelings and patterns is no help to the individual who is attempting to develop love and power resources as a tool of expanding human relationships. Premature sexualization of deep feeling undermines the workmanship of love, and the effort to build responsible power patterns loses its sense of reality when invaded by celebrative tendencies. Socially reinforced heterosexual patterns of sex and celebration bombard the adolescent with seductive and intimidating influences which embarrass his psychological development.

It is in the area of relationships of individuals of the same sex that men find opportunity for an unobstructed search for a high degree of personal identity. In the civilized world, men undertake to help each other with their need for a sense of importance in the inner self. When masculine friendships are polarized and succeed in attaining a high degree of privacy and separateness in relationship to social dogma and authority, they become the true proving ground of the individual's search for identity. Love and power interchanges between men are reinforced in their importance by the parallel that exists with the father-son relationship. This does not mean that in a polarized friendship one individual is the father and another is the son. Rather it is the dynamic interaction between father and son which is reenacted and each helps the other to further develop psychological capacities which took their origin in the original relationship of each to his father. It is of great value to the creative psychological development of individuals that love and power interactions between men are not readily sexualized. The surplus components which come into the relationship are utilized for further development of the ability to love and to take responsibility in a constructive way. If an attachment between men is allowed to take its natural course, uninfluenced by social prohibitions against romantic attachments between men, there comes a point where the emerging need for a mated union must be dealt with by those men who are capable of exploring their mated needs in an independent way. If this undertaking is rejected because of external social prohibitions, the developing capacity for creative love and power relationships will be damaged. The ability to recognize and deal with homosexual feelings and needs is basic to the unrestricted growth of psychological resources. On the other hand, the emergence of promiscuous homosexual tendencies is a threat to the creative use of homosexual capacities. Whether homosexual capacity leads in any given case to the making of a homosexual union depends entirely on the goals of the personality. If psychological growth is firmly established as a primary need of the personality, the homosexual component of the self becomes increasingly important to the psychological welfare of the individual.

13

The romantic spirit of man develops revolutionary implications when the sense of individuality it brings leads individuals to alter their relationship with their adaptive world. Behind the social prohibitions against homosexuality lies a deep concern over the private and separate status it confers on the romantic capacities. In a homosexual romance love and power are released to find their own destiny. Men face the fact that love is an entity which is not automatically brought into being because socially supported eroticism exists, but must be built in a workmanlike fashion out of true devotion to an idealized object. In a similar way, the personal power capacities must discover the nature of moral integrity, operating through an enduring exploration of human resources. Such growth experiences increase personal honesty and courage to a degree which threatens the stability of social beliefs and institutions. Although society encourages heterosexual romance, such acceptance is qualified by the expectation that a heterosexual union will not be allowed to interfere with a stable relationship with the adaptive social life. Romance implies an intense and total involvement of the pair with each other, and this tends to shut out the adaptive world. This state of affairs does not disturb adaptive adequacy when lovers are able to set up the proper conditions for a honeymoon and holiday phase in their lives. If the inner development of each partner leads them to question and discard stable social values, the adaptive dislocation can be very great. Most great romances in literature are tragedies in the Romeo and Juliet pattern, because the tendency of lovers to ignore the practical world leads to their ultimate destruction. No great human romantic event can be considered successful until the increased identity in both partners has led to a creative capacity to deal with the world on a basis chosen by the individual, so that the new independent status of the personality finds a human world in which it can survive.

Homosexual capacity is a component part of the personality of civilized man. Men choose to use this capacity in spite of the social pressures against it only when their need for individuality is very great, and this need is related to their inability to cope with the severities of socially reinforced gender roles. Whenever an individual finds that conformity to social pressures brings an increasing and inflexible depression, he must seek to relieve that depression in any way that promises to be effective. It is the need for this kind of self-therapy which guides men in their deviancy from established social patterns in the romantic area. The right to such deviancy is essential to the creative development of individuals and to social progress itself. To attain so-called normality in a world which is itself abnormal in the sense that it justifies ignorance and immorality as the inevitable price of stability can only lead to a compromise with psychological depression which must ultimately prove itself to be unworkable. Those who insist on independent access to contentment and happiness in the name of mental health are received as the enemies of social stability. Without mental health, no apparent human accomplishments can be rewarding, either for the individual or for society, and the right to pursue mental health is an irreducible necessity in the civilized world. No animal save man has this obligation to provide for his own psychological health. The individual cannot pass this obligation to others. The deterioration of any human personality is an event which he alone experiences, and he alone is in the position to make the choices which lead away from psychological disability.

When men attain an inner identity they are in a position to turn away from hate and anger at the ignorance and immorality of the stable social world and toward their own pursuit of the constructive uses of love and power. Until they stand on their own feet they are not in a position to recognize that the psychological failings of society are theirs also. Psychological independence always produces a crisis in personal development, because it is only when man really needs the kind of independent access to human truth which a science of human nature should supply, or access to the objective techniques of human control which established modalities of personal responsibility should give, that he becomes aware of the undermining inadequacy of the psychological tools which his social heritage supplies. As man seeks to face the challenge of independent psychological development, he must confront the fact that his human science and engineering are still in the dark ages of human social capacity. Once a man takes an independent position in life his need for these tools cannot wait. This is why those who seek human truth and right are vulnerable to neurotic and delinquent difficulties and find themselves committed to long periods of struggle which carry no guarantee of success. It is not difficult for the creative personality to know what is wrong with society, just as it is easy for society to emphasize the inadequacies and failures of its rebellious and deviant elements. Once truth and right have come into existence they make it possible to put polemic confrontations aside, for they have an inherent continuity and integrity which puts them beyond the influence of both social inflexibility and individual failure. Truth endures, and man's intellect is an instrument which is equipped to know this, whether a million voices espousing error drown out the voice that speaks the truth or not. Given enough time, and assuming that civilization survives as a progressing entity, the words of the one will survive while the voices of the million will leave no record behind.

14

It is impossible to understand another human being constructively without the guidance of love. There are many ways to understand human phenomena at a practical level where love is not involved. Such understanding does not require any commitment to the search for truth. Any level of insight which permits the individual to advance his own adaptive interests is accepted as true in the circumstances. If men do not see the difference between usable insight and the truth, they cannot establish a sound basis for communication between human beings. The ability to love means that the individual is ready to see another individual as a total personality. When men hold themselves ready to employ love in their interpersonal life, they are open to the possibility that any human contact may reach levels of gratification which are fulfilling to the inner identity of both. This readiness for love rests on faith in the expanding humanity of the self and others. Because understanding which proceeds from love has a great potential for influencing other people, it can either advance their interests or betray them, depending on whether the depth of the love is adequate to the mutual psychological exposure which is occurring. The offering of love invites its utilization by another and in this moment an expanding expression of inner identity becomes possible. Whenever the level of true understanding guided by love increases in human affairs, the capacity for communication and involvement increases. Human truth is the basic tool by which love does its work in the world. When the need to love is cut off by the impact of practical necessity, the sense of importance in the self diminishes in favor of various practical goals or emergency survival needs.

Personal power has the same capacity for influencing the expansion of human relationships. Responsibility for its own sake enters an interaction with another when practical matters do not cut off the free sense of personal leadership. When a man assumes control over some aspect of another human being in a constructive context, he seeks to help that person expand the basis of their interaction. In helping another he establishes new modalities of partnership, thus reducing the essential aloneness of people. The willingness to help another rests on the hopeful attitude that intervention in the life of another can make a difference, increasing the sense of human importance of both individuals. In a world of expanding communication and commitment, guided by love and power, human understanding and skill exist on an ever widening basis. Inner security and freedom thrive in such an atmosphere. Well developed modalities of constructive intervention constitute the basis of morality in human affairs. Without morality, intervention in the life of another can readily sidetrack into destructive exploitation.

When any given level of understanding fails to reach another person, the individual who loves is challenged to expand the conceptual basis of his understanding. This involves psychic work. Love cannot undertake such a demanding task unless the emotional depth of love can be maintained. The test of love in such circumstances rests on its ability to idealize, responding to the totality of its object and sensing the beauty embodied in it. If love is motivated by the inner hunger to attach itself to such an object, a continuity is created in which an expansion of human understanding is possible. Power also finds circumstances in which its effort to establish involvement is maintained by the recognition of the potential goodness in another. Power endures through a need to explore and experiment where opportunity is seen to exist. It is only through such efforts that new modalities of mastery can come into existence. Because the work of love and the commitments of power lead to creative self-expression in areas that lie outside the practical adaptive needs, men are able to exercise these psychological functions without any certainty of fulfillment in any given situation. Love is not yet a mature emotion when it demands a guarantee that its efforts will be rewarded, nor can mature power refuse to act because the outcome of its explorations is in doubt.

15

It is the search for mental health which forces men to grow psychologically in their adult years. Men who cannot make adherence to social dogma and authority work successfully for them are seen by society as inadequate personalities, and their sense of alienation is systematically cultivated as a means of further reinforcing social stability. When growing individuals find the inner resources to throw off shame and guilt, they turn toward the affirmations which independent love and power capacities make possible. It is only when men are in trouble with their so-called normal social adjustment that the real problems of creative love and power emerge.

Men who attempt to love on an independent basis must face the difficult realization that they have reached adulthood without an adequate comprehension of how love functions in human affairs. A deep and sensitive personality is psychologically feminine in structure, but civilized man has little awareness of what psychological femininity implies. A pure feminine position in the inner self brings inhibitions in the area of action. It is impossible to develop depth in the self to a degree which makes the creative search for truth possible without sacrificing freedom in the area of independent action. Without imbalance there can be no inner identity. It is the sense of incompleteness which leads the individual toward expanding interactions with others in mated and creative ways. He cannot be equally independent in both the feminine and masculine aspects of the psychological self. It is the need to serve an idealized object which opens the channels of action for the feminine personality. Without this mechanism, activity becomes willful, selfish, and follows compulsive patterns. Only the individual's need to develop his inner psychological resources can keep him on the right path. In the development of his love capacities, conventional social influences always work the other way, pressuring him toward the kind of action which meets adaptive needs. Because the compulsive pressures are so great in the feminine personality, men who seek truth have often made a retreat from the practical world. Men hesitate to bring the human truth that they have found into the market place of daily living because of their vulnerability to being corrupted in the process. Throughout history men have developed a special semantics for expressing human truth which is only communicable in the protected environment in which it originated. To reach truth as a living instrument in human affairs requires a great deal of ability to resolve the compulsive tendencies within the self. Men who seek to love in a way that reaches the needs of other people must learn to use love as a motivation for action without the corruption that the self-serving use of expanding insights brings.

It might be thought that the development of an inner masculine identity is an easier psychological task for a man, since it is parallel with his biological masculine status and his socially reinforced gender role. The masculine personality, however, cannot reach independence without a major developmental struggle in which the individual must discover for himself the true nature of opportunity. The attempt to exercise the masculine virtues of personal courage, self-confidence, and spontaneous initiative brings the individual into an exploratory and experimental relationship with his world. If he is to use personal freedom as a meaningful tool he cannot be limited by the beliefs and principles that he has been taught. The masculine elaboration of modalities of mastery requires that he turn away from the independent pursuit of insights for their own sake. The free mobility of his surplus psychological life puts him in a state of imbalance, vulnerable to a hunger for meaning and security. The more independent his power faculties become, the more dependent he is in his need for love. Men find psychological freedom more readily when they associate themselves with gregarious undertakings which put a high value on initiative and courage. A strong need for masculine self-expression has led men into human situations where the pressures toward general social conformity are reduced while encouraging an esprit de corps with a high sense of group loyalty. Psychological freedom must eventually commit itself to some aspect of the human scene if it is not to become lost in meaningless mobility. Personal power develops the capacity to involve itself on an experimental basis, testing as it goes to discover the value of such involvements for its creative purposes. Freedom means the freedom to become involved, provided that the involvement can be dissolved when the purposes of growth make this necessary. Many masculine personalities find themselves seduced by the temporary rewards inherent in comfort and convenience. The search for personal integrity weakens in the face of sensual gratifications and material rewards. When masculinity is thus blocked off from an expanding world of opportunity, an obsessive mechanism takes over. The individual becomes a victim of an over-intensification of feeling in sentimental patterns, attributing value to whatever he possesses simply because he has established ownership, and his capacity for pride deteriorates into vanity.

16

Once the search for an inner identity has begun within the personality, there is no stopping point short of a full-fledged capacity for both creative productivity and adaptive adequacy. The initial stages of growth do not lead to immediate wisdom or strength. The individual who begins to accept an inner identity in either a masculine or feminine pattern enters a transitional growth phase in which his only immediate reward may be a sense of his own flexibility and the relief he thus gains from the depressive effects of automatic conformity. The transitional experiences which growth brings are characterized much more by the refusal to feel and act in given ways than by the ability to reach constructive alternatives. The goals of growth must have an impelling psychological quality if the individual is to find the inner resources for giving up his socially supported privileges and rewards in favor of new and as yet unproven capacities.

The search for a deepening ability to love requires that the individual surrender those power prerogatives which discharge the tensions inherent in loving. The imbalance in love is essential to its creative function. Love produces a submissive predilection in the self. The idealization of which, love is capable brings a sense of willing enslavement to the psychological needs of another person. This altruistic responsiveness makes room for the object of love to exploit the lover. It is when the resources of the lover are being used in a constructive way that he is motivated to further develop the resources that he has to give. The increased awareness which love makes possible is translated into knowledge and insight, and as the lover grows in wisdom he becomes a vehicle of truth in human affairs. His potential value to others increases as his inner identity grows. The core of human understanding thus created becomes the essence of what he really is, separate and apart from those external and superficial qualities which give him social identity. The workmanship involved in building human understanding cannot proceed when love deviates from its submissive course. In order to develop a consistent submissive capacity the individual must be able to choose objects which are worthy of love. An automatic submissiveness in situations where the work of love is not appreciated and cannot be used constructively only threatens to overwhelm the psychological life of the lover. The desire to love is meaningless until it has found patterns of attachment to others which permit the constructive work of love to go forward. Creative love is a highly selective process and when the submissive tendencies are not appropriate to the situation the yielding individual must be capable of firm and effective assertion in rejecting an abuse of his inner faculties. As love finds circumstances in which it can abandon itself to its longing for attachment, it undertakes to remain loyal only insofar as its ability to give is fulfilled. The psychological essence of creative love lies in its ability to be effective in its patterns of giving. It cannot be effective where its influence is not wanted or needed. Love must be able to separate constructive submission from passivity. Loving is an active state in which the need to communicate is very strong. It is when the activity patterns of love are infiltrated by willfulness and selfishness that the ability of love to do constructive work is compromised. When love acts out of needs which obliterate the needs of the loved object it develops a compulsive structure. Love feelings which find compulsive outlets become fraudulent in nature insofar as the offering of love becomes a means of gaining control over another.

Psychological growth in the adult masculine personality takes place in an atmosphere of spontaneous self-confidence. The right to exercise the will in a dominant fashion arises from the fact that exploitable resources exist. As such resources are developed, the individual's world becomes a richer place in which to live. Power is a concept which is in bad repute with intellectuals, because it is often attached to potentially intimidating authority, especially in political areas. The workings of power are not immediately accessible to intuition. Power can only be understood in the experiential context in which it takes its being. Too often the conceptual analysis of personal power reduces it to a mere shadow of its real self, destroying the flow of its immediacy and concreteness. Power has an impelling need to be understood, however, for it is in the interaction between love and power that masculine identity finds its true access to an expanding interpersonal world. The moral capacity to intervene in the life of others is the natural proving ground of masculinity. Growth requires that the assertive personality maintain a high energy level, guided by pride and a hopeful expectation of the development of new avenues of mastery. The innovational probings set in motion by a high energy level are exploratory and experimental in nature. The individual judges the success of any particular commitment of energy by the amount of freedom that it bestows. Involvements that undermine his euphoric search for self-expression are selectively rejected. If the ability to dissolve attachments is undermined by guilt, growth is no longer possible. It is the development of the human skills which make responsible interventions possible, rather than the existence of any particular moral commitment, which is at issue in the growth process. The more the masculine personality enters experience in a free way, the less the individual can depend on established meanings to guide him. If he turns away from the experiential core of his development toward a personal search for truth in a conceptualizing way, he is subject to passive withdrawal and an obsessional preoccupation with feelings and ideas. The masculine personality requires a level of understanding which is adequate to the creative level of his emerging capacity for independent action. Only the love which comes from creative sources within his world can supply the degree of insight that he needs. If this need for love overwhelms his search for a dominant relationship with others, his personality becomes feminized in a dependent pattern and he becomes vulnerable to sentimentalized over-intensification of feeling. Sexual feeling readily becomes obsessive in such cases. His sexual potency offers a false promise of masculine dominance. His love capacities lie at the surface of his personality and fail to reach a level where insight can develop and where the work of love can be done. Love becomes a sexualized trap from which he constantly seeks escape through the discharge of tension in sexual experience. Such love has no continuity and the promiscuous sexuality that it brings has an addiction pattern. As the individual seeks liberation through a restless search for an ultimate and perfect gratification, he finds himself further entrapped by these efforts to reach a goal which exists only in his dreams. Only love coming to him from outside can establish the primary position of his masculine self, thus making deep feeling possible without feminization. As the masculine personality exploits feminine resources in his environment in a constructive way, both are fulfilled in their search for identity and both retain access to further growth.

17

The submissiveness of love can be channeled into conformity to social authority. Society is satisfied when the yielding individual does what he is supposed to do. The conforming individual feels love for his world in serving its interests, but this is not an expanding demotion or creative position. The warmth he feels takes the form of social cohesion and a general sense of having earned social acceptance. If internal pressures toward growth threaten to disturb the equilibrium of his social adjustment, he seeks to deepen himself in those areas which do not involve his adaptive life. It is this need to isolate inner creative development from the totality of his life pattern which accounts for the ivory tower quality of the human pursuit of love and truth. This pursuit is much more at home in the sphere of religious experience and in the search for knowledge in non-human fields than it is in the psychological give and take of daily living. If inner development opens up the capacity for intensity in ordinary human relationships, the individual finds himself in the position of investing love in areas where love has no work to do. Because the commitments to adaptive action patterns are rigid, the individual cannot find the flexibility that he needs to reach those elements in society which are worthy of the psychic investments he seeks to make.

The assertive personality finds socially supported power gratifications through believing in those things that society accepts as abiding values. As long as society can control what the individual thinks, it can grant him the right to act on his own, without the risk that his behavior will go beyond the limits established by social convention. Society does not need to make clearcut distinctions between yielding and assertive personalities. It influences both thought and action for the protection of its own stability, reaching any given individual in that aspect of his personality where his dependent needs make him vulnerable, thus maintaining control over potential deviancy. If the individual can think for himself he is told what to do, and if he can act on his own he is told what to think. When the masculine personality is exclusively committed to socially reinforced motivations, he lives a brainwashed style of life. If a developing need for freedom creates restlessness and dissatisfaction, he seeks to express his vigor and spontaneity in areas that are dissociated from his adaptive social patterns. Society encourages recreational activity in which euphoria can be shared gregariously, often with the aid of alcohol or other drugs. Enjoyment of this kind gives the individual a sense of importance which is no challenge to adaptive conformity. If his need for importance becomes more individual and personal, he enters a growth process which can only fulfill itself if he is free to select a human world where his moral capacities can find expanding outlets. He needs a personal world which is worthy of his growing human skills, and this means he must be able to select those situations where his capacity for intervention is both needed and wanted.

18

Love which can act without false power prerogatives is creative in structure. When personal power can experience loyal commitment without losing itself in sentimentalized attachments it becomes creative power. The capacity to give to others is at the heart of creativity. The instrument of love's creative work is truth. The pursuit of truth is a uniquely civilized human phenomenon. The female in nature finds all the truth she needs through obedience to her elemental instinctual tendencies. She reaches a full expression of her love capacities in the nurture of the young. Her devotional depth is no less than that of a creative human being, but this devotion finds a full outlet through those needs of the young which are clearly apparent to her. She does not need to do psychological work in order to be ready to clean the young when they are born, to nurse them, and to protect them in their helplessness from a potentially dangerous world. Human beings employ similar mechanisms where they are needed and effective, but once elemental needs are taken care of, there is a great surplus remaining in human relationships. When the young have come to maturity in the animal world, the female's need to give love passes out of the picture, but man's need for an inner identity keeps love alive and growing, directed toward helping others to live a better life. At this point love leaves the area of simple biological or socially reinforced adaptive needs and sets out to do its own work. The ability of love to understand and to convey that understanding in such a way as to alter the lives of others confers importance and uniqueness on the personality. This kind of individuality is the ultimate source of the individual's security in human relationships, because what he has to give can only come from him. If he cannot face the struggle inherent in the search for truth, he will find that he is using little instruments for big purposes. Under such circumstances love cannot really give but must demand love in return. Frustrations bring anger and a false power process is set in motion. Love which wants only to be loved is always compulsive in pattern and is characterized by selfish and self-serving goals.

Power also has its biological and socially supported channels of expression. In nature the male takes responsibility for the protection of his domain, and with the arrival of the young his position of strength carries him to the highest levels of courageous commitment. He does not have to develop his capacity for moral choices because the immaturity of the young defines the area of his responsibility. The creative reachings of power in civilized human beings carry the masculine personality into areas where personal courage and integrity become unique attributes of the individual. He chooses to commit himself to others as a form of voluntary giving based on self-confidence and pride. This is the source of real freedom in human terms, because whatever he chooses to do has constructive implications, and he can therefore exercise his will without restriction in human affairs. As he reaches for a higher expression of what is right in his personal life, he can be sidetracked by an excessive acceptance of simple obligations toward the elemental needs of others. His sense of dominance is then out of proportion to the scope of his aspirations for psychological importance, and his pride deteriorates into pretentiousness and vanity. This kind of power position is vulnerable to a false over-intensification of feeling in an obsessive pattern. Ordinary events are infused with the spirit of great undertakings. The individual no longer seeks true opportunity in an expanding way, but instead turns toward self-validation through posturing and the winning of flattery. He lives in a world where people agree to reinforce each other's ego status, using mechanisms of family pride, racial and religious prejudice, and a general tendency to depreciate anyone who is seen as different. In such a world of mutual power supports, the hatred of others is fostered and encouraged, undermining the development of moral capacity.

19

Throughout history truth and right have been reached only after a struggle with social dogma and authority. The writings of Copernicus were on the prohibited list of the Catholic church for centuries, and the teaching of evolution has been prohibited in recent times in certain areas of the South. But this kind of fear of knowledge creates hardly a ripple compared to the stormy confrontations which the pursuit of psychological knowledge can create in the modem world. Men have resisted the influence of mechanical and industrial progress, scoffing at the enterprise of inventors and refusing to supply the resources for the full utilization and development of new techniques, but this kind of conservatism is as nothing compared to society's ability to drown in a sea of neglect the efforts of individuals to apply moral principles in the daily life of man. It was 2000 years ago that Jesus stood on the shores of Galilee, inviting his disciples to become fishers of men. There has been very little progress since that time in integrating men of his caliber into the general social fabric.

It is much easier for the individual to turn his attention toward the search for truth in physics or chemistry, or toward establishing what is right in building bridges or putting a man on the moon, than it is to face the massive impact on the personal life of the self when social dogma and authority must be challenged. Society has every right to protect its stability. The individual who pursues human truth and right must do so at his own peril. If he is to give up the rewards which society confers on those who comply with its standards of thinking and acting, he must be able to find personal rewards of a spiritual and ethical nature which more than compensate him for his loss. This means that science and engineering in human relationships belong in the hands of those who are capable of investing their whole life pattern in the creative task they have set for themselves. The thinker is a lover of his subject matter, and if his subject matter is other human beings he can no longer afford to confine the investment of his love feelings to patterns which society tells him are acceptable. The attempt to love that which is inherently unlovable destroys the inner security of the personality. The man who builds constructively must use his personal power capacities, and when he commits himself to moral undertakings he cannot accept the obligation to control that which is committed to intransigence. Love which is not needed is a voice calling in the wind. Power which does not select its opportunities finds itself standing in a hurricane, commanding the winds to cease.

Since conformity offers the promise of an easier life, the individual will endure considerable inner emptiness in order to gain its rewards, but if the depression becomes too great he has no alternative but to face life on a more independent basis. When a man lives the kind of flexible and growing life on which the search for truth and right is based, he develops a great sense of personal importance, but his independence carries the risk of adaptive failure. He must go through many transitional growth states in which he is attempting to use psychological tools which are not yet reliable. Psychological growth is not possible without experimentation, and if an experiment is a genuine one it must contain the possibility of failure. The creative individual must lose many battles if he is to win his war for independent self-expression. Automatic social conformity has the quality of selling one's soul to the devil, whereas creativity tends to go in the direction of childlike dependence in practical affairs. Great undertakings which end in ineffectuality do nobody any good. The line between the areas that belong to creative strivings and adaptive conformity is never clearly drawn. It is guided by the inner need to avoid the depressive effects of over-conformity on the one hand, and the need to reach a sufficient adaptive adequacy on the other.

It is in the area of romantic feelings and attachments that conformity and creativity fight their greatest battles. The socially reinforced images of what it is to be a man or a woman erect tremendous barriers against an independent search for inner identity. The patterns in which sex and celebration are expressed are highly sensitive areas in the making of a successful social adaptation. Deviancy in these matters sets the individual apart to a far greater degree than vocational or political individuality. The civilized world keeps sexual problems hidden because it cannot afford to illuminate the rigid dogmatic influences which guide the development of sexual feeling among human beings. The development of sexual feeling is governed by the simplistic assumption that the male and female are attracted to each other because their genitals are different. This carefully cultivated delusion ignores nature's real mechanism which is based on the mated interaction of the yielding of the female and the assertion of the male. Civilized society has never developed the psychological resources to cope with the fact that among males there are both yielding and assertive personalities as there are among females. Without a true courtship and union based on a polarity between personalities, there can be no reliable attraction between male and female. The automatic acceptance of the erotic significance of the physical difference between male and female is the primary weapon of the conventional world in opposing the development of a creative inner identity. The channeling of erotic feeling is a facade built up out of conventional images of what is attractive to a man or a woman, in which fascination with secondary sexual characteristics, physical mannerisms, the pushing to the fore of superficial active or passive qualities, and even style of dress play a heavy part. The cultivation of the sense of gender difference begins early in childhood where the entire style of fantasy and play is divided into boy and girl patterns. At puberty this process is intensified through various seductive and intimidating social influences designed to guide the adolescent toward the opposite sex. The pressure is greatest in the area of the beginning explorations of physical affection and the pride of mutual attachment, and those who fail to respond are subject to a sense of inferiority and guilt. Society fears honesty in sexual matters because it perceives such independence to be a threat to social conformity in general and to the institution of marriage in particular. Because of the artificial pressure which society exerts in the forming of sexual patterns, it finds itself burdened with the promiscuity which results when sexuality is separated from the natural moorings which a love relationship provides. This pressure originates in the need to protect itself from the threat inherent in the homosexual resources of the personality.

20

It is impossible to love deeply without exposing the self to the need for an ideal, and when this ideal takes a human form it turns out to be that embodiment of moral authority which is called masculinity. Nor can personal power continue to expand without seeking the unique opportunities which love can bestow, and this capacity for submissive responsiveness in another is called femininity. When men carry the masculine-feminine polarity outside the world of man-woman relationships and into a world of unstructured affection and cooperation, the kind of creative interplay comes into existence which is the proving ground of psychological growth. The deeper the yielding individual's personality, the more he must rely on his own insights in his perceptions of what is worthy of love. He knows that he is on the right pathway when his developing comprehension reveals the presence of beauty to him. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it is because he is capable of finding beauty where it was not apparent before that he can bring new truth into existence. The discovery of beauty is an active process and comes only to the mind that is capable of doing independent intellectual work.

As personal power increases its surplus energy investment it has an increasing need for independent exploration of the nature of opportunity. When the sense of reality is based on a fixed picture of what the world is like, there is no room for the development of new modalities of mastery. It is impossible to develop new capacities for intervention in the life of others without a changing awareness of what the needs of others really are. The exploration of psychological opportunity by the assertive individual is guided by a sense of the goodness of others, in the sense that they are ready and willing to respond to what he offers. Since what he offers constitutes a new and unique event in the interplay between human beings, it cannot attain value until it is appreciated. The offering of a higher level of moral responsibility requires genuine sensitivity to the need which exists in others to respond to leadership. The creative man of action tests the ground with every step he takes. There is a union between the will of the doer and the quality of his materials, and he only discovers these qualities in the process of manipulative action. The goodness which is inherent in human responsiveness can only be discovered through the taking of control.

Creative love is oriented toward giving and its primary tool is insight. Creative power is equally organized for giving and its primary tool is the kind of constructive mastery which is keyed to the nature of the materials it manipulates. Love and power use the mated mechanism, each finding its potential through the other in the same psychological way that male and female mate in nature. When a psychologically yielding male is interacting with masculinity, he is exposed to an intensity of feeling which can readily enter a sexual channel. A psychologically assertive male equally finds himself exposed to a tendency to possess the feminine resources so richly developed in the yielding male personality. There are times when sensitive personalities respond homosexually to the conventional masculine traits of other men. This kind of reaction does not set the stage for an independent search for a greater love capacity. Such individuals often select objects to idealize that have no need for such intensity. A good deal of the homosexual feeling in the civilized world is of this order. It is often kept hidden, feeding masturbation fantasies, and if expressed becomes an embarrassment to its object. Homosexual love which cannot find creative grounds between two partners threatens the entire structure of the socially reinforced masculine role without offering anything of significant psychological value in return. When homosexuality is accepted between two individuals on a genuinely mated basis, there still remains the difficult problem of excluding sexuality from the workings of love and power interactions in the rest of the psychic life. There is a great paradox in the fact that creative love and power development requires the exclusion of promiscuous sexual phenomena, and yet when this goal is attained in the relationships between men by social prohibitions against homosexuality, love and power are deprived of the kind of open access to expanding awareness and commitment on which their creative function depends. The only sure way for men to dissipate their promiscuous homosexual tendencies is on the basis of a full capacity to understand and deal with the homosexual components within their personalities. The love and power interactions between men are deeply rooted in the original father-son polarity and in the fact that their interactions provide a special place where men can employ a full measure of human honesty and courage, uninfluenced by conventional social barriers.

21

Sexuality is not fully healthy until sexual experience has found a natural and spontaneous place in a relationship between partners. The better the inner identity of the individual is developed, the more he must find his own way in sexual feeling and behavior. The masturbatory patterns which initiate the sexual life give expression to the fact that sexuality can exist separate and apart from an established relationship. When sexual pairings come into being through empathetically shared masturbatory capacities, sex is separated off from the need for a mated union. The adolescent striving to reach sexual adequacy in a coital relationship between male and female puts a false emphasis on the mechanics of the sex act, raising its accomplishment to a level of importance which threatens the existence of the psychological courtship on which a true mated union must be based. Society has a great psychological investment in the belief that a sexual event between two genitals which are physically different constitutes a true union. Without the psychological differences which make a genuine union possible, the physical differences in the bodies of sexual partners captures an excess of psychic investment which can only obstruct the development of a mated relationship. No amount of fascination with the supposed importance of anatomical differences can hide the fact that psychologically unmated sexuality remains essentially masturbatory in pattern. In its anxiety to develop the heterosexual responsiveness of its members, society pressures masturbatory sexuality into heterosexual channels, and then asks the growing individual to wait for ultimate sexual development until a marital relationship is made. Marriage endows the sexual life with the outward form of a mated relationship. Society's answer to the problem of the sexually promiscuous tendencies that it has itself created is to issue a preemptory prohibition against sexuality which is not expressed through marriage.

In the homosexual area, there is a great deal more flexibility in the independent dealing with sexual capacities. The individual is set free from the socially supported automaticity of sexual patterns which erect a barrier against the exploration of alternatives of sexual feeling and behavior. When mutual masturbatory patterns are brought into play in relations between men, there is no way to evade the recognition of the fact that such sexuality has no mated significance. If men are to proceed from this mutual masturbatory base toward a true romantic attachment with polarization between the personalities, they must travel this path by utilizing their own psychological resources, finding and developing inner identity through the interlocking dependence they provide for each other. If a true courtship is to occur in either a heterosexual or a homosexual relationship, it must utilize this kind of independent search for an inner identity. Because of society's fear of independence in sexual matters, the exploration of the nature and function of genuine psychological masculinity and femininity fails to find the central importance that belongs to it. Mankind's ignorance concerning sexuality is directly related to its abysmal lack of preparation for the exploration of a feminine or a masculine status in a romantic attachment. Society is satisfied if masturbatory sexuality can be forced into patterns of expression which satisfy the needs of the institution of marriage. The fact that under this system sexuality remains on the loose in the human psyche, always ready to express itself in inappropriate situations, is taken to be a natural and inevitable aspect of human sexual life.

22

Independent growth requires of the individual that he take responsibility for his own sexual capacities. As long as he conforms to the social pressures which would take this responsibility away from him he remains psychologically in the position of a child. The core of man's struggle to reach a creative adulthood is contained within his efforts to guide his own romantic nature. As long as his sexual feelings and celebrative attitudes are influenced and controlled by forces outside himself, no attempt to expand his love and power capacities can possibly succeed. The deepening of love and its widening application in