The understanding of human nature is an enormous problem, whose solution has been the goal of our culture since time immemorial. It is not a science that should be pursued by a few specialists only. Its proper objective must be the understanding of human nature by every human being.
— 1927, , Understanding Human Nature Psychology cannot limit itself to the phenomena of consciousness, but must extend its technical observation to the whole man: his acts, his powers, his habits, and his entire personality. It must be a science of human nature if it is to be a science at all.
— 1945, Robert Edward Brennan,
Few would disagree with Alexander Pope's statement that "the proper study of mankind is man." If we follow the progress of this study through the years, however, we cannot help but be disappointed. The modern era, in particular, has energetically pursued this goal; in the past century and a half, it has created an entirely new discipline, psychology, to bring to "man" a rigorous knowledge. The results, however, have fallen far short of expectations. Producing with its measurement and research abundant "findings," psychology has scarcely advanced us beyond what we already know about human nature through common sense. In addition, it has been increasingly fragmenting into multiple areas, approaches, and schools. Man, it seems, is fated to stand sphinx-like behind a veil, rebuffing every attempt we make at methodical knowledge; and whatever insights we do gain into him are those that we find in fiction, drama, and poetry.
— 2012, , Our knowledge has become so extensive, so complex, so technical and so specialized that it has to be formulated in language which is decreasingly related to that of ordinary life and interpersonal relationships. This in turn makes it ever less available to us as a basis for a view of the world that we can actually live with, in an everyday sense. The upshot of this is that we come very powerfully to feel that there is something dehumanizing, depersonalizing, about the consequences of the growth of our own knowledge. And the result of that is that — side by side with the growth of knowledge and directly related to it — there grows a sense of the need for what one might call a philosophy of man, some sort of theoretical conception of ourselves which helps us to preserve our sense of our own humanity and relate us to our social and cognitive situation.
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Life has always seemed a little complicated to most of us. We just try to muddle through and hope we don't get caught in the machinery, like Charlie Chaplin does in "Modern Times". But there are always people who try to figure out the basic rules of the world around them. For example, in the animated world on the right, you could start by studying the behavior of marbles in motion. This is, in fact, where Newton started. We call such people scientists.

Three hundred years after the Enlightenment, the idea of a science of human nature is still new to some people. But in those days, it was practically all anybody ever talked about. If there were underlying laws that explained physical phenomena, what laws explained human behavior? Time after time, attempts to agree on the foundations of such a science have collapsed under heated debates about terminology, or this camp's refusal to accept that camp's discoveries.

During the last two centuries too much of social science has degenerated into politically fashionable interpretations of skewed statistics. How often do we hear that psychologists can tell you anything you want to know about the effect of dinner bells on dogs, that psychiatry is used to suppress dissent, or that psychoanalysts are still vacationing in Disneyland? Even New Age psychotherapists avoid educating their patients when hand-holding and the sale of inter-class validation — remember medieval indulgences? — can get the bills paid about as well.

Many observers of this state of affairs have suggested that we need theoreticians with more backbone, who aren't afraid to say what they really think. We take pride in offering the ideas of Paul Rosenfels as a candidate for what may in the future come to be regarded as the foundation of a true science of human nature. According to Paul Rosenfels, another cause is "homophobia". The love tendencies are inevitably attracted by that which is psychologically masculine, which usually confuses the masculine image the thinker has of himself. This creates a problem of secret homosexual feeling in yielding individuals. Embarrassment over this emotional tendency is the outstanding cause of the psychological dishonesty which has slowed the development of the science of human nature.

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When Paul said that psychology's biggest hurdle was homophobia, he didn't mean that scientists didn't like gay people. He meant that they were unable to fully investigate their own psyches for fear of the homosexuality they might find. For a science of man (the species) must start with the scientist's examination of himself before he can ever be objective about other people. And because even gay scientists continue to cling to an artificially impersonal model of objectivity, their view of human nature remains lacking in real human content. According to in (1943), psychoanalysis is a disease whose symptoms psychoanalysis tries to cure, a psychologist is a person trained to cure the obscure, and psychology is the science which tells us what everybody knows in language that nobody understands.