The Ninth Street Center What Our Members Think

Walter Ross

In a basic sense, Paul describes for the first time the psychology of the creative surplus which lies outside adaptive strivings and where the best in human nature resides. In this core of character, called inner identity, human beings find their most stable source of mental health. In Paul's approach, the narrow limitations of traditional physical science are set aside in favor of new concepts which are defined in context.

Paul's science is a science of creative growth, taking place in an expanding personal world where polarity between interacting submissive and dominant character specializations, whether detached from gender origins or not, is the essence of a high level of psychological achievement or mental health. Inner identity is the product of polarized growth between individuals who have chosen predominantly submissive or dominant roles in the surplus (non-adaptive) areas of living, apart from day-to-day survival needs.

The biological mating drives in lower animals are the replica for psychological mating in civilized humans with no necessary link to gender origins. Polarized submissive love and dominant power, dedicated to the elaboration of truth and right in human affairs, bring individuals a residual lifelong inner resource which is the mark of creative maturity, and maturity in this sense is the life-force or soul of human progress. Truth and right are seen as products of creative growth that have no arbitrary terminal point and thus are never final. The discovery of truth and the production of right in individual lives, when universalized, alters society, changing social institutions.

Paul's revolutionary science says that maturity has been instinctive as a goal since the beginnings of social life, but its unique psychological nature has been little understood. To elaborate this view, Paul has explored broadly and deeply the characteristics of immaturity, thus offering a unified science of human nature. He shows how immature beliefs lie at the core of established social rules and customs falsely seen as mature and are used to ostracize independent creativity as a threat to the social order. Paul shows how false maturity standards promote destructive influences such as lifestyle depression, addictions, criminality and war which place civilization in recurring states of crisis and threaten the success of human tenancy on earth.

Guidelines to the understanding of the three areas or compartments of living are elaborated: 1) adaptive as in family life and careers; 2) gregarious and esthetic as in the art of living; and 3) creative as in psychologically mated love and power relationships whether intra-gender or inter-gender. The optimum placement of the three compartments in an individual's life is fully explained.

Paul shows how the age-old ideals of mankind as expressed in religion, philosophy and literary works can be shifted from the relative seclusion of thinkers to work as a disciplined science in the marketplace of life where they become usable self-knowledge in the daily lives of individuals and thus increase the resources of human contentment and happiness.

The instinctual basis for the seeking of truth and right through the polarity of love and power in paired relationships, when not suppressed by social forces, is universal and central to human beings and is not the province of an aristocracy of intellectuals or talented individuals. When psychological growth in an expanding personal world becomes the first priority of living, independent self-knowledge about what constitutes mental health and the quality of life become superior to authoritarian social and religious dogma as the source of survival for the human species.

Thus, an all-encompassing science provides the means for a lifestyle of growth that can dispel universal fears and anxieties engendered by centuries of ignorance about the real nature of man. The implications for human values and behavior are both radical and revolutionary.

For myself, Paul's science has been a liberating influence, changing the way I view the human scene. It has brought the harmony of understanding in place of the disharmony of half-knowledge. It illuminates the truly consequential matters of living through a process of magnificent discovery.