Crisis is not new in human history, but the crisis of our age has assumed unprecedented proportions. Material abundance is everywhere, but spiritual peace is still the blessing of the few. Crisis speaks to us in the passion of the revolutionary, in the suffering of the neurotic, in the complaint of the critic and in the defiance of the delinquent. It also gains expression in the lives of the creative personalities of our time who forge new values and fashion new meanings.

This book examines the crisis of our age and illuminates the role that creative men and women must assume in resolving it. The author offers no panaceas, no quick and easy solutions, no echo of past dogmas. He believes we must begin to understand human nature in all its forms, yet he advocates no return to traditional concepts of man's nature, for their rigidity stifles the very creativity which alone holds promise of releasing man from the imprisoning web of commonly held psychological pseudo-truths.

Homosexuality in its broadest sense emerges as the key to this creative struggle, particularly the growing relationship between fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters. The principle of polarization, as defined and elaborated by the author, operating above and beyond the conventional transactions of life, explains human beings as psychologically masculine and psychologically feminine regardless of gender. This principle of development, which is not found in the animal world, amounts to a new kind of vibration in the universe and accounts for the rise of civilization. The implications of this theory are worked out in probing detail with a simplicity and clarity that is unique in psychological literature.

On a scientific level this book is offered as the record of a monumental discovery comparable to the Newtonian revolution in physics, yet it is written as a guide to living for all who are independent enough to seek out the rewards which come from understanding it. Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process is the offering of a brilliant physician who has given a lifetime of thought and analysis to his subject. It stands as an astonishing answer to the hopes and fears of a troubled world.

[1] 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.

[2] 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.

[3] 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.

[4] 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.

[5] 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.

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 extraversion, 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,

Not on sad Stygian shore, nor in clear sheen
Of far Elysian plain, shall we meet those
Among the dead whose pupils we have been
Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again,
Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.

The best place to hear Paul today is at one of the talk groups held every week at the Ninth Street Center in New York City, where his words continue to animate the hearts and minds of his former — and now future — students, the very first generation of Rosenfelsians. But even those who join our community continue to read and read again this book. Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process bears witness to an uncommon life illuminated by a Promethean fire, a fire whose radiance will not fade as long as men seek the truth or reach for the right.

[6] 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.

[7] 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.

[8] 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.

[9] 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.

[10] 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.

[11] 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.

[12] 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.

[13] 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.

[14] 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.

[15] 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.

[16] 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.

[17] 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.

[18] 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.

[19] 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.

[20] 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.

[21] 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.

[22] 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.

[23] 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.

[24] 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.

[25] 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.

[26] 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.

[27] 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.

[28] 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.

[29] 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.

[30] 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.

[31] 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.

[32] 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.

[33] 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.

[34] 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.

[35] 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.

[36] 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.

[37] 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.

[38] 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.

[39] 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.

[40] 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.

[41] 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.

[42] 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.

[43] 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.

[44] 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.

[45] 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.

[46] 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.

[47] 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.

[48] 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.

[49] 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.

[50] 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.

[51] 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.

[52] 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.

[53] 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.

[54] 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.

[55] 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.

[56] 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.

[57] 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.

[58] 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.

[59] 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.

[60] 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.

[61] 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.

[62] 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 human affairs inevitably brings an increasing sexual responsiveness. If this sexual reservoir within the self becomes a burden to the psyche, disrupting the capacity for stable romantic and adaptive relationships, the individual will find himself victimized by either promiscuous tendencies or by a neurotic accumulation of feelings which have no outlet. If he finds these states intolerable, he has no choice but to erect defenses against the deepening of feeling and the exploration of his love capacities. In a similar way, personal power cannot accumulate the energy which seeks a widening capacity for moral intervention in the lives of others if the individual's heightening euphoria and spontaneity are disruptive to his personal stability. If he cannot guide his self-confidence in a disciplined way, he will either be drawn into an addiction to automatic euphoriant experiences such as drugs can provide, or disorganized by psychopathic restlessness. Under these conditions he must erect defenses against the accumulation of such surplus energies.

[63] The struggle to deal with sex and celebration independently cannot succeed where these surplus phenomena become entities in themselves, separated off from their natural love and power moorings. The individual who attempts to make a good sexual adjustment in sexual terms is doomed to defeat. The study of sexuality as a subject in itself is only an exercise in voyeuristic gratification. Emphasis on the concrete aspects of sexual experience makes of sexuality an athletic exercise and arouses a hope of fulfillment that can never be realized in this way. Independent sexual development rests on the growth of the love capacities, and it is in this area that social conformity does its worst in maintaining the childlike status of individuals. As the adolescent comes into maturity he must face the difficult realization that he lives in a world that wants him to take love capacities for granted. The more independent he becomes, the more he realizes that his knowledge of what love is and how it operates is at an extremely elementary level. As he deviates from accepted standards of normality, the more he needs insights which only he can find. If he follows conventional paths he finds himself prepared for a life which he has not chosen for himself. If he follows his own path, his sense of ignorance and inadequacy is very great. Only the strong motivations which come from love itself, namely the individual's love for mankind and his desire to help build a better world, are sufficient to carry him through the uncertainties of a long developmental process. He cannot take his journey into the unknown without the inner security and peace of mind which come from a deeply rooted devotion to the search for truth. Since he does not yet know the full dimensions of his love or how it is to be used, his attempts to love have a tentative nature. The growth of love requires the right to make a succession of love relationships, in spite of the fact that the ultimate goal of love is permanence and loyalty. Love is not free to develop unless it can honor its own vision, and love which attaches itself to objects which have no need for its expanding capacity to give will be stifled in its efforts at growth, wiping out the inner identity of the lover. The forcing of permanence on love because this is the way it is supposed to be constitutes an abandonment of its real goals, since the permanent quality of love can only reach fulfillment where the work of love never ends. This occurs when the work of love releases power in others. This mutual expansion of inner resources, which takes place in a true mated interaction, keeps the inner self always young in spirit.

[64] The growing individual wants experiences which help him undermine the depressing aspects of conformity. He puts a high value on sensual and euphoric novelty because the new and the unexpected have the potential for opening up his personality in unaccustomed ways. In contemporary terms, such experiences have a psychedelic impact. The reaching for an expanding sexual sensuality and for new avenues of celebrative excitement are the catalytic agents of inner change. These forces intensify and invigorate the searchings for an inner identity. If the struggle to escape the dulling effects of social dogma and authority is a difficult one, sexual libertarianism and the indiscriminate seeking of euphoriant release, especially with the aid of drugs, tends to take over, thus obscuring the real growth goals of the personality. Falling in love, provided it rests on an independent search for self in both partners, is the greatest psychedelic experience of all. The great sense of personal importance which lovers find and share together must lead on into further growth in their individual relationships with others. Once a mating is made in the civilized world, there is a strong tendency for its goals to be taken over by the institution of marriage. It is easy to abandon the personal search for self-development in favor of the social supports for loyalty and commitment which are inherent in marriage, but when this happens, the creative relationship with the outside world is compromised. This is the mechanism that exists in nature where the coming of the young takes up all the surplus capacities of the parents. Animals do not need to continue a growth process in such circumstances since nature's purposes have been attained in preparing them for the care of the young. If the need of civilized human beings for a continuing growth process is ignored in favor of marital stability, the potentials which romance has released find no constructive outlets with the passing of the years and the marriage becomes a source of rigidity and depression. Society attempts to deal with this situation by encouraging an expansion in the practical preoccupations and activities of family life. Parents tend to live through their children, finding artificially inflated meaning and value in every aspect of the child's developmental history. Emotional emptiness is counteracted by family centered indulgences and status gratifications.

[65] If the reinforcements of inner identity which romance brings are not to be dissipated in patterns of self-indulgence and vanity, individuals must learn that falling in love is only the beginning of an exploration of the personal uses of love and power. A mated union has the inherent tendency to shut out the external world. Every romance leads into a honeymoon and holiday period which must then alternate with phases of reestablishing a relationship with the outer world. If a romantic pair can utilize their growing inner identities in a creative reaching toward a world of their own choosing, the redirecting of their psychic resources outward toward the world will not damage the relationship they have found together. Many of the great romances of literature are tragedies, because the pair could not find avenues of dealing with the world which were acceptable to them. This is the Romeo and Juliet pattern in which lovers are destroyed because their inner experiences have rendered them unfit to deal with a potentially alien and hostile world. Romantic attachments are essentially a preparation for a creative style of living. In order to succeed, the individual must make room for the separate quality of the identity of each partner and this requires great spaces in the relationship. Such spaces seem to be in conflict with the great involvement that both desire. They can only establish the individuality of each if they understand and use the love and power polarity between them, and help each other make a place for an independent reaching toward a world of their own choosing. When each functions as a separate individual in relationship to his world, the psychological content of their union can remain highly romantic. In such a union, the basic goal is not to be found in establishing a home, or in raising children, or in sharing mutual friends and activities, desirable as these goals may be in the proper context, but in their mutual contribution to each other's inner identity, thus performing a psychotherapeutic function in each other's lives through the bringing of understanding and skill to their human developmental struggles. Each finds in the other their primary creative outlet. The union is a microcosm of the creative potentials which they seek to apply to an external world.

[66] The need for romantic fulfillment becomes greater the more the inner identity grows. Inner identity always brings the imbalance which is so characteristic of the relationship between the male and female in nature. When the reaching for a mate is no longer guided by the institution of marriage, the individual is precipitated into a psychological growth process, characterized by impermanence and incompleteness in his attachments. He cannot reach loyalty and commitment by a direct route. His love capacities must find an object worthy of love but since capacities are growing his choice of a loved object is subject to change. This situation creates the paradox that the more he longs for a mated fulfillment, the more he must be capable of travelling a path characterized by inconstancy and change. The exploration of mating is further complicated by exposure to the promiscuous and addictive patterns which are inherent in cultural influences. Many growing individuals spend a lifetime searching for the union that they want but cannot find. Since they cannot dissipate or control the sexual and celebrative pressures within their personalities in conventional ways, they end by justifying perverse and addictive phenomena. They are like prisoners digging a tunnel to freedom who cannot go far enough to reach the open air. Their passageway to a better life has become a new form of incarceration. Once the expectation of independent growth has increased the sense of self-importance, failure arouses great fear and rage in the personality. Psychological resources are then over-invested in sexual sensuality and the restless search for celebrative excitement because these pleasures and enjoyments tend to keep fear and rage at bay. Others turn back to the haven of conventionality, accepting the cultivation of appearances in place of the struggle with tendencies which are too much for the personality to handle.

[67] Because few people find the romantic union that they want, there is a great overemphasis on romantic phenomena in the western world. Men would like to take fulfillment of their romantic needs for granted. When a man has attained complete romantic fulfillment, he has really done nothing more than any male and female in nature is capable of doing. Men could not possibly invest so much of themselves in this struggle if it did not have a larger meaning. Behind the mated longing lies a creative human need for uniqueness and individuality. The pathway to this sense of personal importance lies through the inner identity which a romantic union reinforces and develops. If the need to give to humanity in a creative pattern fades out of the picture, the need for romantic fulfillment cannot last. If the individual succeeds in establishing a romantic outlet on which he can rely, he can get about the business of building the constructive aspects of his relationship to society. Individuals who are committed to creative goals search for romantic fulfillment as an irreducible necessity. It becomes a basic need to the same degree that a food supply is a required necessity. The unremitting search for romance puts the individual in a position similar to a person who is dying of thirst in the desert. At such a time, he thinks of little else than water, and if he finds it, it is as if the gift of life is being bestowed on him in this moment. But this does not mean that when he returns to a place where the water supply is plentiful that he will spend the rest of his life worshipping the water faucet, or that his entire life will now be suffused with meaning because he can remember the day when water was lacking. Romantic fulfillment could not be so important if it were only an end in itself. It is ultimately a tool for creative living and because this is so, men will continue to seek it as if it were a survival need.

[68] The search for truth is a form of feminine service to mankind. This channel of self-expression is based on love which is guided away from the romantic outlet and therefore does not flow into sexuality. The development of independent moral capacity is a form of masculine commitment to leadership which is guided away from a romantic channel, avoiding celebrative dissipation of its energies. The non-sexual phase of animal mating translates surpluses into warmth and pride, which are then ready for the nurture and protection of the young. The same mechanisms form the basis of the creative life of civilized human beings. Animals do not need to learn to handle desexualized love and non-celebrative power because nature removes these forces when the female is no longer in heat. Human beings retain their sexual and celebrative capacities with continuity through a lifetime. The ability to use love without sexualization, and power without overflow into celebrative channels, is a primary developmental need of the personality. Conventional social influences on the sexual and celebrative life tend to relieve the personality of this task. These influences can only do their work effectively, however, when they are dogmatic and arbitrary, and the more independent the individual becomes, the less he can tolerate the price he must play for this kind of help. One of the advantages of conventional heterosexual patterns is that they help men to keep romantic tendencies out of their interactions together, and this is especially important where their relationships have a strong mated pattern. The greater the depth and scope of male involvements become, the less men can rely on social prohibitions for the maintaining of the non-romantic and creative thrust of such involvements. Independence in the pursuit of human truth and right requires a parallel independence in the handling of sexual and celebrative phenomena. A growing independence must inevitably create a crisis in the awareness of homosexual feeling and capacity. When individuals deal with their homosexual tendencies without shame and guilt, they enter an area of free psychological choice where genuine alternatives exist in the dealing with their romantic capacities. The tendency to misuse erotic capacities between men can as well be controlled by the making of a genuine mated union with a man as by the usual pattern of treating such tendencies as if they either did not exist or could not be tolerated. Men who do not fear their homosexual capacities are in a position to control unwanted manifestations without damage to the expansion of their creative relationships. The utilization of heterosexual patterns to control homosexual ones not only reduces the independence of men in their interaction together, but also brings destructive implications into the relationships of men and women, because the expectations of non-romantic creative relationships between individuals of the opposite sex is thereby reduced. In a world in which the erotic implications of man-woman relationships are being constantly pushed to the fore, the scope of love and power interactions between them dwindles into insignificance. It is extremely difficult to build significant friendships between men and women in such an atmosphere.

[69] Conceptual thinking which is not motivated by a great devotional submission of its subject matter will sidetrack into a superficial acceptance of what is convenient for the thinker to believe. If the thinker communicates logically and with authority, using as a basis his prestige as a man of special knowledge, he can gain a sense of importance in his own eyes and an influence over the thinking of others which is useful for self-serving purposes. The human mind can only reach new truth through the utilization of feminine mechanisms. In order to bring new modalities of the right into being, the man of action utilizes dominant energies which are masculine in nature. If he fails to accept the challenge inherent in the exploration of the untried and the unfamiliar, his sense of importance can only be maintained by a pretentious and dramatic elaboration of his style of procedure, capturing and holding the feelings of others through dogmatic group influences. His personal charisma gives him a sense of control which is limited to those areas where others give him an automatic response. In such circumstances, the right becomes anything that will win him approval, and moral posture becomes subsidiary to personal vanity.

[70] The creative search for truth requires the abandonment of self-serving willfulness in thinking. The creative search for moral strength requires that the individual avoid seduction by the kind of pretension which substitutes the posture of power for its constructive essence. Truth comes into being as a gift from the thinker to society and has an objective existence separate and apart from him, once the work of truth seeking has reached its goal. The man of action develops the right as a form of giving to others, and the right passes freely into the lives of others through identification and imitation, once its unique value has been demonstrated. Concepts which once resided exclusively in the mind of the creative thinker spread out through a widening group of individuals and become their own insights as they accept and apply them. Modalities of action which are the unique development of the creative innovator are taken over by other individuals, when the increased scope and effectiveness inherent in such mastery becomes attractive to them. Truth and right make equals of those it teaches and leads, because the tools it uses have come into being out of a need to give. On the other hand, authoritarian and willful thinking puts others in a dependent and childlike position, as does the influence of leadership which depends on dogma for its effectiveness.

[71] The communication of insight is the primary tool of creative love. The ability to intervene in the lives of others through the demonstration of superior patterns of moral responsibility is the primary tool of creative personal power. When men attempt to use their independent love and power capacities, they find themselves alone in an unknown and chaotic area, needing insights and modalities of mastery which have not yet come into being. The nature of love and power cannot be taken for granted in such transitional growth states. The lover must not only discover how love works but must also find objects of love which permit his development to continue. Power cannot maintain self-confidence and determination without exploring the nature of genuine opportunity. Any progress in the development of an inner identity brings a corresponding challenge to reach an outside world of expanding psychological dimensions. The goals of growth do not involve a fundamental changing of the self. As the self expands, it is the world in which the individual lives that must change. Growth processes fail because inner resources remain locked within the self, unable to find an external world that is worthy of its expansionist nature.

[72] The workmanship of creative love needs more than an atmosphere of pure warmth and feeling. Deep feeling commits the self to the service of an ideal. The loyalties thus created provide the motivational structure in which the efforts of love to find the kind of truth which is of meaning to the loved object can go forward. It is only when love can serve its object that it can maintain its independent identity. Its submission is then neither automatic or passive, but consists of an active affirmation of its capacity to fulfill its function. Love which seeks gratification in exclusively empathetic channels, asking only to be loved in return, tends to solve its problems by a simple renewal of its tenderness and warmth. Such love cannot encourage the independent development of power, but tends to ensnare it in commitments which leave no room for freedom.

[73] Personal power needs more than euphoriant pride to reach significant commitments. Constructive power uses its self-confident independence as a testing ground for involvements, ready to accept new loyalties wherever the sense of commitment does not undermine the integrity of the self. The testing of feeling attachments in this way constitutes the search for opportunity. When power is trapped by fixed beliefs and patterns of feeling, it turns toward those human interactions in which euphoriant experiences are mutually supported, and dominance becomes a matter of socially supported prestige instead of the constructive building of modalities of mastery. Such power cannot encourage the independent development of love because it is hostile to genuine insight.

[74] The personality has the task of reaching balance in a way that does not efface inner identity. Love must learn to assert itself without losing its submissive orientation, and power must learn to yield to circumstances without losing its dominant organization. Yielding femininity is vulnerable to a sense of inferiority because of its lack of preparation for independent action. Assertive masculinity tends to develop a sense of guilt because it does not find loyal feelings in an independent way. When the yielding individual is attached to an ideal, he can act out of service to that ideal. When the assertive individual attains a sense of ownership of assets which are valuable to him, he can feel deeply about his possessions. When the yielding individual accepts the pattern of action which an authoritative society imposes on him, he responds as if that society were an idealized entity. In this way he can act effectively, but he must pay the price of lack of flexibility in choosing an ideal. If inner growth causes him to withdraw from his acceptance of such social pressures, his entire organization for adaptive action may be compromised. When the assertive individual accepts the patterns of feeling which society wants him to take for granted, he is using socially reinforced beliefs as if they were his personal assets and possessions. This gives him clear access to loyalty, but at the price of inflexibility in the discovery of a broader world of opportunity. The more an individual is guided by love, the less he can accept idealization which is imposed from the outside. The more independent the individual is in his power capacities, the less he can accept the socially reinforced sense of what is real in his human environment. The truth seeker who is guided by love cannot afford to accept action patterns until they have been tested in the arena of his own personal devotion to an ideal. The man who seeks to embody independent moral leadership cannot accept the potential seductions of loyalty until actual experience has demonstrated to him that his freedom will not be compromised in the process. A man cannot find truth in human affairs unless his own personality becomes the measure of truth, and this requires an unassailable commitment to his inner feminine identity. The only way a man can find what is right out of his own psychological resources is through the effect of the right on his struggle for masculine self-fulfillment. In creative matters the self becomes the final arbiter of what has meaning and value, and this kind of psychological functioning leaves no room to compromise the continuity and integrity of the inner self.

[75] As the ability to love deepens in the creative individual, he becomes aware of the fact that he has been born into a world which is ignorant of the psychological structure of love. Society wants to take the workings of love for granted, because in this way it can neutralize the potentially revolutionary implications of creative love. There is no other field of inquiry in which knowledge is so potentially dangerous. The capacity for growth which a deepening love brings cannot stop short of its ultimate goal, which is to equip the personality with communicable truth. If the individual does not reach an independent love capacity, his growth efforts will only disturb the stability of his relationship to society without bringing compensatory rewards. In human relationships it is certainly true that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The inherent emotional importance of love can give it an exaggerated influence which has fraudulent implications both for the self and for the objects of love, leading to great and potentially destructive frustrations in human affairs. The development of power capacities leads to similar stresses in the stable patterns of social adjustment, and when power is used without reaching the capacity for the kind of constructive responsibility which increases the value of the resources it exploits, it can readily be discredited for its destructive implications.

[76] Psychological femininity rests on the accumulation of submissive tendencies within the self. The tensions thus created are not drained in action but are allowed to accumulate because of the pleasurable sense of increased self-awareness which they bring. This submissive accumulation of pleasurable feeling is increased in the presence of an ideal. The ideal is recognized through its power to increase the submissiveness in an unlimited way. This readiness to feel without question produces the psychological state called love. An ideal which dominates the self embodies beauty. The submission to beauty is not an automatic thing. It is as if the ideal needs to be appreciated, and in the act of being adored beauty expands and takes on its full dimensions. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, since its existence depends on a flexible and growing interaction between itself and its observer. As the capacity to love takes up residence within the personality, the beauty in the outside world begins to be revealed to the self. The work of love cannot go forward unless the conceptual powers of the individual are utilized to discover the manifestations of beauty in all its aspects. Love is able to see beauty where it was not seen before and this is what gives love its unique value. Truth is a conceptual representation of the essential beauty of its subject matter. Understanding which is not guided by love cannot expect to find truth, because without idealization thinking enters self-serving patterns which fail to reflect the true integrity of the subject matter. The pleasurable intensities of submission which motivate femininity cannot become a significant psychological force until the sense of belonging to an ideal develops in the feminine personality. There must be a love and power interchange for this to occur. It is only when the ability to serve the interests of an ideal becomes an integral part of femininity that its creative work can proceed.

[77] Dominant masculinity accumulates energy which needs the opportunities that exist in a submissive environment. If these energies are to accumulate in a free and unlimited way, they cannot be irrevocably committed to particular outlets but must develop for their own sake. When they find a responsive world, they can be committed at the will of the individual. The accumulation of energy is enjoyable in itself, creating a hunger for those outlets which will increase its dominant status. Masculinity seeks a responsive psychological environment in which a total possession of resources is assured by the submissive goodness of that environment. The discovery of goodness in others comes through the constructive exploitation of their responsiveness. The more such resources are used the more valuable they become, and in the process of such exploitation both the user and the used grow in dimensions. As dominant masculinity exerts its will, new aspects of what it possesses are revealed.

[78] The intensity of feeling which is characteristic of love builds up in a pleasurable way within the feminine personality. It does not become organized for action until its submissive potential has been realized in a surrender to a loved object. It is the surrender which creates the motivational basis for action. Tensions which build up out of survival needs work differently. If an animal is hungry, it sets about finding food in order to dissipate the hunger tensions, and if it feels fear of an external danger, it undertakes to remove itself from that danger, but the tensions which come from love are stored in a harmonious way. The devotional work of love brings balance to the personality without undermining its tension storing function. When the lover accepts a power submission to a loved object, his need to serve the interests of that object opens an unlimited range of dutiful performances. The work of love does not reach into new areas of creative mastery. It is directed in an efficient way toward concrete results. It accepts new areas of accomplishment and abandons old ones when its expanding awareness of the needs of the loved object dictates such changes. In nature, the power submission of the female is shown both in sexual activity and in her contributions to the welfare of the mated domain. The female bird takes priority in nest building activity, contentedly going about her work with great energy and single-minded purpose. At the same time the male takes priority in defining and defending the domain, sitting on a high branch and singing his song, warning off competitors and ready to deal with threats to the domestic welfare. In the sex act the female sexual excitement reaches its fulfillment in the orgastic gratification of the male. Because of the physical activity of the male in coitus, it is easy to make the erroneous assumption that it is the male who is organized for action. The reason that the male is physically active is because this is the only way that he can attain sexual stimulation. His need to find genital contact with the female is brought into being by his awareness of her sexual accessibility. As he reaches genital contact, his need for penetration hinges on the pleasurable feelings it brings. The coital movements are dictated by his need to intensify the sexual pleasure. He cannot reach his sensual goal unless the female's own devotional involvement makes this possible. Her submissive role is not passive or automatic. She is not being used in the sense that food is used when it is eaten. Her willingness to make herself sexually available and her cooperation in the coital act, maintaining the stability of her position so that the act can go forward, is for her a pleasurable fulfillment of her capacity to serve the male and is an affirmative action. Rape is only possible to human beings, because they are vulnerable to distortions in their sense of sexual union. Adolescent sexual fantasy, when it is under the influence of socially supported images about sexuality, converts the masculine sexual function into a conquest in which the male genital is used as a tool of power, and the female function into an abandonment of the self for sexual purposes, as if overwhelmed and without choice.

[79] Masculinity stores and holds energy, and this energy is dissociated from any particular pattern of interests and activities through which it could be dissipated. This is quite different from the way energy is used in survival activities, because in this area energy only accumulates as the need for it becomes apparent. When external danger confronts the individual with a need for action, his anger at this threat mobilizes energy. Similarly, any established adaptive purpose which has become part of the survival pattern will mobilize energy. The surplus energies of power are accumulated because of their enjoyable effect upon the mood of the individual. The increased self-confidence and desire to dominate which results lead the individual to a mated need to possess a world which is responsive to his will. Once he gains the position of possessive dominance, his capacity for feeling is released in an unlimited way. He can need, explore, and commit himself to that which belongs to him, and because he feels love for this world, he reaches balance within the personality. It is only when deep feeling is aroused in this masculine way that his power capacities can be safely committed to particular interests and situations. Without a world to own, he cannot find enduring loyalties. Just as femininity is efficient in its action patterns, so masculinity assures itself of gratification by limiting its exposure to sensual needs to those areas where the pathways of gratification are established. The sensual self-awareness of the individual is not used to explore an unknown world in the service of new understanding. He stays close to those patterns of feeling which he knows will bring gratification. He must remain free to choose those gratifications which he can readily reach and abandon those desires which put serious frustrations in his path, if the primacy of his dominant psychological patterns are to be maintained. In mated sexuality his sensual needs take form in a situation where gratification is assured. When the masculine personality carries sexual tension independently of its outlets for gratification, the dominant structure of masculinity is compromised. The image of the sexually promiscuous male proving his masculinity through sexual conquests is reinforced by a society which fears the independent power status of genuine masculinity. Creative masculinity needs an equally creative femininity in order to reach a healthy sexual capacity.

[80] Love uses concepts as the basic tool of its workmanship. All concepts, including the concept of love itself, operate as windows through which the world can be seen in its larger aspects. Through its use of conceptual insight, love undertakes to see the totality of its subject matter, and in human affairs this means that the loved person is seen in his constructive aspects. Only love is capable of discerning the true beauty in another human being. Personal power employs the development of skills as a means of discovering the resources that exist in a human world. Power is itself a technique, and it permits the individual to develop the resources that he uses. The more power uses resources, the more valuable they become. When a farmer plows and fertilizes a field it becomes richer farmland. The use of resources in such a way that they grow in value constitutes the essence of morality. The building of skills in human affairs has as its goal the ability to make human things happen in such a way as to reveal the goodness inherent in human resources.

[81] Creative insight requires the ability to find beauty where it is not readily apparent, just as the building of skills reveals the value of resources which were not appreciated before. The creative conceptual processes can convert the ugly and the distasteful into a larger image where beauty exists. The ability to find beauty in this way enlarges tremendously the scope of love in human affairs. The development of techniques for moral intervention enables the individual to bypass what is resistive and unresponsive, utilizing inventive exploration to convert that which appears barren and forbidding into a fertile place. The intensity of the search for beauty, and the single-minded commitment to the moral exploitation of human resources, brings yielding and assertive personalities into an area where polarity is of the greatest importance in human affairs. As the search for beauty intensifies, the feminine inner identity deepens and the capacity to idealize masculinity grows, and such feelings cannot be confined by social prohibitions against love relationships between individuals of the same sex. Creative love cannot be desexualized by a process of eliminating the sexual component of deep feeling. An expanding awareness of beauty in other human beings can always enter a sexual channel. If it is not to lead to actual sexual experience, it will be because the individual chooses not to be sexual in this way. For this choice to be made in a constructive and healthy fashion requires great honesty and familiarity with sexual tendencies and needs. Sexual desires which break through prohibitions are not guided by genuine insights. It is obvious that civilized man has much sexual feeling that he does not choose to translate into sexual experience with another person, but in order to handle this kind of intensity, he must have confidence in his ability to establish a fulfilling romantic attachment. As the masculine personality reaches out toward a world of expanding responsiveness to him, he cannot successfully ignore the potential resource which exists in the psychologically feminine responsiveness of other men. Yielding personalities who readily recognize their need to idealize masculinity come to an awareness of their homosexual feelings in a direct way. Assertive personalities who recognize their need for feminine responsiveness often find it possible to follow conventional heterosexual channels in their early romantic reachings, but the more independent they become, the less they can allow their psychological development to be confined by arbitrary limitations on their search for responsiveness in others. Creative growth requires a full utilization of all the resources which the human scene provides. If men do not allow themselves to find goodness and beauty together without prior restraints, they are accepting limitations which destroy the essence of the creative process.

[82] The insights which love develops cannot be relied upon unless the individual has surrendered his independent power status. The feminine position in life is not merely a matter of deep feeling. Femininity which does not belong to a loved object will use its psychological assets for self-aggrandizing purposes. An increased awareness of the human environment can be translated into power manipulations. The thinker can use knowledge in an authoritarian pattern, dominating others in the process. If the teaching function is to preserve the independence of the student, ideas must be communicated as objective truth which is then used by the student to expand his own creative thinking capacities. No matter how much knowledge the authoritarian teacher may impart, he can only undermine the adulthood of others if he requires a submission to his personal control. His methods then become essentially intimidating, in the same pattern that occurs in both the parent-child relationship and the relationship between the individual and stable social institutions. Family welfare makes such intimidation essential where the beliefs of the child might threaten the ability of the family to maintain itself as an effective instrument of survival. Similarly, social institutions must employ intimidation where their stable continuity is brought into question. If the thinker uses insights to enforce compliance with his own will in the service of his personal adaptive effectiveness, his altruistic service of the truth is undermined.

[83] The development of new modalities of mastery by the assertive personality exposes the individual to the temptations inherent in egocentric vanity. The more his techniques of control develop, the more he needs an awareness of the true nature of the human materials that he dominates. The capacity for responsibility in leadership hinges on his commitment to the earning of the love of others. Control which ignores the identity of that which is possessed cannot reach the status of morality and justice. Human skills which are channeled by dogmatic principle result in the kind of leadership which is employed in the care of children and in the operations of political power where the stability of government so requires. If leadership takes cognizance only of those human areas where its dominance is established and fixed, the independence of those who are led is destroyed. The development of human skills can only be constructive where the application of such skills is under the influence of those who are being manipulated by theme. When the leader undertakes to control the thought processes of his followers by seductive means, ignoring any insights which do not favor his power position, and intensifying all emotions which increase the acceptance of the dogma that he requires, the creative potential of masculine dominance is undermined.

[84] When knowledge and insight do not enter the service of an ideal, they become the tools of self-aggrandizing behavior. Knowledge bestows competitive advantage when it is used as a private asset. Communication based on special knowledge may be used to impress others, especially if the individual is secretive and dishonest in failing to tell all he knows. The self-aggrandizing use of information has great practical applications in the adaptive life of human beings. When such methods are used in the surplus emotional life, intruding on the area which belongs to deep feeling and its concomitant insights, love can degenerate into a destructive force. There is a fear of love in the civilized world, based on this tendency for entrapment and exploitation. Oscar Wilde said that each man kills the thing he loves. The story of Samson and Delilah tells of the vulnerability of masculine strength to the manipulations of a love which has not made a genuine power submission. The pleasurable sense of warmth inherent in love can be intensified by playing on the helplessness of others, in the same way that warmth is enriched by the nurture of a pet or a child. Affection of this kind does not encourage problems and is generally set free of the workmanship of love. The elaboration of elemental expressions of warmth brings to the individual a sense of being loved in return, without the necessity of dealing with the totality of the loved object. The individual does what he wants to do and expects gratitude. If the gratitude fails to emerge, the warmth is readily converted into anger, and the sensitive resources of the individual are put to work in a critical and depreciatory way. Love which fails to do creative work finds another kind of work to do in enlarging its critical and polemic faculties. When love starts with attachments which are too superficial, it ends in an analytic dissection which can only undermine the dignity of others. It is not safe to understand other human beings in the name of love without a love that is deep enough to sustain the commitment which the constructive purposes of love require. It is impossible to build a science of human nature unless the thinker can sustain and handle the love orientation within himself which such an undertaking must bring into being.

[85] The skills which power develops must have an objective existence if they are to be used for moral purposes. The self-confidence of power seeks constructive outlets when it rests on the ability of the self to build modalities of mastery. If it depends instead on the pride of possession of particular things, the individual must stand guard over his possessions in a proprietary way, vulnerable to the kind of vanity which feels unique importance in anything that belongs to him. His egocentric needs cause him to reject any changes in the patterns of his understanding, and he clings to established meanings in a sentimental and dogmatic way. He fears and hates those who would challenge his beliefs, identifying them as hostile and alien elements. This destructive use of prestige bars him from an expanding world of intervention in the lives of others. Such power cannot find morality and justice because it must obliterate the function of creative thought.

[86] When the yielding individual uses knowledge and insight for competitive advantage, his action patterns become compulsive in nature. As he becomes primarily organized to seek respect, deference, and recognition from others, the drive for accomplishment effaces the inner identity. He cannot become creative in his life of action, because his competitive patterns require him to seek familiar pathways to mastery in which successful results are assured. His power manipulations are similar in pattern to emergency survival reactions. When a man is escaping from a burning building, he is not trying to find new modalities of control. In the face of recognized danger, he becomes organized for effective behavior, using methods which are most likely to achieve the practical results he seeks. When the individual's action patterns are organized by his submission to an institutionalized ideal, he cannot readily tolerate ineffectiveness, because the sense of his own importance has become attached to his ability to perform in socially accepted ways. The competitive power drives of the yielding personality flow readily into patterns of material success. The earning of money becomes a central aspect of his need to prove his adaptive effectiveness. Because he uses money as an index of his accomplishments, he is able to assure himself that he is meeting the needs of other people, since they are paying for his services. The more he becomes involved in the competitive activities which lead to material advantage, the less room there is for developing depth of feeling for its own sake. In such circumstances, the creative search for understanding loses its emotional investment and the ability to love ceases to grow. Action patterns which take their origin in a submissive service to a socially established ideal, but which are separated off from the love capacities of the personality, become automatic and machine-like in nature. No matter what the accomplishments of the individual are, they are never enough to endow the personality with an independent sense of its own importance. Accomplishments which have escaped from their original basis in love, and have no possibility of accepting the experimental status of a creative search for the right, become dissociated entities which tyrannize the individual. His practical accomplishments leave no residue of inner security in the personality, and the search for such goals has no endpoint.

[87] The assertive individual who is committed to socially established beliefs seeks a constant reinforcement of feeling about his prestige status. His need to endow the dogma by which he lives with increasing meaning results in an obsessive thinking pattern. This pattern has similarities to emergency survival reactions. Where fear is needed to protect the individual in the presence of danger the individual excludes all other preoccupations, focusing in a single-minded way on his awareness of the noxious influence. This kind of fascination with the data of observation is only relieved when the danger has been comprehended sufficiently to take the necessary action to remove the individual from it. The obsessive fascination with feeling has no creative potential. It cannot build insight for its own sake. When the individual is trapped by such emotional preoccupations, his freedom of action dies. Instead of building new skills for their own sake, he seeks to elaborate the feeling investment in the modalities of mastery he has. Creative power seeks new ways to involve itself in an expanding world, but power which is limited by obsessive mechanisms seeks only expansion of feeling and sensual gratification in a world which does not change its boundaries. Such feeling intensity is dissociated from the search for understanding, and cannot find the kind of fulfillment which releases the individual into a mobile life of self-confident action. Freedom is corrupted by a licentious hedonism which becomes its own kind of prison for the personality.

[88] The creative yielding personality uses the workmanship of love to find an ability to act effectively in the world. The individual rejects the kind of submission to institutionalized social forces which could spare him an individual struggle for a deep inner identity. It is the awareness of unhealthy and unproductive inner stresses, in the form of anxiety and depression, that forces the individual toward an independent psychological position. If he is to succeed in his deviation from a path which appears to be easy and sensible to others, but has become a source of psychological illness to him, the individual must start with a rejection of automatically established meanings and values. He cannot accept the fact that he is a failure in making a conventional adjustment to established social forces without taking a strong position concerning the falseness and immorality of the established system. The creative thinker in the human field is in the position of a disappointed lover who must give full vent to his hatred of the false ideal which he has tried to serve, if he is to separate himself from his attachment to it. The negativism toward established forces of persons who have entered a fundamental growth process can only be understood if the dimensions of their personal struggle are understood. The truth seeker can hardly expect society to bestow the kind of creative understanding on his undertaking which is his own responsibility to find. He must know the importance of what he does, both from the point of view of his inner development and in terms of the ultimate value of contributions to human truth for the welfare of all. When the creative thinker can see society as an entity changing for the better, his hatred for established social systems can be contained within a larger viewpoint which permits the love of mankind to affirm itself within his personality. He can love a world which moves toward the correction of ignorance and injustice, and as his inner growth brings an increasing capacity to deal with society in his own terms, his critical distaste becomes increasingly less important in favor of the affirmations which the creative workmanship of love can bring.

[89] When the creative assertive individual rejects the dogma he is supposed to believe, he finds himself in the position of a mobile wanderer who cannot make enduring attachments. At first he can only separate himself from the seductions of socially reinforced beliefs through giving full play to his anger at the ignorance and dishonesty of social influences. His heretical refusal to believe in anything which he has been taught is necessary if he is to deal with his own tendency to be ensnared by the temptations of easy sensual rewards. He is in the position of a person who has been cheated by a skillful confidence man and now must test every apparent value through personal experience before accepting it. As inner growth brings him an increasing ability to choose his areas of opportunity, his anger can diminish in favor of the constructive aspects of his activities. He can resolve his anger at society when he retains the right to choose his own human world, dealing with society as a changing entity which can be influenced by the leadership inherent in moral capacity.

[90] The contemplative retreat of the thinker leads to insights which must be tested against experience. Such applications are not motivated by adaptive purposes but come in response to the need of the thinker to solve problems. Behind the search for truth lies the ability to ask significant questions about actual phenomena in the external world. Truth can be recognized by its inherent ability to describe events in abstract categories which give meaning to all the known data, bestowing unity on the subject matter. Inquiry does not end with the arrival of a particular moment of insight. The motivational structure of creative thinking draws the thinker into a further expansion of his awareness of his subject matter, and further inquiry reveals new problems. The premises on which old truths rest are discarded in favor of an expanding sense of the dimensions of the subject. Truth seeking is a never-ending process which is motivated by the love of the thinker for his subject matter and a devotional sense of service to its integrity. This state of mind can only exist when there is an altruistic power submission within the psyche of the thinker. He belongs to his subject matter, and in this abandonment of himself to its control, the workmanship of creative thinking can go forward. Such work never ends, and it is entirely analogous to the feminine function in a mated union.

[91] When the psychological status of the thinker is invaded by compulsive power tendencies, the surrender to the subject matter is lacking. Insights become tools of the need to dominate rather than tools that are used to enrich the work of love. When understanding is dissociated from its love origins, it can be used to depreciate and undermine the integrity of others, and such uses have self-aggrandizing utility. If love and the understanding it brings is to live up to its constructive potential in human affairs, men must learn to deal with the destructive implications of insights which operate outside the realm of its devotional work. If understanding is not guided by the pursuit of truth for its own sake, the individual will find himself corrupted by the instruments of power which his conceptual capacities have put into his hands, and his relationship to others becomes sadistic in nature. The essence of sadism lies in its capacity to hate, taking cognizance of others in aspects which are distasteful and weak, substituting these aspects for the whole person. It is a domination which lies outside the area of morality. Sadism does not share the beauty of constructive power, and it creates nothing in the power realm. Sadistic impulses are liberated when the rights of others become meaningless in the context where these impulses operate. Sadism is not felt to be immoral since it goes outside the area where morality exists. The individual who employs sadistic mechanisms cannot feel the humanity of his victims. He has built his understanding of others in such a way as to fragment their identity. They are no longer complete individuals, but only examples of particular tendencies which he can exploit. This ability to dehumanize others through the capacity of the mind to substitute a fragment of their nature for the whole person liberates tremendous power potential in human interactions. Love which has not accepted a power submission is always vulnerable to this kind of fragmentation in its vision of others.

[92] The assertive individual who builds modalities of human control needs an expanding world of opportunity. These opportunities only come into being as his skills increase. He accepts the challenge to master new situations when his awareness of what is right grows under the influence of yesterday's accomplishments. The seeking of the right is a never-ending process, motivated by the sense of personal importance which comes to the individual who is expanding his ability to discover and develop new human resources. Continuity in the power status can only come out of a great commitment to his own self-development. He loves that which he controls because it belongs to him. It is only in this atmosphere of dominant loyalty that the development of creative personal power can go forward. This development has no arbitrary limits, and its pattern is the same as that of the masculine function in a mated union.

[93] When the psychological status of the man of action is invaded by obsessive feeling, the dominance of his psychological world is undermined. His need to find loyalty overflows into a submissive state, failing to operate as a tool of a free expansion of power. When human skills become dissociated from their creative power origins they tend to imprison the individual in the area of their proven operation. His reaching for the right loses its flexibility, and he seeks further expansion of his inner self through intensification of feeling about the power prerogatives he already has. The expectation of growth disappears in favor of the surrender of the self to the seductions of security and its associated sensual gratifications. The manipulative abilities of human beings bring them to the point where it is possible to withdraw behind a wall which protects what they now possess, rejecting the stress and uncertainty inherent in new challenges. This withdrawal obliterates the sense of development through time, replacing it with a surrender to the sensibilities of the moment. When this kind of preoccupation with feelings becomes a necessity for the individual, he is vulnerable to masochistic mechanisms. The essence of masochism lies in the surrender to the need for automatic feeling, under circumstances where no alternative is comprehended. Masochistic submission utilizes no affirmative seeking of understanding, and does not find beauty in others. Behind masochism lies a helpless anger at forces which control the individual, but which he must accept out of his commitment to sensual gratification. He is not aware of the origins of his entrapment because the submissive state blots out everything except the feelings of the moment. When personal power cannot love in a dominant way, it is always vulnerable to the kind of emotional entrapment which loses its sense of progression through time.

[94] The feminine personality is dependent in the action side of its nature. The individual develops the capacity for effective action when he attaches himself to an ideal which he is motivated to serve. The more independent he becomes in the choice of an ideal, the more his established patterns of action are threatened, since the personal search for an ideal must go through transitions in which neither his ability to love nor his capacity to serve an ideal are firmly established in his personality. As he deepens his love capacities he must be able to deal with the sense of inferiority which comes from neurotic inhibition, without losing faith in the ultimate development of his action capacities. If his search for an independent love identity becomes too difficult, he can abort the growth process through the utilization of sadistic mechanisms. Instead of feeling inferiority because he cannot serve an ideal in an effective way, he experiences a sense of superiority, based on his ability to put others in a position of weakness. His sensitivity to their faults and deficiencies justifies him in cutting short any further development of his love capacities. The lover who uses sadistic mechanisms is motivated by the sense of power inherent in his insights. He uses this power without guilt, because his personality is no longer oriented toward constructive goals. His real goal is the liberation of his action capacities ii) order to avoid neurotic inhibition and the sense of inferiority which goes with it. His cruelty finds justification because the object is believed to be unworthy of anything else. When love gives up its capacity for growth it cannot avoid sadistic deterioration. Such love is provisional in quality, taking the position that it will love only when the object conforms to what the lover expects. When intellectual cruelty substitutes itself for the workmanship of love, it is as if there is a promise of an ultimate total acceptance of the object, once it has been completely altered by the will of the lover. Sadistic energies gain validation because there is an absolute conviction that they rest on truth. This kind of apparent truth is separated off from any insight into the way it is being used.

[95] The masculine personality is dependent in the area of feeling. As the creative assertive individual turns away from conventional images of opportunity, he finds himself with accumulating energies which have no pre-established outlets. He is an explorer in uncharted territory where he must learn to endure the sense of guilt which comes from his rejection of loyalties and the consequent lack of meaning in his life. The more he operates in a world without established principles, the more vulnerable he becomes to delinquent mechanisms. If he loses hope in the ultimate emergence of constructive loyalties, he will submit to circumstances out of the immediate need to belong somewhere. He accepts and elaborates love feelings in order to counteract guilt, and this kind of automatic feeling is masochistic in quality. The masochistic mechanism utilizes a need for security, but this security is not a base for giving to others. The individual feels he is doing what is right, but it is only right in the private terms which the avoidance of guilt dictates. The individual can comprehend no alternative to his submission because the elaboration of feeling has built an encircling wall which contains all that he can recognize as real. His understanding of that reality is rigid and automatic. He accepts this effacement of conceptual alternatives because of his impelling sense of commitment to what is right for him. His moral sense is guided only by his personal need to accept his fate. When power gives up access to growth, it is always vulnerable to masochistic mechanisms.

[96] The insights of creative love can only be put to work where there is a submission to an ideal. The object which is loved must need such insights as a tool of its own development. Without a worthy ideal, the energies of love cannot reach patterns of constructive effectiveness. If the individual attempts to love in a situation where his love capacities are not needed or wanted, his inner identity is effaced. He defends himself against anxiety through compulsive mechanisms in which he finds energy outlets which are dissociated from their love origins. The compulsive individual behaves as if he were in love with his own patterns of efficiency. He gains temporary satisfaction from orderliness for its own sake, both in logical thinking and in practical activities. Compulsiveness provides a defense against the unsettling effects of falling in love. When the machine-like efficiency of compulsiveness becomes attached to the adaptive social roles, any tendency to deepen the personality carries a threat against the individuals entire adaptive structure. His personal defenses against such revolutionary consequences are reinforced by institutionalized pressures. When the compulsive pressures are weakened by inner growth, the individual must learn to love in a creative pattern, and this means dealing with his sadistic mechanisms. As he exposes himself to the need to find beauty in a loved object, he becomes aware of the imperfections of his ideal. If he does not have sufficient capacity for submissive devotion, he will not be able to maintain his sense of the integrity and unity of his ideal. The ideal becomes fragmented, and its imperfections stand in place of the whole. Creative love gives to its ideal through gratifying needs and desires in a liberating way. It takes care of dependent needs without effacing the independent identity of the object. The sadistic mechanism takes over when the perception of imperfections, ugliness, and weakness have effaced the awareness of beauty. The action patterns arising from service to an ideal continue to exist, but now are distorted into an attempt to destroy that which is seen to be unworthy. Sadistic energies undertake to serve an object by destroying it, and this paradox can come into being because the individual has lost sight of the object as a whole and is now only concerned with the protection of the self from an overwhelming sense of inferiority.

[97] The obsessive mechanisms of the assertive personality constitute a defense against the disrupting effects of the experimental enterprise of independent power. Obsessive feeling allows the individual to cling to the gratifications which he already has, elaborating them in intellectual and sensual ways so that they appear to be increasing in value. The miserly counting of money is an obsessive manifestation. This preoccupation with possessions in an emotionally extravagant way provides a defense against commitment to the patterns of inspired initiative which new opportunities arouse. Obsessive clinging is reinforced by social dogma, much of which has a religious tone. The security patterns thus bestowed assist individuals to conform more readily to the social roles expected of them. When the obsessive patterns are breached by growth, the individual becomes vulnerable to guilt and the accompanying masochistic defenses. Because he is now exposed to the need to find expanding opportunity, he must search for a human world which makes room for development of his creative powers. He needs to be loved in a way that preserves his dominant assets on a continuing basis. When the responsiveness of others is not deep enough to envision his total aspirations, he cannot maintain a hopeful sense of self-development. He wants to dominate his world in such a way that it is increasingly fulfilled in being possessed, but if he can only see obstructiveness, he reacts to each moment of frustration as if it were for all time. The commitments of masochism operate to produce a sense of helplessness. The gratification inherent in masochism stems from the fact that the individual feels that he is loyal, committed, and involved, but his right to choose an involvement has disappeared, because the feelings of the moment are all that is real. Masochistic submission protects the self from the overwhelming guilt which dissolution of attachments brings. Just as sadism destroys the integrity of the object, so masochism effaces the sense of continuity through time in a relationship.

[98] If love is to cleanse itself of its destructive elements, the yielding individual must be able to bear the impact of a full recognition of the inadequacy of his love capacities. So-called normal individuals come to their maturity with an expectation of effectiveness in establishing a career and making a marital adjustment. They accept social remedies for their inner sense of inferiority. They do not accept awareness of the inner feminine core of their personalities, but turn instead toward self-validation in prestige seeking and competitive ways. Their sense of social adequacy depends on the pushing forward of a socially supported masculine identity which has no creative implications. There is no need for honest examination of the constructiveness of their search for a power status, because they are not personally responsible for the patterns of action they espouse. They are only doing what they are supposed to do, and the human entities that they manipulate are not seen as total personalities. Their world tends to become dehumanized, but they accept this state of affairs as natural and inevitable. They only know something is wrong when the depressive effects of such a life become severe enough to be disabling. If the yielding individual refuses to become a cog in the social machinery, he has no alternative but to open himself to the recognition that he has come to maturity in a world which is ignorant of the nature and functions of love, and that if he is to develop an inner identity on which he can rely in making independent relationships with others, he must build his love capacities on his own, discarding his pseudo-masculine prerogatives. Such an undertaking prolongs the adolescent search for an inner self and makes personal growth a primary goal in living. It is only when he learns to love in a creative way that he can dissipate the sense of inferiority that comes from living in a dehumanized world.

[99] If power is to find an increasing capacity for moral intervention in human relationships, it must be able to nullify the paralyzing effects of guilt. The masculine individual does not have to take cognizance of guilt if he follows socially reinforced patterns of commitment and loyalty. In growing up in a so-called normal way in the civilized world he does not use his masculinity as an independent resource. Instead he follows opportunity patterns which society creates, conforming to social roles which bear the promise of advancement in career activities and reinforcement of the pride of social position. The more he conforms, the greater is the promise of acceptance in a caste system which feeds his vanity. He utilizes psychologically feminine mechanisms which have no creative implications. His inner security expands, not because he understands life better, but because he is feeling what he is supposed to feel. He loves others in order to draw them into loving him, and the feeling thus established becomes a mark of group acceptability. There is no continuity in his commitment to feeling beyond the situation created by mutual participation in a socially defined interaction. Feeling is a tool of social manipulations, creating status identity and mutual cooperation in advancing social interests. People are accepted and liked for their social usefulness, and no human relationship needs to be pursued beyond the opportunism of the moment. Such a psychological environment is dehumanizing in its influence, but the individual accepts it as inevitable unless its depressive effects undermine his ability to operate. If the masculine individual rejects this kind of effacement of an independent inner identity, he is thrown into a chaotic world of personal reaching for a human environment chosen by him for his own purposes. When personal growth becomes the primary focus of his life, he must find the strength to handle the apparent aimlessness which accompanies an adolescent growth pattern. It is only when personal power learns to build creatively that it can dissipate the sense of guilt that comes from living in a dehumanized world.

[100] The civilized world avows a belief in love, but when the individual attempts to make a life adjustment based on love, he finds himself unprepared for his task. It is not too difficult for a deep personality to accept the desire to love others constructively, but there is a great hiatus between intention and performance. Much of the evil that exists in the world comes from the destructive forces unleashed by idealism. The development of human knowledge and understanding leads to a greater awareness of immorality and injustice in the social fabric, and the more men seek to apply such insights in their interactions with others, the more vulnerable they become to the tendency to dehumanize the agent of an immoral act, separating the action off from any total understanding of the person who performs it. When the awareness of human truth leads men to oppose immorality through power manipulations, the groundwork is laid for the kind of holy war which makes the creative workmanship of love impossible. The motivations inherent in love can bring men together in a kind of mob spirit which releases tremendous power potential, and such power, since it comes into being to oppose immorality, is not answerable to morality itself. The power drives thus liberated have a sadistic structure since they lie outside the realm of moral considerations. Because love cannot be trusted until it is deep enough to lay aside the sword of amoral invincibility, the operations of love in the daily affairs of men are often received with uneasiness and suspicion. Human understanding itself is viewed with a paranoid uneasiness because the ability of another to expose unknown areas of the self is seen as a tool which can be used for dangerous purposes. Under these conditions men do not really undertake to explore each other's natures with the honesty and persistence which scientific inquiry requires, but prefer to accept an image of each other which keeps interpersonal tension at a minimum.

[101] The civilized world believes in the idea of individual moral responsibility, but the creative masculine individual who attempts to develop his capacity for moral intervention in the lives of others finds himself unprepared for this task. As men develop their human skills, they find that their capacity for loyalty is captured by the egotistical gratifications of the moment. Human initiative and enterprise bring rewards which destroy the spirit on which enterprise rests. Accomplishments become a substitute for skill, and human resources which do not fit into the accepted patterns of accomplishment are discarded. Human beings become automatic elements in a system which only has value because it is believed to be working. Awareness of the continuity of human relationships disappears, and the failure of any individual to be useful in maintaining the accepted power structure results in a loss of his human identity. The more men develop the capacity to make human undertakings work, the more vulnerable they become to the tendency to destroy what is useless to them through neglect and indifference. Human truth no longer has an independent existence, and only that is seen to be true which serves the needs of established group undertakings. Disloyalty to the beliefs on which group cooperation rests is seen to be a manifestation of moral decay and degeneracy. Under such circumstances, the creative capacity of power to explore new commitments is undermined. Power becomes the victim of the security system it has itself created, and this mechanism has masochistic implications. The loss of the right to think independently becomes a barrier to the enlistment of men in worthy human undertakings.

[102] The ability to love is generally taken for granted in the civilized world because love is an emotion which is empathetically and intuitively shared. Men assume that they reach communication easily in the love area. It is only when the yielding personality attempts to use an inner identity based on love for a lifetime of psychological growth that he faces the impact of mankind's inability to use love as a creative force in human affairs. Although love is everywhere in the world, it generally remains a uniquely personal experience in which men assume without basis that the dimensions of the love that they know are similar to that experienced by others. If love is to be used as a reliable source of human understanding, it must have the kind of continuity which scientific truth confers. It is only when love adheres to its truth seeking function that it can build an objective body of insights which are true for any person in an equivalent psychological context. When men have access to this kind of truth, they are in a much better position to lead independent lives, using their love capacities for a growing relationship with the outside world, always open to giving more to others. Without objective knowledge of love and its mechanisms, the creative individual is overwhelmed by the weight of his personal ignorance, at a time when he needs his understanding the most. The motivation for engaging in a growth struggle comes from his personal reaching for peace of mind and mental health.

[103] The vicissitudes of love divide roughly into four phases. There is a neurotic phase in which the intensity of feeling builds up without establishing outlets in love relationships. The individual is unable to apply these feelings in any way that leads to service of an ideal, and this phase brings anxiety. The next phase is the compulsive one in which action patterns develop, but without a meaningful submission to an ideal chosen by the individual. Compulsiveness is a defense against anxiety. The next phase is the sadistic one, in which the individual serves an ideal but cannot maintain a sense of its integrity. He is driven by a self-aggrandizing amorality in which dominance is justified by dehumanizing others. The sadistic mechanism is a defense against feelings of inferiority. The creative phase is not a defense against anything. It rests on the need for inner contentment and peace of mind. It alone has the positive goal of making a better life for the self and for others, in which both the individual and his ideal are fulfilled.

[104] Society takes the desire to build moral stature for granted. There is a ready identification between individuals when they act in the name of morality, and there is an assumption that moral standards can be taken at face value. It is only when the assertive individual takes personal responsibility for the development of his human skills that he must confront the impoverished state of moral involvement which characterizes society as a whole. If personal power is to be used as a reliable tool of human mastery, it must build the same kind of objective techniques and skills that engineering employs in the non-human fields. Individuals who attempt to use power in an independent way in human affairs are usually undermined by the disparity between their methods and the dimensions of the task. It is only under the motivational drive of a need for personal happiness and mental health that men find sufficient endurance to build the procedural assets that they need.

[105] The development of the creative use of personal power also goes through four phases. The buildup of energies which cannot find meaningful involvement in anything produces a restless search for activity which is disorganized in nature. This is the delinquent or psychopathic phase. The obsessive phase is a defense against psychopathic restlessness, and is characterized by an automatic involvement with feelings and beliefs which cut the individual off from the capacity to choose new patterns of experience. In the masochistic phase, the individual uses helplessness as a power tool, and can now deal with a changing reality. It provides a defense against guilt and gains its psychological rewards through the sense of self-importance which intensified feeling can bring. It has strong magical components, imprisoning the mind in a dogmatic acceptance of frozen beliefs which obliterate the sense of change through time. The creative phase releases the individual from his defensive posture and substitutes the constructive exploitation of human resources, utilized in such a way that both the individual and his world are revealed to have unlimited potentialities of development.

[106] As the truth and right which are brought into being in the lives of creative individuals become the property of all men, changes are wrought in social institutions. Since social institutions are inherently stable, such changes are resisted until it becomes a matter of self-evident common sense that the altering of social institutions will produce a new and more rewarding level of stability for society as a whole. Society cannot sponsor growth processes which enter the area of the unknown and the chaotic and reduce psychic investment in adaptive matters below an acceptable minimum. In modern times the rapid development of science and industry has led to equally rapid changes in social structure, because expanding knowledge and ability have been able to demonstrate their value in the practical affairs of men. The tendency to resist such change has been reduced by the obvious advantages to be gained. Society has fused its need for stability with an expectation of social progress. Men have learned that they can want and work toward a better world without risking the destruction of the one that they live in. In order to do this, they must require that new insights and modalities of mastery prove their obvious advantage before their influence can be accepted. For many centuries the search for human truth and right has remained in the hands of a few individuals, or in the keeping of small groups who are dissociated from the mainstream of social intercourse, and the knowledge and ability that they have developed have remained separated from conventional beliefs and patterns of behavior. Love and the work it does continues to be substantially alien in the market place of daily living. The capacity for moral intervention can only operate in those special circumstances where individual courage finds unexplored territory to challenge. The failure of society to accept the influence of love and personal power in the altering of its social institutions has been ascribed to inherent weaknesses in human nature, based on the conviction that human beings are inherently evil and destructive under the veneer of their civilized exterior. Men will apply any kind of truth and right in their daily lives, however, when the revolutionary implications of such applications have been removed by a clear recognition of their advantages. Society has no commitments which bar the further influence of love and moral responsibility, provided that these psychological tools are used as truly constructive forces. Men cannot open their hearts to love unless they understand what love is and how it works. Without an established science of human nature which alone can give continuity and communicability to insights concerning the nature of love, there is no possibility of the kind of major changes in social structure which the applications of love in the daily affairs of men would bring, nor can the influence of personal power be allowed to alter the structure of social institutions until it has developed techniques which are accessible to all men in every kind of human situation. The ultimate development of a better human world rests on the ability of creative individuals to bring such a science of human nature and such human engineering skills into being.

[107] The creative process requires the individual to reject any established pattern of feeling and behavior which undermines the growth of his love or power capacities. This kind of flexibility is seen to be a threat to the stability of the social structure, especially when it enters sensitive areas such as the accepted social role of male and female in the adaptive aspects of career and marriage. Men would much prefer to explore human understanding in an ivory tower atmosphere, secure from any disrupting influence on the major areas of a mature social adjustment. It is impossible, however, to measure in advance the consequences of the growth processes which an increasing capacity for love brings. It means nothing to be able to love more without developing new levels of human attachment in which love has expanding outlets for its capacity to give. If love is to emerge as a genuinely creative process, surviving the distortions brought into being by neurotic, compulsive, and sadistic tendencies, it must have the right to alter any pattern of human attachment which creates barriers to its further development. If certain areas of human adjustment have a sacred and unalterable quality, lying outside human questioning and experimentation, the truth seeking function will fail to find the total commitment on which its existence rests.

[108] Men would much prefer to develop their capacity for courage and moral strength in special areas of human endeavor where such personal virtues find direct reinforcement and recognition, such as military undertakings, competitive sports, and the adventuresome facing of hazardous challenges. It is impossible, however, to limit in advance the area in which an increasing capacity for personal power will operate, because the essence of such development lies in the ability of the individual to perceive new opportunities. If the capacity for power to involve itself is to have creative human consequences, surviving the corruptions brought into being by delinquent, obsessive, and masochistic tendencies, it must be free to disengage itself from any kind of loyalty which makes further expansion of its constructive control impossible. If there are areas of commitment which lie outside the possibility of question, the individual will have to measure his stature to the limitations thus established, and the seeking of the right will not have the continuity on which its existence depends.

[109] Psychological growth cannot prove its value until the individual who is growing has demonstrated to himself and to others that he has reached a status which is superior to the one he left behind. Growth involves a transition, motivated by faith and hope, and until this journey through a changing world has reached constructive ends, the individual cannot allow himself to be judged by ordinary standards of effectiveness. Psychological growth in adult years means a utilization of adolescent mechanisms in which the importance of the self rests on the acceptance of self-development as a goal. A growth process which is abandoned along the way can only be seen as human failure because the individual is neither equipped to face life with new assets nor to utilize the adaptive effectiveness which a full scale social conformity could have brought. It is only when the commitment to the finding of human truth and right becomes an irreducible goal of the personality that the individual will be able to reach the kind of creative self-development which alone can give validity to a growth process.

[110] The more independent an individual becomes in the development of his love capacities, the more independent he must be in dealing with the sexual component which intensity of feeling brings. The independent development of the power faculties requires an independent ability to handle the celebrative component which vigor and self-confidence bring. Sex and celebration are an extremely sensitive area in the building of independent psychological capacities. If individuals cannot handle sex and celebration out of their own psychological resources, they will have no choice but to accept the conventional feelings and patterns of action in this area, and such conformity undermines the unrestricted flexibility which lies at the heart of growth. It is in the area of homosexuality that the development of love and power must fight their greatest battles with conventional social forces. Society accepts love and power tendencies provided that they do not go outside the realm of the heterosexual patterns which society has chosen to reinforce out of its concern for the institution of marriage and its child rearing function. If heterosexual patterns are reinforced in sexual terms, separate and apart from the psychological development of the capacity for a mated union, the sexual life of mankind becomes dissociated from its love and power moorings. The heterosexual pressures which exist in the civilized world are not in harmony with independent love and power capacities. Mankind has not been prepared to recognize that the responsibility for developing the sexual life of the individual, whether in homosexual or heterosexual directions, must rest with his ability to find the kind of romantic union which makes a natural and fulfilling place for sexuality. Automaticity and dogma in sexual feeling is the enemy of creative love, without regard to the gender of the object. If the individual is to love without arbitrary restrictions on his love capacities, he must be able to love any human being whose qualities arouse those capacities. If the sexual component of love for an individual of the same sex is alien and dangerous, the further deepening of the love capacities becomes impossible, thus aborting the entire growth process. As long as society can instill a fear of homosexual feeling in men, it can build a wall around the development of creative love, and this wall protects not only conventional heterosexual feelings but the entire fabric of conventional images about what constitutes human truth.

[111] The physiological maturation of the sexual capacities at puberty occurs in a personality not yet ready to explore its mated capacity. Sexuality is channeled into masturbation and its accompanying fantasies. This means that the adolescent growth struggle begins with sexuality already separated off from the psychological mechanisms of love. The sexual feelings of the child before puberty do not significantly intrude upon his love relationships because of the strong incest prohibitions maintained by the family and society. He approaches his adolescent task of developing his romantic capacities with strong sexual feelings and needs and a relatively weak sense of what a romantic union is. The early pubertal celebrative tendencies bring a strong appetite for the kind of exciting freedom that can be experienced in gregariously inspired defiance of rules, dangerous competitive exploits, the use of euphoriant drugs, and any kind of playful crossing of the previous limits of freedom. The child's acceptance of clearly defined obligations to conform in the family power structure has spared him from a celebrative intrusion into his power relationships, but at puberty his strong celebrative needs stand in marked contrast to his inner preparation for the mated use of power. Social pressures which create shame concerning masturbatory sexuality and guilt in the area of euphoriant play tend to hold the young adolescent in the position of a child. Society takes the position that independent inner development cannot be trusted to find a natural and healthy place for sexual and celebrative capacities. In so doing, society sets up a developmental system in which the individual passes directly from childhood into the socially supported world of marriage, where the sexual and celebrative capacities are given an institutionalized place. The adolescent years are seen as transitional only in the sense that it is never clear whether the individual is to be treated as a child or as an adult, but this difficulty is tolerated by society in the same way that a storm at sea is tolerated by passengers on a ship as an unfortunate but inevitable complication of travel. This dehumanization of adolescence results when its primary function of providing an arena for the development of an inner identity cannot be seen or accepted.

[112] The simplistic analogy between the biological male-female relationship in marriage and the mated union of animals in nature is accepted and reinforced by society as a defense of its heterosexual structure. The dawning romantic love capacities of the yielding individual in adolescence cannot be forced into this pattern if inner growth is to be the primary goal of the personality. The individual must learn that the capacity for idealization is essential to his development. It is only when he can find beauty in a loved object and devote himself to the service of that object that a true union will result which can make a full place for his sexuality. It is only when the growing assertive individual accepts his need to possess an object which wants to belong to him that his capacity for romantic loyalty can become firmly established. There can be no independent capacity for mating without this kind of self-discovery. Any automaticity in heterosexual patterns which ignores the inner identity in favor of anatomical differences and socially supported roles is in direct conflict with the creative growth processes.

[113] The fact that sexual and celebrative capacities exist in the growing adolescent before there has been any significant development of the ability to make a mated union means that the sexual life begins in an essentially promiscuous pattern. The adolescent finds that he must make a sexual adjustment, in the same adaptive sense that he makes an adjustment to practical social demands. The dealing with sexuality as if it were a facet of man's adaptive life does harm to its natural relationship to mated love. The lower animals do not need to make a sexual adjustment, but find their inborn sexual tendencies a natural overflow of the intensity of feeling which accompanies mating. A civilized human being has to choose where he will put his sexual capacity, and this choice is strongly influenced by socially reinforced preoccupations with automatic patterns of sexual feeling and behavior. The sense of difference between male and female is elaborated for the purpose of insuring the attraction of one sex for the other. Since it is difficult for men and women to interact independently as genuine human beings under such a bombardment, society attempts to separate the courtship leading to marriage from the sexual sphere. The high level of sexual attractiveness which is supposed to exist between men and women is brought under the influence of the sexual prohibition which originated in the incest barrier, and when the courting individual has a serious interest in another, he is supposed to wait until marriage for sexual experience. This effort to capture sexuality for the institution of marriage can only succeed where social prohibitions significantly outweigh inner development. The more independent individuals become in their search for the natural sources of their sexual self-expression, the less effective such artificial barriers become.

[114] The yielding individual who is attempting to make a sexual adjustment under the influence of socially reinforced images of heterosexual adequacy finds himself using compulsive mechanisms. His need to love in an idealizing way as a precondition of his sexual life is replaced by a compulsive proving of his sexual potency. The compulsive use of sexual performance operates as a defense against the recognition of the feminine structure of his inner personality. The more he accepts his need to prove his masculinity in the way that society dictates, the more dangerous it becomes to recognize the inner feminine tendencies which lie at the heart of his ability to love. He is not able to see that compulsive masculinity is a poor form of masculine self-expression, or that any man who fulfills himself as a constructive individual is thereby a real man, without regard to the psychological patterns he uses in relating himself to others. It is only when the compulsive quality of his orgastic drive is replaced by a devotional submission to the orgastic needs of another that the yielding individual can reach a mated union and the sense of fulfillment that it carries. If the orgastic goal that exists in masturbation is carried into the attempt to make a sexual union, the identity of the loved person will be effaced. Compulsive masculinity cannot escape from its promiscuous implications, and sexual loyalty under such conditions can only be maintained through socially reinforced prohibitions. Since romantic feeling cannot develop and expand under the influence of prohibitions, there is always lurking below the surface of compulsive masculine potency a threat of impotence.

[115] The assertive individual may find his initial efforts at reaching a heterosexual adjustment more successful, because his inner masculinity overlaps the masculine role which society has assigned to him. His capacity for sexual potency leads him into sexual performance in which the sense of his own power is carried by sexual conquest, rather than by the strength inherent in the moral exploitation of the responsiveness of others. Whenever sexual adequacy becomes the carrier of masculine pride, the individual becomes the victim of self-love, and the real love that he needs from others cannot be recognized or valued. The sense of being loved disappears as love becomes equivalent to sexual indulgence, and masculinity is undermined by obsessive involvement with sensuality. If the individual turns away from his obsessive heterosexual imagery in an attempt to free himself for genuine power purposes, he must face the superficiality of his feelings and the accompanying inability to accept commitments. The lack of ability to take responsibility in a constructively dominant way brings a heavy burden of guilt. If his personal power capacities cannot enter a genuine growth process, he tends to return to a sexual pattern of feeling. His obsessive sexual preoccupations are a feminizing influence and his goal becomes the sexual service of others. This Don Juan pattern of sexual behavior leaves no room for personal power and the mated love that it needs, but becomes instead a restless search for the momentary pride which sexual success brings. Without continuity in relationships the romantic capacities cannot grow, and there is always the threat in such sexual obsessiveness of a narcissistic withdrawal into a sexless world of addiction to passive security mechanisms.

[116] Individuals who need a sense of romantic union as a precondition of sexual experiences are unable to accept the influence of socially reinforced images of what is sexually exciting and desirable. Such individuals cannot look on sexual adaptation as an isolated event separated from the need to love and to belong to another. In the presence of such a barrier to the utilization of society's automatic heterosexual patterns, the sexual feelings of the adolescent tend to turn toward those relationships with members of the same sex in which idealization and possessiveness most readily flow. The search for the sense of beauty which can release erotic intensity finds outlet in the yielding male's idealization of the masculinity of other males. The search of the assertive male for submissive responsiveness on which he can rely, and which is capable of arousing a total sense of self-confident dominance in him, turns toward yielding males for its fulfillment. The polarization of masculine and feminine tendencies which men can find together provides an arena for the development of an inner identity. The more individuals grow in such relationships, the greater is the sense of enduring and total attachment, and this brings them into the area of potential romantic feeling. This kind of love and power interchange between men is built on the original polarity of the father-son relationship. Whenever the need of the individual for the development of an inner identity grows greater, his tendency to fulfill himself through relationships with individuals of the same sex increases.

[117] The great value of polarized masculine friendships lies in the fact that they provide a psychological atmosphere favorable to the development of love and power in their creative aspects. Such relationships encourage honesty and moral commitment in human affairs, and guide each partner toward a further development of his ability to live in a broader human world of his own choosing. Because the goal of such attachments lies in the giving of help toward the living of a better life, they take on teaching and leadership functions, and this has psychotherapeutic implications. The need to interact with others in a way which brings more contentment and happiness into the world underlies the creative search for human truth and right. The espousal of such human directions gives the sense of uniqueness to the individual on which inner identity rests.

[118] Polarized masculine friendships operate outside the area of pressure toward sexualization with which society invests the relationships between individuals of the opposite sex. Not only are men free to discover their mutual warmth and helpfulness in independent ways, they are also assisted in desexualizing their love feelings by the social prohibition against homosexuality. If men depend on such prohibitions, however, their independence is ultimately undermined. It is impossible for men to accept an expanding world of love and power together without working through the potentiality of sexual responsiveness in those relationships which have a sense of enduring and total commitment. At the point where men accept the genuineness of a sexual attraction between each other, they find themselves in the uneasy position where social prohibitions are being laid aside without any guarantee that the individual can handle his sexuality in a mature and responsible way on his own. When an individual decides to accept his need for homosexual experience, he finds himself in a potentially confusing world of sexual temptation. Although society opposes the states of mind in which men find each other sexually attractive, it does create the psychological conditions in which sexuality is on the loose in the human psyche. The attempt to bring sexuality under the control of a true mated love requires that the individual bring great creative resources to the task, since he lives in a society which cannot provide him with meaningful insights in this area. If he is to divest homosexuality of its promiscuous contamination, he must accept the challenge to inner growth which homosexual capacities bring. Although homosexuality begins in the independent effort to find a more genuine love and power experience, many homosexuals find themselves sidetracked in their inner development by the same unattached sexuality which besets society as a whole, but without society's prohibitions. The identification of homosexuality with promiscuity provides society with confirmation of its fears that homosexual attachments have no responsible human function.

[119] Although men build friendships of great meaning and value for their psychological development under the protection of society's prohibition against homosexuality, they come to the place where their mutual understanding and cooperation cannot enter new psychological territory. The farther men go in their sense of a polarized union together, the less influence they can accept from social prohibitions. As they discard arbitrary limitations, they discover sources of sexual attraction which come from the psychological femininity and masculinity that they bring to each other. This attraction is parallel to the attraction of male and female in nature. All the surface differences between the sexes which are so strongly emphasized by civilized society are unimportant or nonexistent in the lower animals. The male rabbit does not know that he has a penis, nor is the female aware of her vagina. The existence of developed mammary glands in the female is not a matter which becomes sexually important. There are no social roles which are developed for the sole purpose of reinforcing masculine and feminine differences. The important differences are those functional ones which trigger and reinforce mating between submission and dominance. It is out of this union that partners reach access to natural sexuality. The only physical differences which are important in bringing the pair together are those which embody the quality of beauty in the male and the sense of goodness in the female. The greater strength and size of the male, as well as his more colorful appearance, reinforce the idealizing tendency of the female. The greater physiological intensity of the female, which builds the tensions that are channeled into devotional activities, increases the male's sense of her desirability and value. Among the animals with a strong olfactory sense, odor becomes a key stimulus, revealing to the male the female's accessibility. Society's great need to build up a maximum number of gender differences actually interferes with the establishment of psychological polarities. Since all women are not psychologically feminine nor all men psychologically masculine in their inner identity, society settles for a collection of traits which arbitrarily receive a masculine or feminine designation. The need to idealize women, for example, has resulted in a great emphasis on the wearing of colorful and stylish clothes and the use of cosmetics, thus encouraging an exhibitionistic aspect which in nature belongs to the male. The devotional functions of men in accepting financial responsibilities for women, both within and without the structure of family life, is also a reversal of nature's mechanism in which the female serves the power status of the male. When it becomes feminine to wear beautiful clothes, or masculine to pay the bills, society is showing its disregard for psychological mechanisms in favor of its own practical decisions about what masculinity and femininity should be. When men enter a growth process in which the finding of an inner identity is the primary goal, their increasing independence makes them intolerant of any aspect of identity which is not deeply rooted in their psychological natures. Because the polarized interaction between men creates an arena which has the least influence from social gender identity, it is the most favorable area for the discovery of genuine psychological masculine and feminine functions. The farther men travel down this path, the more they must deal with the sexual potentials which are aroused by an inner exposure to masculine and feminine polarity.

[120] When the individual rejects the social images and patterns of so-called normal sexuality, which are based on a fascination with anatomical differences and social roles, he precipitates himself into a human area where a great deal of psychological independence is required. His personal honesty and courage in sexual matters brings both rewards and penalties. He finds that his new erotic accessibility increases the general tendency toward promiscuity which is inherent in civilized sexuality. Independence in sexual feeling and behavior can only be justified if the individual thereby increases his independent capacity for constructiveness in human relationships. Whenever sexual sensuality and celebrative excitement become goals in themselves, they undermine the creative workmanship of love and the moral capacities of power. The homosexual who cannot handle his promiscuous tendencies is in the same psychological position as the political revolutionary who opposes the ignorance and immorality of an established system but who cannot develop the resources to find truth and right on his own. If the only truth he knows is that the system serves error, and the only right that he can embody is destructive confrontation with it, he will find himself adrift in a dehumanized world. The homosexual who is lost in his own promiscuous tendencies has thrown a challenge to society which he cannot sustain, and must turn toward self-indulgent and pretentious gratifications to hide the emptiness of his relationship to society as a whole. The only ultimate justification for independence in sexual matters lies in the need to find the kind of sexual honesty which creative love requires. When the acceptance of homosexuality becomes part of the human search for truth and right, it provides the tools for building a better life for all human beings, and this includes the area of their heterosexual development.

[121] Because society fears homosexuality and encourages an overemphasis on automatic heterosexual patterns, there is a general tendency for latent sexuality to invade human relationships whenever men seek to expand the depth and scope of their interactions. Since pubertal sexuality develops outside the mated relationship which contains sexuality in nature, society's insistence on sexual prohibitions on the one hand, and its eager espousal of automatic sexual responsiveness on the other, results in a major overemphasis on man's sexual life at the expense of his constructive love and power capacities. Men live in a psychological world where independent growth always carries the threat of sexual unorthodoxy. If men accept their homosexual capacities as an aspect of their need to live in an expanding world of human warmth and helpfulness, they must continue to pursue the growth patterns on which their deviancy is based. Growth has no value unless it is a continuing process. The nature of growth is such that it cannot stand still. The more the individual devotes himself to the goals that only love can reach, the more he must expand his ability to love. Growth is not a matter of particular accomplishments in giving to others, but of the development through a lifetime of the love and power capacities. In this way, self-development and the ability to give become one and the same thing. Without this inner expansion, the individual's sense of personal importance dies, and the emotional gratifications and accomplishments of yesterday become the basis of today's disabling depression. Society's opposition to homosexuality is based on the false premise that society has nothing to gain from the lives of individuals who establish psychological growth as the primary goal of their human existence. Society cannot support growth processes which it can neither understand nor control. It is the task of the deviant individual to pursue growth processes to those constructive ends that reveal its meaning and value for all men. The so-called normal person in civilized society has only an apparent adulthood. His increased access to adaptive success is based upon his willingness to abandon his independence in the crucial areas of his ability to love and his capacity for moral responsibility. It is only when men see the price they pay for lip service to love without the substance of its constructive devotion, and for the taking of the posture of morality without genuine commitment, that they begin to realize that they have sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. There are attempts to remedy the situation with hectic efforts at spiritual renewal and social reform, but there is no remedy for a love-deprived world save a rededication to the workmanship of love itself, nor can a human world which lacks the capacity for genuine involvement remedy its social ills without a willing personal enlistment in the search for moral exploration and development.

[122] When human beings fall in love, they anticipate an unlimited expression of their need to share affection and cooperation. The romantic union brings a promise of an end to aloneness. The idyllic world of romance brings only those needs and purposes into focus which lovers can share in a fulfilling way. The heart of the romantic experience lies in its polarity. It is possible to bring both the independent and dependent sides of the personality into a relationship only when the dependent needs in one partner reach out to the independent capacities of the other. This interlocking of dependencies provides a full access to the childlike gratification of dependent needs without sacrificing the adult status of the individual. This expectation of the fullest possible gratification of all aspects of human need gives romance a quality of permanence and completeness, and endows it with the qualities of a goal toward which the individual need no longer struggle. This acceptance of the romantic union as a mated endpoint is no problem in animals who bring their natural capacity for polarity to the relationship. The romantic union cannot reach the fulfillment it seeks if falling in love brings a need for an inner identity which is not yet established. The idyllic nature of romance is disturbed when problems of self-development intrude. It is when the expectation of a perfect fulfillment is undermined by the reality of the lack of inner preparation for romantic experience that human beings begin to face the need for psychological growth. Romance is inherently intolerant of failure, yet it is through the failures of romance that the individual learns to recognize his inadequacies. When romantic goals are frustrated, motivation comes into being for the further development of romantic capacity and the individual recognizes that romantic experience can be a stepping stone. The ability to make romantic attachments as if they were permanent and complete, and at the same time to retain the capability of dissolving an attachment which fails to find the necessary fulfillment, is essential to the growth process. If the individual cannot dedicate himself to romance without reserve, he imposes qualifications which undermine the experience he seeks to have. If he cannot recognize failure in a romantic attachment after he has done all he can to reach fulfillment, his capacity for growth will be compromised. Falling in love exposes the individual to his need for permanence and completeness in a mated union, but the relationship must be tested by its effect on the psychic life of both partners, and it is only when there is a continuing renewal of romantic fulfillment that the expectation of permanence becomes a reality.

[123] The romantic union cannot stand still. The sense of being in love, although unlimited in quality, must grow through time if the intensity of feeling on which sexuality is based is to be maintained in the relationship. An unlimited love can grow greater, because the capacity for love to do psychic work enlarges the scope of its operation. The feelings of love become translated into new insights into the nature of the loved object, and there is a corresponding development of the capacity for devoted service. The power aspect of the union, although total in its implications, can grow greater through the faculty of power for expanding its commitments, and this expansiveness insures access to the celebrative mood. It is only through the involvement of both partners in this kind of expanding emotional world that romance can reach a dynamic stability, and such a commitment depends on the ability of each to grow in the relationship. The romantic union rests on the apparent paradox that a force which is inherently unstable, namely growth, becomes the basis of a new level of stability.

[124] When men lack the inner identity on which growth depends, they cannot undertake to establish romantic stability out of their own psychological resources. If they substitute the social supports inherent in the institution of marriage for genuine inner development, the union is no longer able to hold the surplus tendencies within it, and if the partners remain loyal in their sexual behavior it is only because they have accepted social prohibitions in this area. The spirit of romance cannot survive prohibitions because its essence consists of the voluntary quality of its commitments. Psychological growth is meaningless unless it is free to question the validity of romantic relationships and to pursue new levels of romantic fulfillment. As men accept the primacy of psychological growth, they can no longer attempt to isolate their capacity for a mated union from the whole fabric of their creative pursuits. The romantic union has not reached its goal until it has created a psychological world favorable to growth in both partners. The ultimate and highest need in the relationship of lovers is to accept a psychotherapeutic function in each other's lives. A mated union based on shared growth must make room for creative confrontation and conflict when problems and frustrations emerge in the relationship. This means that romantic fulfillment must periodically give way to a creative struggle toward greater understanding and a greater capacity for responsibility. There is a phasic alternation between the idyllic moments of romance and the willingness to accept the impact of problems and obstacles which the creative faculties bring out in the open. In the creative phase, the mated union becomes less romantic and more constructive in its implications. The romance endures during the constructive phases because the partners have faith and hope in their ability to solve problems.

[125] The way men find psychological balance is a crucial factor in the creative process. The development of the love capacities in a feminine personality must find its own kind of power, just as the power status of the masculine personality must include its own ability to love. The masculine components in femininity, and the feminine components in masculinity, need to be expressed without upsetting the primacy of the inner identity. The mated relationship makes it possible for the feminine personality to assert itself within the psychological framework of a submissive relationship to an ideal, and for the masculine personality to yield within a framework of a dominant relationship to that which is possessed. Without the mated status of voluntary submission, the assertiveness of the feminine personality escapes from the motivational pattern of serving an ideal, and without the dominant status of exploiting love, the yielding of the masculine personality is no longer guided by the exploring of opportunity. Individuals who lack a well defined inner identity cannot find the means to use balance constructively. Assertiveness in the feminine personality becomes willful and self-aggrandizing. Yielding in the masculine personality degenerates into unproductive self-preoccupation and vanity. The ability to use the sexual and celebrative surpluses in a mated pattern lies at the core of man's struggle to handle these psychological forces. When the search for sexual fulfillment becomes separated from the mated needs in a promiscuous way, the identity struggle of the entire personality is undermined. In promiscuous sexuality, each partner takes from the other. In a mated union, each partner gives to the other. When promiscuity sets the stage, sexuality is the goal. Under the influence of a mated union, the entire psychological welfare of each partner is the goal, and within this exchange of affection and helpfulness, sexuality comes into existence without artifice. In a union which accepts anything which contributes to contentment and happiness, sexual desire and performance find a natural home. Promiscuous sexuality cannot be guided by concern for the welfare of the partner, because it can only fulfill itself where such outside preoccupations and commitments are excluded. When individuals join together on the basis of sexual accessibility, they are under the influence of the socially reinforced illusion that sexuality can exist in a healthy form as an isolated psychological phenomenon. There is always a union of some kind in a sexual experience with another person, but in a promiscuous experience the union is based on a mutual agreement to ignore any aspect of the partner which does not contribute to the sexual goals of the moment.

[126] A sexual relationship occurs when sexual feeling and the readiness for sexual experience come together. In the mated union, the feeling state of the feminine personality builds out of idealization of the power status of the partner, and the masculine readiness for exploitation builds out of interaction with the responsive love of the partner. This reinforcement of a polarized identity in each individual constitutes the romantic courtship. As the courtship builds pleasurable longing in the feminine personality, and enjoyable eagerness in the masculine personality, there is a deepening and broadening of their mutual psychological exposure which brings sexuality into being. Sexuality emerges in a setting where the yielding in the one and the assertion in the other is already firmly established. A fulfilled sexual union is impossible without devotional assertion in the feminine personality and without exploitative yielding in the masculine personality. Feminine activity in the sex act is released by the need to gratify the male orgastically. Masculine sexual excitement is set in motion by the recognition of the longing of the female for altruistic surrender. Sexuality on the loose encourages any utilization of assertion and yielding which serves the need of the sensual gratification of the moment. When longing is directly sexualized, it leads into compulsive sexual behavior.

[127] When eagerness for recognition and admiration is captured by sexual images, it leads into obsessive sexual feelings. Compulsive and obsessive mechanisms are necessary elements in the making of a promiscuous sexual adjustment. Under such conditions, the need to develop an inner identity is replaced by the need to preserve sexual adequacy. Compulsive and obsessive sexuality lead to a continuing overemphasis on the meaning and value of sexuality, guiding it into an area where it acts as an antidote to depression.

[128] In the adaptive life of man psychological balance is used to reach practical effectiveness. Balance takes precedence over the need to accumulate inner tension and energy for creative purposes. Understanding is important only to the degree that it leads to effective practical action, and the development of ability is keyed to situations of known practical utility. In adaptive areas, sensitive individuals put their greatest emphasis on the ability to act, and the man of action emphasizes the usable understanding inherent in know-how and shrewdness. Romantic and creative self-development cannot thrive when their psychological area is invaded by adaptive mechanisms, nor can the adaptive life maintain its practicality if there is an excessive investment of tension and energy in its activities. The fulfillments of the creative life cannot be reached as if they were products to be bought and sold in a market place. Excessive enthusiasm and inspiration in practical affairs undermines judgment and reliability.

[129] The compulsive and obsessive mechanisms come into being as an artificial kind of balance within the self. Through their operation the individual finds a false sense of completeness, bypassing the need for psychological growth. The more machinelike compulsiveness becomes, the less access to depth of feeling the personality has, thus threatening to undermine the desires and longings which compulsiveness undertook to gratify. In this state of psychological depression the individual turns toward the elaboration of self-expression in adaptive areas such as the career and the domestic aspects of marriage. An excessive investment of feeling in areas which cannot lead to inner growth leads to a reinforcement of the compulsive cycle. Compulsiveness is favored both by the inability of love to find work to do, and by the excessive investment of love feelings where creative love does not belong. Similarly, obsessiveness is favored both by the lack of capacity for the exploration of opportunity, and by the assumption of a power stance in areas where creative power cannot extend its domain.

[130] when men pursue creative goals they must avoid the investment of love where it is not needed and the engagement of power where opportunities are blocked. The adaptive life is structured to satisfy basic survival requirements. The search for an expanding capacity to find human truth and right can only interfere with the practical nature of adaptive undertakings. The psychological depression which comes from the failure to establish a romantic and creative life motivates the individual to seek increasing satisfactions in the adaptive area. Where psychic growth is blocked, the socially supported goals of career competition and the accumulation of material property receive a compensatory investment, and the more the individual accepts involvement in the pursuit of worldly rewards, the more his chances increase of finding success in this direction. It is as if he falls in love with the socially supported power structure, or enlists himself in unquestioning allegiance to the prestige seeking goals which social beliefs support. This over-investment in adaptive matters brings enthusiasm and inspiration into the life of the individual and operates as an antidote to depression. The motivational structure thus has created a pseudo-creative pattern. When yielding personalities find access to action in this manner, its falseness can only be seen when its compulsive structure is recognized. The ideal which they serve is a self-aggrandizing one, and since practical effectiveness guides their actions, the end justifies the means. Their adaptive activities become aggressive and amoral in character, and in spite of the fact that they have undertaken goals which society supports, their activities are revealed to be a form of taking, not giving. Creative goals bring resources into being which benefit all human beings. The pseudo-creativity of the compulsive adaptive life only increases the isolation of people from each other, since the process can only validate itself by the success of the individual in winning competitive struggles with others.

[131] When the adaptive life of assertive individuals is invaded by a pseudo-creative pattern, the shallowness of the process is exposed by the recognition of its obsessive structure. The individual submits in a wholehearted way to situations which promise prestige rewards. He lives in a brainwashed world in which truth loses its objective identity. Men adopt any belief that furthers their prestige status in society with a fervor that is out of place in relationship to the shallowness of their undertakings.

[132] The creative process requires the growing individual to live in a world which is changing and expanding. His life consists of developmental phases in which he selectively proceeds to the kind of new relationships which make room for his growing capacities. He does not try to force changes in old relationships out of his own personal need to interact on a deeper or broader scale, ignoring the psychological welfare of others. The pseudo-creative patterns of compulsive and obsessive individuals do not seek to find an expanding human world. When the compulsive individual accepts commitments to action based on a socially reinforced ideal, he is seeking an increase in his adaptive effectiveness and not an expansion of his ability to give to others through an increasing understanding. The efforts he expends have his own self-aggrandizement as their goal and do not provide the kind of insights which become human resources for the moral development of others. The compulsive mechanism provides for one-sided development and therefore has no mated structure. The service of the ideal does not reveal new aspects of its nature, but rather permits the individual to concentrate his energies on goals which are not subject to question and do not change. Under these circumstances, the individual can seem to grow without the insecurity which comes from living in a changing world.

[133] When obsessive mechanisms are used in a pseudo-creative pattern, the individual conforms to socially established ideas without the need to find new areas of opportunity. The opportunities he does exploit are not subject to question. His capacity for exploitation is not geared to the enrichment of his resources, and therefore his increasing adaptive mastery has no mated structure. He is spared the heretical doubts which accompany the selective search for new opportunities. He attains the appearance of psychological growth without the need to risk his pride in undertakings which have no guarantee of success. The price of this kind of access to a sense of personal importance is the rejection of truth as a force in human affairs, just as the compulsive mechanism results in a rejection of the significance of morality.

[134] The compulsive mechanism takes its origin in the need to overcome neurotic inhibition. Its effectiveness is measured by its ability to translate tensions into action. The individual cannot tolerate deep feeling for its own sake because this would interfere with his organization for action. Any needs and desires which cannot be directly gratified are excluded. The individual becomes machine-like and perfectionistic in the pursuit of goals which are socially supported and do not change. The ideal which the individual serves has an authoritarian position in his life, and his motivational energies are maintained through intimidation. The individual seeks to cure the depression which is inherent in compulsiveness through further development of his adaptive efficiency. Since he has given up his capacity for creative love in favor of the direct development of his ability to act, he seeks to win love from others in order to restore the feeling level of his personality. He wants to be loved because he is doing what he is supposed to do. The power status which he gains from being loved depends solely on the success of his practical activities and operates to increase the intimidation which he must endure. He is driven by perfectionistic strivings in the expectation that such accomplishments will make him more worthy of being loved. When the yielding individual is loved for what he can do in the practical area, his adaptive life closes the door to inner growth.

[135] The obsessive mechanism operates to protect the individual from delinquent or psychopathic tendencies. The automatic acceptance of feelings which are socially supported permits the individual to find commitments and loyalties which serve his adaptive purposes. The success of the obsessive mechanism is measured by its ability to capture energies in patterns which are not subject to question. The individual cannot tolerate psychological freedom for its own sake because this would undermine the dogmatic quality of his commitments. Because the obsessive individual lives exclusively in a practical world, shaped by dogmatic adherence to established values, he is in a psychologically seduced position. Having given up the capacity for creative power development, he turns away from the need to exercise responsibility in an independent way and instead feels that others are responsible for him. The love that he feels for others in this protected position has no creative implications. His capacity to develop an inner identity is sacrificed to a sense of worshipful submergence in a world which gives him unquestioned acceptance.

[136] Compulsive and obsessive individuals are trapped in a world of practical accomplishments, and this includes the surplus psychological capacities. They use sex and celebration as entities to which they must adapt. The materialism of their position has given rise to such literary images as the Midas touch and the Faustian selling of the soul. Accomplishments reached through these mechanisms increasingly dehumanize the personalities of those individuals who cannot tolerate any diminution of the prerogatives and rewards they have attained. The pseudo-creativity which exists in such a world brings much knowledge and ability into being, but the more men develop socially useful assets in this way, the farther they get from the operations of creative love and power in their own lives. The advancements reached in non-human fields make it appear that men are using their constructive faculties in a productive way. It is only when failures in the application of love and moral responsibility in human affairs are recognized that the emptiness of their way of life becomes apparent. Human understanding and cooperation in a compulsive and obsessive world rest on the willingness to ignore problems and disregard obstacles which would interfere with the efficient operation of established social patterns of thought and action. As long as truth and right must remain practical, men cannot find the time or place to explore human truth and right as goals in themselves, and there is no basis for challenging the status-quo until obvious difficulties threaten to overwhelm the efficient working of the established social system. At such times men attempt to solve their problems by a renewal of their compulsive and obsessive zeal, but this attempt to attain great ends through the use of little tools can only reveal the fact that the worship of practicality is, in the end, impractical. The social stresses which emerge when the failures generated by human ignorance and immorality become evident cannot be remedied by the direct methods which are appropriate to the repair of a piece of machinery. Until it is recognized that major social stresses are an indication of a fundamental lack in the capacity of human beings to use love and power as full fledged constructive forces, their misplaced and ineffective efforts to emerge from their social difficulties will only increase the problems that they have.

[137] The more men become entrapped by a psychological over-investment in a practical world, the less important inner identity becomes. All the surface manifestations of identity are reinforced and become the substance of what men regard as the truth about themselves and what they take to be the nature of moral behavior. No matter how much men attempt to expand their interaction at the level of their social roles, they cannot penetrate the psychological isolation which such superficiality brings. Since they live in a world of implied or explicit agreement not to recognize psychological forces which would undermine conventional social beliefs and patterns of behavior, they must resist the influence of independent individuality whenever it gives truth and right the highest priority in human affairs. The wholehearted acceptance of social roles in areas such as male and female gender identity, the family role of husband and wife, and the espousal of qualities appropriate to a career identity, provides a basis for socially supported empathy and identification which leaves no room for individual efforts to expand the influence of honesty and courage in human affairs. When men are committed to an image of themselves which is determined by practical necessity, they learn to use communication for the double purpose of conveying the thoughts they wish to have understood and to hide those elements in their feeling and awareness which are not harmonious with the role they are enacting. In the same way, their interventions in each other's lives have a dual quality. They imply a degree of good will and morality which their social roles require, but they do not intend to become involved beyond the point which rational social interests dictate. The individual requires of himself only that he assume the posture of moral responsibility. This kind of pretentiousness becomes the substance of social cooperation. When feelings are kept secret because of their social inappropriateness, and responsibility becomes a matter of manner rather than commitment, there is no way for men to break down the encircling isolation which keeps each human being in his own psychological cell, accepting remoteness and alienation as if they were inevitable aspects of the human environment.

[138] Individuals cannot develop the expanding personal relationships on which contentment and happiness rest through an increase in the scope of their adaptive lives. No amount of social interaction based on conformity to social beliefs and institutions can reduce the inner isolation of the individual. The expansion of social systems into new areas of human needs does not in itself pose a threat to the creative life of man. The threat comes when individuals use such systems as a source of pseudo-creative development in their personal lives. It would be impossible to develop human understanding and responsibility in a creative way without leading to an increase in society's ability to take care of the basic needs of its citizens. The objective and automatic nature of social institutions belongs to their function and cannot affect the independent individuality of those persons who are capable of separating their creative strivings from their adaptive life.

[139] When men turn in a creative direction in their personal development, rejecting the direct road to psychological balance inherent in compulsive and obsessive social conformity, they must recognize the inadequacy of the human tools which they are attempting to use. The first prerequisite for psychological growth is the ability to handle failure. The practical world of dogma and authority is well supplied with signposts. The creative search for truth and right in human affairs must be carried out in a changing world beset by unknown and chaotic influences. As men attempt to love more deeply, they are betrayed by their own inability to maintain the kind of idealization which alone can open channels of action that are not aggressive and self-aggrandizing in nature. When men attempt to develop their responsible power capacities, they find themselves unable to use exploitation with the kind of integrity which alone can open channels of loyalty that do not lead into passivity and vanity. The hate and anger which men feel for a social world which equips them so poorly for psychological growth tend to overflow into the whole relationship of the individual to society, leading to destructive confrontations which advance neither the interests of a stable social world nor the need of, the growing individual to find a basis for the independent pursuit of constructive human goals. If love is to do its work in an atmosphere favorable to its development, it must find insights as it goes, and this requires continuity in its devotional faith in the value of truth for all men. If personal power is to find loyal involvement, it must build mastery techniques as it goes, and this can only occur where there is a total commitment to the meaning of moral capacity. These independent psychological undertakings are carried forward in a world characterized by the failures which experimental flexibility brings. The faith and hope of growing individuals must be firmly grounded to make such independence possible.

[140] When men use compulsive and obsessive mechanisms, they are under the influence of socially established goals. The idealization of the authority inherent in social institutions by the compulsive individual means that he loves an impersonal entity which does not change in response to being loved. The creative aspect of love, namely its capacity for bringing new insights into being, has no place where the object of love has no need for its devotional work. The compulsive individual needs understanding only insofar as it increases the efficiency of his own manipulative activities.

[141] Because the obsessive individual accepts the guidance of the dogma which is inherent in social beliefs, his power status comes into being in response to impersonal influences which do not change in the process of being exploited. The creative aspect of power, namely its ability to bring new techniques of mastery into being, has no place where its increasing capacity for moral intervention cannot bring an increasing level of responsiveness in others. The compulsive individual loves that which is beyond the reach of love and only requires conformity. The obsessive individual exploits that which cannot respond to being possessed but only requires allegiance.

[142] In the civilized world, the need to love is generally accepted, but the psychological methods which love uses to do its work are poorly understood. It is much easier to feel the gratifying warmth which love brings than to struggle with the constructive work of love which requires that the individual find his own access to human truth. Without sufficient understanding, the idealization process cannot survive involvement with the totality of the idealized object, because such involvement must include an awareness of the defects and weaknesses inherent in the loved person, and this is especially true where he is growing. Personal power is also valued in principle in the civilized world, but the vicissitudes of its development are poorly accepted. The self-confident acceptance of opportunity must run the gamut of exposure to assaults on its sense of integrity which the ignorance and indifference of others put in its path. Idealization must be able to find beauty in the midst of ugliness. The capacity for exploitation must be able to find goodness in others without being sidetracked or entrapped by the recalcitrance and hostility which emerge from inadequate understanding.

[143] Deep feeling which cannot attach itself to an object breeds neurosis. Such feeling undermines the capacity to act. When deep feeling finds access to action through service of an ideal, neurotic inhibitions are overcome. If the ideal is rigid and authoritarian, there is no room for the creative truth seeking functions of love and compulsive mechanisms to take over the personality. Behind this kind of service to an ideal lies a self-aggrandizing orientation of the personality. When the individual turns toward an independent use of his love capacities, searching for an ideal chosen by him and responsive to his influence, he is threatened once again with neurotic inhibition. If his submissive capacity is not deep enough to permit the true workmanship of love to develop, he becomes vulnerable to sadistic deterioration of his efforts to influence the object which he seeks to idealize. Sadism is a manifestation of disappointed idealism.

[144] Spontaneous energy which cannot commit itself to particular areas of human opportunity breeds delinquency. Such spontaneity undermines the capacity for loyalty. When the individual is able to make meaningful commitments, delinquency is overcome. If the access to opportunity is rigid and dogmatic, there is no room for the creative development of moral capacities and obsessive mechanisms take over the personality. When the individual turns toward an independent use of his personal power capacities, reaching for opportunities chosen by him and enriched by his dominance, he must pass through a growth period in which his capacity to adhere to goals is brought into question, exposing him again to delinquent patterns. If his capacity for dominance does not reach the kind of wholehearted integrity which leaves room for constructive probings for new opportunity, he becomes vulnerable to masochistic deterioration of his feeling patterns. Masochism is a manifestation of disappointment in the search for opportunity.

[145] Understanding without love is a potentially destructive tool in human affairs. The scientific understanding of an impersonal subject matter requires a devotion to truth, if that understanding is to reach the kind of conceptual validity which reveals the laws of nature. If men fail to reach truth in their scientific inquiries, and accept pseudo-insights which cannot explain natural phenomena, their ability to win territory from the unknown is diminished, but natural phenomena are not altered in the process. Human understanding, on the other hand, influences the lives of those to whom it is offered, and when partial insights usurp the place of truth in a relationship in which understanding is needed and accepted, the integrity of the object of understanding is undermined. The way an individual is understood influences what he becomes. When men attempt to love in an independent way, but without sufficient submission in the power realm to permit truth seeking to go forward, their attempt to idealize others brings them to an increasing awareness of the faults and defects in other personalities. If the individual cannot relinquish his relationship with the object he is attempting to love, he must express hostility toward those obstructive qualities which frustrate his effort to idealize. The manipulative component of his love feelings becomes separated off from service to the total personality of the other individual and is directed toward the elimination of the hated qualities. When understanding is used for destructive purposes in this way, it escapes from its love moorings and proceeds on hostile motivations of its own. The submission of the object to such hostile influence is motivated by the need of the object for feeling and understanding from another, even though such understanding undermines the integrity of the recipient. The psychological manipulations are received as if they had magical properties. The sadistic deterioration of the workmanship of love comes into being when the maintenance of a relationship takes priority over the methods used to give it continuity. There is a desperation inherent in sadism based on the lack of capacity to face the possibility of failure in making a human attachment. The individual using sadistic mechanisms cannot tolerate the sense of inferiority which would arise from a recognition of the failure of his love capacities.

[146] Involvement in the lives of others without moral commitment has destructive implications. Exploitation of human resources requires a commitment to the right, if exploitation is to use the kind of objective techniques which take the entire nature of resources into account. When human techniques reach such objective reliability they have the same status as engineering skills in non-human fields. When engineering technique fails because the full nature of the materials it uses has not been taken into account, the effort to expand control fails for the moment, but natural phenomena are not altered in the process. The attempt to take human responsibility, on the other hand, does influence the lives of others, and when inadequate modalities of mastery usurp the place of moral responsibility, dominance and its exploitative tools become damaging forces. The way an individual accepts control influences what he becomes. When men attempt to assume power in an independent way, but without sufficient self-confidence to permit the free search for opportunity to go forward, the loyalties they develop become entrapping in nature, and they become increasingly aware of the obstructiveness of others. If the individual cannot dissolve frustrating loyalties because of the threat of emotional emptiness which such separation entails, he must dwell in a world of hatred for the neglect and indifference which surround him. The feeling component of his power aspirations becomes separated off from the exploration of responsiveness in others and is captured by a mounting intensity in the involvement of the moment. He submits to forces which otherwise would anger him, with the expectation that such intensity of involvement will permit hind to guide these forces into patterns chosen by him. Such behavior has miraculous implications. When the capacity for involvement is used in this way, it becomes detached from its power base and proceeds on energies generated by hatred. The individual uses weakness as a means of influencing others, and their willingness to respond to such helplessness is motivated by a distorted need to idealize that aspect which is miraculous in nature. The service of such an ideal tends to undermine the depth of those who respond to it. The masochistic deterioration of the loyalties of power comes into being when the maintaining of an involvement takes priority over the methods used to give it psychological substance. There is a resignation to fate inherent in masochism, based on the inability to let go of a power attachment. The individual using masochistic mechanisms cannot tolerate the sense of guilt which the abandonment of loyalties brings.

[147] The tendency of love and power to take sadistic and masochistic directions can only be overcome through the development of an inner identity. The only cure for sadism is a reaffirmation of love. Masochism can only be dissipated when power finds the freedom to dissolve the influence of dogmatic loyalties. Sadism and masochism are disorders which lie in the path of the creative search for psychological independence. These mechanisms have a social influence, since they are subject to identification and empathy among those who share the same developmental problems. But if the individual is to go further in his growth struggle, he must proceed into an area where social supports offer him no assistance. The only pathway to creative development lies through the honesty and courage which permit men to face the sense of inferiority which the deficiencies of their love capacities bring, and the sense of guilt which the inadequacies of their power capacities create. Men who live in a compulsive and obsessive pattern never face these issues, because they do not accept personal responsibility for their own psychological growth. It is only when men are determined to live in an expanding human world that they accept the challenge to find the ability to give to others from a love or power base. The need to overcome depression in their personal lives supplies men with the patience and endurance which are required to face the discomforts of inferiority and guilt. Since the first step toward independent wisdom is the recognition of the individual's own ignorance, and since the first efforts of courageous human enterprise require that he face his own weakness, man needs the kind of motivation which only comes to those who have excluded all the defensive alternatives, voluntarily abandoning the avenues of retreat which society provides.

[148] Men cannot break down the psychological barriers which exist between human beings without utilization of the mated mechanism, whether in the form of a romantic union or in the creative application of love and power in human affairs. When men turn away from the intimidating and seducing influences of socially reinforced relationships, they must struggle against the selfish tendency of love to use power for its own ends and against the pretentious aspect of power which uses love as a tool of its own vanity. Men need imbalance as a basis for inner identity, and once imbalance is accepted, there is an incompleteness which drives the individual to find expanding relationships with others, but also leaves him extremely vulnerable to the taking of any route which promises momentary psychological comfort. Sadism and masochism are disorders of individuals who are attempting to make an expanding relationship with their world. When growth is blocked through inability to handle shame and guilt, the individual uses essentially emergency techniques which employ magical and miraculous elements. Instead of finding an ideal, sadism undertakes to eliminate or destroy those aspects of another which are distasteful and ugly without regard for the integrity of the object. The identity of the other disappears in the face of the onslaught of manipulative energies, which operate as if they had a clear and impelling justification. This focused release of dominant energy comes with a sense of self-fulfillment, not because of the destructive element in itself, but because of the inner release from psychological inadequacy. Sadism, in contrast to compulsive patterns of behavior, frees the individual from intimidation and brings a kind of enjoyment within the psychological framework it creates.

[149] Instead of seeking to find new opportunities, masochism leads to an over-investment of submissive feeling in that which is unresponsive and obstructive, without regard to the continuity of experience. In this surrender to an outside force, the individual eliminates his sense of responsibility, using his intensity of feeling to ignore the failure of his capacity for control. His comprehension of the nature of outside forces disappears in his total involvement in the feelings of the moment, and this abandonment of the self has for him an inevitable quality. This focused release of submissive feeling comes with a sense of self-fulfillment, not because of the suffering in itself, but because of the release from guilt and the accompanying expansion in his sense of security. Masochism, in contrast to the obsessive mechanism, frees the individual from a sense of seduced obligation and is experienced in a pleasurable way.

[150] Emergency survival reactions in nature come into being through fear and rage. Distaste and apprehension become full-fledged fear when there is an expanding awareness of a dangerous object, and anger becomes rage when an obstructive situation provokes an expanding need for control. The emergency fear and rage responses employ the same expanding capacity for submission and dominance which are used in the surplus sexual and celebrative reactions. Intensity becomes sexual when danger is dissipated through idealization, and vigor becomes celebrative when obstructiveness is converted into opportunity through the exploitative capacities. Deepening fear is painful, and swelling rage causes suffering, whereas sex and celebration bring intense pleasure and keen enjoyment, skirting the edge of pain and suffering but maintaining a distinct separation. The sadistic mechanism protects the personality from a submission which cannot fulfill itself in a pleasurable way, and if pursued would produce fear. Because the need for deep feeling is frustrated, the individual responds with anger to components in the object as if they were obstructive forces. This is a calculated anger which has self-justifying implications, protecting the self from an expansion of submissive feeling which cannot reach constructive gratification. Sadism protects the self from the sense of inferiority which the failure of love capacity brings.

[151] The masochistic mechanism protects the personality from rage. When the outlets for free energy are blocked, the individual responds with hatred for obstructing circumstances as if they were unalterable and eternal. This sense of being imprisoned by timeless forces brings an abrogation of the will, surrendering to a fate which lies outside the range of his manipulative capacities. This surrender is not a fear reaction with the discomfort that fear entails, but a rational hatred which spares him from responsibility, protecting the self from an expansion of dominance which cannot find constructive outlets. Masochism protects the self from the sense of guilt which failure of moral responsibility brings.

[152] It is through the development of insights that love reaches the creative level of giving. There is a unique understanding of an idealized object, and this understanding endows the lover with a sense of individuality, so that his submission is not self-effacing. If he cannot use his understanding effectively to serve the interests of an ideal, he may protect himself from a sense of failure by using his insights to depreciate the ideal. Since the compulsive personality serves an ideal which is established for him by society, he is protected from such hostile tendencies. It is only when men accept the higher obligation to find an ideal out of their own independent love capacities that they must struggle with the destructive component which partial insights bring into being.

[153] It is through the development of skills that power reaches the creative level of giving. When power exploits the love of others, it develops the resources that it uses in a unique way, so that its accomplishments are personal, avoiding a sense of dutiful obligation. If mastery is frustrated by a lack of responsiveness in others, the individual tends not to feel committed, and he may protect himself from a sense of guilt by an intensification of feeling for the obstructive aspect of the relationship. He uses his techniques of mastery to increase his exposure to the hateful impact of the obstructive situation. Since the obsessive personality does not have to find opportunity for himself, being limited to a socially reinforced sense of values, he is protected from fascination with such hateful tendencies. It is only when men operate at a higher level of personal initiative, seeking an exploitable reality out of their own independent power capacities, that they must struggle with the entrapment by hateful forces which incomplete mastery brings into being.

[154] The only cure for the destructive use of partial insights is a greater ability to love. The only remedy for the entrapments which incomplete mastery techniques bring is a greater capacity for constructive power. The fact that deep love and vigorous personal power are so close to romance means that men must enter the arena of their creative interpersonal strivings well equipped with understanding and ability in dealing with sex and celebration. Promiscuity comes into being when sexuality is separated off from the mated union. When love cannot submit to the power status of its ideal, the mated process is disrupted. The deep feelings which idealization brings create insight into the sexual needs of another. When sexual needs are perceived as a thing in itself, apart from the power organization of the partner the awareness of his sexual accessibility operates as a partial insight, utilizing psychological mechanisms which are sadistic in pattern. Since the partner willingly submits in a masochistic pattern, the sexual event is endowed with a high level of erotic intensity on both sides. Because of the sensual gratification inherent in the pseudo-mating of sadistic and masochistic sexual tendencies, the sexual event is accepted and justified in its own terms, without regard to the over-all effect on the growth potential of both partners. Just as love cannot deepen when sexual gratification replaces the workmanship of a continuing love, so power cannot develop an increasing capacity for responsibility when it is enveloped by an entrapping sexual feeling wherever it seeks to explore new avenues of involvement. When the exploitative needs of the masculine personality cannot find genuine opportunity because of the inadequacy of its mastery faculties, its vulnerability to masochistic yielding is readily captured by the sexual tendencies.

[155] The union of sadistic and masochistic tendencies pairs human beings together in a way that is polarized but lacking in creative growth potential. Sadistic exploitation leads to enslavement of its object and this submission cannot become the basis for a development of the truth seeking capacities. Masochistic idealization encourages an amoral self-indulgence in its object and this kind of dominance cannot lead to the development of moral responsibility. The sado-masochistic deterioration of mating tends to discredit the efforts of human beings to break down the psychological barriers which exist between them. The more their need to reach each other takes sado-masochistic directions, the more discouragement they feel in their efforts to use love and power constructively. Under such conditions, there are strong resistance's against independent inner development, and men are driven back to the compulsive and obsessive world where conformity to social dogma and authority give them the guidance that their independent efforts cannot find.

[156] The development of creative love and power capacities must pass through sado-masochistic territory. The truth which comes into being through the workmanship of mated love is the only weapon that can overcome sadism. The affirmation of the right which evolves from the experimental probings of mated power is the only force that can conquer masochism. Since the sadomasochistic deterioration of mating protects individuals from inferiority and guilt, dulling their sense of the inadequacy of their insights and of the incompetence of their human skills, men can only maintain their growth potential if they have the right to change the psychological world in which they find themselves. Psychological independence means that the individual has the right to select the human environment in which his dependent needs will be met. An individual who is struggling to overcome the sadistic components in his personality must face the fact that the ideal he seeks to serve may not be adequate to his needs. The masochistic individual cannot get out of his passive entrapment through a simple determination to exercise control. He must face the fact that the opportunities that he seeks to exploit may be inherently resistive to the expansion of the free exercise of his will. When men cannot accept inner growth as the primary goal of their lives, they cannot maintain the flexibility which permits them to evolve beyond the sado-masochistic level of development.

[157] The ability to dissolve those human attachments which put a barrier in the path of growth hinges on the development of new insights and mastery. Sado-masochistic attachments have the inherent quality of protecting the individual from the need for new psychological assets. If he goes outside such protection, he finds himself in the position of giving up what he has without any assurance that his personal assets are great enough to replace it with something better. The conquering of sadistic and masochistic tendencies requires great faith and hope in the creative potential of love and power. The transitional quality of growth requires that the old be dissolved before the new has taken form, and it precipitates the individual into a world where orientation and organization are difficult to find. Such transitions have a revolutionary and heretical quality, and the individual knows much better what he is not willing to feel or do than what ideals he will serve and what loyalties he will accept. The growing individual finds a deepening capacity for love by rejecting the kind of love which makes no room for his growing capacity for truth seeking. As personal power develops, it rejects those responsibilities which undermine the freedom of the individual to choose his own kind of moral integrity. During growth transitions, the only understanding which attains the permanence of truth is faith in the ultimate constructiveness of love, and the only mode of procedure which attains the integrity of the right is the unflagging commitment to the goals of personal power. It is only when men accept the primacy of psychological growth goals that they can tolerate the emptiness and sense of limbo which the transitions of growth bring.

[158] Most of the mated attachments in the civilized world have significant sado-masochistic elements, to the degree that without these elements the relationship itself is threatened. When men cannot tolerate the instabilities which growth brings, they must endow their stable world with a sense of inevitability, eliminating the possibility of alternatives. Stability takes priority over the growth process and the psychological substance of mating becomes lost in the effort to protect it. It is only when men can gain the independence which permits the search for an inner identity to go forward that psychological mating can emerge as the natural product of their creative love and power capacities.

[159] Men who grow must face the fact that the making and dissolving of human attachments is the basic instrument of self-development, and this is nowhere more true than in the area of a romantic union. The dissolving of romantic .ties creates a sense of loss which reveals the individual's own inadequacies, and thus provides the motivation for further growth effort. There is no way to grow without exposure to such challenges. Growth proceeds through a succession of failures, but with each failure the individual becomes better prepared to meet life with expanding psychological assets. This ability to use failure as a motivation for growth separates the creative adult from the conventional members of society who reject any aspect of truth and right which would expose their personal ignorance and irresponsibility. The creative individual puts himself in the position of encouraging failure, provided that the importance of his developmental effort is great enough to match the inner stress which he must bear, just as the creative thinker must ask questions which have no apparent answer if he is to penetrate the unknown, and the creative man of action must attempt what is regarded as impossible if he is to reduce a part of the chaotic to orderly control.

[160] When men face the fact that they live in an ignorant and immoral world they must decide whether they will conform to it, ignoring and denying their own ignorance and immorality in the process, or whether they will oppose it by choosing to live their lives in a psychological world selected by them, where devotion to the truth and adherence to the right can find a home. The idealization of human nature as an objective entity worthy of love is an absolute necessity if the individual is to expose himself to the weaknesses and defects of society without losing his capacity to search for truth in the service of all men. Unless the love of mankind is great enough to contain within its sense of human beauty the awareness of ugly aspects, the love capacities of the individual will be swept away by his hostilities and his revolutionary fervor will be captured by sadistic mechanisms. The readiness to exploit human nature as a responsive resource, guided by a sense of the essential goodness of men, is an irreducible necessity if the individual is to confront the indifference of society without losing his capacity for moral development. Unless the sense of opportunity is great enough to contain within its utilization of human goodness the capacity to avoid ensnarement by obstructive attributes, the power capacities of the individual will be undermined by hatred, and his heretical inability to find new loyalties will enter masochistic channels.

[161] The idealization and exploitation of human nature as an objective entity make it possible for men to live in a world characterized by beauty and goodness. It is impossible to discover beauty and serve its interests without insight. Men cannot find goodness in others and exploit it as a resource without the development of human skills. These tools cannot stand still but must grow in relationship to the expansion of the depth and scope of human involvements. If men cannot accept growth as a primary goal, they cannot maintain sufficient insight and mastery to dispel the encroachment of ugliness where beauty is sought, nor resist the entrapments of obstructive immorality where goodness was anticipated. When men accept growth as the primary goal of living, their need for an inner identity comes sharply into focus. Because inner identity commits the individual to the acceptance and utilization of mated mechanisms, he must not only discover who he is, but he must also choose those human relationships in which his inner identity has meaning and value. It is impossible to develop love capacities without the ability to choose a world in which beauty can be found, and expanding moral integrity cannot exist without locating itself in a world of potential opportunity which the responsive goodness of others brings into being. When men are strongly influenced by compulsive and obsessive patterns of normality, or when they allow themselves to take advantage of the protection from inferiority and guilt which sado-masochistic mechanisms offer, they cannot find the wholehearted involvement in psychological growth which permits its creative development to go forward.

[162] The development of an inner identity requires the ability to choose attachments worthy of idealization and exploitation. The flexibility which growth requires becomes a threat to stable social beliefs and institutions. If the individual is not to become a victim of adaptive failure, he must clearly distinguish the difference between the area that belongs to practical matters and that part of his psychic life in which he develops love and power capacities for their own sake. It is within the area of romance, friendship, and creative productivity that the individual finds room for the kind of independent honesty and courage which permit new truth and right to come into being. If this area of the psychological surpluses is encroached upon by the commitment to stable attachments for adaptive reasons, each effort at inner development will be fraught with a disturbing sense of crisis, and the price of change will have become too great.

[163] The development of the capacity to make a romantic union lies at the heart of man's search for an inner identity. There is no human experience in which there is a greater need for flexibility. The more the individual accepts the need to learn to love and to exercise power constructively in a mated relationship, the more room he must allow himself for the failures which are inherent in the growth process. Because mating is inherently permanent and uncompromising in qualify, the right to dissolve mated attachments can only exist where the development of the ability to mate is at question. Where responsibility for the psychological constructiveness of mating is taken away from the individual and invested in socially reinforced beliefs and institutions, the exposure of the individual to failure can only bring the threat of serious depression. The defenses against such depression require the individual to turn even farther away from independent self-development.

[164] Children must accept the psychological world in which they find themselves. The growing child develops defenses against those aspects of his world which threaten his sense of self but which he cannot change. Through withdrawal and indifference the child learns to have a private and separate life, beginning very early to prepare himself through fantasy and play for a psychological status which is not limited by the influences of the family. Psychological independence is given partial expression in his choice of friendships, and he can reinforce his independent reachings by interacting with the unfulfilled human aspirations of his parents. When parents want children to live better lives than they do, the child finds considerable room for the development of individuality, but the child cannot grow beyond the limits set by the dependent needs which immaturity imposes. The child who grows in such a way that he can no longer tolerate his psychological environment becomes neurotic or delinquent. The first requirement of childhood adjustment is the willingness to learn how to make a basic adaptation to the psychic world of the parents. When men carry this lesson over into their adult years, accepting conventional relationships as if they were inevitable and unalterable, they are abandoning their adult prerogative of choosing their own psychological world, and this means that no matter how successful they are in adaptive ways, they continue to operate as if they were biologically dependent. It is paradoxical that men appear to be more mature when they give up the independent choices on which true maturity rests, exchanging the form of maturity for its substance. Because the reachings of creative persons expose them to all the uncertainties and inconstancies which characterize adolescent psychology, it becomes a simple matter for society to discredit the mature status of those who accept psychological independence as the true hallmark of maturity.

[165] The conflict between psychological growth and conventional patterns of maturity reaches its greatest intensity in the area of homosexuality. Prohibitions against explorations of the meaning and value of romantic attachments between individuals of the same sex sets up a barrier against unrestricted personal growth. When the fear of sexualization prevents love from deepening, and men cannot explore increasing responsibility because of a prohibition against belonging to each other, they have no choice but to reduce their independent efforts toward greater human understanding and cooperation. The discrediting of homosexual phenomena is society's greatest weapon against the unwelcome intrusion of expanding truth and right in human affairs. There is no aspect of psychological growth in which the individual is more on his own than when he attempts to develop his homosexual capacities. As he turns away from the automatic feelings and attitudes with which heterosexuality invested, he is exposed to his own ignorance and ineffectuality in the use of independent love and power.

[166] Society's first line of defense against homosexuality lies in the partial insights into its nature which come from those who occupy the position of truth seekers in society. As long as the homosexual component of human nature lies outside the area of what is accepted as beautiful and good in human beings, men are barred from the kind of idealization of a subject matter which alone can bring enduring truth into being, and from the kind of untrammeled access to exploitation of human resources which an expanding moral capacity requires. When men cannot idealize the homosexual phenomenon, it cannot be understood without the sadistic deterioration which partial insights bring.

[167] Those who accept conventional images of sexual normality as if they were immutable entities put themselves in a position where their understanding of homosexuality cannot be influenced by the growth processes on which the discovery of scientific truth rests. Truth cannot live in an atmosphere where a prior commitment to depreciation of its subject matter destroys the operation of the workmanship of love. Those who undertake to understand homosexuality from the safe position of their preconceptions concerning its pathological nature spare themselves the need to explore the meaning of their own homosexual capacities. Those who deal with homosexuality as an area of human failure must turn their backs on the human resources it provides in their own lives.

[168] The acceptance of psychological growth as a primary goal requires the capacity to challenge any preconception and explore any commitment without regard to pre-established boundaries. Without such flexibility, man cannot win territory from the unknown and the chaotic. If the thinker and the man of action accept the forbidden status of homosexuality in their personal lives, they cannot maintain access to the honesty and courage in human relationships on which growth depends. If the defense against homosexuality becomes more important than the development of human understanding and responsibility, men cannot maintain their psychic investment in the primacy of the growth process. If truth and right bring men into territory which they regard as alien to their psychological welfare, they will have to deny the existence of that truth and right. Whenever men encounter feelings and experiences which they cannot bring within the scope of the constructive search for knowledge and ability, they are thrown back on magical and miraculous mechanisms which disrupt the creative processes.

[169] When truth is dangerous and right provokes punishment, men turn toward the support of social beliefs and institutions in order to avoid exposure to such areas of conflict. The exclusion of homosexuality as a pathological and unnatural phenomenon can only succeed where dogma and authority, acting in the name of social stability, are able to obliterate man's capacity to place his inner psychological development above all other human goals. When the psychological growth of the adult becomes nothing more than a further investment in adaptive capacity, men lack the motivation to face the unsettling effects of exposure to their own human ignorance and moral deficiencies. Without such honesty and courage, there can be no increase in the depth and scope of man's interpersonal life, no matter how great his achievements may be in the adaptive area. The more men become involved in making their socially accepted world function efficiently, the more they must discredit the kind of personal growth which exposes them to genuine scientific inquiry in human relationships and draws them into the exploration of the place of morality in human affairs. Men are only hostile to growth if there are aspects of growth which threaten to open doors into forbidden areas. Men would prefer to live in a world of greater individual fulfillment where love and power guide their relationships if they could resolve the sense of alienation which unrestricted growth brings. This sense of alienation is rooted in the fear and hostility which characterize the reaction to homosexual phenomena. There is nothing else in the whole area of human deviancy which has the same capacity to erect barriers against inner development. The touching of the homosexual issue produces fear and rage of a degree which brings all the psychological defenses into full scale operation, crippling mankind's ability to accord psychological growth its natural place. There is far more opposition to the adolescent growth spirit than can be accounted for by society's need to defend its basic stability. Society finds itself in the position of opposing independence in the development of love and power capacities as dangerous in itself.

[170] If men are to find a psychological world where growth can continue throughout a lifetime, they must be able to throw off the need for social protection against recognition of the failures and defects of their own love and power capacities. The mere existence of such protection in the form of automatic beliefs and conventional behavior becomes a threat to the search for truth and right, once the individual has faced the fact that he lives in an ignorant and immoral world and has committed himself to the creative task of contributing to mankind's store of genuine understanding and responsibility. As he separates himself from social intimidations and seductions and the rewards that go with conformity to these forces, he finds he stands alone and exposed to the operation of his own psychological defenses. If the ability to love is to grow, it must start with the recognition of the individual's own inadequacy, and if power is to expand its responsible influence, the individual must begin by facing his own lack of resourcefulness and flexibility.

[171] Growth requires inner identity and inner identity takes its being in polarity. The only kind of psychological importance which is on a big enough scale to meet man's need for contentment and happiness is that which comes from self-discovery, individuality, a sense of having a soul (in a non-religious sense), and the accompanying qualities of personal beauty and goodness which are inherent in identity. Although men, value this kind of importance above all other things, they live in a social world which obscures and avoids the developmental challenges which polarity brings, making inner identity a prize which can only be won by the greatest investment in an independent struggle against obstructing forces. Men want to live in a world where the avenues of self-discovery lie open to any person as a natural attribute of civilized existence. When men have to accept the fact that the thing they most want is the hardest to find, they cannot avoid a sense of alienation from their conventional world, no matter how great the practical and worldly rewards of accepting it may be. Without knowledge of inner identity and the freedom to use it for constructive involvement with other human beings, men can only tolerate their human world, and the sense of full participation in the sensual goodness and joyful aliveness of an expanding interpersonal life, which children believe in and ask for as their rightful heritage, continues to evade the grasp of civilized adults.

[172] The acceptance of the fact that inner identity can only reach its fullest dimensions when the individual is capable of separating his surplus romantic and creative capacities from his adaptive life, using either a feminine or masculine identity in the process, sets the stage for the elaboration of polarity and its mated mechanisms. As men use the dynamic interaction between the feminine and masculine principle for the development of their romantic and creative self-expression, they can no longer accept society's view that masculinity and femininity reside in gender and that the attributes of psychological masculinity and femininity are to be found in the socially accepted images and patterns of behavior with which man-woman relationships are invested. The removal of the search for self from the dogmatic and tyrannical influence of gender identity is an essential step for independent inner growth and constitutes a disturbing threat to the heterosexual patterns of society, insofar as those patterns are taken to be automatic in nature and therefore beyond challenge.

[173] It is impossible for men to experience the influence of masculine and feminine polarity between themselves without exposure to the homosexual component of their natures. As men enrich and expand the scope of their interpersonal relationships through the use of mated mechanisms, learning to give to each other in new ways, they cannot avoid confrontation with the romantic aspect of human needs, especially since this area is so fraught with frustrations in the civilized world. Homosexuality emerges as an aspect of man's need for greater honesty and courage in his search for self-expression. It arises from a background created by warmth and pride, brought into being by shared understanding and cooperation, and is therefore secondary to the making of attachments of high human significance, even though homosexuality, once released, is capable of highly promiscuous expression. Before men open the door to the romantic element, they have already established their ability to reach toward increasing levels of idealization and exploitation together. When the emergence of sexuality is preceded by a process of tension and energy accumulation, it is following the same courtship patterns through which sexuality emerges in nature. The heterosexual patterns of civilized society stand in marked contrast in that sexual desire and performance follow channels which are already established and taken for granted. The heterosexual adjustment is taken to be an entity in itself, capable of validating relationships on its own. Once the inevitability of heterosexuality is accepted by individuals, courtship is given a place in the making of a marital attachment, but under these conditions the romantic resources have not reached their fullest development.

[174] The insistence by society on the channeling of romantic capacities into gender pairing is a simplistic reflection of the fact that in nature masculinity is confined to the male and femininity to the female. This reliance on the biological differentiation of man and woman provides a model which appears to have natural roots, but it ignores the psychological structure of polarized mating, without which no animal would arrive at a pairing with the opposite sex. When men ignore the character differentiations on which civilization rests out of their need to bring persons of opposite gender together, they are substituting the mechanics of anatomical sexual differences for the psychological substance of mating, and in the process fail to comprehend the full characteristics of nature's model.

[175] Because heterosexual imagery and patterns of involvement are established by society without regard to inner identity, the emergence of the independent search for identity exposes the individual to a recognition of the artificiality and pretentiousness of socially supported heterosexuality. Any fundamental questioning of the biological model on which romantic capacity is supposed to rest becomes an undermining attack on the whole superstructure of social dogma and authority, affecting the entire range of conformity to social beliefs and institutions. The insistence of society that the inner life of the individual give way to its version of what it is to be a real man or a real woman provides an imposing bulwark against the exposure of the ignorance and immorality of the world of so-called normal people.

[176] As men turn away from the conventional structuring of their romantic capacities, they are precipitated into a psychological world where they must face the shame and guilt inherent in the inadequacies of their own love and power resources. When men undertake to challenge social dogma and authority, they find themselves in need of a wisdom and strength which may not yet have come into existence. It is not difficult for deviant and creative personalities to become dissatisfied with the status-quo, but the bringing into being of a higher level of human fulfillment in their own lives can only be accomplished through a long and arduous growth process which carries no guarantee of success. It is relatively easy to escape from the burdens of the growth process by remaining in the rebellious and heretical stage, accepting a life pattern which rests on hatred and anger at the conventional world. Such motivations lead nowhere, however, when the essence of the individual's dissatisfaction lies in his need to find a world where love and personal power guide the affairs of men. It is characteristic of the adolescent growth spirit that it focuses on the attempt of the individual to develop his own resources for living, and it is here that the greatest vulnerability exists for the discrediting of his human position by the established forces of society. It requires a recognition of the importance of creative self-development for all of society if the failures of growing individuals are to be understood and accepted. This is nowhere more true than in the area of homosexual exploration and development, where the hiatus between the desire to love and the ability to use love creatively is so great, a fact recognized both by homosexual individuals and by a society bent on discrediting the homosexual phenomenon.

[177] Homosexuality opens a Pandora's box of conflict and struggle in all the major human developmental areas. As men lay aside the socially supported patterns of romantic experience they enter a human world where their defenses against shame and guilt no longer operate with reliability, and it is under such circumstances of psychological nakedness that the pursuit of human truth and right can begin. There is no undertaking which requires more honesty and courage than this journey into the uncharted land where the real issues of human development lie exposed. Without the guidelines laid down by society, men have no choice but to deal with the tendency to sexual promiscuity which is inherent in the inadequacy of their mated attachments, to face the failures of their creative love and power capacities, and to learn to handle the relationship between the creative and adaptive aspect of their own lives without allowing either to efface the other. These are the major areas into which men must move if mankind is to win territory from the unknown and the chaotic in human affairs, and they are relatively untouched by the conventional world.

[178] The homosexual lives closer to the real problems of human psychological development because his homosexual position evolves from a failure to reach heterosexual capacity in the patterns dictated by society, and this kind of failure in making conformity work underlies all creative individuality whether homosexual or not. No one chooses to fail, but in meeting the challenges inherent in failure in a way that leads to personal growth, the individual is able to place the responsibility for his failure outside himself, and this enables him to start a personal journey into a changing psychological world where his assets and resources can find new levels of fulfillment. Any individual who can use failure as a basis of growth opens the door to an independent course in life. Without the right to fail, and without the ability to exclude the unproductive alternatives which failure brings, there can be no creative productivity.

[179] The rejection by homosexuals of socially supported male and female gender roles does not in itself bring the individual any closer to the discovery of an inner identity. The refusal of the individual to be governed by society's homosexual prohibition is an act of defiance, motivated by his need to avoid the depressing effects of conformity. The greater the potential depression, the greater his motivation becomes, and although he may experience great satisfactions in his homosexual life, he remains in the position of a rebel and heretic as long as he fails to use his special position for an affirmative and constructive building of his human assets. When men attempt to establish a pattern of living based on their ability to avoid that which is distasteful and noxious they lay the foundations of a new depression, because it is only when they remain in the neighborhood of the hateful and the disturbing that they can remind themselves of the advantage of their position. A personality which needs polemics and provocation cannot develop to a higher level than the world it chooses to defy.

[180] Homosexuality equips human beings to challenge the artificiality of conventional patterns of heterosexual feeling and behavior. The homosexual is in a position to know that the mated model of male-female attraction which exists in nature does not correspond with the heterosexual structure imposed by civilized beliefs and institutions. Homosexual attraction employs psychological resources which are powerful in an elemental way, because they open the personality to an unimpeded exercise of its capacities for idealization and exploitation. Whenever polarity is developed and reinforced in this way, it is homosexuality which becomes the repository of nature's mated mechanism, and men must deal with the fact that their natural and instinctive eroticism is being channeled accordingly. The only way society can oppose this tendency is by the attempt to prohibit the individual search for natural erotic experience, substituting instead social standards of normalcy in sexual feelings and behavior. The natural quality of the homosexual tendencies is first revealed in the adolescent growth struggle toward independent erotic capacities, and is based on well established psychological patterns which take their origin in early character development, guided by the father-son polarity. The creative reachings between father and son provide the first basis for expanding love and power development, and when romantic needs emerge in adolescence, a natural pathway exists for endowing homosexual attraction with psychological importance.

[181] The deviancy of the homosexual rests on his need for greater access to romantic experience. In the process of releasing his independent eroticism, he finds himself in a psychological world where he cannot count on social prohibitions to control promiscuity. It is not enough for any individual to embark on a course of development which is guided exclusively by expanding access to sensuality and euphoric enjoyment. He must be capable at the same time of demonstrating his ability to use his increased freedom for self-expression for the advancement of those meaningful and responsible human goals which all men share together. The isolation of the homosexual from conventional society is only valid as long as his opposition to superficiality and pretense forms the core of that isolation, but when his deviancy takes its being in the mere fact that his partner is of the same sex, without meeting the challenge of society's need for the creative development of love and power capacities, he finds himself lost in the same self-indulgent corruption and vain status seeking which he opposes in the heterosexual world. Since the homo sexual operates in a world without social controls and protection, his failures are more evident to him and more exposed to public view.

[182] The fact that sexuality which is not rooted in a mated union between masculine and feminine elements must always develop promiscuous tendencies underlies man's difficulties in expressing his erotic nature to the full. The conventional world regards the sexual nature of man as essentially degenerate, and can accord it the status of a normal and healthy phenomenon only when it is confined by prohibitions and channeled by man's adaptive need to promote marriage and child bearing. The contemporary effort to remove sexuality from a condemned status hinges on the recognition of the dishonesty and ineffectiveness of such restrictions, but this effort cannot meet the real needs of human beings until the causes of promiscuity are recognized and dissipated. If the manifestations of man's surplus psychological life bring him into patterns of feeling and behavior which are perverse and addicted, no amount of insistence on honesty and freedom of choice can remedy his difficulties, and each effort to throw off restraint will be followed by a reaction toward social control. Man has no choice but to face the real reasons for his lack of capacity for utilizing sex and celebration as harmonious aspects of a life of creative maturity. He cannot do this as long as sexuality is seen as a phenomenon dissociated from love and existing as a lustful entity with a life of its own, a viewpoint which cannot be laid aside until man develops insights which are adequate to the task. Freudian theory provides a good example of the quandary of modern man in sexual matters. Freud encouraged sexual honesty while at the same time canonizing the image of the degeneracy of man's instinctual resources in the form of the Freudian Id.

[183] Because the homosexual is not guided by conventional prohibitions, he must take personal responsibility for dealing with the undermining effects of sexuality on the loose in human affairs. If he is to find romantic experience in a lasting and fulfilling way, he must face the deficiencies of his own psychological resources, and this challenge points him in the direction of psychological growth. Society sees the homosexual as an essentially promiscuous person, a viewpoint which has a great deal of validity in the life experiences of many homosexuals. There is within the homosexual experience, however, the core of a different process at work, and this consists of an openness to inner change and development, with a far greater access to self-exposure and self-criticism than the conventional world makes possible. The homosexual must deal with the high level of promiscuity which any release of eroticism in a sexually dishonest society brings. The promiscuity of the homosexual is his heritage from society's failure to face this problem, and insofar as he is capable of developing toward a level of human involvement which goes beyond promiscuity, he attains the creative expression of an inner identity for which his sexual honesty and flexibility have laid the groundwork.

[184] It is the homosexual above all others who is in a position to search for an inner identity in the civilized world. Since his partner is of the same gender, he is a living testimony to the fact that romantic capacity is not necessarily tied to the automatic heterosexual patterns which society cultivates and guides. As he opens himself to homosexual mated experience, he is no better prepared than society as a whole to recognize the importance of a polarized masculine-feminine relationship in a romantic union. When he fails to confront this problem, choosing a style of life in which eroticism is allowed to exist as a separate entity, he finds himself mired in a degree of superficiality and pretense which threatens to undermine all his human capacities. The homosexual lives at the edge of crisis in the area of his use of his sexual and celebrative assets. His increased access to sensuality and euphoria is at war with the shame and guilt which come to any individual who fails to use expanded inner depth and vigor for constructive human purposes. It is easy for him to accept society's position that his shame and guilt are the consequence of his homosexual status, but this simplistic view fails to attain credibility when the individual is able to live up to the growth potential inherent in his homosexual position. If the mated life of the homosexual is to become the basis of a creatively mature relationship with a world of his own choosing, the individual has no choice but to develop an inner identity of such continuity and integrity that it can support a truly independent capacity to find truth and right in human affairs. The homosexual is not only in a superior psychological position to discover and employ inner identity, he is also favorably placed to find access to the increased flexibility in his human attachments which make progression through a changing human world possible. Unless such flexibility exists, with the accompanying right to face the failures which experimentation and exploration bring, the growth process must take a secondary position to other goals, a process which compromises it out of existence.

[185] The search for contentment and happiness guides all human development. Men will follow social dogma and authority only to the point where they can continue to believe that these forces provide the avenue to a fulfilling personal life. The need to live life to the full requires growth, because it is only within the scope of expanding human understanding and responsibility that civilized man can dissipate the depressive cloud which the demands of his mature adaptive life engenders. The complex and frustrating burdens which adaptive life brings can never be converted into idyllic sources of self-fulfillment. When men attempt to do so, they do violence to the maturity patterns of their lives, and at the same time they fail to develop the sense of individual identity on which the search for contentment and happiness depends. When the mature adaptive life of individuals has effaced the possibility of independent growth, men can no longer comprehend the nature of the sacrifice they have made. It is only when deviant individuals demonstrate the higher levels that human development can reach that the victims of over-adaptation are confronted with the fact that alternatives exist. This confrontation threatens the stability of their lives but in no way equips them for entering a significant growth process themselves, so that they can only respond by arming themselves for conflict. They fight this battle in the name of their own need to avoid invasive depression, but such motivations lack the capacity to win allies among those whose lives are more open to creative human goals. No matter how much intimidation and seduction they bring to bear, they cannot make inroads in areas where truth can be heard and right can assume leadership. It is the convulsive struggles of dying maturity patterns which are responsible for the destructive waste of human resources in the civilized world, but there is no way to remedy this situation by the use of the kind of reason and negotiation which would be appropriate to opponents of equal stature. The fight against individuality is a struggle for survival by those who have lost access to such individuality in their own lives, and they cannot be expected to become willing and cooperative victims in their own psychic devaluation.

[186] In order to make a place for the growth patterns on which a creative life is based, the individual must be able to disengage himself from the futile and wasteful confrontations with established social forces which his deviancy brings into being. The essence of independence lies in his ability to select his own human world, and for this purpose the growing adult must be able to reject socially established patterns of identity in any area where basic adaptive needs are not involved. His life becomes a search for the meaning and value of being himself, and he must select those human relationships in which the constructive and giving aspect of his inner self develops in response to the needs of others. Independence which rests on hate and anger, rejecting mutual dependent needs between human beings, can go nowhere except toward an emotional emptiness which exhausts inner identity and forces the individual back toward socially established roles.

[187] Men will continue to live in a world which is essentially ignorant and immoral as long as their psychological development is blocked by their inability to make the search for an inner identity the first consideration of a constructive life. It is only through the influence of love and its workmanship that human ignorance can be overcome, and love cannot demonstrate its effectiveness in bringing to mankind the tools for a better life when the failures of love cause individuals to turn away from their devotion to its development. It is only when the personality itself is anchored in the need to find self-expression through love that sufficient motivation exists to continue a lifetime of growth toward the utilization of love as a creative force. Such personalities are specialized to be the vehicle of love and its functions, and in psychological terms this specialization consists of establishing and using a feminine inner identity as the basis of the surplus psychological life.

[188] The overcoming of immorality rests on the expansion of the influence of personal power, and power cannot mobilize resources to demonstrate its unqualified value if the failures of individuals who explore new avenues of moral intervention cause them to lose their commitment to its goals. It is only when the identity of the personality is inextricably attached to its personal power organization that sufficient motivation exists to continue a lifetime of struggle toward the development of the mastery techniques on which the creative uses of responsible power rest. Such personalities are specialized to be the vehicle of power and its functions, and this comes into being through the development of a masculine inner identity.

[189] Because inner identity rests on masculine-feminine polarity, it is impossible for individuals to enter upon a life of unrestricted growth without the ability to recognize and use masculine and feminine psychological traits outside the influence of the socially supported gender roles. In a world where masculinity and femininity are social entities, subject to strong reinforcement out of the need to protect heterosexual patterns, marital stability and conformity to conventional beliefs and institutions in general, the attempt to explore their nature through independent inner growth reveals the fact that these fundamental facets of man's psychological life are alien and intangible to most people. Since men have no clear access to the inner identity on which the development of understanding and responsibility depend, they find that any increase in the scope of their human commitments leads to a corresponding increase in their sense of the unknown and the chaotic in human affairs. The essence of the adolescent growth spirit lies in its willingness and ability to confront such challenges constructively, utilizing faith and hope in the ability of mankind to conquer ignorance through scientific insight, and to overcome incompetence through an engineering type of objective mastery, in the same way that men have won impressive victories for themselves in the non-human fields. The core of this undertaking lies in the ability to use masculinity and femininity as a base for self-development, guided only by the need to extend the influence of love and moral integrity in human affairs.

[190] The essence of the creative process lies in the ability of the individual to separate himself from his psychic investment in adaptive matters, utilizing his surplus capacities for the pursuit of truth and right for their own sake. The creative process produces original, unique, and superior levels of human accomplishment because the individual is able to probe the unknown and challenge the chaotic without subjecting himself to the practical need for application of his developing assets in worldly adaptive ways. It is only in this kind of isolated arena that men can ask questions for the sake of expanding knowledge itself, seeking always to place themselves in relationship to the world in such a way as to have an inexhaustible supply of problems which they have chosen for themselves on a selective basis, guided by their need to idealize and to serve that ideal with the best in themselves. Problems are chosen on the basis of their effect on the inner self. The tensions aroused by the exposure to problems become harmonious when the inner identity is enriched by the work of truth seeking. This is quite different from the tensions inherent in practical problems, where the individual undertakes to dissipate the problem by the most direct route possible without regard to inner identity.

[191] When men seek to establish control of their world for the sake of expanding their modalities of mastery, they accept an inner organization of their energies which provides a consistent supply of challenges to their will, in areas chosen by themselves out of their need to exploit opportunity, under conditions where their greatest assets will be committed to their undertakings. Obstacles are chosen on the basis of their effect on the inner self. The energy level brought into being by the confrontation of obstacles becomes harmonious when the inner identity is invigorated by the acceptance of moral involvement, in contrast to the energies provoked by practical frustrations which seek to overcome adaptive difficulties without regard to inner identity.

[192] Man reaches his highest level of evolutionary development when he is utilizing his creative faculties. The more civilized he becomes, the more he needs to distinguish between instinctual tendencies which are expressed in ways that undermine constructive human undertakings, such as jealousy, false pride, and competitive arrogance, and those instinctual sources of the life process which feed the spiritual and ethical resources. Instincts exist in a general form which must be channeled by the context in which they are expressed. Aside from the emergency survival needs, the instincts which affect the ultimate welfare of human beings are those connected with reproduction in nature. These instincts utilize surpluses in the life process and consist of the basic tendency to submit, which takes form in femininity, and the basic tendency to dominate, which takes form in masculinity. Man utilizes his surplus capacities for creative purposes, carrying the whole area of masculine-feminine interaction beyond the limits of the reproductive life. No matter how far he may seem to have traveled from any resemblance to his primitive forebears, he cannot avoid dealing with the fact that his most civilized characteristics are inextricably involved with instinctual sources of tension and energy which are rooted in his biological animal heritage.

[193] Civilization takes its being from the contributions to the general welfare of creative individuals, and it cannot survive without social progress. With each advancement new problems and obstacles emerge and if men do not continue to respond constructively to such challenges, they can only become alienated by the social system they themselves have brought into being. Without continuing expansion in the human rewards which social progress alone can supply, civilization becomes a Frankenstein's monster, releasing destructive forces which are made more devastating by man's increasing knowledge and ability.

[194] The source of man's creative potential lies in his surplus psychological life. It takes form though his capacity to pursue truth and right as goals in themselves. All human knowledge originally came into being by winning territory from the unknown, and each advancement in man's understanding of himself and his world has come as a gift from the hands of love.

[195] There is no other way that men can find the capacity to ask the necessary questions and sustain the inevitable inner uncertainties which the work of truth seeking requires. All human skills have taken their origin in the willingness of men to undertake the mastery of situations which appear chaotic and beyond control, and each accomplishment in establishing new modalities of mastery has come as a gift from the unflagging commitments of his moral nature. Without moral integrity, there is no way for men to find the motivation to explore uncharted areas and overcome the doubts which adherence to the right entails.

[196] The key to the development of love as a creative force in human affairs lies in the ability of men to understand and apply psychologically feminine virtues in relating themselves to their world, just as the acceptance and utilization of masculine virtues underlies the development of creative and responsible power. It is only when the basic psychological resources inherent in masculinity and femininity are set free from socially supported gender roles that men can begin to build their love and power capacities to the point where they are no longer bound by the cynical ignorance and opportunistic immorality which pass for essential elements in a normal social adjustment in the civilized world. Whether the submissive personality in the male is designated by its biological name, femininity, or is referred to as yielding, sensitive, or introvert does not make that much difference. The real issue which must be faced is the absolute necessity of overcoming the false patterns of compulsive and sadistic dominance with which the feminine personality defends itself from personal responsibility for the failures of the workmanship of love. The designation of the dominant personality in the male as masculine is easier for society to accept, but this does not bring individuals any closer to the real nature of masculinity, since the exploration of a psychologically genuine masculinity must resist becoming misidentified with the socially established masculine roles. Masculinity which is vulnerable to false submissive patterns, utilizing obsessive and masochistic defenses in the process, cannot take personal responsibility for its failure to expand the scope of its moral commitments.

[197] Creativity rests on the psychological interaction between masculine and feminine elements in the civilized world. Polarization of character makes it possible for individuals to achieve psychological identity. Without specialization in the character, men lack the motivation to develop their personal resources to the point where new truth and right come into being. It is only when character specialization is productive in this creative way that its value becomes apparent to human beings. Since the psychological life of most individuals is shaped by their defenses against the inferiority and guilt which beset the path of independent growth, they cannot recognize the central importance of character specialization. Unless the development of inner identity actually brings a better life to human beings, they are not in a position to understand and explore its psychological dimensions. The existence of feminine and masculine traits, separate from gender roles, is recognized in a vague and general way by many individuals, yet the real significance of polarity for psychological growth remains unrecognized. Because men have not comprehended the basic and simple facts about the core of their own identity, their tendency to become lost in the midst of social seductions and intimidations is very great. Their self-knowledge and self-control, adequate though it may seem to be as long as they remain within the protection of conventional social supports, is revealed to be completely inadequate once they undertake an independent psychological journey into human territory of their own choosing. Men accept in principle the importance of truth and right as goals, but they do not understand the psychological processes by which such goals can be attained. Wholehearted enthusiasms and noble aspirations are not enough. The greatest of human undertakings must come to nothing if men lack the capacity to stay on the track of the self-development which such creative accomplishment requires. Psychological growth is a passage down a long hall with many doors, each of which gives outlet to a direct route to gratifications and accomplishments which prove in the end to be compromises. Once the individual has accepted the need to reject egress through them, it is not as difficult as it first appears for him to reach his goal.

[198] Psychological growth depends on the ability to increase the depth and scope of human interactions, developing and applying feminine or masculine resources in the process. It is difficult for men to identify these resources, not only because of the interference by socially supported gender roles, but because of the fact that they only appear in a clear and focused form in the surplus psychological life. No one needs a pure expression of inner identity in adaptive matters, since the only test of the individual's ability to function in this area is the practical effectiveness of his efforts. When his goals are romantic and creative, however, the gratifications and accomplishments of the moment are insignificant compared to the self-development involved. The lover wants not only to be able to love today, but to bring to a relationship an enduring capacity for love which is ready to respond to increased demands upon it with a corresponding increase in the ability to give. Love is actually resident in this sense of continuity, not in any gratification of the moment, just as power is resident in the expectation of moral integrity, not in any accomplishment of the moment. In the civilized world, there is a strong tendency to mingle and confuse surplus and adaptive phenomena, so that men find it difficult to establish a psychological place where feminine and masculine traits can be developed in a pure form.

[199] Feminine traits become recognizable as such only when the yielding personality makes a submission in the power realm, utilizing love as the motivating force for such a relationship. Love cannot demonstrate its creative potential without the surrender of the independent power component of the personality. The assertions of love must not be lost in the process, since they are essential to its constructive self-expression. Love finds access to action through the devotional service of an idealized object. The feminine personality is dependent in the action realm and must protect and develop its idealizing capacity on a continuing basis if it is to maintain its access to action. The development of the feminine identity can fail either through the inadequacy of the idealizing capacity or through the false investment of idealization in adaptive area's where love does not belong, resulting in an effacement of inner identity.

[200] Masculine traits attain a clear psychological statement only when they operate in the surplus area, taking a position of dominance over the resources supplied by love. Power cannot attain a creative status without acceptance of the fact that the independent capacity of the individual for devotional submission as a goal in itself must be excluded from the personality. The devotional aspect of power must not be lost in the process, because it is essential to the exploration of opportunity. Power finds access to feeling through its capacity for possession of that which is responsive to its constructive exploitative drives. The masculine personality is dependent in the feeling realm and must protect and foster its capacity for exploitation if its needs for feeling are to be met. The development of the masculine identity can fail either through a lack of exploitative capacity or through an inappropriate over-investment of energy in adaptive areas where the nature of opportunities sets limits which defeat the growth of the inner self.

[201] Attributes and prerogatives of the personality cannot be identified as feminine or masculine outside the context in which they take their being, in contrast to the socially supported male and female traits which are regarded as entities in themselves by society. In psychological terms, it is neither specifically masculine nor feminine to earn a living, to do housework, or to make decisions in practical matters. The specialization of functions which become valuable in family life, especially when the rearing of children is involved, are arrived at by a division of labor dictated by adaptive needs. In a psychologically mated context, any function motivated by love and structured by devotional service is feminine, and any function motivated by personal power and structured by the kind of exploitation which enriches the value of the possessed object is masculine. It is dear that femininity can only be defined in relationship to masculinity, and vice versa. When men pursue creative goals, they are in an area where the dynamic interplay between femininity and masculinity reaches the purity of expression which permits these entities to be recognized and developed.

[202] Civilization is the victim of man's unwillingness and inability to make love and power the primary goals of human existence. Creative love means independence in thinking, and much as men want the truth, they fear its revolutionary effects. Creative power brings independence in the choice of alternatives of action, and although men put a high value on moral integrity, they respond to any genuine increase in freedom as a heretical assault on established principles. Men would welcome the kind of change which could reduce the ignorance and immorality of their social system if they could feel at home in the transitional stages which growth brings. Men can deal with the fear of the unknown and rage at the chaotic only when their personalities are firmly anchored by inner psychological forces which cannot be overwhelmed by any external challenge. Man is bigger than any problem he must face when he himself chooses the problems he will confront, using his capacity for love as his exclusive guide. He is bigger than any obstacles that he must deal with when he chooses his own commitments, guided only by his need to use his moral capacities.

[203] When the individual has separated his surplus psychological life from his adaptive life to the degree necessary to permit a long and arduous growth struggle to go forward, he is in a position to need and develop inner identity as an irreducible necessity for the study and exploration of the human scene. The only individuals who really need to be firmly rooted in a feminine or masculine character identity are those who cannot maintain mental health without an unqualified commitment to human teaching and leadership functions. Individuals who accept a mutual psychotherapeutic interaction as the core of human relationships enter a world of potential goodness and beauty which, once sensed and touched, makes it impossible to accept any other kind of world, no matter how much embellishment is used to make the substitute appear attractive. It is the great motivational forces inherent in elemental love and power goals which make it possible for men to face the lonely struggle against false elements in themselves which growth requires. It is not enough to recognize and condemn faults in the social system. Each man carries within himself a system of defenses against shame and guilt which is his heritage from a cynical and opportunistic society, and if he is to rise above the level of the society he condemns, his task must be to cleanse himself of these sources of blindness and futility. His real enemy is not in the external world but is to be found in the residues of the influence of that world which he carries within himself. He cannot undo this influence with revolutionary and heretical social confrontations. He needs to develop human assets which make it possible to enter a psychological world of his own choosing where his defenses give way to creative human undertakings.

[204] Human truth can only come into existence when men are capable of becoming scientists in their study of man's personality. Truth is not an easily accessible commodity, lying about to be picked up by any perceptive and clever person. It is the product of a consistent devotional workmanship in which the individual surrenders the right to self-aggrandizing formulations in favor of a genuine creative enslavement to truth seeking for its own sake. The conceptual search for universal truths in a non-human field such as physics requires the same devotional submission to the workmanship of scientific inquiry, but there is no particular reason why the physicist must recognize the feminine nature of his relationship to his world of creative effort. The student of human nature, however, cannot avoid facing the fact that his submissive status evokes a response from the human world that he seeks to understand, and both must accept alteration in the process. There is no way to study human nature at a truly scientific level without acceptance of the feeling component of a submissive idealization, namely love. The acceptance of a deepening love capacity alters the entire range of human adjustment to life and requires that the individual develop insight into his own feminine character and the defenses against it which social forces have engendered in him. The physicist can grow as a physicist, leaving the rest of his life relatively untouched, but a student of human nature must grow as a man and this is a far more complex and potentially unsettling human undertaking.

[205] In a similar way, the operational search for moral integrity uses the same experimental methods of building skills as exist in the non-human engineering fields. The bringing of new levels of control into being requires freedom of inventiveness, unrestricted by old images of what is or is not effective. This kind of initiative rests on the primacy of the individual will, set free to explore opportunity as a goal in itself. There is no clear necessity for the creative engineer to recognize the masculine nature of his relationship to the world he manipulates. The man of action who seeks an expanding capacity for moral intervention in the lives of others, however, must deal with the alteration in human relationships which his masculine position brings. His dominant status influences the mood investment of his personal life, making him a vehicle of power in human interactions. An increasing power capacity involves a corresponding acceptance of the masculine nature of his character and requires that he deal with the defenses against masculine self-expression which are a part of his social heritage.

[206] Creativity in human affairs requires a full exposure of the individual to his romantic mated needs. The real motivation behind any creative growth process is always the personal need of the individual to promote his own mental health and welfare. Giving to others becomes a way of life because it has become essential to the capacity for pleasure and enjoyment. The surplus assets and resources of the self come to nothing unless they are wanted and needed by others. The mated mechanism which is brought into being by the interaction between femininity and masculinity is the basis for an expanding depth and scope in human relationships, permitting men to find those spiritual and moral rewards together that characterize a healthy and rewarding psychological life.

[207] Although men have a great need for the inner importance which creative self-development brings, they are unprepared for the effect of such development on their personal lives. It is impossible to seek truth and right as a disembodied spirit. No one can utilize inner identity for creative purposes without dealing with the accompanying drive toward romantic fulfillment in a mated pattern. The more men bring love and power into their relationship with their world, the greater becomes their need to find romantic self-expression out of their own personal psychological resources, separate and apart from the patterns which society imposes. The ability to fall in love in a way that fulfills the best in themselves, bringing into a romantic union their entire capacity for sexual sensuality and celebrative euphoria, while at the same time building the romantic union in all the constructive psychotherapeutic ways which contribute to the mental health of both partners, becomes the heart and essence of a basic readiness for creative living. Man's mated need is as great as that of any animal in the jungle and it comes from the same polarized psychological tendencies, but in the civilized human world these tendencies are rooted in character identity, and they only come to full expression when men pursue surplus psychological goals. Unless man can live in such a way as to bring his surplus psychological life within the scope of his understanding and control, his great mated drives will be dissipated by his failure to develop and protect their channels of expression, resulting in corrupting distortions of those human tendencies which he values the most. A fulfilled romantic union which endures and prospers is man's most cherished dream, but the reaching of it remains sufficiently difficult so that men discredit their own longings, convincing themselves that what they do attain through socially supported marital patterns constitutes the full expression of their mated needs. Such compromises take the pressure off the growth process, but there are deviant individuals who can neither tolerate the depression which such loss of inner identity entails, nor accept the presence of the distorted sexual and celebrative tendencies which discredited longings release in the human scene.

[208] It is impossible to love others constructively without loving life, just as men cannot accept responsibility for the destiny of others without the self-confident expectation that life will accord them the place of moral leadership they deserve. Romantic fulfillment brings alive all the sources of sensibility and pride, and exposes the individual to a process of continuing inner renewal and rededication to the meaning and value of the life process. No one can grow throughout a lifetime, facing all the challenges which a changing relationship to life entails, without the enrichment and invigoration which flow from romantic fulfillment.

[209] Romance is not the goal of creative living, but only its most essential instrument. The mated union is something that any sexual animal can find, and when human beings attempt to find identity through romance alone, ignoring their inner need for creative self-expression, they overburden and distort the romantic fabric by the expectation of levels of fulfillment which it cannot supply. When romantic expectations expand in this way, the elemental simplicity of the love and power interchange is undermined and destructive tendencies take over. On the other hand, when men turn away from romantic experience because of its unsettling effects on their adaptive lives, they are vulnerable to a renewal of their romantic needs whenever the rewards of adaptive conformity fail to protect them from a recognition of the emptiness of their emotional relationships to others. When romantic needs reenter a life out of an emergency need to dissipate depression, the individual is not in a position to develop the inner identity on which romantic capacity rests, and his personal resources are dissipated in a struggle to reach a mirage which fails to take on earthly qualities. If it does become real, he must reject it as alien to his pattern of living.

[210] The psychological independence on which growth rests is intimately tied to romantic capacity. The greater the acceptance of the imbalance which inner identity brings, the more the individual is exposed to the mated need which is inherent in nature's masculine-feminine polarity. Whenever mating is approached as a matter of independent self-expression and fulfillment, separate from social dogma and authority, individuals are vulnerable to the choice of that mated object which promises the greatest access to the eroticism inherent in submissive idealization and to the euphoria inherent in the pride of possession. Whenever an individual cannot, for any reason, make an acceptable adjustment to his romantic needs through conformity to socially reinforced heterosexual patterns, he becomes exposed to the homosexual capacities of his personality. Homosexuality, like Poe's purloined letter, is hidden in the open in the civilized world. Society has a great need to protect the love and power interactions between men from the romantic overflow which unrestricted access to warmth and cooperation make possible. Precisely because men are not reared under the influence of social pressures toward erotization of their relationships, they are able to extend the boundaries of their mutual psychological exposure, reaching new levels of honest understanding and uncompromising commitment to each other's welfare. The more men dwell in this realm where idealization and exploitation thrive, the closer they come to the continuity and integrity which form the basis of courtship in nature. Society wants to separate the romantic life from this area of the independent expression of the creative love and power faculties, but it is this artificial isolation of the sexual and celebrative life which damages the further development of the creative capacities, leaving a residue of unattached surplus tendencies which find outlet in promiscuous and addictive channels.

[211] The tremendous overemphasis on sexuality in the civilized world is the direct result of man's attempt to force its expression into patterns chosen by society. There is no such thing as natural or healthy sexuality outside the operation of love and its romantic component, nor can celebrative enjoyment take a constructive place within the personality outside the influence of the moral commitment which power brings. Without psychological mating, sexual experience falls victim to the acting out of sexual fantasy, which then becomes the only guide to a fuller sensuality. Without the ability to form a mated union, celebrative release follows the false passage created by addiction to the euphoriant effect of intensified interests of the moment, which then becomes man's only way to lose himself in a world of uninhibited participation in the flow of experience. When men use sexual and celebrative freedom as a revolutionary tool against the emotional rigidities of a conventional society, they become the victims of the same separation between their surplus capacities and the mated union which characterizes the world they oppose. Love and power cannot deepen and expand in a context where sex and celebration are on the loose. It is only when men can develop a mated relationship to the level where a place is created for the fullest expression of their sexual and celebrative drives that they will bring these capacities into focus and under control without socially reinforced guidelines or prohibitions. As long as society fails to understand and accept the mated phenomenon, remaining attached to its own version of romantic pairing based on the adaptive requirements of marriage, it sets the stage for the failure of mankind to utilize its fullest romantic resources. Instead society cynically accepts the existence of perverse and addictive phenomena as regrettable but inevitable manifestations of the weaknesses of human nature.

[212] The acceptance by any individual of his homosexual capacities is motivated by a desire to reach a greater independent access to erotic and euphoric experience. The transition into a homosexual pattern of feeling and behavior comes as a result of his failure to adapt to social dogma and authority in this area. Every individual would find life simpler and easier if he could conform in every way to all of society's demands, winning from this surrender of individuality a clear access to the fulfillment of his human needs. Since individuality is itself the most important key to human contentment and happiness, social conformity can only work when society leaves room for independent self-expression in those surplus areas where basic adaptive requirements are not involved. The individual must reject adaptive pressures in areas where social influences toward conformity constitute an intrusive disruption of his right to discover his own identity and to form his own patterns of self-expression.

[213] It is only when human beings face failure that they are in a position to find the motivation to develop new resources in themselves. At the point where the confrontation by failure becomes inescapable, a crucial decision must be made by the individual concerning his own growth potential. If he accepts a psychological status in which the fault lies with him, he can only bow his head and endure the resulting inundation of his personality by neurotic and delinquent tendencies. If he recognizes resources in himself that call for a new dedication to a personal search for truth and right, accepting the need to alter the psychological world in which he seeks to express himself, he opens the door to a life of psychological growth. The kind of failure which leads men to seek self-development underlies all the creative reachings of human beings.

[214] The acceptance of the explicit need for homosexual experience starts when an individual cannot find sufficient pleasure and enjoyment in heterosexual patterns to motivate the development of his romantic capacities, and when he finds it impossible to ignore or suppress his romantic needs. As he explores the potentiality for self-development in the homosexual area, he finds himself adrift in a human context where erotic intensity and euphoric spontaneity have been liberated without any corresponding development in his constructive love and power capacities. The breaking down of society's barriers against homosexual experience exposes the individual to a more complex and less structured psychological world where he must make independent choices in the selecting and developing of human attachments. The greatest impact on the personality comes not from the fact that the individual has attained a better romantic capacity through his adoption of a deviant erotic path, but from his ability to enter a human world where his increased depth and scope have produced radical changes in the level of his personal honesty and courage in human matters. Once the homosexual is released from the conventional need to protect himself and others from the openness of feeling and readiness for involvement which society must fear as a potentially homosexual threat, he has crossed a Rubicon into a world where love can find creative tasks worthy of its resources, and where power can reach for the kind of unlimited opportunity which permits the development of moral integrity to go forward. The psychological rewards which come from such an expanding human world give men the motivations they need to lay aside the defenses which social dogma and institutions protect and reinforce. The expectations of greater human fulfillment through the development of an increasing individuality in which the self finds new capacities to give to others become a motivational force which is capable of overcoming any shame at the inadequacies of love or any guilt which emanates from the inconstancies of power.

[215] Society sees the homosexual as a failure in the area of heterosexual development, and there can be no doubt that this failure does exist, but the simple identification of failure in human undertakings is not enough. Once human beings accept the fact that they live in an ignorant and immoral world, they have no longer any reason to conform to that world in areas where the surplus capacities are involved. When men attempt to accept a conventional heterosexual adjustment as part of a need to live up to basic and minimal adaptive requirements, they sacrifice too much of their inner access to their creative growth potential. There is no ultimate reason why heterosexuality cannot be detached from its conventional automaticity of feeling and dutiful patterns of commitments, but this evolution of man's ability to use his inner identity in building psychologically polarized mating between individuals of the opposite sex demands of him great independence in the utilization of love and power capacities, and this independence cannot avoid, at the very least, a passage through homosexual territory. When the deviancy of the homosexual is identified with human inadequacy and sickness, the tremendous human resources which exist in the polarized interactions between men are either disregarded or devalued, and as men turn away from those experiences in which new levels of human truth and right can be found, they sacrifice their personal search for contentment and happiness on the altar of their false worship of heterosexual certainties which they find easy to accept but impossible to use for the purposes of human growth.

[216] Homosexual deviancy lies at the core of the adolescent need of the individual to find the meaning and value of life for himself. As long as sexual and celebrative patterns are controlled by society, the individual remains imprisoned within pre-established limitations on the workmanship of love and the loyalties of power. The dissolving of fixed beliefs concerning the nature of love is an absolute prerequisite for the expansion of psychological knowledge, and men cannot deepen and apply their growing love capacities if the accompanying alterations in their erotic accessibility come up against an autocratic social barrier which places conformity before the search for truth. Neither can they dissolve fixed patterns of social responsibility in favor of an expanding capacity for individual moral integrity without alterations in their euphoric needs, and they cannot reach the necessary freedom in their personal style of enjoyment if their celebrative life is confined by dogmatic social prohibitions.

[217] As long as society can stimulate shame and guilt in the area of sexual and celebrative deviancy, it has all the weapons it needs to assure itself that adolescent heresy and rebellion will not pass outside the boundaries of a transient and ineffectual defiance. Society leaves a great deal of room for isolated expressions of hatred and anger by its members at the depressive effects of social conformity, provided that these states of mind can be categorized as the product of human failure and weakness and are not allowed to expose the kind of real shame and guilt at human ignorance and immorality which would confront the whole of society with the need for psychological growth.

[218] In crossing the homosexual barrier the individual exposes his personality to a great deal more than the taking of a direct path to the honest and courageous affirmation of desires and needs which remain unrecognized or hidden in others. He finds he has committed himself to a passage through perilous territory which he was not prepared to handle. The success of his undertaking then depends on the wisdom and strength he can muster for the task. All that he needs to guarantee the fullest development and utilization of his personal resources is the determination to go forward. The homosexual pattern of living confronts men with the need to use love and power relationships as tools of their own personal growth. The fact that the homosexual is no better prepared to understand human nature or to develop his capacities for moral responsibility than any other individual puts him in a truly adolescent position, where the sources of growth are revealed to be a matter of motivation. The only psychological asset which is his special and unique characteristic is his capacity to pursue love and power goals as entities in themselves, separate and apart from society's pressures toward conformity in institutionalized family patterns. The only way a human being can develop his love and power capacities is through his ability to give up those defenses against shame and guilt which undermine the workmanship of love and the exploratory commitments of power in the conventional world. The struggle with these defenses tells the real story of homosexual development, and because the individual cannot avoid personal responsibility for the failures which are inherent in any genuine growth process, he is extremely vulnerable to the kind of belittlement and contempt which society reserves for those who are rash or foolish enough to undertake human ventures which, if successful, carry sufficient spiritual meaning and moral authority to bring down the psychological defenses of an entire social system.

[219] The hostility of society toward homosexuality is only a special case of its general hostility toward the adolescent spirit. In order to undermine the creative efforts of individuals to shape their lives by their own standards of human understanding and morality, society identifies their deviancy in terms of its inadequacies and failures, thereby undermining their access to basic social acceptance in adaptive areas. Individuals who turn toward creative human goals carry the germ of potential defeat within their personalities, because the establishing of creative love and power goals does not change the fact that the individual is using the same inadequate psychological tools which have shaped the shallowness and corruption of the world he opposes. The deviancy of the creative personality can only succeed when it leads to a full acceptance of the kind of long and arduous growth process which brings sufficient truth and right into being to enable love and power to communicate and demonstrate their constructive potential. Men readily accept greatness of purpose in setting human goals, but it is much more difficult to maintain a full sense of the meaning and value of life when each turn of the road brings new confrontations with the personal failures of their surplus love and power capacities. Psychological growth takes its being in such challenges, and when the process is going forward in a creative way, the individual passes beyond each stage of frustration or defeat wiser and stronger than before. The ability to accept the psychological vicissitudes of growth lies at the heart of man's search for the tools he needs to build a better human world.

[220] Society cannot value truth and right which are coming into being, because in this stage they cannot provide the consistency and stability which social institutions require. On the other hand, if society cannot accept the right of individuals to so place themselves in the human scene as to make unlimited growth possible in their personal lives, it undermines its own access to social progress. It is in the area of its opposition to homosexuality that society reveals its greatest failure to comprehend and accept the importance of psychological growth as an entity in itself, and this phenomenon can only be explained by the fact that basic and universal homosexual tendencies have been handled by destructive denial and rejection to the degree that man's devotion to the development of human truth and right have been compromised. Man lives in a paradoxical world where his human development is hamstrung by the fact that the only kind of free scientific inquiry he does not allow himself is the pursuit of human truth, and the only kind of audacity in engineering enterprise which is alien to his nature is the undertaking of moral intervention in the lives of others. Since the beginning of civilization he has sought to understand himself and to become his brother's keeper, but the reason for the devastating inadequacy of his accomplishments in this area continues to evade him.

[221] Society takes the position that it wants no traffic with human truth and right if it brings the accepted basis of its heterosexual romantic patterns into question, believing that such a state of affairs would undermine the entire structure of family life. With truth and right, however, man can do anything that he wants and needs to do, including the rebuilding of the structure of his heterosexual romantic life and its accompanying involvement in family duties and responsibilities, all without destructive implications for the development and expression of his creative spirit. Without truth and right, man will continue to find that too much of human existence is a delaying action against the onslaught of disabling depression. No matter how well his world is illuminated by the candle power of those self-aggrandizing rewards which come from the misuse of his love capacities, he will continue to experience the darkness which surrounds his inner self, and no matter how many possessions he accumulates through his surrender to the seductions of irresponsible power, he will continue to find himself in a wasteland of lost opportunities. Love alone can light his world. Power alone can claim that world for him.

EDITOR'S NOTE

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