I was so surprised to get such an immediate, friendly, message from you — wiping out thirty years of time in an instant — that I thought I should think about what I should say for a few days.
But I didn't. (Sounds like the old Dean, right?) So now I'm sitting down to write to my old dear friend just for the hell of it and without knowing where this will go.
To make a long story short (and this isn't an insertion of a pre-written autobio), I went to St. John's College with Peter and Laurie . Peter went nuts within six months and had to be sent home. I learned years later that he eventually committed suicide. Laurie eventually settled with different man way up in Canada in a log cabin with no electricity.
After two years at St. John's I saw a Greenwich Village psychotherapist named Paul Rosenfels for a few weeks during my summer vacation. He seemed amazingly deep, more of a philosopher than just a shrink, and when I went back to school in the fall I became convinced of his intellectual importance by reading the two books he had published by that time. When I visited him during Christmas he announced that he had fallen in love with me! He seemed shocked that the idea of being homosexual had never appealed to me. He said he could see that I "wasn't ready" but that he would wait for me. We decided to be friends and to stay in touch but not to see any more of each other for the moment. I was tremendously frightened by this amazing development, and it led me to wonder whether I was suppressing/repressing some homosexuality in myself that I should now confront. I felt that a close relationship with Paul would be a tremendous opportunity to learn about the science of psychology first hand, so to speak.
I dropped out of school after my third year with the intention of exploring a close relationship with Paul, but was so depressed by having to live in a small East Village apartment and having to work at a menial job every day that I couldn't face him. (For a year I was "Mr. Science" at the Hall of Science in Queens, in one of the few buildings left over from the 1964 World's Fair.) Finally after a year of feeling lost, I began to develop fantasies of kidnapping him and escaping into the woods. (Woods??) When I saw how nuts I was getting, I called him up and asked for an appointment.
I was astonished but not really disappointed to learn that he had taken another lover named Gerry in the meantime. He said he always wanted someone to take long walks with and that seemed a simple and non-committal way for us to learn how to be comfortable with one another. I didn't know, of course, that he was actually breaking up with Gerry then.
To shorten this story a bit, we did become lovers, and that was a big step in my psychological development, especially considering that Paul was 60. But what was more important was that I learned that he had been developing a rather independent model of human psychological growth. He had spurned Freudian psychoanalysis after having been certified by the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and had developed ideas about human nature that took into account the insights of great thinkers of all periods, from the Greeks to the Christians and beyond. This kind of humanistic orientation would later be called the Third Stream by Maslow and others. (First: Freudian intuitionism, Second: Adlerian behaviorism, Third: "human potential"). Paul's work takes everything that is legit in intuitionism and behaviorism and combines them dynamically within washing out the nature of each. In a way, he took Jung's ideas of the introverted personality vs. the extroverted personality and took them much further than Jung could.
The identification of individuals as either being introverts or extroverts of course helps understand how homosexuals can mate as profoundly as heterosexuals. It isn't the genitalia that are mating, after all, but the personalities. And if the personalities are polar opposites, well, opposites attract.
Paul was still doing therapy in the East Village at this time, and I was trying to learn how to apply his insights to our stormy relationship and trying to figure out what the hell to do with my life. Naturally, I wanted to become a therapist too, but having now been involved at a kind of post-graduate level with a working psychotherapist for five years it seemed ridiculous to go back and try to get the kind of academic qualifications that would have legitimized me in the eyes of conventional patients, not to mention insurance companies. I volunteered at the Gay Activist Alliance for a number of years and helped to moderate many of their discussion groups, but they were frustrating because the ideas I really wanted to talk about were too technical for many of the people who came mostly to complain about what society had done to them and why couldn't they have sex in public. Something you once said still sticks with me: The early 1970's were a wonderful period for the creation of all sorts of countercultural institutions, some of which did some great things.
Finally, in 1973 several of his other students and I rented a basement space and started running discussion groups there. We called it the Ninth Street Center. After a number of chaotic months had passed and we more or less knew what we were doing, Paul started coming over and running talk groups. For the next few years, Paul now had a lectern from which to share his insights with the many hundreds of people who now wanted to learn from him. Around 1978 he became to too ill from angina pectoris to visit, and around 1980 he stopped seeing patients. He died in 1985.
I always thought the Center would go on forever. We had a board of directors who were each as convinced of the historical importance of his work as was I. But by 1991 we had to face the fact that not as many people wanted to learn from us as had wanted to learn from Paul. For lack of funds, we closed the doors to the basement at 319 East Ninth Street and continue today mostly as a publishing house. We publish the three books and seven monographs that Paul wrote, plus a book of interview that I did a few years after he died with his friends and students, as well as back issues of the Ninth Street Center Journal.
All during this time I have earned my daily bread as a software developer. I also have hobbies in order to rest from the psychological exhaustion that can overtake people who are very serious about their intentions to help the world. I have a large collection of books and other materials about prehistoric life, play the violin, and until just recently had a handful of much loved and now much missed cats.
Oh, yes, I have a mated relationship with a woman named Jennifer. I could give my standard two-minute lecture on what -sexuality I am, but I'll spare you. Suffice it to say that I don't believe in shutting out possibilities for the sake of being politically correct (or "psychologically correct"), and Jennifer was as much a pleasant surprise in my life as, well, as Paul himself was.
That's more than enough for now. I'll write again soon, hoping next time to address more specifically the points in your reply.
What did people do before the Internet, daddy?
You certainly weren't one of the "left-wingers who told me to get laid and read Marx". On the contrary, you were one of the very few who didn't need to believe that all possible questions of philosophy, psychology and politics had been solved long ago either by left-wing or right-wing ideologues. You were still open to wondering about life and didn't judge me for admitting that I was confused and unsure about the simple fundamentalist solutions being marketed to me by lesser minds.
The boy who was cruel to me was Karl, who had been in my 5th- and 6th-grade classes. He lived near me and occasionally we used to play "box ball," a poor cousin of tennis where two sidewalk squares become the tennis court, pinkies substitute for tennis balls, and hands imitate rackets. We had lost touch with each other in junior high school and, thanks to his intense fetish about competing academically, he had skipped a grade. When we met up again at Bronx Science he had become much more intellectual and, in his own mind, spiritually elevated and morally superior. He took me under his wing and tried to enlighten me, at first giving me after school lectures about early Greek philosophers. When he asked me if I believed in God I said I was much to young to trust my preliminary impressions about such a controversial issue, and he said he was very impressed by the maturity of my response. This was the first time anybody took a personal interest in my intellectual enlightenment, and I found it absolutely thrilling.
At that time I was still coping with a lifelong depression because of having parents who didn't care much for children. One time when we were sitting together on the subway, Karl put his arm around me. Even though it wasn't at all sexual it was a very bold move, and I admired his independence in deciding to cheer me up this way. And it instantly made me feel a whole lot better about myself — as if I might actually be worthy of human companionship. I came to life like a wilted flower being watered and, from that moment on, felt that Karl held the key to my future psychological development.
When we met again after summer vacation Karl had changed, though. Suddenly he was sadistic and vicious towards me and called me a loser every chance he got, especially when his other friends could see him doing it. I was devastated. All that year he would hide in wait for me, then spring out of the shadows when I least expected and strafe me with an air machine gun he was somehow never without. My depression came back with a vengeance and I cried myself to sleep for the rest of that term and my entire senior year. Even though I had never felt sexual towards Karl and was experiencing a normal string of unrequited crushes on pretty girls in my purview, it was the loss of Karl's love that I couldn't stop mourning.
The next year at St. John's I finally screwed up the courage to write to him at Columbia. He said he felt ashamed about what he'd done and that I should understand that he was very confused at the time. At the age of 18, this felt to me a bit as if a murderer was demanding I show a little compassion. I tried my best, and even invited him to a party I threw during that next summer vacation, but we never really connected after that.
Years later, my good friend Laurie — whose father was one of the founders of the American Communist Party and who was followed to school every morning when she was a child by FBI agents — told me that she had known Karl at the camp she had spent a few summers at in upstate New York at which the children had been introduced to Stalinist ideas. Had Karl learned from this training that "losers" like me need to be exterminated in the greater interest of the class struggle? I don't know, but I began to see that he wasn't nearly as independent a thinker as I'd hoped but instead more of a "true believer" who needed "great men" to do his thinking for him. If ever you needed an example of the dangers of avoiding taking personal responsibility for one's psychological development, I don't think you could ever find a better one than the young Karl.
These days Karl is teaching "critical legal theory" — cant for Marxism — but it's possible that he's overcome, or is at least struggling with, his need to be a tiny cog in the great machine called "class struggle". I hope so.
Trust me, Alan, you don't have the capacity for the kind of calculated, precision-targeted sadism that we're talking about here. You and I are both what Jung called extroverts, and extroverts err on the side of masochism, not sadism. We love to use our energy, vitality and personal power to make the world around us better for everyone. Yet, because we're painfully aware that we're not as sensitive by nature as some of our friends, we are susceptible to embarrassing self-consciousness, occasionally harmless passivity, and potentially chronic guilt. We like to keep uppermost in our minds the maxim that, in your insightful words, "it is possible to be cruel without really intending it".
Thanks for letting me dilate about my personal history.