Edward,

Yes, I am interested in continuing a dialog with you. I already consider you a valuable member of the Rosenfels Community and have mentioned your work to several people.

Being a philosophical theorist (i. e. a "thinker") by nature, Paul's psychotherapy consisted primarily of teaching people how to understand human nature. Naturally this tended to filter out those seeking only to be stroked or patted on the head, or to be told "I'm okay, you're okay", and to filter in those who, like him, wanted a deeper, more philosophical, kind of insight than most health workers have access to. It also explains why I am still largely ignorant of the modern interest in body work, and also why it may be hard for me to relate his ideas to specific innovations in the field such as those which you are spearheading.

He was (and I am) also skeptical from long, sad, experience of much of what passes for New Age therapy which turns out to be magical and miraculous incantations and rituals. That doesn't mean, of course, that various modalities of useful body work are not available to aspirants fortunate enough to find serious people (such as yourself) or that other modalities may not be discovered in the (far?) future. (Prediction is difficult, said Yogi Berra, especially about the future.) For now, though, I personally concentrate on the talking cure, otherwise known by the ancient name of education.

The only book I've ever read on this subject is Frank Pierce Jones' Body Awareness in Action, which is about The Alexander Technique and was recommended to me by my friend Laurie Bell and which I quote on my web page about Paul and William James as follows:

James wasn't the only scientist to decry the "mismeasure of man" by the misapplication of otherwise scientific methods. [Jones] tells this story about John Dewey: Dewey had been reading an article in the "Psychological Review". As I came in he threw it down with an impatient gesture, remarking, "I despair of psychologists. They seem to think that borrowing a technique from another science makes them scientists." He pointed to the cracks in the plastered wall behind me and said, "If I measured each of those cracks, I could calculate their slopes and derive a formula for them. That would not be science, but I could fool a psychologist into thinking it was".

As you can guess, I am (and Paul was) very concerned with asking not only whether a therapy is perceived to be (momentarily) comforting but whether it is actually useful in the long term by objective scientific standards, not only in reducing symptoms but in promoting personal growth. What this means is a complicated subject since we believe that scientific research is something that we all do everyday. (See Huxley's essay "What is Science?"). If he really thought that no assertions could be made until multi-million dollar double-blind experiments were conducted by major research institutions, after all, he would never have written a single word about his ideas.

I too am conducting a Great Books reading group that will read Nietzche in a month or two. I did read Zarathustra 30 years ago and remember feeling that Nietzche had a true understanding of uncorrupted personal power. (If you think power corrupts, try powerlessness!) Neitzche is brilliant and well worth studying, but utterly unreliable if you want a consistent viewpoint. He is more of a social critic than a social theorist, blasting some institution one day and praising it the next. He sees what's wrong, and uses his hatred to great literary effect, but is incapable of stringing together a set of universal insights that might have comprised a framework upon which we might have hung a real science. (That's okay, nobody else did either until Paul came along.) I'm not aware of his expressing insightful ideas about personal relationships, particularly ideas about introversion/extroversion if in fact they do exist, so beyond this I cannot comment. (I find it odd, by the way, that even Jung had little of significance to say about lovers.)

I can say, however, that it is all too common for people who celebrate power to belittle love, and for people who value love to denigrate power. This is tragic because love is only valuable when giving to power, and power is only meaningful when seeing a world illuminated by love. Love needs to come out of the closet, in other words, and power needs to be grounded in the real needs of human beings. Paul's first book ends as follows: Love and power are a natural pair; put apart, love sickens and power runs wild. If men do not bring their honesty and courage to each other's aid, so that they find a view of life and way of life through each other, the great undertaking which is civilization may still go down under the hammer blows of fear and rage. It is not fitting that men should attempt to make peace with pain and suffering, ignoring the great problems which depth of character exposes and bypassing the fundamental obstacles which vigor of character confronts. Let the truth be told; let right be done.

Paul and I came to the conclusion, like so many before us, that people are permanently set in a masculine or feminine direction quite early in childhood. What Paul has added is the discovery that this is all set in motion when the child polarizes with the parent of the same sex. (That in itself shows the extraordinary overriding importance of homosexuality to civilization.). This doesn't help individuals figure out which pole they are, unfortunately, because so much of life in this ignorant world is about denying ourselves, specifically denying the ways in which we stand out from other people. Thus masculines spend their wholes lives trying to be more feminine, and vice versa. (This is called being "well-rounded", and is why so many people in the armed forces, for example, are feminines acting macho and why so many people in religious retreats are depressed masculines in disguise.)

Diagnostically, these culturally engendered defenses are quite useful because more often than not a student who initially insists that he's masculine is actually feminine, and vice versa. People in the 20th century are chronically tired of being masculine or feminine, generally, and often see a "polarity transplant" as the royal road to an escape from all their problems. For example, when I was a (masculine) adolescent I saw clearly that "What the world needs now is love." I read Erich Fromm, who said that if you want to get love you must first give love. Therefor I set about methodically trying to feminize my personality. I did volunteer work in mental hospitals and experimented with any and all manor of altruistic behavior to see just where it would get me. Where it got me was frustration squared until I met Paul. Paul was wise enough to say, "You're right, Dean, the world does need love. But you leave that to people like me. You concentrate on being assertive and you'll awaken love in the hearts of others. That's where your real happiness lies."

Of course, he was right. This very most simple level of polarity awareness could liberate so many good well-meaning people who are fighting against their real natures if only we could get the word out to them. Liberating the remainder of mankind who for cultural reasons have little capacity for psychological focus will probably take centuries, but nevertheless it is a task to which I have happily given my life. Someday, of course, polarity awareness will become part of the shared heritage of mankind and will be part of the "common sense" taught to children by their parents.

You're quite right that individual courtships can be quite confusing. At the Center, we're pretty old-fashioned in thinking that sex can be pretty overstimulating and is often better left deferred until people have gotten an accurate bead on whether they're even polarized or not. (Naturally, this is a rule we break all the time.) Paul's first homosexual relationship with a man named Ronnie was a rollercoaster ride where Paul was feminine one day and masculine the next. This did not work well for either of them and compromised their mental health despite the "good sex". It was only when Paul insisted on being the feminine partner that a psychological interdigitation could even begin. Habituation to what are euphemistically called "affairs" can leave people in a confused state that demeans the very point of having an identity. Without being too condemnatory on the subject, I would claim that sex on the loose in the human scene is one reason why we're still in the dark about "who we really are".

You sound very masculine to me, Edward. What do you think?

Dean