In 1991 I lived for a year in New York City and came to a meeting at the Ninth Street Center, inspired by a brief advert about a group for those interested in exploring psychological perspectives. I was teaching Literature at an Ontario Canadian university and on a one year research leave. I was working on a project where there were archival resources in New York State and Texas. New York struck me as an exciting cultural centre, free of the provincial restrictions of the small Ontario town I lived in. I had academic and personal connections in New York so I decided to base myself there for the greater part of my year.

I was drawn to the notion of a group exploring psychological perspectives because I had at that time developed an interest in the relation of the creative arts to psychotherapy — specifically literary art. I am also gay and had recently separated from a twelve year relationship with another man. My relationship to the university as an institution was also a mixed one at that time. I felt I had spent too much of my life in "the ivory tower" and needed a different scope. I was not sure what that was. I wasn't in a midlife crisis — I was fifty one at the time — but I was searching and contemplating changes. This psychological group seemed to offer what I wanted.

I certainly found support in my search for further psychological and living growth in the group. Some of my previous research in literature had involved ideas about polarity and its relation to personal growth so Rosenfels's ideas interested me powerfully. Polarity was a concept not entirely new to me but Rosenfels's antithesis between what he termed 'masculine' and 'feminine' and the application of that polarity to growth through personal relationships was entirely new — and for good reason, since that concept is Rosenfels's unique contribution. I had initial diffliculty with the special use of the terms "masculine" and "feminine" and I made various attempts to restate the idea in the group. Then Dean Hannotte asked me a direct and obvious question, "Have you thought about yourself? How do you identitify yourself? Do you think you are masculine or feminine?"

In fact I had not thought about applying the ideas to myself. And what better way can there be to clarify thinking for one's self than to relate it to your own experience and awareness. Being put on the spot at that time I felt confused and took a hesitant stab at the answer: "Oh I'm feminine, I think ". Dean and the other members of the group present at this time all responded negatively to my self-description. "No, no. You're masculine". I remember resisting the idea — without understanding why. "Alright, be feminine, if you wan't" Dean said. I shrugged and then thought "What if they're right? How would it fit me to be masculine?"

More recently, Dean suggested I write something personal about the way Rosenfels influenced my life. I hope it will be interesting to readers to share my earlier discovery of different ways in which I began to recognize aspects of my masculine identity and then tried to develop that identity. I began by asking myself why I thought I was feminine. The answer to that question encouraged me to rediscover my past and to alter my view of the narrative of my own personal history. Since I was already fifty one when I began this process the reinterpretation of my past narrative was important to me and I think it can be very liberating to consider that if past events cannot be changed, your understanding and interpretation of them can. That is broadly a psychotherapeutic process; in my case I thought that it profoundly altered my sense of who I was, how I came to be who I was and how I might change and develop.

As an adolescent, I was shy, socially withdrawn and introverted. Some of those characteristics were probably established through a lot of physical illness in infancy and early childhood. In my teens I was not athletic, not interested in aggressive sports (which were played in my school). I was musical and demonstrated some precocious ability as a pianist. I was academically oriented and a voracious reader. Very early on — before I was thirteen I identified myself as gay. All these characteristics combined in my mind to think of myself as feminine, rather than "effeminate" and I think that description might have been imposed on me by others. But I recognize now that a feminine description did not fit, neither in the conventional nor Rosenfelsian sense of the term. No one else identified me as gay. I escaped being bullied — which other Gay males in British secondary schools suffered a lot.

I was perfectly fit and physically strong. I could have succeeded in games and sports but I decided I just was not interested. I sense now that that decision and my "withdrawness" was part of a masculine assertion. If I rejected physical activities I was drawn to mastering skills: musical, pianistic, linguistic. I did take part in a number of social activities: debate and discussion societies, school magazine writing — so there was a social dimension to my personality despite my comparative aloneness. I did develop a lot of guilt feelings about sexuality. On the other hand I was very certain of my sexual identity within myself And I did have a physical contact with another boy. I knew my sexuality and I even attempted to act on it.

In adolescence I developed independence and earned a nickname from my parents: "Independent Michael". One of my recreational activities were long walks, alone, into a richly historical and beautiful countryside where I developed a fascination for the local country churches, their history and architecture. I delighted in discovering counter reformation "priest holes" or hiding places, Saxon arches and Norman naves. I loved nature, flowers and birds.

The guilt feelings associated with my sexuality resulted in the sense of having a Jekyll and Hyde personality. Rosenfels's words in (section 54, page 192) strike home powerfully: Secrets are spatially isolated, taking their existence behind walls away from the eyes of society. The dissociated is separated in time; it has no apparent meaning in the life of the individual and is hidden in the open. It has a safety valve type of spontaneous action, and when it is gone it leaves no record of its existence. The secret, if exposed, is shame arousing; the dissociated, if involved in the main stream of life, is guilt producing. Yielding civilized man has a great secret, his feminine sexual feeling. Assertive civilized man has a large area of dissociated activity, based on his masculine celebrative attitude.

I combined strong sexual feeling with a very strong spiritual interest. I became, for want of a better term "devout". I am the product of a mixed religious background: a Jewish father and a Christian/Anglican atheist mother. My period of intense involvement in the Anglican church into which I was baptized and confirmed and where neither of my parents ever went, I now see as an explorattory path which took me to an enlarged world away from my family. Mine was the first generation in England to be offered the gift of free university education and, for those who could qualify, into the elite universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Neither of my parents went to university. I worked hard to follow the path that was offered to me because, again, I could gain access to a wider, broader world, away from any where my family had trod and away from the restricted world of a small South Welsh Puritan town.

I gained my first partial independence from family life at university and in doing vacation jobs. I did experience some disillusionment. Probably I had built up unrealistically idealized notions of the intellectual and social riches university life would provide. I certainly became aware of social elitism and class prejudice as a middle class boy from a state school. Some of my fellow undergraduates were sons of peers, or Indian princesses. I wasn't overly impressed with these glamorous appurtenances. Moreover, I was conscious of being patronised and looked down on simply beacuse of my class origins. Was I envious? Was I jealous of privilege? I may have been but I also developed an interest in socialism, joined the Labour Party and thus transgressed against my Conservative parents. These values put me at odds with many of my companions who seemed to me to value their university degree because it was an open sesame to privilege, wealth and power. I became alienated from them. "Stop standing there like that, so self-contained and independent," I remember one of my friends commenting.

Post university, I developed interests in social reform, education and equality of opportunity. I moved to the University of London where I did teacher training in an environment firmly Marxist and left wing. I then got a job in a "Comprehensive School", a recent socialist experiment in the United Kingdom in non-streamed education, students of all abilities and all clases taught in one school. The British educational system, selecting at eleven years of age those who went to "grammar" or academic schools and those who went to vocational schools helped to form the kind of stratified society Aldous Huxley portrays in "Brave_New_World".

The choice was a disastrous one for me. I had tough East End "spill over" students from working class areas of London who were often delinquents. Students would explain their absence from school on certain days because they had to appear in juvenile court. A quieter, academic, gay man of twenty-two, I suffered hellish discipline problems. Rosenfels emphasises the importance of learning from failure. I hope I did. I wanted a juster more free and open society for myself and others. The ideal was important to me and is important.

A major change in my life occurred when I was twenty-three and emigrated to Canada, taking the opporunity to do postgraduate studies leading eventually to my career as a university teacher. Canada offered financial support for this which I could not get in Britain at that time. And I was recruited, since Canadian universities were expanding and they needed personnel. People have subsequently commented that it took quite a bit of courage to get on a boat and travel to another continent at a time when international travel by younger people was less common than it is now. I suppose my decisive action to seek further opportunities for knowledge, growth and experience at that time is another evidence of masculine psychology. Rosenfels comments "the assertive individual who builds modalities of human control needs an expanding world of opportunity".

The only comment I want to make about my thirty-year career in academia is that as well as teaching and a modest degree of research and publication, I did a lot of administrative and organizational work on various academic committees but also organizing cultural events, community educational programs and the like. I reflect now that as an adolescent I was branded as an impractical dreamer, an introvert who wouldn't be able to organize his way out of a paper bag. And I accepted that idea for a while until I saw myself actually organizing quite complicated operations efficiently and often with enthusiasm which then led to my being asked to take over a leadership role. I was amazed at myself in a way. I didn't then know how to think of myself as being masculine, I just was masculine!

So, what about my sexuality and my personal relationships during these years? For long periods of time I submerged my personal needs into institutional ones. I was extremely busy, teaching, doing two graduate degrees after my undergraduate one and a post graduate year of teacher training. This busyness was productive but it also allowed me to follow a path of avoidance of my sexuality and my identity. The avoidance I now see as an emergency solution. Rosenfels comments that strong repression of the self can put a stop to personal growth. I refused to think about the implications of being gay. I knew I was gay but part of me preferred not to recognize it. I was celibate for long periods. Then when sexual pressures became strong and I felt lonely I had brief physical sexual contacts. I also had crushes on male friends who were straight.

I was brought up in a period of strong Victorian sexual repesssion. My parents were not comfortable in talking about sexual matters at all and the topic of homosexuality was avoided by everybody. I lived in the era of homosexual criminalization. There was fear of blackmail and legal arrest as well as social reprobation. People lost jobs if their sexuality was discovered. Some gay men were hospitalised with nervous breakdowns. The psychologists had devised deconditioning therapy. This state of affairs lasted until after I left Britain and in Canada until 1965 when Trudeau acted on his famous dictum "The government has no business legislating in the bedrooms of the Nation".

The experience of a mated relationship in the interests of personal growth eluded me until 1976, after a year of revisitng Britain in the post criminalisation era. Then I officially "came out" to friends and employers and stopped behaving as a pseudo-heterosexual. However, throughout that time, I nurtured a fantasy I had had since adolescence of finding an ideal companion, a soul mate or spiritual twin with whom I could share everything. I think it's possible that that ideal may have still motivated my personal quest. I now see how it was a false ideal, based as it was on a notion of identity with the object, a spiritual brother who embodied myself, who could be a consolatory companion, a relief from loneliness. No polarity there, obviously and hence no psychological growth. Another false path was an attempt to relate to older more experienced men, more confident than I was at the time and an idealised father. In these relationships I was assuming a feminine role I think, at odds with my real identity. These relationships were not long lasting — and just as well since they would have ended in my own rebellion against them.

It took me to the age of thirty-five before I realized that I did not necessarily need to seek a partner but that a partner could be drawn to me and I could become his ideal. I would have rejected such a notion for a long time — not out of false or even genuine modesty but for lack of full knowledge of my own masculine identity. I have had two long term relationships in my life, one for fourteen years and the second I still have for eleven so far. My current relationship is with a Mexican and we lived together in Mexico for three and a half years. At the Ninth Street Center I was warned against the idea that travel can be a learning experience contributing to growth. However, relating to someone in his own country, living, working, coping with its language and experiencing the society, the history and the culture is different from "travel". But I will restrict my comments about what I learned in Mexico to some reflections about being masculine in that particular culture.

It was the first time that I had lived for any length of time in a Catholic rather than a Protestant culture. The spectacular baroque churches of Mexico are two-thirds empty as churches are in Canada and the United Kingdom. Although most Mexicans go to church only for baptisms, confirmations, weddings and funerals and many are severe critics of the church, the church has had a strong and deep influence on society and has sometimes provided an important sense of community. Wherever I went in the country I was confronted by three paradoxical cultural features: artistic representations in mural art of Marxist revolutionary past, awe inspiring archeological testimonies to Mexico's indigenous and pre-Christian past and baroque Catholicism. Aztec culture was intensely cruel based on human sacrifice. Spanish colonialism was excessively cruel and literally made slaves of the inhabitants of the country. Catholicism was spread by fire, the sword and torture. And I think I was subject to aggression and intimidation in my earlier life! Robert Fink told me that one of the key questions he asked of Paul Rosenfels was "Would your science of human nature hold true in any culture?" The answer was in the affirmative which it would have to be, since a science of human nature has to be universal.

What I did witness and experience are ways in which human nature can be distorted by cultural factors which employ aggresssion and intimidation. Mexican culture is distorted by extreme "machismo". Men have to be intensely masculine. And women correspondingly feminine and passive. Of course and fortunately, things are changing, but the traditional ways of thought still exert enormous pressure. Feminine men and masculine women have a hard time but intensely so in that culture. Certainly my friend Javier has spent a life time trying to free himself from these cultural intimidations. Many gay Mexicans get married and their wives accept their homosexuality. Men who do not marry tend to live at home, their freedom constricted. They conduct a semi-secret homosexual life. The psychological toll has been heavy. But now in Mexico City and larger centres emancipation has come. Mexico City allows gay marriage, for example and gay liberation flourishes. Mexico threw over the PRI in the year 2000, and it is becoming more like Quebec in separating church and government.

The topic of Mexico has brought me from the past to the present — from "BR" the time Before Rosenfels to "AR" the time after Rosenfels. So a word or two about "AR" before I finish. Shakespeare's Prospero in "The Tempest" declared on his retirement from Power that every third thought would be his grave. How do those who follow Rosenfels deal with aging and a sense of their own mortality? Here is my take. First I am glad that I have done the things I have done and thought what I have thought already. If I can arrive at the end having lived as fully as possible, having grown as much as I can, I think it will be easier to let go. I am trying to remain true to the ideals of love and power through working for a more just, peaceful and secure world. I mean by that a world that is not constantly reacting to emergency threats and wasting energy in destructive ways that are neither the path to survival nor to civilization.

There are limits to what I or a single individual can do in the face of the enormous problems we face in the world. However I do support effective organizations that can be more powerful and effective than I can on my own. I have worked for thirty years as a volunteer in various capacities for , an organization devoted to the establishment of basic rights of peoples to food, shelter, education and health. Love has often operated destructively in promoting international aid. In the name of charity we have devoted money resources and energy to fill a constant void of self-perpetuating need. That is not the way to go. Oxfam Canada recently promoted a publication of a book by Mark Fried, , exploring the theme of Poverty as the result of the exploitation of those who have power over those who don't. So the organization is in the business of empowerment of, for example, women in rural communities with microloans to start businesses, in consultation with local groups to develop sanitation, in equippping schools with the technologies to cope with climate change which is already affecting many developing communities in the developing world. They also pressure governments to take responsibility for providing for their own people. I perceive this as a mode of social engineering.

There is nothing wrong with wealth as such but there is something wrong with societies in which nine tenths of the wealth is in the hands of one tenth of the peoples in that society. More social justice will be a better answer to terrorist threats than invading other countries or torturing people into saying what you want. The other organization I work for is , well known and effective and taking its cue from the . I take faith in the idea that peoples in a wide range of countries and cultures can agree that there are basic human rights which cannot be infringed without harm to all of us. Since 9/11 we have sacrificed human rights to emergency survival and in doing so threaten the continuation of a just civilization. In the Eighteenth century the poet Alexander Pope said that "Self Love and Social are the same". In ensuring Truth and Right in the world we do protect ourselves from aggression and destruction.

It is always possible to help others to grow. I can fall prey to hate and anger in my relations with others but I try to practice ways of neutralising both. Observation and awareness are a start and also rising to the challenge of pointing out ways in which others can grow when they are not. W. H. Auden declared in 1939 that "we must love one another or die". I paraphrase that in other words by saying that we must either continue to grow or become stagnant — a condition which can lead to one's death. I share D. H. Lawrence's interest in trying to understand how and why cultures and civilizations have fallen into decay and then have arisen. I take from Paul Rosenfels the truth that continued growth creates Life.

I close this personal self-description of a "masculine" with the thought that the scientific objectivity of the terms masculine and feminine leaves undescribed the many individual ways in which one may be masculine or feminine. I accept the notion of a science of human nature but I remain in awe of the individuality of the thumbprint — or nowadays the DNA. No one of us is exactly alike. But the understanding of the operations of Love and Power and individual Identity create the perfect path for individuation.