One of the presidential candidates in the 1980 election, writes Eugene McCarthy, stated his religious belief that the “United States was strategically placed by God as an island of freedom between two continents in which freedom was either denied or un-recognized.” This holier-than-thou claim seems to me to make a mockery of freedom.

Freedom is used and abused to rationalize our laissez-faire, “free”-enterprise economic system. A trustee of a large university who also was the president of one of the leading oil companies in this country argued in a private conversation, that his company was justified in cutting off the supply of gas to raise the price at the time of the shortage during the excessively cold winter of 1975—1976. His company had the “right” and “responsibility” to its stockholders, he stated, to make as much money for them as possible. Was he assuming that the preserving of the free-enterprise system is more important than the lives of the human beings, the American people who were suffering severely that winter, some of them literally freezing to death because of the unavailability of gas? “Right” and “responsibility” are moral words used here for the immoral purpose of defending an action that results in hardship to thousands of people struggling to survive the subzero cold.

The argument that such practices of the free-enterprise system must be defended at whatever price in human suffering is dubious indeed. Have we forgotten the wisdom of Richard Tawney, who pointed out four decades ago that modern “industrialism is the perversion of individualism”? For the “repudiation of any authority [such as social value and function] superior to individual reason . . . left men free to follow their own interests or ambitions or appetites, untrammeled by subordination to any common center of allegiance.” Tawney pointed out that a self-contradiction is set up in industrialism itself: a “completely free” industrial system would destroy its own market and ultimately itself, as we see now happening in the automobile industry in this country. This seems to be also occurring in our curious phenomenon of simultaneous rising inflation and unemployment. The dilemma hinges on how we use the term “freedom.” How important that we rediscover its authentic meaning!

Justice William O. Douglas, as well as numerous others, has remarked that there can be no freedom which does not begin with the freedom to eat and the right to work. “Freedom,” writes Irwin Edman, “involves, as Marx and Robert Owen and Edward Bellamy were to discover, the economic conditions of action, and in the struggle for democracy economic security has only at late last been recognized as a political condition of personal freedom.”

I believe that the materialism and hedonism, so often decried by Solzhenitsyn and now Commager, are themselves symptoms of an underlying, endemic anxiety. Men and women devote themselves to making money when they cannot get gratification from making anything else. It is above all a personal dilemma, whatever its economic repercussions. Couples develop sexual hedonism as an end in itself because sex allays anxiety and because they find authentic love so rarely available in our alienated and narcissistic culture. At present in our country there is a general experience of suppressed panic: anxiety not only about the hydrogen bomb and the prospect of atomic war, but about uncontrolled inflation, unemployment, anxiety that our old values have deteriorated as our religions have eroded, about our disintegrating family structure, concern about pollution of the air, the oil crisis, and infinitum. The mass of citizens react as a neurotic would react: we hasten to conceal the frightening facts with the handiest substitutes, which dull our anxiety and enable us temporarily to forget.

Commager emphasizes that the price of surrendering our freedom is much greater than most people are aware. For freedom is “a necessity for progress,” he proclaims, “and a necessity for survival.” If we lose our inner freedom, we lose with it our self-direction and autonomy, the qualities that distinguish human beings from robots and computers.

The attack on freedom, and the mockery of it, is the predictable mythoclasm which always occurs when a great truth goes bankrupt. In mythoclasm people attack and mock the thing they used to venerate. In the vehemence of the attack we hear the silent unexpressed cries “Our belief in freedom should have saved us—it let us down just when we needed it most!” The attack is based on resentment and rage that our freedom does not turn out to be the noble thing inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty or that Abraham Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” has never occurred.

In all such periods of mythoclasm, the great truths yield the greatest bootlegged power to their attackers. Thus, the attack on freedom—especially by those psychologists who use their freedom to stump the nation, arguing that freedom is an illusion—gets its power precisely from what it denies.

That keen observer of America, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote that people in America imagine that “their whole destiny is in their own hands. The woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after, no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself.” As a result, Tocqueville states, “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” In European nations like France, where the monarchy stood against the legislature, one could exercise freedom of mind since if one power sides against the individual, the other sides with him. “But in a nation where democratic institutions exist, organized like those in the United States, there is but one authority, one element of strength and success, with nothing beyond it.” Tocqueville writes eloquently of the “tyranny of the majority” in America, which I call conformism of mind and spirit. We have recently seen this exhibited in the last election in the power of what is called the “moral majority.” “There the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.” Tocqueville continues: “The master no longer says, ‘You shall think as I do, or you shall die’; but he says, ‘You are free to think differently from me, and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. You will retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you.” Other people “will affect to scorn you.” The person who thinks freely is ostracized, and the mass of people cannot stand such alienation.

Have we not too easily and readily seized upon freedom as our birthright and forgotten that each of us must rediscover it for ourselves? Have we forgotten Goethe’s words: “He only earns his freedom and existence/Who daily conquers them anew”? Yet destiny will return to haunt us as long as it is not acknowledged. Destiny is eternally present to remind us that we exist as part of a community. We cannot afford to ignore “those who went before,” as Tocqueville puts it, and “those who will come after.” If we are ever to understand what Milton meant when he cried “Ah, Sweet liberty,” or what the Pilgrims sought in landing at Plymouth rock in search of religious freedom, or any one of the other million and one evidences of freedom, we must confront this paradox directly.

The paradox is that freedom owes its vitality to destiny, and destiny owes its significance to freedom. Our talents, our gifts, are on loan, to be called in at any moment by death, by illness, or by any one of the countless other happenings over which we have no direct control. Freedom is that essential to our lives, but it is also that precarious.

The same crisis of freedom is present in psychotherapy, this curious profession which burgeoned so fantastically in America during the past half century. The crisis can best be seen when we ask: What is the purpose of therapy? To be sure, to help people. And the specific purpose differs with the particular condition with which the person is suffering. But what is the overall purpose that underlies the development of this profession of psychological helpers?

Several decades ago, the purpose of the mental-health movement was clear: mental health is living free from anxiety. But this motto soon became suspect. Living free from anxiety in a world of hydrogen bombs and nuclear radiation? Without anxiety in a world in which death may strike at any moment you cross the street? Without anxiety in a world in which two-thirds of the people are malnurished or are starving?

Dr. Nicholas Cummings, in his inaugural address as president of the American Psychological Association, made a wise and insightful statement about the endeavor to avoid anxiety:

The mental health movement, in promising a freedom from anxiety that is not possible, may have had a significant role in the current belief that it is a right to feel good, thus contributing to the burgeoning consumption of alcohol and the almost universal prescription of the tranquilizer by physicians.

The mental health movement has emphasized “freedom from anxiety” as the definition of health. But finding that that is not possible in the general run of life, people have assumed that the quickest way to achieve this “freedom” is through alcohol and tranquilizing drugs.

Furthermore, if we did achieve freedom from all anxiety, we would find ourselves robbed of the most constructive stimulant for life and for simple survival. After many a therapeutic hour which I would call successful, the client leaves with more anxiety than he had when he came in; only now the anxiety is conscious rather than unconscious, constructive rather than destructive. The definition of mental health needs to be changed to living without paralyzing anxiety, but living with normal anxiety as a stimulant to a vital existence, as a source of energy, and as life-enhancing.

I propose that the purpose of the psychotherapy is to set people free. Free, as far as possible, from symptoms, whether they be psychosomatic symptoms like ulcers or psychological symptoms like acute shyness. Free from compulsions, again as far as possible, to be workaholics, compulsions to repeat self-defeating habits they have learned in early childhood, or compulsions perpetually to choose partners of the opposite sex who cause continual unhappiness and continual punishment.

But most of all, I believe that the therapist’s function should be to help people become free to be aware of and to experience their possibilities. A psychological problem, I have pointed out elsewhere, is like fever; it indicates that something is wrong within the structure of the person and that a struggle is going on for survival. This, in turn, is a proof to us that some other way of behaving is possible. Our old way of thinking—that problems are to be gotten rid of as soon as possible—overlooks the most important thing of all: that problems are a normal aspect of living and are basic to human creativity. This is true whether one is constructing things or reconstructing oneself. Problems are the outward signs of unused inner possibilities.

People rightly come to the therapist because they have become inwardly enslaved and they yearn to be set free. The crucial question is: how is that freedom to be attained? Surely not by a miraculous charming away of all conflicts.

When a person loses his freedom, there develops in him an apathy, as in the blacks in slavery, or neurosis or psychosis as in twentieth-century people. Thus, their effectiveness in relating to their fellow men and also to their own natures is proportionally reduced. Following Kierkegaard, we can define neurosis and psychosis as lack of communicativeness, “shut-up-ness,” inability to participate in the feelings and thoughts of others or to share oneself with others. Thus, blind to his own destiny, the person’s freedom is also truncated. These states of psychological disturbance demonstrate by their very existence the essential quality of freedom for the human being—if you take it away, you get radical disintegration on the part of the victim.

Neurotic symptoms, such as the psychosomatic paralysis of the leg which one of Freud’s early patients developed when she could do nothing about being in love with her sister’s husband, are ways of renouncing freedom. Symptoms are ways of shrinking the periphery of the world with which one has to deal to a size with which one can cope. These symptoms may be temporary, as when one gets a cold and takes several days off from the office, thus temporarily reducing the world that one has to confront. Or the symptoms may be so deeply set in early experiences that, if unattended, they block off a great portion of the person’s possibilities throughout all of the person’s life. The symptoms indicate a breakdown in the interplay of one’s freedom and one’s destiny.

This brings us to one of the gross abuses of freedom in our day: change for its own sake, or change as a flight from reality. This abuse of freedom is most egregious in what are called “growth centers.” Let me hasten to say that impetus for the growth-center movement and the work of many individual centers I believe to be sound and admirable. This impetus is the courage to confront one’s own self and one’s problems in human relationships; it is the belief that one can take oneself in hand and establish some autonomy in one’s life.

But anyone who reads the “Free Directory of Growth Centers” in Marin County can readily see the preponderance of “positive thinking” and self-delusion in its most blatant forms. From the brief individual ads for the 280 various centers given in this directory, one’s impression is overwhelmingly of such purposes as “tapping your true potential and creativity,” “finding more and more joy,” “a perfect living guru is a ‘must’ on the path Godward,” and so on. Nowhere could I find words dealing with common experiences of anyone living in our day—namely, “anxiety,” “tragedy,” “grief,” or “death.” All is drowned out by endless joy and the fearless promises of triumph and transcendence, a mass movement toward egocentric “peace,” self-enclosed “love,” with its somnolescent denial of the realities of human life, the use of change for escapist purposes if there ever was one. And what a misunderstanding of the ancient religions of the East that in their name salvation is promised over the weekend!

The problem in these growth centers is the complete absence of any sense of destiny. Tocqueville is right: they seem to believe that all of destiny is controlled by themselves. The individuals will totally determine their fate. The leaders seem not to be aware that what they are espousing is not freedom at all, but sentimentality, a condition in which the feeling alone is sought rather than reality.

It is surprising how often neurotic problems seem “fateful” in that they appear at a given time in one’s career as demands that the individual confront this or that particular complex within oneself. From this viewpoint, psychological problems are blessings in disguise. They come not by accident, but by an inner destiny that arises out of the needs of the person himself.

One of the things that gave us hope of getting to the origin of Philip’s problems was the death of his disturbed sister several weeks before he came to see me. Simultaneously with her death, he had had an attack of very painful neuritis, which felt “like a sword thrust through my neck.” One day in an early session, he had been talking about the pain and loneliness of his first two years of life, and he remarked that it was a relief to cry. At the utterance of the word “relief” the pain suddenly struck him in full force. In a few seconds he was writhing on the floor, grabbing at his neck as though to choke off the unbearable anguish. When the pain left and I helped him up, I asked whether he felt like continuing our session. He answered, “Yes. I have to get through this problem no matter how much it hurts.” The pain, he felt, was his dead sister punishing him, as though she were crying out, “Where do you come off being so healthy and successful when I had to suffer so?”

But I took the pain to be something more than this physical torture. I felt it was a prediction of the pain he would have to endure psychologically if we continued our work. His determination to continue, come hell or high water, was an inspiration to me.

In such cases, the metaphor of “imprinting” comes into my mind. A newborn duck, when the myelinization of the duck’s neurological pathways is right, will follow and stick to whatever object it first sees. I have watched a full-grown duck following a rabbit around because that was the creature to which it had been originally imprinted, even though the irritated rabbit regularly turned and nipped the duck to drive it away. The unfortunate duck, seemingly welded to a way of life that was continuously punishing, continued following the rabbit. Paradoxically, when the imprinting is made especially difficult for the creature being imprinted—say, by such punishment of the duck—the attachment becomes even stronger. I felt like crying out to the duck, “For God’s sake, go away and find your own mother! Don’t continue just being bitten and hurt.”

Sometimes in my patients I see a similar blind, irrational attachment to a way of behaving to which the person has been conditioned by his fate at a very early age. The metaphoric relation of imprinting to human beings is that, in their early attachment to their mothers, human babies seem to follow their original attachment with a similar blind fidelity. And this behavior may be made even stronger by punishments or other difficulties put in its path.

Use of terms like “self-punishment” and “masochism” are to no avail. The original way the infant was taught to behave wins out. When the child becomes a little older, this emerges as the impossibility of basic trust, to use Erikson’s words. Dr. John Bowlby, who has made the classic studies of attachment and separation of infants, writes:

The way in which attachment behavior develops in the human infant and becomes focused on a discriminated figure is sufficiently like the way in which it develops in other mammals, and in birds, for it to be included, legitimately, under the heading of imprinting.

Although there is doubt as to whether this original “imprinting” can be overcome, the person can build new experiences around and over it and thus compensate for an original unfortunate experience.

Even though he was in his fifties, Philip was still striving to find a “good” mother to make up for the “bad” mother of his experience, to bring him justice after the cruel first two years. He had gone through his life lonely, yearning for a love that would fill the large area of emptiness in his breast. He had lived on the edge of becoming the kind of person who goes on year after year looking in the face of every woman he meets with the silent question: Are you the one who will make up for my loss? One of my tasks in therapy with Philip was to get across to him that this struggle he was engaged in was bound to be self-defeating.

The first and fundamental challenge for such a person is to confront his fate as it is, to reconcile himself to the fact that he did receive a bad deal, to know that justice is irrelevant, that no one will ever make up for the emptiness and the pain of those first two years. The past cannot be changed—it can only be acknowledged and learned from. It is one’s destiny. It can be absorbed and mitigated by new experiences, but it cannot be changed or erased. Philip only adds insult to injury by going on the rest of his life knocking his head against the same stone wall. Fortunately, psychotherapy can be a vehicle through which human beings may become more aware of and compensate for such implanted destiny.

I pointed out to Philip how hanging on to this way of life was also hanging on to his mother. It is an expression of the hope that someday Mother will reward him, someday he’ll find the Holy Grail. Now he’ll get the original care which was missing; now he’ll get that restored! But there's no way to restore it, no matter how much of a loss it is. Bad fate, yes. But that’s the way it is. The lost mother image, the lost chance, the great emptiness within him—they are all going to remain there. These things are the past; there is no way of changing them. You can change your attitude toward these tragic happenings, as did Bettleheim, describing his “ultimate freedom” as his command over his attitude toward the storm troopers in the concentration camp. But you can’t change the experiences themselves.

If you hang on to an illusion of such change, always hoping for “pie in the sky by and by” you cut off your possibilities. You then become rigid. You don’t let yourself take in the new possibilities. You trade your freedom for a mess of emotional pottage. And this way, as a corollary, you never use your anger constructively. You lose a tremendous amount of power, energy, and possibility. In short, you lose your freedom.

But is there no constructive value in coming to terms with one’s early fate? Yes, there is—and a value potentially greater than what one gives up. The struggle to come to terms with such early relationships as Philip suffered as an infant has much to do with the emergence of creativity. Would Philip have developed these talents which led to his high status in the world of architecture if he had not experienced such a disturbed family life? Alfred Adler believed, indeed, that creativity was a compensation for such early trauma.

We know that creative people often come out of such unfortunate family backgrounds. Why and how they do is still one of the mysteries the answer to which the Sphinx of creativity has not revealed. We do know that unfortunate infants like Philip have never been permitted to take life lightly. They learn from the hour of birth not to accept Jocasta’s advice: “Best take life easily, as a man may.” They cannot coast along or rest on their laurels.

This exceptional achievement following a disturbed childhood has been documented in many cases. In his study of creativity Jerome Kagan writes:

Such freedom of the artist is not born. It is made in the pain of adolescent loneliness, the isolation of physical handicap, or, perhaps, the smug superiority of inherited title. The freedom that permits “generation of possibilities” . . . is the beginning of a creative product.

Similarly, Richard Farson finds his “calamity theory” fits such situations:

Many of our most valuable people have come from the most calamitous early childhood situations. Investigations of the childhoods of eminent people expose the fact that they did not receive anything like the kind of child rearing that a person in our culture is led to believe is healthy for children . . . . Whether in spite of or because of these conditions, it is clear that these children not only survived, but reached great heights of achievement, many after having experienced the most deplorable and traumatic childhoods.

The tension in these personalities between high aspiration and disappointment may well be the necessary matrix out of which creativity—and, later, civilization—is born. This type cannot slide into any "well-adjusted" syndrome. There is the outstanding exception of J. S. Bach, but his contentment—if it was that—seems to have been a combination of fortunate social conditions. The “well-adjusted” persons rarely make great painters, sculptors, writers, architects, musicians. Coming out of such a confused early childhood as Philip’s, this creative capacity may be considered a later compensation. The question is: Can a person like Philip seize these possibilities—these new reaches of freedom not without cruel fate, but despite fate—and weld them into a significant building, a statue, a painting, or some other creative product?

There is another boon worth more than the loss in Philip’s confrontation with his mother. If he can accept this deprivation of the care he had rightfully expected, if he can engage this loneliness face to face, he will have achieved a strength and a power that will be a foundation more solid than he ever could have achieved otherwise. If he can accept this aspect of his destiny, the fates will work with rather than against him. In this way one lives with the universe rather than against it.

These last things about the values in engaging one’s destiny I did not express at this time directly to Philip, for I did not want him to accept his destiny in order to achieve creativity. That never works. I did strongly emphasize the need to engage and accept these cruel things in his background. I wanted him, to put it in our words rather than the words of the therapy, not to accept destiny for anything, but simply because it is.

What we hear most about the psychology of anger is that it clouds our vision, causes us to misunderstand each other, and in general interferes with the calm necessary for a rational, clear view of life. People point out that anger curtails one’s freedom. All this is true. But it is one-sided; it omits the constructive side to anger.

In our society, we confuse anger with resentment, a form of repressed anger that eats steadily away at our innards. In resentment we store up ammunition to “get even” with our fellows, but we never communicate directly in a way that might resolve the problem. This transformation of anger into resentment is, as Nietzsche so emphatically proclaimed, the sickness of the middle class. It corrodes our stature as human beings.

Or we confuse anger with temper, which is generally an explosion of repressed anger; with rage, which may be a pathological anger; with petulance, which is childish resentment; or with hostility, which is anger absorbed into our character structure until it infects every act of ours.

I am not referring to these kinds of hostility or resent am speaking, rather, of the anger that pulls the diverse parts of the self together, that integrates the self, keeps the whole self alive and present, energizes us, sharpens our vision, and stimulates us to think more clearly. This kind of anger brings with it an experience of self-esteem and self-worth. It is the healthy anger that makes freedom possible, the anger that cuts one loose from the unnecessary baggage in living.

It may seem strange to some readers that the green-blue lad was for Philip the personification of anger and that he appeared at this particular time. To understand this we must realize that many people who come for therapy have lost their freedom because of their repression of anger, a repression generally caused by their learning early in life that any anger will be severely punished. They regularly adopt the pattern that Philip showed to start with: being deceitful, covering up what they really think, learning not to speak out directly but to foresee what the other person’s reaction would be before they speak. The resentment into which their anger has been transformed in its repression is often a central cause of their lack of integration and their continuing to surrender their freedom and their possibilities of choice.

Whereas resentment is almost entirely subjective, this kind of constructive anger, symbolized for Philip by the green-blue lad, is generally objective. As long as Philip felt only resentment toward his mother, everything he would have said about her would have been negative. But when, in therapy, he got angry at his mother in his fantasy, this led him, to his great surprise, to reveal how he secretly was appreciative and proud of his mother’s care for him and her gifts to him. We recall his objective statement that his mother had done the best she could bringing up the children with no help. It may seem that this is an “excuse.” I do not think so. I think, rather, that it is an endeavor to ground the anger on the conditions which caused the anger in the first place. In other words, one is angry against destiny.

His slip of speech says something important. Loneliness is honesty in one sense. In honesty you have to separate yourself from the impersonal mass—you are saved from conformism. To be honest is to be lonely in the sense that you individuate yourself, you seize the moment to be yourself and yourself alone. There is an initial loneliness about being oneself, speaking out of one’s own center.

I responded to him, “Isn’t that the loneliness that we all experience at times, the kind that is inseparable from the human condition? If you dare to be honestly yourself, you will be lonely. At each moment in our self-consciousness we are alone. No one else can genuinely come into our sanctum sanctorum. We die alone. No one escapes. This is destiny in its deepest sense. When we recognize this, then we can overcome the loneliness to some extent. We recognize that it is a human loneliness. It means we are all in the same boat, and we can then choose to, or not to, let others into our life. Lo and behold, we then have used the aloneness to be less lonely.”

But here we arrive at a fascinating question: Is not our destiny itself our concentration camp? Is not the destiny that impinges upon us that which forces us to see our bondage? Does not the engaging of our destiny—which is the design of our life—hedge us about with the confinement, the sobriety, indeed, often the cruelty, which forces us to look beyond the limits of day-to-day action? Is not the inescapable fact of death, whether we are young or old, the concentration camp of us all? Is not the fact that life is a joy and a bondage at the same time enough to drive us to consider the deeper aspect of being? This is the greatness of life and our “quiet desperation,” which Thoreau talks about, in the same instant.

James Farmer tells of the struggles of CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] to help black people turn the simple proclamation of freedom put on paper by Abraham Lincoln into real and actual freedom. Out of the battles he and his followers went through and the violence they had to endure, Farmer writes:

In the very act of working for the impersonal cause of racial freedom, a man experiences, almost like grace, a large measure of private freedom. Or call it a new comprehension of his own identity, an intuition of the expanding boundaries of his self.

He identifies this as the “radical source” of freedom; I call it the freedom of being. He describes one incident in which he and his followers endured the brutality of police, and “the men and women who stood between me and the lynch mob gradually, during the course of those two violent days, made the decision to act instead of being acted upon.”

Since it limits freedom, responsibility is one aspect of the destiny pole. So long as we are born of woman (in contrast to cloning) we shall have to come to terms with mother not only as a source of food, but increasingly as a person carrying her own destiny. Freedom for oneself increases as one’s awareness of the destiny of others increases.

The paradox is fundamental in psychotherapy, a point not realized by most therapists. Philip, for example, attained his personal freedom only when he came to terms with the paradoxes of his life. The chief one was his love-hate relation with his mother. But there were other derivative paradoxes such as his dependency-love relation with Nicole. The major experiences such as birth, death, love, anxiety, guilt are not problems to be solved, but paradoxes to be confronted and acknowledged. Thus in therapy we should talk of solving problems only as a way of making the paradoxes of life stand out more clearly. Just as the acceptance of normal anxiety is necessary if we are to be able to free ourselves of neurotic anxiety, so the acceptance of the normal paradoxes of life—love-hate, life-death—is necessary if we are to achieve freedom from the compulsive and neurotic aspects of our problems.

The confusion with regard to freedom in our day is that we have conceived of freedom as a bow with no string to hold it in tension or a lyre with no frame to give it tautness and hence produce music. We were created free, the American Declaration of Independence tells us, and hence we assume there are no limits. Freedom thus has lost its viability; it has vanished like the flame going out in our fireplace just when we need it most.

The legend of the Grand Inquisitor [inside Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov] asks sharp questions of each of us. Do we choose comfort rather than risk, stagnant certainty rather than creative doubt? Do we choose to remain in a dull and uninteresting job because the pay is certain, or choose to remain in a destructive marriage because of fear of loneliness if we left, or choose to cling to the security of the doll’s house, as Ibsen would put it? Do we choose to walk out on marriage quarrels rather than confront the inevitable misunderstandings and blows to one’s narcissism in working the problems out?

The Grand Inquisitor confesses, symbolically, that he knows the paradox of freedom is all too real. They—the officials of the Church—must face the paradox, even though they may succeed in protecting humankind from it. The paradox, he admits by implication, is present in all persons who seek to realize themselves. But the Church will protect humankind as a whole from self-realization, from going through the crises of freedom that should occur in everyone's growth. They will keep humankind as children who never taste failure, struggle, aspiration, rebellion, and the joy of life that comes from a sense of human dignity. They never will understand the irony in that enticing character in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the Indian who quotes Shakespeare continually and wanders about longing to suffer. Those “children” of the Grand Inquisitor will never be gripped by the drama of King Lear or know the delight of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or be shaken by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

This stubborn, oppositional tendency in humankind raises the question, Is the possibility for rebellion necessary and inevitable for human freedom? I answer yes. Freedom, we have seen, is known only when something opposes it, takes it away. Hence the word freedom exists always in the company of such verbs as resist, oppose, rebel. I do not mean rebellion in the sense of fixation on childish patterns of defiance nor in the sense of sheer destructiveness, or rebellion for its own sake or for the sake of diversionary excitement in one sector of one’s life to avoid commitment in another.

I mean the capacity for rebellion as the preservation of human dignity and spirit. I mean the act of coming to terms with one’s own autonomy, learning to respect one’s own “no.” Thus, the capacity to rebel is the underpinning of independence and the guardian of the human spirit. Rebellion preserves the life core, the self as conscious of its existence as a self. The capacity to rebel gives one’s cooperation efficacy. Otherwise one is simply inert human weight rather than a cooperating human being. And if one senses these characteristics as important in himself, he must, if only to preserve his own psychological integrity, grant this sense of dignity and the respect that it rightly demands to other persons in the world as well. “Without rebellion,” wrote Bertrand Russell, “mankind would stagnate, and injustice would be irremedial. The man who refuses to obey authority has, therefore, in certain circumstances, a legitimate function, provided his disobedience has motives which are social rather than personal.”

Determinism is one part of destiny. That we have to die, that we are conditioned, that we can so easily be taught to behave like robots—is not all of this part of our destiny? We reflect on our lives, we anxiously anticipate our death, we are conscious of the fact that we never know when we are to leave this earth or how—does not all this refer to destiny?

The radical shift from determinism to destiny occurs when the subject is self-conscious about what is happening to him or her. The presence of consciousness creates the context in which the human being’s responses to his or her destiny occur. Albert Camus describes the relation between consciousness and destiny in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”:

That hour like a breathing space which returns as surely as his suffering is the hour of consciousness. . . . [Man] is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny. . . . Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. . . . Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I define destiny as the pattern of limits and talents that constitutes the “givens” in life. These may be on a grand scale, like death, or on a minor scale like the gasoline shortage. As we shall see below, it is in the confronting of these limits that our creativity emerges. Our destiny cannot be canceled out; we cannot erase it or substitute anything else for it. But we can choose how we shall respond, how we shall live out our talents which confront us. Destiny is a term that describes our condition prior to sociological and moral judgments. One’s destiny is archetypal and ontological; the term refers to one’s original experience at each moment. It is the design of the universe speaking through the design of each one of us.

Destiny confronts us on different levels. There is our destiny on the cosmic level, like birth and death. We may postpone death slightly by giving up smoking, for example, or we may invite it by suicide; but all the while death stands there irrevocably waiting. Dylan Thomas’s poem on the death of his father is an impassioned and arresting creative work. But it did not cancel out the fact that his father had to die.

Also on this cosmic level are earthquakes and volcanoes, curiously called “acts of God” in insurance policies. We can choose to flee from the vicinity of earthquakes or volcanoes, or we can take our chances, remaining in the path of the eruptions. But we cannot escape the fact that volcanoes and other such eruptions of the universe do occur without the slightest concern for us. When we admit these so-called destructive aspects of destiny, we also see that the positive side of the pattern includes the “pleasure in the pathless woods” and “the rapture by the lonely shore.”

There is a second group of “givens,” genetic. Our destiny is expressed in our physical characteristics, like the color of our eyes and skin, the race we happened to be born into, whether we are male or female, and so on. “Anatomy is destiny” is the famous statement by Freud. One’s talents—such as special gifts for music, art, or mathematics—are part of this bundle. One feels possessed by them. There is no denying talents without penalty, and one name for the attempt at denial is neurosis.

Third, there is the cultural aspect of destiny. At birth we are “thrown,” to borrow Heidegger’s term, into a family we did not pick, into a culture about which we knew nothing, and into a particular historical period about which we had no say. We may, and sometimes need to, fight our family, but there is no successful way of disowning this fount from which we sprang. “Freedom’s great emotional potency,” writes Bronislaw Malinowski, “is due to the fact that human life and indeed the pursuit of happiness depend upon the nature and the efficiency of those means which culture gives man in his struggle with the environment, with other human beings, and with Destiny herself.”

A fourth group of givens is circumstantial. The stock market rises and falls; a war is declared; Pearl Harbor is attacked. Once these happen, they cannot be reversed nor avoided nor ignored nor done over again.

Destiny in this sense is that design of our lives that we spend our years trying to find, seeking and groping, trying this job and that one, loving this woman or man and that one, stumbling into this therapist’s office or that one sometimes with success and sometimes with failure. The tendency, present especially in America, to believe that we can change everything at any time we wish, that nothing in character or existence is fixed or given (in Los Angeles not even death) and that now with psychotherapy or the cults we can remake our lives and personalities over the weekend is not only a misperception of life, but is also a desecration of it.

Psychoanalysis and its offspring provide varied ways of trying to discover this vital design of each of us. Gurus—or other persons who claim to have some transterrestial connections—are so prized in our day because they presume to tell us what our vital design is.

To the extent that we are able to live out our destiny, we experience a sense of gratification and achievement, a conviction that we are becoming what we were meant to become. It is an experience of authenticity, a feeling of being in accord with the universe, a conviction of genuine freedom. William James would have understood what we are talking about:

The huge world that girdles us about puts all sorts of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. Some of the tests we meet by actions that are easy, and some of the questions we answer in articulately formulated words. But the deepest question that is ever asked admits of no reply but the dumb turning of the will and tightening of our heartstrings as we say, “Yes, I will even have it so!”

Destiny and freedom form a paradox, a dialectical relationship. By this I mean that they are opposites that need each other—like day and night, summer and winter, God and the devil. Out of the encountering of the forces of destiny come our possibilities, our opportunities. In the engaging of destiny our freedom is born, just as with the coming of the light the day overcomes the night. Destiny, as we have said, is not to be thought of as a ball and chain that afflict human beings. It is true that

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

But it is likewise true, as Shakespeare also points out,

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

These statements sound like a clear contradiction. But they are paradoxes instead. Freedom is by no means the absence of destiny. If there were no destiny to confront—no death, no illness, no fatigue, no limitations of any sort and no talents to pose against these limitations—we would never develop any freedom.

This sense of responsibility is partly the impingement of culture upon us. We have to have responsibility if we are to live with any harmony in community. Culture can help us mitigate or meliorate destiny: through culture we learn to build houses to keep out the snow and the winter cold. Through culture we barter our services for food so that we do not starve. But culture cannot overturn destiny, cannot erase it. We can collectively cover our eyes to the results of our actions, blind ourselves to the full import of our cruelty and our responsibility for that cruelty, as we did in the Vietnam war. But this requires a numbing of our sensitivity and will sooner or later take its toll in neurotic symptoms.

For Homer the acknowledging of destiny was by no means a wallowing in guilt, but an acceptance of personal responsibility. Homer has the gods proclaim in the Odyssey:

O alas, how now do men accuse the gods! For they say evils come from us [the gods]. But they themselves, by reason of their sins, have sufferings beyond those destined for them.

The Greeks found, furthermore, that their belief in destiny, expressed in the gods and goddesses, energized and strengthened them individually. The typical Greek citizens, as anyone who reads Herodotus or Thucydides knows, were amazingly self-reliant and autonomous. We look at their activities and realize that it is not true that belief in destiny tends to make one passive and inert. The opposite is true—namely, that belief in unlimited freedom, as the flower children demonstrated, tends to paralyze one. For unlimited freedom is like a river with no banks; the water is not controlled in its flow and hence spills out in every direction and is lost in the sands.

Hence the seeming paradox that the deterministic movements, like Calvinism with its predestination, and Marxism with its economic determinism of history, have such great power. One would think that since people are the result of their predestination or their economic status, not much change is possible. But the Marxists and Calvinists work energetically to change people and often with great success. In other words, their belief in their particular form of destiny gives them power.

Once in a while a person, after going through innumerable smaller decisions, arrives at a point where his freedom and destiny seem united. This was true of Martin Luther, who, when he nailed his ninety-nine theses on the door of the cathedral at Wittenberg, said, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” Such acts are the fruition of years of minor decisions culminating in this crucial decision in which one’s freedom and destiny merge.

Hubris is the refusal to accept one’s destiny. It is the person’s belief that he performed great acts all by himself. It is the tendency to usurp the power of the gods. It is also the denial of how much one is always dependent upon one’s fellow man and woman and one’s society. Destiny itself is the source of our talents and aids the victors in these great projects like the Trojan War, and when we lose sight of this—as we do when we commit hubris—evil consequences ensue.

Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one some responsibility to do it? I choose to answer yes. Responsibility is no longer simply tied to past causes—i.e., what one did. It must be geared also to present freedom—i.e., what I can do. The freedom to act confers on me the responsibility to act. In this sense freedom and responsibility are united. Responsibility is more than a moral teaching, more than another rule of the ethical life. It is part of the underlying ontological structure of life. This means, obviously, that there is a host of things that we are responsible for that we will never be able to discharge. But it is better to carry unfulfilled responsibility than to act on some pretense of “pure” conscience.

This is what Abraham Maslow meant when he wrote, while recuperating from his heart attack: “Death and its ever present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible. I wonder if we could love passionately, if ecstasy would be possible at all, if we knew we’d never die.” This is not simply an expression of “I almost lost this . . . I almost died,” but is a sensing of the rich depth that comes from awareness of destiny and the new possibilities, the new freedom of aesthetic sensibility, that then opens up.

No one knows what lies beyond this pale. But if there is anything other than extinction, we can be sure that the best preparation for it, in this brief interval when the bird of time is still on the wing, is to live out our lives and our creativity and as fully as we can, experiencing and contributing what we can.

If, however, we defend ourselves against the dread of dying by the belief that death is simple and easy, life becomes insipid and empty and the concept of freedom has no meaning.

Like most of the people who have read and heard [Elizabeth] Kübler-Ross, I have been impressed by her stories of her self-sacrifice in dealing with dying patients. I don’t wish to detract from that or from her right to believe what she thinks is correct. But this should not prevent us from looking clearly at the implications of the conclusions she draws. Kübler-Ross states that death is like the opening of the chrysalis of the caterpillar and the emergence of the butterfly. This, I propose, is a form of denial; it takes away the person’s impetus to make the most of this life. Kübler-Ross also quotes some of her patients as saying, “I cannot wait to die and see my friends.” If death is so nice, then we would hurry toward it, with no poetry, no attention to building civilization for our children, no painting to pass on to posterity, no Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. And freedom would not even be a relevant concept.

But immediately we run up against the omnipresent denial of death in our culture, the fact that our society is sick in its pretenses in song and ritual that we never really die. When Hubert Humphrey, wizened and thin from cancer, made his last appearance before Congress, the senators, in their speeches, spoke optimistically: “Get well soon, Hubert. We need you back here.” Who were they kidding? Not Humphrey, who courageously knew his death was only several months away. Not the millions watching on television, who could see clearly he was dying. Themselves? How much in contrast is Senator Richard Neuberger’s statement, which he wrote shortly before his own death from cancer, that there had come

a new appreciation of things I once took for granted—eating lunch with a friend, scratching Muffet’s ears and listening for his purrs, the company of my wife, reading a book or magazine in the quiet cone of my bed lamp at night. For the first time I am savoring life. I realize, finally, that I am not immortal.

But what a tragedy that one waits until one is dying before savoring life!

We note that it is the conventionally “good” people—the faithful Catholics and Protestants, the ethical bourgeois citizens, the monks and nuns—who seem to have been most ready to ascribe witchcraft to other persons living on the fringes of their communities. These “good” people are most apt to repress the evil tendencies within themselves and to pretend that fate does not exist, and, therefore, they are most likely to project their unacceptable urges on to other persons. Thus, goodness without the humility that John Bunyan expressed on seeing a condemned man being taken to the gallows, “There but for the grace of God go I,” can itself lead to evil. Whenever I hear the customary platitudes “I love everyone” or “I have no enemies” or “Illness does not exist since God is spirit,” I sigh and find myself wondering: Which aspect of destiny is the person repressing? Where will the projected energy rear its destructive head?

Societies also go through the process of repression and projection that produces witches and witchcraft. Sometimes it takes the form of scapegoating, as when it was used against the Jews and the blacks in our own time. Every nation in wartime shouts out to its people the atrocities committed by the enemy and projects its own repressed aggression on the enemy. Thus freed of their own guilt at killing and given tangible “devils” to fight, the people can unite on the side of “God,” “democracy,” and “freedom.” Like the “good people” of the Middle Ages, we are the righteous ones, struggling against the representatives of Satan.

We can see this in our own country, when we are told that we cannot talk with the Russians because they do not believe in God and an afterlife. Whether the statement is sincere or is made by officials simply as a way of enlisting the support of the religious masses, the dynamics are the same. It is the dynamics of witchcraft all over again. Witchcraft led to torture and burning at the stake in past centuries, and such behavior can lead us and our world into unimaginable tragedy—atomic warfare. Coming to terms with our own destiny is essential if we are to have compassion and empathy for others who are different from us, but with whom we must co-exist in a world with possibilities of unprecedented cruelty.

It is the genuiuses, the persons of abundant talents, who have the greatest difficulty in seeking and living out their destiny because their gifts continually present them with so many different possibilities. Hence geniuses are more often depressed and anxious than the rest of us, and more often joyful and ecstatic. Life, especially for creative people, is generally anything but simple and harmonious. It is especially hard, admits Ortega, for those with a multiplicity of gifts, which “troubles and disorients the vocation, or at least the man who is its axis.” It may well be, I would add, the destiny of persons like Goethe not to rest in an unambiguous vocation.

The example par excellence of one who struggled to discover and live out his destiny is found in William James, to my mind the greatest psychologist and most original philosopher America ever produced. He embraced many different professions. He first studied art and planned to be an artist; then he shifted back to his childhood interest in science, from which he moved to biology and medicine. “I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist,” he tells us, “but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality.” Those two words, “drifted” and “fatalism,” reveal the paradox he experienced in acknowledging destiny. The psychology and philosophy into which his restless quests drove him were, interestingly enough, subjects in which he had had no academic training. These shifts were by no means dilettantish, but an expression of the earnest seeker who lives perpetually on the razor’s edge.

Since the extrovert efforts proved more or less bankrupt, they now were replaced by introvert concerns. One felt the question in the 1970s—and we therapists heard it time and again: Can we find ourselves by means of some therapy for the inner person or with some new religion? Can we find our guidance in the East? Can we learn a new kind of yoga or meditation? Many of those who had been leaders in the activist movement went directly into the introvert movements. Of the Chicago Seven, Rennie Davis became one of the devotees of a teenage guru who dominated the news for a while and now is, like so many of them, heard of no more. Jerry Rubin turned to writing introspective, confession-type books, availing himself of that avenue which beckons to all who feel empty—i.e., writing about sex.

It needs to be said, in defense of the new narcissism, that the threat of losing oneself was real—losing oneself to behaviorism, which was indefatigably preached in those years with the dogma that the self did not exist, that all behavior was simply a conglomeration of conditioning, and that freedom was an illusion. The extent of the general culture’s acceptance of these ideas, partly to escape the pervasive fears of atomic warfare and internal chaos, was shown in the wide sale of Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Or losing oneself to a technologized culture that was becoming more computerized by the minute, losing oneself by becoming a mechanical robot of our society. A significant minority retreated—some of them would say “advanced”—to another fort, the fort of oneself, in the hope that behind that stockade they could form the final line in defense not only of freedom but of their existence as human beings. The new narcissism is seen in Nicole’s statement concerning sex: “I have a right to do what I wish with my own body.”

The songs said it: “I Gotta Be Me,” “I Do It My Way,” and “My Heart Belongs to Me,” the last sung convincingly by Barbra Streisand. Hence, also the great tidal wave of self-awareness books for shoring up the individual’s self-esteem: I’m OK—You’re OK, I Just Met Someone I Liked and It’s Me, Being Your Own Best Friend. Even Alan Watts entitled his autobiography In My Own Way. One book, written by the same person who produced Winning by Intimidation, was entitled How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World and includes such monstrous examples of the ultimate in narcissism as “free men in any country have found ways of living their lives freely and happily without feeling a responsibility to be involved.” Also, “Of what importance is society if you must give up your happiness for it?” Where did this man learn to speak if not in society? Who protected him as an infant if not the society of his mother? Did he never attend society’s schools or the million and one things for which people join in society? That this “me” age is still alive is shown in a full-page advertisement that recently appeared in the New York Times for a book entitled The Sky’s the Limit, which promises “absolute happiness” and to “make you a winner 100% of the time!”

It is significant that in psychotherapy, too, narcissism has become the dominant problem. It is recognized, from Freud on, that the completely narcissistic person is the most difficult to help in psychotherapy because the therapist can achieve no relationship. The client seems unable to break through his own self-enclosing fog.

Christopher Lasch points out that now our whole society partakes of the culture of narcissism. He describes the narcissistic person:

Liberated from the superstitions of the past, he doubts even the reality of his own existence. Superficially relaxed and tolerant, he finds little use for dogmas of racial and ethnic purity but at the same time forfeits the security of group loyalties. . . . His sexual attitudes are permissive rather than puritanical, even though his emancipation from ancient taboos brings him no sexual peace. Fiercely competitive in his demand for approval and acclaim, he distrusts competition because he associates it unconsciously with an unbridled urge to destroy. He extols cooperation and teamwork while harboring deeply antisocial impulses. He praises respect for rules and regulations in the secret belief that they do not apply to himself. Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits, he does not accumulate goods and provisions against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of nineteenth-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire.

The main problem in the “if I am me” syndrome, and the reason it so quickly goes bankrupt in the search for personal freedom, is that it omits other people; it fails to enrich our humanity. It does not confront destiny as embodied in the community. It reminds us of the famous statement of Fritz Perls:

I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you and I am l;
If by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped

This yields the courage—or arrogance, if one wishes to call it that—of one against the world. True, it may be a necessary phase of individuation at certain times in one’s history—and I think the past decade has been such a time. But it is a cop-out as a permanent way of life. Tubbs, in “Beyond Perls,” is certainly right when he states, “The I detached from a Thou disintegrates.” “Narcissism is self-hate disguised as self-love,” says Clint Weyand. “It is probably the cruelest and most insidious form of self-deception, because it destroys the healing power of loving relationships. We must now transcend the seduction of the mirror, and replace the ego’s image with a moral and political vision which restores our morale and enriches our humanity.”

It is the uncertainty about the reality of oneself that threatens us. The self becomes increasingly insignificant in our world of technology. The emphasis on living now, with no ability to get solace or renewal from the past or future, the inability to commit oneself because one is not sure there is a self, the pervasive sense of purposelessness and vague despondency always threatening to become severe depression—these are all symptoms crying out that something has radically gone wrong with the self in relation to its world. The new narcissism and the “me” decade are symptoms of what has gone wrong with the reality of oneself. We seem to have to question every relationship, and the answers continue to be ambivalent.

Confronted mostly by young people in the 1960s, this unreality of the self has led to a fear of psychosis on a scale broader than ever before. For their elders all these compulsive-obsessional symptoms—the rigidity, the hollowness, the lack of affect—were protections against psychosis. But the young had taken LSD, and the psychoticlike shock to one’s consciousness that this produces makes it clear that a similar shock was possible for the whole of society. More and more the question is being asked whether society as a whole is psychotic, and the pause after the question is a sign that the answer could be yes as well as no.

There can be no sense of the self without a sense of the destiny of that self. How we respond to the facts of illness, disaster, good fortune, success, renewed life, death ad infinitum is crucial; and the pattern of such response is the self relating to destiny. For the sense of self consists, when all is said and done, in the relationship between the person’s freedom and his or her destiny.

So we must conclude that the lack of sense of reality of the self is due to the fact that we have omitted destiny. We secretly tend to believe the advertisements that tell us that we are “unlimited,” “the sky’s the limit,” “we’ll be 100-percent winners,” “we make our own destiny,” and so on and on. And it is this that robs us of the sense of reality—and of adventure also—in our encountering the vicissitudes of human existence. It is certain that the “if I am me, I will be free” is a mistaken path, for it lacks the sense of destiny that gives freedom to reality. Instead of freedom, this path leads to isolation and estrangement.

The well-worn dogma that you cannot love others if you hate yourself is true. But the converse of that—that if you love yourself, you will automatically love others—is not true. Narcissus, in his rejection of Echo, dramatically demonstrates this. Many persons use self-love as a substitute for the more difficult challenge of loving others. What is generally called self-love, then, ought really to be termed self-caring, which includes self-esteem, self-respect, and self-affirmation. This would save us from the confusion of self-caring and love for others, as it is shown so vividly in the myth of Narcissus.

To be free to love other persons requires self-affirmation and, paradoxically, the assertion of oneself. At the same time it requires tenderness, affirmation of the other, relaxing of competition as much as possible, self-abnegation at times in the interests of the loved one, and the age-old virtues of mercy and forgiveness toward each other.

Destiny is the other person in the act of loving. The dialectical poles of self-caring and love for the other fructify and strengthen each other. Fortunately, this paradox can neither be escaped nor solved, but must be lived with.

Considering the above factors, it will not come as a surprise when I state that, on the basis of my psychotherapeutic experiences, the people who can best function in a system of sex without intimacy are those who have little capacity for feeling in the first place. It is the persons who are compulsive and mechanical in their reactions, untrammeled by emotions, the persons who cannot experience intimacy anyway—in short the ones who operate like nonsentient motors—that can most easily carry on a pattern of sex without intimacy. One of the saddest things about our culture is that this nonloving, compulsive-obsessional type seems to be the “fruit” of the widespread mechanistic training in our schools and life, the type our culture cultivates. The danger is that these detached persons who are afraid of intimacy will move toward a robotlike existence, heralded by the drying up of their emotions not only on sexual levels, but on all levels, supported by the motto “Sex does not involve intimacy anyway.” Little wonder, then, that in the story which cites what the women of different nationalities say after sexual intercourse, the American woman is portrayed as saying “What is your name, darling?”

I have noticed that in detached relationships with women, some male patients, not uncommonly intellectuals, are sexually very competent. They not only exemplify sex without intimacy, but they also think and live without intimacy; and their yearnings, hopes, fears have been so strait-jacketed as to be almost extinct. Then in therapy they begin to make progress. Suddenly they find themselves impotent. This troubles them greatly, and they often cannot understand why I regard it as a gain that they have become aware of some sensibilities within themselves and can no longer direct their sexual organs on command as one would a computor. They are beginning to distinguish the times when they really want to make love and the times they don’t. This impotence is the beginning of a genuine experience of sex with intimacy. Now their sexual life ideally can be built on a new foundation of relationship; now they can be lovers rather than sexual machines.

Christopher Lasch rightly points out that the new “narcissist is permissive about sex,” but this has given him “no sexual peace.” What happens is that a premium is placed upon not feeling. Susan Stern, in describing how she gravitated toward the Weathermen, confesses an “inability to feel anything. I grew more frozen inside, more animated outside.”

The sex-without-intimacy trend in our culture goes hand in hand with the loss of the capacity to feel. This is a trend I saw developing in patients in therapy as early as the 1950s. Lasch now also sees this. Speaking of some new movements in our culture he says they arise “out of a pervasive dissatisfaction with the quality of personal relations.” This teaches “people not to make too large an investment in love and friendship, to avoid excessive dependence on others, and to live for the moment—the very conditions that created the crisis of personal relations in the first place.” Lasch also states:

Our society. . . . has made deep and lasting friendships, love affairs, and marriages increasingly difficult to achieve. . . . Some of the new therapies dignify this combat as “assertiveness” and “fighting fair in love and marriage.” Others celebrate impermanent attachments under such formulas as “open marriage” and “open-ended commitments.” Thus they intensify the disease they pretend to cure.

I mention these uninspiring items in order to ask the question: Why is it so hard for people like these two men to see that if one really cares about some other person, there will be some attachment, some normal jealousy and one will be vulnerable to pain; and that the aim with jealousy is not to exorcise it entirely, but to realize it is a problem only when it reaches neurotic proportions? The awareness of normal jealousy is the one corrective to the growth of neurotic jealousy, the dreary picture of which we have seen in these vignettes.

Freud gives us some hints as to one of the causes of our present preoccupation with sex:

In times in which there were no difficulties standing in the way of sexual satisfaction, such as perhaps during the decline of the ancient civilizations, love became worthless and life empty, and strong reaction-formations were required to restore indispensable affective values . . . the ascetic current in Christianity created psychical values for love which pagan antiquity was never able to confer on it.

In the judgment of many of us, our great preoccupation in America with sex, like “the decline of the ancient civilizations,” when “love became worthless and life empty,” is related to the disintegration of our mores and culture. Roman society was the only other historical society that was as preoccupied with sex as we are—with sex not only in our bedrooms but in our advertising, our literature, our movies, our TV, and heaven knows what else. It is said that when the Goths were outside the walls, the Romans masturbated in order to drown their anxiety. For sex is a very effective antidote against anxiety; the neurological pathway that carries the sexual stimulation cuts off that pathway which transmits anxiety. In our own concern with the innumerable problems in our society that we cannot solve, it is understandable that we turn to preoccupation with sex. But we should avoid making principles out of our own abnormal state.

Joseph Adelson, reviewing two books in the New York Times, remarks that “the books are alike in that they reflect and act upon the moral vacuousness that has become so commonplace as to be nearly normative in recent writing about sex.” Is not this moral vacuity one explanation for the fact that, while we never had more talk and workshops and public-school teaching on sexual practices and contraception, the rate of venereal disease, teenage pregnancies and abortions are rising dramatically?

Sex and the intimacy that goes with it are so basic a part of human existence that one cannot separate them from one’s values. To treat sex and values as totally divorced from each other is not only to block the development of one’s freedom, but also to make the cultural problem of sex simply insoluble. Moral concern in sex hinges on the acceptance of one’s responsibility for the other as well as for oneself. Other people do matter; and the celebration of this gives sexual intercourse its ecstasy, its meaning, and its capacity to shake us to our depths.

As a way of life, sex without intimacy is motivated by resentment and vengeance, like Echo’s in the myth. Narcissus self-destructs by stabbing himself, but we self-destruct by a long, drawn-out amputation of vital parts of ourselves. Our contemporaries seem not to be vengeful because some specific person won’t love them now (as was the case with Echo), but they seem to carry a vengeance from infancy, an experience of not having been loved, that they have never come to terms with. They have never accepted, as one must accept, their destiny, with all its cruel and its beneficent strains. Nor have they accepted the fate that no one ever gets enough love. This yearning for love makes us human. Having accepted that aspect of destiny, perhaps then we can join the human race.

What the proponents of the ideal of sex without intimacy as the way to genuine freedom have grossly overlooked is that freedom in sex is like freedom in every other realm of life: one is free only as one recognizes one’s limits—i.e., one’s destiny. The structure, the design, of the sexual function in life needs to be seen steadily and whole. In human relations responsibility comes out of ever-present loneliness and our inescapable need for others, which is dramatically true in sexuality; and without this sense of responsibility there is no authentic freedom. Our freedom in sex then grows in proportion to the parallel growth of our sensitivity to the needs, desires, wishes of the other. These needs, desires, and wishes of the other are the givens. The fact that sexual stimuli can blossom into authentic intimacy and into love is one of the mysteries of life which can give us a lasting solace and joy.

As in all aspects of confronting destiny, there is a risk. If you have feelings, you are bound to be vulnerable and to hurt. And sometimes the pain and ache and even agony of miscarried love is almost more than we can bear. But accepting this risk is the price of freedom, and especially the freedom to love authentically. Who wishes to trade these for existence as a zombie?

Since personal freedom is a venture down paths we have never traversed before, we can never know ahead of time how the venture will turn out. We leap into the future. Where will we land? With freedom one experiences a dizziness, a feeling of giddiness, a sense of vertigo and dread. The dizziness involves the whole body, not just one’s mind; one can feel it in the stomach and limbs as well. We recall that dizziness can be both pleasurable, as when one is being whirled around on a roller coaster, as well as painful, as it is in the first stages of panic. All of these feelings—dizziness, vertigo, giddiness, dread—are expressions of the anxiety that accompanies freedom like its shadow.

Sometimes a patient in therapy will wryly smile and say, “When I am mad at you, I think I was better off when I was neurotic—then I could go along in only one groove.” I say “wryly” because if he really believed this, he wouldn't be in therapy in the first place since the purpose of therapy is precisely to take one out of the rigid grooves, the narrow, compulsive trends, which are blocks to freedom. This gives the person a sense of release. But it is a freedom that brings anxiety.

Anxiety is potentially present whenever we are free; freedom is oriented toward anxiety and anxiety toward freedom. “Anxiety is the reality of freedom as a potentiality before this freedom has materialized,” Kierkegaard put it. For freedom is possibility, and who is to forecast what the end result of any possibility may be?

In the previous chapter we found the specter of anxiety forcing its way into the picture time and time again. The pause is the moment when a person is most vulnerable to anxiety. It is the tremulous moment when we balance possible decisions, when we look forward with wonder and awe or with dread or fear of failure. The pause is the moment when we open ourselves, and the opening is our vulnerability to anxiety.

When we spoke about “listening to the silence,” we noted that many people flee from silence because of the anxiety the silence brings. They perpetually seek the company of some noise from TV or radio even to the extent of carrying blaring portable sets with them on the streets or in the erstwhile “peace” of the parks. John Lilly found in his experiments in which people floated in his stimulus-free tank that silence, with its complete freedom, brings to many people more anxiety than they can bear. Who knows what devil may emerge out of the complete silence? Where are our familiar boundaries? The members of John Cage’s audience at his famous “concert of silence” were required to absorb their own anxiety. There was no music to do it for them. People shrink from the “quiet desperation” that confronts them in periods of complete silence, fearing they will lose all ways of orienting themselves.

In our technological society, we are moving toward periods of greater and greater leisure—in earlier retirement, for example—and superficially we welcome this prospective leisure. But we find within ourselves a curious gnawing fear of something missing. What will we do with all this unfilled free time, this unplanned, unscheduled empty space? Does it not hang before us—O paradox of paradoxes!—like a great threat, the threat of emptiness, rather than the great boon we were seeking? Will our capacities, lying fallow, evaporate? Will we lose our abilities? Will we be blotted out in sleep for a half century like Rip Van Winkle? Will we lose our consciousness if there is nobody knocking at the door? Secretly, many of us interpret freedom as becoming nothing. And will we, in our now unhampered possibility, become simply “no thing”?

Although the examples above are of great men, we are illustrating something that we all experience, though to a lesser degree. Every human being experiences this anxiety when he or she exercises the freedom to move out into the no man’s land of possibility. We can escape the anxiety only by not venturing—that is, by surrendering our freedom. I am convinced that many people never become aware of their most creative ideas since their inspirations are blocked off by this anxiety before the ideas even reach the level of consciousness.

A pressure toward conformism infuses every society. One function of any group or social system, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out, is to preserve homeostasis, to keep people in their usual positions. The danger of freedom to the group lies exactly at that point: that the nonconformist will upset the homeostasis, will use his or her freedom to destroy the tried and true ways. Socrates was condemned to drink hemlock because, so the good citizens of Athens believed, he taught false “daimones” to the youth of Athens. Jesus was crucified because he upset the accepted religion of his day. Joan of Arc heard voices and was burned at the stake. These extreme examples are of persons whose ideas later became the cornerstones of our civilization. But that fact only confirms my point. The persons whose insights are too disturbing, who bring too much of the anxiety that accompanies freedom, are put to death by their own generation, which suffers the threat caused by the earthquake of the new ideas. But they are worshiped by subsequent generations, when their ideas are crystallized into the dogma of the new age and there is no chance of the dead figures rising from their silent graves to disturb the peace anew.

The denying of the dizziness of freedom is shown in the phrase “pure spontaneity.” For no one can seek that without succumbing to the dreadful implications of freedom. Even John Lilly, in his experiencing “pure spontaneity” in his stimulus-free tank, describes the great dangers therein, and his own great anxiety in his experience hovering on the edge of nonbeing, death. One may envy one’s colleagues who claim to exist in pure spontaneity and who seem to be on a perpetual “high.” Yes, we may envy them, but we do not love them for that. We love them for their vulnerability—which means their accepting and owning the dizziness of their freedom, their destiny which always stalks their freedom.

The legend of Icarus presents a picture of a young man refusing to accept the dizziness, or the anxiety, of freedom. Icarus that day must have felt a sense of great adventure—to be the first person who could sail “high” and taste the ecstasy, the sheer freedom from the bonds of the earth, with no limits at all. For this one afternoon he was completely subject, not limited even by the distant reaches of the sky. He could order his universe as he wished, could live out his whim and desire born in his own imagination. Here, indeed, was “pure spontaneity.” No longer part of the world, no longer subject to the laws of earth or its destiny or the requirements of community. What exhilaration there must have been in the young man’s breast! A great dream comes true, an experience of complete freedom, pure spontaneity at last. One needs only the self-preoccupation, the refusal to consider compromise. He is like the humanists of previous decades who insisted that there was no evil they need bother to consider. Mankind had done such great things in the past; why could we not overcome any and all difficulties in the future? Icarus remained as spontaneous as a child and burst into the sea to drown not as a young man, but as a child.

We recall also that the prophetess Cassandra, in ancient Mycenae, hated her role as a medium and hated to prophesy. One way to distinguish between the authentic prophet or saint from the fanatic or charlatan is this: the authentic prophet feels anxiety about his role and the charlatan does not. Like the prophets in the Old Testament, the authentic ones do not want to be prophets; they do their best to decline the role. They would escape if they could because of the dizziness and dread such great freedom entails. Jonah even fled from Nineveh and had to be brought back by a whale to give his prophecies.

The common ways of denying the anxiety of freedom include, in our society, alcohol and drugs. When Peer Gynt, in Ibsen’s play, hears the passing people talking and laughing at him as he hides behind the bushes, he comforts himself:

If only I had a dram of something strong,
Or could go unnoticed. If only they didn’t know me.
A drink would be best. Then the laughter doesn’t bite.

True, it does not bite so much when one has recourse to a dram of Scotch; this is the dominant way of escaping anxiety in our culture. Harry Stack Sullivan once remarked that liquor was a necessity in a technological civilization like ours to relax people after a compulsive-obsessional day in the office. Whatever truth there may be in that statement, probably made by Sullivan with tongue in cheek, it is obvious that alcohol drunk to avoid anxiety may ease the mind and dull the sensitivities. But the drinking to escape anxiety puts one on a treadmill: the next day, when the anxiety increases, the drinking must increase also, and so on, until Alcoholics Anonymous has a new member. Overuse of alcohol erodes our freedom to imagine, to reflect, to discover some possibility that would have helped us cope with the anxiety in the first place.

The prototype of the tendency in psychology to deny its own limits, became, in the last two decades, B. F. Skinner. I count Fred Skinner as a friend, but this does not hinder me from emphatically opposing his viewpoint in the debates we have had over the air and before college audiences. Skinner has made many constructive contributions to animal psychology and to educational theory which we all prize. But he has refused to admit the limits of psychology, which means, in my terms, destiny; and he has stretched his theory to include, among other disciplines, philosophy, sociology, criminology, and mental health. His work is an amazing example of hubris in psychology (we have defined hubris as the refusal to acknowledge destiny). Indeed, in Skinner’s view it seems psychology has no limits at all.

The popularity of his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity testifies to the vast number of people who are crying to be told that freedom is an illusion and they need worry about it no longer. Skinner capitalizes with a vengeance on the widespread feelings of powerlessness and helplessness, which are the underlying anxiety of our time; and he reassures people that personal responsibility is démodé and that they do not need to trouble their consciences—if they have any left—about it. We need to look once again into the phenomenon of that book to find several hitherto unexamined problems about personal freedom.

Skinner argues that we must develop a technology of behavior, but that our belief in freedom and human dignity stands in the way. This new technology, he writes,

will not solve our problems, however, until it replaces traditional pre-scientific views, and these are strongly entrenched. Freedom and dignity illustrate the difficulty. They are the possessions of the autonomous man of traditional theory, and they are essential to practices in which a person is held responsible for his conduct and given credit for his achievements. A scientific analysis shifts both the responsibility and the achievement to the environment.

We would be the last to argue that the environment does not influence—to a considerable extent—the development of the person. Indeed, I would argue that the environment has an even more varied effect than Skinner argues: anyone in psychoanalysis knows that the environment is important even on unconscious levels and in dreams. Any viewpoint that leaves out the environment—like the extreme forms of the human-potential movement, where it is argued that only the inner potentials are significant—is equally wrong. But there are other points related to responsibility and freedom in Skinner's system that concern us here.

Again and again Skinner attacks the traditional belief that a man “can be held responsible for what he does.” “A scientific analysis shifts the credit as well as the blame to the environment.” The “literature of freedom and dignity”—whatever that means—cannot “accept the fact that all control is exerted by the environment and proceed to the design of better environments rather than of better men.”

All this has great bearing upon freedom. For freedom is release from dogma. Freedom is the capacity to increase our theories, to look about ourselves to find more possibilities. Freedom means that we can see many different forms of truth, some from the West and others from the East, some from technology and others from intuition. The very existence of theories and our dependence upon them are on the side of freedom. Then we achieve the mark of the mature intelligence, as Alfred North Whitehead is reputed to have said, that is, we can hold in the mind two opposing thoughts without undermining either one of them. So the inescapable uncertainty of human life is accepted as our destiny from which we do not flee.

The hanging on to illnesses, or the difficulty in asserting one’s freedom and responsibility toward illnesses, has been well known through history and literature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarks about the tendency of human beings “to run to meet their chains thinking they secured their freedom.” Even in the Declaration of Independence our forefathers recognized this truth: “All experience hath shown that man-kind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Thomas Mann shows in one of his stories how we make a way of life out of our own or others’ sickness. In “Tobias Mindernickel,” he pictures the dog as overly independent, a loner and not very friendly toward its master. In an accident the dog breaks its two front legs. The man then puts it in bed beside him and nurses it through the illness. Finally, when the dog recovers and is able to run around as used to be its wont, the man no longer has the animal to care for nor the animal’s friendliness and dependency upon him. He is beside himself. Unable to stand his present isolation, the man takes a hammer and breaks the dogs legs all over again.

The moral of this story is applicable to the multitude of relationships in our world in which marriages, friendships, dependencies of various sorts are kept together essentially by the need to be cared for on the part of one member and the need to take care of on the part of the other. On the healthy side this is the comradeship we experience in comforting each other as we embrace cold and lonely destinies we cannot change. On the unhealthy side, it is the self-limitations built into the world by persons who have suffered illness and are loathe to give up their dependency when the possibility of freedom does open up again.

We need to understand the function of illness and health in a culture. The disease itself, as Harold Bailen puts it, is not the ultimate enemy. It may actually be a blessing in disguise in that it forces the person, as my tuberculosis did me, to take stock of his life and to reform his style of work and play. I wish to quote here two paragraphs which I wrote in the Meaning of Anxiety:

Having a disease is one way of resolving a conflict situation. Disease is a method of shrinking one’s world so that, with lessened responsibilities and concerns, the person has a better chance of coping successfully. Health, on the contrary, is a freeing of the organism to realize its capacities.

I believe that people utilize disease in the same way older generations used the devil—as an object on which to project their hated experiences in order to avoid having to take responsibility for them. But beyond giving a temporary sense of freedom from guilt feeling, these delusions do not help. Health and disease are part and parcel of our continuous process throughout life of making ourselves adequate to our world and our world adequate to ourselves.

Nor is pain the ultimate enemy. As Norman Cousins writes: “Americans are probably the most pain-conscious people on the face of the earth. For years we have had it drummed into us—in print, on radio, over television, in everyday conversation—that any hint of pain is to be banished as though it were the ultimate evil.” He goes on a show how leprosy is such a dreaded disease because of the fact that the affected person has lost the sense of pain and has no signal to tell him how and when to take care of the infected parts. We consume in this country a fabulous number of tranquilizers in the process of blocking out pain.

The interplay of pain and pleasure, and the dependence of one on the other, was seen by Plato:

How strange would appear to be this thing that men call pleasure! And how curiously it is related to what is thought to be its opposite, pain! The two will never be found together in a man, and yet if you seek the one and obtain it, you are almost bound always to get the other as well, just as though they were both attached to one and the same head. . . . Wherever the one is found, the other follows up behind. So, in my case, since I had pain in my leg as a result of the fetters, pleasure seems to have come to follow it up.

Pain is a sensitizer in life. In running away from pain we lose our vitality, our capacity genuinely to feel and even to love. I am not saying that pain is a good thing in itself. I am saying that pain and the relief from pain paradoxically go together. They are the bow and the string of Heraclitus. Without pain we would become a nation of zombies. Some critics believe we already have arrived at that state.

Illness and health are complexly balanced in each of us, and taking responsibility, so far as we can, gives us some possibility of restoring the balance when it goes awry. It is not by accident that so many of our greatest persons have struggled with disease all their lives. Noting the large number of important creative human beings who have had tuberculosis, a physician some years ago wrote a book entitled Tuberculosis and Genius in which he argued that the tubercular bacilli must eject some serum into the blood to produce the genius. This explanation seems to me absurd. It makes much more sense to hold that the way of life of the genius—intensive work, unquenchable enthusiasm, the fire in the brain—puts too much of a strain on the balance, and hence the individual becomes ill as a necessary way of withdrawing into himself for a time.

The struggle between health and illness is part of the source of creativity. British doctor George Pickering gathered data which he put into a book entitled Creative Malady and subtitled Illness in the Lives and Minds of Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Each one, he points out, suffered severe illness and met it constructively. Pickering speaks of his own osteroarthritic hips as “an ally,” which he puts to bed when they get painful; and in bed he cannot attend committee meetings or see patients or entertain visitors. “These are the ideal conditions for creative work: freedom from intrusion, freedom from the ordinary chores of life.”

Dr. O. Carl Simonton has pioneered in the treatment of cancer by having the patient himself take responsibility through meditation on the cure. He teaches the person with cancer to become aware that a fight is going on and to meditate for two ten-minute periods each day on the white corpuscles killing the cancer cells. When we look at the drawings of the fantasies of these people of their meditation, we see pictures of warfare, of rats and tigers, of the white corpuscles as soldiers. A be-all and end-all struggle in occurring, and the consciousness of the person is the chief participant in the struggle. The old ways of being “patient” and handing the responsibility for one’s illness over to the doctor are simply not relevant any more.

In our day the word spirit has become less respectable because of its association with ghosts, apparitions, specters, fairies, and other forms of “spiritualism.” “I have the spirit” is the prelude to speaking in tongues and other practices in fundamentalist churches. It is significant that all of these are endeavors to leave behind our humdrum existence and get “free” by leaping immediately into a spiritual existence. Paul Tillich has stated that crossing the boundaries from material to spiritual existence so easily was a sign of magic rather than spirit. Whatever one may think of these apparitions, I am not talking of this usage of spirit.

I use the word spirit in its etymological sense of the nonmaterial, animating principle of human life. Its root is spirare, which also means “breath” and is the root of aspire, aspiration, inspire, and inspiration. Thus, spirit is the breath of life. God breathes the spirit into Adam, as the creation myth puts it, and from then on Adam shares this capacity to pass on the life-giving principle to his own descendants in ways that are still a mystery to us.

Spirit is that which gives vivacity, energy, liveliness, courage, and ardor to life. We speak of the Spartans fighting at Thermopylae “with great spirit.” When one is “high-spirited,” one is lively, active in the sense that Spinoza meant when he described the free person as active and not passive. Or one has “lost all spirit,” meaning that the person is in deep despondency and at the point of giving up life entirely. We borrow from the French the phrase “esprit de corps,” implying the confidence that comes from participating in the spirit of everyone else in one’s group. Spirit increases as it is shared, and decreases as one’s freedom is blocked off. Spirit has its psychological roots in each individual’s inner freedom. Rousseau sees this identity between freedom and spirit when he writes,

Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys, Man feels the same impetus, but he realizes he is free to acquiesce or resist; it is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of the soul is shown.

Spirit can be powerful—indeed, so powerful that it can transcend natural law. Goethe says of Faust,

For fate has put a spirit in his breast That drives him madly on without a pause, And whose precipitate and rash behest O’erleaps the joys of earth and natural laws.

The spirit here is described as part of fate, of destiny—or, as we would say in contemporary language, it is both born in us and developed as our culture influences us from birth. Goethe’s description can be seen in our day in the patients who come for psychotherapy who are workaholics, driven by ambition, who not only push themselves into a heart attack, but also miss what Goethe calls the “joys of earth” en route.

Freedom turns out to be central in the concepts of the mystics, probably because they exercise their own freedom so intensively in achieving their inspirations. Arguing that God does not constrain the will, Eckhart says, “Rather, he sets it free, so that it may choose him, that is to say, freedom. The spirit of man may not will otherwise than what God wills, but that is no lack of freedom. It is true freedom itself.” This sentence expresses the curious union of destiny and freedom that characterizes the great religions. In them freedom and necessity, or freedom and bondage, are ultimately identical. Eckhart makes it a condition of those who wish to understand him that “your intentions are right and your will is free.”

An uneducated cobbler, Boehme spoke with such an amazing degree of insight that half a dozen books are necessary to contain his wisdom. Though he had never read Heraclitus or any of the Greek philosophers or had any systematic schooling, Böhme spoke of God being a fire. “For Boehme, existence is a stream of fire. All life is fire. The fire is will.” “According to Boehme, will—freedom—is the principle of all things.” “Freedom is deeper than and prior to all nature.” “Boehme, first in the history of human thought, has made freedom the first foundation of being, freedom is to him deeper and more primary than all being, deeper and more primary than God himself.” The wrath of God is necessary if the love of God is to have any meaning. With respect to the question of where his wisdom came from, he tells us, “By my own powers I am as blind as the next man, but through the spirit of God, my own inborn spirit pierces all things.”

Evelyn Underhill speaks of Boehme as “the inspired shoemaker” and “one of the giants of mysticism.” Nikolai Berdyayev writes in his introduction to one of the books by Boehme: “We must salute Boehme as the founder of the philosophy of freedom that represents the true Christian philosophy.”

It is important to recall that both of these mystics were condemned as heretics by the institutional church, and their writings were viewed as dangerous to the ecclesiastical establishment. The Grand Inquisitor's statement that since the eighth century the Church had given up following Christ is not entirely a figment of the imagination. Perhaps another characteristic of the authentic mystics is that their insistence on freedom of religion cannot be stomached by the ecclesiastical organization.

However one judges them, such authentic mystics have a source of wisdom that cannot come from learning (because they often have so little learning), but must come from insights that spring out of an immediate participation in the universe in ways we cannot understand but surely can admire. It recalls to mind the “participation mystique” that French anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl has found in primitive tribes around the world. The mystics’ wisdom seems to be a combination of empathy, telepathy, intuition. This shows how far off the mark are those who criticize such things as acupuncture, and placebos of many sorts from a purely left-brain, rationalistic point of view. Such things as placebos may simply represent tangible patterns that act as foci on which a person may project the insights and intuitions that come from different sources.

In the course of my therapeutic experience I have met and talked with a number of parents whose son or daughter happened to be in treatment with me. When the parents let their hair down, their attitudes varied from tearful regrets on the part of a clergyman high up in the ecclesiastical hierarchy about his son’s depression to the genuine, if sad, puzzlement of a mother whose psychotic episode when her daughter was born had a good deal to do with the latter’s present promiscuity to the boisterous instructions of a Wall Street executive who adjured me to hurry and get his son to shape up. The boisterousness of the executive only served to emphasize his subconscious realization that his authoritarianism had a good deal to do with his son’s perpetual failures in everything he tried. If these parents could have spoken out of the depths of their feeling, each one of them—even the Wall Street executive—would have cried out, “Why do I harm the very person I love?”

Scarcely any of us can remain unaffected when we see the evil we do, mostly unintentionally, to those in our own family and to people we love by our inability to understand what is going on in the other’s thoughts. Oscar Wilde’s line “Yet each man kills the thing he loves” may relieve us to some extent in that it presents the universal quality of the problem of evil; we are not alone in the harm we partly cause. But Wilde also makes it impossible for us to forget that each of us participates in the inhumanity to other human beings.

The inevitability of evil is the price we pay for freedom. And the denial of evil is also the denial of freedom, as Berdyayev states in his interpretation of the sayings of Jacob Boehme. Since we have some margin of freedom, we have to make some choices; and this means the chance of making the wrong choice as well as the right one. Freedom and evil presuppose each other, whether we accept responsibility for our freedom and evil or not. Possibility is possibility for evil as well as good. We can pretend innocence, but such retreating to childhood ignorance does not help anyone.

The problem of evil has been a stumbling block for philosophers and theologians for millennia. Those who represent the rational approach to evil, from Aristotle through Aquinas to the rational philosophers of today, hold that the more we solve our problems, the less evil will exist. Evil is thus a lack of goodness. The more our science progresses, the argument goes, the more the mysteries of life and nature are solved, and the less evil there is in the world. I believe this point of view is wrong. I heard this judgment much more in my earlier days before the advent of Hitler, before the Second World War with all its newly technologized ways of killing, before the use of concentration camps as an accepted political arm of government, and before the hydrogen bomb, with its unutterably cruel mass maiming and slaying. This depressing list should make clear the fact that the progress of science and technology has not resulted in our being less evil. Human cruelty and capacity for evil increases neck and neck with human technological progress. Our ways of killing are made more efficient as well as our ways of living.

The main example of the evil that is present in technology along with the good is, of course, nuclear power. If we had any doubts about the dangers to health and even life itself in radiation, nuclear residue, as well as the nuclear bombs per se, we have only to listen to the Union of Concerned Scientists to shock us out of our delusions. Not only can nuclear fission destroy the world population many times over, but there is evidence that radiation and strontium 90 may already be seeping into the bodies of an unknown number of us. In any case, we walk a razor’s edge in dealing with nuclear fission. Science and technology deal with the how of life, and not the why or what for—which truth reputable scientists by the score tell us. Science increases the possibilities for good and the possibilities for evil, which many esteemed scientists have been shouting to us from the housetops.

There is also another group of philosophers and theologians who take a different approach. This group includes Heraclitus, who said “war is both king of all and father of all,” through Socrates, Augustine, Pascal, Boehme, and down to Kierkegaard and Bateson. These thinkers directly face the fact that freedom makes evil inevitable. As long as there is freedom, there will be mistaken choices, some of them catastrophic. But to relinquish the capacity to make choices in favor of the dictatorial segment of us called our reason is to surrender what makes us human in the first place.

The modern form of the Grand Inquisitor’s plan leads people to hand over their responsibility to the scientist in the white coat or to the psychotherapist in the comforting office or to the priest in the church or to the anonymous environment all about us. If we could do these things, we would have the temporary facsimile of evading evil. But while we are no longer committing evil, we also are no longer commiting goodness; and the age of the robot will be upon us.

The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face. This denial of evil—and freedom along with it—is the most destructive approach of all. To take refuge with the Moonies, or with Jonestown, or any others of the hundreds of cults, most of which seem to spring up in California, is to find a haven where our choices will be made for us. We surrender freedom because of our inability to tolerate moral ambiguity, and we escape the threat that one might make the wrong choice. The mass suicides at Jonestown seem to me to be the terrible, if brilliant, demonstration of the ultimate outworking of the attitudes with which the adherents joined in the first place. They committed spiritual suicide in surrendering their freedom to evade the partial evil of life, and they end up demonstrating to the world in their own mass suicides the final evil.

Religious people have for millennia fervently asked, “How could a God of love permit evil?” An answer is given by that tributary of Christianity, Gnosticism:

God allowed evil to exist, woven into the texture of the world, in order to increase man’s freedom and his will to prove his moral strength in overcoming it.

Freedom without compassion is demoniacal. Without compassion, freedom can be self-righteous, inhuman, self-centered, and cruel. Anatole France’s remark about freedom—that the poor man and rich man are both equally free to sleep under the bridges of Paris at night—illustrates how freedom can turn into cruelty toward the underdog. Many of the crusades under the banner of freedom—and not merely the ones we read about in history books—have consisted of requiring the other person to accept one’s own concept of freedom. Thus, they have turned out to be tyrannical.

This can be seen in some experiences of psychotherapy. The therapist may be convinced that his own form of freedom is the only thing that is good for the client, which then makes for coldness, rigidity, inhumanness in the therapist even though what he does may be technically correct.

I once supervised a psychiatrist whose patient, a young woman of nineteen, was giving him a good deal of trouble. The patient was constantly being irritated, changing the subject, and in general angry and petulant. I remarked in the supervisory hour that the young woman might be trying to get some sign of affection from the therapist. The psychiatrist in the next session, when the young woman was playing out her petulant drama, interrupted her with “You know, I like you.” The patient stopped talking, paused a moment and then said, “I guess that’s what it’s all about.” When the therapist reported this to me, I asked, “Do you like her?” And he answered, “No, I really don’t.” There flashed before my mind a glimpse of the whole treatment collapsing, for there is no doubt that patients in therapy can sense this presence or lack of compassion, despite all pretenses. Surely enough, she broke off the therapy after a couple of sessions.

Compassion on the part of the therapist is the essence of any psychotherapy which deserves the name. Patients will see through any pretense when the level is as basic as compassion, even though they may not speak of it, since they are taught in our culture to pretend that they don’t see such negative things.

A therapist colleague of mine was seeing regularly a patient whose manner was generally bombastic and insolent. One day the therapist’s daughter had been seriously hurt. Nothing was said by the therapist in the session about the accident, but the patient that day, as we heard on the tape, was tender, kind, and completely without his usual bombast, as though he were aware of the therapist’s tragedy—which he could not have known. Does this presuppose some degree of mental telepathy in therapy or some capacity to pick up the tiny cues such as the sound of one’s voice? I believe both are probably true. Freud was right, in my judgment, in his “moral” theory of telepathy, stating that he had learned not to lie in therapy because he had often enough experienced the fact that the patient would see through the lie no matter how hard Freud tried to cover it up.

It is our destiny to live always in some form of community. Even the frontiersman who counted it a matter of pride that all of twenty miles separated him from his nearest neighbor was still bound to that neighbor by language no matter how rarely he spoke it, by his memory, by every thought, ad infinitum. The “wolf child” is an anomoly and, indeed, is a proof of what I am saying in that he became “human” only when he exhibited a communal morality. The fact that we belong to a community as well as being individual persons requires that we acknowledge this destiny and relate to each other with compassion. Compassion limits our freedom, but it renders freedom human at the same time.

As we have seen in the chapter on narcissism, the refusal to admit destiny is to cut ourselves off from others. And now we can see its cruelty. Surely it is relevant: “If I don’t take care of myself, who else will?” But if one takes care only of oneself, one’s freedom can become cruelty to others. Love, of which compassion is the first step, keeps freedom from becoming tyrannical.

Evil will not disappear or shrink away during the night. We will never wake up in the morning to find that evil has vanished from the face of the earth. The purpose of human life is not to avoid mistakes, nor to show an unblemished escutcheon, but to rise to meet the challenges as our destiny reveals itself and to search out in freedom the challenges we wish to engage. As I read the human tragicomedy, we will go on struggling, avoiding complete nuclear catastrophe by the skin of our teeth, trying to become aware of the pitfalls in ourselves and our society, so that we can make constructive choices whenever possible. In this tragicomedy forgiveness and mercy will season justice and make life bearable with the presence of beauty, the emotion of love, and the occasional experience of joy.

Authentic despair is that emotion which forces one to come to terms with one’s destiny. It is the great enemy of pretense, the foe of playing ostrich. It is a demand to face the reality of one’s life. The “letting go” that we noted in despair is a letting go of false hopes, of pretended loves, of infantilizing dependency, of empty conformism which serves only to make one behave like sheep huddling in a flock because they fear the wolves outside the circle. Despair is the smelting furnace which melts out the impurities in the ore. Despair is not freedom itself, but is a necessary preparation for freedom. The Grand Inquisitor is right: we would not choose to go into despair if we consulted only our rational choices. But there is no denying destiny or fate, and reality comes marching up to require that we drop all halfway measures and temporary exigencies and ways of being dishonest with ourselves and confront our naked lives.

It is well known that Alcoholics Anonymous, that organization which is far and away the most effective in curing alcoholics, states frankly that the alcoholic cannot be cured until he or she is in complete despair. It is only then that the alcoholic can give up the need for alcohol as a solace for his or her forlorn hopes or to bolster his or her false expectations. Those who have been through AA and then work to help new members simply laugh outright at the predespair alcoholic’s grandiosity, his pompous I-am-the-master-of-my-fate-attitude, his vain resolutions to control his drinking by his own will power. This is a beautiful example of T. S. Eliot’s line of “hope for the wrong things.” Hopes themselves can become the most seductive of delusions.

When a person has “hit bottom”—i.e., when he has reached ultimate despair—he then can surrender to eternal forces; this is the dynamic in all authentic conversions. I would describe this process as giving up the delusion of false hopes and, thus, acknowledging fully the facts of destiny. Then and only then can this person begin to rebuild himself. It is a superb demonstration of the hypothesis that freedom begins only when we confront destiny.

Despair is a desperate refusal to be oneself. Kierkegaard puts it well, citing the different levels of “despair at not willing to be one’s self, or still lower, despair at not willing to be a self; or lowest of all, despair at willing to be another than himself.” Despair is a failure of spirit, a spiritlessness. “Man when he is characterized as spirit-less has become a talking-machine, and there is nothing to prevent him from learning a philosophical rigmarole just as easily as a confession of faith and a political recitative repeated by rote.” Again: “Despair is a qualification of spirit, it is related to the eternal in man. . . . In unconsciousness of being in despair a man is furthest being conscious of himself as spirit.”

Demeter’s suffering is followed by this intense joy, which is stronger than she would have felt had the sorrow not preceded it. In other words, despair is a prerequisite to the birth of joy. Persephone’s fearful descent into the underworld is followed not only by joyful ascension, but the “earth’s period of barrenness is followed by an eruption of fruit and flowers.” The myth shows “pain followed by joy, separation followed by reunion, death followed by renewal, winter followed by spring.”

Winter—the part of the year Persephone must go back to the underground—is often considered the dreaded part of the year, the time when despair would be most prevalent. But winter is the “purifier,” as the Magee Indians call it. The snow and the ice purify the ground. They cover over the myriad creatures from insects to deer who have lived out their span of life; and the ground, being enriched, springs forth with new life after the purification. This is the gestation before creativity. Nietzsche seemed to have been writing (and beautifully) about the end of this experience:

Out of such abysses, from such severe sickness one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childhood and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever seen before.

A similar linking of despair and joy is the death and resurrection in Christian theology—and all resurrections, seen in the prototype of the resurrection of flowers and leaves on the trees in the spring. This pattern runs through all of life. It is destiny, the design of the universe, the form in which all of existence is encompassed. In Europe at Easter time, people turn out en masse for the sacrament of Good Friday, since they want to make sure Jesus is dead. The celebration of his death is a necessary precursor to any rising from the tomb. The renewal requires the death beforehand. That Christ has risen has meaning only if he has been really dead. In America there is scant attendance on Good Friday, but the churches are filled to capacity on Easter. This is indicative of our lack of belief in tragedy in this country. It is a demonstration of our endeavor to overlook the death that must occur before the resurrection, the suffering that precedes joy, the tragedy that precedes achievement, the conflict that precedes creativity. Henry Miller refers to the same thing in terms of emotional death and resurrection when he writes “those who are dead may be restored to life.” For Miller this occurs in the emotional release, after despair, of the creative process.

Happiness is a fulfillment of the past patterns, hopes, aims; but those are exactly what Philip had had to give up. Happiness is mediated, so far as we can tell, by the parasympathetic nervous system, which has to do with eating, contentment, resting, placidity. Joy is mediated by the opposing system, the sympathetic, which does not make one want to eat, but stimulates one for exploration. Happiness relaxes one; joy challenges one with new levels of experience. Happiness depends generally on one’s outer state; joy is an overflowing of inner energies and leads to awe and wonderment. Joy is a release, an opening up; it is what comes when one is able genuinely to “let go.” Happiness is associated with contentment; joy with freedom and an abundance of human spirit. In sexual love joy is the thrill of the two persons moving together toward orgasm; happiness is the contentment when one relaxes after orgasm. Joy is new possibilities; it points toward the future. Joy is living on the razor’s edge; happiness promises satisfaction of one’s present state, a fulfillment of old longings. Joy is the thrill of new continents to explore; it is an unfolding of life.

Happiness is related to security, to being reassured, to doing things as one is used to and as our fathers did them. Joy is a revelation of what was unknown before. Happiness often ends up in a placidity on the edge of boredom. Happiness is success. But joy is stimulating, it is the discovery of new continents emerging within oneself.

Happiness is the absence of discord; joy is the welcoming of discord as the basis of higher harmonies. Happiness is finding a system of rules which solves our problems; joy is taking the risk that is necessary to break new frontiers. Tennyson portrays Ulysses from the point of view of joy; he sees the old man scorning “to rust unburnished, not to shine in use!”

The good life, obviously, includes both joy and happiness at different times. What I am emphasizing is the joy that follows rightly confronted despair. Joy is the experience of possibility, the consciousness of one’s freedom as one confronts one’s destiny. In this sense despair, when it is directly faced, can lead to joy. After despair, the one thing left is possibility.