The Road Less Traveled - SECTION II - Love - Episodes 13 - 17

 

Episode 13:      The Risk of Confrontation

The final and possibly the greatest risk of love is the risk of exercising power with humility.

The most common example of this is the act of loving confrontation.

Whenever we confront someone we are in essence saying to that person, "You are wrong; I am right." When a parent confronts a child, saying, "You are being sneaky," the parent is saying in effect, "Your sneakiness is wrong. I have the right to criticize it because I am not sneaky myself and I am right."

When a husband confronts a wife with her frigidity, he is saying, "You are frigid, because it is wrong for you not to respond to me sexually with greater fervor, since I am sexually adequate and in other ways all right. You have a sexual problem; I do not."

When a wife confronts a husband with her opinion that he does not spend enough time with her and the children, she is saying, "Your investment in your work is excessive and wrong. Despite the fact that I do not have your job, I can see things more clearly than you, and I rightly know that it would be more proper for you to invest yourself differently."

The capacity to confront, to say "I'm right, you're wrong, you should be different," is one that many people have no difficulty exercising. Parents, spouses and people in various other roles do this routinely and casually, leveling criticism left and right, shooting from the hip.

Most such criticism and confrontation usually made impulsively in anger or annoyance does more to increase the amount of confusion in the world than the amount of enlightenment.

For the truly loving person the act of criticism or confrontation does not come easily; to such a person it is evident that the act has great potential for arrogance.

To confront someone is to assume a position of moral or intellectual superiority which peradventure may not recognize and respect the unique individuality and separate identity of the other person. (I will say more about this later.)

The truly loving person, valuing the uniqueness and differentness of his or her beloved, will be reluctant indeed to assume, "I am right, you are wrong; I know better than you what is good for you." But the reality of life is such that at times one person does know better than the other what is good for the other, and in actuality is in a position of superior knowledge or wisdom in regard to the matter at hand. Under these circumstances the wiser of the two does in fact have an obligation to confront the other with the problem.

The loving person, therefore, is frequently in a dilemma, caught between a loving respect for the beloved's own path in life and a responsibility to exercise loving leadership when the beloved appears to need such leadership.

The dilemma can be resolved only by painstaking self-scrutiny, in which the lover examines stringently the worth of his or her "wisdom" and the motives behind this need to assume leadership.

"Do I really see things clearly or am I operating on murky assumptions?

Do I really understand my beloved?

Could it not be that the path my beloved is taking is wise and that my perception of it as unwise is the result of limited vision on my part?

Am I being self-serving in believing that my beloved needs redirection?"

These are questions that those who truly love must continually ask themselves. This self-scrutiny, as objective as possible, is the essence of humility or meekness. In the words of an anonymous fourteenth-century British monk and spiritual teacher, "Meekness in itself is nothing else than a true knowing and feeling of a man's self as he is most sure and in so doing he must be meek indeed."

There are two ways to confront or criticize another human being: with instinctive and spontaneous certainty that one is right, or with a belief that one is probably right arrived at through scrupulous self-doubting and self-examination.

The first option is the most common way of parents, spouses, teachers, and people generally in their day-to-day affairs; it is usually unsuccessful, producing more resentment than growth and other effects that were not intended.

The second option is the way of humility requiring as it does a genuine' extension of  oneself; it is more successful and never destructive

A significant number of individuals who for one reason or another have learned to inhibit their instinctive tendency to criticize or confront with spontaneous arrogance but who go no farther, hiding in the moral safety of meekness, never daring to assume power.

One such was a Minister and Father of a middle-aged patient who was suffering from a lifelong depressive neurosis. My patient's mother was an angry, violent woman who dominated the household with her temper tantrums and manipulations and not infrequently beat her husband physically in front of the daughter. The Minister never fought back and counseled his daughter also to respond to her mother by turning the other cheek and, in the name of Christian charity, being unendingly submissive and respectful.

When she began therapy my patient revered her father for his mildness and "lovingness." It was not very long, however, before she came to realize that his meekness was weakness, and that in his passivity he had deprived her of adequate parenting every bit as much as her mother had with her mean self-centeredness. She finally saw that he had done nothing to protect her from her mother's evil and nothing, in fact, to confront evil, leaving her no option but to incorporate her mother's bitter manipulativeness along with his  pseudo-humility as role models.

To fail to confront when confrontation is required for the nurture of spiritual growth represents a failure to love equally as does thoughtless criticism or condemnation and other forms of active deprivation of caring.

If they love their children parents must, sparingly and carefully perhaps but nonetheless actively, confront and criticize them from time to time, just as they must allow their children to confront and criticize themselves in turn. Similarly, loving spouses must repeatedly confront each other if the marriage relationship is to serve the function of promoting the spiritual growth of the partners.

No marriage can be judged truly successful unless husband and wife are each other's best critics.

The same holds true for friendship. There, is a traditional concept that friendship should be a conflict-free relationship, a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" arrangement, relying solely on a mutual exchange of favors and compliments as prescribed by good manners.

Such relationships are superficial and intimacy-avoiding and do not deserve the name of friendship which is so commonly applied to them.

Fortunately, there are signs that our concept of friendship is beginning to deepen.

Mutual loving confrontation is a significant part of all successful and meaningful human relationships.

Without it the relationship is either unsuccessful or shallow.

To confront or criticize is a form of exercising leadership or power.

The exercise of power is nothing more and nothing less than an attempt to influence the course of events, human or otherwise, by one's actions in a consciously or unconsciously predetermined manner.

When we confront or criticize someone it is because we want to change the course of the person's life. It is obvious that there are many other, often superior, ways to influence the course of events than by confrontation or criticism: by example, suggestion, parable, reward and punishment, questioning, prohibition or permission, creation of experiences, organizing with others, and so on.

Volumes can be written about the art of exercising power.

For our purposes, however, suffice it to say that loving individuals must concern themselves with this art, for if one desires to nurture another's spiritual growth, then one must concern oneself with the most effective way to accomplish this in any given instance.

Loving parents, for example, must first examine themselves and their values stringently before determining accurately that they know what is best for their child. Then, having made this determination, they also have to give greater thought to the child's character and capacities before deciding whether the child would be more likely to respond favorably to confrontation than to praise or increased attention or storytelling or some other form of influence.

To confront someone with something he or she cannot handle will at best be a waste of time, and likely will have a deleterious effect.

If we want to be heard we must speak in a language the listener can understand and on a level at which the listener is capable of operating. If we are to love we must extend ourselves to adjust our communication to the capacities of our beloved.

It is clear that exercising power with love requires a great deal of work, but what is this about the risk involved?

The problem is that the more loving one is, the more humble one is; yet the more humble one is, the more one is awed by the potential for arrogance in exercising power.

Who am I to influence the course of human events?

By what authority am I entitled to decide what is best for my child, spouse, my country or the human race?

Who gives me the right to dare to believe in my own understanding and then to presume to exert my will upon the world?

Who am I to play God?

That is the risk.

For whenever we exercise power we are attempting to influence the course of the world, of humanity, and we are thereby playing God.

Most parents, teachers, leaders-most of us who exercise power-have no cognizance of this. In the arrogance of exercising power without the total self-awareness demanded by love, we are blissfully but destructively ignorant of the fact that we are playing God. But those who truly love, and therefore work for the wisdom that love requires, know that to act is to play God. Yet they also know that there is no alternative except inaction and impotence. Love compels us to play God with full consciousness of the enormity of the fact that that is just what we are doing. With this consciousness the loving person assumes the responsibility of attempting to be God and not to carelessly play God, to fulfill God's Will without mistake.

We arrive, then, at yet another paradox: it's only out of the humility of love can humans dare to be God.

 

Episode 14:      Love Is Disciplined

I have indicated that the energy for the work of self-discipline derives from love, which is a form of will.

It follows, then, not only that self-discipline is usually love, translated into action, but also that any genuine lover behaves with self-discipline and any genuinely loving relationship is a disciplined relationship.

If I truly love another, I will obviously order my behavior in such a way as to contribute the utmost to his or her spiritual growth.

A young, intelligent, artistic and "bohemian" couple with whom I once attempted to work had a four-year marriage marked by almost daily screaming, dish-throwing and face-clawing quarrels, along with weekly casual infidelity and monthly separations.

Shortly after we began our work they each correctly perceived that therapy would lead them toward increasing self-discipline, and consequently to a less disorderly relationship. "But you want to take the passion out of our relationship," they said. "Your notions of love and marriage leave no room for passion." Almost immediately thereafter they quit therapy, and it has been reported to me that three years later, after several bouts with other therapists, their daily screaming matches and the chaotic pattern of their marriage continue unchanged, as well as the un-productivity of their individual lives.

There is no doubt that their union is, in a certain sense, a highly colorful one. But it is like the primary colors in the paintings of children, splashed on the paper with abandon, occasionally not without charm, but generally demonstrating the sameness that characterizes the art of young children. In the muted, controlled hues of Rembrandt one can find the color, yet infinitely more richness, uniqueness and meaning.

Passion is feeling of great depth.

The fact that a feeling is uncontrolled is no indication whatsoever that it is any deeper than a feeling that is disciplined.

On the contrary, psychiatrists know well the truth of the old proverbs "Shallow brooks are noisy" and "Still waters run deep."

We must not assume that someone whose feelings are modulated and controlled is not a passionate person.

While one should not be a slave to one's feelings, self-discipline does not mean the squashing of one's feelings into nonexistence.

I frequently tell my patients that their feelings are their slaves and that the art of self-discipline is like the art of slave-owning.

First of all, one's feelings are the source of one's energy; they provide the horsepower, or slave power, that makes it possible for us to accomplish the tasks of living.

Since they work for us, we should treat them with respect. There are two common mistakes that slave-owners can make which represent opposite and extreme forms of executive leadership.

One type of slave-owner does not discipline his slaves, gives them no structure, sets them no limits, provides them with no direction and does not make it clear who is the boss.

What happens, of course, is that in due time his slaves stop working and begin moving into the mansion, raiding the liquor cabinet and breaking the furniture, and soon the slave-owner finds that he is the slave of his slaves, living in the same kind of chaos as the aforementioned character-disordered "bohemian" couple.

Yet the opposite style of leadership, which the guilt-ridden neurotic so often exerts over his feelings, is equally self-destructive.

In this style the slave-owner is so obsessed with the fear that his slaves (feelings) might get out of control and so determined that they should cause him no trouble that he routinely beats them into submission and punishes them severely at the first sign of any potency.

The result of this style is that in relatively short order the slaves become less and less productive as their will is sapped by the harsh treatment they receive. Or else their will turns more and more toward covert rebellion. If the process is carried out long enough, one night the owner's prediction finally comes true and the slaves rise up and burn down the mansion, frequently with the owner inside.

Such is the genesis of certain psychoses and overwhelming neuroses.

The proper management of one's feelings clearly lies along a complex (and therefore not simple or easy) balanced middle path, requiring constant judgment and continuing adjustment.

Here the owner treats his feelings (slaves) with respect, nurturing them with good food, shelter, and medical care, listening and responding to their voices, encouraging them, inquiring as to their health, yet also organizing them, limiting them, deciding clearly between them, redirecting them and teaching them, all the while leaving no doubt as to who is the boss.

This is the path of healthy self-discipline.

Among the feelings that must be so disciplined is the feeling of love. As I have indicated, this is not in itself genuine love but the feeling associated with cathexis. It is to be very much respected and nurtured for the creative energy it brings, but if it is allowed to run rampant, the result will not be genuine love but confusion and un-productivity. Because genuine love involves an outpouring of oneself, along with the vast amount of energy released in the process, like it or not, the amount of energy is quite unlimited.

We may have a feeling of love for mankind and this feeling may also be useful in providing us with enough energy to manifest genuine love for a few specific individuals. But genuine love for a relatively few individuals is all that is within our power.

To attempt to exceed the limits of our energy is to offer more than we can deliver, and there is a point of no return beyond which an attempt to love all comers becomes fraudulent and harmful to the very ones we desire to assist.

Consequently if we are fortunate enough to be in a position in which many people ask for our attention, we must choose those among them whom we are actually to love. This choice is not easy; it may be excruciatingly painful, as the assumption of godlike power so often is. But it must be made. Many factors need to be considered, primarily the capacity of a prospective recipient of our love to respond to that love with spiritual growth. People differ in this capacity, a fact to which more examination will later be given.

It is, however, unquestionable that there are many whose spirits are so locked in behind impenetrable armor that even the greatest efforts to nurture the growth of those spirits are doomed to almost certain failure.

To attempt to love someone who cannot benefit from your love with spiritual growth is to waste your energy, to cast your seed upon arid ground.

Genuine love is precious, and those who are capable of genuine love know that their loving must be focused as productively as possible through self-discipline.

The converse of the problem of loving too many people also needs to be examined. It is possible for some people, at least, to love more than one person at the same time, to simultaneously maintain a number of genuinely loving relationships.

This itself is a problem for several reasons.

One reason is the American or Western myth of romantic love that suggests that certain people are "meant for each other"; thus,  by extrapolation, they are not meant for anyone else. The myth, therefore, prescribes exclusivity for loving relationships, most particularly sexual exclusivity. On balance, the myth is probably helpful in contributing to the stability and productivity of human relationships, since the vast majority of human beings are challenged to the limit of their capacities to extend themselves to develop genuinely loving relationships with their spouses and children alone. Indeed, if one can say that one has built genuinely loving relationships with a spouse and children, then one has already succeeded in accomplishing more than most people accomplish in a lifetime.

There is frequently something pathetic about the individual who has failed to build his family into a loving unit, yet restlessly searches for loving relationships outside the family.

The first obligation of a genuinely loving person will always be to his or her marital and parental relationships. Nonetheless, there are some whose capacity to love is great enough for them to build loving relationships successfully within the family and still have energy left for additional relationships. For these the myth of exclusivity is not only patently false, but also represents an unnecessary limitation upon their capacity to give of themselves to others outside their family. It is possible for this limitation to be overcome, but great self-discipline is required in the extension of oneself in order to avoid "spreading oneself too thin." It was to this extraordinarily complex issue (here touched only in passing) that Joseph Fletcher, the Episcopalian theologian and author of The New Morality, was addressing himself when he reportedly said to a friend of mine, "Free love is an ideal. Unfortunately, it is an ideal of which very few of us are capable." What he meant was that very few of us have a capacity for self-discipline great enough to maintain constructive relationships that are genuinely loving both inside and outside the family.

Freedom and discipline are indeed handmaidens; without the discipline of genuine love, freedom is invariably non-loving and destructive.

By this time some readers may feel saturated by the concept of discipline and conclude that I am advocating a style of life of Calvinistic dreariness. Constant self-discipline! Constant self-examination! Duty! Responsibility! Neopuritanism, they might call it.

 Call it what you will, genuine love, with all the discipline that it requires, is the only path in this life to substantial joy.

Take another path and you may find rare moments of ecstatic joy, but they will be fleeting and progressively more elusive.

When I genuinely love I am extending myself, and when I am extending myself I am growing. The more I love, the longer I love, the larger I become.

Genuine love is self-replenishing.

The more I nurture the spiritual growth of others, the more my own spiritual growth is nurtured.

I am a totally selfish human being. I never do something for somebody else but that I do it for myself. And as I grow through love, so grows my joy, ever more present, ever more constant. Neopuritan perhaps I am. I am also a joy freak.

As John Denver sings:

Love is everywhere, I see it.

You are all that you can be, go on and be it.

Life is perfect, I believe it.

Come and play the game with me.

Episode 15:      Love Is Separateness

Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.

The genuine lover always perceives the beloved as someone who has a totally separate identity. Moreover, the genuine lover always respects and even encourages this separateness and the unique individuality of the beloved. Failure to perceive and respect this separateness is extremely common, however, and the cause of much mental illness and unnecessary suffering.

In its most extreme form, the failure to perceive the separateness of the other is called narcissism. Frankly narcissistic individuals are actually unable to perceive their children, spouses or friends as being separate from themselves on an emotional level.

The first time I began to understand what narcissism is all about was during an interview with the parents of a schizophrenic patient whom I will call Susan X.

Susan at the time was thirty-one. Since the age of eighteen she had made a number of serious suicide attempts and had had to be hospitalized almost continually in a variety of hospitals and sanatoria for the previous thirteen years.

However, largely because of superior psychiatric care that she had received from other psychiatrists during these years she was finally beginning to improve.

For some months during our work together she had demonstrated an increasing capacity to trust trustworthy people, to distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy people, to accept the fact that she had a schizophrenic illness and would need to exert a great deal of self-discipline for the rest of her life to deal with this illness, to respect herself, and to do what was necessary to care for herself without having to rely on others to continually nurture her.

Because of this great progress, I felt the moment was soon at hand when Susan would be able to leave the hospital and for the first time in her life lead and maintain a successful independent existence.

It was at this point that I met with her parents, an attractive, wealthy couple in their mid-fifties. I was very happy to describe to them Susan's enormous progress and explain in detail the reasons for my optimism.

But much to my surprise, soon after I began to do this, Susan's mother started to cry silently and continued to cry as I went on with my hopeful message. At first I thought perhaps her tears were tears of joy, but it was clear from her expression that she was indeed feeling sad. Finally, I said, "I'm puzzled, Mrs. X. I've been telling you things today that are most hopeful, yet you seem to be feeling sad."

"Of course I'm sad," she replied. "I just can't help crying when I think of all poor Susan has to suffer."

I then went into a lengthy explanation to the effect that while it was quite true Susan had suffered a good deal in the course of her illness, she had also clearly learned a good deal from this suffering, had come out on top of it and, in my estimation, was unlikely to suffer any more in the future than any other adult. Indeed, she might suffer considerably less than any of us because of the wisdom she had gained from her battle with schizophrenia. Mrs. X. continued to weep silently.

"Frankly, I'm still puzzled, Mrs. X.," I said. "Over the past thirteen years you must have participated in at least a dozen conferences like this with Susan's psychiatrists, and from what I know, none of them was as optimistic as this one.

Don't you feel gladness as well as sadness?"

"I can only think of how difficult life is for Susan," Mrs. X. replied tearfully.

"Look, Mrs. X.," I said, "is there anything I could say to you about Susan that would make you feel encouraged and happy about her?"

"Poor Susan's life is so full of pain," Mrs. X. whimpered.

Suddenly I realized that Mrs. X. was not crying for Susan but for herself. She was crying for her own pain and suffering.

Yet the conference was about Susan, not about her, and she was doing her crying in Susan's name. How could she do this, I wondered. And then I realized that Mrs. X. was actually not able to distinguish between Susan and herself.

What she felt, Susan must feel. She was using Susan as a vehicle to express her own needs. She was not doing this consciously or maliciously; on an emotional level she could not, in fact, perceive Susan as having an identity separate from her own. Susan was she. In her mind Susan as a unique, different individual with a unique, different path in life simply did not exist-nor, probably, did anyone else. Intellectually Mrs. X. could recognize other people as being different from herself. But on a more basic level other people did not exist for her. In the depths of her mind the entirety of the world was she, Mrs. X., she alone.

In subsequent experiences I frequently found the mothers of schizophrenic children to be extraordinarily narcissistic individuals like Mrs. X.

This is not to say that such mothers are always narcissistic or those narcissistic mothers can't raise non-schizophrenic children.

Schizophrenia is an extremely complex disorder, with obvious genetic as well as environmental determinants.

But one can imagine the depth of confusion in Susan's childhood produced by her mother's narcissism, and one can objectively see this confusion when actually observing narcissistic mothers interact with their children.

On an afternoon when Mrs. X. was feeling sorry for herself Susan might have come home from school bringing some of her paintings the teacher had graded A.

If she told her mother proudly how she was progressing in art, Mrs. X. might well respond: "Susan, go take a nap. You shouldn't get yourself so exhausted over your work in school. The school system is no good anymore. They don't care for children anymore." On the other hand, on an afternoon when Mrs. X. was in a very cheerful mood Susan might have come home in tears over the fact that she had been bullied by several boys on the school bus, and Mrs. X. could say: "Isn't it fortunate that Mr. Jones is such a good bus driver? He is so nice and patient with all you children and your roughhousing. I think you should be sure to give him a nice little present at Christmastime." Since they do not perceive others as others but only as extensions of themselves, narcissistic individuals lack the capacity for empathy, which is the capacity to feel what another is feeling.

Lacking empathy, narcissistic parents usually respond inappropriately to their children on an emotional level and fail to offer any recognition or verification of their children's feelings.

It is no wonder, then, that such children grow up with grave difficulties in recognizing, accepting, and hence managing their own feelings.

While not usually as narcissistic as Mrs. X., the vast majority of parents fail in some degree to adequately recognize or fully appreciate the unique individuality or "otherness" of their children. Common examples abound. Parents will say of a child, "He's a chip off the old block" or to a child, "You're just like your Uncle Jim," as if their children are some genetic copy of themselves or the family, when the facts of genetic combinations are such that all children genetically are extremely different from either of their parents and all of their forebears. Athletic fathers push their scholarly sons into football and scholarly fathers push their athletic sons into books, causing the sons much unnecessary guilt and turmoil.

A General's wife complains about her seventeen-year-old daughter: "When she's home, Sally sits in her room all the time writing sad poetry. It's morbid, Doctor. And she absolutely refuses to have a coming-out party. I'm afraid that she's seriously ill."

After interviewing Sally, a charming and vivacious young woman who is on the honor roll at school and has lots of friends, I tell her parents that I think Sally is perfectly healthy and suggest that perhaps they should lessen their pressure on her to be a carbon copy of themselves. They leave to look for another psychiatrist, one who might be willing to pronounce Sally's differences deviancies.

Adolescents frequently complain that they are disciplined not out of genuine concern but because of parental fear that they will give their parents a bad image. "My parents are continually after me to cut my hair," adolescent boys used to say a few years ago. "They can't explain why long hair is bad for me. They just don't want other people to see they've got long-haired kids. They don't really give a shit about me. All they are really caring about is their own image." Such adolescent resentment is usually justified. Their parents generally do in fact, fail to appreciate the unique individuality of their children, and instead regard their children as extensions of themselves, in much the same way as their fine clothes and their neatly manicured lawns and their polished cars are extensions of themselves which represent their status to the world. It is to these milder but nonetheless destructive common forms of parental narcissism that Kahlil Gibran addresses himself in what are perhaps the finest words ever written about child-raising:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bow from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,

and He bends you with His might that His arrow may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

The difficulty that humans so generally seem to have in fully appreciating the separateness of those who they are close to interferes not only with their parenting but with all their intimate relationships, including marriage. Not too long ago in a couples group, I heard one of the members state that the "purpose and function" of his wife was to keep their house neat and him well fed. I was aghast at what seemed to me his painfully blatant male chauvinism.

I thought I might demonstrate this to him by asking the other members of the group to state how they perceived the purpose and function of their spouses. To my horror the six others, male and female alike, gave very similar answers. All of them defined the purpose and function of their husbands or wives in reference to themselves; all of them failed to perceive that their own mates might have an existence basically separate from their own or any kind of destiny apart from their marriage. "Good grief," I exclaimed, "it's no wonder that you are all having difficulties in your marriages, and you'll continue to have difficulties until you come to recognize that each of you has your own separate destiny to fulfill."

The group felt not only chastised but profoundly confused by my pronouncement. Somewhat belligerently they asked me to define the purpose and function of my wife. "The purpose and function of Lily," I responded, "is to grow to be the most of which she is capable, not for my benefit but for her own and to the glory of God." The concept remained alien to them for some time, however.

The problem of separateness in close relationships has bedeviled mankind through the ages. However, it has received more attention from a political standpoint than from a marital one.

 Pure communism, for instance, expresses a philosophy not unlike that of the aforementioned couples-namely, that the purpose and function of the individual is to serve the relationship, the group, the collective, the society. Only the destiny of the state is considered; the destiny of the individual is believed to be of no consequence.

Pure capitalism, on the other hand, espouses the destiny of the individual even when it is at the expense of the relationship, the group, the collective, the society. Widows and orphans may starve, but this should not prevent the individual entrepreneur from enjoying all the fruits of his or her individual initiative.

It should be obvious to any discerning mind that neither of these pure solutions to the problem of separateness within relationships will be successful.

The individual's health depends upon the health of the society; the health of the society depends upon the health of its individuals.

When dealing with couples my wife and I draw the analogy between marriage and a base camp for mountain climbing. If one wants to climb mountains one must have a good base camp, a place where there are shelters and provisions, where one may receive nurture and rest before one ventures forth again to seek another summit.

Successful mountain climbers know that they must spend at least as much time, if not more, in tending to their base camp as they actually do in climbing mountains, for their survival is dependent upon their seeing to it that their base camp is sturdily constructed and well-stocked.

A common and traditionally masculine marital problem is created by the husband who, once he is married, devotes all his energies to climbing mountains and none to tending to his marriage, or base camp, expecting it to be there in perfect order whenever he chooses to return to it for rest and recreation without his assuming any responsibility for its maintenance.

Sooner or later this "capitalist" approach to the problem fails and he returns to find his untended base camp a shambles, his neglected wife having been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, having run off with another man, or in some other way having renounced her job as camp caretaker.

An equally common and traditionally feminine marital problem is created by the wife who, once she is married, feels that the goal of her life has been achieved. To her the base camp is the peak. She cannot understand or empathize with her husband's need for achievements and experiences beyond the marriage and reacts to them with jealousy and never-ending demands that he devote increasingly more energy to the home.

Like other "communist" resolutions of the problem, this one creates a relationship that is suffocating and stultifying, from which the husband, feeling trapped and limited, may likely flee in a moment of "mid-life crisis." The women's liberation movement has been helpful in pointing the way to what is obviously the only ideal resolution: marriage as a truly cooperative institution, requiring great mutual contributions and care, time and energy, but existing for the primary purpose of nurturing each of the participants for individual journeys toward his or her own individual peaks of spiritual growth. Male and female both must tend the hearth and both must venture forth.

As an adolescent I used to thrill to the words of love the early American poet Ann Bradstreet spoke to her husband:

"If ever two were one, then we."

As I have grown, however,

I have come to realize that it is the separateness of the partners

that enriches the union.

Great marriages cannot be constructed

by individuals who are terrified by their basic aloneness, as so commonly is the case, and seek a merging in marriage.

Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually seeks to cultivate it, even at the risk of separation or loss.

The ultimate goal of life remains the spiritual

growth of the individual, the solitary journey to peaks that can be climbed only alone. Significant journeys cannot be accomplished without the nurture provided by a successful

marriage or a successful society.

Marriage and society exist for the basic purpose of nurturing such individual journeys.

But, as is the case with all genuine love,  "sacrifices" on behalf of the growth of the other result in equal or greater growth of the self.

It is the return of the individual to the nurturing

marriage or society from the peaks he or she has traveled alone which serves to elevate that marriage or that society to new heights.

In this way individual growth and societal growth are interdependent, but it is always and inevitably lonely out on the growing edge.

It is from the loneliness of his wisdom that

once again the prophet of Kahlil Gibran speaks to us concerning marriage:

But let there be spaces in your togetherness,

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf

Episode 16:      Love and Psychotherapy

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let

each one of you be alone,

Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.

For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.

And stand together yet not too near together:

For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in

each other's shadow. *

It is hard for me to recapture now the motivation and understanding with which I entered the field of psychiatry fifteen years ago.

Certainly I wanted to "help" people. The process of helping people in the other branches of medicine involved technology with which I was uncomfortable and which in other ways seemed too mechanical to suit my tastes.

I also found talking to people more fun than poking and prodding them, and the quirks of the human mind seemed inherently more interesting to me than the quirks of the body or the germs infesting it.

I had no idea how psychiatrists helped people, except for the fantasy that psychiatrists were the possessors of magical words and magical techniques of interacting with patients which would magically unscramble the knots of the psyche.

Perhaps I wanted to be a magician. I had very little notion that the work involved would have something to do with the spiritual growth of patients, and certainly I had no notion whatsoever that it would involve my own spiritual growth.

During my first ten months of training I worked with highly disturbed inpatients who seemed to benefit much more from pills or shock treatments or good nursing care than they did from me, but I learned the traditional magical words and techniques of interaction.

After this period I began to see my first neurotic patient for long-term outpatient psychotherapy.

 

Let me call her Marcia.

Marcia came to see me three times a week. It was a real struggle.

She wouldn't talk about the things I wanted her to talk about, and she wouldn't talk about them in the way I wanted, and sometimes she just wouldn't talk at all. In some ways our values were quite different; in the struggle, she came to modify hers somewhat and I came to modify mine somewhat. But the struggle continued despite my storehouse of magical words and techniques and postures, and there was no sign that Marcia was improving. Indeed, shortly after she started to see me she began a pattern of almost outrageous promiscuity, and for months she recounted unabatedly innumerable incidents of "bad behavior." Finally, after a year of this, she asked me in the middle of a session, "Do you think I'm a bit of a shit?"

"You seem to be asking me to tell you what I think of you,"

I replied, brilliantly stalling for time.

That was exactly what she wanted, she said. 

But what did I do now? What magical words or techniques or postures could help me? I could say, "Why do you ask that?" or "What are your fantasies about what I think of you?" or "What's important, Marcia, is not what I think of you but what you think of yourself." Yet I had an overpowering feeling that these gambits were cop-outs, and that after a whole year of seeing me three times a week the least Marcia was entitled to was an honest answer from me as to what I thought of her.

But for this I had no precedent; telling a person honestly face to face what you think of him or her was not one of the magical words or techniques that any of my professors had taught me. It was an interaction that had never been suggested or recommended in my training; the very fact that it had not been mentioned indicated to me that it was an interaction that was disapproved of, a situation that any reputable psychiatrist would not allow himself to fall into. How to act?

With my heart pounding I went out on what seemed to be a very shaky limb indeed. "Marcia," I said, "you have been seeing me now for over a year. During this long period of time things have not gone smoothly for us. Much of the time we have been struggling, and the struggle has often been boring or nerve-wracking or angry for both of us. Yet despite this you have continued to come back to see me at considerable effort and inconvenience to you, session after session, week after week, month after month. You wouldn't have been able to do this unless you were the kind of person who is determined to grow and willing to work very hard at making yourself a better person. I do not think I would feel that someone who works as hard on herself as you do is a bit of a shit. So the answer is, No, I do not think you are a bit of a shit. In fact, I admire you a great deal. "

From among her dozens of lovers, Marcia immediately picked one and established a meaningful relationship with him which eventually led to a highly successful and satisfying marriage.

She was never again promiscuous. She immediately began to speak about the good things in herself. The sense of unproductive struggle between us instantly vanished, and our work became fluent and joyful, with incredibly rapid progress.

Strangely, my going out on a limb by revealing my genuinely positive feelings for her, something I felt I was really not supposed to do-rather than seeming to hurt her, apparently was of great therapeutic benefit and clearly represented the turning point in our work together.

What does this mean?

Does it mean that all we have to do to practice successful psychotherapy is to tell our patients that we think well of them?

Hardly.

First of all, it is necessary to be honest in therapy at all times. I honestly did admire and like Marcia.

Second, my admiration and liking was of real significance to her precisely because of the length of time I had known her and the depth of our experiences in therapy.

In fact, the essence of this turning point did not even have to do with my liking and admiration; it had to do with the nature of our relationship.

A similarly, dramatic turning point came in the therapy of a young woman I will call Helen, whom I had been seeing twice weekly for nine months with a noticeable lack of success and for whom I did not yet have much positive feeling. Indeed, after all that time I did not even have much of a feeling of who Helen was at all. I had never before seen a patient for such a length of time without having gained some idea of who the individual was and the nature of the problem to be resolved.

I was totally confused by her and had spent the better part of several nights attempting without any success whatsoever to make some sense out of the case. About all that was clear to me was that Helen did not trust me.

She was vociferous in her complaints that I did not genuinely care for her in any way, shape or form and was interested only in her money.

She was talking in this fashion during one session, after nine months of therapy: "You cannot imagine, Dr. Peck, how frustrating it is for me to attempt to communicate with you when you are so uninterested in me and therefore so oblivious to my feelings."

"Helen," I replied, "it seems to be frustrating for both of us. I don't know how this will make you feel, but you are the single most frustrating case I have ever had in a decade of practicing psychotherapy. I have never met anyone with whom I have made less headway in so long a time. Perhaps you are right in believing that I am not the right person to work with you. I don't know. I don't want to give up, but I sure as hell am puzzled about you, and I wonder until I'm almost crazy as to what the hell is wrong in our work together."

A glowing smile came over Helen's face. "You really do care for me after all," she said.

"Huh?" I asked.

"If you didn't really care for me you wouldn't feel so frustrated," she replied, as if it were all perfectly obvious.

At the very next session Helen began to tell me things that she had previously either withheld or actually lied about and within a week I had a clear understanding of her basic problem, could make a diagnosis, and knew generally how the therapy should proceed.

Again, my reaction to Helen was meaningful and significant to her precisely because of the depth of my involvement with her and the intensity of our struggle together. We are now able to see the essential ingredient that makes psychotherapy effective and successful. It is not "unconditional positive regard," nor is it magical words, techniques or postures;

it is human involvement and struggle. It is the willingness of the therapist to extend himself or herself for the purpose of nurturing the patient's growth-willingness to go out on a limb, to truly involve oneself at an emotional level in the relationship, to actually struggle with the patient and with oneself. In short, the essential ingredient of successful deep and meaningful psychotherapy is love.

It is remarkable, almost incredible, that the voluminous professional literature in the West on the subject of psychotherapy ignores the issue of love.

Hindu gurus frequently make no bones about the fact that their love is the source of their power.

But the closest Western literature comes to the issue are those articles that attempt to analyze differences between successful and unsuccessful psychotherapists and usually end up mentioning such characteristics of successful psychotherapists as "warmth" and "empathy." Basically, we seem to be embarrassed by the subject of love. There are a number of reasons for this state of affairs. One is the confusion between genuine love and romantic love which so pervades our culture, as well as the other confusions that have been dealt with in this section.

Another is our bias toward the rational, the tangible, and the measurable in "scientific medicine," and it is largely out of "scientific medicine" that the profession of psychotherapy evolved. Since love is an intangible, incompletely measurable and supra-rational phenomenon, it has not lent itself to scientific analysis.

Another reason is the strength of the psychoanalytic tradition in psychiatry of the aloof and detached analyst, a tradition for which Freud's followers more than Freud himself seem to be responsible.

In this same tradition, any feelings of love that the patient has for the therapist are generally labeled "transference" and any feelings of love that the therapist has for the patient "counter-transference," with the implication that such feelings are abnormal, a part of the problem rather than its solution, and are to be avoided. This is all quite absurd. Transference, as mentioned in the previous section, refers to inappropriate feelings, perceptions and responses.

There is nothing inappropriate about patients coming to love a therapist who truly listens to them hour after hour in a nonjudgmental way, who truly accepts them as they probably have never been accepted before, who totally refrains from using them and who has been helpful in alleviating their suffering.

Indeed, the essence of the transference in many cases is that which prevents the patient from developing a loving relationship with the therapist, and the cure consists of working through the transference so that the patient can experience a successful love relationship, often for the first time.

Similarly, there is nothing at all inappropriate in the feelings of love that a therapist develops for his or her patient when the patient submits to the discipline of psychotherapy cooperates in the treatment is willing to learn from the therapist, and successfully begins to grow through the relationship. Intensive psychotherapy in many ways is a process of re-parenting.

It is no more inappropriate for a  Psychotherapist to have feelings of love for a patient than it is for a good parent to have feelings of love for a child.

On the contrary, it is essential for the therapist to love a patient for the therapy to be successful, and if the therapy does become successful, then the therapeutic relationship will become a mutually loving one. It is inevitable that the therapist will experience loving feelings coincidental with the genuine love he or she has demonstrated toward the patient.

For the most part, mental illness is caused by an absence of or defect in the love that a particular child required from its particular parents for successful maturation and spiritual growth. It is obvious, then, that in order to be healed through psychotherapy the patient must receive from the psychotherapist at least a portion of the genuine love of which the patient was deprived. If the psychotherapist cannot genuinely love a patient, genuine healing will not occur. No matter how well-credentialed and trained psychotherapists may be, if they cannot extend themselves through love to their patients, the results of their psychotherapeutic practice will be generally unsuccessful.

Conversely, a totally un-credentialed and minimally trained lay therapist who exercises a great capacity to love will achieve psychotherapeutic results that equal those of the very best psychiatrists.

Since love and sex are so closely related and interconnected, it is appropriate to mention here briefly the issue of sexual relationships between psychotherapists and their patients, an issue that is currently receiving a good deal of attention in the press. Because of the necessarily loving and intimate nature of the psychotherapeutic relationship, it is inevitable that both patients and therapists routinely develop strong or extremely strong sexual attractions to each other.

The pressures to sexually consummate such attractions may be enormous.

I suspect that some of those in the profession of psychotherapy who cast stones at a therapist who has related sexually with a patient may not themselves be loving therapists and may not therefore have any real understanding of the enormity of the pressures involved.

Moreover, were I ever to have a case in which I concluded after careful and judicious consideration that my patient's spiritual growth would be substantially furthered by our having sexual relations, I would proceed to have them. In fifteen years of practice, however, I have not yet had such a case, and I find it difficult to imagine that such a case could really exist.

First of all, as I have mentioned, the role of the good therapist is primarily that of the good parent, and good parents do not consummate sexual relationships with their children for several very compelling reasons.

The job of a parent is to be of use to a child and not to use the child for personal satisfaction.

The job of a therapist is to be of use to a patient and not to use the patient to serve the therapist's own needs.

The job of a parent is to encourage a child along the path toward independence, and the job of a therapist with a patient is the same.

It is difficult to see how a therapist who related sexually with a patient would not be using the patient to satisfy his or her own needs or how the therapist would be encouraging the patient's independence thereby.

Many patients, particularly those likely to be most seductive, have sexualized attachments to their parents which clearly impede their freedom and growth. Both theory and the scant bit of evidence available strongly suggests that a sexual relationship between a therapist and such a patient is far more likely to cement the patient's immature attachments than to loosen them. Even if the relationship is not sexually consummated, it is detrimental for the therapist to "fall in love" with the patient, since, as we have seen, falling in love involves a collapse of ego boundaries and a diminution of the normal sense of separation that exists between individuals.

The therapist who falls in love with a patient cannot possibly be objective about the patient's needs or separate those needs from his or her own.

It is out of love for their patients that therapists do not allow themselves the indulgence of falling in love with them. Since genuine love demands respect for the separate identity of the beloved, the genuinely loving therapist will recognize and accept that the patient's path in life is and should be separate from that of the therapist. For some therapists, this means that their own and the patient's paths should never cross outside of the therapeutic hour. While I respect this position, for myself I find it unnecessarily rigid.

Although I have had one experience in which my relating to an ex-patient seemed to be definitely detrimental to her, I have had several other experiences in which social relationships with ex-patients seemed clearly beneficial to them as well as to myself. I have also been fortunate enough to successfully analyze several very close friends. Nonetheless, social contact with the patient outside of the therapeutic hour, even after therapy has been formally terminated, is something that should be entered into only with great caution and stringent self-examination as to whether the therapist's needs are being met by the contact to the detriment of the patient's.

We have been examining the fact that psychotherapy should be (must be, if successful) a process of genuine love, a somewhat heretical notion in traditional psychiatric circles.

The other side of the same coin is at least equally heretical: if psychotherapy is genuinely loving, should love always be psychotherapeutic?

If we genuinely love our spouse, our parents, our children, our friends, if we extend ourselves to nurture their spiritual growth, should we be practicing psychotherapy with them?

My answer is: Certainly. From time to time at cocktail parties someone will say to me, "It must be difficult for you, Dr. Peck, to separate your social life from your professional life. After all, one can't go around analyzing one's family and friends, can one?" Usually, the speaker is ony making idle conversation and is neither interested in nor ready to assimilate a serious reply.

Occasionally, however, the situation gives me the opportunity to teach or practice psychotherapy there and then, on the spot, explaining just why I do not even attempt, or would want to attempt to separate my professional and my personal lives.

If I perceive my wife or my children or my parents or my friends suffering from an illusion, a falsehood, an ignorance or an unnecessary impediment, I have every bit as much obligation to extend myself to them to correct the situation insofar as possible, as I do to my patients, who pay me for my services. Am I to withhold my services, my wisdom and my love from my family and my friends because they have not specifically contracted and paid me for my attention to their psychological needs? Hardly.

How can I be a good friend, father, husband or son unless I take the opportunities that are available to attempt, with whatever artistry I can command, to teach my beloved what I know and give whatever assistance is in my power to give to his or her personal journeys of spiritual growth? Moreover, I expect the same services from my friends and family to the limits of their ability. Although their criticism of me may be unnecessarily blunt at times and their teaching may not be as thoughtful as an adult's, I learn much to help me from my children. My wife guides me as much as I guide her. I would not call my friends,  friends were they to withhold from me the honesty of their disapproval and their loving concern as to the wisdom and safety of the directions of my own journey. Can I not grow more rapidly with their help than without it? Any genuinely loving relationship is one of mutual psychotherapy.

I have not always seen it this way. In years past I was more appreciative of my wife's admiration than of her criticism and did as much to foster her dependency as I did her power.

My self-image as a husband and father was that of provider; my responsibility ended with bringing home the bacon.

Home I wanted to be a place of comfort, not challenge. At that time I would have agreed with the proposition that it would be dangerous and unethical and destructive for a psychotherapist to practice his art upon his friends and family.

But my agreement was motivated as much by laziness as it was by fear of misusing my profession. For psychotherapy, like love, is work, and it's easier to work eight hours a day than it is to work sixteen. It's also easier to love a person who seeks out your wisdom, who travels to your territory to obtain it, who pays you for your attention and whose demands upon you are strictly limited to fifty minutes at a time than it is to love someone who regards your attention as a right, whose demands may not be limited, who does not perceive you as an authority figure and who does not solicit your teaching.

Conducting psychotherapy at home or with one's friends requires the same intensity of effort and self-discipline as it does in the office but under much less ideal conditions, which is to say that at home it requires even more effort and love. I hope, therefore, that other psychotherapists will not take these words as an exhortation to immediately begin practicing psychotherapy with their mates and children. If one remains on a journey of spiritual growth, one's capacity to love grows and grows. But it is always limited, and one clearly should not attempt psychotherapy beyond one's capacity to love, since psychotherapy without love will be unsuccessful and even harmful.

If you can love six hours a day, be content with that for the moment, for your capacity is already far greater than most; the journey is a long one and it requires time for your capacity to grow.

To practice psychotherapy with one's friends and family, to love one another full time, is an ideal, a goal to strive toward but not instantly achieved.

Since, as I have indicated, laymen can practice successful psychotherapy without great training as long as they are genuinely loving human beings, the remarks I have made concerning the practice of psychotherapy on one's friends and family do not apply solely to professional therapists; they apply to everyone.

Occasionally when patients ask me when they will be ready to terminate their therapy, I will reply, "When you yourself are able to be a good therapist." This reply is often most usefully made in group therapy, where patients of course do practice psychotherapy on each other and where their failures to successfully assume the role of psychotherapist can be pointed out to them.

Many patients do not like this reply, and some will actually say, "That's too much work. To do that means that I would have to think all the time in my relationships with people. I don't want to think that much. I don't want to work that hard. I just want to enjoy myself." Patients often respond similarly when I point out to them that all human interactions are opportunities either to learn or to teach (to give or receive therapy), and when they neither learn nor teach in an interaction they are passing up an opportunity. Most people are quite correct when they say they do not want to achieve such a lofty goal or work so hard in life. The majority of patients, even in the hands of the most skilled and loving therapists, will terminate their therapy at some point far short of completely fulfilling their potential. They may have traveled a short or even a goodly distance along the journey of spiritual growth, but the whole journey is not for them. It is or seems to be too difficult.

They are content to be ordinary men and women and do not strive to be God.

Episode 17:      The Mystery of Love

This discussion began many pages back by noting that love is a mysterious subject and that until now the mystery has been ignored. The questions raised here so far have been answered. But there are other questions, not so easy to answer.

One set of such questions derives rather logically from the material thus far discussed. It has been made clear, for instance, that self-discipline develops from the foundation of love. But this leaves unanswered the question of where love itself comes from. And if we ask that, we must also ask what are the sources of the absence of love. It has been further suggested that the absence of love is the major cause of mental illness and that the presence of love is consequently the essential healing element in psychotherapy.  

This being so, how is it that certain individuals, born and raised in an environment of non-love, of unremitting neglect and casual brutality, somehow manage to transcend their childhood, sometimes even without the loving assistance of psychotherapy, and become mature, healthy and perhaps even saintly people? Conversely, how is it that some patients, apparently no more ill than others, fail partially or totally to respond to psychotherapeutic treatment by even the most wise and loving therapist?

An attempt will be made to answer this set of questions in the final section, on grace. The attempt will not meet with anyone's complete satisfaction, including my own. I hope,. however, what I write will bring some enlightenment.

There is another set of questions having to do with matters deliberately omitted or glossed over in the discussion of love.

When my beloved first stands before me naked, all open to my sight, there is a feeling throughout the whole of me: awe.

Why? If sex is no more than an instinct, why don't I just feel "horny" or hungry? Such simple hunger would be quite sufficient to insure the propagation of the species. Why awe?

Why should sex be complicated with reverence? And for that matter, what is it that determines beauty? I have said the object of genuine love must be a person, since only people have spirits capable of growth. But what about the finest creation by a master woodworker? Or the best sculptures of medieval madonnas? Or the bronze statue of the Greek charioteer at Delphi? Were these inanimate objects not loved by their creators and is not their beauty somehow related to their creators' love? What about the beauty of nature-nature, to which we sometimes give the name "creation"? And why in the presence of beauty or joy do we so often have the strange, paradoxical reaction of sadness or tears? How is it that certain bars of music played or sung in certain ways can move us so?

And why do I become wet-eyed when my six-year-old son, still ill on his first night home from the hospital after a tonsillectomy suddenly comes over to where I am lying, tired, on the floor and begins to rub my back gently?

Clearly there are dimensions of love that have not been discussed and are most difficult to understand. I do not think questions about these aspects (and many more) will be answered by sociobiology.

Ordinary psychology with its knowledge of ego boundaries may be of a little help-but only a little.

The people who know the most about such things are those among the religious who are students of Mystery. It is to them and to the subject of religion that we must turn if we are to obtain even glimmerings of insight into these matters.

The remainder of this book will deal with certain facets of religion.  

The next section will discuss in a very limited way the relationship between religion and the growth process.

The final section will focus on the phenomenon of grace and the role it plays in this process. The concept of grace has been familiar to religion for millennia, but it is foreign to science, including psychology. Nonetheless, I believe that an understanding of the phenomenon of grace is essential to complete understanding of the process of growth in human beings.

What follows will, I hope, represent a contribution to the slowly enlarging interface between religion and the science of psychology.