| | Mr. Dwyer, Bill
I liked your reply very much. The term subconscious came into the lexicon as result of Freud’s theories and it is closely associated with him. An encyclopedia of philosophy would not have been the reference book of choice were I researching psychotherapy, but it is accurate. I feel the need to apologize for my over-reaction and for my suspicion that you were making an arbitrary distinction simply to divorce Brandon’s ideas from historical psychiatry. You are a prolific, perspicacious and pleasant contributor to this site and I should not be dismissive of you or discouraging.
Although Brandon talks about human minds as computers as you say, he also writes about repression, giving endless hypotheticals (apparently) of neurotic behaviors that result from suppressions/repressions. He tells us that our emotions lead us to an awareness of repressed thoughts (which I suppose reside in the subconscious) while also assuring us that emotions are not cognates. I find it hard to understand how examining non-cognates can lead to understanding. I am reminded of Scientology’s search for engrams and the excision of them which results in what they refer to as becoming ‘clear’ or 'a clear' .
In the information that follows, my own commentary is in brackets and bold type.
Regarding The Six Pillars of Self-Esteen Branden says the following:
"I would say, with complete conviction, that if I were not the author of [The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem], there is not a sentence in it that, if Ayn Rand were alive, she would not agree with. And yet, I say certain things that do clash with certain things she has said, so that's the paradox I want to address...."
[Paradox? What happened to: when you experience a contradiction, check your premises?]
This is how Branden describes his second pillar which he calls "the practice of self-acceptance". He quotes from a description of Roark in "The Fountainhead":
"Sometimes, not often, he sat up and did not move for a long time; then he smiled, the slow smile of an executioner watching a victim. He thought of his days going by, of the buildings he could have been doing, should have been doing and, perhaps, never would be doing again. He watched the pain's unsummoned appearance with a cold, detached curiosity; he said to himself: Well, here it is again. He waited to see how long it would last. It gave him a strange, hard pleasure to watch his fight against it, and he could forget that it was his own suffering; he could smile in contempt, not realizing that he smiled at his own agony. Such moments were rare. But when they came, he felt as he did in the quarry: that he had to drill through granite, that he had to drive a wedge and blast the thing within him which persisted in calling to his pity."
and then asks the question: Would you say-human being to human being-does Roark have a right to have some bad days? Does he have a right to suffer, from time to time? Is his suffering legitimately entitled to be honored and respected?
[Is Brandon arguing for victimhood over the heroic?]
He continues "Now, I don't think we can reasonably doubt that the author meant this to be heroic on Roark's part. [I don’t doubt it, do you?] There's nothing in the text to suggest that she thinks Roark is mistaken in handling his suffering this way. But...is contempt the appropriate response to your own perfectly legitimate, real, human suffering? [Rand believes that self-pity is contemptuous.]
Brandon continues: "Now, I'm 14 years old. I'm not exactly socially adept...I was lonely a great deal of the time. I didn't really have any friends. I was a semi-disaster with girls during my teenage years. And I felt that any longing in me for human companionship, any feelings of loneliness, any pain, was something that-if I was as good as Roark-I would handle the way Roark handled: "I'm not lonely for nothing or nobody. I don't need nothing or nobody."
"I don’t need nothing (sic)"… [Does Branden seriously believe that Roark needs nothing?]
More Brandon "That laid the foundation for an awful lot of later problems in my life. I don't think I'm unique, in this respect. I think it's a perfectly natural application [of the passage]. Now the question then becomes: Is this part of Objectivism? Even though Ayn Rand may have said, at the time, at that stage of her development, yes it is, I would say it isn't-because it is a form of failing to respect reality. [Italics mine] And that is more basically Objectivist than this issue. Any time you are for any reason, good or bad, noble or ignoble, putting yourself into an adversarial relationship to reality, you are in conflict with Objectivism...." [Human suffering as facing up to reality? This is antithetical to Objectivism.]
He quotes further this time from Atlas Shrugged:
"He grasped a feeling that he had always experienced, but never identified because it had always been absolute and immediate: a feeling that forbade him ever to face her in pain. It was much more than the pride of wishing to conceal his suffering: it was the feeling that suffering must not be granted recognition in her presence, that no form of claim between them should ever be motivated by pain and aimed at pity. It was not pity that he brought here or came here to find."
Branden comments: "Let's look at the messages that are contained here. This is the woman I love most in the world; this is the person with whom I feel freest to be myself. Under no circumstances must you ever know if I'm suffering. That's proposition one.
Two: If I were to show you my suffering, or allow you to see my suffering, my only motive could be to elicit your pity." [Clearly Rand believes it to be so. Branden clearly disagrees. Harken back to the strawman he calls a paradox (or a dichotomy in ROR parlance) that begins this commentary.]
He continues, "Now, I could give many more examples of passages.... They're not contained in the abstract formulations; they're contained in the dramatizations of the abstract formulations... [H]ere's only one last one: when Dagny quits for the first time, and she goes to the cottage in the country, trying to recover. She spends her time reshingling the roof, cleaning up the front yard... And of course she's missing her work at Taggart Transcontinental. Again, is this normal pain, [when] you give up the work you love most in the world? As a psychologist, I would say that the healthiest thing you can do right now is mourn your loss. Mourning is the way an organism heals itself from loss." [We mourn, each in our own way.]
"She had come here with three assignments given, as orders, to herself: rest-learn to live without the railroad-get the pain out of the way. Get it out of the way, were the words she used. She felt as if she were tied to some wounded stranger who could be stricken at any moment by an attack that would drown her in his screams. She felt no pity for the stranger, only a contemptuous impatience (here we are with contempt again); she had to fight him and destroy him, then her way would be clear to decide what she wished to do; but the stranger was not easy to fight."
Branden: "I would say that, of any single practice that I teach, the one that people in general (it's by no means confined to Objectivists...) have great difficulty with is allowing themselves in a compassionate, respectful way to recognize their own feelings and give themselves permission to feel what they feel...." [He certainly has a penchant for self-pity encouraging us to wallow in it at our leisure. Notice that he does not refer to the origin of these ‘feelings’ or whether or not they are justified.]
You quote or paraphrase Branden as saying:
Thus, past knowledge (provided it has been properly assimilated) can be instantly available to man. . .
I think the key here is ‘provided it has been properly assimilated’. If you care to continue this, I would like you to contrast and compare Branden’s and Rand’s views on self-pity and explain how it is possible to know when one has assimilated the entire content of one’s subconscious/non-conscious/unconscious.
(Edited by Robert Davison on 5/09, 7:38am)
|
|
