Paul Rosenfels is a man most people have never heard of, but his effect on those who came into contact with him was extraordinary. There are many unconventional psychotherapists around who attempt to liberate people by sanctioning their deviancy, but few who offer demonstrable techniques to remove internalized obstacles to growth. Fewer still concern themselves with the wider social implications of psychological growth, or who have a vision large enough to encompass the whole of civilization as we know it. Paul not only helped creative people break free of the intimidating and seductive pressure of social norms, he also developed a comprehensive theory of human nature which allowed seemingly unique aspects of one's personal history to be understood in terms that applied to everyone.
Paul's view of human nature owes very little to the intuitive psychoanalytic school of Freud and his heirs, but took its origin in the democratic values born in ancient Greece and the universal love and faith found in early Christianity. Born and raised in Illinois, he had studied the writings of men like John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, and was deeply influenced by the climate of social liberalism he found at the University of Chicago. But their beliefs in the common man, in the inherent goodness of human nature, and in learning through experience, were only a backdrop to his original discoveries concerning the dynamics of personality. Over many years, and working alone, he forged a wide-ranging and eclectic synthesis -- integrating his new insights with earlier psychological findings -- and slowly gave birth to what may someday come to be regarded as a science of human nature itself.
Although he became a board-certified psychiatrist and was trained at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, he turned his back on these disciplines in mid-career and decided -- as so many others have since -- that they had very little to offer the average man. His patients had often received better advice from co-workers and tea-leaf readers than icy mental health professionals whose code of ethics included an explicit injunction against caring about patients on any personal level.
Paul did, in fact, care about his patients very much. He cared when the Freudian gobbledygook he was handing them didn't help them to live the better lives he felt they deserved. And he was disturbed that his attempt to adjust to a heterosexual marriage was failing. So in the late 1940's he decided to leave his wife and young son, give up his career, and forget what the textbooks said -- in order to go off and decide for himself what was really important about human beings. For years he applied his growing insights to himself and the few people he counted as friends. Only after he published his first book in 1962 did he offer psychotherapy again, this time on much firmer ground.
Paul found it inconceivable to imagine a scientific study of human nature being undertaken on the basis of anything less than a deep love for humanity. You might certainly be able to find a cure for cancer without loving people, but you can't understand what love is until you experience it yourself. And he felt that a therapist or teacher must set an example of the advice he gave. So his new patients were much more than clients now: they were men and women he could love. He thought of them as his students, and found nothing unethical in becoming friends with many of them. His lovers, too, came from the ranks of these new colleagues.
Three themes predominate in Paul's teachings: creativity, homosexuality and polarity. He felt that personal growth was synonymous with learning how to live a creative life, at least for the kinds of students he wanted. But by creativity he meant not merely unleashing a talent to paint or to sing, but developing psychological resources in a much deeper way, a way that would lead to caring about people and about making a lasting contribution to society. Teaching creativity for Paul meant creating more love in people's hearts, and expanding their power to act responsibly toward their world.
Homosexuality is central to Paul's work because this most primeval love is still an unacknowledged need in the lives of most people, yet clearly an asset too great to leave off the balance sheet of human fulfillment. Haven't all men been loved by their fathers? Haven't all women tried to love their mothers? Having spent much of his adult life trying to adjust to a difficult marriage, Paul saw that our capacity to obey arbitrary rules about who we shouldn't try to love is a pointless obstacle to living life to the fullest.
And, just as Trotsky had observed that schoolboys who had once found the courage to defy academic authority later became leaders of the October Revolution, Paul saw that those who were capable of rejecting society's lies about sex were often better equipped to face its dishonesty and cowardice in other arenas as well. His counseling practice in New York's East Village confirmed his suspicion that, at least in his time and place, gay people were in the forefront of mankind's search for psychological liberation.
The idea of polarity for Paul is similar to Carl Jung's hypothesis of introverted and extroverted character types. If everyone is either introverted or extroverted regardless of whether they're male or female, then homosexuals can have relationships that are as truly mated as heterosexuals, for the simple reason that opposites attract. Seeing that the polarity between introverts and extroverts is the basis of all lasting mated relationships, Paul had already gone far beyond Jung. And since he liked to use ordinary words rather than psychiatric terminology, he decided to abandon "introvert" and "extrovert" and use "feminine" and "masculine" instead. To this day the very first mistake people make when hearing about Paul is to assume that he sanctioned culturally oppressive terminology, when just the opposite is the case.
Where Jung had gone on to muddy his analysis by dividing each of the two basic personality types into "thinking," "feeling," "sensitive" and "intuitive" subtypes, Paul had much more interesting questions to think about. Since society demands that men be "real men" and women be "real women," he wondered, just what happens to feminine men and masculine women? Indeed, what price had he himself paid in never acknowledging his own femininity before now? Paul concluded that, when they gave in to society's pressure to conform, masculine women ended up passive, obsessive and masochistic caricatures of true femininity. Feminine men likewise ended up aggressive, compulsive and sadistic caricatures of real masculinity -- they become the very guys who give power a bad name. This discovery shed great light on the age-old conflict between the individual and society, particularly between the individual's need to grow and society's need to be stable, and was the subject of much of his writings.
Paul found in his practice that surprisingly common psychological difficulties often stem from a simple failure to accept one's inner polarity, from trying to be what you just aren't. His patients sometimes reported startling progress in overcoming lifelong problems which previous therapists had seemed to regard as either incurable character flaws or "just human nature." He helped masculine women to get over their feelings of helplessness, and feminine men to "get under" their reckless behavior. Masculine men and feminine women were helped too, because they now had a better grasp of what healthy masculinity or femininity looked like -- untainted by society's misguided glorification of aggressive men and passive women.
Although Paul used ordinary words to describe human nature, he gave subtle nuances to the names he chose for qualities that were analogous between the types. Here are some of the "analogs" you can watch out for in the pages of this book:
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DEAN:
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How did you hear about the Ninth Street Center?
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FRANK:
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I saw the ad that was running in the Village Voice that said "Tired of the Bars and Baths?" That was fourteen years ago. Actually I saw two ads that day. There was an ad for a conference going on at Columbia sponsored by the Gay Academic Union or something, and there was the Ninth Street Center ad. Well, I went to the Columbia conference. And I was there only an hour before it reminded me why I had been thrown out of teaching. They had various conferences on various topics in various rooms. Somehow I mentioned the Ninth Street Center, and a lesbian psychologist who had a practice in the Village warned me not to go there. Obviously she had a lot to lose, but I didn't know that then.
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DEAN:
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What was the reason for her not wanting you to go to the Center?
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FRANK:
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That it was psychologically a dangerous place. She said it had done damage to a number of people she knew. So I had my guard up about coming down.
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DEAN:
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But you came down anyway. What did it sound like, what did it feel like?
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FRANK:
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First I couldn't find it, because nobody had said anything about it being downstairs in a basement. So I called and Mark told me it was down the stairs. And when I entered, there were Mark and Paul in the back by themselves hemming and hawing and farting and burping. Nobody said anything.
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DEAN:
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This was before the talk group had started?
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FRANK:
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Yes, and they were the only two people there. I sat down. I think one of them may have told me about coffee or something like that. Then other people began to arrive and the group got started. I was not impressed. It was not what I was anticipating.
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DEAN:
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Because it was a slow night, or because Paul was the only one talking, or . . .
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FRANK:
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Because of its simplicity. The thing that strikes me most about Paul was his overwhelming simplicity in life as in his understandings, getting down to that which is most simple, most basic in some way. I was overstimulated by this simplicity, by people standing around and not talking but just farting and burping and exhaling air. I don't think I had a fantasy about what it would be like, but having been to similar kinds of things I guess I expected name tags or people saying "What's your name?" or "Hi, welcome."
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DEAN:
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Or, "We'll make you feel like part of the family."
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FRANK:
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"We'll take the tension away."
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DEAN:
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"We'll make everything easy."
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FRANK:
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That first impression was in a way the most lasting, although I really haven't vocalized it, I don't think, until now.
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DEAN:
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Did that same feeling persist as the group started and Paul started talking? That it was unimpressive?
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FRANK:
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I don't want to be sounding like I'm defending myself here, but I think anyone that comes for their first time, comes with their own baggage. My baggage was "I know a lot." I think most people come in with that. We're not taught in any way, shape or form to deal very much with what we don't know in any kind of honest or courageous way. Our postures and our facades are all about what we know and what we understand, or what we can do and what we've done.
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DEAN:
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Our credentials.
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FRANK:
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Right. I was -- though not consciously -- doing what I would have done at any other meeting: I was saying, "Here's who I am. I know a lot." And that wasn't going anywhere. It didn't work. No one was impressed by that. No one was mean-spirited about it, especially Paul, but nobody said, "Oh, that's real interesting, you've lead a marvelous life, you're doing just fine." Instead, people would say things like, "Well, why did you come down? If everything's so fine, what are you doing here?" Not asked in a hostile way, but certainly with the intent of undercutting my facade. I now think that's what it's like when there's warmth present.
Paul had a great capacity to probe and confront. Not all the time -- there were times when he didn't really want that. But in open talk groups very often he asked such provocative questions of people that it literally pushed them back against the wall. And that happened several times to me.
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DEAN:
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Paul developed an ability to love ordinary people, knowing full well how ignorant and how undeveloped most of us were. He wanted to show through his warmth that he would love you in spite of your incompleteness and your deficiencies and all the credentials you didn't yet have. For me and for many other people, to experience that warmth and that love was a little disorienting.
I had an analogous problem to the one you had. I felt that I was very talented: I was musical, I was mathematical, I played chess, I was interested in the great books of the Western World. I felt fucked up, yes, but I wasn't prepared for anybody to just come out and say, "I know you're fucked up but I love you anyway because I see what you can become. That's what I'm good at." I think people who learned to use Paul's influence had to trust the fact that they didn't have to be wearing their medals in his presence. They could just be simple.
Did something prick your conscience to make you want to come back, or did you stay away after that since you weren't impressed?
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FRANK:
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Two things were going on after that, one very obvious and conscious and one subconscious. I didn't come very many times before Jurgen was at a group, who was like a definite "imprint." I don't ever remember him saying much at all, it was just that he was masculine. Masculine/feminine polarity was being talked around in the group, but I had no conscious registration yet of polarity or the fact that people were being talked to differently by Paul or that the topic of polarity was underlying everything.
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DEAN:
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You hadn't tuned into that frequency yet.
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FRANK:
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I hadn't had an opportunity. I was still going on everything I knew and trying to fit everything into that, bringing it around so that I could bring up some incident from my life that related to what was being said -- generally in some stupid way or ignorant way that didn't really relate or that exposed just parts of myself to the group. But anyway it was mainly because of Jurgen that I kept coming back. I wanted to see more of him. I was following an attraction, an instinctual biological kind of thing.
This is the way choice works, you see. Psychological choice does not work by saying, "Oh, my, this is a different world. I think I'll go back there because they're challenging me a lot and, although I don't like being challenged, it's real stimulating and they're asking important questions of me."
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DEAN:
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That all comes later.
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FRANK:
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Right. That you see only in hindsight. And it's parallel to choosing a homosexual lifestyle. You don't see it immediately. You look back and say, "Oh, yeah, women were treated differently than men and I probably noticed that."
So, the things that I can talk about in that area are all from hindsight. But I'm as sure of them as I'm sure that one has a choice about the lifestyle one's living. The subtlety that was going on was in the simplicity of the groups and their overwhelming psychological content, that people would sit for two hours and talk about such things.
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DEAN:
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And not mention movies or the gay bars.
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FRANK:
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Or if they did, relate them to their experience in terms of what they were trying to get away from, in terms of problems in their lives or how they were trying to lead a better life in some way. And this was just not in my world.
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DEAN:
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But you were in your thirties by then and you'd thought about life. You'd been living an unconventional life for years. Would you say that you had never had the opportunity to really focus inward in a psychological, consistent way?
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FRANK:
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Oh, definitely. My hedonistic bent protected me from that for a long time, because seriousness was grim. When my parents were serious they were not talking to each other.
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DEAN:
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Were you also "fighting the establishment" at your school jobs?
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FRANK:
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A lot of energy had been expended in investing myself in political importance. First of all in jobs, which my father had taught me, and then in terms of making it my own in some fashion by being rebellious in political ways, in the school district or the army or whatever the authority was. I had just come out of a relationship that had been modeled after my marriage basically.
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DEAN:
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You mean a gay relationship?
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FRANK:
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Yes, my first real gay relationship of any extent in time. It wasn't the first that wasn't purely sexual, but close.
I went to Paul once to see whether he would counsel me, and he asked about this relationship with Jim. I was giving a lot of details and he stopped me and said, "Was there love in that relationship?" And I thought to myself, "I don't know. I haven't thought about that. Why is he bringing this up?" It was just like him to cut through the crap.
Questions like that were asked in open talk groups, too. And not only by Paul. I don't remember them all. There was all this undermining going on: that's the way I would look at it. I kind of look at this now, when new people come in, in terms of How do I undermine here? And if I'm good and at my best, I do it with a lot of warmth, so they can swallow it. And if I'm not, they get my brittle pride.
That's definitely what was going on: I was being undermined. And it was very . . . stimulating, I guess is the best word. It had elements of "They'll know who I am," and other kinds of phobias like "What kind of secret cult is this? Where are the rules? Why are they all talking this language I don't understand? Why does it seem like a number of them know what they're talking about and I don't?"
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DEAN:
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Or, "Why is it that some people can say anything they want and nobody challenges them, but when other people say things everybody jumps down their throat?"
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FRANK:
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I left five or six times with the intent that I'd never go back.
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DEAN:
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Were you ever confronted personally?
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FRANK:
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Yes, by Little Eric of all people. The little seventeen-year-old whippersnapper zapped me good. I was talking about my straight friends -- I still had a few at that point -- and he asked, "Why are you holding on to them?"
It was very frightening for me to even entertain the idea of giving them up, because there was nobody else. My relationship with Jim had just ended and I was in fragile, fragile shape. This was my first failure in this realm and I didn't know why it had failed. In fact, it took me many years to figure that out.
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DEAN:
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Was that failure one of the reasons you started looking for stimulation at the Center?
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FRANK:
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Yes. It had failed in the spring and I had gone bananas with credit cards during the summer. I just had a great hedonistic time. And of course, those things run their course. It ended in the fall when other things were dying as well. Things looked pretty bleak. If you can't continue living the life of Riley, what are you going to do now? I had defended myself well over the summer but when one has gone so much in that sexual/celebrative direction, it's a big let-down to try to be simple.
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DEAN:
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When you say you went on a credit card binge, did you also get into a sexual promiscuity binge?
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FRANK:
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Oh sure, but that's been a part of my history for a long time. So that wasn't anything new.
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DEAN:
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Was that literally bathhouse kinds of stuff?
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FRANK:
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I don't think I was into baths. Mostly picking people up.
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DEAN:
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Where it was understood that you didn't want to see them afterwards?
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FRANK:
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No, not by me. It just generally worked out that way. My defense of promiscuity at that time was well structured. It had come from this idea of how males are sexualized in this society. Something about how if you go straight, you are arbitrarily pushed in the direction of monogamy. I probably talked myself into being bisexual all the way up to that first relationship with Jim. I had put myself in the bisexual category although I wasn't really that interested in women at all. The defense was that this was a good thing to do: you could explore this and you got it out of your system. It doesn't hurt anybody.
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DEAN:
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In those days, people generally thought sexual liberation meant promiscuity. "There's no reason not to have sex with a new person. It's healthy. We'll learn what it means through experience. Let's not inhibit ourselves just because people from the church wag their finger at us."
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FRANK:
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Well, this question from Eric was very direct and firm. I remember the tone of it more than the actual question. Something about, "Why don't you just leave these people behind?" I was livid. First of all, it was from a snot-nose kid. That was my attitude then, and it's real humorous now. I now think it's just fine for people to say about me, "Ooh, that bald old man, who does he think he is!"
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DEAN:
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Did you tell Eric where to go?
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FRANK:
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I probably got very quiet. But his question had its effect. It was legitimate. I may have been numb in many ways or ignorant, but I wasn't able to dismiss it as much as I tried. I would go back to saying "No, no, I can't go back there any more. Who do they think they are, snot-nose seventeen-year-old kids." But it had validity. One could not dismiss the question. It would always come back. That was probably November or December of '74 or '75. That February I moved to St. Mark's Place, just around the block from the Center.
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DEAN:
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You'd been living uptown?
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FRANK:
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Coming down from the Upper West Side.
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DEAN:
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Did you move just to be closer to the Center?
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FRANK:
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Definitely. I began counseling with Tony. To be quite honest, it was kind of a devious way to find out information about Jurgen, who I'd learned was his lover. Not totally, but that certainly was part of it; and I suspect Tony knew that. But also because Tony was vocal in groups then and made a lot of sense and was counseling other people. I really didn't know him well enough to know what kind of shape he was in then. Eventually, under Paul's advice, he gave up counseling about three months into seeing me, which was very shocking and disappointing.
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DEAN:
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When you stopped counseling with Tony, did you just go back to the talk groups and focus on that as a learning experience?
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FRANK:
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Once I realized this was a place I was going to come back to regardless of how straining it was, I wanted to be closer to it and closer to the people that I had already made some minimal contact with. Later I counseled with Tom and then Steve, but first I was going to groups a lot. I was probably pretty socially "promiscuous": I went to many people's groups, like most people do. And I knew there was something different about Paul's groups.
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DEAN:
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When did it occur to you that this man not only knew a lot, but had forged a synthesis of insights that constituted something new in the human scene? Or was that not important?
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FRANK:
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Oh, it definitely was, but only when I began to understand my own femininity, when that became real enough that I could begin to see who was masculine and who was feminine, not only at the Center but in the work world or wherever I happened to be.
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DEAN:
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When were you told you were feminine?
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FRANK:
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There were two periods of time when a space opened up in Paul's counseling schedule, and I got neither one. But finally I did get to see him. And I remember kind of whining about my difficulty identifying whether I was masculine or feminine. It was specifically in using the ideas in Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process. And I remember Paul getting kind of angry at me.
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DEAN:
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That was the first book of his you read?
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FRANK:
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Right. I would read one paragraph and think I was feminine, and then I'd read the next paragraph and I'd be masculine.
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DEAN:
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Like everybody else who reads Paul for the first time!
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FRANK:
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And I was reporting that to him, and he said, "Don't you know that even yet??"
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DEAN:
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He could be testy sometimes.
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FRANK:
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It was quite unfair in a certain way, and I was quite intimidated by him. Today I would say something like, "No, I don't know that yet. That's one of the reasons I'm here."
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DEAN:
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One of the reasons Paul was always throwing himself at masculine youths -- all of the people he courted at that time were in their early twenties -- was because he had a real burning anger towards anybody who looked anything like a professor. That's why he named his dog "The Professor." There may have been something about your demeanor which said, "I'm an expert too!" Or the attitude that some sanctimonious feminines have of, "I am what I am and don't need to be typecast." And Paul would have found that very hard to take.
After he dropped out of the professional world, Paul never got close to any really developed knowledgeable older feminines. The only feminine his own age he had in his later years was Doug, a very monk-like, subservient sort of guy with whom Paul could feel safe. I don't think he felt very comfortable with feminines who thought they could teach him something too.
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FRANK:
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Paul knew in some sense -- if not consciously at that point, certainly subconsciously -- that things were winding down for him. It wasn't too long after this that he basically stopped taking any new people at all. And not long after he wasn't doing groups any more.
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DEAN:
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He had a lot of people -- hangers-on who'd been in counseling for years -- that he ultimately didn't like very much and who ultimately didn't do very much with his ideas. In the early days, of course, Paul literally just took anybody. When he first opened his practice he took straight people. He hardly was selective at all. As long as they were young and open to being taught something, he didn't mind who they were. Then he became more selective, first taking only gay people, then taking only gay men.
I guess anybody who does any kind of work as a consultant, as you and I both do, wants to work in a situation that's comfortable. If you have a choice, you'd rather work with something that's esthetically more pleasing than just whoever happens to want to hire you, even though that's going to annoy the people you turn down.
But you must have interacted with Paul in talk groups or heard him speak in talk groups. When did you see that this was something earth-shattering? After all, it's one thing to find a group of people who gather around a good therapist -- if you believe that every large city has a dozen or so good supportive therapists -- but did you come to a point when you realized that there was something categorically different about this man?
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FRANK:
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I was just saying that when I saw Paul that first time I wasn't yet able to get in touch with my own femininity, to identify my own polarity. Well, although his reaction was abrupt, that abruptness had a payoff. It said, "This is important! This is where you've got to start."
I always had the sense that Paul liked me. I never felt that he didn't like me. I had some disappointment in not getting to counsel with him, but now I'm really glad I didn't. I think I would have just battled him because he would have been another authority.
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DEAN:
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Maybe he sensed that.
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FRANK:
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Knowing my history of idolizing thinkers, I would have just looked to him for answers. And that would have driven him up the fuckin' wall. I know how he would have responded. It would have been like his response to my "I don't know my identity, yet. Come on, you can tell me. I promise to be helpless if you tell me," his anger about, "Don't you know that even yet? Let's get working here. This is your life, not mine!" There was a lot of that behind it that I didn't see for a long time. And -- I don't know -- he may just have had gas that day.
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DEAN:
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I'm glad you're illuminating the fact that this was not a man to be idealized. One of the things that drives me crazy is when new people -- and some older members -- make him sound like a perfect god who could do no wrong. It wasn't usually the things he did that were worth thinking about and returning to, it was the things he taught.
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FRANK:
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You asked about when the "overwhelmingness" of his insights hit me. It never did. I don't think it does with most feminines -- not in the way that it might to a masculine. To find truth that's been hidden all the time is not surprising to me. It's seems very natural. It was very humorously correct, in fact, that all of this would be taking place in a basement on a little street in the East Village. When you look at the real history of the world and ask, "Okay, where in the world would the right place be to go for truth?", it would be a basement on Ninth Street. It would be some incongruous setting. It would not be some huge cathedral, it would not be some institution of renown. So there's almost for me -- and I'm guessing at other feminines -- this like sliding into it, a feeling of "Oh, yeah."
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DEAN:
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Paul used to say that if Jesus came back he would walk right past St. Patrick's Cathedral and come down to Sixth Street where he and I used to live and say, "So, how are things going with mankind?"
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FRANK:
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It was always much more ironic or even funny than it was the "Wow" kind of thing you're talking about. That may be your experience, you see, so I don't want to take it away or diminish it.
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DEAN:
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Well, the "awesomeness" of my own experience was actually twofold: the scientific objectivity of his insights, yes, but more importantly the fact that a man I could respect was willing to love me. It didn't matter whether he was Paul or anybody else. This was just something that was tremendously moving, something that I had always wanted although I didn't know it. And when I got it, I felt much better about being Dean than I had ever felt.
But I also feel qualified -- because I award myself the qualification, not because I have academic credentials -- to have the opinion that this very pure system is on a higher level and has a wider scope than the other systems available as yet. I haven't read more than one or two books on any one period of psychological thought, but it's clear that Paul evolved a very eclectic and very sound system. He didn't care who he learned truth from. It's heavily influenced by the Greeks, by Christianity, by the humanism he was exposed to at the University of Chicago. Some of his prescriptions for avoiding being overstimulated by the so-called real world come right out of hospital psychiatry.
But it's not a sloppy kitchen-sink kind of "everything you always wanted to know about human nature" system. He's thrown out all of the conventional magical baggage that doesn't work. And he doesn't pretend to tell people how to be more masculine or how to be more feminine, he merely says what happens when you do. And that's really a different kind of presentation than you might get, say, from a self-help book.
A lot of thinkers have tried to use their abstracting capabilities to come up with what you might call "a useful overview of everything," which is what philosophy usually degenerates into. If you look at somebody like Hegel, who's kind of the height of absurdity in this direction, you see a system which is all words and no matter. It's more and more about less and less. It has none of the simplicity that you were talking about before. Not only is Paul's work abstract to the degree necessary to be both coherent and comprehensive, but it is also true, it's also factual. It seems to state how things actually work rather than being science fiction in the form of psychology.
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FRANK:
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The more you talk about it, the more I believe that there is a difference between how feminines and masculines perceive that kind of thing. It's so much a part of my nature to have been searching for truth since my early years -- in reading, in college, in trying this and that, in getting married, and all of those things that I entered: psychiatry, psychology, the theater.
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DEAN:
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You entered psychology?
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FRANK:
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I mean in dealing with psychologists or psychiatrists who were treating me. All that experience really was just a part of a search which lead in most cases to dead ends. When I reached one that worked, you see, it was not so surprising because that's what I was doing: I was looking for something that would work.
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DEAN:
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You knew it was there. You just hadn't found it yet. Whereas I had no idea that these ideas could even exist.
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FRANK:
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It's a part of my nature to know that there is truth. So when I run into something that's true -- and Paul used to talk about this -- it feels like it's been there all the time. It's no great surprise. I just ask myself, "Why didn't I see this before?" Sometimes it's euphoric or there's a celebration to it. But it doesn't have the same resonance that I think it has in a person like you who's really dependent upon other people to bring it out. I'm always ordering things, so when an order is laid out in front of me by somebody else, what I do is try it on. And in this case I tried it on and it fit.
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DEAN:
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You're probably more aware of the incompleteness of it also, because it's much easier for somebody like me to just designate it as being the correct system. I never find a need to really question the system per se. I can always find a way to interpret new data within its framework.
When we first got together, I had trouble with Paul's personality because he could get moody and cranky. But even when I was fed up with him, I never doubted the truth of his system. I conducted a thought experiment after we had lived together for six months. I had actually broken up with him and moved out. I took a look at Love and Power or something and said, "Yep, it's still true. It's all true. I'm never going to 'get over' this stuff. Even if I never talk to Paul again, I'm always going to be using these ideas." Once I saw how true it all was I knew his irritability and recklessness were just noise that I didn't have to take seriously.
Another thing that told me that there was something both wonderfully true and yet almost entrapping or at least captivating about this system was that whenever I was angry with Paul and we were not getting along, I would use his concepts to think about our problems. I would say the relationship is too passive-aggressive, or "That was a sado-masochistic moment." And I would stop myself and say, "Think of how you're seeing this. You're still using his words. You're being the loyal student even when you're fed up with him personally."
I saw at that point that I had become completely Rosenfelsian. It was now just how my mind worked. It wasn't going to do any good to say, "Gee, I wish I could get away from this stuff." I was going to have that stuff in me forever. And this spooked me. I told Paul one day that I felt as if my brain had been washed -- but he didn't exactly appreciate the compliment!
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FRANK:
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His ideas are not as foreign to me as they sound when some people talk about them. It's in the nature of truth that, once it's passed on, it belongs to no one man. It doesn't have Paul's name on it. What he gave is mine to use as much as it is yours or anyone else's. It's not owned. I'm not ungrateful for the work that he did, but that only takes me to this moment. That can't be a stopping point. It has only taken on that quality to me when I've become a disciple and have tried to sell the system to others, mainly to hear myself talk or to impress myself with how much I know.
When you mention the incompleteness of this, I always have an underlying feeling of irony that this should be taking place at all, that this should exist: a place in a basement on Ninth Street, a community in the East Village. And the fact that most people who run into it reject it, or don't even hear it let alone reject it.
Most people don't even get to hear anything coming close to the truth that is in our words. I used to be so disappointed with that -- as you get at times -- getting caught up in proselytizing, in really not understanding why someone won't hear it. But nowadays it's very clear to me why people won't hear it. Truth is not something that can be force-fed. Somebody has to be looking for it or they're not ever going to see it. Never. You can't shove it. You can't force-feed it. That's why their dissatisfaction with where they're at is so key.
When I go to groups, what I try to ask is, "What level of dissatisfaction is being expressed here?" Often I can pinpoint this by asking a question like, "Well, why did you come down?" If somebody says, "Oh well, there was nothing else to do tonight," that tells me at once that I'm there to entertain them. Well, I'm not going to be entertainment. But I am going to shut up.
Now, if somebody says, "Well, I had a few lovers and it didn't work out. I was just looking around. I don't know what to do. I kind of don't like the way things are," then I say, "Oh, tell me more!" If they don't have that openness, you're just flapping your mouth. You're just jerking off in public.
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DEAN:
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I may be having a problem with that with someone I'm counseling. He's a very bright man and I tend to want to be stimulated by his brilliance. He knows he's feminine: he accepted my diagnosis instantly and didn't have any trouble with it. He's capable of asking interesting questions and is somewhat malleable and compliant. But it's not clear to me yet exactly what he wants from me. A lot of times he'll just come and talk about his little "adventures in dating" and bore me to death. We have to work on that. We have to figure out whether he really wants something from me or is just using me to convince himself that he's so bright that he can even master this Rosenfelsian system without thinking much about it.
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FRANK:
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One thing that Paul was so good at in open talk groups was cutting through the bullshit and just going for the heart talk. So a question like "What do you want from me?" in the midst of this chattering ought to silence him up. It would silence me or take it to another level, so to speak. It was that kind of question, the most obvious, that made it all so simple. When you look back on it, it wasn't like Paul sat there a long time thinking, "Now, what question will push this guy back up against the wall?" It wasn't that sadistic at all. It was very much a keen sense of listening to the person and knowing so much about defenses that he could just see what was coming at him, and just go around it.
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DEAN:
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Nor was it a matter of Paul giving such brilliant lectures that we would all love hearing every word. He would often be rather quiet. But when he spoke people listened because they found that he would say things that nobody else in the room knew how to say, or would dream of saying, but really hit home. I guess that's what a teacher is versus an entertainer.
I'm always looking for people who may be similar to Paul in their psychological writings and that I could include in this history of psychology I think about writing. Do you get psychological knowledge from any other books or writers?
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FRANK:
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I don't look for that so much. I look for applying what I know is true to what I'm reading generally, which is often fiction. If it's nonfiction, it's generally biographical or historical. Things like the new book on AIDS or Bonfire of the Vanities.
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DEAN:
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Did you have fun with The Lost Language of Cranes?
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FRANK:
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Yeah, I finished that and passed it on to Tony. Another book I like is Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, his follow-up to A Boy's Own Story.
It's real helpful to be able to see if a writer is feminine and, if he is, to empathize with a lot of his experience and be able to read him in a way that I wouldn't have before. It enables me to see his level of ignorance, his level of intelligence, how far it goes, what he knows, doesn't know.
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DEAN:
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Somebody who thinks we're just a cult might ask, "Well, Frank if you're so interested in psychological insights, which are available in the writings of other thinkers in the world, why aren't you looking through those other books? Or if you have, what other books or writers do you think are related in spirit and substance to Rosenfels? Do you find this such a satisfying system that you can imagine going no further?"
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FRANK:
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It's not that I won't go any further. But there's a simplicity to Paul's unraveling of the way things actually work in the human scene that I don't really expect to find anywhere else. It's really a kind of measurement of my own time. I've been around for quite a few years. I'm open to reading. I read lots of reviews. I keep my eye on things that are of a psychological nature. I often pick books up with lots of hope and throw them aside after ten minutes.
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DEAN:
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So this is really a categorically new kind of system?
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FRANK:
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Not until it's been absorbed more do I expect to see any other writings that would be of benefit to me or of interest. It's not that I don't read things.
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DEAN:
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This is interesting to me because of my current hobby of studying the history of psychology. You know, masculine scholars are really shameless in a way. They just collect data, and arrange the data, because it pleases them. It's like books on a bookshelf: there is no inherent logic to how the content of different books relate, so you simply establish your own convention, you know? 100 is reference, 200 is mythology, 300 is religion. But most books could go in two or more categories. So it's fun for a masculine like me to just arrange things and to know his own little private system, because it always works and who's to say it's not true? It has nothing to do with truth, it has to do with arranging and organizing things in a pleasing, consistent and useful pattern.
Maybe what a masculine historian does is draw lines from one thinker to the next or one event to the next without having to ask himself whether there actually was a causal link between the people or the times or whatever it is he's connecting. I'm sure I'll find these lineages to Paul if I go looking for them.
I'm going to give a talk in June at the Center on the history of polarity theory, just as an experiment -- really jumping off the deep end to see if I swim. I have a number of books that I can draw from which refer to polarity or constitute early versions of polarity theory. Jung really deserves a lot of credit. He wrote a book called Psychological Types in which he talks all about polarity. He really is talking about the real polarity, but he doesn't understand a lot about it. He doesn't understand how friendships evolve or why people mate, for starters. He's usually talking about a level of culture that's very shallow and superficial. It doesn't relate much to the kind of lifestyles that people at the Center have chosen, lifestyles of honest inquiry and real experimental courage, establishing new forms of truth and right at a human, simple level. But at least he would have wanted to understand this stuff, unlike Freud who was happy being cynical and famous.
But it's interesting to sift through this material, and I think a summary of some sort may encourage university people to approach Paul's work -- which I think is what Paul had in mind when he suggested I do this. People may see that Paul isn't simply coming out of left field, that there is a history of this kind of talk and that a lot of other people have seen it too. This could be a really constructive contribution for me to make some day.
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FRANK:
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Where Paul separates from these other thinkers, of course, is his incorporation of homosexuality into the picture, using his own experience. But when he says in his autobiography that he was laying in bed that night and said, "I'm feminine," that was an awesome moment. That's where everything started. Consciously. And it was from that point that all hell broke loose in his personality.
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DEAN:
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Let's be more explicit about that. There have been lots of thinkers and writers who we now know were homosexual. It's a big business now to prove that X or Y was homosexual. So you're not saying that it's enough to be homosexual. What we are talking about here is embracing homosexuality or celebrating it or -- well, what are we saying really?
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FRANK:
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Well I wouldn't dismiss the homosexual element at all, but actually I think the most important thing he said was, "I'm feminine." He didn't say, "I'm homosexual." It's actually the opposite of where I came from. I was homosexual and then found my femininity. Most of us have misplaced our identities into being homosexual or being heterosexual, when what we should be saying is "I'm feminine" or "I'm masculine." That's the real revolutionary idea.
But once you begin to explore what that means you see that the only way to explore that in the world we're in is to enter homosexual territory. We're not going to get a healthy heterosexuality till people come dragging through their own homosexual territory into something healthier. That's where Paul leaves everybody else behind. Yin and Yang is one thing, but these other people could not carry it through.
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DEAN:
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There was some awareness of polarity in ancient Greece. I'm sure Socrates knew he was feminine. He was always building up masculine youths the same way Paul used to, with little flattering asides and puffery. I don't think Socrates really talked about polarity though as an important thing. Although Socrates recognized that some men were going to be more vigorous and some men were going to be more philosophical -- as he was -- he never said that homosexuality was important to his philosophy. He never actually said that if you want to be a good philosopher and really understand human nature you have to explore your homosexuality.
Where Paul goes further is in saying that not only are goals like truth-seeking or loving people regardless of gender imprints good, but that they are connected. One really depends on the other. And if you're not good at loving people in the face of gender prejudices, then you are not going to be very good about studying what's really going on in the human psyche.
Do you still read Paul's stuff?
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FRANK:
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I haven't read anything recently. I've been staying away from that kind of stimulation.
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DEAN:
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Are you one of these people who's read everything he ever wrote?
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FRANK:
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I think I read everything at one point in time. I mainly use them now as a reference when my thought process needs some further stimulation or I get stuck on a point or I don't remember exactly how something goes.
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DEAN:
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There are passages that you go back to?
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FRANK:
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There's always something there.
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DEAN:
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I remember you saying once that you didn't like his style of writing.
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FRANK:
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It's not that I don't like it.
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DEAN:
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It's just very dry?
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FRANK:
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It's not even that it's dry.
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DEAN:
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It's like reading equations?
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FRANK:
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You have to be questing, searching, dissatisfied enough to look it up. It's like my walking into the Center that night. It doesn't say, "Welcome, everything is going to be fine." It doesn't say that at all. Maybe an attractive cover could create that illusion. We've often talked about putting nude men on the covers of his books!
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DEAN:
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What do you think turns a man into someone like Paul? Is it just latent in human nature to want to be severely dissatisfied with the world, and every once in awhile somebody like this comes along?
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FRANK:
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He was somebody who had the honesty to stick it through. Not somebody who says, "What do I mean, I'm feminine? Forget about this, I want some toast!" Part is his stoic nature. I don't think a hedonist would have done it. I think a hedonist would have said, "Oh, I think I'm feminine. Now I'll have some coffee and ice cream."
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DEAN:
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A hedonist might accept it and see it but not want to go out in the world and make a fuss about it or try to impress other people in print. Every year or so I used to hear about people who'd come in to his office and say, "Oh yeah, I've always known that I'm feminine," or, "Oh, I realized I was masculine when I had my first lover and he was feminine." It wasn't a big deal for them, and they didn't feel they had to write long difficult books about it, either.
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FRANK:
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It really goes back to that question of choice again, whether a person wants to take the time, initiative and strain of going back and thinking through their life. I've done this to some degree because it was fun a lot of the time.
The question is, can one say without looking any further back than where you are right now, "I choose to live this way, to lead a homosexual lifestyle."
This woman psychologist who was doing a study that I volunteered for asked me, "What does the word gay mean?" And I said I had some problems with that word. I really don't object, but I like the word "homosexual" better. She said, "How would you define a homosexual?" And I said, "Somebody who's chosen to lead a lifestyle of trying to love or take responsibility for someone of the same gender for clear and rational reasons that they can talk about."
That was the first time I'd ever vocalized it. I thought, "Wow, that sounds good. Yeah, I like that." Certainly as a serious homosexual, that's what I would say. They must be able to say, "I have chosen to lead this lifestyle because this and that and whatever." And then they can throw out to you their reasons -- which may be debatable as to whether they are rational or not, but must appear rational at least to the person saying them. And I can do that.
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DEAN:
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Your homosexuality is something you can feel proud of just as one would feel proud of believing in democracy or feeling that one excelled in one's profession or even that one had decorated one's house in a way that was appealing. It's something you've chosen to do, not something you are.
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FRANK:
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If you say, "I was born this way, I never had any choice in the matter, I'm making the best of what was handed to me," you're just in a helpless position. You're not going anywhere.
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DEAN:
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And there's really then no motivation to understand it in psychological terms. When people see a science fiction movie about some superior alien race, they don't go home saying, "Poor me, I guess I was just born to be an earthling." Of course, this is usually because Hollywood filmmakers aren't very good at understanding what a superior anything would look like, but basically there's nothing you can do once you've accepted the finality of something. There is nothing worth thinking about. It's only that which is changeable that is worth thinking about. Nobody I know bothers feeling sorry for himself because he doesn't have a brain twice the size that he does have. What would you do with that kind of self-pity? Paul believed the universe was probably swarming with superior civilizations -- that some of them might even have transcended time and space -- but that we humans have our job cut out for us right here on earth.
Do you think the feminines at the Center are developing the same kind of creative truth-seeking capability that Paul had, to the degree that they will be able in some way to add to his work?
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FRANK:
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I couldn't know, for myself even. Things often look these days pretty bleak psychologically, but I just know from my history that out of bleakness has come some very interesting states of mind and being.
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DEAN:
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Does it feel bleak just to you personally or do you see the whole Center community as being kind of bleak?
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FRANK:
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Oh no, it's me. It has nothing to do with the Center. My absence from the Center community right now is a choice that has to do with me and my mental health and it's no reflection on the Center. If there is bleakness at the Center, I don't know about it. It may be the phoenix rising. I'm not, in my bleakest moments, hardly ever pessimistic. I always can't wait to get up tomorrow.
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DEAN:
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Maybe in that larger sense you're talking about it wouldn't even be pessimistic to think of the Center winking out of existence. The books are out there, we're out there, and we may find some other context or setting in which to live this new way. We might find something else to do that is as important as having a Center.
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FRANK:
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It's hard to say. I really don't have any sense of what's been happening there.
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DEAN:
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I go down there about once every five weeks when it's my group. And I run the Study Group, which tends to be about three people, although last time we had five. I go to the board meetings and I do the Publishing Committee stuff.
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FRANK:
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I hear there's been some new people.
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DEAN:
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I guess there's always new people. I haven't really talked to anybody who sounds like a committed truth-seeker, though.
I'm starting to think that it does us no good to get these books out to other cities. It may only be one person in a million who can pick up on this stuff unless they are actually with a community of people who are working with it.
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FRANK:
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I'm pretty much caught up by the state that I'm in or have been working through. If I have any criticisms of the Center I don't even know how to define them. I know that the realness of Paul's work is made alive by people living it -- made real, made truthful or right. And that's where we're failing, many of us. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't be. But that's where it counts. It doesn't matter how many books are distributed, or how many people have read them. If you can't live up to it in some kind of way that you can respect, then you should do something else for a time. That's kind of the state I'm in. This is a result partially of my last courtship.
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DEAN:
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Isn't that putting too much importance on what that relationship was all about for you?
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FRANK:
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It has raised all kinds of really profound questions and avenues for me to explore. I can get into a state where I can dump it all on him, but I'm not intent on doing that because I know it's not true. But in some sense, through that experience, I suffered a great loss of faith. It was very damaging. I'm not saying that he caused me a great loss of faith. He has some responsibility in that, I had some responsibility in there. Nonetheless, wherever it came from, it came in some kind of really disabling ways at times.
If a feminine doesn't have faith, there's nowhere to go. I'm real good in talk groups and I know I do that well. But here I was in this situation with this other man that failed. And that seemed much more important to work on than to be able to go down there for the sake of boosting my pride up for an hour or two by impressing all these people. I saw the falseness of it, that it would be really detrimental. These people might even benefit from my participation, but I wouldn't. I'd get intimidated into thinking that it was really important.
I'm seeing a guy who lives in New Orleans who I met while traveling last summer. I was down there the last time at Christmas. He was supposed to come up but he got sick. It's wearing thin because you can't do too much long distance, but I'm still considering going down there for an extended period of time.
This only came about in a way because of being able to separate myself from the Center in that sense. If I had been going to open talk groups and connected, I would have really felt like I was leaving something. I don't really think that's the way the Center works. As a Center person who really believes in Paul's work, there is a certain part of me that says people have to be allowed to have their experiments regardless of where it takes them or how bizarre it seems.
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DEAN:
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Growth is bigger than loyalty to a community. If something is true, people will use it. If it's not true, they won't use it. If this information has helped people live better lives, they will live those better lives wherever they go. If somebody wants to ask them how come they're living such a better life, they can say, "Well, I knew Paul Rosenfels, and here's a book I have, and we could talk about it if you want." There's no reason this information can't be shared between people if there's a genuine motivation to do it, and conversely, if the information isn't being shared it's because there is a good reason for it: because it hasn't been made real to them or because it's not good enough yet. We need the next teacher after Rosenfels for that student, or maybe just a century of this information trickling down into what the average educated person knows about science.
I don't get involved in encouraging people to stay at the Center. Maybe it's just because I'm kind of detached and never was a family-oriented person, but three years ago when Tony was thinking of moving to New Mexico, I just got very excited about it and said, "Oh boy, let's talk about what you are going to do there." He wanted to start a Ninth Street Center in Santa Fe. And I thought, I don't think there's anything wrong with this: it may be about time that somebody decided this stuff was important enough to divide the Center and conquer the world. What do they call it when amoebas split?
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FRANK:
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Mitosis.
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DEAN:
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So maybe it's time somebody did that. I don't regard anybody dropping out of the Center as being necessarily a cop out. It's very convenient for some of us to be catty and say, "Oh sure, he stuck around for awhile, but where the hell is he now?"
Well, we just don't know where he is. He might be in a very much better place for him. We can't really know about things we're not in contact with.
I just don't know if a lot is really going on at the Center that "lives up to" the kind of stimulation we were offering one another ten years ago. I don't know why this is. There may be very simple sociological factors. Maybe if you want more stimulation you have to have more people than just the same old twenty faces after ten years.
Do you think we'll be here in five years?
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FRANK:
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I have no idea. But the idea of polarity won't go away. It might be covered up again or not seen for a period of time. We may not be the ones who bring it into the forefront in the early experiments. It may be that we'll die out and somebody else discovers it and starts some other group somewhere else or does something else with it.
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DEAN:
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That would be a loss for all those people who didn't get to learn this stuff, but it's not a tragedy for us, because we got to live better lives because of it. So we should feel fortunate. If those other people are not prepared to open up to it, we shouldn't feel as if it's our cross to bear.
Sometimes when he's lost confidence in himself, Bob -- who has done more than anyone else except Paul's brother Walter to promote Paul's books -- really believes it's our duty to slave and "rededicate ourselves with enthusiasm" and all that stuff. And I just don't see what you get at the end of it, except maybe a stupid Nobel Prize. The fact that when you're eighty you're going to hobble up to some podium somewhere and some bureaucrat is going to put a medal around your neck and say, "Yeah, kid, you did good," leaves me less than wildly enthusiastic.
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FRANK:
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It's a question of Bob seeing his importance. You and I know that Bob would be much more important to each of us as an individual if he would control his compulsive do-gooding. That would have such importance to us. That would really affect our lives and have repercussions everywhere. If he could stop assaulting people with free literature when they came in the door it would have a positive effect. It would affect my respect for him and his ability to exercise self-control. It would have all kinds of repercussions. That's where it gets down, for me, to the nitty gritty. It's not so much what you can say in the open talk groups, it's what life you're living.
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DEAN:
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One of the things that helps people is seeing how empty the administrative work at the Center is. Half of the people who have gotten to be President have dropped out of the Center after one or two terms. I think it taught them that official power wasn't important; what's important is what's going on in their lives. And I guess half of them decided that they were willing and able and interested in pursuing what was going on in their lives, while the rest didn't, at least not at the Center. It may even be that some of those who dropped out didn't have anything else going on inside of them, and so becoming President was a demoralizing experience, similar to what you were saying about your last relationship. You really had to look very deeply, in ways that you hadn't before, at yourself and your life and what you were doing.
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FRANK:
|
I guess it's easy for feminines to point at masculines and say, "Look! Clay feet!" I don't guess, I know. But there is an element in truth in saying that. And I wish the masculines could use the groups to talk more about their guilt and their immorality and their clay feet, because that's where the work needs to be done.
If I could talk more about my shame in open talk groups I'd say, "Now, here I was trying to love a man. And, when he was involved with someone else sexually, I let my own understanding of what was going on get in the way of being able to assist him because I knew 'the answer' and therefore couldn't ask the questions. All I could do was give answers. And he had to really turn to somebody else for counsel, someone who could basically just objectively ask the questions. I couldn't be objective. I carry a certain amount of shame for that."
And I'd like to hear him talk about the other side of that, where I would say his responsibility was. "I was attempting to take responsibility for someone, and their surface form got in the way. The way they look did not fit my image of who I could take responsibility for." I firmly believe that was the foundation of his problem. I didn't fit his image of a lover. It's not the first time I've run into that with masculines, so it's kind of familiar to me.
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DEAN:
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What do you think made it possible for me to accept Paul as a lover, given the age difference and the lack on my part of romantic interest?
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FRANK:
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You wanted it.
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DEAN:
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I guess I had such a great need to be loved that if some giant lobster from the ocean had come ashore and said, "I'll love you," I probably would have gone back into the ocean with him. Is this real powerful hunger for love from a man something you learn, do you think?
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FRANK:
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Hopefully.
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DEAN:
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Let me ask you a question about methodology. You've said that the feminines don't come down and talk about their shame and masculines don't come down and talk about their guilt. Instead, we entertain the new people or are entertained by them. Yet, it's always been the case that closed talk groups have been nothing but trouble. In the first year, Art had a closed talk group that a lot of serious and good people came to, and nothing happened but arguing. They all believed in Paul's ideas, and yet they were just exhausting themselves. Paul even didn't understand why this was happening.
I guess we would say now that you shouldn't argue yourself into exhaustion with a bunch of overstimulated people. That's fine. But what I see happening at the Center in the last ten years is that the level of stimulation between people has so gone down that I don't see very many people using one another for psychological stimulation at all, practically. It's like we're all on a permanent vacation.
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FRANK:
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I don't know what's happening in their personal relationships, but I just suspect from my own knowledge that that's where the real learning and progress is taking place. Not that one can't grow in other ways when one is not involved or committed to a relationship, but it's just heightened in those situations. And just because you or I don't see it doesn't mean it's not happening.
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