Almost all of the emphasis in the preceding discussions has been on form, structure, what could be characterized as “masculine.”  What, then, of the other half of the picture - the more nebulous, perhaps “feminine” side?  From when does the energy itself come that infuses with life our elaborated superstructures which we so proudly erect?  To the far-reaching but narrow masculine viewpoint the problem of matter, material, or Maya has always been a source of great annoyance, a stumbling block. Except for materialism in its gross physio-chemical form, we have little concept.  Our concept of being is such a one; yet even ontology is often formalized past the point of its essential character of Maya by the very act of thinking about it.  How the spirit becomes incarnate, how the word becomes flesh, we have little idea.  Yet part of our central problem in guidance is this very aspect.  Although Western Psychology has some vocabulary in this respect, the paucity of actual knowledge or even understanding is amazing. We do speak of motivation and emotion, of passion as the energy aspect of behavior.  We do recognize the place of reinforcement or reward and punishment in our psychology of learning. We do speak of the place of “depth” or emotional insight in the therapeutic situation.  And great religious thinkers and even scientists often comment on the illuminated experience which accompanies the creative insight or intuition.  But, on the whole, the problem has failed to remain in our focus.

In traditional cultures the problem of emotional depth support rarely goes beyond that which the family - especially the mother - can provide.  The one great exception to this might be the caste system.  The almost universal appearance of matrilocalism, if not matriarchy, seems an important phase in psycho-cultural evolution.  Even in more advanced cultures we still refer to mother earth and motherland.  The majority of the people in the present age have as the primary focus of devotion some sense of the (W)holy Mother - be it that of the Virgin Mary of the Catholic church, or Kannon of Buddhism, or Kali-Durga of Hinduism.  Indeed, it is curious that in Protestant Christianity, Judaism, and Islam there is nothing immediately comparable.  One is tempted to ascribe certain characteristics to these latter as a result.  I have wondered if the repetitively feudal character that strikes us today about so many of the countries of Islamic Middle East, with its recurrent but ever-changing dictatorships does not result from what appears as this curious absence of the maternal aspect.  The two main Islamic empires have rested essentially on the body of Mother India and that of the early Mother-Church in its form of Sophia in Byzantium.  Both conquests produced cultural flowerings that are amongst our greatest human achievements.  Protestant Christianity, probably in compensation, is responsible for much of the exaggerated materialism that characterizes the Western world today.  It sought its reinforcement in matter and created the major changes that characterize the technological and industrial revolution. Yet today it is often remarked that Western man is empty or hollow and profoundly anxious.  We lead highly theoretical lives but are greatly dissatisfied in ourselves.  We have far-reaching plans but find our condolence in drink and sex.  Judaism, since the Diaspora, has no existence independent of a somewhat cruel or indifferent stepmother of Christianity or Islam.  For the Jewish individual the mother has had to serve the double function of true mother and universal mother.  Indeed, the very recognition of the role of “motherness” in the West is to the credit of Judaism through the insights of Sigmund Freud and Eric Neumann.

The wife in all cultures has also served in part this maternal role to her husband. She surrounded, protected, and encouraged him whenever he faltered.  She “understood” him, so to say, gave him an emotional foundation.  This is a role which for many decades now the Western woman has more and more resented and rejected as she has striven for equal “independence” and recognition as an individual in her own right.  The result is a still further sense of insecurity, for not only the husband but the wife and children as well.  Many a man has no “home” to come home to at the end of a day.  As the modern woman demands more and gains more freedom she is unable and unwilling to offer the supportive and relatively undifferentiated restorative functions she used to have for her children and especially her husband.  Indeed in many families where both husband and wife are professional workers, the husband may emotionally support the wife as hers is the newer adventure.  The relation of the two is often just sexual.  The “home” has become a ‘house’ in American slang terms.

Yet, somehow one doubts if there will ever be a return to just the family as the exclusive source of energy and support.  The world is now too small physically and too vast psychologically to rest just on the family.  What was historically the role of wife and/or mother need not for us be the only source, providing that we recognize the necessity for and the nature of what it was that the wife-mother gave.  Although the Chinese and Japanese conception of Kwan Yin (Kannon) is today feminine, the original person on whom this conception as goddess was based was a man - a saint, the first Bodhisattva.  It has been the major role of any saint to serve this function.  Repeatedly it has been demonstrated to be a non-sexual or extra-sexual form of love - agape which we all have for each other - perhaps the true origin of universal brotherhood.  For the world of the future this role must be amplified and multiplied.  For the immediate present, as we are in transit between the “mother” world of the ancients arid that of the still unknown future, the reinforcing role - the energy restoring role - becomes that of the few whose professional interests have brought them unexpectedly to this function.

Perhaps this talk could better be labeled, “Why a man is needed in the guidance process”?  Why is not information sufficient?  After all, a good bit of our judgment will be based on the results of machine-scored tests, communiqués are issued, pamphlets and maps and guidebooks can be offered.  Tables can locate an individual’s test results as to relative place and rank in the total population often more accurately than the more fallible human memory of the personnel officer.  Computers can be programmed to reveal the complex interrelations and correlations among variables far more efficiently than any one individual and scores can be made available and intelligible to a testee by automatically printed instructions.  Students taking placement tests are usually furnished their results by a printed chart showing their exact location relative to their proper test population.  This method of score reporting may communicate more graphically and firmly to a person than a counselor who may inadvertently communicate to a crestfallen applicant a false hope in his voice.  Or often a note of disparagement creeps into the vocal announcement of less than but near perfect result. For certain kinds of information giving the objectivity of the printed page, a graph or dial can do a better job.  A person can often accept emotionally the fact of his position relative to his peer group population with the degree of anonymity such a method of communication provides.  The success of even teaching machines for certain rigorous logical processes such as mathematics or the arbitrariness of details of our languages are further examples of the value of a non-human encounter that have recently developed in our field.  Why should the folk-established arbitrary vagaries of English spelling, Hindu writing, or French verbal irregularities to be a source of social embarrassment to a student?  Why should a foolish mistake in logic be also socialized in degree of shame? So also the acceptance of one’s intelligence quotient for what it is - and to a degree its meaning in terms of professional or occupational or scholastic level - is first one’s own business.

I cannot help think of the ease with which the following somewhat irreverent examples of a personnel service from another place and perhaps another age could be automatized.  In Buddhist temples in the Far East one of the earliest examples of prediction devices, derived originally from the ancient I Ching, the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yang-Yin technique of forecasting the auspiciousness of undertakings, still is used.  A cylinder containing sticks on each of which is one of the sixty-four possible combinations of Yang and Yin marks along with its appropriate file number is vigorously shaken.  One is then allowed to fall out of a small hole that permits emergence of only one at a time.  This is handed to the priest who takes the appropriate printed prediction from a large file cabinet with like number of drawers.  The individual then reads his forecast or, if blind or illiterate, hands it to the priest for reading.  Fortunately for him his culture permits him to buy another draw if it displeases him, providing that he ties the first one (or ones) to a tree hoping that the gods will not connect it with him.  Our clients can similarly go to a different agency or request revaluation.  We see many going from agency to agency.

Of course the individual often wants or needs further information to fill in the cracks and fissures overlooked or unanticipated by our evaluation and prediction devices.  But equally important, if not more so, the act of counseling in the face-to-face situation symbolizes and actually expresses the human community in general.  I may read that people do this or have done that, but my impression is much richer and deeper when I see and hear another person do it or speak of it.  If I too have done such and such, I feel less alone to speak with another.  When I am expected to do something, it helps that others too have done before or do now too.  How much easier to bear calamity with others and how difficult when the disaster is ours alone to bear!  How wonderful to share a joy, and how empty a solitary triumph is.  Of, course the rare solitary genius often bears the burden alone but we also remark about the distortions of personality the self-reinforcement of genius so often produced.

The best guidance - as spiritual leaders have often noticed – is, of course, leadership.  The example set before our eyes is one of the clearest statements of the humanly possible we can experience.  “Coward take my coward’s hand,” said one poet. How much better we feel in a strange land when a guide smoothes our initial encounters.  We often present the standardized pattern but yet one is grateful of the path he shows to us.  A young lad may have read all the books available about sex but how much better when he can speak about his concerns with a mature adult.  A laboratory exercise works better often after a previous demonstration and certainly if the laboratory instructor is at one’s elbow.  Language lessons with a teacher go better than with just a tape recorder or a phonograph record.  This is all so obvious as to not require elaborations.  Yet, when we encounter a stranger on territory familiar to us it is often difficult to realize the degree of non-confidence and hesitation with which the stranger proceeds upon the new direction or opportunity.  And if my first talk has any truth value then we must all expect to be strangers more and more to each other’s familiar situations.  Although we have been together for these many sessions we still feel that little hollowness, uncertainty and anxiety about each other and certainly about the task ahead.

Sigmund Freud was one of the first in recent times to treat the problem of psychodynamics seriously.  The obvious is always so much taken for granted that only the rare genius seems to see for itself and restore it for human consideration.  Freud was concerned chiefly not with the primary form of guidance which I consider as leadership but with the therapeutic situation where the individual seems to have fallen so far behind that the question of leadership seems hardly the paramount question.  Yet the very nature of the relation of therapist and patient ultimately revolved about exactly this problem but now in the reduced level of the original parent-child relationship. Freud discovered and began to write about what he called the transference relationship. This was the interchange of libidinal (love) attachment between doctor and patient that occurred and through the long analysis grew and grew often to embarrassing proportions.  Many of Freud’s patients were exactly from that group of well-to-do but idle young unmarried women mentioned earlier and who in those days in the gay Vienna of Franz Joseph undoubtedly had many sexual grievances, especially that of insufficiency in both their own and lovers’ eyes.  A seemingly romantic attachment was not only possible but likely under the circumstances of the prolonged, private and intimate discussions.  Gratitude for the beginning of alleviations of often painful but usually discouraging and distressing symptoms was only the first step to he manifest by a young woman with often no better object for attachment than her physician.  His almost magical powers must have made him seem doubly attractive.  But it was the genius of Freud to see in the therapeutic relationship a necessary recapitulation of the earliest human community relationships, the infant’s family.  Hence, Freud’s emphasis upon the libidinal nature of the infant’s development and its attachment to parents, especially of the opposite sex.  This extra attraction between mother and son, father and daughter - and the often conscious sense of rivalry and jealousy between son and father, daughter and mother often to the dismay and surprise of all concerned - become the cornerstone of Freud’s thinking.  These social-sexual relations also become part of the therapeutic situation and indeed if they failed to develop there was usually no progress in the course of therapy.  Their appearance in the therapeutic relationship heralded the depth of emotion at which patients were willing to reveal themselves and to “work through” their difficulties.  As long as people merely talked about or intellectualized their problems, there seemed no release, no relief, no change in symptomatology.  Indeed, the defenses often grew.  Endless repeated sessions often resulted in little change and so psychoanalysis became something for exceptionally rich ladies without responsibilities.  It still is essentially of this group, as the Boston survey has shown.

But occasionally a break occurred, the psychologist would be addressed accidentally as “father” - and from the depths of one’s being old misinterpretations, attitudes, misunderstandings began to appear for conscious consideration and the psychologist found himself as a true father or mother under the circumstances and as such exercised the leadership and authority to once more point the way in a more health-reinforcing and open direction.  My own experience with large numbers of neurotic rats has for me amplified this pattern.  The best “treatment” is to essentially recapitulate the original human directing functions of the orienting training sessions. The human, of course, may actually dream the psychologist to be father.  A child patient will call a doll both father and doctor in a play session.  Once these reactions come forth there is a beginning openness to further reinforcement by information, reassurance, sympathy and even a severe scolding has been administered with success, to a newly open and no longer primarily defending patient.  Yet usually such well-meant advice, warnings, or even neutral knowledge - outside of the context of the problem the individual basically faces in his own mind - rarely helps and often overlays and hinders the revelation of the original sources of the difficulties.

Freud also noticed the opposite type of attachment - that of doctor to patient. This he terms “counter-transference” and is also one of our concerns, for it exercises a severely limiting influence on our therapeutic capacities.  For example, there are many tired and discouraged doctors who do little to stimulate the emotional reactions of the patients.  Others are not much better than ghouls or voyeurs whose only emotional life is what is taken from the patient whose life experiences give the poor doctor his only opportunity for adventure and fulfillment.  Some well-meaning but lazy psychologists do not really encourage more than verbal intellectual patter.  Often their own emotional or economic difficulties interfere with a basic openness to the patient.  One senses almost immediately if the psychologist is really listening or taking notes on a good case history for his next book.  Often many a therapeutic relation is spoiled by a doctor’s involuntary expression of shock at the patient’s difficulty.  The pitfalls are many.  The therapist may be the wrong sex for maximum effectiveness, given the particular pattern of a patient’s history.  Or there is often just no common ground for a true meeting of minds.  Recent evaluations of therapy have reported most discouraging results.  There often seems to be little better than chance results.  Yet, when results are obtained the patient reports a sense of being understood, accepted, a feeling that some one opened a door in his life often for the first time.

Where therapy does seem to occur there have often been some aspects of similar or shared experience in the therapist’s past or to which the therapist has had access in some unusual way.  For example, John Rosen in his direct analysis technique employs as psychiatric assistants former patients who have been “through it” already and who have improved.  This seems to be part of the reason behind the partial success of group therapy.  In Alcoholics Anonymous former alcoholics offer their services on a “stand-by” basis to the newly recruited and still shaken members and are available to older backsliders.  This technique is now being used for those who are former drug addicts, or attempted suicides.  In the “half-way houses” (as they are often called) where former institutionalized patients are given the opportunity of trying once more in more worldly activities, the presence of more successful patients serves to reassure those first very exposed anxious days.  The psychiatrist in private practice also occasionally encourages association among those of his patients who are facing similar difficulties.  Often what has been a private difficulty seems to be a public social problem.  But the ultimate exercise of the counter-transference is still between counselor and client.  If this fails there just is no therapy.

Yet occasionally, external circumstances can exert a profound but unexpected influence of a transference type nature.  One of the most remarkable and dramatic evidences for something like transference is now being produced by some of the hospital volunteer projects now manned largely by college students.  One such recent report has shown what the untutored, infectious enthusiasm of youthful volunteers can accomplish among the often hopeless and seemingly terminal cases in our public mental hospitals.  Our best public sector hospitals are often little more than “holding operations” where people are sent when too poor to pay for more adequate help or judged as hopeless at least within the limits of the family resources.  Here they at least no longer harm the members of their immediate families and neighbors and themselves. Here, their immediate physical needs of clothing, shelter, and food are met and their physical health is controlled to some degree.  These hospitals are badly understaffed at best, and the typical staff will usually have twenty general physicians for each psychiatrically-trained doctor.  For the mentally ill seem to have more than their share of such ailments as flu, colds, stomach ailments and infectious diseases and also receive much corrective surgery.  The results before the introduction of the tranquilizing drugs from India were as depressing for the patient as for the occasional visitor.  However, the great popularity of psychology on college campuses (the most common major on many) began to produce requests from the students at first to see the “insane” but also to visit the mental hospitals.  Often, these requests were prompted by morbid or ghoulish curiosity and were refused.  I can remember the great relief I felt when excellent sound movies became available to demonstrate in classes the various types of mental illness, but “safely.”  But still the pressure grew from the students to “help.”  Often, many students found part-time employment as “aides.”  In the hospitals catering to the very rich, much abuse was put upon well-meaning students by patients who treated them as servants, as lackeys, peons.  The student fared better but little so in the public hospitals. Here they were permitted to work as ward attendants but, because of their part-time employment, were often locked away with the patients for the night by the busy, overworked staff who had little time for careful supervision in the utter impersonality of the overcrowded hospitals.  It was hard to tell an anxious volunteer from some of the patients.  These first volunteers went about their tasks (when someone thought to give them one) with considerable apprehension which, as communicated to the patient, wrecked the morale of both.  Often, these students were used as aides to bring patients to and from shock therapy sessions which brutalized both the one in an already strained body, and spirit of the other as witness and participant to the desired convulsive seizures.

But with the advent of tranquilizing drugs the scene underwent a dramatic change.  The patients become more tractable and the staff less scared and defensive about their essentially restraining role.  And with less to worry about, the hospitals began to admit the student (often unpaid) volunteers who, finding less to be afraid of, opened up.  The result was a large number of healthy young men and women on an enthusiastic self-fancied errand of mercy coming to help keep the now tranquil but bored patients busy.  The very enthusiasm of these young spirits improved the patient-staff relation from mutual distrust and harassment to almost cordial cooperation.  The physical damage - the byproduct of shock treatment - began to abate as it was found less than helpful and more time could be devoted to the psychological aspects of the patient.  The result has come to be more releases of patients with renewed courage and confidence.  Of course, the passage of time also eliminated many of the precipitating problems stemming from home, family and jobs.

That this is an excellent example of part of the general problem of counter- transferences seems perhaps apparent only to me.  The students are not “doctors” - they have no skills, they do little that actually helps of a concrete nursing nature.  They especially do not “do psychology” at the patients.  Rather they are primarily warm, lively and affectionate individuals acting as individuals whose hopeful enthusiasm seems to recharge the tired social atmosphere of the hospitals.  Theirs is an effect of a basket of kittens, gombling lambs, tail-wagging furry puppies, flowers bursting into bloom.  They act despite any high-sounding purpose they may conceive to be their function to show that life is possible to the discouraged and defeated.  They restore to undifferentiated life.  They act much as the undifferentiated yolk in the egg nourishes every creature through its embryological development.  Paul Tillich calls this “faith,” Gabriel Marcel calls it “hope.”

It is strange to realize that in the last four decades several new techniques for the amelioration of psychological disease have given up to 90% success in their first few years, only to fail after a few more years.  Each in turn was acclaimed as the cure at last. Metrazol, insulin shock, psycho-surgery, electroshock did really succeed at first in the hands of their discoverers, and in those of their immediate disciples.  Then evidence concerning post-treatment disabilities began to accumulate to our shocked disbelief. Pneumonia was a frequent by-product in insulin treatments.  The profound contractions produced by Metrazol convulsions often snapped bones, especially the spinal processes, and treatment had to be terminated.  Electroshock at first was also too powerful in its effects on muscles and bones and tendons.  Psycho-surgery was of course known to damage the brain - a calculated risk to be used only in the most hopeless cases.  And as the postmortems came in on those patients who chanced to die early, brain damage was revealed in most of the cases treated by “shock” techniques. Up to 100% of the cases evaluated have been so reported as these studies accumulate. So enthusiasm for these shock treatments wore off and so, strangely, the effectiveness of the treatment.  Now, from the perspective of several years, the enthusiasm with which the treatment was administered seems to have been the major factor in the initial successes.  Today hardly any of these shock treatments remain in the therapeutic repertoire of our more progressive institutions.  Electroshock has been severely modified and limited.  Contagious enthusiasm and leadership evinced by the sincere and honest men who pioneered these therapeutic techniques seem now to he the chief factor.  These physicians seemed so sure at first their very confidence helped.

Of course, counter-transference has its absurdities - its unfortunate consequences, as well, and it would be unfair not to mention them.  Many of the psychologists and analysts have damaged their own personal lives and that of their patients by an unwise degree and direction of transference.  Many have married their patient to the later regret of each.  F. Scott Fitzgerald caught this dilemma in his novel, Tender is the Night, for Fitzgerald too had married a “patient” in the “good old days” of the twenties when everything seemed possible.  He, too, was partly destroyed in the process.  Utter emotional exhaustion from giving to a succession of patients force most practitioners to limit their efforts to a few well selected patients at a time.  There is a Chinese adage that “He who saves a life from suicide becomes the owner of that life.” What can be done with someone who has no one else?  Just as vocational guidance may be futile in times of mass unemployment, so a saved life is yours to guide, to place, to cherish.  Many a psychoanalyst develops a train of devotees, not unlike the guru.  One sees patients vacationing where their doctor goes, eating at the restaurants he frequents, and using his tailor.  Too often, patients fail to outgrow emotional dependencies on doctors.  Here, group therapy has helped to widen the horizon of the patients and turn some of their attention to each other and to the world at large.  Often they just form a “club.”  Yet, sometimes where a number of patients with similar problems (but not necessarily symptoms) come together a social problem which can be approached as such can be seen to emerge.  So once again, we face not just the failure of an isolated individual but a basic failure in religious and cultural design as mentioned in our first meeting.  Erich Fromm has recently drawn the attention of all of us to the necessity of facing our problems as social problems, as well.  As a social problem, it becomes the public responsibility of those who would lead the way and that means each of us.  And worse yet, any of us may fail in a similar way in the next cultural shift, as mentioned earlier.  One in twenty in the United States spends some time already in a hospital for acute psychological disabilities and it is estimated that one in five would benefit by some help over an acute emotional crisis.

Although the foregoing account has emphasized transference in the therapy of those more serious cases which we label neurosis and psychosis, the personnel service officer often faces similar acute crisis but of lesser extent and duration.  From a psychological point of view the problems differ in degree rather than in kind.  It would thus be worthwhile to investigate the process and problem of any guidance situation.  If an act is already adequately presaged by its predecessor one merely continues to do approximately as one did before.  We have a habit, we say.  Slight modifications usually obvious within the context of the problem enable continuance.  Thus, the clerk, the machine operator, the traditional functionary as mentioned in the first discussion.  The goals and habits required are within the frame of reference of tradition.  We generally worry only about skill and perfection of achievement, not about worth or relevance. Little guidance beyond additional information is required.  But the post industrial situation is becoming more and more a matter of shifting ways and goals for which previous training can be not only inadequate but deleterious.  Otto Rank said, “We are not even neurotic yet” because he envisaged a society or age beyond the present that he termed “creative.”  This would be an age where many Buddhas would be needed, a culture which also aimed at the creation of the bodhisattva as a way of life.  This would be the platonic dream of the philosopher king, the time of the true Brahmin, the guru.

In terms of our present problem, anything new becomes the occasion for anxiety as much as for the exhilaration of creativity.  Anxiety is the price of freedom, and is the other side of the coin of the creative act.  As the existentialists have pointed out since the realization of the “death of the gods” as reassuring “Father Images,” man has felt forlorn, forsaken, and anxiously in despair.  No longer is he a child to obey the rules given him by his father.  He must plan his own way, often into an unknown.  Who today can forget the first manned space flights and the anxiety felt by all on the ground? The eternally-sanctioned guidance to the seemingly limited encounters of the tradition-bound world took care of almost all contingencies.  Any departure was the work of demons or a special act of interference by the familiar gods as boon or punishment.  But today man feels responsible even for his revealed religious heritage.  He asks, at least, did I hear correctly?  Has the word been passed on accurately?  The sublime faith of Sri Ramakrishna is given to very few in the modern world, and at that he was primarily a devotee to the Mother in the form of Kali.  Kali is the ultimate in the cycle of destruction. Many modern people, especially in our great cities, have also made a cult of this.  “The tradition of the new,” Harold Rosenberg (an American art critic) has termed it.  Recent advances in astrophysics, biological, and cultural evolution have for a century now emphasized that newness – creativity – is the rule, not the exception.  Psychologists only a decade ago (and most still do) used to consider the “problem of creativity” as a very special subject to be briefly mentioned in the last lecture if there was time to mention such unknown rare phenomenon.  It was associated at best with “genius” - something that happened at one extreme section of the population in the normal distribution curve.  Other manifestations of creativity, because usually unworkable, were termed error and let it go at that.  Today it is necessary for some psychologists to start with “creativity” and carry it through as the basic theme of all courses.  The existential and phenomenological themes of the last century have also done much to make us realize that nothing about human nature can be taken for granted.  Sartre has even gone so far as to suggest there is no essential human nature.  And someone long ago pointed out that there can be no freedom without eternal vigilance.  Man may be that which so far he has elected to become - in view of his human situation - his condition.  What he will become he now realizes is up to him for he has been largely responsible for these conditions in which he finds himself.  At least, he realizes it is now up to him.

The ease with which the most educated and cultured people the world has ever known elected to adopt the futile terrorism of Nazism has shocked us deeply.  President Kennedy’s assassination is equally shocking for a country with such democratic ideals and aspirations.  The chaos ever lurking beneath the superficial manifestation of civilization has repeatedly manifested itself in religious separatism, revolution, empty nationalism, mob action, and student indiscipline.  The recent student troubles in Allahabad and elsewhere - with its wall breaking, stone throwing, death threat screaming young people - is as close to Nazi terrorism as I hope to ever witness.  The Nazi movement got much of its impetus from its youth movements.  And many of these youth were the flower of educated, good families.  How tragically many of our best families have been faced by the seemingly senseless murders committed by youths in search of thrills.  Mostly these are homicides of the “accidental” kind committed in a moment of negligence or extreme daring in an automobile. But some are deliberate.  The famous Leopold and Loeb case in Chicago was, it seems now, but a beginning.  Leopold, in an autobiographical account, said they killed their victim for the fun of it.  And it probably was fun at the time.

Many psychologists try to “excuse” or ”explain away” such behavior as some reaction to frustrated love.  But it is time we faced the problem for what it is.  Man can, unless otherwise committed, find considerable enjoyment in violence.  Despite all the hopeful propaganda concerning the playing field as a center of character education, one need only watch what actually happens at any football or soccer match.  And at the movies the funniest parts are often those unadulterated acts of violence – slapstick – to those we consider less “human” than ourselves.  The cartoon shows are replete with violence for the children.  The fairy tales we revere as classics are among our most vivid pictures of horror.  Man’s favorite reading - “comic books” - are full of violence.  And “western” and “detective” fiction give us the double participation in both the original crime and then in the vengeance sought throughout the rest of the story.

I am not trying to say that people are bad or life is awful instead of the equally silly idea that man is all good.  I am not trying to say man cannot really control his instincts to hunt and kill.  Nor am I trying to document the so-called primitive passions that underlie our so recent veneer of civilization and culture.  It has, of course, been very recent that we have begun to learn about these things.  Rather, I am reminding you that violence, like sex, comes to the fore because they are both very close at hand - easy for us to find and to do.  Evolutionarily speaking, they were of great value.  Here let me introduce a concept of “availability.”  Much of what has been often considered a “powerful instinct” need not be more than availability to ease of access.  For example, one reason sex is so often the prominent if not exclusive concern of neurotic individuals is that they often have nothing better to think about.  The relative obviousness of bodily stimulations come to the fore.  Some neurotics may be as obsessively concerned with stomach gas as with sex.  Certainly there is little love lost upon the alleged “loved one.” Sex in the instinctual sense as described by the ethologists is clearly not concerned.  It is not a concern with sex as drive, as motive, as object, as means - but rather as that which is available, close to hand, easy to come by.  It is a sexuality that comes because of the relatively undeveloped horizons of the individual experience.  It is rarely dammed up, frustrated, all powerful.  Similarly, violence.  It often appears where sex is already a source of boredom or where at best sex has shown signs of flagging appetite.  This last seems the case in most of the alleged pornographic literature now on sale in the West via the more “literary” publishing concerns such as the “travelers’ library.”  A reading of de Sade shows this combination to be the primary concern.  For the bored aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France such behavior is hardly surprising.  We are now encountering it again in the “Jet Set” and in the affluent suburbs of our great cities and capitols.  One does not sense in bored adolescents the helpless victim of overwhelming passion so much as the general failure of adequate guidance to, information of, and involvement in the larger world that lies beyond the immediate neighborhood of bodies, friends, narrow social caste class or custom.  One does what is most available, closest at hand, unless one has the visions that enable us to see and take us beyond the immediate place and moment.

How this intuitive vision - this “facing forward in time” as I have termed it elsewhere - is generated we have little idea at present.  Because we too often identify “religion” with that created one to three thousand years ago, we think of science and present-day knowledge as the only reasonable means to those historical ends.  We motorize the prayer wheel, so to speak.  We give the priest a public address system.  We no longer really believe in so much as defend our ancient heritage.  Recent efforts toward the creation or recognition of values have been largely limited to such methods as advertising and propaganda.  Of course, it may be impossible to generate more than the most superficial type of external interest by external manipulation.  If this is so, then we must learn to accept this as a fact of human behavior and learn to preserve its internal source of generation in intuition.  We certainly need to encourage the sense of hope and vision that leads us to develop integrity or integrated paths of life.  We so far have done little more than leave the development of “value” to chance, or worse yet “Sunday schools” as we call them.  Curiously few of our educational institutions consider the goals and values of the students to be their concern except as the student’s behavior threatens to infringe upon the reputation of the institution.  Repression of the student prevents the problem from ever coming up.  Certainly our sense of external control is woefully inadequate and unconfident.

Part of this has been due to a basic misinterpretation of the function of reward and punishment.  These have been our mainstays in our attempts to introduce new value systems or to control old ones.  Punishment, according to our most recent psychological investigations, is essentially worthless except as a quick stopgap measure. For it turns out to teach nothing of what to do and does not often cause a line of action to be abandoned.  In fact, many experiments show that punishment may so frustrate the individual that he fixates the very act punished for.  At most, punishment gratifies our sense of vengeance.

But reward is seldom better than a form of bribery.  After all, the reward first encourages not that act we intend to reward but that act in which the reward is consumed.  A child whose dessert or sweets are rewards for eating other foods learns first the great value of the sweet itself.  Our concern for money more than service rendered, degrees and grades over knowledge and wisdom, number of publications over content, research methodological elegance over insight, hears painful witness to all of this.  Children very quickly succumb to and learn to achieve candy or “affection” rather than learning the pattern of behavior or the sense of value intended to be encouraged by the reward.  What does the reward reward?  Is it not the reward taking behavior itself?

But so many of the important things in life are to be discovered intrinsically and primarily in the process of living itself.  Here, the wise friend, teacher, or guru cannot reward but can only set an example, encourage by his own personal willingness to lead the way.  Who will ever not be inspired by Gandhi’s personal example?  Who is not moved by that of Ramakrishna?  Can such influence be multiplied?  Can these depths of wisdom be deliberately tapped, their treasure turned into light, or is their very remoteness and slowness part of our basic problem?  Too often the attempt has resulted in frustration at best and the cultism of totalitarian movements at worst.  Yet, that India has escaped the worst of these sectarian explosions, at least on the part of its more ancient Hindu majority and except at the hands of its invaders, suggests some human control is possible over this problem.  But to Western standards perhaps the very slowness of the pace of chance is too great a price to pay and we would prefer the “hysterical do-good-ism” of the totalitarian reform movements that have periodically swept the West to the continued consternation of mankind.

That such control is exclusively the province of the individual is often the message of our romantic fiction.  Our first understanding of progressive methods in guidance and education often had this emphasis to an exaggerated degree.  One cartoon shows the guidance expert lying on the analytic couch while the patient sits rigidly at the desk.  Another shows a child asking the teacher “please tell us what to do, we are tired of doing what we want.”  That wisdom should come exclusively from within the individual rather than from within the individual experience was one of the great misreadings so commonly found among students of such men as Thoreau, Emerson, William James or John Dewey.  It was a misreading nourished by fantasies of forest dwellers, desert saints, mountain top sadhus.  The current plight of many youths is ample evidence to the contrary.  The recent development of phenomenology and existentialism once again stresses the encounter, the act-in or experience-in the world as a mutual give and take, transaction, or interchange.  Here the subject-object dichotomy disappears except as a fact of experience.  Even evidence from treatment of neuroses both in war-time and in peace-time worked to this end.  Men kept at and in their jobs and positions recover better and sooner than men withdrawn from battle or life and treated as “individuals” outside their context of responsibilities.  The latter tend to develop “invalid” personalities.  The former once helped through the period of intense anxiety following some dreadful encounter went on to reasonable mental health.  But the isolated individual had little to fall back upon except that which isolated confinement exaggerates - sex, hostility, fear and the appetites.  These latter are always available in isolation and these have always been the basic plague of all who aspired to live entirely from within the “self” alone.  The result is often the somewhat frantic but curiously empty outpourings of energies that characterize large sectors of modern life. We have splashed canvases in painting, loud noises in music, monumental blobs in sculpture, strings of words and even just sounds in poetry and literature, and endless rows in politics.  Expressive, perhaps, but of little that is of help in facing outwards and forward.  Alone we are an endless source of disappointment to ourselves.

As we face these problems in a more conscious way we may be envious of the older ways of control.  The terror generated by the revengeful supernatural beings which populated the world from the nightmares rising from within the beast-ridden experiences of our ancestors is no longer ours to manipulate.  The threat tactics of some prohibitionist group - be it against alcohol or tobacco or sin - has not a comparable impact of a “devil.”  Ours is a far more difficult problem, for we attempt to maintain a more rational level.  Yet it is always tempting to develop some modern equivalent of the supernatural terrors, the demonic powers.  America has its “communists,” China its “imperialists,” “whites” their “blacks,” and all of us have a demonic conception of diseases or pollution - real or fancied.  Often after a disaster has struck, we have a momentary feeling of the joys of terror.  The elementary human dimensions seem more clear.  We know how to act.  The primitive availabilities are once more at hand.  We curse, moan, blame, and punish.  We ever often seem to be more immediately social in our lives.  Strangers in large cities will suddenly speak to one another after some public calamity has occurred.  We almost are grateful to our catastrophes, to our enemies - for they often throw us back upon familiar ways.  We enjoy resenting corruption, bigness, authority, bureaucracy. These are the most available responses.

What has been neglected by men all through history is that human organization and regularity must be earned, labored for.  As we now begin to admit to the continued novelty of our lives we see the need for creating regularity, order, of inventing more and better means of human socialization.  A community must now be earned.  It is not natural in the sense that it can be taken for granted.  One senses that many here were very surprised at how much had to be done following independence.  This shock still has not altogether worn off in many places.  Yet the responsibility is now yours.  You, too, will have to find the sources of gratification in disciplined organization and responsibility.

There is a peculiar paradox in modern man’s respect for the wonders of antiquity.  The pyramids of Egypt and Mexico leave us awestruck.  The magnificence of the Taj Mahal, the paved roads of the Incas of Peru, the sculpture, buildings, and monuments of Ankor Wat, Tun Huan, or Ajanta often seem beyond us - miracles.  Yet these were built with slave labor, captives, prisoners.  But we have our marvels of human discipline and cooperation.  The Golden Gate Bridge, Rockefeller Center, the great dams of the Tennessee River Valley are but a few such modern miracles.  The ancient monuments are often but monuments to tyranny of a single monarch compared to the spirit of mutuality necessary to the building of the latest hydroelectric dams. Today we all begin to see at least glimpses of these ends in view and so can hope to participate in its fruits.  When we can so envisage our future we work hard and we cooperate.  We see discipline as a necessary function and do not merely resent it.  But when we do not see ahead we behave very badly.  When the vision is not also ours we do little of help.

The primary problems of guidance relate to the envisagement of the road ahead. Sometimes we do not know about the goal beyond our own horizon.  Sometimes a sign is absent that could point the way.  Often we do not know which of a staggering number of alternatives to take.  But mostly we are likely to lack the confidence to try a particular one.  It is this last factor that calls upon all the humanity of the trained therapist or guidance counselor.  Yet it is not that we lack confidence in some general “neurotic” way, although this is also possible.  Rather, it is like learning to dive or swim, to drive or fly, especially when one is already adult.  Compared to the mature skills we already possess, we resent our infantile helplessness.  We usually demand too much of ourselves too soon.  How to first face a typewriter keyboard, a computer, an airplane, how to first face a new school course of study, a new profession.  These all raise some problems for which our previous experience has not prepared us.  We all need help then in taking first steps.  We are truly infants in first trials, so why not expect to treat and be treated as such.  Experiments have shown that the first few days or weeks in laboratory experiments on animals very little is learnt concerning the experimenter’s project.  One such experiment showed that if rats were patted and hand-fed regularly for an hour a day, they did as well as their brothers who were actually started in the same experiment for the same time.  Although orientation periods are enormously wasteful to busy scholars it seems to pay off in terms of preparing them for the actual break in their life still to come.

No surgeon today would fail to give blood, glucose, and saline solution intravenously during and after a major operation.  It even is now done routinely for relatively minor ones.  He literally re-establishes the umbilical attachments of the infant. Thus, strength is maintained until the patient is sufficiently healed to eat, breathe, or eliminate as an adult once again.  We are not ashamed of such help then.  Why should the educational process be that different?  When we begin each new phase we must to some degree start over again.  We have to regress our standards and expectations.  The external supports to such regressed conditions also apply.  The psychoanalyst is now very aware of these regressions in therapy and calls them “regression in the service of ego.”  These are usually temporary, yet the individual is usually better for them.  He rebuilds on a firmer foundation in his next phase of growth.  That this need occurs in education is evidenced by the fact that with current methods of language teaching, few individuals who start a new language after the age of fourteen years fail to develop a marked accent.  We do not seem to regress our language habits far enough.  And little support is given for the few who might dare to be that “childish” anyway.  This pride, both assumed by the individual and externally demanded by the group, seems the worst enemy of all adult learning and change.  And the more traditional the background, the less we are inclined to “let down” - become as children, ignorant once again.  Yet, as has been pointed out, the single greatest achievement of modern man is his willingness to admit his ignorance.

But most important of all there has long been a faulted notion as to the way change is produced by external circumstances, that which we call the learning process. We speak of drill, repetition, practice in our attempts to capture the often absurd and arbitrary nature of our culture such as is manifest by English spelling or Hindi writing. As Shaw pointed out, fish could conceivably be spelled “gh-o-ti” – “gh” as in “enough,” “o” as in “woman,” and “ti” as in “attention.”  That it is fish - F, I, S, H - is fairly arbitrary.  Hence, early beliefs had learning as chiefly a matter of experienced associations often of a quite coincidental and accidental nature.  And therefore the forced experience of such contiguities by drill-on practice.  But a moment’s reflection will show that practice can only offer the opportunity for learning by giving the chance for encounter.  Yet there could be no improvement in learning unless the individual does his action or perception in a significantly different way each time.  The situation may repeat, the individual should not.

We also attempt to offer new goals from outside the experience of the individual. Or we attempt a very matter-of-fact common-sense demonstration of our own goals, hoping this will be adequate to catch the reasonable fancy of another person.  Our techniques of sharing and imparting values has consequently been most unsatisfactory. Too often we take for granted that our goals are held in common.  But experimental investigation shows these techniques may and do fail unless the individual already shares our goals and is willing to act accordingly.  According to Moritz Schlick, man does not act according to an idea of valuable consequences, goals, rewards as such.  One acts because of a pleasant idea of a state, not because of a pleasant state.  One anticipates a state or action with pleasure.  We are not as influenced by the expected consequences as such at any one time.  Another way of formulating this has been offered by Kurt Goldstein.  After many years’ study of patients with neurological disabilities, especially of the central nervous system, Dr. Goldstein concludes that man does the best he can to maximize the remaining abilities.  That there is knowledge of “better” to be done merely brings guilt feelings and shame to a person, but does not help the individual actually perform better.  All of this then is further evidence that change comes from within experience.  We have repeatedly pointed out to you that you already perform many of the guidance functions.  We have, to some degree, to wait out our client’s need to also reorganize their own value systems.  That some never will may be one of the permanent problems we will always have with us.

Yet we also have some reason to hope that our sincere efforts to aid our fellow man and especially our youth will bear fruit.  We do hope to improve our and their lot. After all, we have at times appeared to be truly cooperative, neutral, civilized in our efforts.  There have been times when we seem to do better when some little added effort seemed to help if only to a small degree.  These small degrees are really all we ever have in any kind of progress when progress does seem to occur.  There are times when we seem most human to each other.  Yet we also tend to be impatient of the other person’s reorienting difficulties.  Most habits - when once established - seem so easy, so obvious.  So we are now learning that a period of time must be left at the beginning of any behavior change for reorientation.  And this must be a social setting, as well - for if not, the waiting period is often wasted as the individual wanders off in his own particular direction.  The new skills to be learned must be offered at least at first in very “human” terms.  When we say human we mean that the complete person be recognized with all his other needs and skills as well.  Often this can be done with new individuals in small groups under an established leader familiar with the local situation.  In most American colleges the senior students often volunteer for the week of extra orientation given to new students.  But often the change is of an individual nature that precludes such group action.  Then the guidance officer has to provide this reassuring, time marking social setting as the connecting link between the old and new skills or values.  Yet even this social setting is best supplemented where possible.  We have been recently witnessing an enormous growth of literature which helps in this way.  Almost all the major professions now have large amounts of literature of a fictional nature which does a great deal to smooth the transitions from novice to job.  We all read with extra interest novels about psychology or education, delight in even the poor movies or television shows about our professions.  Similarly, we all read novels and tried to meet people from India before coming here.  In this way we “warmed up” to our new adventure.  It made it more plausible and reasonable that we find ourselves here.

So, what we are recommending is the opportunity for communion as well as communication.  That is why the pamphlet or guidebook is not always enough.  That is why the person must also be in the guidance picture as part of the introduction or transition.  The personnel officer helps make the new effort in family terms - albeit the human family - as well as in familiar terms.  Indeed, the root word is the same in both.

After all, we are as much a part of one another as we are part of the natural world.  Indeed, more so.  Individuals are not entirely separate, independent except for arithmetic or analytical purposes as in taking census.  We are as often a group, family, or family of nations and live and work as a collective in Carl Jung’s sense.  We are both individuals and parts of a social organism at various times.  These are not contradictions so much as facets of our lives.  Few are ever truly independent of all social dependency.  Few are even completely immersed in the social totality.  We are just sometimes more one than the other.  Only a few are more regularly one than the other, as all the personality tests bear witness.  Usually we have our own particular style of rhythmical alternation which sends us in and out of phase with one another -often to our dismay but often to our great pleasure.  Fortunately, we coincide a good part of the time.  Guidance could be the deliberate recreation of the opportunity of maintaining social coincidence even during some of the times we least seem to manifest it.  Hopefully a warm, mature, experienced person can reassuringly point the way or maintain contact as one temporarily falls behind.  Or, in the terms of Carl Rogers, the guidance officer helps the client see for himself in its total human context some transitional period with its forlorn confusion, its fear and trembling, its groping for ends and means toward the future.  If successful, the client breaks over into that future, cautiously and inelegantly at first but later skillfully and responsibly.  If not, he may stand eternally on the threshold, building defenses against his own potential growth. Through the insight and researches of psychologists and social thinkers as Kurt Goldstein, Carl Rogers, Andras Angyal, A. H. Maslow, Rollo May, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre (to mention but a very few), we see more and more the role the individual is capable of paying if given an adequate but supported chance.  He is neither the blind victim of impersonal heredity nor of environmental determinism.  But the more we see the individual, the more we see the social dialectic at work, as well.  For he is neither self sufficiency or automaton - the individual operates in a social matrix.  Without either, there is nothing much.  There can be no society without individuals.  But there can be no individual without some social milieu.  First steps need reinforcement very badly and need encouragement and acceptance as such by one’s peers.  Otherwise, just exclusive self-approval results in the romantic mad genius of popular Western fiction.

But perhaps we carry “coals to Newcastle.”  If we compare East and West - the lives of Jesus in his social context and the Buddha in his - we are immediately struck by a great contrast much to the humiliation of the Westerner.  Many have thought Jesus to be a mad man, a megalomaniac at best.  Buddha, by contrast, lived every phase of life and at the end became all to all.  Yet the social setting of each was very different.  The Buddha was accepted by those around him.  Jesus was mostly shunned.  If both are considered avatars of Vishnu, then the difference is one of social matrix.  If so, you already knew all we have said.