CONTENTS: · 1. My Life Story · 2. My Family · 3. Medical School · 4. A Private Practice · 5. Ed and I · 6. A Prisoner Named Bobby · 7. Angel's Flight · 8. I Meet Ronnie · 9. A Monastic Retreat · 10. Staff Psychiatrist · 11. New York · 12. My Counseling Service · 13. Dean · 14. The Ninth Street Center · 15. Open Groups, Closed Groups · 16. A Young Man Named Nick · 17. A Science of Human Nature

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a selection from the first section

1. My Life Story

When I reflect on my life story I find it remarkable that I was consistently able to walk away from conventional sources of security. When I have turned my back on all things that men are supposed to hold dear to advance into an unknown world, it has not been with a sense of crisis. It has been more like a casual walk into an unfamiliar section of a forest where I already feel at home. This conduct might seem inconsistent with my phobic personality structure. To have agoraphobic tendencies implies anxiety in the face of unfamiliar expanses of space. This symptom nullifies any simple joy someone might feel in running loose in space. But I discovered long ago that I had the ability to carry a surrounding space with me in a fashion not too dissimilar to the tortoise and his shell, and with this sense of secure orientation I could nullify agoraphobic threats. In fact, the apparently familiar, by which I mean the conventional structure of the human world as it supposed to be, turned out to be more a source of phobic anxiety than experiences which were fresh and novel. I was easily overstimulated by the false promises inherent in conventional social relationships. This touched off the phobic mechanism which originates when intensity is too great for the experience which stimulates it. The phobic reaction means that the individual is burning in the fires of his own feelings and therefore cannot retain a sense of the simple reality of experience.

The one thing that I could not allow myself to accept was the sense of being a finished product, and this means that I wanted to continue to grow throughout a lifetime. The kind of growth I had in mind did not consist of the mere expansion of the scope of my adaptive capacities, but rather an openness to a revision of the basic architecture of the life process itself. I was profoundly convinced that if self-development was the real goal of living that nothing could defeat the human personality. The guiding principles had to do with internal things such as self-knowledge and self-control. There is really no way to be a finished product without rejecting the need for more self-awareness and self-mastery, because these things are inherently incomplete. The key to a good life is the ability to like and enjoy oneself as an incomplete person. Then there is always room for that reaching into something more which brings intensity and excitement into living. The sense of being fully alive is born of this vividness, and when a person has everything he expects to get in life, and cannot change anything lest the whole structure collapse, the kind of aliveness which is generated from within dies and his apparently perfect world becomes a nightmare.

As a child when I was presented with a picture of the world where everything worthy of attention was in the notch that was appropriate for it, I got a shrinking feeling deep within myself, as if confronted with a dangerous masquerade. I could only trust people who were dissatisfied with the way the world was put together....