# Psychology for Valentine’s **URL:** **By** Joan Kennedy Taylor **Published:** February 1, 1981 --- “Here is a book about freedom that includes the topic of romantic love, and a book about romantic love that implies the concept of freedom.” _The Psychology of Freedom,_ by Peter R. Breggin, M.D., Prometheus Books, 242 pp. (discount distribution, Lake House Books, P.O. Box 5919, Washington, D.C. 20014, $12.95 including postage and handling). _The Psychology of Romantic_ _Love,_ by Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D., J.P. Tarcher, Inc., 210 pp., $10.00. February is a month for lovers, and anyone looking for a Valentine’s Day gift for a special person couldn’t do better than to buy Breggin, or Branden, or both. Here are two first-rate books by libertarian psychologists about love—one, long awaited; the other, a welcome surprise. Here is a book about freedom that includes the topic of romantic love, and a book about romantic love that implies the concept of freedom. The authors stand on common ground in their approach to psychology: both of them emphasize the importance of free will, self-esteem, and the primacy of reason over emotion. Politically, both are active libertarians, who not only support libertarian ideals publicly, but also support the Libertarian Party. Now, having stated what these books have in common, let me discuss them separately—because really they are quite different. Peter Breggin, who acknowledges in his preface his intellectual indebtedness to “Nathaniel Branden’s analysis of the rational pursuit of self-interest,” has subtitled his own book “Liberty and Love as a Way of Life.” It is a comprehensive approach to psychology that extends libertarian political ideals to the psychological realm. The heart of his approach is the thesis that it is important psychologically to be a loving person—by which Breggin means, not a doormat who accepts abuse from others and claims to love them in return, but a person capable of joy and positive relationships. He sums it up in this way: Liberty is the context within which each individual can best develop himself or herself. Love is the liberated individual’s affirmation of life. Liberty and love are the twin principles of the good and happy life. Breggin starts off by distinguishing between personal sovereignty and personal freedom. The first he defines as “the capacity and the right to be in charge of one’s inner, subjective world of feelings, thoughts, and actions,” while by _personal freedom_ he means the fulfilling or expressing of that personal sovereignty in the external world. He spends several chapters establishing the ground rules within which he will be operating—the importance of free will and choice, his definitions of concepts such as self-esteem (“the good feeling generated by placing high value on the conscious, ethical, and rational exercise of free will, personal sovereignty, personal freedom, and self-determination”), love (“the good feeling generated by placing high value upon another person’s existence....Joy or happiness in the presence of another person”) and the relation between thought and emotion (“So-called involuntary emotional reactions stem from specific kinds of controllable thoughts or mental decisions”). Then, in chapter six, “_Libertarian Ideals to Live By_,” Breggin takes principles such as voluntary exchange, the right to self-defense, and civil disobedience, which are well-known to libertarians in the political arena, and redefines them in psychological terms. Here he sets forth his code of ethics (“when I use the term _ethics_, I will usually have a more specific meaning than ordinary dictionary definitions. I mean rational ethics and I mean _libertarian ethics_”). His four main principles are as follows: 1. You must not treat others by antilibertarian standards, regardless of their bad conduct toward you. 2. Never let others abuse you, even if you have acted wrongly. 3. Never abuse yourself. 4. Never compromise your own ethics because others compromise theirs. This application of political principles to the psychological realm is, to my mind, both original and convincing. Breggin also applies to personal conduct the legal principle that you may defend yourself only with necessary force—you may not defend your property by shooting trespassers, for instance—and concludes that many, perhaps most, people operate unethically. Here his distinction between personal sovereignty and personal freedom bears fruit. You may, in order to defend yourself, limit someone else’s personal freedom if necessary, but you are never justified in invading that individual’s personal sovereignty. You may imprison a murderer, but it is never an ethical act to influence his or her mind with drugs or lobotomy. On a more everyday level, you may leave a spouse, even though that spouse claims dependence on you, but you may not attack or undermine his or her self-confidence. “If you attack and harm a person whom you could walk away from, you have become an agres-sor....This is a radical principle; its application would put almost all hostile, self-defeating relationships out of business.” You can see that Breggin is implying a radical redefinition of force when he uses it in the psychological area, to include much behavior that we would not include in a strictly political context. For instance, this is his definition of oppression: any use of force or deception, or any enforcement of an involuntary relationship, except in self-defense; any infringement on an individual’s unconditional right to self-defense; any imposition upon an individual’s personal sovereignty, even in self-defense; any other-determined antilibertarian, or unethical action or relationship; any undermining, disparagement, or discouragement of the principles of self-determination. This is indeed, as he says, “a broad definition that far exceeds the libertarian political injunction against force or fraud....This is a psychological definition of oppression, not a political one.” But, he explains, “Ethics and the law do not coincide; ethics defines what is right, while the law defines what is allowed. Many things must be allowed in the interest of freedom, even unethical conduct.” To be a loving, liberated person, according to Breggin, it is necessary first of all to love oneself. Breggin sees love for others as the basis from which we accord them their natural rights. Therefore, if one does not love oneself, one will not only not fully love others, but one will not recognize and defend one’s _own_ rights. Hence the phenomenon of self-oppression, which Breggin sees as underlying most psychological disturbance. In a chapter entitled “_Self-oppression — How People Choose to Fail_,” Breggin explains why he prefers the concept of personal failure to designate much of what is referred to as mental illness. He uses conventional psychiatric labels such as depression, paranoia, and anxiety, he explains, to make it clear that he is referring to the same behavior as are conventional psychiatrists, even though he does not accept their explanations of the behavior. Rather, he sees such states as “lifestyles of self-oppression,” and examines them and their accompanying emotions, as strategies from which a self-loving individual can achieve self-liberation. Breggin holds that a failure to love oneself enough is at the root of all psychological problems, and that we are taught this lack of self-love by our families. “The self-liberating individual can benefit most from confronting, understanding, and overcoming oppression where it has hit the hardest—within the confines of his or her own family.” As children, we are helpless with respect to our personal freedom, and too often surrender our personal sovereignty as a result. The principles of voluntary exchange clarify the nature of self-oppression. Confronted with coercion, the self-oppressive person coerces himself or herself in order to avoid conflict with the feared authority, and, in effect, creates a self-imposed involuntary exchange by using fraud against himself or herself. Four chapters of this book — 59 out of 239 pages of text—deal with the relations between parents and children. “The oppression of children throughout the world,” Breggin writes, “is so thoroughly accepted that it is used as the model for justifying all other forms of oppression.” Men who wish to oppress women attribute to them traits that they also ascribe to children, including helplessness and dependency. Psychiatrists themselves tend to belittle women with a double standard of normality, indentifying a normal male with a normal grownup, while a normal female is assigned childlike traits. Mental patients in general are similarly oppressed by attributing to them the traits of children, much as it was once fashionable to justify slavery in terms of the black’s alleged childishness. These so-called childlike qualities have little or nothing to do with anything inherent in children but reflect instead the child’s response to chronic belittlement and oppression. This is why chronically oppressed groups develop similar traits. These traits are adopted by the victims to ensure survival at the hands of the oppressors, who demand helplessness, dependency, and even ridiculousness upon the part of their victims, whether these victims are slaves, mental patients, prisoners, women, or children. When the full force of moral authority and social institutions reinforces these victimizations, allegedly childish traits become commonplace. This is a lovely book. It speaks to a yearning for self-determination and individual happiness that is the mainspring of today’s three great grassroots movements—libertarianism, feminism, and the human potential movement. Up to now, Peter Breggin has been best known as a critic of abusive psychiatric techniques, but with this book, he should reach a wider and more general audience. Nathaniel Branden, of course, not only speaks to the human potential movement, he has become one of the mainsprings of it. His weekend Intensives are attended by hundreds of people all across the country. Last fall, his first three theoretical books, _The Psychology of Self-Esteem_, _Breaking Free_, and _The Disowned Self_ were reissued in one volume, as _A Nathaniel Branden Anthology_. A few months earlier, his newest book was a main selection of _The Psychology Today_ Book Club and appeared several times on _Time_ magazine’s best-seller list. At last report there were some 75,000 copies of the hardcover edition in print. Branden began crusading for the importance of self-esteem, choice, and responsibility in the early ’60s, well before the original publication of _The Psychology of Self-Esteem_ in 1969. The copy on that book’s dust jacket announced, “_The Psychology of Self-Esteem_ will serve as the theoretical base and framework for Mr. Branden’s future work, which will include a study of the nature and psychological meaning of romantic love....” in June 1980 that book, _The Psychology of Romantic Love_, was finally published. For those of us who have been waiting for it, it was well worth the wait. I find myself assuming that every reader of _The Libertarian Review_ will be familiar with the psychological theories of Nathaniel Branden, but of course that may not be the case. For the record, then, Branden was the first psychologist to emphasize the crucial importance of rational self-esteem (which he defines as “the conviction that one is competent to live and worthy of living”) to psychological functioning, and the first to develop his approach, which he calls “biocentric psychology,” from the idea that just as animals have various tools of survival, so do human beings, the uniquely human tool of survival being reason. Because when he began his practice over 20 years ago the influential psychological schools were using adjustment to society as their standard of psychological well-being, Branden opposed their views by championing the idea that there is an absolute, biologically centered standard of “mental health”—a terminology which is criticized by Breggin and Thomas Szasz—though he recognizes, of course, that the mental health/mental illness concept has been wrongly used by psychiatrists to seize political power. There seems to many to be a growing disillusionment with romantic love today. But rather than abandon the ideal, says Nathaniel Branden, we should rethink the concept. And he does so in this book, exploring not only the way various civilizations have viewed love and marriage, but also love’s psychological roots, “the needs it strives to satisfy, and the conditions for success or failure.” In four main sections (“_The Evolution of Romantic Love_,” “_The Roots of Romantic Love_,” “_Choice in Romantic Love_,” and “_The Challenges of Romantic Love_”), Branden covers a wealth of topics, including Jealousy, Sense of Life, Sex in Human Life, Projecting Visibility, Self-Esteem, The Art of Nurturing, Marriage, Divorce, and the Question of Forever, and Communicating Emotions. Branden’s first books were formal and philosophical in their theoretical explication, which is not to say that they didn’t contain colorful case histories. But there has been a radical change in tone from _The Psychology of Self-Esteem_ to _The Psychology of Romantic Love_. The assignment Branden seems to have given himself is to make romantic love intelligible, a task in which he succeeds admirably, but he also writes in such a way as to make the reader believe in the possibility of love for himself or herself. “Let me state at the outset,” he says, that I am writing from the conviction that romantic love is not a fantasy or an aberration but one of the great possibilities of our existence, one of the great adventures, and one of the great challenges. I am writing from the conviction that ecstasy is one of the normal factors of our emotional life, or can be. I do not see romantic love as the prerogative of youth. Nor do I see it as some kind of immature ideal, inappropriately adapted from literature, that must crumble in the face of “practical reality.” I do see romantic love as requiring more of us, in terms of our personal evolution and maturity, than we generally appreciate. Indeed, that is one of the central themes of this book. Although the book is connected to and to some extent builds on Branden’s previous work (for example, a large chunk of the material in the chapter in _The Psychology of Self-Esteem_ entitled “Self-Esteem and Romantic Love: The Principle of Psychological Visibility” is repeated here) it also stands totally by itself. I notice with interest that _A Nathaniel Branden Anthology_ is being advertised as “The three major works from the early stages of his thinking,” and that in its brief preface he invites the reader to begin by reading his third book, _The Disowned Self_, which he says is closest to the way he thinks about psychology today. In that book he departed somewhat from his previous emphasis on reason and rationality to stress the importance of self-acceptance; to accept oneself, he wrote, “is to refuse to disown any part of one’s experience...to accept what one is, is to let oneself be fully aware, without censorship and without interfering self-criticism, of one’s thoughts, feeling, emotions, desires, aversions, actions”; self-acceptance, he argued, is deeper than self-esteem; “it is the root or beginning of self-esteem.” One of the pleasures of reading _The Psychology of Romantic Love_ is the glimpses it gives of Nathaniel Branden the feeling man, as opposed to Nathaniel Branden the Mind, whom we have learned to know through his previous works. He speaks throughout, for example, of his relationship with his late wife Patrecia (who died in a drowning accident in 1977) and of her influence on him. When we met, Patrecia lived “in her body” to a far greater extent than I did and was in far better touch with her feelings; her emotional openness and willingness to be transparent facilitated the process of my own deepening contact with my inner life. Through her, I learned the power of vulnerability, the power of letting others see who I was and what I felt, without defense or apology. I rediscovered the child in myself—not only because she was in contact with the child in herself, but also because she very clearly saw the child in me.... And now, as I sit at my desk, writing these words, I see her face grinning at me—she is almost laughing—and she seems to be saying, “Are you writing this because it really helps to clarify your point, or are you trying to smuggle in a love letter to me?” “I’m not totally certain, Patrecia.” “Well, leave it in. Sometimes when you’re eager to explain some point you can get a little abstract and remote. Let them have you, not just your ideas.” No discussion of Branden on love would be complete without at least touching on his unique contribution to the psychology of romantic love, his concept of the need for psychological visibility. We normally experience ourselves from inside, as a process, Branden points out. “In the course of our life,” he writes, “our values, goals, and our missions are first conceived in our mind...and then—to the extent that our life is successful—are translated into action and objective reality....Yet our most important value—our character, soul, psychological self, spiritual being—whatever name one wishes to give it — can never follow this pattern in a literal sense, can never exist apart from our own consciousness.” But when a loved one sees and responds to our character or soul, that person acts as a psychological mirror, reflecting back to us what we are, and permitting us to have the experience we yearn for, the experience of seeing ourselves “out there.” This experience is, Branden says, “the core significance” of romantic love, because it is only in a romantic relationship that one can feel the fullest psychological visibility. This book has been criticized because its definition of romantic love is “a passionate spiritual-emotional-sexual attachment between a man and a woman that reflects a high regard for the value of each other’s person.” A letter to the _Los Angeles Times Book Review_ complained, for example, “to let such an unduly restrictive, inaccurate statement go by after 11 years of gay liberation activism is appalling.” In an answering letter to the _Times_, Branden repeated what he had already stated in his book—that he was not attempting “to deal with the difficult and complex question of homosexuality and bisexuality—we deal with the mode of man/woman relationships, even though much of what is said clearly applies to homosexual love relationships.” Branden is saying, as I understand him, that to his mind much of the homosexual experience is included in the heterosexual experience, in much the same way that for generations writers felt that the female experience was included in the male and that therefore terms such as _man_, _man’s_, and the exclusive use of masculine pronouns could be read as generic. It takes a society time to become uncomfortable with such generic usage. In 1970, I myself was the co-author of a book that was rife with such generic masculinisms; it would have felt false at the time to alter them, but that does not negate the fact that I was insensitive to those I might offend. The way one decides whether or not such behavior springs from hostility, I think, is by considering other behavior. In _The Psychology of Self-Esteem_, Branden felt comfortable in discussing “man’s psychology,” but at the same time, one of the few contemporary books he referred to favorably was Betty Friedan’s _The Feminine Mystique_. Obviously, then, he was in no basic sense anti-feminist. Similarly, he welcomes homosexuals into his Intensives, from which fact I conclude that he is in no basic sense desirous of excluding their experience from the broad spectrum of human romance. Both these books have a social value apart from the truth and hope that they communicate. And that is, that they put ethics and psychological structure into the whole phenomenon of “me-centeredness” that has so often been criticised (sometimes rightly) as anti-social hedonism. In the Spring of 1979, Philip Green attacked libertarians, Robert Nozick, and _Inquiry_ magazine, among others, in an article in _The Nation_, as contributing to “the assault upon our sensibilities of everyone’s ‘right’ to do what they damn well please without giving a fig for anyone else’s needs or concerns.” If the person struggling for individual happiness and growth thinks that an accurate description, it can only cause him or her unnecessary pain. “Individualism,” says Branden, in a section of _The Psychology of Romantic Love_ on the human potential movement, “is at once an ethicopolitical concept and an ethicopsychological one.” These books bring those two concepts together, by showing the relationship between self-fulfillment and the supremacy of individual rights. What I referred to earlier as the three great grassroots movements of our day (libertarianism, feminism, and the human potential movement) are not only concerned with different aspects of individualism, but they all fit together like pieces in a puzzle. The libertarian wants to free all people from political authority, but to do so, must persuade them that they are capable of solving economic and social problems voluntarily and that it is unnecessary to agree with Philip Green that “the citizens of every industrial society find the whole ‘bureaucratic’ apparatus of social security, unemployment insurance, workman’s compensation, etc., so invaluable a part of ‘the good life’,” because they don’t have “the faintest idea how to go about allocating ... present income for only vaguely discerned future needs.” The feminist wants to free all women from masculine authority, but to do so, must persuade them that they are capable of independent achievement and that it is unnecessary, to quote a study cited by Letty Cottin Pogrebin in _Growing Up Free_, for the gender barrier to “become so formidable that it even block\[s\] out fantasies and dreams.” “Thus, one blond moppet confided that what she really wanted to do when she grew up was fly like a bird. ‘But I’ll never do it,’ she sighed, ‘because I’m not a boy.’” The metaphor is haunting. “I could not help wondering,” said the researcher, “how many little children believe that only males are capable of something as grand as flight.” The practitioner in the human potential movement wants to free all of us from the need for authority of all sorts to structure our lives, but to do so, must persuade us that we are capable of happiness and of dealing with our own inner reactions and feelings on an ongoing basis. For, as Dr. Branden says in his Intensives, “There can be no such things as intellectual independence or autonomy in a person who is cut off from his own organism, cut off from feelings, emotions, the entire world of inner experience.” This is not to say or imply that every libertarian has to be a feminist or an explorer of the human potential, or even that we need look with sympathy on all who apply those labels to themselves—after all, even some who call themselves libertarians differ with each other on major issues. But it is to say that any true individualist would do well to be thankful that all three movements exist. In their essence, all three discourage dependency and make it less likely that people will blindly follow leaders — “whether those leaders call themselves husbands or politicians,” as my friend Louise Lacey says. And while we are being thankful, we can be thankful to Peter Breggin and Nathaniel Branden for sending these books as Valentines to the best within all of us, and to the world we all want to see come into being. Joan Kennedy Taylor is a member of the standing platform committee of the Libertarian Party, Vice President of the Association of Libertarian Feminists, and co-author with Lee M. Shulman of _When to See a Psychologist_. She has worked as a co-therapist in groups at the Shulman Center for Personal Development and at the Free Clinic in Stockbridge, Mass.