Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (37 page)

PSYCHOLOGICAL
INTEGRATION

Having briefly discussed Rand’s concepts of “sense of life” and “psychoepistemology,” we can now return to a more informed discussion of the relationship between
reason
and
emotion
. As I have suggested, Rand was certainly aware of the possibility that an individual’s inarticulate, emotional, and subconscious mechanisms could be more consistent with the facts
of reality than an individual’s conscious convictions. Even if she tended to focus on the side of reason, she would have agreed with Nathaniel Branden (1971b) that “reason and emotion must function in integrated harmony, or distortions result in both spheres” (8). Whereas Rand and Peikoff emphasize the dictum, “Think, and you shall feel” (Peikoff 1991b, 229), Branden (1983b) argues that we must also “
feel deeply … to think clearly.
” Branden rejects any “notion that thinking and feeling are opposed functions and that each entails the denial of the other” (159). In this belief, he reaffirms the essence of Rand’s nondualistic view. He transcends any emphasis on reason alone. He proclaims that as integrated organisms, individual persons who become disconnected from the reality of emotional experience cannot preserve the clarity of their thinking. For Branden ([1971] 1978, 7), just as an abdication of thought will result in
emotional
privation, so too, a denial of feeling will result in
intellectual
impoverishment.

Branden examines the cognitive distortions that follow from the severing of reason and emotion. An individual who is alienated from his or her inner experiences rationalizes rather than thinks. Rand too recognized this danger. She had argued: “Rationalization is … a process of providing one’s
emotions
with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications—in order to hide one’s motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself.” She acknowledged that in any attempt to subvert one’s emotional processes, one risked hampering, distorting, and ultimately, destroying the efficacy of cognition. By rationalizing, individuals become disconnected from the reality of their inner experience.
⁴⁸

In a journal entry from the 1950s, Rand grasped too that the process of articulating
emotions
cannot be rushed; an individual who attempts such articulation must initiate and sustain it gradually and volitionally. Individuals cannot achieve emotional self-awareness by memorizing “formulas and dogmas which [they do] not fully understand.”
⁴⁹
Branden has called this a process not of “rationalizing,” but of
“intellectualizing.”
In “intellectualizing,” individuals respond to personal problems by spouting floating abstractions with no relevance to the concrete issues of their own lives. Both rationalizing and intellectualizing pervert the purpose of thought, which is the apprehension of reality. By cutting their thought processes off from both external and internal reality, individuals sabotage their capacity to experience the full range of their emotions. Thus, for Branden, intellectualizers are just as dissociated from their inner emotional experience as the most fervent “whim-worshipers” who indulge in a few disconnected feelings (N. Branden [1971] 1978, 7, 24–25). Intellectualizers repress their emotions and escape into the realm of the abstract, undermining their
awareness
of both inner experience and external reality. “Whim-worshipers,” equally threatened by their own
inner states, escape into the realm of random
emotionalism
. In both cases, repression and emotional self-indulgence are a means of undercutting objectivity and separating the conscious from the subconscious aspects of the
mind
.
⁵⁰
Having bifurcated
reason
and emotion, cognition and evaluation, an individual has no recourse but to engage in blind action. Branden ([1971] 1978) observes: “In all such instances, the motive is
avoidance
—avoidance of some aspect of reality” (4–5).

In Branden’s view: “
Awareness moves freely in both directions
—
or it moves freely in neither
.” The integration of reason and emotion is simultaneously a means to the union of
mind and body
. As persons struggle toward
psychological
maturity, they begin with the knowledge that the body is part but not all of the self. All too often, however, as a person’s
consciousness
evolves toward a more comprehensive sense of self, the mind may become disconnected from the body. Many people begin to view their own bodies not as an aspect of the self but as a
non
self. Branden argues that such alienation from the physical is simultaneously alienation from the emotional, because it is through the body that one’s emotions are felt. Every emotion has both a spiritual and a somatic component. Hence, estrangement from emotion is, by extension, estrangement from the body. By cutting themselves off from the data that the body provides, many people damage their ability to integrate thought and emotion. Seeing a clash between their thoughts and feelings, they view reason as a means of conquering threatening emotional signals. In an effort to preserve the autonomy of their own minds, they continue to subvert the integrity of their emotional mechanism, and by consequence, they cripple the very rational faculty they wish to sustain. Like
Wilhelm Reich
before him, Branden argues that “unblocking the body—unblocking feelings—is unblocking consciousness.” Our autonomy demands the inseparable union of the physical and the spiritual, the emotive and the cerebral; “it involves our entire being.”
⁵¹

Rand was fully aware of this
mind-body
unity. She recognized that even bodily sensations provide people with “an automatic form of knowledge” based upon the natural pleasure-pain mechanisms of the organism.
⁵²
She also maintained: “Cognitive processes affect man’s emotions which affect his body, and the influence is reciprocal.”
⁵³
But she did not examine this reciprocal interaction at length.

By contrast, Branden analyzes the elements of the mind-body connection, viewing the issues developmentally. He focuses on how parents “teach” their
children
to “disown” their feelings. Examining a variety of deadening family situations and relationships, Branden (1992) maintains that “most of us are children of dysfunctional families.” He examines how parents can create severe obstacles to the child’s cognitive and emotive development (3).
In such circumstances, children may unwittingly adopt defense techniques that numb their awareness of unacceptable or painful impulses, feelings, ideas, and memories. As they mature, they may genuinely seek to dissolve their unarticulated guilt, fear, anger, and internal conflicts. But such emotional repression cannot be merely commanded out of existence by sustained logical reasoning. No amount of persistent analysis can overturn the wreckage brought about by long-term cognitive and emotional subversion. Branden argues that in such cases, the individual must first practice the art of “owning” his
emotions
, of bringing the aspects of his inner experiences into full awareness. Whereas lifelong evasion and repression engender cognitive
dis
integration, the removal of obstacles to the experience of one’s emotions reignites the mind’s integrative processes (N. Branden [1971] 1978, 42, 87, 102–3). Thus, for Branden: “Therapeutic understanding represents an integration of intellect and emotion, cognition and experience, thought and feeling—not either/or, but always both together” (109).

Many of Branden’s post-Randian writings center on the techniques he has developed to aid the self-disclosure of “unrecognized attitudes and patterns.” Branden (1983a, 131) uses a sentence-completion method, in which the individual subject spontaneously completes a sentence stem presented to him or her by a qualified therapist. While an assessment of these techniques is beyond the scope of the present study, I believe that Branden has provided Objectivism with the equivalent of a “
depth hermeneutics
” similar in spirit to that pioneered by
Jürgen Habermas
.
⁵⁴
Habermas focused on the process by which the individual could be liberated from “distorted communication.” He utilized
Freudian psychoanalysis
as a means of transcending distortions in communicative interaction brought about by self-deceit and interpersonal manipulation. As
Thomas McCarthy
(1978) has observed, Habermas’s “depth hermeneutics” aims to translate “what is unconscious into what is conscious,” igniting “a process of reflection, a reappropriation of a lost portion of the self” (200). This therapeutic process is as important to Habermas’s project as it is to Objectivism. The full implications of this parallel will be explored in
Chapter 11
.

Branden is not the only theorist to redress the imbalance of
reason
and emotion implicit in some of Rand’s formulations.
⁵⁵
Peikoff, too, has stressed the importance of somatic and emotive aspects of experience. Since he views the individual as a unity of mind and body, reason and emotion, Peikoff explores how emotions serve as crucial psycho-epistemological agents. For Peikoff, although emotions are not means of cognition, they provide an important tie to concretes. They enable individuals to maintain their contact with internal and external reality, concretizing their abstractions and contributing enormously to their creativity.
⁵⁶

Like Branden, Peikoff further maintains that there are culturally related differences in how men and women deal with their
emotions
. In this culture, women are encouraged to exercise their emotions, whereas men are encouraged to
intellectualize
them. The tendency to equate femininity with intellectual self-alienation and masculinity with emotional self-alienation is disastrous to both women and men in their quest for genuinely human relationships.
⁵⁷
Peikoff inherits from Rand an antipathy toward the cultural bias to keep women “in their place.” Rand characterized
sexism
as “an ancient, primitive evil, supported and perpetuated by women as much as, or more than, by men.”
⁵⁸
In her view, women had accepted and sustained their own victimization, subverting their need for independence. Her novels present female protagonists who are strong-willed and autonomous, reflecting her own success in a male-dominated intellectual world.

Nevertheless, Rand characterized herself as an ardent “anti-feminist” and “man-worshiper.”
⁵⁹
She dissociated herself from modem
feminism
because she believed that it had embraced biological egalitarianism and collectivist statism. Both Rand and the early Nathaniel Branden emphasized the anatomical and biological differences between men and women that served as the basis for their respective
sex
roles as “aggressor” and “responder.”
⁶⁰

But in his work since 1968, Branden is far more concerned with the need to transcend
culturally induced
dualism in
gender
relations. Branden (1986, 241) observes that whereas men tend to disown tenderness, sensuality, and the capacity to nurture, women tend to disown strength, assertiveness, sexuality, and self-reliance. He argues that the most creative individuals are those who can integrate both “male” and “female” aspects of personality. By not conforming to cultural stereotypes, such men and women “are more open to the totality of their inner being.”
⁶¹

In this regard, Branden and Peikoff agree, surprisingly, with modern feminist methodology.
Lynda Glennon
, for instance, emphasizes the need for “
synthesism
” in the human personality. The male-female duality, according to Glennon, violates the wholeness of human nature, splitting men and women into half-people. In her view, “culturally specific connotations of ‘masculine/feminine’ as opposite categories is, then, but one more variation on the dualism that pervades everyday life and thought.”
⁶²

It is fitting that both Peikoff and, to a larger extent, Branden, in their movement toward a fuller
integration
of alleged opposites, such as
reason
and emotion, the masculine and the feminine, have reaffirmed the tendency toward synthesis that Rand had absorbed from her
Russian
ancestors. This reaffirmation is all the more significant because it bears a subtle resemblance to the ideas of the Russian
Symbolists
. As noted in
Chapter 1
,
Merezhkovsky
had viewed the
sexual
act as the highest form of unity, since each body is interpenetrated by the other. For Merezhkovsky, true human being involves a synthesis of the womanly aspect in man, and the manly aspect in woman (Lossky, 1951, 337–41). While Peikoff and Branden would not embrace Merezhkovsky’s indivisible androgyne as a moral ideal, they are clearly engaged in a similar revolt against culturally induced sexual dualism. This revolt has become more apparent as Peikoff, Branden, and others have separated themselves from some of Rand’s personal attitudes, which had been codified by both her followers and detractors as part of the corpus of Objectivism. Rand’s traces of cultural conservatism, as expressed in her opposition to the candidacy of a woman
president
and her disapproval of
homosexuality
, were sometimes mistakenly elevated to the status of
philosophical
principle.
⁶³

The issue of homosexuality, in particular, dramatically illustrates the contrast between Rand and her successors. In 1971, during a question-and-answer session following her Ford Hall Forum lecture “
The Moratorium on Brains
” (1971T), Rand asserted that although every individual has a right to engage in any consensual sexual activity, homosexuality is a manifestation of psychological “flaws, corruptions, errors, unfortunate premises,” and that it is both “immoral” and “disgusting.” Ignoring factors of social environment and/or genetic-biological endowment, Rand viewed homosexuality as a moral issue, based on her implicit assumption that it was a consciously chosen behavior. Whereas behaviorists see human beings as primarily products of social conditioning and the psychoanalysts see them as primarily creatures of internal drives, Rand emphasized the volitional aspects of consciousness.
⁶⁴