The family is the civilian equivalent of Marine boot camp. It is supposed to prepare people for the combats and joys of life. Let us look at it, however, in light of the fact that one out of every three spouses checks out of [their] first attempt at marriage. And let us view the family in light of the hypothesis that rigid conformity to the middle-class design for marriage and family life is the prime cause of physical and psychological breakdown in our time.
We live in a utopia-for-somebody. It is not utopia for intelligent young middle-class man and
women who drop out and become hippies. They are not in dialogue with their elders, but commune
if at all with their peer group. It is not utopia for the blacks. It is not utopia for
the poor. It is not utopia for many women. For whom is America a utopia? Perhaps just
for that minority of men--the power elite and those who are close to them--who profit
from the status quo and resist social and institutional and educational change that
might diminish their grip on the levers of power. And they are not in dialogue with
the many they control rather than serve.
The act of writing bears something in common with the act of love. The writer, at
his most productive moments, just flows. He gives of that which is uniquely himself.
He makes himself naked, recording his nakedness in the written word. Herein lies
some of the terror which frequently freezes a writer, preventing him from producing.
Herein, too, lies some of the courage that must be entailed in letting others learn
how one has experienced or is experiencing the world.
On Loneliness and Solitude
(excerpted from "The Psychotherapist as Psychedelic Man," [1968] )
The ability of healthier personalities to find and maintain relationships of love and friendships in the world insures that a healthier person will have access to relief from the existential loneliness in which we all live. (I use the term relief, not cure, of existential loneliness.) Loneliness is not a disease from which one can be cured; rather, it is an inescapable fact of human existence. Less healthy personalities, cut off as they are from the fount of their real selves, find themselves terrible company. They cannot long tolerate solitude, and they run willy-nilly into busy work or superficial companionship with others. They do not, however, truly encounter another person, and enter into dialogue with him. Hence, the feeling of loneliness, of not being known and understood...
A healthier personality,because he is less self-concealing and has readier access to his own possible experience, the experience of possibility, is less afraid of solitude when that is their lot; and when he is with others he can feel secure enough in his own worth that he can let encounter and dialogue happen. During the process of such dialogue the shell that encapsulates him as a separate being ruptures and this inner world expands by receiving the disclosed world of experience of the other. When the dialogue ends he has experienced himself in the new dimensions evoked by the other person and he has learned of the personal world of another. He is enlarged and changed.