Monday, December 8, 2014

The Eugenics Movement In the History of American Medicine

The Eugenics Movement In the History of American Medicine
Bernard Pyron

This is mostly quotes from sources on the American Eugenics movement
and its influence upon American medical doctors and nurses.

Out of a crude 19th century science of genetics came genetic
determinism - and the Eugenics movement came out of this in the late
19th century. Out of the Eugenics movement came the 1973 Supreme
Court decision to legalize abortion. The Eugenics movement, along
with the influence of the financial elite in the late 19th century,
had an early influence on the American medical culture. Doctors and
nurses now think that genetics are more important than recent hard
science in human genetics shows it to be. Eugenics was and still is a
part of the ideology of the financial elite. It manifests as use of
anything to reduce population and reduce the birth rate.
keep the laces from frazzling. Every time a cell divides its telomeres
are shortened. But an enzyme named telomerase can rebuild the lost
telomeres as ends of the chromosomes, and some research has been
focused on what contributes to the production of telomerase.
Theoretically, telomere length can be a predictor of aging.

But in the more  recent "hard science" of human genetics a series of experiments has produced an understanding of aspects of human genetics far more advanced than Charles Darwin's theory of evolution of the genetics of John Dalton of the 19th century.  Dalton was a forerunner of the medical Eugenics movement which began in the late 19th century.

Elizabeth H. Blackburn, at the University of California, San
Francisco, was one of the pioneer researchers in genetics who focused
on telomere length and its relationship to chronic diseases
like cancer, and heart disease.

The research of Blackburn and others, including some Ph.D. psychologists
whose none I don't have now, developed a line of studies showing that
at least three main factors determine chromosome telomere length, some
nutrients, exercise and stress reduction. Their theoretical model
says if you don't get these nutrients, don't exercise and have high
stress you don't live as long.

Elizabeth Blackburn  was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak, for their pioneering work on factors contributing to Telemere Length.  Some Ph.D psychologists also worked on Telemere Length and factors involved in it.  Psychologists did at least one study published in 2014 on Telemere length related to cortisol levels, an indicator of stress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

"Eugenics (is) the social movement claiming to improve the genetic
features of human populations through selective breeding and
sterilization, based on the idea that it is possible to distinguish
between superior and inferior elements of society..."

"The American eugenics movement was rooted in the biological
determinist ideas of Sir Francis Galton, which originated in the
1880s. Galton studied the upper classes of Britain, and arrived at the
conclusion that their social positions were due to a superior genetic
makeup. Early proponents of eugenics believed that, through
selective breeding, the human species should direct its own evolution.
They tended to believe in the genetic superiority of Nordic, Germanic
and Anglo-Saxon peoples; supported strict immigration and
anti-miscegenation laws; and supported the forcible sterilization of
the poor, disabled and "immoral".

See: http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/eugenics.aspx

"The acknowledged leader of American eugenics, Charles Davenport,
received his Ph.D. from Harvard, taught at the University of
Chicago..." Harvard has been a major university for the training of
intellectuals who work in support of the elites.

http://www.emmerich1.com/EUGENICS.htm

"Eugenics has had a religious dimension. Galton suggested that it
should function as a religion, and this proposal was echoed by George
Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russel and others. In the United States shortly
after the turn of the century, the American Journal of Eugenics
advertised itself by noting that it was "formerly known as Lucifer the
Light Bearer."

MEDICAL EUGENICS WAS FUNDED AND PROMOTED BY THE TOP FINANCIAL ELITE

"The American eugenics movement received extensive funding from
various corporate foundations including the Carnegie Institution,
Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad fortune.[6] In 1906
J.H. Kellogg provided funding to help found the Race Betterment
Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan."

In the book, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism In
AMERICA, 1979, by E. Richard Brown, he says the current problems in
the U.S. health care system are due to the "marriage of modern
medicine to corporate capitalism."

"In the early years of the 20th century, Brown says that because
medical technology was expensive, doctors turned to the financial
elite for money. The Rockefeller family supplied a large part of the
money to fund medical technology, as well as medical research and
medical schools."

"Rockefeller University began in 1901 as the Rockefeller Institute for
medical Research. It began giving doctor's degrees in 1957. And the
Rockefeller University Hospital does basic as well as applied medical
research."

http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/rockroth.html

This site presents Chapter Ten of Murder By Injection, 1988, by Eustace Mullins.

Mullins says "...the Rockefeller Medical Monopoly attained control of
the health care of the nation."

In his 1988 book, Murder By Injection, Mullins says the Rockefellers,
with the help of the American Medical Association, gained control of
the U.S. Health Care System. He says the Rockefeller Education Board
spent more than $100 million to gain control of the U.S. medical
schools and thereby to turn United States doctors into allopathic
physicians using drugs and surgery.

The Rockefellers were involved in the pharmaceutical drug industry and
helped to make American doctors into highly paid salesmen for
prescription drugs. Perhaps the Rockefellers and others in the ruling
elite helped give high status to American doctors, making them members
of the ruling class, to help fool the people into accepting the drugs
they promoted as "cures" for many diseases. After all, a highly
respected doctor with much image must know what he is doing in
prescribing drugs.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/armageddon-or-newage/messages?o=1

According to this web site a Rockefeller in the 1950's advocated
putting mercury into vaccines. Mercury can have harmful effects upon
the health of people who receive vaccines.

The financial elite, especially the Rockefellers, made the American
medical profession into a top-down system, where local doctors are
controlled from the top of society, the financial and corporate
elites. The Eugenics movement was a part of that financial and
corporate elite, a movement that in the top-down system influenced the
culture of American doctors and nurses.

THE CALIFORNIA EUGENICS MOVEMENT SPREAD TO HITLER'S NAZI GERMANY

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

"After the eugenics movement was well established in the United
States, it spread to Germany. California eugenicists began producing
literature promoting eugenics and sterilization and sending it
overseas to German scientists and medical professionals. By 1933,
California had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than
all other U.S. states combined. The forced sterilization program
engineered by the Nazis was partly inspired by California's."

"The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German
eugenics programs, including the one that Josef Mengele worked in
before he went to Auschwitz."

EUTHANASIA AS A METHOD FOR POPULATION MANIPULATION

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

"One of the methods that was commonly suggested to get rid of
"inferior" populations was euthanasia. A 1911 Carnegie Institute
report mentioned euthanasia as one of its recommended "solutions" to
the problem of cleansing society of unfit genetic attributes. The most
commonly suggested method was to set up local gas chambers. However,
many in the eugenics movement did not believe that Americans were
ready to implement a large-scale euthanasia program, so many doctors
had to find clever ways of subtly implementing eugenic euthanasia in
various medical institutions. For example, a mental institution in
Lincoln, Illinois fed its incoming patients milk infected with
tuberculosis (reasoning that genetically fit individuals would be
resistant), resulting in 30-40% annual death rates. Other doctors
practiced euthanasia through various forms of lethal neglect."

"In the 1930s, there was a wave of portrayals of eugenic "mercy
killings" in American film, newspapers, and magazines. In 1931, the
Illinois Homeopathic Medicine Association began lobbying for the right
to euthanize "imbeciles" and other defectives. The Euthanasia Society
of America was founded in 1938."

IN THE 20TH CENTURY EUGENICISTS PROMOTED POPULATION CONTROL AND ABORTION

http://www.emmerich1.com/EUGENICS.htm

"From 1952 on, a major part of the eugenics movement was the
population control movement."

"One of the organizations that promoted eugenics under the new
population rubric was the Population Council. It was founded in 1952
by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, and spent $173,621,654 in its first 25
years. That is not a bad budget for one of the organizations in a dead
movement! Clearly, the people who think the eugenics movement died in
the rubble in Berlin do not understand crypto-eugenics, genetics or
population control."

"The coercive Chinese policy has a great deal of acceptance and
support in the United States, including from feminist leaders like
Eleanor Smeal and Molly Yard. When the Reagan administration cut off
funds for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) because of its
support for the Chinese population program, two American organizations
sued to restore funds: Rockefeller's Population Council and the
Population Institute in Washington. A 1978 survey of members of the
Population Association of America found that 34 percent of members
agreed that "coercive birth control programs should be initiated in at
least some countries immediately."

"In fact, the United States government is responsible for much of the
global population control. "

http://www.emmerich1.com/EUGENICS.htm

"The influence on the eugenicists on abortion in America is perhaps
best seen by comparing Roe v. Wade and a book by Professor Glanville
Williams, The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law. The book is cited
repeatedly in the 1973 abortion decision, but the numerous citations
do not reveal the full extent of the influence. Justice Blackmun
lifted his whole argument from Williams, including the history of
abortion, ancient attitudes, the influence of Christianity, common
law, Augustine's and Aquinas' teaching, canon law and English
statutory law. And Williams was a member of the Eugenics Society. Roe
v. Wade was based on eugenics."

EUGENICS IN EARLY AMERICAN PSYCHIATRY

Dowbiggin, a historian of psychiatry, focuses on the role that
psychiatry played in the eugenics movement. George Alder Blumer and
Charles Kirk Clarke were both psychiatrists who were under the
influence of the Eugenics Movement and both were superintendents of
influential mental asylums. Blumer headed the Utica State Hospital in
New York and the Butler Hospital for the Insane in Providence, Rhode
Island. Clarke ruled over the mental hospitals in Kingston and Toronto
before accepting a government mental-health post.

"Both Blumer and Clarke were early proponents of eugenics, emphasizing
the importance of restrictive laws that would limit the immigration
and marriage of the "mentally defective." To them, such laws seemed
necessary to stem the explosive growth of state and provincial mental
asylums where foreign-born patients made up more than 50 percent of
the hospital population. Further, the growth of hereditarian views in
science supported eugenic proposals; psychiatry's desire for greater
respectability in the medical profession made eugenic "science"
attractive."

On the 1897 Michigan Asexualization Bill, psychiatrist and Eugenicist
Blumer said the bill was a hopeful sign of the times. Blumer urged
surgeons to aid "the survival of the fit" by removing both ovaries
from women in whom on was affected, making them unable to have
children. The late 19th century Eugenicists wanted to make women who
they saw as inferior unable to have children.

Robert Battery, a surgeon at this time, advocated the removed the
ovaries of "inferior" women to cause premature menopause. Eugenicists
then claimed that removal of the ovaries cured insanity, reduced
sexual desire and prevented anti-social behavior. But their
motivation was to reduce the birth rate of people they considered
inferior.

CIRCUMCISION AND THE EUGENICS MOVEMENT

In the very late 19th century Doctor Peter Charles Remondino took up
the cause of routine infant circumcision. Remondino was influenced by
the theory of Charles Darwin and as a result believed that male
infants should be circumcised to perfect a fault in human evolution of
the male reproductice organ..

The circumcision argument showed a racist side. In the late forties,
for example, Newsweek magazine quoted Dr. Eugene Hand's address to the
AMA in which he observed that whereas the "promiscuous" and
uncircumcised Negro had an incidence of venereal infection of "almost
100%,... for the widely educated Jew, circumcised at birth, the
venereal disease rate has remained the same or decreased." Newsweek,
21 July 1947, 49; E. A. Hand, "Circumcision and Venereal Disease,"
Archives of Dermatology and Syphilis 60 (1949): 341-46.

See: http://www.nndb.com/people/018/000133616/

"Dr John Harvey Kellogg became chief physician at the Western Health
Reform Institute of Battle Creek, a home for healthy diet and
lifestyle that had been founded by Seventh Day Adventist leader Ellen
G. White in 1866."

Dr John Kellogg was an early American medical Eugenicist who was a
Seventh Day Adventist, and advocated eating his Kellogg's corn flakes
and circumcision of all male babies. According to
http://english.pravda.ru/health/27-03-2006/77873-circumcision-0/ Dr.
Kellogg said "It is important to perform surgery without using any
anesthetic so that pain during an operation may affect the mind. It
would be good if pain could be also associated with the idea of
punishment. "

"Surprisingly enough, U.S. doctors quickly embraced Kellogg’s
controversial concepts."

The Eugenicist doctors who promoted routing infant circumcision in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries may have thought that circumcision
would help reduce the birth rate, though they claimed the surgery had
health benefits for all kinds of ailments
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Sunday, September 28, 2014

Kurz Number One, When Carl Kurz Struck Oil And Began the Somerset Oil Field

Kurz Number One, When Carl Kurz Struck Oil And Began the Somerset Oil Field
Bernard Pyron

I have looked for San Antonio Newspaper articles on the discovery of oil on the Carl Kurz place. I would like to find a newspaper article written at the time Carl Kurz found that he had hit oil instead of artesian water which he was drilling for. I would like to find out exactly when grandfather Kurz discovered oil and whether or not it was a gusher, as Billy Kenney implies in his interview for the Institute of Texan Cultures. In oil field lingo, the well that Carl Kurz drilled for artesian water which struck oil would be called Kurz Number One. But I have never found an online newspaper article on the discovery of oil on the Carl Kurz land.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset,_Texas

"In 1913, while drilling for artesian water, Kurz discovered oil. A boom followed. The Somerset oilfield extended from Somerset to below Pleasanton and was the largest known shallow field in the world at that time. Two oil refineries in the field and a pipeline into San Antonio handled the high-gravity crude."

http://books.google.com/books?id=7pgtAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA114...

The Oil Weekly, January 21, 1922

"The Somerset, Texas shallow oil pool completed its tenth year with the close of 1921 without a single dry hole in proven territory since the discovery of the field........the field had only eight or ten very small wells and development did not really start until three years ago...the older wells finished around 900 feet with from one to four barrels production."

If ten years went by up to the end of 1921, then the beginning of the Somerset Oil Field would have been in 1912, so the date in the above wikipedia article saying Carl Kurz hit oil in 1913 is too late a date.

This Oil Weekly information on the ten years at the end of 1921 from the start of the Somerset Oil Field supports the earlier date of the discovery of oil by Carl Kurz according to the oil leases that A.M. Pyron contracted in 1912 for the Somerset Oil & Gas Co, seen in online Bexar county land transaction records. These records show that A.M. Pyron contracted 17 oil leases in 1912-1913. The list of land owners in a Bexar county transaction on June 9, 1913 that A.M. Pyron as the Trustee for the Somerset Oil and Gas Company signed leases with include R.B. Touchstone, 133 acres, C. Kurz, 129 acres, S.S. Wildman 286 acres, Aug. F. Ernst 480 acres, John Eastwood, 234 acres, C.H. Long, 111 acres, W.B. Kilborn, 78 acres. The oil and gas leases were signed from November 12, 1912 to January 6, 1913.

Again, the 1913 date for the discovery of oil by Carl Kurz is not consistent with the online Bexar county transactions showing A.M. Pyron contracted oil and gas leases as early as November of 1912.

Billie Kurz McCord in a phone call of December of 2012 said that the original well was near the Carl Kurz house, which became the Gus Kurz house on Payne Road. Billie said there was a small house over the oil well.

Billy Kenney On the First Carl Kurz Oil Well In His Interview For the Oral History Collection, Institute For Texan Cultures in 1988: Billy Kenney was born in February of 1904, so in about 1912 he would have been only about eight.

HC: "At one time Somerset was the largest shallow well in
the country, wasn't it?
K: Largest shallow oil field in the world.
HC: In the world? Now, Kurtz, wasn't Carl Kurtz diggin'
for water?
KENNEY 10
K: That's right. The way I understand it, he and my
grandfather, of course, - ther e was just a road separatin'
them.
HC: That's grandfather Pyron.
K: Grandfather put in with him to dig a thousand foot
well.
SC: Water well.
K: See if they could get some water. That would be good
for irrigating, see?
HC: Yeah.
K: And they got that oil and they was the maddest ole men.
I remember that day they were really put out. They didn't
want no damned oil, they wanted a water well. (laughter)."
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My Jungle On Idiot Road In the Bug Lands of Missouri

My Jungle On Idiot Road In the Bug Lands of Missouri
Bernard Pyron



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Tulsa, the Dog Who Survived


Tulsa, the Dog Who Survived
Bernard Pyron

When Tulsa, the dog shown in the photo here taken September 26, 2014, was born in March of 2004 his mother had only two, and the other looked just like Tulsa. Both got parvo virus in July of 2004 and his brother died. The old Christian Media Network group, or several in it, were praying for Tulsa to live and on a Saturday morning suddenly he was up and playing with his mother. He got over the parvo virus.
Tulsa, who is part Walker, and part Wolfus Spaniel and Beagle was not named for Tulsa, Oklahoma, but for a famous South Texas coyote hound, who was written up in the journal, The Hunter's
Horn. Tulsa, the famous hound, ran in the area of Devine. In a Hunter's Horn article from the thirties the the writer said the famous Tulsa of the thirties would "sit up in front of a pack behind a Wolf and scream every time his feet hit the ground." 

LIFE magazine on December 7, 1936 had an article on the South Texas Wolf Hunters Meet held on the Story Ranch at Cotulla. Julian Roberson was the owner of Tulsa the hound who won both the hunt and bench show.

 Running hounds after coyotes in the thirties and forties was part of another time and another culture, very different from the one we live under now..........You might say that being interested in running hounds after coyotes is now politically incorrect - and thats partly why it is interesting. Few now can understand why men would go out in the country, build up a camp fire and sit around it for hours in the night listening to the barking of their hounds on coyote trails maybe a mile or two away. See: http://www.texashuntingforum.com/.../ubb.../topics/2473692/2.............

"There are still a few "Wolf Hunters" out there. I just visited with a buddy who had been up around Decatur where he hunted with a couple of fellows who still had running dogs..

  Gary Roberson says "My Grandfather, Julian Roberson bred and hunted a dog by the name of Tulsa. Tulsa won the meet in the late 30's and is considered by most of the South Texas Wolf Hunters to have been the greatest of all time. Walt Disney sent a sound crew down to Cotulla, TX and recorded the dog running a coyote and it was Tulsa who actually provided the sound track of the hound in the Disney movie, "Voice of Bugle Anne". He later sold the hound to Preacher Balkham from San Antonio. To everyone's disappointment, Tulsa never reproduced any offspring with his great classic bugle mouth.."

"Preacher Balkham" is Robert Gaddy Baucom, in the thirties preacher of the South San Antonio Baptist Church, who had coyote hounds and sometimes ran them with those of my older brother and father. Baucom, or as the coyote hunters called him "The Preacher," had a Model A truck which was equipped to hold several of his hounds - and he had built along the sides of the back shelves and  cupboards like in the old chuck wagons the cowboys of the open range used. Baucom would arrive in the Somerset area on a Saturday night  before dark with his rig and park it at our house near town. When my Father Blake Pyron and my older brother George got off from work after dark on a winter night, they would head out to the Quesenberry, the Ballard, or wherever the group was going that night.

 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028471/plotsummary...

The Movie Voice of Bugle Ann, 1936

"The countrymen in the hills of Missouri take the hounds on night fox hunts. This goes on until Jacob Terry comes into the county and decides to raise sheep and install a woven wire fence. This upsets the neighbors since the dogs would not harm the sheep and they will be hurt running into the fence at night. Jacobs vows to shoot any dogs or people that he finds on his land. But Bengy Davis is in love with Camden Terry and that alone causes problems. But when the hound, Bugle Ann is missing one night, both sides are out with guns to settle the score." 
http://immortalephemera.com/.../the-voice-of-bugle-ann.../

http://www.tcm.com/.../Voice-of-Bugle-Ann-The-Original...

This is a two and a half minute clip from the 1936 movie Voice of Bugle Ann, which has a few seconds of the distinctive voice of a hound, which, if
Gary Roberson is right, is the voice of the famous South Texas coyote hound, Tulsa recorded in 1936. The voice of Tulsa, if it is him, does sound like a bugle. And Gary Roberson is the grandson of Julian Roberson the owner of Tulsa.

The Voice of Bugle Ann as a full movie is online, but I did not find one on youtube. The others involve signing up for something... As Bugle Ann, the dog with the voice of Tulsa, was killed in the movie, so the lead dog, Pep, that belonged to my older brother George, in 1935 or 1936, was shot and killed by a farmer, Cleve Kight, when she was leading a pack through Kight's place. There was an article on the killing of the Lead Dog, Pep in the Hunter's Horn, April 1936 page 16, about how in a Bexar county, Texas court trial in San Antonio my father, Blake Pyron, testified that he could tell what his hounds were running by the sound of their barking. He said the dogs "never changed their tune," when the lead Dog Pep was killed. Cleve, or Cleveland L. Kight, who killed her, said the hounds were running his hogs. Since the address of Kight who killed Pep and another Pyron hound that night was given as Von Ormy, its likely that the incident occurred in the general area of the Quesenberry ranch on the north banks of the Medina. I am not sure how Kight got in position to shoot dogs running on a coyote trail. George was only about 16 when his dog was killed. A lead dog is one who gets out in front of the pack of hounds which are usually scattered behind the lead dog. The lead dog is responsible for staying on the trail of the coyote, though when trailing becomes difficult, other hounds who are the trail dogs who first find trails of coyotes, may come up and help the lead dog find the lost trail.



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Sunday, August 17, 2014

My 1967 Article On Interpersonal Relationships
image
My 1967 Article On Interpersonal Relationships
Bernard Pyron

In 1966 or 1967 - forty-seven or forty-eight years ago - I wrote an article on interpersonal relationships which was published in a social psychology journal in 1967.  The article is really about the heterosexual relationship, though it can be applied to any two person relationship.  The ideas I used in the article reflect the personality and social psychology of the sixties, some of which is outdated.  For example, my approach to accuracy of interpersonal perception, an interest of personality and social psychologists in the sixties, was based on the social psychology of accuracy of interpersonal perception as related to the complexity of the perceiver’s cognitive capability.  The influence on my 1967 paper included the work of James Bieri, published in 1955, on cognitive complexity and accuracy of interpersonal perception,  Ivan D. Steiner’s work on interpersonal relations influenced by accuracy of social perception, 1955, Bernard Farber’s factor analysis of “elements” of competence in interpersonal relations, 1962 and my own experiment on accuracy of interpersonal perception as determined by consistency of information, in which I manipulated the consistency of the target person to be predicted, published in 1965.  This line of theory and research was typical of the work in the sixties before attribution theory became popular in personality and social psychology.

I use some academic verbiage in this 1967 article in a peer review journal that I would not use today. 

My discussion of romantic love and of adjustment, success and monogamic sufficiency in the 1967 paper are outdated and now  I would write something like this.

In 1966 and 1967 the Madison, Wisconsin  University scene  was into the beginnings of the changes that the counterculture made in culture and in the American heterosexual relationship. Especially for educated people, the counterculture made the heterosexual relationship less idealistic and less controlled by abstract expectations from society, while at the same time the counterculture brought in a loss of morality in the relationship and all that eventually increased the divorce rate.

Even in the fifties the expectations were that in the heterosexual relationship men were to be active, while women were to be more passive. The woman had to wait for the man to ask her out on a date with him. Usually in the fifties women did not ask men to marry them.  But many of  the counterculture people moved toward a type of heterosexual relationship in which men and women were to have equal roles, so that it became acceptable for the woman to be active in creating a relationship and in initiating meetings of the two.  In other words, the conventional idea of the different roles of the man and the woman in a relationship was beginning to be changed by many in on the fringes of the counterculture in 1966-1967.

At the University of Wisconsin in 1966-67 some  women undergraduate and graduate students were much more active in creating heterosexual relationships  with men and in initiating  meetings with them than similar women wold have done ten years earlier in the fifties.  But these women who were more active in the heterosexual relationship often dumped their boy friends and got into relationships with other men.  This is where the heterosexual liberation movement of the mid to late sixties went against basic Biblical morality.  Clearly, leaving one’s spouse, whether the couple has gone through a marriage ceremony and has a marriage license from the beast government or not, is against Biblical morality.

 ”Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” Matthew 19: 6

"And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord, Let not the wife depart from her husband:    But and if she depart, let her remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband: and let not the husband put away his wife." I Corinthians 7: 10-11


"He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness,"  Matthew 19: 18

If a couple who breaks up after a few weeks together is not seen as being spouses to one another, then I Corinthians 6: 13, 18 applies. “Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body………..Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that commiteth fornication sinneth against his own body.” Many people within the heterosexual liberation movement then went from one heterosexual relationship to another.

A few years ago  I corresponded by E Mail with Michael William Doyle, who wrote Free Radicals and is co-editor of Imagine
Nation, essays on the counterculture.  Doyle says “The trick to writing about the Sixties counterculture, I  think, is in how you define this “movement” in way that is coherent  and plausibly differentiates it from the other, more conventional  social movements with which it is inextricably intertwined.”   The heterosexual liberation movement which began alongside and within the counterculture’s watering holes and in some major universities in the early to mid sixties was one of such “more conventional social movements” intertwined with the Hippie and Drug movements which were at the core of the counterculture of the sixties and seventies. Many men and women in that early heterosexual liberation movement did not use LSD, nor were they regular pot smokers. Many of them dressed conventionally and, for the most part, were straight and intelligent  undergraduate and graduate students.

But this heterosexual liberation movement spread after the mid sixties to millions of  young people of a  broader American culture, and for this reason it is important.  For many young people after about 1965, the heterosexual relationship was changed from the way it was in the fifties.

It is interesting, though,  to see something I wrote about 48 years ago and have not read in over 30 years.

"Who am I? What unique combination of objects, places, and people have I loved or hated so much that these attachments make me what ‘I am? "Who I am" can be experienced freshly and momentarily in a concrete act of relatedness to another person. The "Who I am" in relation to objects, places, and other people I have known—the music I have enjoyed, the art that I have met or have created, the philosophy and theory I have absorbed and worked with—lives more vividly in the momentary experience of relatedness to another. Relatedness at a given moment in time may inspire in the other a sensitivity to my feelings, moods, attitudes, voice quality, facial expression, and the expression in my eyes. And this sensitivity to me on the part of the other is sent back to me and helps me experience "Who I am." "Who I am" is partly learned in relation to someone else. But when we try to impose upon these spontaneous happenings in human relationships a belief of what relatedness should be, ought to be, or what we want it to be, we are destroying the possibility of fully experiencing the spontaneous moments of relatedness to another. Relatedness at a given moment in time may inspire in the other a sensitivity to my feelings, moods, attitudes, voice quality, facial expression, and the expression in my eyes. And this sensitivity to me on the part of the other is sent back to me and helps me experience "Who I am."

"Who I am" is partly learned in relation to someone else. But when we try to impose upon these spontaneous happenings in human relationships a belief of what relatedness should be, ought to be, or what we want it to be, we are destroying the possibility of fully experiencing the spontaneous moments of relatedness. If one worries about his failure to achieve relatedness to another, he is less likely to achieve success in two-person relationships. Being overly concerned in a painfully self-conscious way about failure to achieve heightened relatedness is nearly always self-defeating and destructive of human relationships. And when we categorize and classify the other as a twenty-year-old, a philosophy major, a Methodist, an Irishman or a Jew, or according to one of our friend’s description of the other, we are separate.

One reason of our failure to relate emotionally to others is the attitude of painful self-consciousness. Self-consciousness makes us separate from others, alone and isolated in our conceptualization of ourselves. But this attitude can lead to a conceptual and rational analysis of the two-person relationship. A rational understanding of human relationships may help individuals develop attitudes and skills which will lead them to achieve more rewarding relations if, in the moment of relatedness, self-consciousness can be discarded, and if the rational attitudes are fully integrated with feeling and action. In accord with this orientation, the present paper is an attempt to state some of the conditions which, when achieved, will increase mutual reward in two-person relationships. It is an “if-then” type of theory. If these conditions, which are attitudes and skills inherent in the two persons, are achieved to a maximum degree, then it is more probable that the relationship will be mutually rewarding. By reward I mean satisfaction of basic needs, including the need for novelty, identity, relatedness, and mutual trust. The conditions which follow can be applied to all two-person relationships: parent-child, male-male, female-female, and adult heterosexual relationships. Since failure in marriage is perhaps the most damaging interpersonal relationship failure in our society, most of the emphasis will be on marriage relationships.

The marriage contract involves a commitment to continue rewarding the other. A marriage partner who fails in this commitment often experiences guilt because of his failure to reward the other for whom he is responsible. The statistical fact that one in three marriages end in divorce is only, the most obvious indication of heterosexual relationship failure in our society. Those who fail to achieve relatedness in marriage but stay married often suffer every variety of unhappiness, anxiety, worry, boredom, and psychosomatic disease. These symptoms may result from a conflict between rebellion against the marriage commitment and a desire to adjust to an imperfect situation. Several contemporary myths have been incorporated into the
American institution of marriage, and it is my hypothesis that “these myths do much to prevent the achievement of the conditions that are necessary for mutual and lasting reward in marriage.

 The Myth of Romantic Love

The myth of romantic love—where two selves who think they are highly individualized and who think they are just right for each other but who soon come to be isolated from each other and thus seek greater togetherness in a superficial way—has become our current ideal of romantic love. In longing for love, the adolescent or adult idealizes the love relationship and creates in his imagination an ideal mate which he will never find. When the boy or girl actually begins a relationship with a real member of the opposite sex, he or she may see the other through these idealized dimensions.   The communication and love that may be felt is not real but due to idealization, which serves the person’s need for perfection and eternal devotion resulting from affection deprivation.

As the relationship continues, there may occur a deep-felt disappointment because the other does not live up to expectations. The ideal heterosexual relationship is now a part of the mythic structure of contemporary American life because it serves a deep need of individuals. The ideal love relationship is now a myth since, like other myths, it expresses a longing for an impossible and unachievable condition. Although our women’s magazines devote a considerable amount of paper to the elaboration of part of the myth, it is not an adequate myth for inspiring marriage love. It is without embodiment in a system of concepts and facts about human relationships, and the myth of romantic love is not really part of a faith whose function would be to bring the individual personality into an emotional and perceptual relationship to other people and the physical environment.

A number of writers have discussed the myth of romantic love which began with the troubadours of the Middle Ages and became a tradition in the West, for example, Evans, 1, 1953,  Ellis and Harper, 1, 1961 and Hayakawa, 1, 1957. To the extent that this myth is based on localization, the desire to sutler in love, me notion mat people have a dire need for love, possessiveness, and so forth, it is unrealistic. The romantic love myth does inspire some feeling of love between people, but it is a superficial myth which generates failure experiences in both premarital and marital relationships on too wide a scale. And yet this widespread failure experience can be an instigation to change the myth.

The Myths of Adjustment, Success and Monogamic Sufficiency

Linder, 2, 1952,  has suggested that our society is dominated by what he calls the “eleventh commandment,” “thou shall be adjusted.” The myth of adjustment requires that individuals conform to their environmental situation, to passively accept things as they are, rather than actively try to change them. The current version of the myth of adjustment applied to the marriage situation is based on the attitude of powerlessness. The individual is thought to be powerless to change his present state. Even though his relationship with his mate leaves much to be desired, even though he may feel that his life is in a rut, that he is missing out on something vital in life, he is supposed to accept his situation since he is thought to be powerless. Thus, the myth of adjustment might be seen as a kind of medicine to be used to counteract the unrealistic interpersonal aspiration fostered by the myth of romantic love. The myth of romantic love offers the individual complete fulfillment and happiness through heterosexual relationships, and when these idealized expectations are not achieved, the individual feels that he is a failure. A common response to failure is to resign oneself and to defend against an overwhelming sense of failure by feeling that one’s situation is the fault of the social order, of chance, of fate, or the influence of other, more powerful people. Since the individual is powerless to change the social order and also to change his relationship with his mate, he must, according to the myth of adjustment, accept his situation. As long as people feel power-less to change their marital situation, little change is apt to come about. A major source of conflict in marriage results from people’s
failure to fully accept the myth of adjustment.

The conflict is between passively adjusting and actively seeking to build a new type of relationship. Another current American myth which has been incorporated into the institution of marriage is that of success. This is Western man’s basic need for achievement. In American culture this involves a need for position, influence, respect, and, above all, economic power. Since few are able to achieve success in this sense, since their aspirations are higher than their chances for success, they develop a deep sense of failure. A man may feel 1 that he is a failure, and his wife may also feel he is a failure.  These feelings often become highly disruptive of marriage relationships A man who is a failure, especially among other men, [ will likely be a failure in his relationship with his wife as long as both have a high need for success. And again, a conflict results because an increasing number of people are coming to question the value of the American myth of achievement. Many feel that it not only offers hollow goals, but leads to a hopeless rat race. But one must have a certain amount of financial power and influence to function in American society. Hence the basic conflict.

The third myth which is another source of conflict in marriage is the notion that the married couple is emotionally sufficient in themselves. The idea that the married couple is a sufficient social unit and may remain emotionally isolated from others is an imposition upon the reality of many present day marriage relationships. The achievement of emotional sufficiency is a noble goal, but when sufficiency is imposed where it does not, in fact, exist, conflicts result. Sufficiency can exist only when the couple is able to maintain a high level of mutual reward. When mutual reward is low, conflict results because the imposed myth of monogamic sufficiency clashes with the desire to relate to individuals (male and female) other than the marriage partner.

A Rational Model of Mutually Rewarding Relationships

When individuals do not hold strongly to the myths of romantic love, adjustment and success, and are able to meet to a minimal degree the conditions of communication, complexity of interpersonal perception, and absence of high affection drive, the marriage relationship may be superior to many existing relationships. It should be emphasized, however, that I do not intend to imply that these three conditions are all the conditions that are required for mutually rewarding relationships. There arc many other important conditions.

Condition 1: Authentic Communication of Self

If one wishes to change the other’s perception of him so that the other will reward him to a greater degree, he must be able to accurately communicate his feelings and attitudes to the other. When both individuals say exactly what they feel and do not attempt to deceive the other, a feeling of mutual trust may develop. This feeling of mutual trust is necessary for further accurate communication. According to Jourard, 3, 1964, “we disclose our-selves when we are pretty sure that the person receiving the disclosure will evaluate our disclosures and react to them as we do ourselves.”’ Withholding one’s feelings and attitudes from others often results in one not knowing what his real feelings are himself. Alienation from oneself and from others is so wide-spread in our culture that Jourard feels no one really recognizes it as a sickness.

The self-alienated person who cannot know himself because he cannot communicate himself authentically to another person often finds himself vaguely anxious and depressed. Since he does not know himself he cannot grasp his problem clearly, and he cannot know the contribution of his own feelings and perceptions to the problem situation. It is even difficult for the self-alienated person to identify a situation as a problem. The dangers that most people anticipate from authentic communication of themselves to another person are often real. A person who discloses himself to people with whom he has only a casual relationship may be regarded by them as weak, confused, or sick. They may take advantage of the information given and do harm to the self-discloser. An individual needs to communicate himself authentically to only two or three significant others whom be loves and trusts.

If an individual communicates himself honestly to two /or three (or even one) loved and trusted others, he will likely be better able to play his professional role without great conflict. But when an individual does not reveal himself to anyone,  and thus has only an ambiguous and confused concept of himself, he may develop conflicts between the roles he is asked to play as a professional husband or father, and his confused concept of what he himself really is. Conflict of this type often results  in anxiety, neurotic symptoms, psychosomatic ailments, and death. Honest verbal communication is especially necessary when the two persons in a relationship have experienced different environments, have developed different interests, and more important, have experienced different ranges of stimuli.

For example, if one person’s attitude toward architecture has developed from his limited range of experience with conventional homes and buildings, and the other’s attitude has developed on the basis of a much wider range of architectural stimuli from conventional homes all the way to a considerable degree of experience with architecture designed by highly creative architects, the two are almost certain to have different attitudes toward particular buildings. Only through honest communication to each other about their attitudes toward buildings and about their particular concrete experience with architecture can they come to understand and perhaps accept the other’s different attitudes. The same process holds when the two have experienced different ranges  of social stimuli. One person may dislike behavior in people which the second person can only understand by coming to understand, with the help of the first person, the concrete experiences that determined his attitude. It is much easier for two people to communicate accurately and concretely their attitudes toward experiences outside their own relationship.

Yet when one individual feels that the other has a mistaken perception of him, he may with the other to express his exact feelings and attitudes toward him. Negative as well as positive feelings must be expressed to the other if honest communication is to take place. But it is quite possible that honest communication of dislikes for the other will tend to destroy the relationship. However, no relationship can develop without some negative feeling; some anger and frustration. These feelings should be expressed to the other at times rather than suppressed or expressed to an outsider. If the relationship is more rewarding than punishing for both, it will survive and gain from honest communication of negative feelings. But a self-conscious striving to communicate accurately and in great concrete detail all of one’s experiences to the other has a false ring, especially when it becomes somewhat intellectualized or labored.

An individual may also strive to be honest to the other but later discover that he has deceived himself and the other. He may wish to perceive himself and have others perceive him as an honest person, but will fail so long as he strives, so long as he attempts to reveal himself in his unique essence in a single moment, and so long as he holds a rigid picture of himself as a person who is honest. But a person who has never communicated to another honestly may have to go through this stage, and hopefully will come to realize that relatedness and the experience of identity in a relationship cannot be achieved by self-conscious striving, cannot be simply verbal, or achieved in a short period of time. Another result of a. self-conscious striving to be honest to achieve this longed-for relatedness to another is what Tom Banta calls “selective authenticity” Banta,4, 1965.

The individual wants to be honest but covers up other feelings and attitudes which he may wish to keep Secret or which are unconscious. He may avoid telling the other of his deepest disturbing fears, desires;and terrors. If he is able to communicate these disturbing feelings, this may threaten the other, especially if the other also has disturbing anxieties and fears. When both disturbed persons attempt to communicate disturbing fears to each other, feelings may become increasingly threatening, complex, tangled, ambivalent, and morbid. The two individuals may then attempt to escape each other. Each must learn to communicate to the other only the feelings that  the other can handle, can come to understand, accept, and react effectively to, and each must learn to understand, accept, and make an effective response to the other’s communicating or disturbing feelings. In time, each may come to understand the complexity of the other’s feelings and move out of the fear-producing  tangled web of interacting disturbing emotions. Thus far we have considered communication as an aid to  increased accuracy of perception of the other. There is some evidence from experimental studies in interpersonal relations that accuracy of interpersonal perception is related to social effectiveness and interpersonal competence (for example, the review by Steiner,5, 1955 and a study by Farber, 5, 1962.

Communication, both verbal and nonverbal where there is no conflict between the two, is also rewarding in itself. It is both a complete surrender, an outpouring of oneself to the other, and an active process of giving to the other whatever is necessary for his or her momentary experiencing or development. Communication moves each individual away from a feeling of isolation, tends to satisfy his or her need for affection, and in part frees both to be less dependent upon each other, to be self-sufficient, and to face the world alone. At the same time it provides the contact that is necessary for the feeling of relatedness and “What I am,” or identity.

Condition 2: Complexity of Social Perception

The human nervous system seems to be built to simplify and  organize the multitude of concrete stimuli which impinges upon it. We need to order concrete stimuli, the thousands of sensory perceptions we receive from another person, into a manageable system. We simplify the enormous complexity of social stimuli. We have to. But we can easily overdo it, for when we overly simplify another’s behavior, we lose something of the other. Whether we consciously realize it or not, we usually compare one person to another or to several others we have known. Is Nancy more or less affectionate than Joan? Or is John more or less creative than Jim? The simplifying processes that we use to experience others are determined by two kinds of past experiences: (1) the traits our culture has told us to look for and evaluate in
people, and (2) the range of personal experience we have had with people.

A given act of another person is ordered in relation to other acts of that person  or in relation to acts of other people we have known. We arrive at perceptions of a “greater-than or less-than” type of organization. For example, Jim is more intelligent than Tom, but Ralph is more intelligent than Jim. We order the behavior of other persons along scales of discrimination, which are our mechanisms for simplifying the otherwise impossible  confusion of concrete sensory stimuli? Intelligent-unintelligent, sincere-insincere, and honest-dishonest are examples of scales for ordering people. The term number of categories is used to  describe the number of descriminations we are capable of making along any given scale. If we perceive others as being either intelligent or not intelligent, we are making use of only two categories; but if we perceive Tom as slightly unintelligent, Jim as slightly intelligent, Joe as moderately intelligent, and Ralph as highly intelligent, we are making use of four desirable categories along the scale of intelligent-unintelligent. To achieve simplicity of perceptual organization, the individual uses a very small number of scales to discriminate between the acts of people and uses a very small number of categories along each of his scales (more dichotomous or black-white).

When this process of simplification reaches an extreme, we are no longer in perceptual or emotional contact with a real live other person; we are experiencing him or her in a world of abstraction. To perceive a person through highly simplified scales and categories means  that we ignore much of the person’s concrete behavior. We are not “with” the other person.  At the sensory level, which is the most concrete level of human perceiving, people order muscular tensions, the sound of another’s voice, or a visual image of another, along scales such  as weight, loudness, and so forth. But when we impose an abstract ordering scale such as sincere-insincere upon these many concrete sensory stimuli coming from another person, we are  shutting out much of the concrete stimuli and registering only the stimuli that fits into our system of scales, categories, and needs. When we summarize a number of concrete acts of another person by perceiving him as submissive, a great deal of information is lost in the abstracting process. But when we perceive—as a summary of another’s behavior—that “He will do what his girl friends want him to do, except when he is jealous of a girl, and he will do what his teachers want him to do, except when the teacher has given him a bad grade,” less sensory information is lost. It is likely that the human organism’s discrimination system is hierarchically organized, with concrete sensory scales such as weight and loudness at the bottom, and the most global. integrating. scales like sincere-insincere or intelligent-unintelligent at the top.

When the master scales at the top become very powerful and suppress sensory scale experiencing so that communication within the hierarchy breaks down, the individual will tend to lose perceptual contact with people. Abstract master scales like happy-sad or honest-dishonest nearly always form embedding contexts. The concrete stimuli that has been abstracted into the summarizing scale is embedded in that scale. If we perceive John as stupid, all the concrete behavior of his which we have summarized under the abstract scale of stupid is embedded in the stupid context. Even the behavior of John which is not so stupid is suppressed by the perception, by way of the abstract scale, that he is stupid. But if the abstracting process is regarded as tentative, hypothetical, and subject to change, a given concrete stimulus can be more easily differentiated from the embedding context. For example, some of John’s behavior can be experienced as intelligent.

So, certain stimuli can be removed from one embedding context and placed in another or experienced more fully without the influence of the context if abstract scales are not regarded as “given” as “the way things are,” and as “reality.” The ability to fully experience the concrete behavior of the other with a childlike innocent eye instead of overly classifying the behavior or comparing it to that of another is highly important for experiencing a feeling of relatedness to another. When we overly abstract and experience the other in highly simplified ways, we separate ourselves from the other, as the so-called objective scientist in nineteenth-century thought is supposed to separate himself from the object of his study. The separation of subject from object, the separation of mind, spirit, or intelligence on the one hand from the physiological, the animal or the unconscious on the other, the dualistic way of ordering, has been much a part of Western experience.

Simplicity-complexity of social ordering is an important conceptual framework for understanding interpersonal relationships. If one overly simplifies the other’s behavior in his perception of him, he becomes separate from the other. Since he actually desires closeness and love, he experiences a feeling of failure to achieve that which he thought he was potentially capable of achieving. Separation from the other is then experienced as guilt for having failed to achieve relatedness. In this sense separateness is also experienced as sin. The more complex ordering person is better able to reward the other because he is likely to have experienced a broader range of concrete stimuli. When this wider, richer experience is communicated to the other, it may expand the other’s range of  experience. If the other desires to expand his range of experience  and is willing to accept change in his perceptual ordering and belief systems, this is experienced as rewarding.

 Acceptance  of change might be considered as another condition which is necessary for exeriencing relatedness. The more complex ordering person is better able to reward the other because he likely has  greater accuracy of interpersonal perception. He understands the other better because he lives less in the separate  world of abstract categories. Understanding is experienced by the other as rewarding.

Condition 3: Self-Sufficiency—Absence of High Affection Drive

The human being, from birth onward, seems to have a need to experience love from another person in the form of close  physical contact, succulence, approval, understanding, and unconditional love. In giving the child unconditional love, the parent loves him regardless of what he does, and loves him as a person rather than as an object to satisfy the parent’s own needs. In conditional love the parent loves the child only when he behaves the way the parent wants him to behave. The notion that an adult who was not adequately loved as a child and was frustrated by his parents will not have the ability to experience and give heterosexual love is too simple. Many other personality characteristics of the adult and many interpersonal experiences after childhood interact to determine his ability to love. Some individuals may get over the adverse effects of interpersonal failure in childhood; others may not.  If the child has a strong attachment to his parents who both loved and   frustrated him, and if he has not freed himself from parental attachment, he will not likely be able to fully experience heterosexual love. In the same way, the person who has not freed himself from a previous adult heterosexual attachment, which involved love and frustration with a high degree of conflict, will not be able to fully experience love again.

The individual who has a long history, starting with early childhood, of failure to give and experience love will likely develop a severe need for love. This is the individual who experienices severe affection deprivation and severe feelings of failure. A great deal of the deprived individual’s behavior, some of which may be unconscious, is directed toward avoiding the unpleasant experience of high affection deprivation and with defending himself against additional failure. The individual becomes goal-directed, and the goal-directed organism is blind to much of his environment. If he must perform simple tasks based on habits he has overlearned, he may perform them better than the less deprived person, but complex tasks will be performed less well.

The deprived person experiences severe frustration and anxiety. Anxious individuals often seek a tensionless state to reduce their anxiety. A complex and unpredictable social environment is thus highly threatening to the anxious person. To make his social environment less threatening, the anxious person tends to overly simplify the behavior of others in his perception of them. He tends toward severe simplification of his perception of himself and others, uses a very small number of abstract scales with a small number of categories (black-white discrimination), and distorts his perception of others in accord with his needs. In this way he loses perceptual and emotional contact with others, and his world becomes even more uncontrollable and unpredictable.

Since the achievement of rewarding interpersonal relations is necessary if the severely deprived person is to move toward a relief from severe affection deprivation, the severely deprived individual will perform this interpersonal relations task less well because it is a complex task. Thus the person who needs unconditional love most of all is unable to receive it or give it. And - since he desires perfection in love relationships because of his great need for love but never gets it, his frustration and affection deprivation experiencing increases. He will also tend to fail in love relationships and in marriage because he regards other people as  objects to satisfy his great need for love, approval, and understanding. He will project this image upon them and will restrict the other’s freedom to promote his own security much more than the less deprived person. Many individuals in our culture have been severely deprived  of affection and have a long history of interpersonal failure. Since they tend to be in a state of anxiety and frustration, they are often unable to lose themselves in a momentary experience of relatedness to another. They are continually seeking either to avoid further failure in interpersonal relationships by withdrawing from social interaction or are seeking to find the perfect relationship which will totally satisfy their anxiety-ridden needs for love.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. William N. Evans, “Two Kinds of Romantic Love,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XXII, 1953. 75-85; Albert Ellis and Robert A. Harper, Creative Marriage ,New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961;
S. I. Hayakawa, “Popular Songs vs. the Facts of Life,” in Mass Culture, eds. B. Roscnbcrg and D. M. White, Glencoe: The Free Press, 1957.

2. Robert Lindner, Prescription for Rebellion, New York: Rinehart & Company, 1952.

3. Sidney M. Jourard, The Transparent Self, New York: . Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1964).

4. Thomas J. Banta, Authenticity, Social Games, and Social Contracts. Talk given to the American College Public Relations Association, April 26, 1965, Denver, Colorado.

5. Ivan D. Steiner, “Interpersonal Behavior as Influenced by Accuracy of Social Perception,” Psychological Review XXII (1955), 268-74; Bernard Farber, “Elements of Competence in Interpersonal Relations: A Factor Analysis,” Sociometry, 1962, 30-47.

6. Bernard Pyron, “Intercorrelations of Simplicity-Complexity of Social Ordering, Accuracy of Interpersonal Perception, Acceptance of Change, and Self-Reliance,” Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1965, 1293-1304.

7. Bernard Pyron, “Accuracy of Interpersonal Perception As a Function of Consistency of Information,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1965,  111-117.

8. James Bieri, Cognitive Complexity and Predictive Behavior.  Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1955, 263-268.




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