Humanitas
Psychology, Science, & the Sea
Ed Mendelowitz completed his doctoral work at the California School of Professional Psychology in Berkeley where he worked closely with Rollo May. He is on the board of editors for the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and a contributor to some of the major compendiums of existential/humanistic/depth psychotherapy. He has presented numerous papers on psychology and its relationship to philosophy, religion, and the arts in both the USA and Europe. His recently published book Ethics and Lao-Tzu has been called an "extraordinary moral narrative" by Robert Coles and a "remarkable compendium of wisdom" by the psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis. His essays and talks attempt to get to the heart of the aesthetic, even spiritual, bases of psychology in their invocation of imagination, transience, possibility and awe. Dr. Mendelowitz is a part-time faculty member at Saybrook Graduate School and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of the Rockies. He lives and works in Boston.
In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight. We see the cloud, and feel its bolt, but meteorology only idly essays a critical scrutiny as to how that cloud became charged, and how this bolt so stuns. The metaphysical writers confess, that the most impressive, sudden, and overwhelming event, as well as the minutest, is but the product of an infinite series of infinitely involved and untraceable foregoing occurrences. Just so with every motion of the heart.
Herman Melville,
Pierre, or The Ambiguities
And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick, or The Whale
"In [man's] heart, there is a germ. That we seek to foster. To that we cling; else, all were hopeless!"
Herman Melville,
Mardi and the Voyage Thither
If there is not something mystical in your explanation, something unexplainable to the understanding, some elements of mystery, it is quite insufficient ...What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding but robs the imagination?...If we knew all things thus mechanically merely, should we know anything really?
Henry David Thoreau,
Journals
[A Consultation]
[Dr] Reilly: You have reason to believe that you are very ill?
Edward: I should have thought a doctor could see that for himself. Or at least that he would enquire about the symptoms. Two people advised me recently, almost in the same words, that I ought to see a doctor. They said—again, in almost the same words—That I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I didn't know it then myself—but if they saw it I should have thought that a doctor could see it.
Reilly: "Nervous breakdown" is a term I never use. It can mean almost anything.
T. S. Eliot,
The Cocktail Part
Excuse me...some notes for my diary. I write ...I narrate. But just what am I narrating? An ocean journey? The journey of life? That is not narrated, it is embarked upon.
A journalist,
Federico Fellini's
And the Ship Sails On
[In modern physics] one has now divided the world not into different groups of objects but into different groups of connections ...The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.
Werner Heisenberg,
Physics and Philosophy
Therefore the sage embraces the Oneness (of the universe), making it his testing-instrument for everything under Heaven.
Lao-tzu,
Tao te Ching
In Psychology and the Human Dilemma, Rollo May tells of a conference which he had attended during which he had the pleasure of passing several hours in a car with the physicist Werner Heisenberg. May asked Heisenberg if he wouldn't mind explaining to him the essential points of Heisenberg's "principle of indeterminacy," the so-called "uncertainty principle." Heisenberg was a congenial fellow, May found, and in his response emphasized physics' newfound discovery that the view of nature as an object "out there" was quite illusory, that the subject was always part of the equation, that an inexorable reciprocity between subject and object existed such that the very act of observation changed irreparably that which was observed. In making his point, Heisenberg offered what he thought was an obvious concession, namely that psychologists must have understood the complementary relationship between subject and object all along having had, so to speak, subject as their object. May smiled to himself, not wanting to interrupt the flow of the quantum physicist's thoughts, but understood that mainstream psychology was light years behind the insights of this new physics simply by virtue (the word, I admit, is ill-chosen) of its having passively followed the quantifiers down a primrose path of scientific fundamentalism so crude as to be defined in the end by a philistine mangling of the mysterious subject/object interplay.
May was one of the few psychologists of his time who understood that the fundamental paradox of existence inhered precisely in the fact that the human being is both subject and object at once. It was thus psychology's privilege and burden to have to bear the scrutiny of being a different kind of enterprise than had marshaled the early advances of the natural sciences. This essential insecurity, he argued, could not be avoided without doing violence to the object (and subject) of inquiry, "namely, the human being." Like all great thinkers, May sought to understand and not to simplify. He perceived that psychologists' preoccupation with method covered over an a priori insecurity with positivist ebullience—destined to be "illusory for us as it was for the physicists"—"that if we can only find the right method, we shall be freed from the human dilemma."
Rollo May clearly understood the importance of empirical inquiry; his life's work did not shy away from science. It was radical empiricism's claim to absolute truth which he so vehemently opposed:
But I do urge that we not let the drive for [objectivity] put blinders on us and cut off our range of vision so that we miss the very thing we set out to understand—namely, the living human being. We must go beyond the naiveté of the faith that if we can only get somehow and ultimately to the "bare empirical facts" we shall at last have arrived safe and sound in the harbor.
Rollo May,
Psychology and the Human Dilemma
May was, in fact, never interested in any sort of "safe harbor", but rather in a thoroughgoing investigation of human being and human experience—this by any and all means at his disposal. I can imagine him reveling in this passage of Nietzsche's on the joys of adventure on a sea of Uncertainty (a voyage beyond safe moorings and catalyzed by the death of even that latter-day god who goes by the name of Scientific Objectivity, one whose parameters we moderns still misperceive):
At last the horizon seems open once more, granting even that it is not bright; our ships can at last put out to sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an "open sea" exist.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science
Sadly, May was an island sage in a professional sea of vast mediocrity. (Nietzsche had long before given up an encumbered academic post to retreat to his metaphorical mountain cave where he sketched an outline of what lay in store for the burgeoning, bustling 20th century.) Such voices seem to be heard in their profundity only by the few such that psychology has today lost its way out there on board the Pequod where it clumsily hunts down Truth with all the tenacity, megalomania, and fatefulness of Ahab and his "iron way." May himself was quick to acknowledge the advances of science in his own time even as he came to an awareness of its relativity. He understood at once what Heisenberg meant when he observed that "every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability." Reading Heisenberg, in fact, one finds descriptions at the atomic level which bear striking resemblance to oft-repeated insights which May himself had gleaned from many sources, really, but especially, perhaps, from the pre-Socratics and the existentialists to whom he returned throughout his life:
The familiar classification of the world into subject and object, inner and outer world, body and soul, somehow no longer quite applies, and indeed leads to difficulties. In science, also, the object of research is no longer nature in itself but rather nature exposed to man's questioning, and to this extent man here also meets himself.
Werner Heisenberg,
The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics
Social and natural sciences alike have had, in short, to reckon with what Whitehead has called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness," a fallacy perpetrated by "hard-headed men" who "want facts" which they mistakenly equate with truth.
Eerily, all these fine investigations seem to have been anticipated by Melville himself who had already pondered things and had put the matter succinctly: "Science lights but cannot warm." Heisenberg was not above harking further back than Melville as he became fascinated by the strangeness with which the findings of physics at its furthermost reaches had already been anticipated by the ancient and un-technological East. ("What is now proved was once only imagin'd."—William Blake) There he must have convened with kindred pioneers in the various sub-specialties of science, fellow travelers in Time, Space, and Awareness. Thus, in the 20th century it is possible to speak of a science of man, woman, and nature and yet, again as Melville had said, "speak for the heart." This is science at its most esoteric, gnostic science.
We can, then, state our thesis boldly: science is important but not all. And anticipating need of our best armaments, let us invoke what must surely be psychology's most sublime voice, the awe-inspiring William James, who puts things directly: "To no type of mind is it given to discern the totality of truth. Something escapes the best of us, —not accidentally, but systematically, and because we have a twist." William James is one of our chosen, "a towering figure in the history of American thought," as Gordon Allport had written, a man initially steeped in hard science who came to realize, increasingly, the significance of the psychological as he evolved beyond earlier interests in medicine. In The Will to Believe, James has this to say about the powers and limitations of science:
We all, scientists and non-scientists, live on some inclined plane of credulity. The plane tips one way in one man, another way in another; and may he whose plane tips in no way be the first to cast a stone! ...Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
James speaks for a psychology, which embraces contradiction and subtlety as he comes to understand our discipline as associative, we might even say poetic, science (Nietzsche had already talked of "gay" or "joyful science"), even as he exposes the "insufficiencies" of the conventional framework:
Of all the insufficient authorities as to the total nature of reality, give me the "scientists" ...Their interests are most incomplete and their professional conceit and bigotry immense. I know no narrower sect or club, in spite of their excellent authority in the lines of fact they have explored, and their splendid achievement there. Their only authority at large is for method.
William James,
Letters
As with May, it was not science that troubled James, really (one glance at his massive Principles of Psychology ridicules the very thought), but rather scientism: the application of pseudo-scientific strategies to unsuitable areas of inquiry, the deification of method. He realized that the scientist's opposition to religion belied an Enlightenment theism all its own, one in which God had been upended by progress:
Certain of our positivists keep chiming to us, that, amid the wreck of every other god and idol, one divinity still stands upright, —that his name is Scientific Truth, and that he has but one commandment, but that one supreme, saying, Thou shalt not be a theist, for that would be to satisfy thy subjective propensities, and the satisfaction of those is intellectual damnation. These most conscientious gentlemen think they have jumped off their feet, —emancipated their mental operations from the control of their subjective propensities at large and in toto. But they are deluded. They have simply chosen from among the entire set of propensities at their command those that were certain to construct, out of the materials given, the leanest, lowest, aridest result ...and they have sacrificed all the rest.
Science, in short, is selective and, further, hardly innocent.
But James was not Thoreau, not quite a transcendentalist. He trod a Buddha-like "middle path" as he championed a reconciliation of science and heart. This tension or balance he called "pragmatism." One might say that he walked a razor's edge between enlightenment and the Enlightenment. Still, he understood implicitly the metaphysical implications of science and, like Melville, anticipates 20th century physics when he writes in the final paragraph of his Psychology:
When, then, we talk of "psychology as a natural science," we must not assume that that means a sort of psychology that stands at last on solid ground. It means just the reverse; it means a psychology particularly fragile, and into which the waters of metaphysical criticism leak at every joint, a psychology all of whose elementary assumptions and data must be reconsidered in wider connections and translated into other terms.
Psychology, James had come to understand, is water-based, not terra firma. In James's view, the great scientists of the mind when at last they appeared—he refers here to neuropsychology and neurophysiology (and does not, apparently, include himself among the elite!)—would have to yield to "the necessities of the case" and turn their sights, in the end, to matters "metaphysical."
Nietzsche, too, had early on apprehended the "powerful illusion" afforded by science as it raced "irresistibly toward the limits" with an "optimism concealed in the essence of logic" and where, in its hubris, it would one day "suffer shipwreck." He described a "circle of science" with an infinite number of "boundary points" on the periphery where "logic coils up and finally bites its own tail" as one "gazes into what defies illumination." It is precisely at the point of shipwreck at the boundaries of one's chosen system that that open sea of his unfolds at last upon the horizon. The psychiatrist Karl Jaspers understood that individuals, like systems, "founder," "suffer shipwreck," borrowing unabashedly from Nietzsche in outlining various "limit-" or "boundary-situations" of profound chaos (suffering, guilt, chance, death)—experiences that overwhelm the extant self, clearing the way for the possibility of psychological renewal. Ecumenical philosopher Gabriel Marcel, too, had suggested that the human being is not so much Homo sapien (literally, "wise man") but rather Homo viator, "man [or woman] on the way," an explorer on difficult and uncharted seas. Thus did Rollo May, with an eye to the centrality of anxiety as existential stimulus, maintain in all seriousness that successful psychotherapy would lead to enhanced awareness and, hence, increased rather than attenuated anxiety. Anxiety is a reasonable response to the dizziness of the journey, a certain amount of seasickness being simply unavoidable. ("I tell you," Nietzsche had written, "one must harbor chaos if one would give rise to a dancing star.") Each of these explorers of existence understood with the filmmaker Federico Fellini that life was to be embarked upon, the narrative jotted down only incompletely and hastily as we sailed along, a bit of dream work along our Dantean way. The journalist on Fellini's mad capped cruise is "a respected passenger upon [the] ship ...adhering to his duties informing readers of world events." Yet he knows what's going on and what it's all about as little as anyone and acknowledges that his job is "a bit ludicrous." His musings, like our own, amount to a bit of scribbling at life's darkened margins.
I have heard estimates that up to eighty percent of the ailments with which patients present themselves to physicians have psychological concomitants. Many of these patients seem to have nothing physically wrong with them at all. (The character in Eliot's play has "ceased to believe in [his] own personality" and is "obsessed by the thought of [his] own insignificance." He consults an unconventional but comprehending doctor who acknowledges being "also ...a stranger" and is a graduate of no program I know. This doctor invokes a deity who is a "protector of travellers" and runs a sanitarium for patients who suffer with "an honest mind ...one of the causes of their suffering." Obviously, neither Prozac nor cognitive therapy will suffice.) Still, psychological acumen among physicians and, worse, even psychologists is rare. Anxiety is too often dismissed as inconsequential or suppressed straightaway with anxiolytics or simple-minded applications of technique. Despair, loneliness, and boredom are likewise routinely overlooked or, at best, approached only symptomatically and pharmacologically. Psychopharmacology has, no doubt, an adjunctive role in the care of certain patients, but physicians would do well to remember that anxiety and suffering are irremediable aspects of life and often signs of a disequilibrium begging to be explored rather than quickly covered over. And psychologists would do well to not ape the physicians with whom it should be our mutual privilege to learn, struggle, and work. If we would "learn rightly," as Kierkegaard has said, we psychologists would have much to offer both patients and colleagues without resort to mock displays of technological panegyrics or looking like so many schoolboys and handmaids who can no longer think for themselves and have let these objectified times utterly define them.
What I argue for, essentially, is an Ishmael-like humility before immensity, for an attention of physician and psychologist to the anxiety (the dis-ease) which, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, "flickers in the corner of [one's] eye." Failing to do this, we tend to objectify our patients and selves into fixed entities devoid of possibility of real growth or substantive change. The psychoanalyst Otto Rank (one of the more amazing minds of the 20th century) taught that it was most instructive to view the patient as "suffering being" rather than as machine subject to breakdown. Life, said Rank, was a gift from the beyond with death the repayment such that merely to live meant to be haunted by a gnawing consciousness of difference. (Although he had been Freud's chosen son, a jealous and bickering in-group had finally forced a break. At their final encounter, Rank presented the great man with the collected works of Nietzsche, then proceeded to Paris, then to America where he rambled back and forth, reading Twain and sending postcards back to the motherland signed "Huck" in identification with yet another water drifter.) Freud too, empiricist though he tried so hard to be, could not help feeling, he confessed to Princess Marie Bonaparte, like "a small island of pain floating on an ocean of Indifferenz." (Even Freud, it seems, could not avoid the water metaphor, counting Moby-Dick as his favorite American novel!) Understood in this way, a strange thought begins to emerge: health is the perhaps the moment of reprieve and neurosis inevitable.
More recently, the psychoanalyst Alan Wheelis has echoed these ontological insights when he writes of irreparability and "problems of being":
It's part of being human, we differ from one another only in more or less. A few tranquil ones, with little conflicts suffer less; at the other extreme, stretched by despair to some dreadful cracking point, one goes berserk. In between are the rest of us, not miserable enough to go mad or jump off the bridge, yet never able if we are honest to say that we have come to terms with life, are at peace with ourselves, that we are happy.
Alan Wheelis,
How People Change
It is best, then, for physician and psychologist to understand that that we have much in common with our patients. We must comprehend that all our knowledge and expertise constitute but a skein of information and technique held up as a cross against the perpetual Void, that we are in the end all patients and would-be soul-doctors, Melvillian orphans buffeted to and fro about the high seas of existence and the global asylum. This means getting beyond, at least for moments during the day, the chasm between self and other, subject and object, beyond what R. D. Laing had called the "diagnostic look"—technique which may aid in the medical approach to the patient while gracelessly covering over the possibility of a more humbled yet integrated understanding of the human being. The Swiss analyst Guggenbuhl-Craig refers in this respect to the doctor as "wounded healer" in contrast to the timeworn notion of the physician as what might be called, presumptuously, "dauntless healer"--an epithet we should by now have long since outgrown:
The image of the wounded healer symbolizes an acute and painful awareness of sickness as the counterpole to the physician's health, a lasting and hurtful certainty of the degeneration of his own body and mind.
Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig,
Power in the Helping Professions
"This sort of experience," says Guggenbuhl-Craig, "makes of the doctor the patient's brother rather than his master."
These are not perspectives that we easily embrace: they frustrate unbounded (but therefore ungrounded) faith in our admittedly impressive technical and scientific headway, thus eliciting anxieties otherwise quenched as we bend the knee at the shrine of Progress. But they are vitally important nonetheless. We are foolish to remain blindly faithful to paradigms that are circumscribed and even dated simply because finer understanding is difficult, elusive. ("Try to get a living by the Truth," Melville had written to Hawthorne, "—and go to the Soup Societies.") I have therefore tried here to gently urge the reader into a more serious consideration of these matters. To look away is surely to do a disservice to self and patient, nor would the world's fate be augmented. We are no doubt in good company: Nietzsche, James, and May transformed themselves into dazzling psychologists (true scientists) as they rode the waves of that vast sea of consciousness. Eliot's doctor of infinite compassion heals his patient with poetry and understanding (though, it is true, another's life ends in crucifixion). Even our journalist tells us that things have turned out all right in the end, if wildly different than anything that may have been even remotely imagined. In the final scene, and after the inevitable shipwreck (Fellini, too, is a master psychologist, after all!), he is seen paddling his lifeboat to safety in the company of a rhinoceros (a more modest prize, perhaps, than the cosmic mystery or the whiteness of the whale). He appears to be content, happy, almost in love. And for those of you who still like your science straight, Heisenberg reminds us that even Newton (whose methods of inquiry into the mechanical workings of the physical world constitute the real liturgy which our disciplines have held up as text and gospel) likened his life's work to that of a child playing at the seashore of existence exploring this pebble and that, even as "the great ocean of truth lay unexplored before him." Capisce?
Afterword
This essay on psychology and science addresses some concerns I have been thinking about for a long time, issues that, I am glad to remind myself, have concerned seemingly the deep thinkers in our field who I have most admired. Depth and subtlety are, indeed, the issue. From the moment psychologists take their earliest academic steps, they are handed Skinner boxes and statistical tables and taught to compute. As human nature is thus dissected and enumerated, these students of psychology (who, as a rule, have too little feeling for art, literature, philosophy, or religion and forget that a man like Henry Murray, creator of the Thematic Apperception Test, had—like William James before him—given up medicine for psychology, venerating Melville as its greatest exemplar) develop a false sense of confidence in their calculations as they jab at one test tube or cage after another. It is the adolescent's pride in the shining sword of methodology. As full-fledged professionals, psychologists as a rule proceed myopically. Like their clients, they have a hard time changing.
For some strange reason, I possessed an aptitude for mathematics and the sciences in my youth, enough so that I came to an awareness, through logic, of their inherent inadequacies in shedding ultimate light on the complexities of existence. (If I had been really smart, I would have drifted further into the humanities where I might have found more kindred spirits, better psychologists.) To be thus exiled from the main artery of the profession (by now a slick and fast-paced autobahn) from an early point in my learning was not easy and led to a great deal of turmoil. Looking back, I see myself strung along for years in back rows of lecture halls in which various spokespersons sold their wares, sometimes reading, covertly, dog-eared copies of Hesse, Kafka, Maslow, and Laing. The exceptional interesting course did little to mitigate the field's overall aridity. Eventually and thoroughly jaded by the scene, I started in with education courses to try and get a fix on where things had gone wrong. By college graduation, I had read much of the literature in humanistic education current at the time and even received teaching credentials for the primary grades.
When I moved to Berkeley in the late '70's in order to pursue my original interests in psychology more seriously than I had on the East Coast (to study "real" psychology), I found myself once again frustrated and often disconsolate. Though the rooms were smaller and the students more wily and willful, still I found myself drifting toward those seats in the rear and the used bookshops along Telegraph Avenue. (At least by now I had some company: California has its advantages.) My most influential professors were a philosopher (a Jewish man who was unusually intelligent, awkwardly compulsive, and who evidenced uncommon integrity in enacting his beliefs through active involvement in various causes, opposition to racism and inner-city violence, for example) and a social worker (a brilliant black man who could ramble on maniacally about, seemingly, almost any topic and play Leadbelly on a 12-string, though not, as I recall, simultaneously—a man who was one of the more memorable and decent people affiliated with that amorphous institution and who, years later, would took his own life). Outsiders of sorts, working within the system; certainly not organization men. I read, in addition to my assignments, Freud, Jung, and the existentialists and worked in the least coveted internships (residential homes for schizophrenics, inner-city clinics, and prisons). Later on, having read more assiduously into Eastern thought, I learned that I had been practicing, unwittingly, a cornerstone of Taoist wisdom: avoidance of authority and egoism in the interests of autonomy and the more legitimate pursuit.
During my 2nd year, I was surprised to find myself with renewed vigor as I now donned the general intentionality and frenzy of my peers in jumping through administrative hoops of all sorts in order to take a course offered once a year and taught out of his Tiburon home by Rollo May. May was in his early 70's at that time and his books and stature were surpassing. There was a presence about him, a genuineness, to which I felt immediately drawn. I listened attentively for a change and, no less unusual, volunteered my own thoughts in response. More impressive than his staggering literacy and accomplishment was his very person: wise and dogged in its essence, with an abiding moral sensibility for once and none of the sham of image-building one finds too often among the stars. I came to develop a friendship with May, one based on a student's reverence for his teacher and a teacher's affection for his student (transference is universal, after all, and ontological in its origins: "unaccommodated man" is such a "bare, forked animal," as Shakespeare has said) and that continued, with decreasing regularity, until Rollo's death in 1994. It was this mentoring relationship that has inspired a more committed, as opposed to half-hearted (though, God knows, the struggle is far from won), devotion to "real" psychology, that is to say, depth psychology, depth that does not let itself get bogged down in hypertrophied systematizing.
In many ways, I have remained, like Ishmael, something of an outsider as an act of sheer survival. Nonetheless, I have learned a thing or two over the years, considered the problems of existence with some avidity, plied my trade under the imagined eyes of a pantheon of elders, pondered the wisdom literature of our field, resonated with the sublime voices and meditated with some earnestness on psychology and its relationship to professionalism, science, and technique. This essay is an outcome of these processes, a bit of Nietzschean "joyful" science that argues for a broader conception of human nature than the present-day practice of psychology will allow. It is the outsider's insight, perhaps, but perhaps, too, a position of some advantage when psychologists at large do often seem to be little more than "schoolboys and handmaids," well-trained men and women who may have accumulated facts of all sorts but tend to understand poorly. These reflections are meant to be evocative, even provocative, are intended to entertain the careful reader, and yet are deadly earnest in the end: the concerns addressed are paramount in significance. If there seems no way of stopping the unrepentant advance of the locomotive that had already intruded upon Thoreau's Walden silence and that had defined Ahab's essential madness, at least the few can carry forth a tradition of truth-telling that, as Melville himself had observed, has not made for popularity.
I am he who walks the States with a barb'd
tongue, questioning everyone I meet,
Who are you that wanted only to be told
what you knew before?
Who are you that wanted only a book to join
you in your nonsense?
Walt Whitman,
By Blue Ontario's Shore
References:
- Coles, Robert. "The Varieties of Religious Experience." In The Mind's Fate (2nd Edition). Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1995.
- Guggenbuhl-Craig, Adolf. Power in the Helping Professions. Zurich: Spring Publications, 1971.
- Heisenberg, Werner. Physics and Philosophy. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958.
- Heisenberg, Werner. The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics. In R. May (ed.), Symbolism in Religion and Literature. New York: George Braziller, 1961.
- James, William. The Philosophy of William James. New York: Modern Library, 1925. Fragments from The Will to Believe and Letters.
- James, William. Psychology: The Briefer Course. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961. May, Rollo. Psychology and the Human Dilemma. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.
- Kramer, Robert (Ed.). A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures [of] Otto Rank. Princeton University Press: 1999.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. In W. Kaufmann (ed.), The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press, 1954.
- Nietzsche, Freidrich. The Birth of Tragedy. In W. Kaufmann (ed.), Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library, 1968.
- Wheelis, Allen. How People Change. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.