Psychoanalysis and Civilization
I believe that Psychoanalysis and Civilization by Paul Rosenfels should be on the college Reading List. My stay at St. John's in the sixties was a time of intense, even desperate, search for insight into human nature, the teaching of which to others I wanted to dedicate my life to. During my 1966 summer vacation, I made an appointment with a psychologist named Paul Rosenfels living in New York. He impressed me as a man of enormous insight and we became friends. As I got to know him I learned that he had been peripherally involved with the great books program in Chicago, and that he had spent the last 30 years attempting to sketch in the foundations of that great dream of the Enlightenment, a science of human nature. Initially quite skeptical and even cynical, over the next few years I began to feel that his contribution was authentic. Using the polarity between introverts and extroverts as a starting point, Paul reformulated much of Western philosophy and psychology, delineating the categories of love and power, honesty and courage, wisdom and strength, depth and vigor, faith and hope, as well as more abstract categories such as time and space, truth and right, tension and energy -- even "causes and effects" and "beginnings and endings." In his three books and 8 monographs, the entire canvas of human nature is described from this single viewpoint and within this single semantics.

Psychoanalysis and Civilization was his first book and, to my mind, conveys his discoveries with an unforgettable vividness and enthusiasm. The full text of all of Paul's works are online at http://eserver.org/gender/rosenfels. An introduction that I've written to Paul's life and work can be found at http://eserver.org/gender/rosenfels/HPCPIntro.htm.

-Dean Hannotte, A'68

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