The Ninth Street Center What People Say About Us

Review of Paul Rosenfels'
Homosexuality:
The Psychology of the Creative Process
by Bill Boushka

Paul Rosenfels is known as a psychological freedom fighter among his inner circle, much of it associated with the Ninth Street Center in New York. Others view him as a "guru." Paul's particular contribution is a very precise articulation of the paradigm of psychological polarity, or yin and yang, as it had been known in ancient Greece.

Paul sees human beings as, regardless of biological gender, essentially feminine or masculine. A feminine personality finds greatest fulfillment in yielding to and nurturing another person. A masculine personality finds corresponding fulfillment in possessing and motivating another person. This is the basic love vs. action duality. At the deepest level, a person is "turned on" by living out according to his polarity.

A perpendicular axis to all this is formed by the subjective vs. objective duality. Subjective feminines and objective masculines are "unbalanced" and the other two combinations are "balanced." Unbalanced persons tend to insist on following goals chosen by them regardless of the support of others. Balanced persons tend to find satisfaction by following more conventional goals (and maybe limited ones) as determined by the needs and support of others.

The other great concept in Paul's writing is the notion of psychological surplus. This comprises a person's opportunities remaining after adaptive needs are met. Creativity means exploring this surplus. Yet creativity has what many people see as a "downside": people become creative when they mal-adapt in conventional pursuits.

A goal of psychological growth is to reconcile achieving of balance (meeting the real needs of others) with surplus, being able to expand in areas where one has something unique to give. Growth is very difficult, and generally is forestalled by use of psychological defenses, where one erects false power or false surrender mechanisms in a kind of sour-grapes or sweet-lemons mechanism to avoid rejection and pain. Ultimately, one is led back, in a most personal way, to moral issues of determining appropriate personal priorities given the needs of others in one's immediate and more distant environments. Morality, to Paul, is simply what is right in human terms.

The path to growth leads Paul to make some startling observations. For example, to experience full psychological growth, everyone must pass through homosexual territory. In fact, one must choose to experience homosexual potential. A "masculine" man may find being loved by another man more affirming to his masculinity than being "loved" in a conventional fashion by a woman in conventional marriage. A "feminine" man may actually feel fulfilled by surrendering (even sexually) to another person. These possibilities occur in heterosexual marriage and gender roles can be reversed.

Paul writes with the precision of a mathematicians giving a formal proof. Often a paragraph describing a concept for feminine personalities is followed by a paragraph describing the same concept for masculines, with the appropriate substitution of analogue concepts.

-- reprinted from the High Productivity Publishing web site

	Read Bill's memoir of the early days of the Ninth Street Center
	Read Bill's essay on "Narcicism, Affiliation and Polarity"
	Go to Bill's web site, High Productivity Publishing