The Ninth Street Center: Robert Fink

*DEAN:*	Just to get the record straight, you were never a patient of Paul's?
*ROBERT:*	No. My only encounters with him were after the talk groups. I came up and talked to him a couple of times. The most memorable experience, I guess, was when I was first coming down to the Center. I came up to him and told him how much I liked his ideas and how stimulating I found all of this, and he said to me something to the effect of, "You are a very ignorant person."
*DEAN:*	Was it said with hostility?
*ROBERT:*	No, it was like he wanted to see what I could do with the information, as if he was saying, "You talk like you're enthused about all this, but let's see whether you can put your mind to work and really do something with it."
*DEAN:*	Put your mind where you mouth is?
*ROBERT:*	That was one of the things that really got me interested and involved. I was going to show him what I could do. It is true that we never had one-to-one counseling sessions, but I remained impressed by him.
*DEAN:*	You used to write him letters and birthday cards and things. What was that about?
*ROBERT:*	There's a funny story in there about my not asking for counseling. I was new at the Center and a bunch of us were walking on the street and we were talking about who Paul was seeing and whatever. And one of his patients said, "Oh, he would never sit with somebody like you." And I believed it. There was a lot of intimidation -- if that's the right word -- or fear in my soul, and I never approached Paul for counseling. So when he did retire from counseling, writing a letter or a card were the few ways that were open to me. I understand that he did appreciate it. He did write me a letter back telling me that I was a person who did not seem to be terribly impressed by success or failure, and a person like that could make real changes in himself and help others. That I thought was a good thing to hear from him. That was very helpful.
*DEAN:*	When you first came down to the Center and heard about this man, what was your first experience of him?
*ROBERT:*	I think that I regarded him as a prophet or a guru and I had finally come upon somebody with all the answers.
*DEAN:*	What made you think that?
*ROBERT:*	Just listening to him speak and listening to the answers that he gave other people. One evening I let one question after another fly at him and the group leader stopped the group and said, "I will not have you treat this man like a prophet. You're putting him up on a pedestal and it's not fair to him or to us." And I listened and I stopped. Paul seemed to have a real understanding of scientific theory and method and what science was all about and I'd always been impressed by science. He was a man who in my opinion was very scientific in his approach. One evening I asked him something about experiments. If a chemistry experiment is conducted in England you should expect the same result as a chemistry experiment conducted in America. Would the same thing hold true for his theories? They were fine in America, but would they hold true elsewhere? (I had had some organizational psychology courses beforehand which had contrasted management styles in different countries.) Paul said that if we were talking about *civilized* countries, his theories would hold true. I didn't know whether to believe him at that point, but something in me said, "Trust him, he knows what he's talking about. If he says that they will hold true, believe him." And then later on as I got to understand more about Paul's theories I saw that of course they would hold true. Masculinity and femininity are not isolated to Americans, they're universal in civilized societies.
*DEAN:*	Although, in fairness, it's not easy to see that if you don't have much contact with those other countries. You haven't lived in France or Russia or Japan. Isn't it conceivable that his models might not hold true?
*ROBERT:*	I took his explanation to mean in those countries where a child is permitted to develop on his own, where there isn't a rigid imposition of "You, Johnny, are going to be exactly like your Dad in every respect." The same holds true for women in cases where women are not expected to hold to the traditional female model to the letter. If children are given some degree of freedom in developing identities on their own, then Paul's theories will hold true. I don't have to go to England or France to know that. I've encountered Englishmen and Frenchmen and their identities are not all masculine or all feminine.
*DEAN:*	At what point did you investigate your own polarity and try to figure out how you fit in with this theory?
*ROBERT:*	That investigation didn't begin until I started getting counseled. That was a year and a half, maybe two years, after my first visit to the Center in November, 1975.
*DEAN:*	How often did you come to the Center initially?
*ROBERT:*	I would come to two sessions a week initially, maybe three, and then I started coming once a week.
*DEAN:*	So that means that you had come to about a hundred sessions before getting into counseling.
*ROBERT:*	I didn't trust counseling as a mechanism. I may have thought well of Paul, but I didn't trust the people down at the Center. I had seen too many of them in the bars and on Christopher Street after they had delivered some big sermon about living a creative life. I said, "Wait a minute, I've been had." I can understand now that they were working on those problems, but I thought then that they were lacking in honesty.
*DEAN:*	One of the questions that is always posed about the Center is: Just because Paul was a scientist, does that mean that all followers of a scientist are also scientists? Do you think some of Paul's followers are actually cult members?
*ROBERT:*	I think that's being a little hard. There may be a cult member or two out there, but I think that while they may not all be scientists they have found something which makes their daily life pleasant, more esthetic, more enjoyable and therefore they use it. They just don't have a personal devotion to science.
*DEAN:*	Would you say that they're beneficiaries of science without being part of the group of people who are capable of or interested in advancing science?
*ROBERT:*	I think that's probably closer to the truth.
*DEAN:*	Although you've contributed in the past to the Ninth Street Center Journal, you haven't written lately, have you?
*ROBERT:*	No. My writing right now is confined to writing letters to various press people and libraries and what-have-you, but I haven't written any serious pieces. I'm slowly getting comfortable with my computer and my word processing software. I'm beginning to appreciate your remark that word processors are like religions: after the trauma of learning one you don't want to believe that any other could work as well.
*DEAN:*	That's where our rigidities belong, in areas like word processing and computer software. I don't think our view of life should be conditioned by those same rigidities. This analogy is similar to what Paul said about Freud. I told Paul one day that I had again seen my favorite science fiction movie, *Forbidden Planet. The earthlings come upon this ancient civilization that died out even though it far surpassed human civilization, so they're trying to figure out what destroyed it. And it turns out that as this superior race explored their own consciousness they had inadvertently released their id, and it was the monsters of the id* which took over the planet and destroyed everything. Paul said, "Yes, that's where the ideas of Freud belong: in science fiction."
*ROBERT:*	I saw that movie. I remember the id coming out and beating up on people.
*DEAN:*	Walt Disney did the animation of the id. It was sort of a cross between a lion and a frog: a lion-mane on a frog body. There's no evidence that Freud ever took a walk in a forest or visited a jungle or petted a lion or anything like that. He didn't know what he was talking about. . . . Oh well, have you been doing counseling in recent years?
*ROBERT:*	My truth-seeking right now is confined pretty much to getting a better understanding of Paul's ideas, sitting with my counselor and asking his opinions and advice. I feel very much like a late-comer at the Center.
*DEAN:*	Still, even after thirteen years?
*ROBERT:*	Yes, very much.
*DEAN:*	But you realize, of course, that the old-timers were there only two years ahead of you?
*ROBERT:*	That's true, but it just keeps cropping up that my understanding of Paul's ideas is not what it should be. Nor is my expression of them what it should be. That's not an excuse for not counseling other people or not getting involved, but I feel very lacking. I think I wrote in one of my letters to you that I really feel like that person in the poem with the broken sword, that there are others out there with very fine-honed swords but who are not doing all that much. I feel that I have a broken sword but I hope to make some real change in society. I hope to do that by promoting Paul's books through libraries and journals and what-have-you, but the others look at me like "Well, he's not really doing anything *creative* with his life." I'm not doing any one-to-one counseling, but I do lead talk groups.
*DEAN:*	And you speak up in other people's talk groups.
*ROBERT:*	If I meet somebody who's really stimulating to me I will certainly give to them of my time over coffee or whatever. We've had a recent visitor, Bill from North Carolina, a man who said that he had publishing contacts. I spent three evenings with him in very heated discussions. It was exciting. Who knows what will come of it. It's not like I keep myself as a monk in my apartment.
*DEAN:*	I think you tend to have more contact with new people at the Center than many of the old standbys who consider themselves the *crème de la crème*.
*ROBERT:*	I do make an effort to greet new people. That's a part of my conventional nature, but I don't let it get out of hand.
*DEAN:*	Paying the Center's rent is conventional, publishing Paul's works is conventional, but these are all things that have to be done, don't they?
*ROBERT:*	I'm of that opinion: that it's something that has to be done, that there's no harm in saying hello to a new person and asking them something about themselves and, if they're interesting, getting into a discussion with them.
*DEAN:*	Though in fairness to the others, once you've been saturated with a new science for a few years and have seen how it can clarify the issues of your own life, it's pretty obnoxious to deal with people who haven't been so enlightened. I liken it to dealing with your parents after you've been to college or after you've lived a little bit and know in no uncertain terms what idiots they really are.
*ROBERT:*	I was thinking about that last night after dealing with a crop of new people that came down. It's like doing something that has to be done or should be done. The people that were down there last night were not all that stimulating to me, but what should we do?
*DEAN:*	Did people sense that the new guy who was helpless was masculine?
*ROBERT:*	Oh, the guy that lost his mate. No, and I hadn't thought about it that much either. It was occurring to me last night that he was. He just didn't seem to be a very warm guy.
*DEAN:*	I warmed up to him a little bit because I like people who have been raised by wolves. He seemed to be very independent, the kind of guy who might have spent ten years out to sea or something -- mountain climbing maybe. He seemed like a rugged individualist who was just not that fond of human companionship. As much as we discourage that kind of attitude towards the human scene, you have to admit that a lot of important people have had to take that route.
*ROBERT:*	There is something about him that was appealing or attractive, but not a whole hell of a lot. After his complaining I felt like saying to him, "Well, you've done nothing with your life, you never will do anything, why don't you go home and do yourself in if that's what you want to do?" But I thought, "No, that's not going to be helpful to this man." Instead I said, "Why don't you think about working in a community like this trying to get a better understanding of yourself?" Then I thought to myself afterwards, "My god, you're encouraging this man who has very little feeling and warmth to come down and make this place his own." But, well, why not? You work with what you get.
*DEAN:*	If you wanted to be on record as having had a certain impression of who Paul was, what would you want to say about him?
*ROBERT:*	He is the man that made psychology real for me. He is the man who really spoke the truth about the human condition, put it down on paper, and made psychology something that I could put my hands on and make my own. That's what I'd say about Paul. I had read a lot of psychology in school and in preparation for course work, and it was dry and disturbing and unreal. Paul made psychology real for me.
*DEAN:*	I always had the feeling in reading psychology that these guys were starting from premises which I could not possibly accept as my own. In particular, they were starting with a great deal of cynicism about human nature and a great deal of distaste for much of what is the best in people. Freud seemed to want just to catalog a lot of symptoms and draw grandiose conclusions about a death instinct or the evil id or sons killing their fathers. It had really nothing to do with the way I was living and with the kinds of things I believed in. I was looking for a life of service to the world, a life of increasing interaction with and accomplishment in the world, but Freud just didn't talk about those kinds of strivings. He went on about foot fetishists and people with sexual inhibitions -- peculiar nineteenth-century hangups. It didn't seem he was grasping the essential motivations that creative people nurture in themselves and are proud of.
*ROBERT:*	You've touched upon something that's very important to me about Paul's work. There is something that runs through it that has to do with human nature unfolding, that people do want to become better. They do want to become healthier, they do want to become responsible for each other. I think a lot of cynics in society and doomsayers just say, "Oh, society is useless, let's blow it up. It's not worth saving." But that's not what Paul saw about people. He saw their beauty and he saw their goodness and he saw that they wanted something better in their life, the majority of them. That's what's so wonderful about working with this material. It reminds us that humanity is something that's worth saving, that it wants to pick itself up. We are mired in centuries of ignorance and immorality that Paul talks about, but it's something that people want to get out of. They want to get into the twenty-first century.
*DEAN:*	And the thirty-first century. He always used to say that people liked to make these picayune and petty predictions for the next fifty years or the next hundred years -- but what about the next thousand years, what about the next ten thousand years? If we're here for another million years, we're going to *transform* ourselves. Problems that look insoluble today may soon appear to be extremely petty. So why are we simply giving up and saying, "Oh, it's human nature, you can't change it"? We've changed it in the past. We can change it in the future, too. The thing that attracted me to Paul is that he sensed something that I had become aware of in high school, that people choose not to live. They actively select not to hope for a better future and to assume that things cannot be any better. As they rigidify, it becomes intolerable to question their own choices and their own commitments. It becomes too upsetting. They would start realizing, in terms that he later used, that they were living a lifestyle of depression: a "lifestyle depression." It was essentially his kind of hope and faith in that process of change -- in the growth process -- that made me sense that I was in the presence of someone who *could* see beyond the depression and the greyness and the failures of mankind. Many people do become crippled and blocked because of the traumas that they have suffered and choose to die inside, but there's always a new generation and there are always young people. He specialized in gathering young people around him. The people who started the Center were all in their twenties, practically. They were people who shared a hope in their own capacity to enjoy life to the fullest and to make something of themselves. He understood that there really is no final reason why we must be cynical or opportunistic, that these don't come out of human nature per se but are merely consequences of living in the twentieth century. Historical circumstance does this to most people: the trick is to live in such a way that it doesn't do it to you. He used to say that if you can just get through life with your creative capacities intact, that alone will be a tremendous achievement. You don't need to write a great book, you don't need to become a senator, you don't need to have a building named after you. What you have to do is keep your creativity intact, keep your hope and your faith and your awareness of the splendor of humankind alive, because that's what's required in order for people to make decisions that ultimately benefit all of us. When the Center started, this whole issue of lifestyle depressions became very central to our discussions. If we sensed that a person was talking out of a lifestyle depression -- that they were essentially selling cynicism or opportunism -- we knew right away that we could not accept what they were doing and we'd have to cut them off and tell them that we were starting from a completely different premise. I think the vibrant quality of Paul's message has to do with its premises. His formulations of specific mechanisms are difficult and complex, they're hard to extrapolate from, they're tough reading. No matter how much you love it and are excited by it, it's tough to sit down and wade through this stuff. But what's thrilling to me are his premises, which are full of hope and faith in human nature and the glory of man's future. That to me is a thrilling vision. And it's a vision unencumbered with religious dogma. Most apocalyptic cults and utopian credos are based on dogmatic assertions of what man is like. But Paul's message wasn't based on dogmatic assertions. He was perfectly willing to admit, for instance, that nobody really gets that much ahead of their own time. He wasn't willing to make hard and fast predictions about what it's going to be like a thousand years from now. The future is always surprising. But he said time and time again that what is important is that we have faith and hope in the ability of human beings to change in accordance with their own needs and purposes. That's all you really need. You don't really need to have a monolithic vision of what the future has to be like, because that becomes just another religion. That's what the Soviets did. They created a society which is a disaster for the human soul. Economic planning is a fine thing when it works, but they tried to plan the evolution of the human soul before taking the trouble to learn shit about what a human soul is all about. That's why they don't know what they're doing, why they're failing. It's much better to leave people free in their private lives, let them decide what they want. Bureaucrats are not psychologists, generally speaking.
*ROBERT:*	It reminds me of that visitor from Michigan the other night who said, "Wouldn't there be chaos if everybody went their own way?" I liked your rebuttal to him, that there would be less chaos if people were permitted to develop on their own with less interference from society, that we would have a happier society.
*DEAN:*	That's the old argument about does society need to coerce people to do good or does goodness come from individuality itself. Paul was always on the side of the individual in that debate. He always thought that society as a whole is merely an adaptive organism that strives to preserve itself, similar to a biological organism. It would always strive for the highest good for the greatest number rather than the freedom of the creative individual who by his efforts can really make revolutionary changes in society. We champion the deviant who needs to live a creative and independent life and does not demand that society follow his own particular way of life in his own time but rather wants the right to live his own way so that those few around him who can follow his lead will keep whatever truth and right he has uncovered alive and can themselves then share it with other people. Not only is the growth process the responsibility of the individual, but the actual teaching and leading occurs at the individual level from one person to another.
*ROBERT:*	I think I have to remind myself of that on evenings when the Center is not so well attended. I remind myself of Paul saying that if there's one other person in the room that you can help to keep creative over time, or even just yourself, that this is a victory. It seems that we used to draw more people at the Center, especially when Paul was speaking.
*DEAN:*	When gay liberation was a new idea?
*ROBERT:*	Yes. During this current time of AIDS or whatever we don't seem to be drawing great numbers of people down at the Center, although there are evenings where we do get a nice turnout -- and we do get young people who are stimulating. There is something going on now which is diverting people, at least from coming to the Center, though I don't know if they're being diverted entirely from leading psychological lives. I have to remind myself that this is a temporary thing, that there will certainly come a time when what Paul had to say will be held as very important and vital and people will want the information that we have gathered. It's an important task to preserve that for them, to pass it on as best we can. I don't want to look at having just one or two people in the room as a failure for all time. People who want to learn can be taught, and you don't need an amphitheater to do it. It can be done in the privacy of a small room.
*DEAN:*	Does Paul seem to you to have been a unique individual? What do you think made him what he was?
*ROBERT:*	I speculate on that to myself. I've encountered other truth-speakers. I had an instructor at a teacher's college in Washington, D.C., who was really a truth-speaker. He'd say, "You think you're learning about the radicals in the newspapers? You're only learning about the Establishment radicals, the people that the Establishment has chosen to tell you about." This guy would go on like that in a course on educational psychology. I was rather impressed by this guy because I'd never heard anybody tell me anything that truthful. But Paul's truth is consistent and usable. It was something that, if I didn't have an immediate use for it in that moment, I knew that there would be a time when I could use it later. What made Paul the man that he was, I just don't know. I can't ascribe it to his education. Maybe his family?
*DEAN:*	You can't use answers like that, because then his family would have been as creative as he was, and we know that they weren't. And certainly not everybody who went through his educational system came out creative. The vast hordes were nerds, although in fairness Chicago University does have a tradition of ambitious social science work. They're humanistic. John Dewey came out of that tradition. The Chicago humanistic spirit probably had something to do with conditioning Paul to believe certain things about human nature. I think we'll have to credit them to that degree.
*ROBERT:*	Do we see Paul as one of those geniuses that comes along once a thousand years, and there's no explanation for it?
*DEAN:*	Well, the reason there's no explanation for St. Thomas, for instance, is because there's no information about his inner life. We don't know what he went through. We know a little bit more about Paul, but I suppose Paul himself would have told us if there was some secret agenda that could make everybody a genius. I consider Paul to have been almost cursed with a gift that he carried around the last thirty years of his life almost like a hunchback. Once having brought the science of human nature into being, having seen how important it was, it then became almost a horrifying burden. It's like you're a kid and your mother has asked you to carry an ancient heirloom or something to grandma next door and you've gotten lost. It's bad enough that you've lost yourself, but you've lost your mother's treasure, too. It wasn't enough for him to just live a life that was good for Paul Rosenfels. He also had this additional responsibility, and that put terrible pressures on him. It made him neglect himself in some ways. I think it's true in general of people who come upon great discoveries that it often damages them in ways that they don't even realize. They sense this tremendous responsibility to get it out there and have people recognize it, and often the world doesn't want to listen.
*ROBERT:*	There are examples of that all over the place.

	See a 1983 essay by Bob about peer counseling
	See a recent statement by Bob about peer counseling