The Ninth Street Center What People Say About Us

The Secret Lore of Gardening
by Graham Jackson

. . . Most thorough in his exploration of polarity within a homosexual context was the late New York psychiatrist Paul Rosenfels. He divided homosexual men into assertive and yielding types. Psychological health, he maintained, could be achieved only through recognition of one's type and subsequent specialization. The domain or specialty of the assertive type is power (in a Marsian sense) and of the yielding type, love (Venusian, in other words). Each of these types is irresistibly drawn to the other and, through relationship, comes not to an incorporation or integration of the qualities of the opposite or not-I (as a Jungian might expect), but to a refinement of his own type. The fruit of the relationship between assertive and yielding types is the enhanced creative potential of each. Rosenfels' ideas, although expressed in dense and difficult prose, provoke much thought; his idea of enhanced creativity, in particular, belongs to this work as well. . . .

-- reprinted from The Secret Lore of Gardening:
Patterns of Male Intimacy, p. 12,
Studies in Jungian psychology by Jungian analysts no. 52,
Inner City Books, 1991