The Ninth Street Center

Dean Hannotte's Introduction to
We Knew Paul [1990]

Paul Rosenfels is a man most people have never heard of, but his effect on those who came into contact with him was extraordinary. There are many unconventional psychotherapists around who attempt to liberate people by sanctioning their deviancy, but few who offer demonstrable techniques to remove internalized obstacles to growth. Fewer still concern themselves with the wider social implications of psychological growth, or who have a vision large enough to encompass the whole of civilization as we know it. Paul not only helped creative people break free of the intimidating and seductive pressure of social norms, he also developed a comprehensive theory of human nature which allowed seemingly unique aspects of one's personal history to be understood in terms that applied to everyone.

Paul's view of human nature owes very little to the intuitive psychoanalytic school of Freud and his heirs, but took its origin in the democratic values born in ancient Greece and the universal love and faith found in early Christianity. Born and raised in Illinois, he had studied the writings of men like John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, and was deeply influenced by the climate of social liberalism he found at the University of Chicago. But their beliefs in the common man, in the inherent goodness of human nature, and in learning through experience, were only a backdrop to his original discoveries concerning the dynamics of personality. Over many years, and working alone, he forged a wide-ranging and eclectic synthesis -- integrating his new insights with earlier psychological findings -- and slowly gave birth to what may someday come to be regarded as a science of human nature itself.

Although he became a board-certified psychiatrist and was trained at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, he turned his back on these disciplines in mid-career and decided -- as so many others have since -- that they had very little to offer the average man. His patients had often received better advice from co-workers and tea-leaf readers than icy mental health professionals whose code of ethics included an explicit injunction against caring about patients on any personal level.

Paul did, in fact, care about his patients very much. He cared when the Freudian gobbledygook he was handing them didn't help them to live the better lives he felt they deserved. And he was disturbed that his attempt to adjust to a heterosexual marriage was failing. So in the late 1940's he decided to leave his wife and young son, give up his career, and forget what the textbooks said -- in order to go off and decide for himself what was really important about human beings. For years he applied his growing insights to himself and the few people he counted as friends. Only after he published his first book in 1962 did he offer psychotherapy again, this time on much firmer ground.

Paul found it inconceivable to imagine a scientific study of human nature being undertaken on the basis of anything less than a deep love for humanity. You might certainly be able to find a cure for cancer without loving people, but you can't understand what love is until you experience it yourself. And he felt that a therapist or teacher must set an example of the advice he gave. So his new patients were much more than clients now: they were men and women he could love. He thought of them as his students, and found nothing unethical in becoming friends with many of them. His lovers, too, came from the ranks of these new colleagues.

Three themes predominate in Paul's teachings: creativity, homosexuality and polarity. He felt that personal growth was synonymous with learning how to live a creative life, at least for the kinds of students he wanted. But by creativity he meant not merely unleashing a talent to paint or to sing, but developing psychological resources in a much deeper way, a way that would lead to caring about people and about making a lasting contribution to society. Teaching creativity for Paul meant creating more love in people's hearts, and expanding their power to act responsibly toward their world.

Homosexuality is central to Paul's work because this most primeval love is still an unacknowledged need in the lives of most people, yet clearly an asset too great to leave off the balance sheet of human fulfillment. Haven't all men been loved by their fathers? Haven't all women tried to love their mothers? Having spent much of his adult life trying to adjust to a difficult marriage, Paul saw that our capacity to obey arbitrary rules about who we shouldn't try to love is a pointless obstacle to living life to the fullest.

And, just as Trotsky had observed that schoolboys who had once found the courage to defy academic authority later became leaders of the October Revolution, Paul saw that those who were capable of rejecting society's lies about sex were often better equipped to face its dishonesty and cowardice in other arenas as well. His counseling practice in New York's East Village confirmed his suspicion that, at least in his time and place, gay people were in the forefront of mankind's search for psychological liberation.

The idea of polarity for Paul is similar to Carl Jung's hypothesis of introverted and extroverted character types. If everyone is either introverted or extroverted regardless of whether they're male or female, then homosexuals can have relationships that are as truly mated as heterosexuals, for the simple reason that opposites attract. Seeing that the polarity between introverts and extroverts is the basis of all lasting mated relationships, Paul had already gone far beyond Jung. And since he liked to use ordinary words rather than psychiatric terminology, he decided to abandon "introvert" and "extrovert" and use "feminine" and "masculine" instead. To this day the very first mistake people make when hearing about Paul is to assume that he sanctioned culturally oppressive terminology, when just the opposite is the case.

Where Jung had gone on to muddy his analysis by dividing each of the two basic personality types into "thinking," "feeling," "sensitive" and "intuitive" subtypes, Paul had much more interesting questions to think about. Since society demands that men be "real men" and women be "real women," he wondered, just what happens to feminine men and masculine women? Indeed, what price had he himself paid in never acknowledging his own femininity before now? Paul concluded that, when they gave in to society's pressure to conform, masculine women ended up passive, obsessive and masochistic caricatures of true femininity. Feminine men likewise ended up aggressive, compulsive and sadistic caricatures of real masculinity -- they become the very guys who give power a bad name. This discovery shed great light on the age-old conflict between the individual and society, particularly between the individual's need to grow and society's need to be stable, and was the subject of much of his writings.

Paul found in his practice that surprisingly common psychological difficulties often stem from a simple failure to accept one's inner polarity, from trying to be what you just aren't. His patients sometimes reported startling progress in overcoming lifelong problems which previous therapists had seemed to regard as either incurable character flaws or "just human nature." He helped masculine women to get over their feelings of helplessness, and feminine men to "get under" their reckless behavior. Masculine men and feminine women were helped too, because they now had a better grasp of what healthy masculinity or femininity looked like -- untainted by society's misguided glorification of aggressive men and passive women.

Although Paul used ordinary words to describe human nature, he gave subtle nuances to the names he chose for qualities that were analogous between the types. Here are some of the "analogs" you can watch out for in the pages of this book:

He also used analogous terms for the "defenses" of the human personality:

Once Paul understood how all these aspects of human nature fit together, he found that his attempts to help his students were far more successful than they had ever been. And since truth is worthless if it can't be freely shared, he was pleased when his students' attempts to share his insights with their friends met with similar success. In 1973, his students opened the Ninth Street Center to teach these ideas to more people than they could reach personally. In our first year, Paul's Saturday Night Buffet Suppers drew hundreds of people from all over the city. Soon the Ninth Street Center Journal was being sold in gay bookstores throughout the country.

And Paul continued to learn new lessons from the work we were doing. He saw, for instance, that incessantly striving to be creative could strangle one's joy in living and lead to a state of exhaustion he called "creativity poisoning." He identified four equally important compartments of life -- creativity, romantic love, fun and pleasure, and a successful adaptation to one's time and place -- each of which required the balanced functioning of the others if the personality was not to become distorted.

Paul's understanding of human nature, his warm friendships with his students, and his openness about homosexuality were what made the Ninth Street Center such a mecca to young gay men in the 1970's. Gay Magazine, for example, called him "the Giant of the New Free Gay Culture." As the Center slowly outlives the ghetto climate in which it was founded, we find ourselves serving a growing community of lesbians as well as gay men, ambitious straight people as well as gay -- anyone, in fact, who believes that human potential, in the words of one of our pamphlets, "is too important to leave to psychiatrists and politicians."

This book is the product of eleven men and women who, though some of them now live in other parts of the country, came together to paint a portrait of a man they see as one of the great figures of our time. The conversations were conducted in New York City between January 1988 and July 1989, all but three on audiotape. Nick Cirabisi and Paul's sister Edith Nash both preferred to respond to written questions, Nick in writing and Edith on audiotape. Paul's brother Walter Ross decided to contribute a statement rather than submit to a formal interview.

Jennifer Minichello spent nearly a hundred hours transcribing the tapes and, after I had translated vernacular speech into written English, spent another eternity proofreading; since I reviewed her work, I take responsibility for any errors that may have crept in. Jennifer trimmed my words more vigorously than I could, deleted most of my war stories, and offered crucial suggestions on the shape of the work as a whole. Some of the participants clarified or elaborated on their comments, while others preferred verbatim spontaneity. Robert Fink and John Calhoun gave financial support to the project. Mark Addis, Len Albert, Eleanor King, Richard Milner, Hope Nachtaler, Paul Ratner and Ellen Rapp each had something original and important to say about the sections they read.

Today -- twenty years after his last book, and five years after his death at the age of 76 -- it is perfectly clear that we will never stop learning from Paul or from the example he set. All of us who put this book together hope that these conversations evoke the real spirit of the man more vividly than any biography ever will, and can be enjoyed by anyone who applauds the example of a genuinely original life lived to the fullest.