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From the Great Hall of the Cooper Union in New York City. National Educational radio presents the Cooper Union forum series on peace love and creativity the hope of mankind. These programs were recorded by station WNYC. Here now is the chairman of the Cooper Union forum. Dr. Johnson the Fairchild. Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the union forum as your chairman John Swinney ferret's I was speaking to you from the great hall of the Cooper Union where we are continuing with our program on peace love and creativity the hope of many a subject for discussion intellectual intellectual. Dr. Miller Dr. Miller is a psychoanalyst here in New York City. Private practice is back to the university. Flight Surgeon United States
Navy. In the School of Aviation Medicine obviously. And I might just mention that he was formally director of the weight control program of the care of the horn eye clinic. You lectured here at Cooper Union previous occasion and I'm very proud as one of the instructors in our adult education courses here at the Cooper Union. I'm very delighted Dr. Miller can come and talk on this intellectual because of all of you. As all of you know follow this program we're taking up a wide variety of different kinds of Dr. Miller is taking this interesting and difficult assignment intellectually. Dr. Miller welcome to the fore again.
First. Professor per child. Ladies and gentlemen I notice a lot of familiar faces here and I want to thank you all for showing up. Ice cold night. I was looking through the bibliography in your catalogue before I came up here this evening and love gets quite a play in the bibliography. There's the one that. What love isn't isn't there's Erics on the art of loving. There's Melanie Klein on love hate and reparation and there's Joseph correct Sean most writers hate the universe and there's con men and you're on love and hate love against hate. Sorry. And there's Leon saw in the hospital
mind the sources and consequences of hate and rage. And there is room for speaking out. We overrate love the power of love. And as I looked through it a second time. I noted that love and hate seem to get together a good bit there steamy love hate and reparation. There seems to be love against hate and the writers seem to make this kind of the film tween love and hate. Reminds me of a little anecdote about a boy that went off to camp. And the first letter he got the parents got from the lad. He says is their fault. I only have one friend here at Camp and I hate him. Though there is some kind of a connection in there and
so when I got this assignment early this summer I was rather curious about what intellectual low but I've had a little longer than you have to think about it. Well you have to listen to what I think about it because I'm sure if I want to round to the unit every one of you would have an answer for me. My son's answer what the intellectual love. I'm sure he won't mind if I tell you. Well you know I know what that is. That's when two people have a date after they've been matched by a computer. That's intellectual. Why not. So I trust that your is curious about this subject. Zion. And it seems to me that live is one of the sticking to a topic that a psychoanalyst or a philosopher or a student of human behavior has because a
lot of spectrum embraces all sorts of human behavior from the most constructive to the most. For example. When I was in college it was during the during the war and one of my. Classmates. Was a ensign in the Navy and he was on a landing barge making the landing at Omaha Beach and accidentally a smudge pot caught fire on the landing craft that he was on. Not this much product continue to burn it would have given away the whole operation. So his decision was to throw himself on top of the smudge pot thereby extinguishing it. But unfortunately it cost him his life. He was burned so badly that he died of the burn. This is sort of in the
tradition of the code that a greater love than this no man had his life for his friends and he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor post-humans Lee for this action. So although this kind of recognition indicates that the country and naval service worthwhile. So this is one end of the spectrum terms of love. The other end of the spectrum is the fellow that makes the front page of The Daily News. He's taken after is wife with an axe. And he's given her 40 whack. And so they ask him why he did it. Any says I did it because I loved her. While that the other end of the spectrum you know we all know what they're talking about. I mean this is not strange or alien or uncomprehensible I mean we recognize these kind of feelings as being prevalent but they do exist.
So. That sort of raises the problem what sort of a definition can we come up with then that will. Cover all this kind of different varieties of human behavior that will make some sense out of it. Well possibly we can. We've got another 40 minutes to be on here we're going to have to try. The. Concept that I like you in my day to day work is to define love and the willingness to have a sustained relationship with someone. In other words if you are willing to have a sustained relationship with someone by my definition this constitutes love. And this is broad enough to include many of the varieties of
relationships that we see every day and this may seem to be outrageously simple and I'm often accused of that. They say I'm not obscure enough to be a psychoanalyst. But at the risk of being outrageously simple Wow. I maintain that love is the willingness to have a sustained relationship. And if you think about this this obviously includes the the love hate relationships which are so prevalent. In other words if the relationship is hateful if the individuals stay together why that that qualifies it to sustain that makes makes the difference. And if I choose to separate from an individual if I want to maintain that I'm crazy about him that I really love him dearly. But if I separate from him then this does not qualify under my definition. The
relationship must be the same. I recall I was a he went to see the play Virginia Woolf some years ago when it was on Broadway and I happened to be sitting behind an old lady. Well into her 80s and she'd seen a lot of livin and after the show was over she came out you know they've been yelling and shouting and beating each other up and raising Cain all the more. And as she walked out she was coming to her friend. She says they love each other very much. And in terms of my definition this would be solved because they had a sustaining relationship. If they stay together they can battle in any way they want. They can call the cops every Saturday night to referee. But if they stay together it's still one variety of luck. OK so the early writers of the early psychoanalytic
writers Freud and those chaps they used to define Love used to define health. Actually as the ability to love and the ability to work and in some ways this is a useful kind of definition but I think we can be a little more precise today. I think we can be a little more elaborate than that and I think that we can say that help is the ability to have sustained relationships. That would be synonymous with the part the ability and I think the other half of that would be the ability to make an effort. These would be the two that were used to say the ability to love and the ability to work. The ability to have sustained relationships and the ability to make effort and this broader concept makes it easier to understand the crazy kinds of affiliations that we see around us. For example the couple
heterosexual or homosexual who battled constantly. But who nevertheless stay together over the years. Also the tepid. Cool distant relationship frequently seen between married couples and they certainly can no longer qualify as being in love in terms of the romantic definition the overestimation of the part. This is long gone but the fact that they manage to have a sustained relationship this qualifies under the definition. So with this expanded view of love then. We can see that the individual who has relationships that extend over the years. Who has the capacity to have friends from grade school from high school from the service. As possessing a well-developed capacity for love.
And unfortunately. The isolation and loneliness the afflict so many people is a consequence of the withering of this capacity and that's usually based on some values that the individual has acquired somewhere along the line that where they lose their flexibility. In other words nobody treats me like that. So I told him a thing or two. And so gradually along the way they chopped off all of these relationships that they've had they wind up all by themselves and many individuals have constructed themselves to such a degree that the only remaining sustained relationship they can have is with a dog or a cat. The fact she wanted a minute. And obviously dogs and cats. If you've got a good one
are not as demanding as people are. They can be put in a corner and they'll remain there. By and large and this pastor finds expression in such things as people are no good for a dog is a man's best friend. So now we've talked about. Love as a capacity and a willingness to have a sustained relationship with someone. So I think a corollary of that would almost be that you tell me how many sustain relationships you have. And I'll tell you how emotionally healthy you are. And if you pause to reflect for a minute you will realize that this also embodies the ability to make effort because if you have sustained relationships over the years it's a consequence of effort. You've worked at it
and you made an investment and you've allowed others to make an investment in you as well. But it doesn't just happen. It's a consequence of effort. Again I say this. This is a simple kind of a concept but I find it useful because it cuts through a lot of the flak that permeate the field of psychology and psychiatry. And then the emphasis that you find on certain tangential considerations other things such as giving. He's a very giving person. I wonder why nobody wants to be around him. He's so giving. The problem is eat you up. That's why nobody wants to be around him. This giving has a lot of strings attached to it or the matter of war or the matter of academic achievement. He's brilliant He's got seven degrees. I wonder why nobody wants to have anything to do with
the matter sexual potency. Is frequently posited as being a basis of mental health. If you're able to achieve the blue Hey why. This is certainly the ultimate good. Not so for the other. Goal it is so highly thought. Of. And that is the simultaneous or get this has a tremendous recommendations behind this must be a hallmark of mental health. Again not well. Or in an inner directed mix this is often given the basis of the ultimate in mental health. Our altruism and individual to self as you see in the the low man on the totem pole the individual's altruism tick. He is obviously
achieve the highest order of integration. Again not so and I posit that these factors to the extent to which they are healthy will emerge in the context of a sustained relationship you don't have to bend over backwards in order to fake it. It's there in the murder. Ok so much for love in general. Now I focus on intellectual love. That's the topic of our dissertation here tonight. And when I first came to New York some of you folks may have belonged to it. Some of you folks who are as old as I call a cat. The Association for the Advancement of psychoanalysis through the jewelry Council and all these letters got into what it was known as a cat and they used to publish psychological psychological papers and most of the titles on these papers were something to the effect like if this were the five it would be intellectual love healthy and neurotic.
And or sexual potency healthy and neurotic. Or. Eating healthy and neurotic. In other words the idea was that every psychological trait every healthy psychological trait had a neurotic counterpart. And this is also true in intellectual love. And since this is the. Title of the series is peace love and creativity of the hope of mankind will save the healthy part to the end. That would be dessert. All right. And we'll talk about a neurotic kind first. Get that out of the way because that gets kind of dreary. Now. In the health of human personality any trait any one trait is just one of many. And a healthy human being is a versatile
human be. A healthy human being has a number of alternatives available. He's versatile. And one of my definitions of psychotherapy is that psychotherapy is the golden road to the acquisition of versatility. I have 100 of them but that's one of them. Psychotherapy is one way of acquiring versatility not the hallmark of any neurotic trait is its exclusiveness. And anything that becomes exclusive thereby initiate the progression that restrictive and debilitating. And this finds expression in the popular question they say how come you're so one way one way. Because the neurotic is one way in this day.
I mean there may be different varieties of individuals who focus on different ways but for one individual he has an exclusive way that he follows and that his pattern and that is one way. Now. As a consequence of traumatic life experiences things that happen in childhood things that happen along the way individuals come to cope with fear and with conflict. We are in a compulsive way sort of the important word in it. And if something is compulsive It means it's fear motivated and it becomes exclusive. Now this can happen with intellectual love and if it becomes compulsive then it becomes repetitious and the other capacities that the individual would possess in hell become relegated into oblivion and the intellect becomes the
paramount and exclusive and. Instrument that the individual uses to meet all of life's challenges. Now. One of the disadvantages of intellectual love. What happens when an individual becomes so intellectualized that all of his relationships are. Of this riot. So that feeling becomes excluded. Well the first thing is there is a pleasure inhibition. The compulsively intellectual individual. Ceases to be able to have the feelings that go with action and his perennial state becomes one of boredom and I'm weak and even though he does different things they all
wind up feeling about the same way. When off with Job. Help the individual when he is off the job he is left to his own resources. These are his own masters. He's able to do things that he enjoys inner directed is one of the things we talked about before and he makes a happy kind of adaptations. But when the hyper intellectualized chap is off the job his impulses are much too dangerous for him to cope with. And too dangerous for him to acknowledge. So we have to guard against the act of controlling self to be on the alert all the time. So what he has YET them incorporated area at the next hurdle control he may have a wife who wants to come by. Shown any impulse that he might have who actually has the external
conscience the external authority who ride herd on him now. And instead of these dangerous impulses been expressed their deep breaths are repressed. So then what would be enjoying now becoming boredom and depression. And frequently you will see this as what is known around as the Sunday neurosis. The individual may be pretty good all week as long as he's on the job as long as work and as long as he's got an external structure to conform to we get along pretty well. But on holidays or on Sundays look out. He's in console and frequently the way the individual deals with this is they have a migraine headache. The preponderance of migraine headaches occur all weekend that structures the time pretty good you have to pull the shade you have to go in a dark room and you have to be absolutely quiet.
And that Sunday pretty good money will be along pretty soon you get back to working with your external control. You live for another week. Now unfortunately we live in sort of a work culture where the ultimate good is work and there is a strict bargaining kind of value that we internalize. And we sort of this is the pressure that's on us all the time. And in the intellectualized in their lives even more so more than in the rest of us. And the new depressive symptoms that the hyper intellectualized person has can be relieved if you get some kind of external authority that he can submit to and that may be a domineering wife or it may be an exploitive family or it may be sports.
If you get set up in some kind of a weightlifting program where you have to do certain exercises a certain number of times I mean these can all act as external controls for it to use up the energy. Now as I said before and one of the other characteristics is that man has a capacity for effort. This is what used to be called work. But the reason they changed it to effort is that someone like. One of the Rockefeller boys may go off on anthropological Exton expedition and spend most of his time doing things that we would not conventionally consider work because they're not financially rewarding but nevertheless make an effort. In this way you get the gratification that goes with making effort and unconsciously the serve the psychological biological purpose. And it embraces the child who is playing in the sand for him and he is making the effort and you can derive gratification from this or the
scientist who is pursuing troupe or the artist who's expressing themselves all these or make an effort. Now. I think you can think of activity in two ways. And since I am a doctor I like to think of it in a medical kind of way. You're an engineer or a plumber or secretary. Why you will have your own way of that will you can analogize these things that my way is the medical way and I feel there are two varieties of activity one activity is what we call first dollar. This is what we get. I get it from blood pressure and insist I like this is when the heart contracts. That's just silly. That's one form of activity. Thanks Natalie. So that's the contraction kind of thing. Of Africa. See now there's another type which is just as important.
And actually in Times terms a duration in the heart is longer and that the diet thought that the lower number on your blood pressure the doctor tells you one hundred twenty over 80 the diastolic is the lower one and the diastole is the feeling say. In other words if the heart doesn't fill completely and well then you don't get a good feeling. So they're both important you've got to have good sisterly to push the blood out but you've got to have good diastole to allow the heart to fill properly. Another these two kinds of activity and the systolic type of activity would be the work and the diet would be the losers.
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Series
Peace, love, creativity: Hope of mankind
Episode
Intellectual love, part one
Producing Organization
WNYC (Radio station : New York, N.Y.)
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
Contributing Organization
University of Maryland (College Park, Maryland)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/500-804xmt2z
If you have more information about this item than what is given here, or if you have concerns about this record, we want to know! Contact us, indicating the AAPB ID (cpb-aacip/500-804xmt2z).
Description
Episode Description
This program presents the first part of a lecture by Claude H. Miller, psychoanalyst.
Series Description
This series presents lectures from the 1968 Cooper Union Forum. This forum's theme is Peace, Love, Creativity: The Hope of Mankind.
Date
1968-03-07
Topics
Psychology
Media type
Sound
Duration
00:28:06
Credits
Producing Organization: WNYC (Radio station : New York, N.Y.)
Producing Organization: Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
Speaker: Fairchild, Johnson E.
Speaker: Miller, Claude H.
AAPB Contributor Holdings
University of Maryland
Identifier: 68-10-14 (National Association of Educational Broadcasters)
Format: 1/4 inch audio tape
Duration: 00:27:50
If you have a copy of this asset and would like us to add it to our catalog, please contact us.
Citations
Chicago: “Peace, love, creativity: Hope of mankind; Intellectual love, part one,” 1968-03-07, University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed October 9, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-804xmt2z.
MLA: “Peace, love, creativity: Hope of mankind; Intellectual love, part one.” 1968-03-07. University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. October 9, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-804xmt2z>.
APA: Peace, love, creativity: Hope of mankind; Intellectual love, part one. Boston, MA: University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-804xmt2z