Saturday, February 12, 2011

February 2011

I’m going to give myself a second chance at making a first impression.  If you read my first, January ’11 entry, you know enough about me to decide whether reading these posts will interest you.  But why the title?
                In the fall of 1967, I began work with a pioneering psychologist, Paul Rosenfels.  This after two years working with a wonderfully supportive Sullivanian woman, Marjorie Newstrand, by now no doubt deceased.  She’d brought me out of the panic attacks and anxiety disorder I’d been suffering from, but now I’d formed relationships in the lower Manhattan anarchist community, and had been getting raves from a female comrade about Rosenfels and his ‘Creative Counseling Service’, run out of a flat on East 6th Street.  So I took the risk.
                My work with him proceeded at lightning speed.  With the few bits of information I provided him on my parents, he made some bewilderingly quick summarizations as to my essential identity.  I was ‘highly specialized, assertive.’  In fact, he threw out a few encapsulations that were so simple and accurate that I grabbed them instantly, held on to them as though they were life preservers.  “What is anxiety?”  I asked.  “You’ll feel anxiety whenever you feel trapped.”  In six weeks of weekly sessions, he pronounced me free of the necessity of therapeutic support.  I stood on the cement stoop of his counseling service tenement, and felt the world available to me for the first time in my life.
                So here’s the pearl of wisdom I received from Paul:  I am a masculine personality.  Synonyms would be assertive, or, in his later writings while working closely with the gay male community, dominant.  My adult life since receiving this essential truth has been to wind my way through an essentially unwelcoming culture.  Convention dictates that women are feminine, or should be if they are interested in the opposite sex.   But the gospel according to Rosenfels is that masculine or feminine orientation is unrelated, independent of gender.  Here is how I proclaim the Rosenfelsian gospel:
Polarity occurs everywhere in nature, but in humans it exists psychologically.  And whereas we are all endowed with masculine and feminine aspects, developmentally we cannot avoid a specialization in one or the other.
The last of the three books Paul penned, Homosexuality: the Psychology of the Creative Process, hit big at the bookstores at around the same time I’d decided to explore my own homosexuality and became part lesbian feminist community as it existed then in lower Manhattan.  The Radicalesbian manifesto, Woman Identified Woman, is still essential reading today for understanding a woman’s coordinates in a world still dominated by men.  Interestingly, at the precise moment when committed myself to a separation from men, three candidates presented themselves.  But that kind of anti-synchronicity is no doubt a topic for another blog post.
After three years I re-emerged to affirm my identity as a bisexual woman, but that led nowhere but to a more compoundedly difficult navigation in a  world that much prefers the more direct read of straight or gay.  There’s my monthly commitment to 500 words.  If interested, stay tuned.