Class Notes - March 11, 1998

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Class notes features

Intimacy, an unattainable frontier for many
Searching for love in all the wrong places? Harold Bernard '68, psychologist, offers hope
For the past decade, clinical psychologist-psychotherapist Harold Bernard '68 has given a two-hour workshop called "Intimacy: How to Build It, How to Sustain It" in New York City and Westport, Connecticut, where he practices. The class provides a vibrant give-and-take between Bernard and attendees, all of them bringing their own experiences and issues to the class. A clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the New York University Medical Center, Bernard also gives a workshop on "Overcoming Perfectionism" to lay audiences (a topic, he notes, that is "not unrelated" to the search for intimacy). Van Wallach '80 attended a workshop in Westport, then spoke with Bernard in his New York office.

Q. Do you have a specific definition of intimacy you use in the workshops?
A. Intimacy involves the mutual commitment to get close and remain close over time with another human being across personal boundaries.

Q. What are people interested in at the workshops?
A. There's been a move in the direction of "quick and dirty" psychologizing. Simply put, I am not a "how-to" psychologist. The resolution of issues surrounding the seeking of intimacy does not lie in trick techniques or any simple key that will make all the difference. When we get into an area like this we are dealing with the whole of a person's psychological make-up. If alterations are required, they don't come about via quick, easy, and clever solutions. So there's a tension when I'm talking to a lay audience. Some people are looking for some very concrete key to take away as their learning. That's antithetical to my whole way of thinking. I inevitably disappoint some because that's not what I have to offer.

Q. Is there a basic message you want to deliver in the workshops?
A. It's that for intimacy to be achieved, a degree of self-development is required. The answer does not lie in people finally meeting "the" right person. It usually involves some self-modification that leaves them in a better place to then hopefully meet a right person. Another message is that there is not one right person. I use the preposition "a" rather than "the" to emphasize that point.

Q. What are the key obstacles to intimacy?
A. I focus on people's ability to be genuinely accepting of another's differences and imperfections. That is not easy to sustain. Then at a different level there are dramatic difficulties in communication, where people are not able to genuinely listen to each other in a non-reactive way. Freud talked about the abilities to love, to work, and to play. The first on the list is the ability to love. We have the need to feel that we can love and are loved by others.

Q. During the workshop you mention the "Object Relation" approach to intimacy. Could you explain that?
A. The evolution of psychoanalytic thinking has been in the direction of emphasizing the primacy of the need for interpersonal connection. The Object Relation approach posits that the basic human impulse is not toward sexual and aggressive outlet but rather toward interpersonal connection, and that sexual and aggressive impulses derive from that more basic human impulse. That's a paradigm shift, a fundamental matter involving how you think of the human condition. That way of thinking informs the way I hear things and try to help people move. It's had a profound influence on me.

Q. Does your own personal experience color your approach to the workshops?
A. It certainly can. Sometimes I'll tell anecdotes as if they were about other people but they're really about me. I certainly find myself thinking about my relationships as I speak on these matters, just as the audience is. If I'm having difficulties with my marriage or my sister or whatever it might be, sure, I'm influenced by it. I'm hardly divorced from this material -- I'm right in there with everybody else.

Q. What's your perspective on how men and women look at intimacy?
A. Men and women are socialized in fundamentally different ways, and have different ways of communicating and different ways of construing the pursuit of intimacy. At the same time, however, there is some fundamental sameness about the human condition -- men and women alike share the quest for intimacy.

Q. Once people attend the workshop, what happens next?
A. It's meant to be a thought-stimulating two hours. It helps couples learn to communicate more effectively about their relationships, and helps individuals think about what's going on in their lives. However, two hours does not a solution make. I hope that people who come find ways to follow up on what's been evoked within them.

When Reason comes in the door
Virgina Postrel '82 has fulfilled her dream of editing a libertarian publication
EARLY IN HER Princeton career, Virginia Postrel '82 decided that what she would really like to do someday was edit a political-intellectual magazine like Harper's or Commentary. The problem was that while she read many such magazines, and found them fascinating, none matched her own politics. Then, midway through her junior year, she discovered a magazine called Reason. Begun in Boston in 1968, its libertarian philosophy of "free minds and free markets" matched her own. She decided that she would like to be editor of Reason.
"That's libertarian with a small 'l'," she says, from her living room in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband and classmate, Steve, an economist specializing in business strategy. "I didn't really expect to become editor of Reason. Also, the magazine had moved to Santa Barbara, not exactly a place my career or personal life was likely to take me. So I pursued a more practical interest in business journalism, majoring in English and working at The Daily Princetonian as a feature writer and ad manager."
After graduating, she spent two years in the Philadelphia bureau of The Wall Street Journal, and two more years at the small-business magazine Inc., in Boston, where Steve attended graduate school at MIT. Then, through a coincidence, the Postrels and Reason moved to Los Angeles during the same month. The magazine was searching for an assistant editor. She applied, got the job, and three years later, in 1989, became editor.
Under her leadership, Reason has become a respected political-intellectual magazine. It has been particularly influential on such issues as immigration, Internet regulation, environmental policy, and drug, tobacco, and alcohol policy. It has been widely cited for its individualist approach to issues of gender and race and its skill in covering science and technology. Reason has twice been a finalist for a National Magazine Award, first in 1993 and again in 1996. During that period, only The New Republic and Harper's among "thought leader" magazines, have garnered more recognition.
"We try to publish ahead of the curve," she says. "We published our first article on Internet regulation in 1991. My vision for Reason is that it become a home for developing a dynamic classical liberal tradition for the 21st century."
Postrel writes regularly for Reason, and often for The Los Angeles Times. She is a columnist for Forbes and Asap, a bimonthly information technology magazine. She recently wrote a big-picture political piece for Wired and has just agreed to write a bimonthly column for intellectual capital.com, the online magazine headed by Peter DuPont '56, who describes her as "the best and most thoughtful libertarian in America today."
She grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, where her father was a chemical engineer and her mother taught college English. "I was politically precocious -- a 12-year-old McGovernite," she says. "I've always been a civil libertarian who believed in free speech, separation of church and state, and was suspicious of government power. I loved John Stuart Mill. By the time I got to Princeton, I had devolved into an old war-hawk who wanted a strong defense posture against the Soviet Union. I started out on the left about the economy. But living through the 1970s beat that out of me -- our economy was so screwed up.
"I learned economics at Princeton, and the analytical tools I gained are part of my intellectual apparatus. I also read more libertarian kinds of writers and began to see the association between economics and personal freedom.
"The defining issue today is how you think of the future. There's a fight going on in intellectual circles: whether you let the future evolve through trial and error, or try to plan it through some centralized approach. It's dynamism versus stasis: people who have a sense for the possibilities of open-ended progress in the future versus those who want to lose it off in some specific way. Most libertarians would fall on the dynamic side.
"Princeton broadened me tremendously," she adds. "Two important presidents were Princeton alumni, James Madison and Woodrow Wilson. In framing the Constitution and authoring many of the Federalist Papers, Madison was the critical person in turning classical liberal ideas into a system of checks and balances that would actually work as a limited government. By contrast, Wilson was the father of the administrative state, the pivotal person in overthrowing the ideals of classical liberalism in favor of technocracy. Princeton is a veritable Wilson shrine, and Madison is nowhere to be seen. But Madison, too, is part of Princeton's heritage of service to the nation -- and I believe, a far more worthy part."
-- Dan White '65

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