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Paul Rosenfels
(1909 - 1985) U.S.A.

Paul Rosenfels

Therapist, writer

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Paul was a Chicago-based psychiatrist who broke with psychoanalysis in the 1940's, when he differentiated between gender and "psychological polarity", and developed his own ideas about human relationships. The Ninth Street Center was founded in 1973 to teach his innovative insights to creative and independent men and women, many of whom have gone on to become teachers and leaders themselves.

Paul's psychology owes a lot to Carl Jung's analysis of introverted and extroverted character types. But where Jung assumed that these types live in separate worlds, Paul showed that they not only attract one another, but can establish mated relationships.

Psychological polarity is illustrated in families between non-mated parings (ex: father and son), operates beyond the mere physical through "civilization", and applies in a sense to "truth" as expressed through history in the form of "knowledge" (though Paul might go further to pair knowledge with action and call these "analogs", where analog denotes a psychological male and a psychological female non-gender pairing, an "opposite" of sorts).

Using a dimensional model, Rosenfels explains how analogs overcome male/female competition (as in parents) so as to contribute to the fuller personality of children and those of an extended childhood. Polarity is overcome through sex and celebration, Paul imples that gender polarity is overcome through sex and psychological polarity through celebration.

Paul was also the first American social scientist to defend homosexuality in print as a valid lifestyle. He drew upon his work with psychological polarity to demonstrate that a relationship between two men or two women could involve much more than the narcissistic hedonism documented in psychiatric literature.

Many people think that his detailed descriptions of love and power, honesty and courage, insight and mastery, and similar components of the psyche are both fundamental and comprehensive enough to constitute a true science of human nature. Paul died at the age of 76.

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