Nathaniel's The Disowned Self


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In my opinion, The Disowned Self is the single most important book that Nathaniel Branden has written. It is really the bedrock identification of how people generate their own psychological problems and of how to grow beyond them -- and of the true Objectivist principle of toleration and benevolence. I recommend it highly.

I also include in the next post the review of this book written by Roy A. Childs, Jr. back in 1972.

Best to everyone,

REB

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The Disowned Self by Nathaniel Branden

reviewed by Roy A. Childs, Jr.

In terms of its immediate effect on people, this is Nathaniel Branden’s best and most important work, midrange in focus and complexity between The Psychology of Self-Esteem and Breaking Free, moving back and forth from psychological theory and case-study illustrations.

The Disowned Self is primarily concerned with human awareness and integration; it focuses on the phenomenon of “self-alienation,” which is “a condition in which the individual is out of contact with his own needs, feelings, emotions, frustrations and longings, so that he is largely oblivious to his actual self, and his life is the reflection of an unreal self, of a role that he has adopted.” The process of “disowning” one’s feelings and emotions, the process of cutting them off by means of muscular contractions and the like, is to Branden one of the root causes of neurosis.

He discusses the nature of the problem, attempts to isolate its biological and psychological context and meaning, to identify the historical roots of repression of painful emotions and feelings—and, ultimately, of feeling as such (since Branden maintains that repression of feelings cannot remain selective).

He attempts to show how both traumatic and everyday experiences in childhood can help this process, and maintains that the policies begun in childhood—as a response to problems faced and painful experiences with which a child is helpless to deal—remain with people long after the initial problems have passed. But, perhaps more interestingly, Branden maintains that these psychological problems developed in childhood do not remain by inertia in a person, but rather that “they continue to exist because they are actively sustained in the present. And no part of psychotherapy is more important than making the client aware of the actions by which he keeps his problems alive and flourishing.”

As solutions to self-alienation, Branden discusses the meaning and nature of self-acceptance and self-awareness and, as a corollary, some of the techniques which he has used in therapy, and has found to be most effective in helping clients to de-repress and become more integrated in their contact with their subconscious, with their emotions, and with the external world.

And this is indeed another crucially important aspect of Branden’s position, the thesis that repressing and self-alienation lead to thinking impairments, since to block feelings means to block unimpeded access to material provided by sensations, and to one’s own subconscious, and material in one’s subconscious which is highly relevant to all types of thinking, particularly in finding the solutions to one’s personal problems.

The most important and original aspect of The Disowned Self is its showing the true relationship of reason to emotion, and in what the application of reason to the sphere of feelings consists. Much of this is implicit, but only implicit, in Branden’s earlier work.

The great virtue of this work is to have (for the first time, so far as I am aware), taken up the problem of man’s self-alienation and self-denial from a rational perspective, retaining above all else a solid respect for both reason and emotions, and to show the appropriate means of their harmonious interaction—appropriate if an individual is to be capable of feeling, thinking and acting, if an individual is to be healthy. It is in this respect that Branden has made a solid contribution to both the science of psychology and to human happiness.

[This review was first published in SIL Book Review, May 1972 and was posted to Objectivist Living on Thursday, September 14, 2006 with the permission of Andrea Millen Rich.]

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I agree with Roger here that *The Disowned Self* is an extremely important book. I think it is especially helpful for both Objectivists and “recovering Objectivists.” It is easy for people to allow the strong idealistic and moralistic elements in Objectivism to encourage self-alienation from their emotional selves. E.g., “I should not feel this way, therefore I cannot feel this way and do not feel this way.”

If I remember right, Nathaniel wrote this book after treating many Objectivists as a therapist. He saw it as a very big problem in this specific group.

In my own experience after returning from Vietnam, I kicked around for several years haunted by unrealistic self-expectations and self-understandings, and I had buried a lot of my emotional life. I grew up with Christianity’s encouragement to repress important parts of my emotional self, and I graduated to an incomplete interpretation of Objectivism’s exhortation to be rational. I strived for “rationality” at the expense of ignoring my emotions. Randian literary heroes were “feel-no-pain” models, which, mixed with my hard-core transformation into a Marine, made me aspire to be a Spartan robot.

Nathaniel’s book arrived at the right time for me. It helped me to re-discover myself. Thanks, Nathaniel.

-Ross Barlow.

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