jbgotmar

More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.com
LOVE IS EXCEPTION MAKING 225
values; to deem her unattractive was to reject her on the deepest level.
Yet Nathan was still an Objectivist, still considered Rand a genius. He
could fi nd no way to reconcile his esteem for Rand with the seeming
contradiction that he no longer wished to be her lover. Even worse, how
could he value the young and winsome Patrecia over her? What did that
say about him?
Nathan’s problems were compounded by his development of Objectivist
psychology, which denied the autonomy and importance of emotions.
Working with the base materials of Rand’s novels, Nathan
constructed an airtight model of the psyche that downgraded emotions
to a subordinate position. Rand trumpeted her distrust of emotion in
almost all her writing. In For the New Intellectual she declared, “Emotions
are not tools of cognition,” a statement that would resurface repeatedly
in all Objectivist writing. To Rand an emotion “tells you nothing about
reality” and could never be “proof” of anything. In his radio speech Galt
declares, “Any emotion that clashes with your reason, any emotion that
you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking
which you forbade your mind to revise.” 25 It was Rand’s loss that her primary
intellectual collaborator did little to broaden her outlook, shake
her loose from her inherent emotional repression, or introduce her to
the teachings of modern psychology. Instead, captive to Rand’s mind
since meeting her almost twenty years before at age nineteen, Nathan
pushed her philosophical ideas into the realm of psychology, with devastating
results.
Nathan saw Objectivism’s deviation from the accumulated wisdom of
psychology as evidence of pathbreaking innovation, rather than a denial
of widely recognized human truth. Unlike all other schools of psychology,
Branden boasted, Objectivism did not “regard desires and emotions
as irreducible primaries, as the given.” Rather, emotions sprang
from thought and “are the product of the thinking [a man] has done
or has failed to do.” 26 Therefore, the way to handle painful or unpleasant
emotions was to uncover and change the thinking that had created
them. Objectivist psychotherapy was not unusual in its rational investigation
of emotional patterns. What made Nathan’s form of therapy
truly destructive was its emphasis on judgment, another inheritance
from Rand. The emotions that Objectivist therapy uncovered were to be
judged and changed rather than accepted and understood. Objectivist
Fore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.com