Men, How Can We Understand Ourselves?

What Do Men Most Need to Know about Their Anger?

2011-09-14T21:57:00.005-04:00

By Dr. Jaime R. Torres

On September 18, 1898 the New York Herald and Le Temps of Paris wrote:
Last night the celebrated Puerto Rican agitator Dr. Betances died at the age of 71 in Paris. Well known for his scientific research, he was a revolutionary fighter for the independence of Puerto Rico and Cuba, and a fervent abolitioner….Let’s respectfully salute the memory of this indefatigable fighter whose name belongs from now on to history.

This was Dr. Ramon Emeterio Betances, who is often referred to as the Father of the Puerto Rican nation, and “el doctor de los pobres” (the doctor of the poor). His passionate fight for justice, his anger at slavery--which helped liberate tens of thousands in the Caribbean from the oppression of the Spanish crown at the end of the 19th century--can be a means of our seeing what we most need to know about anger, and I’ll be speaking some about his life a little later and what I learned about him from Ellen Reiss, with whom I have the honor to study, in a recent Aesthetic Realism class.
I believe the most comprehensive understanding of anger was given by Eli Siegel. He defined anger as “pain with the desire to destroy the cause of it.” And he showed this crucial thing: there are two kinds of anger that come from different sources in the self:

A good anger has like of the world in it, has respect for the world in it; and a bad or hurtful anger has dislike of the world in it, or contempt for the world in it.

I- I Had These Two Angers in the Caribbean

Born on the island of Puerto Rico, I was in a terrific mix up between a good and bad anger. When I was 10, a school in the countryside was damaged after a hurricane. I was angry that the local government was slow to help, and volunteered to collect supplies and books for the children. This anger came from my hope to respect people and have a good effect, and I felt proud.

Meanwhile, as the first son and grandson in my family, I was doted on by my parents, grandparents and aunts and few things were denied me: from specially prepared meals, trips, plenty of toys, a go-cart at age 11, and many compliments, which made me feel superior. It made me angry when other people, shopkeepers, teachers, and other children did not see the immense value I had. I wanted things on my terms and got annoyed, for example, when I had to wait in line; that math was so complicated; or if I had to walk more than three blocks to buy something.

I was a little tyrant, un pequeño tirano. After just three piano lessons I insisted that I needed an organ to practice on. When my parents said it was better to wait until I improved, I threw a tantrum and got the organ. But after a few weeks it became an unused piece of furniture. I angrily felt, “It’s too hard to learn all those notes!” And for years, the sight of the organ made me feel ashamed and angry.

As I grew older, I could be outwardly affable and seem easy going, yet inwardly I often seethed. Since I thought angry people were unlikable and rude, I cultivated an inner life that never saw the light of day, where I made fun of people, felt that persons who had different opinions from mine—which were many—were ignorant, and that the world was one impediment after another. In his lecture Eli Siegel describes a “quiet kind of anger,”
the kind that is smooth disappointment—where we act as if the world will never really please us. [And he explained] All anger would like to become contempt. Anger has pain in it, but contempt is inward bliss. [TRO 893, Self and World p.9]

One form this quiet anger took in me was how I collected grievances in my mind; I never forgot or forgave what I saw as an insult. In an Aesthetic Realism consultation early in my study, I spoke about how I was still angry at a friend from high school for the way he made fun of me. My consultants explained: “A grudge is a very popular way to store some anger and maintain the option of getting angry whenever you want.” And they asked about my desire to hold on to my grudges:

Consultants: Has it made you weaker or stronger? For example, when you have a grudge, how does the world look to you? Does anything else exist besides the person you have a grievance about?

J Torres: No. Everything else is in the background.

Consultants: And at that time are you interested in whether the person has any accurate criticisms of you?

J Torres: That is the last thing in my mind.

These questions were liberating. They had me rethink decisions I’d made to nourish my anger with people, feeling it made me superior and noble. I began to see that the consequences of this unjust anger were my feeling separate and unable to care for anything or anyone.

II- A Different Choice Made in the Caribbean; or Betances, a Fighter for the People

In the lecture we’re quoting from tonight, Siegel said:
What differentiates a handsome anger from an ugly [one] is whether [it] is narrowly personal, is all for the advancement of ego...,or is for something beautiful and just. [TRO 188]

These sentences comment on the work and life of Ramon Emeterio Betances who was born in the town of Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico on April 8, 1827.

As a doctor he did important research on eye disease, the cause of miscarriages, and the treatment of cholera. He was also a writer and diplomat. But he is best known for his anger at the cruelty of slavery and his work to end it. He had a beautiful fury at the injustice of Spanish colonialism, becoming a leading force for the independence of Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. One of his biographers describes him as the “obstetrician” tending to “the birth of Puerto Rican nationality.”

Ramon was the fourth of six children born to Felipe Betances and Maria Alacan. Though his father, a Spanish merchant born in the Dominican Republic, was of mixed blood, he himself owned slaves who worked on his hacienda. When Ramon was nine, his mother died and he was sent to live with family friends in Toulouse, France to get a better education.

Later, as a medical student at the University of Paris, he was in the midst of the revolution of 1848. In that year he wrote, “I reported to duty… and became a fighter for the freedom of all peoples.”

When he returned to Puerto Rico he found an impoverished island, ruled by a tyrannical Spanish governor and wealthy sugar cane barons. His biographer, Felix Ojeda wrote: “the main objective was to use...our people to produce sugar...to be sold in the United States and England...It was pure exploitation.”

Betances had an anger that was kind. His biographer describes what he saw: slaves enduring beatings; their teeth pulled out for eating the sugar cane while working in the fields; some even taking their own life to put an end to their suffering. Inspired by the American abolitionist John Brown, Betances worked with others to end this brutal institution. His anger sometimes took the form of a good cleverness. For example, he arranged to buy children of slaves just before they were baptized—when they would cost less—giving 25 pesos to the parents so they could buy their child’s freedom, and receive what was called "aguas de libertad"--the “waters of liberty.”

This and other courageous acts infuriated the authorities. Threatened with exile, he left Puerto Rico in 1858, eventually coming to New York City where he founded the Revolutionary Committee for the Independence of Puerto Rico and Cuba and held meetings a few blocks from here on Houston Street. In September of that year, his carefully planned uprising to liberate Puerto Rico from the Spanish crown, was put down in a few days, during which many died or were arrested. This is known as the “Grito de Lares,” the insurrection of Lares. Betances returned to France heartbroken but vowing to continue fighting.

Meanwhile, there was another kind of anger in this courageous man—one that was narrowly personal which I think tormented him and made him weary. I’ll say something about this in a moment.

III- Love and Anger: For or Against the World

One of the mistakes men make about love—and it’s a huge one—is using a woman he cares for as a haven, a consolation in a world he sees as harsh and against him. And men have gotten very angry when the loved one shows she’s not just an adoring adjunct. When I met Donita Ellison, a tall, beautiful woman from Missouri who was a teacher, I was swept by the passionate way she spoke about education and her students combined with her easy Midwestern manner. With every conversation the world looked better to me, and when I asked Donita to marry me she said yes.

But like men in the 19th century and today, I also resented having to think deeply about Donita and the fact that she had different opinions from mine and even sometimes had the nerve to offer some useful criticism of me. I’d seemingly agree, but would battle with her in my mind, saying to myself, “I’m a good husband, I provide well, don’t drink or smoke or stay out late, and I’m doing good work—she should be happy with this good husband!”

Donita was not adhering to my picture of a loving, devoted wife—and I was angry in a way of which I wasn’t proud.

When I told about this in a Aesthetic Realism class, the Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss asked me if I felt my ideal was to be completely adored and completely unbothered. It was, and I’ve seen this to be so with many men. I said that I sometimes didn’t even want to talk with Donita about work I care for very much in behalf of a just health care system--and which Donita is also very much for. Ellen Reiss said:

The thought about a woman’s inner life can seem very different from thinking about what is fair to people in a large way.

Jaime Torres. Yes, I think I’ve seen them as too different.

And she asked: “what is the relation between trying to understand the depths of a woman close to one, and fighting hard so that people everywhere are seen justly?” She explained: good will, the desire to have someone else stronger is the purpose that relates the personal and the wide, care for one person and justice to people in general. I’m grateful to be in the midst of studying this with my wife whom I love very much.

Though Ramon Betances and I are very different—I believe he needed to hear what Ellen Reiss said to me. And as I was preparing for this seminar, in order to understand him better, I wrote to her asking if she could look at and discuss some of Betances’ writing both in Spanish and French, including verses and a short story. She did, and the discussion that followed--only a little of which I can present here--was magnificent in scholarship and deep understanding of the self of this man.

I respect Ms. Reiss enormously for the care with which she placed Betances in relation to persons important in literature at the time he was at the University of Paris in 1857--Gautier, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Mallarme. She said Betances’ courage was tremendous, and meanwhile there were things in his life that needed to be understood.

I had written to Ms. Reiss about a tragic happening in relation to love. When in exile in Paris, he brought to France the young woman he cared for, María del Carmen Henri, nicknamed Lita. They planned to marry on May 5, 1859, but Lita fell sick with typhus and died two weeks before their wedding. He was devastated and also tremendously angry, writing for example:

She left me alone in this cruel world!... She was pure reason and love...my sacred oracle… All joy has been taken away from me for the rest of my life. (p 342-3, 337).

Who Lita was we don’t know. Meawhile in his letters he wrote of this young woman with great praise, describing her as the smartest person he knew, the purest and humblest. He even says she was beloved by thousands in Paris, though she had been there but two months.

Ms. Reiss said: “A large question...is how did he see this lady?” I said it is clear he felt very angry at her death, and she said, yes: ”Anger is here, but along with anger, I also think he felt guilty about her.” And she asked:

Ellen Reiss: Do you think people who have fought for justice have had questions about how they have seen people close to them? Do you think...the way Betances saw this young woman and the way he saw a possible revolution went together or were they in two different parts of his mind?

JTorres: I think they were in different parts of his mind.

Ellen Reiss: This is a very important person and very praiseworthy, but like any person he could be asked: “Dr. Betances, did you make Lita apart from the world?”

JTorres: I think he did.

Ellen Reiss: When you try to make someone apart from the world and as an answer to all your questions and they are taken from you, you can be very angry.

And she said that Betances, with all his courage, likely lacked a deep courage as to a woman, the courage to want to know her deeply. I wish Betances could have heard questions like these; he would have felt understood, and it would have lessened his pain and made him sure of the best thing in him.

Though he spent the rest of his life in exile in France he never gave up his ideals and his fight for justice to people in the Caribbean. From Paris he celebrated the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873; and he continued to work for the independence of the Spanish colonies, even as many people asked him to compromise; and many wealthy landowners undermined his work.

In 1882 he wrote a poem titled “Exilio y Libertad,” “Exile and Liberty.” In the class I’m telling about, Ms. Reiss translated and discussed this poem, and though she said it did not have the poetic music necessary to make it authentic poetry, she respected the important sentiment in it. She said:

There are things in it that are very deep... It moves me; this is a person trying to say that with all he’s been though, he still had what he began with, still loves the cause for which he gave his life. This alone should make one respect this man.

I will conclude by reading some of this poem in Spanish and then in Ms. Reiss’ translation. In it, we see Betances trying to give form to the anger in him that was in behalf of the beauty of the world.

Destierro y Libertad
Destierro y Libertad
En horas de tristeza,
¡Cuánto dolor he hallado en mi camino!

Exile and Liberty

Exile and Liberty
In hours of sadness,
How much pain have I found on my road!
Exile and Liberty, how much grandeur
And misery do you contain at the same time!
Now I have seen the lofty brow
Prostrate itself to outlaws
And in tears sink down, weakly. . .
Humiliated at the feet of tyrants,
August Liberty, now I have seen you,
And [seen] many disown their brothers
With disgraceful lip and puny heart.
But each time, with fervent enthusiasm
I exclaimed, “Liberty, you always glow!”
A splendid beacon of light
Your sovereign forehead is for me.
Your song, always courageous,
In powerful agreement with your bronze spear,
And “Fight!” it repeats to us; for exile
Is the baptism of the Holy Cause;
It is the threat through which the people,
Lashing the face of the tyrants,
Prepares political redemption. . .
Exile and Liberty, that is why I love you!
[Trans. Ellen Reiss]

2008-04-07T23:25:00.005-04:00

This talk was orginally given on March 18, 2001 at Harvard University. I later became a chapter in the book, Aesthetic Realism and the Answer to Racism (Orange Angle Press, 2004)

Aesthetic Realism Can End Racism and Prejudice
By Dr. Jaime R. Torres

The federal government statistics continue to show an alarming number in hate crimes motivated by race and ethnicity. That means that thousands of men and women--as real as you and me—-still undergo racial profiling, beatings, and worse. As a Puerto Rican I also have been the object of racism. And the question is: why after years of so many people fighting courageously for civil rights—-many of them losing their lives—-and after passionate pleas from churches and universities, why is it that racism and prejudice still persists in our country? The answer, I believe, is presented here today.

We Have to See Where We’re Unjust

People have been confused and pained by the fact that persons who have suffered the injustice of discrimination--like African-Americans and Latinos—-have also been unjust and prejudiced themselves. Puerto Ricans have discriminated against Dominicans and visa versa; an African American from Harlem has looked down on a black person from Jamaica and vice versa. And contempt is also what has a person from Cincinnati feel superior to someone in Cleveland.
Growing up in Puerto Rico, where most of us are a mixture of African, Taino Indian and Spanish blood, I got the message early that some people—-because of their skin tone, the texture of their hair or how much money they had—-were beneath me and my family.

While I never considered myself a “racist,” when my grandmother would point to her own cheek and tell me in Spanish, “Don’t bring any girls to my house darker than this,” “no traigas muchachas aquí más oscuras que yo,” I did not object. I later learned from Aesthetic Realism, that I used the praise I got from my family to feel I was special and superior, and that other people were less real, unimportant and beneath me.

When I came to New York to study at Fordham University in the 1970’s, I was outraged by the racial violence I saw African Americans endure, and the daily awful discrimination Puerto Ricans suffered here on the mainland. But I made no connection between my feeling against this injustice to the way I refused to join clubs and study groups in college that had Blacks and New York-born Puerto Ricans. Shamefully I felt I was better than they were, and that intellectually they would bring me down.

But I also was the brunt of racist comments like "he got into school through a quota," and "you won't make it academically here." Also, at times when someone didn’t understand my accent he would say, “You are in America now—learn English!” And on a few occasions while looking for an apartment, I would suddenly hear “It was rented,” when in fact it was not. Once, I overheard a broker tell a landlord on the phone about me, “Don’t worry, he is light skin and a professional.” In every instance I felt angry and humiliated. But I didn’t use this injustice to be kinder and to have more feeling for what others have endured, but to feel this world is an insincere mess and I had the right to see anyone or anything as I please, while acting as if I were above it all. My outrage was not enough to change my own prejudice and how I saw other people.

In Aesthetic Realism consultations I began to learn—-and this is what changed me—-that even with all the injustice, what I wanted most was to like how I saw the world different from myself. In an early consultation, as I spoke about not being able to "connect" with others, I was asked:

C-- Do you like people?
JT- People say that I'm nice.
C-- If those people were able to see what’s in your mind, do you think they would like it?
JT- Oh no!
C-- Do you know the difference between acting nice and being kind?
JT- Wow, I don't think I do!
C-- Do you think you have fooled everyone...[I had and my consultants explained this was contempt. They asked]
C-- Do you know how much that has hurt you?

I had thought it was clever to be able to look affable, while inwardly exploiting the shortcomings in others--real or imagined. I came to feel that what I saw as an achievement, was really the cause of my inability to have true feelings for others.

The Profit Motive Encourages Prejudice

What I was learning in consultations helped see my whole life newly. As a Hispanic doctor I was hoping to be useful to others and felt proud of taking care of many people, including some in the poorest areas in New York.

But I also wanted to make lots of money, own several homes and have an office on Park Avenue. What I saw as my comfort went against justice to other people, and increasingly I felt agitated.
This is what many doctors feel and it’s perilous because one way to ease the nervousness is by becoming cold, and the results can be deadly. I was able to understand the battle I was in that made me so cold and distant from my patients.

In another consultation I learned about a central cause of prejudice—-seeing other people as only different from myself. My consultants asked:

C-- Do you think you are more alike or different from your patients?
JT- Oh, different.
C-- That's very dangerous because as soon as you see yourself as different the ego wants to feel superior; and from that many of the horrors of the world have occurred.
As I wrote the assignments my consultants gave me—including to write 10 ways I was the same and different from my patients--I felt new care for them and what they have to endured.

Biology and Genetics are against racism and prejudice

One of the important things biology shows is this: if you look at the inside of any person, you would not know if that heart belonged to a person from Africa, China or Scandinavia.
Throughout history, however, people impelled by a desire for contempt have tried to prove the superiority of one race over another. A great deal of pseudo science has come from this, including the Eugenics movement in the 1920’s, and more recently the book The Bell Curve.

In the United States between 1911 and 1930, the idea that some people were of superior stock--and therefore had to be kept “pure”-- was used to pass laws limiting racially mixed marriages and immigration from many countries.

In 1923 Eli Siegel wrote one of the most important essays ever written: "The Equality of Man," in which he scientifically disproved the Eugenic theory by giving step by step evidence that if all people were given similar conditions—-enough food, a place to live, education, enough money, they would be equal.

I respect and admire him so much because throughout his life, he explained and fought injustice wherever he saw it. And Eli Siegel also showed the beautiful, ethical alternative. His love for truth, for the best in humanity, made him courageous. This essay--written in Baltimore and at a time were Eugenics was so popular, and backed up by powerful people in government--reads in part:

"Mind needs nourishment, care, and training all by itself... And the fact is plain enough that millions and millions of people from the beginning of the world…have not got this mind's nourishment, care and training. Their lives were forced to be led so, to get food enough for their stomachs, was all that they could do...I say it is wrong, to say that any one's mind is inferior, until it has been completely seen that it has been given all the nourishment, care and training that it needs or could get."

In the year 2000 genetic evidence confirmed what was presented in "The Equality of Man." One of the important findings of the Human Genome Project was the showing that "the racial categories recognized by society are not reflected on the genetic level." In fact, all human beings share 99.99% of the same genetic material! And whatever differences exist are literally skin deep only.

Wrote researcher Dr. Eric Lander: "There's no scientific evidence to support substantial differences between groups...The tremendous burden of proof goes to anyone who wants to assert those differences." [NY Times 8-22-00]

As you can see there is no scientific basis for racism; the only reason for racism and prejudice is the human desire to have contempt for what is different from ourselves, “el deseo de tener desprecio por lo que es diferente a nosotros.” That is why it's so emergent that people learn how to like the way they see other people. Aesthetic Realism is the education that can teach that way of seeing that has a person sure that being fair to another is the same as self-expression, pleasure and pride.

2008-04-06T23:11:00.005-04:00

This is a section of a talk given in August 2004 at the Terrain Gallery, New York

Despite Cell Phones & Email-—

Why Can’t People Really Communicate?

By Jaime Torres

“Communication,” explained Eli Siegel, “is the way a person makes his thoughts part of another person’s life.” But, Aesthetic Realism shows, there’s something in every person that wants to keep our thoughts to ourselves. I often felt I was my own best company and preferred my inner monologues to conversation with people. Though I envied persons who seemed at ease talking to others, I also mocked them, thinking people talked too much. I felt if it could be said with a few words, save the energy for something else.

In his lecture Aesthetic Realism Looks at Things: Communication, Siegel describes an “agonizing problem of today”: the fact that people may have to do with each other “for years and really not transmit what they feel to each other.” He explained: “You have to respect and like what you express yourselves to...before the job of communication can have a fair chance” (TRO 485, 486).

Communication didn’t have a fair chance with me because I had two competing feelings about the world and people. In high school, I’d spend hours writing letters to pen pals in Nicaragua and Italy, telling them about the lusciousness of the land of Puerto Rico, where I grew up, about my life, hopes, and concerns. I would eagerly await their letters, about their countries and experiences. Yet I’d drive with my father for hours, seeing the same beautiful vistas I had described, and not exchange one word with him.

I was in a painful jam between wanting to talk freely with my parents, and telling myself they weren’t interested and would never understand. The truth was, I felt strongly that the world wasn’t good enough for me to show my “deep, sensitive thoughts” to and it was best to pretend to be friendly while keeping myself secretly aloof and superior. This way of mind, I would learn from Aesthetic Realism, was contempt, and contempt is the force in us that corrupts communication and makes us feel separate and ashamed.

My life began to change and real communication began to have a fair chance when I learned that the world was friendlier than I’d thought—that, surprisingly, everything and everyone in it had in common an aesthetic structure. Opposites such as surface and depth, toughness and gentleness, for and against were in my father, the Caribbean Sea, a roommate I disagreed with, and myself. Seeing how I was related to the world had me feel increasingly that I could express my thoughts to another person and had me feel for the first time that someone else’s perception of me added to my life.

Concealment versus Communication

As with many families, there was a big lack of communication in our home as I was growing up. When my grandparents took care of me during the day, though they were very devoted, we never spoke much. I felt I only needed a few words to let them know what I wanted. I said “hungry” and they would go through a list of choices of foods to eat. If I said “out,” it meant I wanted to go for a walk. Who these two persons were, why they cared for each other, what their hopes were, what they had endured when they lost their farm during the Depression, was not real to me: they existed to satisfy my whims without much conversation.

In public, my parents, sister, and I were very sociable, but when we got home we drifted silently to different rooms to watch television, sometimes even watching the same program.
I came to feel early that the world was boring, not worth knowing, and full of insensitive people. What I found exciting were my inner thoughts. In my mind, I’d go from imagining myself as Robin Hood fighting evil in Nottingham, to making fun of people, feeling that anyone whose thoughts were different from mine—which was most of the population—was stupid.

I felt understood to my core the first time I read “The Ordinary Doom,” by Eli Siegel. He writes:

Concealment is equated, unknowingly to ourselves, with individuality: the more we conceal the more it seems we are asserting our very personality, resisting a somewhat repellent, unwelcome intrusion of other things into ourselves....Through secrecy, we can be defying the world and deceiving it.

I began to see that the contempt of using my secret thoughts to make less of reality was hurting my life. Because the self is made ethically, when we go against our deepest desire, to know and like the world, there is a kickback: I was often depressed and had a pervasive feeling of unease. I’d rehearse conversations and prepare witty remarks to make people laugh. I couldn’t communicate what I deeply felt because instead of listening to and learning from a person, I was more concerned with the effect I’d have on him or her. As to why I was this way and how to be different, I didn’t have a clue.

I Learn the Cause

Then I had my first Aesthetic Realism consultation, and I was asked what I wanted most to change in myself. I said I wanted to overcome my shyness. And my consultants asked: “Do you have a world inside and a way of presenting yourself to people that are two very different things?” I answered “Yes,” thinking, “How do they know?!” In college I had wanted to “fit in” with different crowds and would tell different stories about myself depending on the group I was with. I had felt victorious, but also terrified that everyone would find out.

My consultants asked whether I thought I had an attitude to the world, and “Can a person who finds the world not so good feel some importance? That’s the principle of contempt.”
JT. It happens quite often.

Consultants. Do you think you have a disposition not to see the feelings of others as real?
Though I answered, “People say I’m perceptive,” I didn’t see the feelings of others as real. With people I wanted to impress, I acted like a sensitive guy, giving advice, pretending to listen; but since my own depths were not involved, inevitably I felt like a fraud. My consultants asked whether, despite my looking affable, I had a secret inner “dialogue about people that they wouldn’t like so much.”

“All the time,” I said, remembering my feeling I could “read” people very well—for instance, “He’s a workaholic,” “She’s looking for attention,” or “Just say something nice and she’ll be happy.” Did I think, my consultants asked, that such a way of seeing people “has anything to do with how a person gets to be shy?”

The logic made so much sense! I’d given myself the right to think of people any way I wanted, and the result was that I couldn’t be at ease in their presence. I thank my lucky stars that I met Aesthetic Realism and had the pleasure of hearing questions like these, which changed the direction of my life.

I began to have conversations with people as I’d never had before. One of those people was the woman who is now my wife, Donita Ellison, a New York City public school teacher of art. Often we spoke for hours about what she was teaching, what we both were learning from Aesthetic Realism, about art, politics, our families. I’m very grateful that we’ve been married for ten years and are continuing our education in professional classes taught by Ellen Reiss.

Communication and Marriage

Meanwhile, though I had changed a lot, I often expected Donita to be satisfied with my two-word answers. And sometimes I would keep my opinion to myself because I knew Donita had a different one and I didn’t want mine challenged. When I spoke about this in an Aesthetic Realism class, Ellen Reiss asked me: “Is there anything in you that doesn’t want to communicate with Ms. Ellison?” When I said yes, she asked with humor: “Do you have the feeling that your self is precious—there is something that is just you and only the very best company should have it?” I did! Ms. Reiss continued:

Suppose you were to really communicate with Ms. Ellison and she were to see what you felt—what do you think you would lose?

JT. A feeling I should have myself to myself.
ER. Do you feel in some way you would lose your soul, your personality, your being? Do you think there’s something in a person that just feels, “I’ll be nothing—it will be all gone, given away to these plebeians”?

Ms. Reiss was so right. I saw that part of what I felt I’d lose was my conceited notion that my way was the best way. That’s why I would undervalue things Donita said, not listen carefully, or try to stop her after a few sentences, assuming I knew all that she was trying to say. Ms. Reiss taught me that good will was the only purpose that would enable me 1) really to communicate with Donita, know her and be known by her, and 2) to see communication as thrilling and truly selfish. Mr. Siegel defined good will as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful” (TRO 121).

As Donita and I have talked, she has encouraged me to see friends, my parents, people who may seem so different from me, with more depth and kindness. As my thoughts meet her thoughts, I feel more complete, more the person I want to be.

*The Frances Sanders Lesson and Two Related Works (NY: Definition Press, 1974), p. 41.
Dr. Torres, a podiatrist, is on the Advisory Board of the National Hispanic Medical Association.

2007-10-18T06:11:00.001-04:00

Reprinted from: El Diario--La Prensa, New York

One Health Insurance, for All, for Life
By Jaime R. Torres

All over this country the crisis in our healthcare system is a burning issue, and people are demanding that politicians resolve it. There are 47 million people without health insurance -- 14 million are Hispanics -- and more than 50 million have inadequate coverage. The Institute of Medicine reported that each year 18,000 people die because of the lack of medical coverage.

When it comes to healthcare, the United States spends more per person than any other industrialized country (almost double than Canada and France). Yet, we have the highest infant mortality and almost the lowest life expectancy in the developed world. It’s very clear there is a lot of suffering, and the proposals of recent years "to improve" our system have had little success.

In my years as a doctor, I have seen a man lose a leg because he couldn’t pay for antibiotics to treat a foot ulcer; I have fought insurance companies because they denied payment for necessary procedures, and I have seen children receive inadequate care because they had Medicaid—insurance which many see as second class. It’s incredible that in the richest country in the world there is such injustice and pain.

But in the rest of the industrialized countries healthcare is provided to everyone. The only reason we don’t have universal health coverage is the unbelievable inefficiency of our system. Even though the United States spends two trillion dollars on health costs, $500 billion never reaches the people of this nation, instead this money is used for administrative expenses and to pay shareholders and millionaire executives who have never changed a bandage in their lives.

It is very clear that the system needs radical surgery. Eli Siegel, the great philosopher and founder of the education Aesthetic Realism, showed its central failing when he explained that a healthcare system based on profit is unethical because it is based on “contempt for people.” He explained that as soon as one is looking to make profits, one cannot be very interested in what other persons deserve, what they feel, because that would limit one's ability to make money from them.

Our system shouldn’t depend on some people making profit from the misfortunes of other human beings. For any insurer, hospital or doctor to see patients in terms of how much money can be made from them is sheer contempt, and it is completely opposed to hoping a person be stronger and healthier.

The truth is that we can provide health insurance for everyone in the United States if we expand the Medicare program to all the people living in this country, regardless of their health or immigration status. Medicare is the federal not-for-profit insurance which has efficiently covered our senior citizens with quality care.

This can be achieved by a tax that would cost less than what most employees or employers are currently paying for insurance. In one single step, it would provide coverage for the uninsured, it would lower administrative costs significantly and would improve our efforts at prevention.

We should educate ourselves and demand all the presidential candidates to expand Medicare as our national health insurance program where everyone would be covered, and its only purpose would be to improve our health--and not make profits.

Dr. Jaime Torres is founder of the Latinos for National Health Insurance and is an associate of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York.

2006-03-18T17:57:00.001-05:00

Reprinted from the South Carolina Black News

What Mistakes Do Men and Women Make About Coldness and Warmth?

By Dr. Jaime Torres

In the summer of 1967, when I was ten, I heard a man speaking passionately to a large crowd about his plans to bring needed jobs to our town and improve living conditions. As hundreds of people cheered, I was impressed, but what I showed was coldness and indifference as I sulkily complained to my mother, "When are we going home? I’m tired of standing."

This man was Jaime Torres Rodríguez, my father, who was running for mayor of Ciales, Puerto Rico. He hoped to have a good effect on people’s lives. But I thought his concern for the welfare of men and women whom I didn’t even know, was against me. And I made the mistake — which I was to repeat for years — of being more interested in what was coming to me than warmly, respectfully being for what others deserved.

The way I shuttled from warmth to coldness caused me and others confusion and pain. Sometimes I would act as though a person I’d just met was destined to be the best friend I’d ever had. At other times I would avoid someone on the street whom I actually knew quite well. Though outwardly I was affable and easygoing, inwardly I would often seethe with anger. By the age of 15, when my grandfather died, I seemed to feel nothing. At his funeral I cried, not because I felt too much but because I felt too little. "How could I be so cold?" I wondered.

I’m more grateful than I can say that Aesthetic Realism brought kind logic, sanity, to this subject. I learned that the debate we have between the opposites of warmth and coldness is an aspect of a bigger debate raging in everyone about how to see the world: should we see it as something we hope to like and find meaning in, or as something to be aloof from and have as little to do with as possible?

"Coldness, quite clearly," Eli Siegel writes, is allied to contempt; and...contempt for the world is seen by man as a safeguard of himself .... Any time we can give a cold shoulder to something, our self-stock rises."

Mr. Siegel’s understanding of contempt is one of the most important discoveries in history. Without this knowledge, people cannot see that something we cherish warmly in ourselves is really contempt, the thing that most hurts us.

Warmth, Coldness, & the Family

As the firstborn and first grandson, I was generally the center of attention in my family. Very early, I came to feel that the praise my mother and other relatives lavished on me was the warmest thing in the world. I used it to be self-centered and superior, to feel I should be waited on and adored.

A person to whom I gave a cold shoulder for a long time was my father. He had begun working at age 13, during the depression, and years later was able to buy his own drugstore, of which he was rightly proud. In public, my father was outgoing and energetic, but at home he often seemed tired and didn’t want to talk. The way he acted so friendly and warm to customers, then in private would often complain about them, confused me. My father too had a fight between warmth and coldness; but instead of trying to understand and see that he was pained by it — which would have been true warmth — I coldly used it to feel he was insincere and to have contempt for him.

Meanwhile, what I held most against my father was that he had so many interests that weren’t me, and also that he was often critical of me for being selfish. I was bent on punishing him, and when he tried to show me affection, I would recoil. If he made a joke and everyone laughed, I was solemn, even grim. And I mocked his desire to hold public office, feeling it was a big interference with our Sunday outings.

What Questions!

Years later in an Aesthetic Realism consultation, when I said bitterly that my father was more interested in his business than in me, my consultants asked: "Where do you think he felt more respected, at work or at home?" "What a question!" I said, remembering the many times I was on the couch watching TV and would hear my father arrive from work at 9 PM. I would fake being asleep so that I wouldn’t have to greet him.

When my consultants asked me what he had done to me to deserve that coldness, I answered defensively, "He didn’t want to know me."

Consultants. It is sad not to be understood, but what have you done to be understood?

JT. I don’t think much.

And they asked, what had I done to understand him?

This surprised me very much. And at the age of 27 I began consciously to change my desire to look for hurts to a desire to know. Because of what I’ve learned I have a new respect and care for my parents and sister, a feeling that is light years away from that summer of 1967. We began to have conversations as never before, and a new warmth came to be. Then my parents too began to study Aesthetic Realism, in phone consultations from Puerto Rico! On their 42nd anniversary, they wrote a letter, published in newspapers in Puerto Rico and New York, in which they said:

[We] are more alive than ever because of what we have learned from Aesthetic Realism .... We learned to understand and respect each other more, and to see the world around us with more value. Instead of routine, we now have more communication. We have seen how adoring our children and seeing them as better than others is contempt, and is one of the reasons why children don’t respect their parents. We believe that if families all over the world studied this education, the social problems that at this time are destroying human beings and the family would greatly change.

Aesthetic Realism is the best, warmest friend of the family, and every person in this world deserves to know it.

The Mistake about Love

A large field for mistakes about warmth and coldness is love. In TRO 1276, Ellen Reiss asks this question: "Are you troubled by the way you can feel cold to someone close to you, someone you thought you felt so warm towards?" And she explains: "We can also feel cold towards someone we care for because there is that in us which wants to love only ourselves."

Soon after I began seeing Donita Ellison, who is a high school teacher of art, I found myself having feelings about her that were big and new: I was swept! But I also made a mistake that without Aesthetic Realism I would never have been able to understand and change. For several months Donita and I spoke almost every day, and I was so glad to see her, couldn’t wait until I did. Yet I found myself one day feeling we were too different and therefore not compatible.

When I spoke about this in an Aesthetic Realism consultation, my consultants asked: "Is Donita Ellison a threat to your big love affair — the one you’ve had with yourself?" This was so true!

I remembered the first time I invited Donita to visit my apartment in Westchester. After dinner at a restaurant and an exciting conversation through which we both had more feeling, on the way to my home I began to think, "This is getting too deep and it is out of my control." When we were in the apartment a few minutes, I told Donita, "It’s going to rain and you have to drive back to Manhattan. Here is an umbrella. Drive carefully." As she left I felt relieved, but also so ashamed and cold. And when Donita called me after arriving home safely and was critical — I was very grateful to hear her voice!

My consultants explained: "There are two things in reality: you and the world. If you don’t want to be truly affected by the world, that leaves only you .... Does Donita Ellison have the right to affect you in a big way? Is it reality you are being affected by through her?"

JT. Yes. Consultants. Is it wholly in your control?

JT. No, it’s not. Consultants. Congratulations!

By the end of 1993 I knew I wanted to marry Donita; and in my mind I pictured a proposal, an engagement, the ceremony and honeymoon, and living happily ever after. I had a plan to surprise Donita by announcing our engagement — which she knew nothing about — at a party with my parents present. Somehow, though, I didn’t feel at ease with my plan, and when I told my consultants about it they asked: "As you thought about this, how did you see Ms. Ellison? Is she just part of the decoration, or do you see her as a real person? In your thought, who were all the people at the party looking at?"

JT. Me.

Consultants. What happened to Donita Ellison?

JT. I guess she was also looking at me.

And they asked whether I saw how something that might begin well could be used in behalf of a selfish purpose.

I certainly did. And I saw that the only way I would feel I deserved to have Donita care for and trust me was to be able to say sincerely: I want to use you to like the world, and I want to do everything I can to have you like the world and to meet what you are truly hoping for.

I’m so happy and honored that Donita is now my wife, and that our wonderful Aesthetic Realism education continues.

Dr. Torres is on the advisory board of the National Hispanic Medical Association.

National Health Care: A Right Not A Privilege

2005-09-23T20:42:00.000-04:00

On this post I am publishing a presentation I was invited to give by Representative John Conyers of Michigan for the Congressional Black Caucus Leadership Conference in Washington DC on September 22, 2005. I am proud to have been among such distinguished panelist as Congressman John Conyers, Congresswoman Hilda Solis, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Dr. Olveen Carrasquillo, Dr. Quentin Young and others.

National Health Care: A Human Right,

Not a Privilege
September 22, 2005

I am Dr. Jaime Torres; a podiatrist and hospital administrator in New York City. I'm on the Advisory Board of the National Hispanic Medical Association, and founder of Latinos For a National Health Insurance. And I'm very proud to be working with Dr. Carrasquillo, who is part of the organization we founded, Latinos for a National Health Insurance, to make sure that every person in these United States has a national health insurance from the time he or she is born. National health care is a human right, not a privilege.

Today we've heard the statistics, telling that over 45 million men, woman and children are uninsured, and millions more are underinsured because of our current profit-driven healthcare. In 2005, in this rich nation of ours, it's unconscionable for any person to feel: I can't afford to go to the doctor. I can't afford to pay for the medicine that my child or wife desperately needs. On a TV program last week I heard a man say "my six year old daughter has cancer, and my insurance only pays for part of the treatment. With a roofer's salary-- what can I do?"

Higher premiums, deductibles and co-payments are encouraging people who are in what is called the Middle Class to delay seeking health care; when they finally do get care they are often so ill that the costs can be astronomical. The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is unpaid medical bills. Just last week, the Keiser Family Foundation released a study showing that:

The average annual premiums for family coverage grew 9.2 percent since last year to
$10,880; [and the] average worker's share of the premiums was $2,713 in 2005.

And USA Today describes it this way:

"Job-based health insurance - the central pillar of America's health insurance system is beginning to crumble. Just 60 percent of businesses offered health insurance in
2005... and some employees who can no longer afford insurance...go without. "

Meanwhile, the Corporate Research Group reported that "in 2004, managed care profits increased 33%." And the way to increase profits is by limiting care, raising prices and making you pay more; and pharmaceutical corporations also made billions from the misfortunes of others.

I've seen a man lose his leg because he couldn't afford antibiotics to treat his foot ulcer. A few years ago I attended the funeral of a 14-year old girl in the Bronx, who died when her HMO refused to do an inexpensive blood test which would have shown that what she was suffering from was not the flu--as her parents were told--but a perforated pancreas. Why did this happen?--because her mother had the temerity to take her daughter to the emergency room without calling the HMO first. This little girl was REAL, not "anecdotal", to use the language of the insurance companies. As Martin Luther King Jr. said so powerfully: "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane."

As we hear pharmaceutical giants singing the praises of the new fake Medicare Prescription Plan, it is inhumane that we have millions of our senior citizens with limited incomes paying for expensive medications. During the previous five years the prices of prescription drugs have risen exponentially and continue climbing.

But according to the "2004 Economic Report of the President" the U.S. health care is doing just fine. Never mind the huge expense, the low life expectancy, the high infant mortality: it's a market-based system, so it must be good!

For healthcare to be based on the idea that it's all right to make money from the illnesses of people is hideous and unethical. In a class of 1968 the philosopher Eli Siegel, founder of the education Aesthetic Realism, explained the root cause of the crisis we are in today when he stated that profit-driven health care is unethical because it is "based on contempt for people." He added: "The idea of people worried about their health and worried about money is barbarous. It's ego corruption." He showed that once you are after profit you can't be too interested in what people deserve, what they feel; to do so will limit your ability to make money from them.

A system in which patients are seen in terms of money and not what they feel encourages ill will in everyone working in it. Too often healthcare providers resort to coldness to protect oneself from "feeling too much." I, like many doctors, began my career wanting to be useful, but I also made the mistake of seeing a patient in terms of what he or she could afford to pay, and as not a full, feeling human being. I remember the turmoil I felt the first time I had to charge a woman with no health insurance. After treating her for a foot infection, she asked "How much?" I went from feeling "She shouldn't have to pay a penny!" to justifying myself by thinking "I studied hard, and have many loans; beside someone else may charge her more." I had no clue how to make sense of these conflicting feeling, and my solution for easing the nervousness I felt was by becoming cold and distant to the people I had hoped to benefit.

Through my study of Aesthetic Realism I began to ask the question Eli Siegel said is central in ethics: "What does a person deserve by being a person?" The honest answering of this question, I know first hand, is the means to see a person with REAL feeling; as real as my own. And when we see a person this way, wanting to be useful will be the driving force in our hearts, not profiting from their illness.

This question is more important than ever after the Katrina disaster. People around this country saw black babies in New Orleans crying for food; we heard the cries of an elderly woman begging for water. People were shocked--usefully shocked--throughout this land by seeing the horrible poverty we've allowed to continue--and grow--in this country. What do they all deserve as fellow human beings? They deserve good housing, food, good education, they deserve jobs, and yes they deserve a national health insurance, where everyone is covered equally.

The Katrina disaster can become a turning point. It should be a used to fight for a just and equitable health care, because what we have is failing. As William Custer, director for the Center for Health Services Research in Atlanta said recently:

"What we are seeing is an unraveling of the way we finance health care in the United
States....It is coming apart at the edges... The levees are breaking. "

A health care disaster has slowly been occurring for years. To continue the current patchwork approach to health care reform is tantamount to trying to cover an unstable, crumbling levee with your little finger. This should not be a political issue any longer, it's an ethical issue. If Congress wants to solve this crisis, it should vote for Conyers' proposal for a U.S. National Health Insurance Act: which is the extension of Medicare, that truly American--truly red, white and blue program--to every person in this nation.

Overeating and Feeling Empty--Is There a Relation?

2005-02-07T22:21:00.002-05:00

Aesthetic Realism shows that the taking in of food represents an organic like of reality, that eating is a tribute to how much we need the world to be strong. It can also be used as a means of having revenge on a world we see as unfriendly. In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known [TRO] Eli Siegel describes a mistake people have made:

A man very often says, he can never get pleasure from people--he can only get pleasure from food. He may go out in company, but there is a big fear. He feels he doesn't have things his way. But with food...he has it entirely his way. So there is a tendency to give ourselves more to food than to feeling, and in this way we lessen our lives...If there is something pleasant like eating, and people can feel that they are managing things, they will take that. So they will have a sensation from the plate and not from the heart. [TRO 594]

Growing up I felt people were difficult to understand and emotions were murky. When I felt things got complicated--which was often--I'd get annoyed and one quick solution to gain composure was in the refrigerator. At that moment I had a swift victory over a pound cake, but afterwards I'd feel ashamed and empty, and this terrible cycle would be repeated again and again. By the age of 15 I weighted close to 250 lb. I felt bad, but with every pound I was creating a thicker wall between the world and myself.

I'd take pills, lose weight, and gain it back. When I went away to college I was able to lose weight, but it wasn't until I met Aesthetic Realism and began to learn that my deepest desire is to like the world, not look down on it, that I began to eat more respectfully. As I've seen meaning, for example, in how a pastry is made, the history of flour, and how the source of my morning coffee began with the labor of a man in Columbia, I liked the world more, and increasingly have felt a sense of fullness that is bigger than the victory of devouring food. People need to see that this is not a food question but a world question, and the only thing that will bring sanity to this subject that torments so many people is by learning from Aesthetic Realism about the fight between respect and contempt in all of us.

I’m so lucky to be getting such a rich education, including on this subject, in classes taught by Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss. A couple of years after getting married to Donita Ellison. I found myself waking in the middle of the night with a great desire to eat a snack. When I mentioned this in a class, Ms Reiss asked me:

Ellen Reiss Early morning dining, what you do think it comes from?
Jaime Torres Wanting to please myself.
Ellen Reiss Do you think at night you feel you have yourself to yourself? Is there that in you that would like to be completely alone? In being married you have the question of how you can be joined with someone and alone…. Ms Ellison's existence is a nag to you--she is dear to you but why does she have to be around you so much?

And Ms Reiss with kind imagination showed me the solution:

Ellen Reiss The answer is technical aesthetics, what goes on in a work of art. If [a photographer] were going to photograph this glass of water in a certain light, he would need the glass and the light-- but something in him feels he is taking care of himself [in needing both]. No one could do anything in the art field without feeling that the thing liked also stands for oneself. Does Ms Ellison --the stranger-- stand for you? Does Jaime Torres like himself more through a conversation with Donita Ellison than through roaming around the house alone at night?

I am happy for this discussion and I’m glad to say that since it took place, my impulsion for nocturnal dining has stopped.

It is an amazing thing that Donita, a woman from the Midwest, who has used her knowledge of Aesthetic Realism to write important articles on behalf of justice coming to farmers, who has had a good effect on her students as she teaches them art at LaGuardia High School, does stand for me. As we talk about what we are learning, about events happening in the world, about our own thoughts, I feel Donita wants to know me and I love her.

A Man's Self-Confidence and Self-Doubt, Can They Ever Make Sense?

2005-01-21T23:55:00.001-05:00

What you will read was part of a talk presented at the Terrain Gallery of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City, on January 13, 2005

From a young age, I worked diligently at presenting myself as confident, using mainly the comments and praise of my family and teachers about how mature I was for my age, how smart, and later how I could really take control and get things done. But regardless of what I showed, I often felt uneasy, and as time went on, I would go from, "I'm certain, this is the right way to go" to an hour later feeling "what was I thinking when I said that!"

In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known (TRO) #794 Eli Siegel wrote:

The matter of sureness and unsureness is as great a plague as any in the human mind, because people usually have to act sure in order to forget they are unsure. Every time we are unsure and have to act sure, we feel somewhat ashamed.

These sentences describe the turmoil I was in. I told myself that being unsure and especially showing it-—was a weakness, a humiliation; and the best solution was to ride over it, come to a quick decision and act. But this was not true confidence, it was arrogance. In my conceit I would thoughtlessly tell people what to do without considering their ideas or feelings, and the result was I felt even more unsure.

Then in 1985 I learned about and began to study Aesthetic Realism, and met what I had been looking for. Confidence, I learned--whether about love, a job, or our general capabilities--has a criterion: we will be confident in proportion to how fair we are to people and the world itself. And central to be being fair is the desire to know, which includes the desire to question ourselves with pleasure and pride. Writes Ellen Reiss in The Right of (TRO):

One can doubt oneself falsely, of course. But there is an underlying self-doubt which... comes from something beautiful in us. And we should try to know it as well as we can, because it is the means to our true sureness. The underlying doubt... unarticulated yet poking and sometimes gnawing and thrusting within us... is this: Am I liking the world more through this thing I'm in the midst of--or am I using it to dislike the world? [TRO 1355]

Tonight I'll speak about what I've learned and also on some aspects of the life of the 18th century physician, Edward Jenner, whose care for people and great desire to know, resulted in his discovery of the vaccine for smallpox.

How well we see people determines whether our confidence is true or false

I grew up in Ciales, a small town in the mountains of Puerto Rico, in the midst of an extended family that included my parents, a sister, grandparents, several aunts, uncles, and cousins. Being the first grandson I got a lot of praise that made me feel important; and I felt powerful when adults would compete for my attention: if my aunt Carmen said “How is my boy! Come and visit me this weekend,” I would hear my aunt Norma from the other room “Nonsense, he is coming to my house first!” I didn’t know it then, but I was developing a false and hurtful sense of myself based on the erroneous conclusion that other people’s happiness was assured by my presence. All I had to do was show up. If people outside of my family didn't treat me this way, they were mean and cold. It never occurred to me that I had an obligation to know people or be interested in their lives.

In my third Aesthetic Realism consultation I began to learn that we use early experiences to come to a general opinion of the world. My consultants asked:

Consultants Do you think you know your mother?
Jaime Torres Yes, like the palm of my hand.
Consultants So we come to our first disagreement. [We’ll ask you this:] What was her favorite subject when she was in school?
Jaime Torres I don't know.
Consultants What did she want to be when she grew up? Who were some of her friends in school?
Jaime Torres I don't know.
Consultants What is her favorite book?

I had no clue! My consultants continued:

Consultants All right, lets take something more recent--how did your parents meet?

When I answered yet again, “I don’t know,” they asked:
Consultants Dr. Torres, do you think your mother had a life before you were born; or do you think she was born in 1957 also, just to serve you?

This consultation was the beginning of useful self-doubt. I realized that for the most part I wasn’t interested in who people were; I saw them primarily in relation to myself. That night, I called my parents in Puerto Rico and told them what I was learning in consultations, and they were very happy. As I began to learn about the people who gave me life, Delia Figueroa and Jaime Torres, I felt this is how I want to see everyone! Soon after, I’m glad to say, my parents began to study Aesthetic Realism themselves in phone consultations from Puerto Rico and their lives flourished.

Aesthetic Realism showed me—-and I love this logic--that when we go after a false confidence through contempt, we punish ourselves by feeling timid, inferior, and unsure. In TRO, Eli Siegel gives this explanation:

The truth that people want to evade most is that they can be their own means of hurting themselves through the way they see what is not themselves. The tendency to make the outside world less as a means of establishing oneself is...most appealing to us; easier than establishing a self through the accuracy and fulness with which we know things. [TRO 890]

Whereas I once observed people with a running commentary in my mind like, "How stupid; I could have done that better," "Where did he get that shirt?" "She is always talking too much,” I began to ask myself what could I learn from that person? What did he hope for? Are her feelings as deep as mine? And as I wanted to know people deeply, I found I liked myself more and experienced with relief and pleasure a growing feeling of true sureness.

Love, Confidence, and the Hidalgo

When I met Donita Ellison, like many men, I had two different notions of confidence as to love: one based on feeling the world and people added to me; and the other based on thinking I needed only myself. Donita, originally from Springfield Missouri, is a high school art teacher using the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method. I was affected by her excitement about teaching and the kind way she spoke about her students. She is also very pretty, thoughtful and self critical, which I respected; and she encouraged me to express my thoughts and feelings. And Donita was a critic of me--of the way I expected to be treated like a prince. I was swept by her--finding myself wanting to be with her every day and talk to her. Sometimes I couldn’t go to sleep at night thinking about her, but then I'd tell myself “We’re not all that compatible.” In a consultation when I spoke about Donita I mentioned how unsure I was, even as I talked about how much I cared for her. My consultants said:

“It’s clear Miss Ellison is having a good effect on you. Is she a threat to your big love affair?” “What do you mean?” I said indignantly, “I'm not seeing anyone else!” “The love affair you’ve had with yourself!” they said.

This was true, and I realized that in caring for Donita, I was more the person I wanted to be and more confident. Through her the world looked better to me and I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. In 1994 we were married.

I saw myself as a modern man--we shared household chores, I helped cooking, I even like doing dishes! But behind all this magnanimity, there still persisted a way of seeing as backward as Fred Flintstone’s. I felt: We are married, things are settled, no questions please, you should be happy with this enlightened husband! However, along with my complacency, there was unsureness and agitation. And Donita was critical of the way I took her for granted. When I described this situation in a class, Ellen Reiss enabled me to see the mistake I was making. She spoke about a noted character in Spanish literature--the hidalgo, which literately translated to English means "the son of somebody" and carries with it a feeling of royalty. She asked:

Ellen Reiss Do you think you have the hidalgo feeling?
Jaime Torres I think I do.
Ellen Reiss Is Miss Ellison the "daughter of nobody"? Have you felt in some way that you have done her a great favor in being in her company at all?
Jaime Torres I think I have.

And she continued:

Ellen Reiss Does contempt hurt one?
Jaime Torres Yes, it makes me dislike myself.
Ellen Reiss You can feel you are an hidalgo but you can have various unsurenesses.

And these unsurenesses I was right to have. Learning how to oppose my conceit and to see the true value in my wife and other people has given me more honest confidence. And Donita and I have a love and deep friendship that grows every year.

A Man shows honest self-doubt makes for true confidence

I speak now about a man I admire very much: Edward Jenner, who discovered the vaccine against smallpox--one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of medicine. His life is evidence for the necessity of honest self-doubt in order to get to a confidence that is true.

Edward Jenner, born May 17, 1749, was a country doctor in Berkeley, England. At that time, in 18th century Europe, the smallpox virus routinely killed millions of people, and the treatment itself was often fatal. He had heard from the farmers and country folk, as well as his patients, that milkmaids who contracted a mild disease called cowpox were never infected with smallpox, and after much study he came to the following theory: that giving people the milder disease might protect them from the deadlier one. And if this premise were true, millions of lives could be saved.

Dr. Jenner's desire to know was great and I have seen that implicit in this desire was an honest self-doubt. A true scientist never takes the first thing he hears as ultimate truth; he asks himself over and over--Is what I'm seeing accurate? What more do I need to see? What have I missed? These honest questions impelled Edward Jenner to rigorous investigation. For two years he carefully studied cattle infections to be able to differentiate cowpox from similar ones. He talked to milkmaids who seemed to be immune from smallpox and recorded their medical histories. Finally, with excitement and high hopes, he presented his preliminary findings to the local county medical society on August 10, 1786. They rejected the report immediately, calling it nonsense, "old wives tales." Biographer I. E. Levine writes,

Jenner was stunned. True, he had expected the report to receive some criticism... but he had not anticipated such violent onslaught...He had hoped to enlist the help of his colleagues to test his theory. [p.102]

For a long time afterwards he doubted himself and thought of quitting, but his wife, Katherine Kingscote, encouraged him tremendously. Jenner continued his methodical research and increasingly came to feel his hypothesis was true. In 1796, his theory was put to the test when a mother, very worried about her frail eight-year-old son contracting smallpox, begged Jenner to inoculate him with cowpox virus. He did, and six weeks later the boy was reinoculated with smallpox virus—-and it worked, he was not infected! Jenner called this procedure vaccination (from the Latin word 'vacca' for cow). And as he repeated it again and again on many people, no one became infected with smallpox! He wrote to a friend saying,

The joy I feel at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities is so excessive that I sometimes find myself in some kind of reverie. [p. 142 ]

In 1798 Jenner published his research in a pamphlet and he thought that finally the medical authorities in London would accept his findings. But that was not to be for a long time. There were grotesque cartoons depicting vaccinated people growing horns or giving birth to calves, and members of the powerful Royal Medical Society had the arrogant attitude, described by Levine, of "Who is this presumptuous country surgeon who is convinced he has found the answer to a puzzle that has eluded the best medical minds for decades?" [p.146]

Eli Siegel described this state of mind--in any century--when he wrote:

Some of the best-known scientists acclaimed as scientists didn’t have [the] desire [to know]...There was another desire that was very strong too...The desire for prestige, the desire for importance, is the foulest and most effective enemy of truth both in the sciences and non-sciences. [TRO 398]

Because medical persons in established positions were so intent on protecting their importance and prestige they kept this life-saving vaccine from people for years and tens of thousands died.
In her commentary to an issue of The Right of, Ellen Reiss wrote that every person should want to understand this state of mind because:

It is the most hurtful thing in the world. It is: I should be able to have contempt for anything, be superior in some way to anything; and if anything interferes, it should be crushed.

The onslaught on Jenner helps me understand more and place the resentment that Eli Siegel endured throughout his life, in even more encompassing fields. His knowledge was vast and scientific, based on principles that have been tested and found true. He defined and explained finally things that had been pondered for centuries: what beauty is, the purpose of life, the cause of insanity, depression, the cause of war, the aesthetic structure of the world and ourselves, to mention a few of his seminal breakthroughs. And he was a poet. His steady desire to know the world and to question himself made him beautifully confident. What he saw made for tremendous respect. The other side of this respect, the noted poet William Carlos Williams described this way:

The extreme resentment that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new. It shows itself by the violent opposition Siegel received from the "authorities" whom I shall not dignify by naming.

Meanwhile over 200 years ago, certain "fixed sclerotic minds" in England were meeting a groundswell of opposition from ordinary English citizens. Vaccinations went on because parents demanded them and because word had spread of how, as a result of them, there was no smallpox around Berkley! So the doctors in London were forced to learn the procedure, but because of their careless preparation difficulties continued.

Dr. William Woodville, the head of London Smallpox Hospital, seen as the foremost expert of the disease, published an article charging that after using Jenner's procedure several patients died. Jenner's conviction, come to through honest self-doubt, had given him true confidence, the real thing, so much so, he was impelled to return to London and confront Woodville. Based on accounts and journal entries Levine recreates this dialogue.

Jenner: "Since you attribute [some deaths] to vaccination, I'd like to examine your records...and if you refuse, I'll be forced to announce that you are unwilling to help me obtain the true facts." Woodville turned pale. He began to sputter. "You are threatening me sir! It’s abominable!" "This is not an issue of personalities at all," Jenner retorted coolly, "The future...is what concerns me."
Upon examinations of records and the treatment rooms, it was clear that cowpox samples had been tainted with smallpox--the real cause of those deaths. Jenner asked:

"Did you and your assistants wash your lancets between inoculating certain patients with smallpox and others with cowpox matter?" "We merely wipe them with a cloth. That is how it is done everywhere, as you know," he answered.

"[This is not the right procedure] Did you read my pamphlet before administering the vaccine?" Jenner persisted.

Woodville adopted a defensive tone. "No, I did not. Nor was it necessary that I do. I have devoted my entire professional career to the study of smallpox, there is no one more experienced than me."

Writes Levine: "Here was a distinguished surgeon who had undertaken a new medical technique without even taking the trouble to learn the basic clinical facts about it. The arrogance of the man was almost beyond belief." [p.162]

This arrogance is so common in the medical profession, and I once had it. I have seen that this desire to be superior is contempt, and against the beginning, kind purpose in medicine. Every doctor needs to learn from Aesthetic Realism about this as much as he or she needs to learn physiology or anatomy.

Woodville, to his credit, admitted his mistake in front of Parliament, and changed what had been a smallpox hospital to a vaccine center. Vaccination was then accepted, and mortality fell dramatically. Jenner was now praised and sought by royalty and the same people who had earlier rejected him. And for a short time it seems he succumbed to flattery. He bought a house in London, spent a lot of money and time with high society, and got more in debt. His wife was a kind critic when she showed him that "The will of God [was not for him to] drive round London in his [fancy] coach serving those who were well able to command other service," but to care for the people who needed him most. He was grateful to her for opening his eyes; they moved back to Berkley where he was glad to become a country doctor again.

Vaccination quickly spread through Europe and the Americas, and although Jenner received worldwide recognition and many honors, he made no attempt to enrich himself and actually devoted much of his time vaccinating people for free--sometimes up to 300 a day. He died on January 26, 1823. In 1980, as a result of Jenner's discovery, the World Health Organization officially declared "the world and its peoples" free from endemic smallpox.

Through Aesthetic Realism we can understand the fight in us between respect and contempt, and how to question ourselves. Because of this knowledge I embarked on a new discovery: to know people from the inside, and to see that their feelings are as real as my own; and I learned to see meaning in things I had dismissed for a long time. I have seen the pride there is in being able to question my purpose with the people I meet, the patients I treat as podiatrist and the woman I love, Donita Ellison; and because of it, I feel increasingly confident. Every man in this world deserves this education.