Steven Weiner, Computer Specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

Why do people so often feel frustrated? And what is the chief frustration in our lives? Does it come from the outside world’s constantly thwarting us, or from a cause within ourselves that we need to understand? For the answers to these questions, and so much more, read “What Is Frustration?,” the important current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

In 1948 Eli Siegel gave a talk on the subject of frustration. No audio recording or transcript of it exists. But as I did this May with another 1948 lecture, I am using notes taken by two people—Martha Baird and my mother, Irene Reiss—to recreate some, at least, of what Mr. Siegel said in that class 67 years ago. And clearly: what he said is great in its logic, vividness, depth, exactitude, scholarship, and kindness.

In 1948 the Freudian approach to mind still reigned. People were being told that all troubled feeling, and certainly frustration, had a sexual cause. Meanwhile, from the time he began to teach Aesthetic Realism, in 1941, Eli Siegel showed courageously that Freud’s way of seeing the human self was untrue: it was, in fact, ridiculous, and insulting to humanity. Mr. Siegel explained early that the fundamental matter in a person’s life is not sex but how he or she sees the world itself: how we are as to sex arises from how we see reality. The lecture we’re publishing was revolutionary when it was given. It is also revolutionary now, because, while people don’t think of frustration as chiefly a sexual matter, they still do not understand it.

This Goes On

Frustration is huge in everyone’s life. There are the particular frustrations people feel day after day. One person tells another (or thinks about the other), “Trying to reason with you is so frustrating—I can’t get through to you, no matter what I say!” There’s the frequent feeling about a computer or program, “This thing is so frustrating. I JUST CAN’T MAKE IT DO WHAT I WANT IT TO DO!” People can spend a whole day feeling frustrated: “Ughhh—I’m stuck in traffic again!” “My wife always keeps me waiting—why isn’t she ever ready on time?” “The dog wants to walk in that direction when I want him to walk in this—it seems we’re always in a contest.”

Millions of people feel they’re in a world that essentially frustrates them: a world they have to fight in order to get what they want. And there is frustration with oneself. For instance, “I don’t know why I can’t give attention to something for any length of time: my mind keeps wandering.” And, “Why can’t I remember things?”

The basis of this decades-old, completely new lecture is the following principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”  >>Read more