Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

In order to like ourselves, do we have to see that our individual self is related to the whole world and other persons? Yes! Read “Your Particular Self–& All People,” the exciting new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by editor Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the conclusion of the great 1948 lecture Mind and People, by Eli Siegel. And we print, too, part of a paper that Aesthetic Realism consultant Bruce Blaustein presented this July at a seminar titled “What Does It Mean to Bring Out the Best in People?—& Do We Want To?”

In Mind and People we see Mr. Siegel describing the biggest confusion, opportunity, turmoil, field for kindness or cruelty in the life of everyone. It is this: We want, terrifically, to see ourselves as just us—unique, apart—and to take care of our own self. Yet we also, simply by existing, have to do with everything and everyone—and we have a deep, impelling desire to see ourselves as of them, related, close. These desires are opposites, and people have gotten and given much pain because they haven’t been able to put them together. In fact, all the cruelty in the world has come from people’s feeling that care for their own self was different from justice to all other things and people.

Aesthetic Realism explains that our constant and burning need is to see ourselves as at once unique and related to everything. It is an aesthetic need, described by Eli Siegel in 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.” The various psychiatrists and counselors today do not understand the aesthetic nature of self, any more than those of the 1940s did. Therefore they don’t understand the cause of human troubles, either the frequent troubles or the less frequent. I’ll comment on one that was the subject of a New York Times article in August: “selective mutism.”

Why Are They Silent?

The article tells about a group of children taking part in a program in Florida:

It has been months, sometimes years, since these children have talked to anyone apart from family….They are terrified of talking in social situations. They may be chatterboxes at home, but at school or around unfamiliar faces, they are stone-faced and silent.

The National Institutes of Health website says of selective mutism: “The cause, or causes, are unknown.”

The various discussions of this condition present it as quite unusual, something most people don’t have. In a way that’s true. Yet it’s not seen that everyone has some selective mutism: there are times we find we cannot talk; also, don’t want to talk. And the cause of selective mutism won’t be understood while the condition is seen as just different from what most people do….   >> Read more