For those capable of philosophical understanding, dialectic becomes the accustomed mode of exploring, speaking, understanding, and sharing ideas and feelings in interpersonal relationships. The supersensible element of Dialectic comes into play when persons in relationships realize that they are co-creators of life-situations, personalities, events, and other phenomena such as artistic and literary works.

      Before we explore the extraordinary features of genuine relationships, we need to examine what constitutes inauthentic relationships in two different arenas:

• Interpersonal relationships

• Political-economic relationships

      If you want to examine ideas and behaviors that are totally opposite to the concept of genuine relationships as defined in this essay, you can go to the Website ² of a person who advocates male dominance over women.

      A major cause of the derangement of the social-political-economic elements of contemporary society are our debased interpersonal relationship structures, ideologies, and behaviors. Many so-called mental health professionals, unfortunately, are as psychologically and morally afflicted as their victim/patients.

      Perpetuating their illegitimacy, the psychiatric-psychological establishment several years ago tried to create a new scam-diagnosis--"Relational Disorder"--to increase the number of counterfeit "illnesses" they can treat at patients' and insurance companies' expense.

      Today, shrinks claim that 48% of people between the ages of 15 and 54 have some form of mental illness. Before psychiatrists and psychologists manufactured what Thomas Szasz called the myth of mental illness, ³ the figure used to be 0.1% of all ages in the mid-1800s.

      The first edition (1952) of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the psychs’ definitive list of mental illnesses, identified 112 disorders; the fourth edition in 1994 listed 370 mental illnesses. It's reasonable to question if such an exponential rise in mental disorder could occur within just two generations.

      The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a psychiatric watchdog group, recently published a study in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics revealing the incestuous financial relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) "billing bible," The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). For over a decade CCHR has called on governments to eliminate the DSM as a valid diagnostic manual for insurance reimbursement or for the basis of any legislation or court testimony. "It is an unreliable, pseudoscientific document with enormous power to damage lives, while being used to rake in $76 billion a year in international psychiatric drug sales," CCHR’s national U.S. president Bruce Wiseman stated.

      How quixotic and fraudulent is the DSM? Robert Spitzer, chairman of the DSM-IV committee, thought up "self-defeating personality disorder" on a fishing trip and persuaded his colleagues to include the disorder in DSM-IV. The Manual doesn't distinguish between mental and physical "disorders." If a child keeps missing the ball in baseball practice and this upsets the child, the parent or the coach, the child is said to have “developmental coordination disorder” and is administered Ritalin or Prozac instead of being coached.

      The fifth edition of the DSM was created by so-called "healthcare professionals" with direct ties to the pharmaceutical industry. The May 7, 2009 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine reported that 56% of the DSM-V taskforce and committee members have ties to pharma corporations. There are some DSM-V work groups where every single member has financial relationships with a pharmaceutical company.

      Among many scams, "Social Anxiety Disease (SAD)" was invented by psychiatrists to give shyness a “scientific label” in 1997. Fifty mentions were made in the media of this SAD condition in 1997 and 1998, but in 1999, one billion media mentions occurred. Ninety-six percent of these also happened to say that Paxil was the only FDA-approved medication that could treat SAD. The Washington Post reported on July 16, 2001, that the manufacturer of Paxil, Glaxo SmithKline, had paid Cohn and Wolfe, a public relations agency, to coordinate a multimillion-dollar marketing and advertising campaign, to "inform thousands of people who previously did not know they were suffering from the disorder, and spurring many to seek needed help."

      Since you're reading this essay, you may be suffering from a new "disease" Senator Bill Frist tried to legitimate with a bill in 2005 that would define "political paranoia" as a mental disorder, paving the way for individuals who suffer from paranoid delusions regarding voter fraud, political persecution and FBI surveillance to receive Medicare reimbursement for any psychiatric treatment they receive.

      Rick Smith, a spokesman for Senator Frist, said that "If you're still convinced that President Bush won the election because Republicans figured out a way to hack into electronic voting machines, you've obviously got a problem. If we can figure out a way to ease your suffering by getting you into therapy and onto medication, that's something that we hope the entire 109th Congress will support." Fortunately, the bill did not go through.

  At present, the entire Republican Party is deliberately embracing the reactionary syndrome, which includes, among other psychoses, the Big Lie insanity. This deliberate embracing of falsehoods is one of a number of fascistic tactics that Republicans are using to destroy American democracy.

      Interaction and communication within genuine relationships evince an uncommon, supernormal openness, considerateness, and honesty which can be experienced in no other atmosphere. Once a person has experienced this kind of interaction, the "small talk" and inanity of ordinary interchange seems unrewarding and repugnant.

      Participants in dialectical interchange are better able to "see" and "listen to" others--in the interchange environment and otherwise. Ego distractions no longer blind and deafen us, and we suddenly discern deeper meanings within persons, events and objects, enabling new, more potent responses.

      Participants in dialectic are more capable of disclosing feelings and ideas, both those which they are aware of when the interchange begins and those newly realized elements which appear as the dialectical process proceeds.

      Persons in inauthentic relationships are incapable of participating in dialectical interchange because they lack the requisite autonomy, intelligence, and honesty. Until very recently, women were not considered "equal" to men, and relationships were male dominated. Misquoting the Bible's "a woman shall cleave to her husband," English law enshrined this inequality. English jurist William Blackstone, arbiter of English law pontificated: "in law a husband and wife are one person, and the husband is that person."

      For two or more persons to engage in genuine dialectical interchange, it's necessary that they both possess mental and spiritual autonomy. Their stations in life do not necessarily need to be equal. All participants must be able to think for themselves and must possess the personal force to maintain their own ideas and sentiments. An interesting example of personal autonomy was that between Jane and Mr. Rochester in the novel Jane Eyre. Though Jane was Mr. Rochester's hired governess and he her "master," she possessed a completely autonomous mind which Mr. Rochester not just tolerated but admired and loved.

      Dialectic is a phenomenon which must be actually experienced before it can be fully understood. Attempting to make Dialectic clear to persons who haven't participated in its reality is like trying to convey an adequate idea of sight to a person born blind. Those discerning enough to seek out true information about, prepare for, and then actually experience Dialectic interchange, become members of a small philosophical fellowship.

      As we've seen, entities--including persons--are ontologically constituted by their relationships. This is no more true than in dialectical interpersonal relationships. Persons within the Perennial tradition are created ⁴ through their dialectical relationships with other members of that small community. In dialectical interchange, we create and re-create ourselves, not through coercion, conflict, or compromise, but through co-investigation, cooperation, co-learning, and co-discovery.

      To most people, to say that person A's relationship with person B creates him, would imply that A was dependent on, subservient to, or inferior to B. In genuine dialectical relationships, the opposite is true: no negative dependency, subservience, or inferiority is involved. The mystical, alchemical aspects of dialectical interchange create and re-create persons, personalities, events, and other entities in a numinous manner.

      As an example, in any genuine dialectical relationship, a person's understanding and practice of intellectual, emotional, and sexual love is re-created, refined, and ameliorated. This improvement in comprehending the essence of love does not occur through argument, debate, or conflict, but through the transcendent processes of discovering new aspects of the other person(s) and of oneself in dialectical interchange.

Any original egocentric need to defend one's stance, in a feeling that not maintaining one's position would involve weakness and capitulation, dissolves as the genuine affection and respect each has for the other begins to work its magic.       Persons realize that many of their previous psychological "needs," beliefs, and scruples were merely elements of Reichian 5 "armoring" that they no longer need in a genuine interchange environment. Old habits of arguing for argument sake, maintaining one's cherished beliefs out of sheer stubbornness, and protecting one's person from attack at all costs, are now seen to be unnecessary, counter-productive defense mechanisms.

Thanks to psychoanalysis, I'm totally free of all defense mechanisms.

Notes:

¹ We're distinguishing between genuine and inauthentic relationships because most interpersonal relationships in today's world possess negative, debilitating elements that turn them into war zones, master/slave alliances, or prisons of compromise. The genuine relationships we'll explore are those among persons working within the Perennial Tradition.

² www.savethemales.ca

³ "The prestige and power of psychiatrists have been augmented by defining increasingly larger domains as falling within the purview of their special discipline." Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illnesss, 1961

⁴ I'm referring to the connotations of creation as: "investing with a new form" and "producing or bringing about by a course of action or behavior"

⁵ Wilhelm Reich, a psychotherapist who broke with Sigmund Freud, conceived of emotional and intellectual defenses as psychological "armoring."