Thank you Joel for reminding me of my roots and for an inspiring acknowledgement of Nathaniel.

My personal experiences with Nathaniel Brandon were limited to a luncheon and visits at several Libertarian Party conventions, plus, of course the NBI, and I thoroughly agree with Joel’s description and experiences. I am a profoundly better human being for having known Nathaniel Brandon.

Read, “To Whom it May Concern” by Ayn Rand in the May 1968 Objectivist.

“I know that others have had different experiences of him in his earlier years, and I’m sure since.” No kidding.

Very nice.

unaware of his passing, I just sent an email addressed to Dr. Branden on nathanielbranden.com I would like to apologize to who ever sees those messages.

I’ve known him through his works, like many of us, and I followed his teaching by way of practicing the sentence stems. It puts my head in the right place almost everyday, regardless of what happened the day before.

Thank you for writing this. I love Dr. Branden’s works.

So much unexplained gobbledygook, without a single illustrative example of what Branden did as psychotherapist that was supposed to be so wrongheaded. The mark of a bad therapist is that he is not himself in therapy? There is something innately bad about being productive for an introvert? The comment starts with arbitrary, unexplained assertions and doesn”t get better. It is just an elaborate smear.

When did all this happen? Can you give some specifics? I’m sympathetic to your pain, but it’s hard to know just what happened? When were you in therapy with him? When was he in therapy and for what? (I”m not sure you can’t be a therapist per se while you’re in therapy.)

tom tan, you have made heavy and disturbing charges against Branden as a psychologist and as a man, and I think you need to back them up with specifics and examples, if you want them to be taken seriously.

One that I dismiss out of hand is the dogma that therapists need to be in therapy themselves. I can certainly see how psychologists during their training could benefit from being in therapy themselves, and why some should be weeded out from degree qualification at that point, but if an aspiring psychologist harbors major personal problems that he isn’t able to overcome even with the help of others, he ought not to be granted a degree in the first place. (BTW I’m using your psychiatric terminology as a courtesy here, despite the fact that it is quite clear that the “mental illness” is a myth – an inappropriate, but self-serving, extended metaphor used primarily to empower and enrich monopoly-credentialled “professionals”, and to relieve society of the burden of dealing with people with aberrant and disturbing personalities.)

Of course most psychological counseling is done by people with no professional credentials whatsoever – friends, relatives, pastors – and I’m quite sure that much of this amateur counseling is of more value than what many professionals purvey. This is an inevitable artifact of the coercive monopoly professional education and licensing racket, and the same may be said, even, of medical practice: many doctors, especially these days, fail to practice the prime injunction – first do no harm? You accuse Branden of malpractice in that respect, and worse, you accuse him of hypocrisy, yet from my limited personal experience with him, and my extensive reading of his words, if he is a pathological liar and actor, as you imply, he is probably the best actor who ever lived – yet you say that his relentless extroversion prevented him from ever being an artist.

You claim that Branden lacked all empathy and sympathy with introverts, but that has to be the most incredible claim of all. Branden wasn’t just a psychologist, he was an intellectual first, and primarily, and the vast majority of those who attended his NBI courses were both introverts and intellectuals. Why would he have created such a relentlessly intellectual presentation of Rand’s philosophy if he lacked all empathy and sympathy with introverted intellectuals. And by the way, I almost don’t need the qualification “introverted” because practically all intellectuals are introverted, as are the vast majority of those with high IQs. Statistics from a study on the Myers-Briggs typology of Mensans (with top 2% IQs) show that about three quarters of them are introverts, compared to about one quarter of the general American population.

If you have any psychological insight yourself, I hardly need to expound that I am deeply introverted myself, and also an intellectual with an exceptionally high IQ, and I identify with your “passive receptivity” paradigm. And I likewise infer from Branden’s early NBI career, as well as from his continued active intellectual curiosity and thinking (amply displayed both in his books and in the many interviews and public talks he has given) that Branden until his split from Rand fell into this same paradigm. In fact, it was clearly Branden’s prolonged period of “passive receptivity” even as he found himself sinking deeper and deeper into a hypocritical hole that he, a master intellectual synthesizer, couldn’t synthesize his way out of, that accounts for his reprehensibly furtive behavior during this period.

What the split happened to him, I think, is that the light went on, and he realized that while the unexamined life may not be worth living, to wallow, and stultify, indefinitely in a state of passive receptivity was to let too many other facets of life, and life’s rewards, pass one by, and after his own born again conversion, he became a passionate proselytizer for his new liberated way of life, ESPECIALLY when confronted with clients just like his former self. It is thoroughly understandable and in keeping with his liberated, passionate, nature that he resorted when necessary to radical means to help these introverted, trapped, personalities break through their own self-made shells. If he occasionally went too far in this endeavor, well, even the best medical professionals make mistakes – lots of them, in fact. Both medicine and psychological counseling are evolving arts, and crafts, not sciences, despite their pretensions to be.

I was never a client of Dr. Branden’s, but I have to say that as a full-blown introvert, the theme of whose life remains understanding, not action or deeds, that I have benefited significantly from reading his books (as well as, back in the 1960s attending his NBI lectures and reading much of the heavyweight literature purveyed by NBI – especially the philosophical works of Brand Blanshard), and I have even benefited (in my passive receptivity) by the radiance of his charismatic example of a fulfilled person. I am also quite sure that if I had been a client, even though his techniques may not have worked on me or for me, that I would have derived some additional insight and stimulus for becoming a more real, and reality-oriented person, and that my self-esteem would have been robust enough that it would have been in no danger of being traumatized by those techniques or exhortations. As an intellectual, even if Branden had failed to reach me, I would have found the whole scene interesting and food for thought. And I have no dark shadow fear of extroverts or extroversion – quite the contrary – I feel quite impregnable.

Finally, your use of Jungian terminology, makes me wonder why you have failed to note that Jung himself (who originated the concepts of extroversion/introversion) believed that each of us should ideally work toward balance in our personalities: introverts should open up more to the world; extroverts should cultivate an inner life. The anima should seek its companion animus; the animus its anima. It seems to me that that is exactly what Branden did with his own life, and I for one celebrate his accomplishment.

This was a good article. Nathaniel Branden certainly made some valuable contributions to the well-being of the human race.

Real psychological research into “self-esteem” doesn’t support Nathaniel Branden’s claims about it. Look up what psychologist Roy Baumeister has written about Branden’s ideas.

good article “I try to make my comments like a woman’s skirt: long enough to be respectable and short enough to be interesting. ”

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Thank you very much for your blog.

I enjoyed reading this article.

I recommend you listen to two recordings of talks/interviews:

In ‘The Benefits and Hazards of Ayn Rand’s Philosophy” Branden is shallow and accepts mysticism.
The title sounds meaningful but he did not really try to do what the title promises.

IN an interview after he published a book about his time with Ayn Rand, Judgement Day, he was asked why he revealed thepersonal lives of Ayn Rand and his former wife.
Because it is a dramatic story, was his response.
That turned off even the persons most enthusiastic about him.

Branden’s accomplishment was teaching a proper basis for self-esteem, something needed in schools today to counter bullying.