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Philosophers should diligently inquire into the powers and energy of custom, exercise, habit, education, example, imitation, emulation, company, friendship, praise, reproof, exhortation, reputation, laws, books, studies etc.; for these are the things that reign in men's morals; by these agents the mind is formed and subdued.
, , Book VII, chapter 3 [1605]

Welcome! My name is , and you've entered the Paul Rosenfels Community website, an oasis in cyberspace where people interested in contemporary secular humanism as expressed in the ideas of this late 20th-century philosopher can meet, read the works Paul and his students left us, and offer up their own ideas and observations.

Paul was a Chicago-based board-certified psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who broke with both these systems in the 1940's and developed his own ideas about human nature. In 1973, he and I founded The Ninth Street Center in New York City to teach his innovative insights to creative and independent men and women, many of whom have gone on to become teachers and leaders themselves. Slowly, more and more people around the world have learned about Paul and the Center's work. Paul died in the summer of 1985 at the age of 76, but this larger community has been served by the website since 1997, and this website since 2009.

Paul's approach to character analysis owes something to Carl Jung's description of the polarity between introverted and extroverted types, which in turn had

many historical precedents. But where Jung thought that these types must live in separated worlds, Paul saw that they not only attract one another, but can establish lasting polarized and even mated relationships when it serves their romantic and other developmental interests.

Paul was also the first American social scientist to defend homosexuality in print as a valid lifestyle. He drew upon his work with psychological polarity to demonstrate that a relationship between two men or two women could involve much more than the narcissistic hedonism stressed in psychiatric literature.

But such insights were becoming common knowledge by the time Paul started publishing in the 60's. His greatest contribution was in analyzing human nature in a deeper and broader way than most conventional psychologists were capable of. Some people have categorized Paul as a "moral philosopher", a "philosophical anthropologist", or simply as a thinker. Many of us believe that his detailed descriptions of truth and right, love and power, honesty and courage, insight and mastery, and similar features of the personality are both fundamental and comprehensive enough to constitute the foundation of that great unrealized dream of the Enlightenment, a true science of human nature.

And check out our sister site, the Blog, where you can discuss the postings of Rachel Bartlett and friends.

. science of human nature, philosophical anthropology, moral philosophy, humanistic psychology, personal growth, interpersonal creativity, social progress, introversion, extraversion, femininity, masculinity, psychological polarity, character specialization