Praise and Approval, and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women

Women, Ethics, Aesthetic Realism

My name is Devorah Tarrow. I am a sociologist and Aesthetic Realism consultant. This blog is to tell people about the education Aesthetic Realism, founded by the poet and critic Eli Siegel. I’m going to tell you straight off--I think Aesthetic Realism is great, kind, and needed education. I felt that when I met it in 1968, and heard this principle, stated by Mr. Siegel, “There is a disposition in every person to think he’ll be for himself by making less of the outside world.” This is contempt, and the reason we don’t like ourselves.

I’d been studying clinical psychology, intending to be a therapist, and with all the theories I’d read, nothing made sense to me like that principle of contempt. Because I knew I had it. For the first time I began to see yes, I made less of people in order to make more of myself, and it was no wonder I didn’t like myself--I was unfair.

I realized that up until that point, I hadn’t felt that any statement in psychology was really true. It was all theory and you were supposed to pick and choose, but there was no principle that was true about people. I had the honor to study with Eli Siegel from 1968 to 1978, and since 1978, I’ve studied in professional classes for consultants and associates taught by Ellen Reiss, who is the Class Chairman. I’ve taught women with my consultation trio, The Three Persons, since 1971, at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, a not-for-profit educational foundation. And the following will be a seminar paper I gave there titled “Praise and Approval--Is There Anything a Woman Wants More?” And there will be more to come!

posted by Devorah Tarrow @ 4:19 PM 0 comments

PRAISE AND APPROVAL‑‑IS THERE ANYTHING A WOMAN WANTS MORE?
(c) 2005 by Devorah Tarrow



When I was 18 and distressed about how I was with men, I wrote in my journal about a conversation I had with a young man:

"Jim and I talked. I wish I could convey the emotions I went through....We started talking about my relationships with guys‑‑the deception of them, the coyness.... After he got finished demolishing my ego by telling me how I faked, acted selfish, didn't know how to be a friend, I loved him because what he said were such insights, was so true....He looked at me and told me the truth. I could never ask for more."

Yes, there is something a woman wants far more than praise and approval, and that is why I wrote with such feeling about a man not flattering me but saying things I felt were true. But no matter how I vowed to be better and not be selfish or coy or fake with men, I kept going after the kind of approval that made me despise myself, until I met Aesthetic Realism and learned what I wanted more. When I read these sentences by Eli Siegel from his great essay The Ordinary Doom, I was swept by their logic and knew they were about me:

"Our desire for praise, so common and often so hurtful, is really a substitute for our desire to be known as we are....It is true that most people seem to prefer being praised without being known, to being known without being praised; nevertheless our greatest desire is to be known first. We live not only in our own minds, but in other minds; our minds depend for their full existence on being apprehended by other minds justly, beautifully. If this does not happen, there is misfortune."

More than praise and approval, we want to be encouraged to go after our deepest purpose, which is to know and like the world. This includes criticism of where we are not fair to people, to things. I love Mr. Siegel for his seeing how much a woman's desire is for truth, including about ourselves. That is the real approval we long for, and if we don't get this, no matter how many hugs, how much "support" of our "self‑esteem" we get, we simply cannot feel we are wholly ourselves. Said Mr. Siegel in his lecture Aesthetic Realism and Love:

"Our biggest desire is to feel that the big world in which we are is something that makes us grow, something that makes us what we want to be. "

Meanwhile, there is that in a woman that wants to be made more important than everything and everyone else, no matter what the facts. This is contempt, the desire to get "a false importance or glory through the lessening of things not oneself."
I. The Fight in Women between Approval and Justice

In an Aesthetic Realism class, when I said I wanted to understand why I didn't like myself for what I went after with men, Eli Siegel asked me:

"What is the chief order of business?‑‑Is it to be just or to be cared for? Do you feel, like most people, that you don't have to be just, because you think you're not cared for?"

DT. Yes‑‑I feel that is what I do!

ES. There is usually a fight between being admired and seeing something truly.

And he said with humor:

ES. Well, Miss Tarrow, you're a real scientist‑‑keen about everything, except yourself!

This was true. As I was growing up in San Antonio, I was in a terrific debate between wanting to be praised no matter what, and wanting to be fair to something. I liked learning things‑‑I loved to read, and studying the violin and playing with others in the San Antonio youth orchestra‑‑I got pleasure trying to be fair to words and to notes and other instruments. Sometimes I heard sincere praise for this.

But when I found I could do things well, I used the approval I got to think I was better than anyone else. As time went on, though I studied hard in school, the thing that seemed to give me the rush, the glory, the thrill, was the praise that made me feel like a star. If there was an election, I ran for office: 6th grade class president; cheerleader; princess in Queen Esther's Court; B'nai B'rith Girls yearbook editor; Community Council secretary in college. If I lost, I would be devastated; yet often if I won, something fell flat and I didn't know why.

I needed to know that what made me feel disgusted with myself no matter how much approval I got was my desire to be scornfully superior. Explained Mr. Siegel in his lecture, "No person can like herself unless she likes the outside world. But people also want to dislike the world, to be contemptuous of it....So there is a great deal of difficulty." This was why I often felt bad, and despised myself for being competitive, jealous and hoping others would flop. For instance, while outwardly I seemed to admire Suzy Jefferson's beauty and intelligence, inwardly I was glad that her big family was poorer than mine, so I could feel superior to her.

As time went on, like a woman today in a coffee bar, I would work to get a man to want me, but then be disgusted with myself when he showed he did, and angry at him for not seeing who I was. Yet I couldn't seem to change. In my journal I gave it to myself as I wrote a mock letter to a former professor whom I'd asked for a praising recommendation: 'Dear Mr. Finch, You couldn't have said too many nice things about me....I'm all grand talk and no grand reality. All fluffy frosting and no cake."

When I met the great logic of Aesthetic Realism about what the self is most deeply after and what interferes, I felt I had emerged into honest sunshine. "We want to be praised," Mr. Siegel wrote with comprehending power in Self and World,

"...but we also want to deserve this. There is such a thing as the ethical unconscious. Well, if we praise ourselves and we know we have been unfair to outside reality in doing so, there is a nervous conflict in us....We can't really think another person loves us unless we really like ourselves with the facts present...."

In an Aesthetic Realism lesson, Mr. Siegel spoke to me about this, as I asserted sadly that all my interest in learning was really a pretense: what I was most interested in was the approval I got through sex. He said:

ES. Is it? Sex is more interesting, but...if you knew that sex would make your mind less powerful, would you be for it?

DT. No.

ES. So what does that show?

DT. That I'm more interested in....

ES. That it is something to consider. People do think that. But if a woman were sure that it would hurt her mind, she wouldn't be for it very much, would she?

DT. That's true.

ES. And you wouldn't be?

DT. That's true!

ES. This has significance. Man and woman are alike there. There's something they cherish in themselves; the way they can see, once they're sure of it.

For the first time I felt I could reach the goal that had been in me but was so hazy until I met the knowledge which made it clear. I was learning that I most deeply wanted to use my mind to see things and people fairly: this I could respect myself for.
Women need to learn--and this is crucial--that we want to be seen, as all people deserve to be, as standing for the world, as having an aesthetic structure: a relation of opposites--such as rest and motion, sureness and unsureness, inside and outside, mind and body, good and evil. As I studied Aesthetic Realism, I came to feel the biggest thing I wanted in love was for a man to want to se me this way and for me to see a man fairly, for who he was, because this was the way I would like myself. Then I met and came to know Jeffrey Carduner, who is now my husband and an Aesthetic Realism consultant. I fell in love with him because he wanted to see me, the person I am, and to make me stronger and better through criticism. And he wanted me to be a good critic of him so he could reach his hopes. There is nothing more roman­tic!


[To be continued]