Original thinkers are original because no one has done it yet. Don't hold Branden's originality against him when you embrace Ayn Rand's originality.

The ideas are what matter.
 

Calling someone a Scientologist or a Randroid are fightin' words around here.

Now it's up to you if you want to be one of Branden's Talmudic heroes.

My role in regard to Objectivism is that of a theoretician. Since Objectivism is not a loose body of ideas, but a philosophical system originated by me and publicly associated with my name, it is my right and my responsibility to protect its intellectual integrity. I want, therefore, formally to state that the only authentic sources of information on Objectivism are: my own works (books, articles, lectures), the articles appearing in and the pamphlets reprinted by this magazine (The Objectivist, as well as The Objectivist Newsletter), books by other authors which will be endorsed in this magazine as specifically Objectivist literature, and such individual lectures or lecture courses as may be so endorsed. (This list includes also the book Who Is Ayn Rand? by Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden, as well as the articles by these two authors which have appeared in this magazine in the past, but does not include their future works.)

All of Branden’s work that appeared in Rand’s periodicals—essays on causality, free will, determinism, emotions, ethics, self-esteem, romantic love, social metaphysics, alienation, anxiety, education, economics, and, yes, the subconscious and repression—were sanctioned and regarded by Rand as part and parcel of Objectivism. 

When some of Rand's intellectual progeny try to bracket out those contributions, the result, in my view, is a diminished Objectivism.  (My book Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical goes a long way toward reintegrating the theoretical work of Nathaniel Branden into the corpus of Objectivism.)  The intellectual relationship between Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden was significant and it had some enormously positive long-term consequences. One might even say (as I did in Russian Radical) that if Nathaniel Branden is the legitimate “father” of the self-esteem movement in psychology, "Ayn Rand is its mother” (Sciabarra 1995, 403 n. 64).  Branden didn’t become a leading figure in the psychology of self-esteem by simply “exploiting [his] association with Rand” ([Valliant 2005, 171); he is an author unto himself of nineteen books and countless articles. And he continues to credit Rand as having had the most important impact on his intellectual development. In The Psychology of Self-Esteem, his first treatise in psychology, much of it a verbatim republication of his essays written for The Objectivist Newsletter and The Objectivist, Branden states unequivocally that “[t]he Objectivist epistemology, metaphysics and ethics are the philosophical frame of reference in which I write as a psychologist” ([1969] 1979, ix). And, in the years since 1968, even as he developed his psychological theories of self-esteem and romantic love, his work on the relationship of reason and emotion, and his pioneering “sentence-completion” exercises in directed association, Branden (1999, 21) has continued to recognize in Rand an intellectual forebear, one who “speaks, on many different levels, to the quest for individuation, autonomy, and self-actualization.”