| | Ted, in post #7 said, "In the realm of personal character ethics Branden failed himself through his cowardice. Rand failed herself by convincing herself that the issues were primarily philosophical and intellectual and hence potentially amenable to argument, as if had she come up with the right formulation, she could have convinced Branden that her status as a post-menopausal woman would be of no import to a man 25 years younger than she was." and "...did Rand ever examine her own self-delusion?"
I don't think the word "cowardice" is appropriate here. I've known Dr. Branden for a long time and it isn't a word that fits. And we know that "self-delusional" isn't a word one would normally associate with Rand. I recognize that Ted is using the words to refer to isolated incidents and not to enduring character traits, but a context needs to be set, and without it, those words are decidedly inappropriate.
I don't enjoy delving into Rand and Branden's personal affairs - which really aren't the normal business of anyone but those more excited by gossip than ideas, more motivated by anger or jealousy than ideas, but there is a need to give the psychological context in this case - because of the choice of those two words - not just from Ted, but from many people over the last 4 decades.
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Branden was still a young man and even if his romantic love for Rand had faded, he still held her to be of extraodinary value in his life. His best friend, his mentor, his hero - someone he treasured. His entire life was wrapped around the ideas and the person of Ayn Rand. But, until he met Patrecia, his love life had not been fulfilling.
Barbara had not been a soul mate - she had been more of an intellectual mate and friend and the spark really wasn't there. The affairs that she had were most likely borne of her need to feel more emotionally connected, to bring more passion to her life, and must have been very painful for both of them. What little romantic attachment he had had in the past with Barbara was gone long before he became involved With Rand. Only very rarely does it make sense to marry our first girlfriend.
With Rand the spark was there, but too much of the excitement came out of a shared intellectual passions and not enough from the entirety of his sense of self - his deepest identity. All of his life, Branden had been boldly living beyond his years, starting as a precocious child and picking up personal power and responsibility through ability, not senority. There is a sense of aloneness that comes with always being older than your years.
At the time he met Patrecia, he was in his prime. He was the driving force of NBI, acquiring a national reputation in psychology, at the center of Objectivism (save only for Rand herself), and nearing the time when he would be able to publish a seminal work in his field. But, he and Barbara were long past romantic feelings. And, I suspect that he was extremely lonely man when he met Patricia - in one way, he had never in his life really been in love - a real love as opposed to the first girlfriend or the intellectuallized love with Rand.
And at that time the younger self within found, for the first time ever, a real partner. I would guess that Patreicia was his first real love - the first one to involve him fully in all the ways love should. So when he first allowed himself to spend anytime with her - even in the early platonic stages of the relationship - it would have been cowardice not explore those feelings. It would have been a betrayal of his self to not see if this was real. He wasn't sexually involved with Rand who was still depressed, or with Barbara who was more like a roommate by then.
He knew that with Rand's unshakable convictions that love must flow from ones premises - and that she believed that she knew what her premises were in this area, and that to say what he was starting to feel for Patrecia would turn his life upside down and hurt Rand. His lie to himself during those early days was, "Maybe things will change. Maybe my feelings will change. Maybe I'll find a way to convince Ayn that it isn't wrong to love Patrecia." He had been working for with Ayn for years attempting to help her come out of her depression - which put him in an awful place. When she was trying to work with his psychological "problem" of not being fired up for resuming their relationship, his conflict was worse. All the time he keeps trying to find the impossible - a way to not give up either of the women he loves - one romantically and the other in every way but romantically.
At some point it clearly became dishonest to continue to explore his feelings for Patrecia without coming clean with Rand - he didn't, but it was not because the man was a coward, but because he was swamped by the dilemma his life had become and his lies were more to himself, that somehow he could find a way to make it all come out good. Both of the values he was pursuing were objective values.
My heart goes out Ayn Rand. I don't believe it is possible to achieve something as extraordinary as Atlas Shrugged without paying a psychological price. The many years of writing must have involved motivating herself with visions of the rewards to come - a decade of postponed gratification. She must have imagined those who would react when they read her work, like reaching into the future and feeling the gratitude of those whose lives were enlightened. We have been told how disapointed she was that there were no leaders of their fields who came forth to say what Atlas Shrugged meant to them. There is a real unfairness to that depression.
Her desire to reconnect to life - to excitement - to passion, to all of the pleasures and joys that leave when depression arrives, is so normal. And sex and romantic love ARE the most vital of all life forces. How natural that as she was coming out of a deep depression, the best within her reaches out to rekindle the love affair with Branden. A decade long depression and the tremendous need to come back but at a time where she still had no driving purpose, no over-reaching goal - and this is the woman who defines purposefullness, that is where she is at this time and that makes it easy to see her putting thoughts out of her mind when they conflict with this life-line back to life. So, it wasn't so much self-delusional as not willing to give up on the belief that she could somehow get what existed years before to exist once again - when inside of her everything cried out to come back to life. Branden himself defined the phrase "Strategic repression" which is where to preserve one's sanity when thrust into a situation to horrible to handle, one partially suppresses part of the negatives in order to maintain the strength needed to move forward.
Both Branden and Rand were heroic in that they struggled in the conflicts they found themselves - attempting to live more fully. Rand's pattern of unforgiving judgments of others and her incomplete understandings of romantic love created Branden's dilemma. They each lied to themselves in hopes that if they worked harder or thought more deeply or argued more persuavely they could win a value that was dear to them in the extreme. I know of very few people who are as brave, or as clear thinking as these two, which is why I don't see this as an area for engaging in moral condemnation, but as a tragedy for them - they made a mistake in judgment in their personal lives and they paid for it.
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