LANDSLIDE : STEVIE NICKS

NATHANIEL BRANDEN - BARBARA BRANDEN - FRANK O'CONNOR OBITUARIES

NY TIMES OBIT FOR NATHANIEL  2014: entitled Nathaniel Branden, a Partner in Love and Business with Ayn Rand, Dies at 84, I think that's a rather brave title.

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As a note Branden was married four times.

Ayn Rand exited him from her will, and she said she would destroy him.  She said she would stop the publication of his boo, The Psychology of Self Esteem.  In 1968 she let it be known that she had broken with Nathaniel. Barbara, Nathaniel's wife began to think that Ayn's mental health was deteriorating.  Rand accused of both Barbara and Nathaniel 

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NY TIMES OBIT FOR BARBARA 2013 : entitled Barbara Branden, Biographer of Ayne Rand, Dies at 84.

Excerpt:  Ms. Branden and her former husband, Nathaniel Branden, were at the center of Ms. Rand's inner circle during its heyday in the 1950's and '60s. a following that included future scholars and economists, most notably Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, who went on to shape the conservative Republican and libertarian movements.

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NEW YORK TIME OBIT FOR FRANK 1979 : entitled Charles Francis O'Connor, Artist, Husband of Ayn Rand

Excerpt: Every hero was modeled after him," Miss Rand said.  "I sometimes took an entire monologue from him and slipped it into my book.  When I couldn't think of a title for one of my novels, he did.  He told the whole story in two words.:  Mr. O'Connor's two word title was "Atlas Shrugged."

NEW YORK TIMES OBIT FOR AYN 1982

Excerpt: Miss Rand was perhaps best known for her novels "The Fountainhead" of 1943, for which she wrote the screenplay when it was turned into a movie with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and "Atlas Shrugged," published in 1957.  From the 1960's on, she increasingly devoted herself to expouinding her views more directly, in such books as "The Virtue of Selfishness" (1965) and "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal." (1966)

She also served as editor of The Objectivist, a monthly journal, from 1962-1971 and wrote The Ayn Rand Letter from 1971-1976.  Her philosophy of objectivism holds that only individual ability and effort account for real achievement and that laissez-faire capitalism provides the optimal environment for talent.  her view of selfishness as a virtue and altruism as a vice as a reversal of the traditional Judeo-Christian ethic.

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IS THERE SUCH A THING AS SOUL MATES or TWIN FLAMES?

Question for Missy:   

I've been watching YouTube videos about this and reading books about it too. Do you personally think there is such a thing as a soul mate, someone who a person has lived many lives with, that a person deeply connects with? Or how about a twin-flame, your perfect partner who you were once united with as one and will be with again and again through lives? 

Should I hold out until I meet one of them?

Roger

Minnesota

Answer from Missy:

Hi Roger.  

Actually I do think having a soul mate or twin flame is possible, but rare. My understanding is that a person can have many soul mates over a life time but only one twin flame in eternity. No, you should not hold out (avoid relationships) until you meet one of them. You could wait a lifetime. Rather, know yourself well, know what you want, what you need, what you're willing to compromise on, what you are willing to go without. I don't think any one person can fulfill all of that for one long life-time, but in relationships we continue to get to know another person as well as ourselves, and life brings us surprises, including finding ourselves in love at times with someone we could have never guessed would be attractive!

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GOT TO HAND IT TO YOU

 

NATHANIEL BRANDON'S AFFAIR OF HIS OWN - EVENTUALLY HE ENLISTS HIS WIFE TO KEEP THIS SECRET FROM RAND

Nathaniel Brandon and Patrecia Gullison agreed to keep their affair a secret and he thought that their affair would end and not mean much.

Excerpt page 345: ...She turned down modeling jobs to be available to him.  He learned "to lie expertly," he wrote, "As I became a master at inventing reasons to be away from the office."  .... In early 1964, he reluctantly gave his wife (Barbara Branden) permission to conduct her own affair with an NBI colleague she had grown fond of. He didn't reveal his affair with Patrecia until three years later, when he needed her help in keeping his secret from Rand.

Missy here:  Despite almost flaunting it, Barbara took a while to catch on that her husband was having an affair with Patrecia.  But in the summer of 1965, she asked Nathaniel for a separation. From 1964-1966, Rand was still counseling the couple in order to help heal their relationship. To me this is all so convoluted. Ayn Rand may have had a philosophy - a theory - that could be applied to therapy but she was not at all qualified just based on her personal involvement with these people.  When the separation was announced, she may have hoped this would be when Branden turned to her, but it was not to be.

Excerpt page 347: Brandon stood on a precipice.  Should he tell the truth, risking Rand's anger and his own disinheritance, or take up his duties as Rand's lover?  He chose a third way, finding other but real incidental ailments to complain of: exhaustion from overwork, trauma from the end of his marriage, fragile self-esteem because of Rand's history of rebuking him, depression, "a sense of (emotional) deadness that made it exceedingly difficult to think of resuming a romance with her," and, somewhat astonishingly at this point, anguish over his second-fiddle status in the triangle with Frank, which had caused him pain in the past, he said, and almost surely would again.....

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But, he was happy with Patrecia, perhaps more happy that he had ever been.  Ayn, perhaps as predicted, tried to find a way to analyze the relationship he had with Patrecia into oblivion. 

Excerpt page 349:  Gradually, his evasions, inconsistencies, and "drift" became intolerable to the woman for whom logic was tantamount to truth.  They began to have explosive arguments.

... The news of the Branden's impending divorce sent shock waves through the concentric circles of Rand's New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington D.C., Toronto, and Chicago organizations...

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They denied others were involved in the decisions the couples made to divorce. It took three years into the affair, until 1966, that Nathaniel and Patrecia admitted to Barbara that they were going to start having sex! To me, this is a testimonial to the fear of Ayn Rand that Nathaniel must have felt. He seems to have been greatly confused about his feelings.

Perhaps Ayn had also had enough. When there are so many shades of grey, one sometimes starts to see thinks in black or white. Ultimately, but with tremendous anger, she did break with Nathaniel. It was an excommunication.

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AYN RAND : OUT OF DEPRESSION - WISHING TO RENEW HER AFFAIR WITH BRANDEN BUT HE'S FALLEN IN LOVE WITH A YOUNGER WOMAN

Although Ayn Rand got back to work - and business - and she - and Nathaniel Branden had lectured and created a following of Objectivists, in the early sixties she continued a long-held pattern of accepting others as friends and then discarding them. Her demands and expectations could be too much yet some of them were hurt. She wanted what - and who - she wanted. Though through her depression she and Nathaniel had gone without sex, now, at fifty-eight to his thirty-three, she wanted sex again.  They were collaborators on many a business venture and that included monthly newsletters, promotions, tours, publications and speaking engagements. He was considered to be her intellectual heir. He had worked hard.  But Nathaniel was no longer the twenty-four year old who had met his literary and philosophical heroine. By 1963 the Brandens, still married after all, moved into the same building as Ayn Rand and Frank O'Connor. But Branden did not want to go back to having an affair with Ayn but initially he agreed they would. Some of her followers would turn against him.

Excerpt pages 340-341: Those who took his side pointed out that he had dedicated himself to her and her ideas from is freshman year in college, was intensely protective of her self-image, and was naturally frightened of her volcanic temper and allegiance to a black-and-white moral universe.  In any case, he later admitted that he didn't love her, not in the romantic sense she meant, and hadn't since before the publication of Atlas Shrugged. (Fall of 1957)  If he appeared to forget her original horror of being "an old woman pursuing a younger man" and was maneuvering to get what she wanted, he was procrastinating. He also told her something that was true: that she was the most important person in the world to him.  He said he needed time to work out the problems in his ten year marriage to Barbara before resuming a romantic relationship with her.  During that early conversation she replied, sighing, "I don't feel fully ready yet, either.  I was just testing your attitude for the future." She offered to counsel the unhappy couple.  He accepted.  For the moment, he was off the hook.

He knew, if she didn't. that it was far too late to begin again.  During the years of her depression, he had behaved toward her as a good son behaves to an ailing mother, except that they occasionally slept together. Yet he had also distanced himself from her. ...

Excerpt page 344: What she didn't now was that, beginning in late 1963, Branden was juggling a new romantic triangle, or rather a parallelogram. As just about the time she decided that she was fully ready to resume sleeping with him, he fell in love with a younger woman - a willowy twenty-three year old fashion model and aspiring actress named Patrecia Gullison.

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Missy here.  Yes Patrecia Gullison was married.  Branden had attended her wedding a year or so earlier. She was youthful but also had attended one of his lectures and was also a bit of a devotee.

Excerpt page 344: Unlike Rand and Barbara, she didn't ask hum to check his premises or overcome his flaws. Unconditional female admiration was a thrilling new experience for him, and he was starving for an extraphilosophical experience of sex.  She was "what Nathan had never had in his life," said Barbara in 2005, "someone who wasn't trying to save his soul."

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AYN RAND : A LITERARY AUTHOR WHOSE BOOKS STILL SELL LIKE CRAZY

And the oldest published books are collector's items 

and can be found on-line selling for thousands.

Two of the best known.

Ayn put in significant time as a Hollywood screenwriter as well.

TWENTY FOUR YEAR OLD NATHANIEL BRANDEN IS SEDUCED BY FORTY-NINE YEAR OLD AYN RAND

 

Missy here.  I wish I could think of Ayn Rand's husband, Frank O'Connor, as her creative muse, but it seems he fulfilled another role in her life, one of unending support - the unselfish one. Nathaniel Branden, though intelligent, educated, and heading for a career as a psychologist, seems to have fallen under Ayn's spell.

Excerpt page 256:  Nonetheless, he felt an unfamiliar sense of elation, power, even mastery.  The woman with the magnificent eyes and the penetrating mind was looking to him for romance; and when he looked back at her, "the image (of myself) I saw reflected (in her eyes) was that of a god," he later wrote.  "I am in love with you, " he said aloud.  It was a fiction that would last fourteen years.

It wasn't a conscious fiction, not at first.  That they had fallen in love struck them both as philosophically inevitable and romantically and morally correct.

That first afternoon, they told each other that whatever they did they would not hurt each other or their spouses.  Rand suggested that the affair would be "nonsexual" in the ultimate sense," meaning that their lovemaking would stop short of intercourse.  Brandon agreed, disappointed but also relieved, he recalled.  As crusaders for integrity and honesty, they also prepared to present the fact to Frank and Barbara. They decided to ask permission to meet by themselves twice a week....

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And actually, they all four met.  Ayn and Nathaniel claimed that this did not mean they did not also continue to love their spouses. So, as I see it, they altered their relationships and were now in Open Marriage.  A couple months later they revamped the agreement to include full sexuality.  Barbara also felt that her frustrating sex life with her husband was part of the reason.  But Barbara was not well, suffering nightmares and panic. Nathaniel, who was enrolled in a master's degree program at NYU began to play therapist with his wife - and others - using Rand's theories.  Evolved a whole language of ideas about a person's psychological state.  By my way of thinking, what this all amounted to is psychological abuse of Barbara. If she could not find this change in her relationship with her husband acceptable then she was blamed.  Objectivists could not also be Emotionalists, like Barbara.

By the fall of 1958 Ayn herself was depressed despite increasing wealth and being in demand as a speaker and lecturer. She was also having to face literary criticism and took to secluding herself. She remained depressed until early 1961. She smoke and drank coffee. She had also begun using stimulants by prescription and may have used the drugs to lift her mood, loose weight, or get wired.  Frank O'Connor didn't desert his wife, but he also withdrew.

Missy

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