• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1657 0

right to an undisturbed weekly idyll in Atlantis. But Rand did not as easily let go of the event. She decided that Barbara must have a psychological problem and briefly put aside her work on Galt’s speech to draft a paper on the subject of Barbara as an “emotionalist,” using a term that Nathaniel had coined to describe a person who understands the world through the filter of his emotions, rather than by reason. Such people tend to recoil from the pain of disappointment, she noted, which distorted their perception of reality. Barbara accepted this hypothesis. So did Nathaniel. From that time forward, he became his wife’s officially acknowledged therapist, guiding her to repair her “premises” and “sense of life.” He remained in that role for as long as they were married. “You cannot imagine what a nightmare” it became, Barbara told an interviewer in 1991. Branden, by the mid-1950s enrolled in a master’s degree program in psychology at NYU, went on to write his thesis on anxiety as a crisis of self-esteem. He considered turning the theory into a book. He also began to offer therapy based on Rand’s and his ideas at low prices to members of the Collective.

Rand and her protégé introduced other specialized words and phrases into their daily discussions. To indicate a person’s general style of learning and thinking, they referred to his or her “psycho-epistemology.” To identify people they thought were overly concerned with the opinions and approval of others, Branden created a category he called “social metaphysics,” which encompassed a detailed analysis of the disordered mind of “second-handers” and which became a much-feared diagnosis. People who confused wishes with horses were labeled “subjectivists.” Beginning with these terms and a few others, Rand’s circle adopted a psychological argot that separated them from other members of their age group and, later, provided defensive characterizations of unfriendly outsiders.

Few knew that “emotionalist” applied to Barbara, let alone that Rand also consigned O’Connor to that type. Apart from his flower arranging, the genial man had found little to do. He and Branden sometimes met in the foyer and shook hands as he left the apartment in deference to his wife. The Brandens later claimed to have discovered that he was drinking heavily in a local bar—an assertion that has been bitterly disputed by Rand’s hard-core followers, but that what evidence there is suggests is true.

It didn’t take long for Nathaniel to conclude that he was in over his head. As he told an audience of Rand fans in 1989, “I confused loneliness, marital frustration, incredible admiration and hero worship for Ayn with romantic love.” Once, he said, he tested the waters of retreat, wondering aloud whether they had made a mistake by introducing sex into their friendship. To his horror, she replied coldly, “This affair is sexual or it’s nothing.” She added, “If we are not man and woman to each other, in the full sense—if we are merely disembodied minds—our philosophy is meaningless.” He naturally heard in this both a warning and a threat and never again raised the subject. Her demands for emotional intimacy, which accompanied the sex (“Where have you gone to? You’ve disappeared,” she’d badger him), would cease when the affair ended, he told himself, within another year or two.

Still the Collective noticed nothing unusual, with the exception of graduate art student Joan Mitchell Blumenthal, Barbara’s oldest friend. “One night very early in the game,” Blumenthal recalled, “Ayn was posing for me. She had on a filmy nightgown. She was primping, and I asked her what she was looking so self-satisfied about. She said, ‘I’ll tell you someday, but I can’t tell you now.’ That was all. And I said to myself, ‘Oh.’ And then—this will give you some idea of the fear and trembling around this thing—I decided not to tell Allan,” her new husband, who was Nathaniel’s cousin and a doctor. “I never did, until things started showing at the seams.” For most of the circle, Ayn’s sexuality was invisible, even inconceivable, perhaps especially