And if it becomes truly his own, you won't need to be surprised if he comes back someday and teaches you a new thing or two about it, too. That's what it looks like to help people to grow, to get them moving on the path they need to follow. Compare this to the dreary image you hear constantly about what therapy is supposed to be like. Go see a therapist to get at your feelings and learn to love the old degenerates as you did in the good old days. Therapy is made to sound like something that will dumb down our need to face the problems of this world and our natural instinct to really accomplish something in our lives, something that will get us to settle for the same interpersonal impoverishment, the same psychological status quo, that the last generation had to endure.
Social progress does, in fact, require a generation gap.
It does require us to try to live lives better than our parents, or better than many of the lives around us, or indeed better than the lives we were able to live yesterday. It asks us to accept in a harmonious way the stress of trying to do something important before we die. But the great thing about the strength and wisdom that emerge from this process is that, once they exist, the next generation accepts them as their natural inheritance, as an inalienable right they would rather die for than do without. Many therapists fail to understand the role that social progress plays in mental health. Paul Rosenfels, whose ideas inspired the founding of our Center, said that our sense of interpersonal importance comes from nothing less than making a personal contribution to the building of a better world.