
Urban E-Zine Entelechy Publishes Wyatt Ehrenfels Essay
Wyatt Ehrenfels's report "So You Say Opposites Don't Attract" has been published in the Fall/Winter 2004/2005 issue of the popular e-zine Entelechy. Months earlier, Wyatt Ehrenfels posted an excerpt of the report to an evolutionary psychology forum, where it caught the attention of Entelechy editor Alice Andrews. Andrews tapped Ehrenfels to submit the complete article for her review and, excited by the full report, proceeded to edit it for publication, calling it "The Science of Oppositionality."
Wyatt Ehrenfels was pleased to receive word of the publication. "I am honored to be part of Entelechy's legacy. It's a good fit. Entelechy contributors are intriguing -- individuals in the true sense of the word. Thoughtful. I don't know where the Entelechy editors find them. I don't know if they stake out street corners in Soho looking for pedestrians in states of deep reflection -- or what -- but it's a good formula. Their works connect you not only to your soul but to read these articles you really feel like you're participating in the soul of another and in the essence of the thing viewed through their soulful lenses. I feel like I'm touring a people museum, where I can get caught up in the objective reality of another person's psyche. With a conceptual and aesthetic splendor, their contributors stir in you imagery, feelings, and sensations that do not seem to belong to your own system. Now I don't believe that my essay falls in this same class. When I put it together I did not intend for it to appeal to the full range of the person's human functions (i.e. intuitions, sensations, feelings). This is one of my utility pieces that makes by the most direct and efficient means possible an important point that needs to be grasped about an enterprise -- the modern science of Psychology -- that fails to address the human condition (soul, if you will) of the human being.
This is not to say that to do this we need to abandon science for the anecdotal tall grass of history and literature. On the contrary, we need only restore fidelity to the fundamentals of true science, but this detective's discipline is maintained by -- of all things -- playfulness -- a childlike curiosity and humility, an appetite for knowledge, and imagination. In Psychology today we see the NFL equivalent of a short-passing game with five tight-end sets. Psychology suffers from a lack of boldness, a failure of imagination, and a kind of fear of intimacy, managing distance (from a phenomenon) that masquerades as 'objectivity.' But genuine objectivity requires an immersion in the facts of the phenomenon under study."