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Gendlin, E.T. (1967). Neurosis and human nature in the experiential method of thought and therapy. Humanitas, 3(2), 139-152. From https://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2040.html

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NEUROSIS AND HUMAN NATURE IN THE EXPERIENTIAL METHOD OF THOUGHT AND THERAPY [*]

Eugene T. Gendlin

University of Chicago

Human nature is not a kind of content. Anthropologists and psychologists have not found a good definition of human nature, perhaps because they have been looking for a content definition. By content I mean: What sort of things is it "human" to be, do, feel, or think? In these respects a tremendous variety can be enumerated, but no complete answer has been forthcoming. Later I shall affirm that neurosis also cannot be defined as a content, and the same is therefore true of mental health. However, first we should discuss human nature.

I would like to cite two examples from anthropology. It was thought that there must be certain contents, feelings, ideas or actions peculiar to all humans. In showing that this is not so, Robert Redfield described a people who express an emotion we are not supposed to understand. In one culture there is an emotion called X. When someone dies the person who mourns the loved one leaves during the night and rows his boat out into the lake. When he rows to the middle, he stops the boat and for a long time screams and screams and screams. Then he returns home. His is an emotion which, according to this anthropologist, we do not understand.

Another example is very similar. It comes from the excellent anthropologist who studied Java, Clifford Geertz. [1] He too discusses a feeling with which, according to him, Americans cannot empathize. It is called by a Javanese word he translates as "respect." [Page 140] However, he assures me, it is not really respect or anything else we may know. It is the feeling a Javanese has when he is in the same room with a spiritual saint. The same word, and apparently also the same feeling, is involved when a Javanese greets a visitor and tells him, "Feel at home, make yourself comfortable, don't stand on respect."

Now, what do these anthropologists mean when they insist they cannot understand these feelings? We understand them quite well from even these short descriptions. They mean we do not have these feelings, and of course, we do not. Geertz means to show that feeling is always culturally patterned, and he is right. What then is the common human nature we share with these peoples?

Anthropology began with the notion that human nature would consist of certain universal contents, emotions, patterns, and thoughts, but has since found that this just is not so. We can often understand very different feelings quite easily, but we certainly do not have them ourselves in our own culture. Here in America we do not have the particular feeling of being in the presence of a Javanese spiritual saint. Of course, this is because we do not have that custom pattern either. We have different patterns.

Feelings are always already culturally patterned and not universal, but this ability of experiencing "to be patterned"—and further patterned—that is universal. Therefore, we can understand a different pattern, as we did in these two cases. This brings me to the second point.

Culture is not an independent system that floats above the heads of individuals. Of course, no one would phrase it that way, but let us look at the order in which body, person and culture are related. The physiological and biological are often put first, most basic, "underneath." Then the individual person is thought to come next, and only then comes culture. If one affirms that order, then it seems the human individual can exist as such, and then still obtain values from above, from an overarching culture. It is as if the human individual ought to have a nature of his own, and not simply the variety added by the culture.

There is no common human nature "underneath" culture. The human individual is not the "lowest" common denominator to which culture is added. Cultural models are not outside us like values a person "aims at," final causes, or norms. [2] Rather let [Page 141] us turn the order around and place culture right after biology, and only then the human individual.

There are strong grounds for this view. The human, apart from culture, is not possible. Apart from cultural forms, humans do not eat, grunt or procreate. Man's animal functions are culturally patterned. The individual self develops out of an interpersonal, linguistic and cultural matrix. The individual is cultural, social and interpersonal before he is an individual. An individual emerges from biology, culture and his own situations as an original mixture who makes a life out of them. The human individual exists only as he transcends the givens of both biology and culture: first biology and culture, and then the human individual.

The individual in any society faces the task of living, which is never organized fully for him. In fact, the more highly organized a culture becomes, the more it is never organized fully. The reason one has to pick his steps through each day, the reason he has to figure out what to do from one life situation to the next, is because of the growing contradictions and stoppages imposed by the highly organized society. Our bodies are so complex, our language and our cultural backgrounds are so rich, the situations that make up life from one hour to the next are so complicated, everything is already so highly organized that very exacting conditions are required of any synthesis that will work. (Later we shall describe what "will work" actually means.) It requires enormous creativity to bring these many patterned demands together, as all play on any one situation. Human nature is not this or that content. What I am is not all this organization which is already patterned. All that is only what is given—the problem—what I am up against outside and in me. To live it is an experiential process, a necessarily creative process, a feat, if I succeed.

Biological and cultural patterning are both raw materials. The human individual is an ongoing process.

In more primitive cultures, people were identified largely with their roles. It was not as necessary for them, is it is for us, to draw the distinction I am making so emphatically. They did not need to distinguish between the creative felt experiencing process and the culturally given patterns and social roles. To a large extent the person was the roles he filled. He grew into them in a more organic way than we can today. He was the values he was taught. He was the outlook he had. In our century, on the other hand, culture organizes us along so many different lines that one cannot help but know and feel contradictory values. No culturally given role, today, supports us and gives us the alive, felt fullness [Page 142] of a human identity. Instead of being supported and sustained by our role, it is we who must hold it up. We have to support the role; we have to fill the requirements; we have to perform the specialized task. If we break our hold, we are dumped; the role marches on. Like a new tube in a TV set, another person is put in our place and that person continues to perform the specialized role as well, or better than, we did. This independence and specialization of roles leaves the human process, the feeling life, somewhat silenced, unformed, inchoate, alienated, separated.

Modern awareness of the human experiential process as such offers both trouble and a promise. In our century we have had both bestial and beautiful forms of protest which have arisen from this human feeling process as separated from specialized forms. It is the cry of the human feeling process which has become separated from its roles. We are aware primarily of different roles, different cultures. Today we know that just down the road, or across the ocean, people are violently different from us in both.

We can, and we must learn to distinguish between the experiencing process and the many different contents, definitions, verbal and role patterns.


What is meant by the experiencing process? It is felt. It is the most obvious thing in the world. It is our sense of being alive, our body sense, our feeling process. The experiencing process is your being here, now. It is you. You are now looking out through your eyes from it. You are a feeling process. You are not words or thoughts. I am not letting you think your own words. If you are following me, you have my words now. My words are echoing in your head. But that does not make you be me. You are still here. You are not these words. You are a concrete experiential feeling process.

The experiencing process is biological and cultural, but it is not these raw materials as contents. It is moving and alive. It is not fully possible without words and social roles, but neither is it words or social roles as such. We cannot separate concepts and feelings, no more than we can separate content and process, or the experiencing process from culturally given forms, patterns, roles and words. How do we put form and process together again? That is the particular question being asked today.

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The experiencing process is "the given" of body and culture—but in motion.

Even since Freud's time, the typical neuroses have changed. Such a change demonstrates also that human nature does not consist of culturally given content. The contents of what it is to be human change, and so do the contents of difficulties in being human.

The neuroses that Freud met and catalogued are rare; today the typical patient seeks a sense of identity, a sense of autonomy, a sense of strength to meet life. He seeks a feeling of really being there, of being involved. Notice that these are all non-content descriptions. He desires to stand strong in his life, "to be on top of it." He lacks a certain manner of living, a manner of experiencing, a manner of feeling, a manner of meeting situations. This is usually the difficulty, rather than content, pattern, repetition compulsion, or pathological thoughts. There are still a few classical neuroses to be found, but for the most part the problem is how to put an alive, experiential living process together with increasingly lifeless social roles, situations, concepts, words.

We cannot resort so easily to old methods. Donning a strait jacket is no help. Originally it was not viewed as a strait jacket to have a single culturally given set of values, when people shared culture in a fullness and depth which we lack. We may look back and say, "How could those benighted people have believed this or that absolutely?" From our stand it seems quite relative. It may as well be another way. The trouble with us is that we see all these ways and then cannot move ahead in any direction. We stand at the crossroads of our relativism and say that this is just as good as that. We go on into neither. In those days people had a common context and shared thirty-nine successive life meanings, one built upon the other. Then they could afford to argue about the fortieth. We cannot do that today. We can only argue about the first, this one or that. We do not get very far. We could have one context, one cultural tradition, one set of values, one vocabulary only by artifically imposing it—a strait jacket. Fortunately, there is no prospect of this. It is not possible any more.

We seek a new way to bring together the many different roles and values within our experiential feeling process. This can only happen in motion, in constant interplay, in zig-zag. We can move from a concept to its logical implications, and we can also move from a concept to what we were getting at in using that concept, what we meant, felt, what we were trying to do in using it. [Page 144]We can pay attention to that. But that is experiential, implicit, not verbal. We must pay attention to the feeling process we had in using the concept. Thus we can arrive at another verbalization, another concept, another role, another definition. Zig-zagging, we can arrive at a different place than we could possibly have gotten to by logical steps alone.

We need both logic and the zig-zag to feeling and back again. If we were to lose logic, we would lose precision and we would not know what we were saying. On the other hand, in living, problem solving, psychotherapy, and listening to someone, in life generally, we need more than the alienated patterns of logical and social roles, more than what is socially appropriate or what follows logically. We need also to pay attention to our experiencing at the moment. What are we getting at? What are we up against? If we are listening to someone, "What is he getting at? What is he up against?"

From this paying attention to what we feel, from the implicit level, we can then return to the verbal or patterned level. We surface on the patterned level at a very different spot than we could ever have gotten to by explicit, logical or already defined steps alone.

Any concepts give us two avenues. It is helpful to use both. (This leads to a very different basic theoretical model. [3]) What we feel is just the body. In another sense what we feel is all our thoughts and situations. We do not feel Javanese respect, because we are not in the situations this involves.

We bodily feel our situations.

We do not feel feelings, we feel situations. To say we feel feelings is to say the same thing twice. If you pay attention to your felt sense, you will see that you feel what you are up against. From focusing on your feeling you can notice that you are reacting to many facets in the situation. If the situation is a problem, you especially need to focus on your feel of it. This is true of any problem, say a problem in geometry. You have the "givens" of the problem. With these alone, you are stuck. That is why it is a problem. Let us say you are to prove that these angles are the same as those angles. There is no way to do it with the givens. You must "mull over it," stew about it. What is clearly given only makes the problem. You must add something to it, you must redefine and restructure it, you must drop a line from the [Page 145] apex to the base. Then it becomes easy. But where do you get this line? You have to think it up.

Any problem is a problem because of how a situation is now structured and defined.

If you remain within the concepts, the roles, the definitions by themselves, if you have only what they imply, there is no way to solve the problem. If one faces a problem he must solve, the clearly defined terms can give him only the problem. If he follows only these clear terms, he can explain how the difficulty came about and why it cannot be solved. He can even prove that it cannot be solved. That is not what we need, however. We desire to see new factors in the picture. The felt sense of what he is up against and trying to do is a living process. It is preconceptual. It is already structured by the givens, but it enables him also to further precision and structure his difficulty, to get the line from the apex to the base, in our analogy.

Since feelings are our being in the situations, a further experiencing permits further structuring which fits and resolves the felt difficulty.

Pay attention to any feeling you have now and ask yourself what is it? You will find, first of all, that it is your feel of situations. My feeling, now, has to do with you. Am I coming across? Some faces say yes and some say no. I better make this clearer; I am not finished; I fear I might not succeed in making my point. That is what I am now feeling. What I feel is out there.

Consider any feeling and you will find that first it has to do with the situation, and second that it is multiple. There are always many facets you can isolate by paying attention to any feeling. It comes as one felt sense, because there is one body. But you can differentiate it into many different facets. Every moment's feeling is multiple. It is the complexity of the body. It also includes the many ways I spoke of earlier, ways in which we are already highly organized, the many contradictory patternings of our culture, the many contradictory meanings that we have built in to our own life by the situations we have brought about, the people and things we care about, flee from, or stubbornly retain, the aspects we are sensitive to, and so on.

Since so many meanings already pattern our feelings, it is not at all difficult to understand why one can get stuck, why there is often no way of living through a situation. The various choices a man is offered may all be impossible for him. To live on he must devise new possibilities. He must often create that line dropped from the apex of the triangle to the base in our example; [Page 146] he must make more meaning, a new structure. But be may not be able to. He may find no way of acting or speaking which carries forward all that he is sensitive to.

Of course, he cannot and need not count or separate all these facets. That would be impossible. He feels them all at once. Only by using feelings can he possibly guide himself. If he finds a way, he says "yes" or "a-ha!" or something like that. The found way solves the problem by carrying forward the many meanings one feels, by setting up a way in which these meanings now go together in a new situational meaning.

If one is very lucky, he finds a way immediately. If not, if he cannot devise a new way to resolve all the meanings he senses, then there is always the temptation to make less meaning. That also seems to work, but really it does not. It would work if one could really talk himself out of what he senses. Or one could adopt the viewpoint that nothing makes any difference, everything is the same as everything else. To the extent one is convinced, his anxiety will relax, but this seldom lasts, and a few minutes later it is all back again. We cannot really talk ourselves out of what we feel.

The experiential process works ahead only, to further meanings. It does not work backwards via the denial of what we are already sensitive to. Feelings are resolved only when our further acts take account of them.

We must take the "hang-ups," the tenseness, the anxiety, the ways in which we are stuck, and carry them forward, looking for some interpretation, some further meaning or action, which will allow that hung-up, tense, anxious feeling to resolve and move. That is possible only by paying direct attention to the way one feels. Feeling is a "process." If you tell yourself honestly what you feel, that will change what you feel. Therefore, you do not have to be afraid of discovering very awful things. In being found they will change. If you zero in directly on the felt sense of what you are up against, if you seek the right words that say what it is, or the right action, there will be a characteristic sense of relief and release, an "oh. . . ." or a "that's what it is!" [4]

However, typically, we do not try to zero in and ask the truth of what we feel until we have first tried all sorts of use- [Page 147]less maneuvers. We lecture to ourselves. We tell ourselves how we ought to be. We lay out in detail how any mature well thinking person would feel and behave, and we try to be that. For about a minute or so we are, and then it is all back again. Nothing has changed. Of course we shall hold on to our "oughts," to how we wish to be. This too we really feel and cannot ignore. Knowing how we wish to be, and knowing that what we feel may be very immature, foolish and bad, let us ask simply: What is it? And then at last, at that point, will come the releasing "Oh . . . That's what it is!" Typically at that point the truth comes in a sentence which is not nearly as sophisticated and interesting as all our good thoughts that were to no avail. It is usually a very simple sentence.

The contents or what we have found may not be very good or wise, but the release indicates that it is the right sentence. It is a kind of knowing that requires no system to tell us that we know. If someone now asked us, "How do you know that this is really so," we would not need to give reasons. The felt truth is similar to what happens when we remember something we have forgotten. We may struggle all morning to remember what we had arranged to do this morning. At last we remember. It all comes flooding back now, with a great sense of relief. If someone were now to ask us, "How do you really know this is really what you forgot?" we would laugh because we would know we have remembered. A similar feeling of release tells us that our simple sentence is true. Nonetheless it is a different sort of truth. It is a moving truth. It changes as it occurs. The felt sense of shift, of release, of moving past the hang-up feels right because we feel the change. Such sentences feel true in the act of making themselves false. Minutes later we find that we are now a shade different. What we now think is different. If a few minutes ago we realized how really angry we were, we may now find we are not so much angry as really hurt. Now all the things we think are different. Our many, perhaps sophisticated, thoughts about the ethics of anger and hurting others are suddenly irrelevant. We could easily have spent days and nights on them, but a single shift in the felt sense of the problem makes them all irrelevant. Instead, attention to feeling lets us see where we now are. We must again zero in on the felt sense we now have, where we are now stuck, so that the movement can continue another step. The words we used with felt truth earlier will now be wrong. We seek again a few words to tell the felt truth now.

Such words have a different kind of truth than we are [Page 148] used to. This is not the objective, predictive sort of truth which is also valuable and which we need not lose. But experiential truth is also a very important sort of truth.

Words that have experiential truth have the effect of releasing the process of feeling and moving it forward. Movement is truth, here. I have no faith in the first thing that I feel when I look at how I feel. I do not agree that if I feel like doing something then it is right to do it. On the contrary, if I pay close attention, I may discover that I feel a little queasy about it. There are people who urge us to deny the feeling that something is wrong with what we say or do. They use some of the same jargon I use. There is an existentialism which says that you cannot do anything without feeling guilty, and so it does not matter what you do. This is taken to mean you can do lousy things even if you know you should not. There is no way to act without feeling guilty anyway; thus a feeling of guilt has no meaning you need listen for. Similarly, "authenticity" is often interpreted as an intense feeling of wanting to do something. If that is all, then all the beautiful words about freedom, choice and authenticity boil down to saying that you can do anything you want, and nothing is right or wrong. Similarly, the emphasis on self-awareness has been taken to mean you can do anything as long as you are aware of it. Such self-awareness is static. Such authenticity is only a master passion.

In order to be whole in what one is doing one does not go by some one static feeling. One may have to go through quite a number of steps of resolving his many feelings.

These steps may involve words or acts. Sometimes one must do something and only then does the situation become clear. Sometimes one must actually begin something before one can discover that it is wrong. At a crossroads we may have to go three miles down one way to see a sign and realize, "Oh . . ." it is really the other road I have to take." It is a mistake to make a choice and then bully through no matter what, without attending to one's felt sense of the situation. One has to move back and forth between his feeling about the situation and his words and actions. We seek words and actions that resolve, release, carry forward, and give more clarity and structure to what we feel. At times, such words and actions can be very hard to find.

A neurosis can be understood in at least two ways therefore. It is a gift, but it is also a fault. It involves sensing more meanings than are livable, but it also involves a lack of focusing and carrying forward to devise their resolution. If the lack of experiential focusing is permanent, it may be due to a lack of skill. I [Page 149] have some research findings which suggest that experiential focusing is a skill. [7] We can now measure in tape-recorded therapeutic interviews the extent to which patients work out their difficulties via focusing on experiencing. Those patients who do are the ones that succeed in psychotherapy. If their words are often fresh formulations of felt meaning, then they show improvement at the end of therapy. (We administer psychometric tests before and after therapy to measure improvement.) The findings show that the experiential focusing process I have described is the essential change process of psychotherapy. The way to change a feeling is by focusing on it and verbalizing it, by structuring and acting from one's feeling. Those patients who can do so resolve their problems and change, even though at the start of therapy they are as badly off as those who cannot focus experientially. We are not yet doing well in teaching experiential focusing to those who do not do it. They go through therapy without ever doing it, and they show no improvement. This would seem to indicate that experiential focusing is a skill. I am now trying to devise teaching methods for it. It appears to be like athletic ability. Some have it naturally, but we teach certain minimum health-maintaining exercises to everyone and not only to the athletically inclined. We teach it especially for the people who are not athletically inclined. They need setting up exercises more than the athletic.

Up until a few years ago we were confused. Our idea of the ideal healthy person was the good psychotherapy patient. Not so. One can be well adjusted without this experiential therapeutic skill. However, it is essential for the resolution of personal problems, because without this skill problems cannot be resolved. To have problems is one factor in neurosis. Another and different factor is the lack if this skill of experiential focusing. One alone is not yet neurosis.

Neurosis is not simply the having of problems, or a question of greater sensitivity, or occasions when one finds for a time no way to live. That may be much better than not having had these sensitivities and problems. It is much better if one can eventually resolve these by creating and discovering more meaning than one would have otherwise been able to do. Neurosis is also not the lack of the experiential focusing skill, since many people are quite fine without it.

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Only when one has sensitivities which add up to no way to live, and one lacks the experiential focusing to carry what one feels further, must we call that combination by a poor name like neurosis.

I must also say that experiential focusing may not be the only mode of the basic zig-zag method I am discussing: To reflect on the feel of what one is up against is one way. One can also guide his actions, moment by moment, with an experiential zig-zag. Perhaps in that way one seems less explicitly conscious (or verbally conscious) of how he guides himself. A zig-zag of feeling and actions might work as well as a zig-zag of feeling and words. The basic question is whether one engages in a constant zig-zag movement between felt meaning, on the one hand, and any sort of patterned steps he uses—either words and concepts or acts and roles.

This interplay between experiential process and patterns brings feeling and form together again—not in one static way nor along the lines of one system or outlook—but in motion and along many steps which are not determined within a given system, logic, or cultural set of roles.

The zig-zag between feeling and words or feeling and acts, as I have described it, is clearly not determined as logical deductive steps are determined. In discussing freedom the existentialists have gone a long way toward making this point and I am glad they have. But they have emphasized discontinuity. [8] They have said: Each moment is new, man can make himself as he chooses. Discontinuity is possible from moment to moment. They emphasized this discontinuity between one moment and the next in order to smash the old notion that we behave in necessary causal chains or as if we were logical computers. It is true that in comparison to mathematical computers we do have a fresh chance to change at every moment. Our transitions are not logically determined. [9] If we pay attention to a felt sense of what we are saying we can arrive at a very different point than is possible by logic alone. On the other hand, it is time to emphasize the continuity. [10] It is a different continuity than that of logic, to be sure. It is a felt continuity. It is not [Page 151] a continuity we can figure out ahead of time. Only when we look back can we figure it out. When we look back, we can verbalize the continuity. It is time to emphasize that freedom for me cannot be anything I please. I have tried it; it does not work. I am not able to be anything I please. I cannot live in another culture. I cannot have another past; I cannot be a different person than the one I am. I can only start with me, with what I am, with what I feel. I must attempt to live that "forward" and, with all that, seek a step of felt truth. Then I must be pleased if my next step is not completely the same as always, if I succeed, even a little, in obtaining a new, fresh and different way that actually works for me. To "work" for me, it must be continuous with my feelings and it must carry them further. When it occurs it is a felt continuity, a moving continuity. It means that what I am feeling is resolved in the actions I devise and choose or in the words I say.

When I am about to say something I do not yet have the words that I shall say. I know what I am about to say. It sometimes happens that when I get the opportunity to speak I find that I have forgotten what I was going to say. Now what do I do? Where do I go to find it? I have never said it in words. I have never had the chance to say to myself exactly the words I would say. I must focus experientially to recover the sense of what I was about to say. And then, when I do get it back, I say "Oh . . . yes. . . ."I still do not have it in words. I have again only the felt readiness to speak. But I cannot say any old things and have it be what I was about to say. There is a very distinct relationship between this feeling I have of being about to say something (that feeling of lost and found again), and the words I can use. There is not a discontinuity here. Only certain words will be what I mean and if I wander slightly I shall hear what I am saying and I shall say "No, no, wait a minute, that is not what I mean; just a second." This illustrates the continuity between what we say and do and our felt process, and the continuity between each moment and the next. In the zig-zag from words, actions, roles, and definitions to feeling and back again, there is a very distinct felt continuity. We may be confused and 'hung-up." We may not know what to say or do, but still, only certain words or acts will serve.

There is no arbitrary gap between one moment and the next. Freedom is only that hard-to-find next step of words or acts which carries what we are further and resolves it, and only that sort of "making ourselves" is real.

To sum up: Human nature is not a set of contents (and [Page 152] neither is mental health). Human nature is the experiential process in which biological and cultural contents are carried forward. We have lost the simple unity between contents and what we are experientially. Instead we can engage in a zig-zag, ultimately better and more interesting than any one set of forms.

Footnotes

[*]Institute of Man symposium on Neurosis and Personal Growth, November 19, 1966.

[1]See Geertz, Clifford. The Religion of Java.

[2] See Parson, T. The Structure of Social Action, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1949.

[3]See Gendlin, E. T. Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning. The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962.

[4] See Gendlin, E. T. A Theory of Personality Change. In Personality Change. Byrne & Worchel, Eds. Wiley, 1964. Also see "Expressive Meanings," in Invitation to Phenomenology, Edie, Ed., Quadrangle Books, 1965, and Values and the Process of Experiencing, In The Goals of Psychotherapy, Mahrer, Ed. Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967.

[7] See Gendlin, E. T., et. al., "Focusing Ability In Psychotherapy, Personality and Creativity," in Research in Psychotherapy, Vol. III, Shlien, Ed., American Psychological Association, 1967.

[8] See Sartre, J.P. Being and Nothingness. Philosophical Library, 1956.

[9] See Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, Humanities Press, 1962.

[10] See Gendlin, E. T., Experiential Explication and Truth. Journal of Existentialism, VI, 22, 1966. Also see "Merleau-Ponty's 'The Structure of Behavior,'" The American Schoolman, and "What are the Grounds of Explication?" The Monist, 49, 1, 1965.

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