THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM
It is obvious we cannot recover our moral footing until we can in some
way determine the true nature of the unconscious. The word unconscious
itself is a mere definition by negation and has no positive meaning.
Freud no doubt prefers it for this reason. He rejects _subconscious_ and
_preconscious_, because both these would imply a sort of nascent
consciousness, the shadowy half-consciousness which precedes mental
realization. And by his unconscious he intends no such thing. He wishes
rather to convey, we imagine, that which _recoils from_ consciousness,
that which reacts in the psyche away from mental consciousness. His
unconscious is, we take it, that part of the human consciousness which,
though mental, ideal in its nature, yet is unwilling to expose itself to
full recognition, and so recoils back into the affective regions and
acts there as a secret agent, unconfessed, unadmitted, potent, and
usually destructive. The whole body of our repressions makes up our
unconscious.
The question lies here: whether a repression is a primal impulse which
has been deterred from fulfilment, or whether it is an _idea_ which is
refused enactment. Is a repression a repressed passional impulse, or is
it an idea which we suppress and refuse to put into practice—nay, which
we even refuse to own at all, a disowned, outlawed idea, which exists
rebelliously outside the pale?
Man can inhibit the true passional impulses and so produce a derangement
in the psyche. This is a truism nowadays, and we are grateful to
psychoanalysis for helping to make it so. But man can do more than this.
Finding himself in a sort of emotional _cul de sac_, he can proceed to
deduce from his given emotional and passional premises conclusions which
are not emotional or passional at all, but just logical, abstract,
ideal. That is, a man finds it impossible to realize himself in
marriage. He recognizes the fact that his emotional, even passional,
regard for his mother is deeper than it ever could be for a wife. This
makes him unhappy, for he knows that passional communion is not complete
unless it be also sexual. He has a body of sexual passion which he
cannot transfer to a wife. He has a profound love for his mother. Shut
in between walls of tortured and increasing passion, he must find some
escape or fall down the pit of insanity and death. What is the only
possible escape? To seek in the arms of the mother the refuge which
offers nowhere else. And so the incest-motive is born. All the labored
explanations of the psychoanalysts are unnecessary. The incest motive is
a logical deduction of the human reason, which has recourse to this last
extremity, to save itself. Why is the human reason in peril? That is
another story. At the moment we are merely considering the origin of the
incest motive.
The logical conclusion of incest is, of course, a profound decision in
the human soul, a decision affecting the deepest passional centers. It
rouses the deepest instinctive opposition. And therefore it must be kept
secret until this opposition is either worn away or persuaded away.
Hence the repression and ultimate disclosure.
Now here we see the secret working of the process of idealism. By
idealism we understand the motivizing of the great affective sources by
means of ideas mentally derived. As for example the incest motive, which
is first and foremost a logical deduction made by the human reason, even
if unconsciously made, and secondly is introduced into the affective,
passional sphere, where it now proceeds to serve as a principle for
action.
This motivizing of the passional sphere from the ideal is the final
peril of human consciousness. It is the death of all spontaneous,
creative life, and the substituting of the mechanical principle.
It is obvious that the ideal becomes a mechanical principle, if it be
applied to the affective soul as a fixed motive. An ideal established in
control of the passional soul is no more and no less than a supreme
machine-principle. And a machine, as we know, is the active unit of the
material world. Thus we see how it is that in the end pure idealism is
identical with pure materialism, and the most ideal peoples are the most
completely material. Ideal and material are identical. The ideal is but
the god in the machine—the little, fixed, machine principle which works
the human psyche automatically.
We are now in the last stages of idealism. And psychoanalysis alone has
the courage necessary to conduct us through these last stages. The
identity of love with sex, the single necessity for fulfilment through
love, these are our fixed ideals. We must fulfil these ideals in their
extremity. And this brings us finally to incest, even incest-worship. We
have no option, whilst our ideals stand.
Why? Because incest is the logical conclusion of our ideals, when these
ideals have to be carried into passional effect. And idealism has no
escape from logic. And once he has built himself in the shape of any
ideal, man will go to any logical length rather than abandon his ideal
corpus. Nay, some great cataclysm has to throw him down and destroy the
whole fabric of his life before the motor-principle of his dominant
ideal is destroyed. Hence psychoanalysis as the advance-guard of
science, the evangel of the last _ideal_ liberty. For of course there is
a great fascination in a completely effected idealism. Man is then
undisputed master of his own fate, and captain of his own soul. But
better say engine-driver, for in truth he is no more than the little god
in the machine, this master of fate. He has invented his own automatic
principles, and he works himself according to them, like any little
mechanic inside the works.
But ideal or not, we are all of us between the pit and the pendulum, or
the walls of red-hot metal, as may be. If we refuse the Freudian
_pis-aller_ as a means of escape, we have still to find some way out.
For there we are, all of us, trapped in a corner where we cannot, and
simply do not know how to fulfil our own natures, passionally. We don’t
know in which way fulfilment lies. If psychoanalysis discovers incest,
small blame to it.
Yet we do know this much: that the pushing of the ideal to any further
lengths will not avail us anything. We have actually to go back to our
own unconscious. But not to the unconscious which is the inverted
reflection of our ideal consciousness. We must discover, if we can, the
true unconscious, where our life bubbles up in us, prior to any
mentality. The first bubbling life in us, which is innocent of any
mental alteration, this is the unconscious. It is pristine, not in any
way ideal. It is the spontaneous origin from which it behooves us to
live.
What then is the true unconscious? It is not a shadow cast from the
mind. It is the spontaneous life-motive in every organism. Where does it
begin? It begins where life begins. But that is too vague. It is no use
talking about life and the unconscious in bulk. You can talk about
electricity, because electricity is a homogeneous force, conceivable
apart from any incorporation. But life is inconceivable as a general
thing. It exists only in living creatures. So that life begins, now as
always, in an individual living creature. In the beginning of the
individual living creature is the beginning of life, every time and
always, and life has no beginning apart from this. Any attempt at a
further generalization takes us merely beyond the consideration of life
into the region of mechanical homogeneous force. This is shown in the
cosmologies of eastern religions.
The beginning of life is in the beginning of the first individual
creature. You may call the naked, unicellular bit of plasm the first
individual, if you like. Mentally, as far as thinkable simplicity goes,
it is the first. So that we may say that life begins in the first naked
unicellular organism. And where life begins the unconscious also begins.
But mark, the first naked unicellular organism is an _individual_. It is
a specific individual, not a mathematical unit, like a unit of force.
Where the individual begins, life begins. The two are inseparable, life
and individuality. And also, where the individual begins, the
unconscious, which is the specific life-motive, also begins. We are
trying to trace the unconscious to its source. And we find that this
source, in all the higher organisms, is the first ovule cell from which
an individual organism arises. At the moment of conception, when a
procreative male nucleus fuses with the nucleus of the female germ, at
that moment does a new unit of life, of consciousness, arise in the
universe. Is it not obvious? The unconscious has no other source than
this, this first fused nucleus of the ovule.
Useless to talk about the unconscious as if it were a homogeneous force
like electricity. You can only deal with the unconscious when you
realize that in every individual organism an individual nature, an
individual consciousness, is spontaneously created at the moment of
conception. We say _created_. And by _created_ we mean spontaneously
appearing in the universe, out of nothing. _Ex nihilo nihil fit._ It is
true that an individual is also generated. By the fusion of two nuclei,
male and female, we understand the process of generation. And from the
process of generation we may justly look for a new unit, according to
the law of cause and effect. As a natural or automatic result of the
process of generation we may look for a new unit of existence. But the
nature of this new unit must derive from the natures of the parents,
also by law. And this we deny. We deny that the nature of any new
creature derives from the natures of its parents. The nature of the
infant does _not_ follow from the natures of its parents. The nature of
the infant is _not_ just a new permutation-and-combination of elements
contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the
infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents,
something which could never be derived from the natures of all the
existent individuals or previous individuals. There is in the nature of
the infant something entirely new, underived, underivable, something
which is, and which will forever remain, _causeless_. And this something
is the unanalyzable, indefinable reality of individuality. Every time at
the moment of conception of every higher organism an individual nature
incomprehensibly arises in the universe, out of nowhere. Granted the
whole cause-and-effect process of generation and evolution, still the
individual is not explained. The individual unit of consciousness and
being which arises at the conception of every higher organism arises by
pure creation, by a process not susceptible to understanding, a process
which takes place outside the field of mental comprehension, where
mentality, which is definitely limited, cannot and does not exist.
This causeless created nature of the individual being is the same as the
old mystery of the divine nature of the soul. Religion was right and
science is wrong. Every individual creature has a soul, a specific
individual nature the origin of which cannot be found in any
cause-and-effect process whatever. Cause-and-effect will not explain
even the individuality of a single dandelion. There is no assignable
cause, and no logical reason, for individuality. On the contrary,
individuality appears in defiance of all scientific law, in defiance
even of reason.
Having established so much, we can really approach the unconscious. By
the unconscious we wish to indicate that essential unique nature of
every individual creature, which is, by its very nature, unanalyzable,
undefinable, inconceivable. It cannot be conceived, it can only be
experienced, in every single instance. And being inconceivable, we will
call it the unconscious. As a matter of fact, _soul_ would be a better
word. By the unconscious we do mean the soul. But the word _soul_ has
been vitiated by the idealistic use, until nowadays it means only that
which a man conceives himself to be. And that which a man conceives
himself to be is something far different from his true unconscious. So
we must relinquish the ideal word soul.
If, however, the unconscious is inconceivable, how do we know it at all?
We know it by direct experience. All the best part of knowledge is
inconceivable. We know the sun. But we cannot conceive the sun, unless
we are willing to accept some theory of burning gases, some
cause-and-effect nonsense. And even if we do have a mental conception of
the sun as a sphere of blazing gas—which it certainly isn’t—we are just
as far from knowing what _blaze_ is. Knowledge is always a matter of
whole experience, what St. Paul calls knowing in full, and never a
matter of mental conception merely. This is indeed the point of all full
knowledge: that it is contained mainly within the unconscious, its
mental or conscious reference being only a sort of extract or shadow.
It is necessary for us to know the unconscious, or we cannot live, just
as it is necessary for us to know the sun. But we need not explain the
unconscious, any more than we need explain the sun. We can’t do either,
anyway. We know the sun by beholding him and watching his motions and
feeling his changing power. The same with the unconscious. We watch it
in all its manifestations, its unfolding incarnations. We watch it in
all its processes and its unaccountable evolutions, and these we
register.
For though the unconscious is the creative element, and though, like the
soul, it is beyond all law of cause and effect in its totality, yet in
its processes of self-realization it follows the laws of cause and
effect. The processes of cause and effect are indeed part of the working
out of this incomprehensible self-realization of the individual
unconscious. The great laws of the universe are no more than the fixed
habits of the living unconscious.
What we must needs do is to try to trace still further the habits of the
true unconscious, and by mental recognition of these habits break the
limits which we have imposed on the movement of the unconscious. For the
whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving
forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws or habits. It is no good
trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon the unconscious. We have to
try to recognize the true nature and then leave the unconscious itself
to prompt new movement and new being—the creative progress.
What we are suffering from now is the restriction of the unconscious
within certain ideal limits. The more we force the ideal the more we
rupture the true movement. Once we can admit the _known_, but
incomprehensible, presence of the integral unconscious; once we can
trace it home in ourselves and follow its first revealed movements; once
we know how it habitually unfolds itself; once we can scientifically
determine its laws and processes in ourselves: then at last we can begin
to live from the spontaneous initial prompting, instead of from the dead
machine-principles of ideas and ideals. There is a whole science of the
creative unconscious, the unconscious in its law-abiding activities. And
of this science we do not even know the first term. Yes, when we know
that the unconscious appears by creation, as a new individual reality in
every newly-fertilized germ-cell, then we know the very first item of
the new science. But it needs a super-scientific grace before we can
admit this first new item of knowledge. It means that science abandons
its intellectualist position and embraces the old religious faculty. But
it does not thereby become less scientific, it only becomes at last
complete in knowledge.