The Social Basis of
Consciousness
A Study in Organic Psychology
Based upon a Synthetic and Societal
Concept of the Neuroses
BY
TRIGANT BURROW
M.D., Ph.D.
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY, INC.
LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.
1927
_THE SOCIAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS_
Chapter I, Part I, was first published in _The Journal of
Nervous and Mental Disease_, and Chapter II, Part I, in _The
Psychoanalytic Review_. Acknowledgment is made to the Editors
for permission to include these papers in the present volume.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
THE EDINBURGH PRESS, 9 AND 11 YOUNG STREET, EDINBURGH
_I am that which began;
Out of me the years roll;
Out of me God and man;
I am equal and whole;
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily;
I am the soul._
“Hertha.”--Swinburne.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface xv
Introduction 1
Significance of Freud’s basic conception--Misconceptions
in psychoanalysis due to present personalistic
basis--Psychoanalysis entails the element of personal
differentiation and sponsorship presented in other therapeutic
systems--Need for abrogation of personal equation--Societal
concept an outgrowth of essential objective findings of
Freud--This thesis an initial presentation of an organismic
interpretation of human consciousness.
PART I
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES
Chapter I 9
PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND IN LIFE
Theory of psychoanalysis rests upon conception that nervous
disorders are substitutive manifestation of repressed sexual
life--Sexuality itself, however, as now existing, symptomatic
of repression and quite preclusive of the organic instinct of
sex--Popular analytic view places a premium upon the reaction
embodied in normality but substitution and repression in
this collective reaction identical with the unconscious of
neurotic individuals--Substitution of self-image for reality,
present in reactions of normal, is not as yet recognized by
psychoanalysis--Psychoanalysis remains in so far a theory
only--In truth, the neurotic personality is index of the urge
toward an essential organic mode of consciousness--Continuity
with organic processes registered as subjective feeling cannot
be approached by objective methods--The insanity of the
individual not to be cured as long as there is the insanity of
the social mind about him.
Chapter II 32
A RELATIVE CONCEPT OF CONSCIOUSNESS: AN ANALYSIS OF
CONSCIOUSNESS IN ITS ETHNIC ORIGIN
The Newtonian system assumes an unqualified absolute and
fails to take account of factors operating within the larger
system in which it is itself an element--In the sphere of
psychic phenomena a similar system of absolutism dominates our
presumably conscious world--Analysis of our judgments reveals
the assumption that the position intrinsic to the observer
is all-inclusive and authentic--But our world of impressions
is artificial and reflects the artificial systematization
that fails to include our own organisms--This autocratic
interpretation of life is based on a bidimensional or image
system which in its arbitrary and personal evaluation distorts
the universe of reality--Normality is consensus comprising the
personal absolute vested in the unconscious of the collective
mind--Need to replace pictorial mode by organic coalescence
in common affectivity--Personal systems of men, single and
collective, are but relative with respect to an organic
societal consciousness--Concept of relativity of consciousness
abrogates absolute standard and embraces dimensional element of
the system, individual and social, of which we ourselves are a
component part--Transition from bidimensional (contemplation of
aspect) to tridimensional (participation in function) affords
basis for measuring deflections of personality, socially as
well as individually.
Chapter III 50
THE ORIGIN OF OUR INDIVIDUAL UNCONSCIOUS
Organic societal consciousness can be comprehended only
through subjective identification with it--Discussion of
the tridimensional reality of human consciousness with
its three determinants--Present phase of consciousness
admits only the bidimensional image--The position of the
bidimensional elements “right and wrong” as incorporated
in the life of the child--Advantage of the parent the real
motive underlying this moral bidimension--Long-continued
experiments with personal mood reactions as substantiation
of view that induced image of right and wrong is at the root
of human psychopathology--Non-inclusiveness of others is
meaning of unconsciousness, individual and social--Present
social adaptation is merely collective response, not societal
extension of consciousness--Substitution of the absolute of
personal interest for inclusive participation as relative
elements affords no basis for inclusion of larger whole in
which the individual is a contributing element.
Chapter IV 63
THE UNCONSCIOUS FACTOR WITHIN THE SOCIAL SYSTEM
Daily reactions betray state of anxiety in the social
mind--These anxieties, sponsored in earlier times by medical
and religious fetish, still substantiated by the systems of
medicine and religion--Organic analysis of the element of
social authority--The systems of psychoanalysis and the Roman
Church as paradigms--Factor of resistance in psychoanalysis
analogous to factor of doubt in religion--The systematization
comprising the social corporation of individuals as much an
aspect of the unconscious autocracy of the personal absolute as
the systematization of the individual--In the conflict between
these two mutually opposed absolutes (socially systematized
authority and the resistance of the individual) there is an
organic impasse.
Chapter V 78
SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS FROM A VIEWPOINT
OF RELATIVITY
The established system demands conformity to its prescribed
norm--The limitation of life to a bidimensional alternative of
one’s own pleasure or one’s own pain results in division of
personality and in compulsion neurosis involving the entire
social consciousness--Bidimensional replacements in social
system found in art, science, education, marriage, etc.--The
mood alternations of the individual are but obverse aspects of
the same bidimensional portrait of personal advantage--This
element of unconscious alternation bars unbiased observation
of the personal absolute--In the field of preventive
medicine the personal cure of the individual subordinated to
safeguarding of community health--But within the subjective
sphere there is resistance to an approach that would consider
the individual’s position as part of a societal unity because
such an approach would menace the illusion of personal
prerogative--Psychopathologists equally involved unconsciously
in the social neurosis--In an objective study of the neurosis
the psychopathologist escapes the subjective acknowledgment
of its presence within himself--Possibility of fundamental
readjustment for dissociated personality lies only in surrender
socially of bidimensional or pictorial illusion in favour of
tridimensional actuality.
PART II
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES
Chapter I 107
ANALYSIS OF FREUD’S DYNAMIC AND INDIVIDUALISTIC CONCEPTION OF
THE NEUROSES
Freud’s theory assumes breach in integrity of consciousness due
to effort of delimited area to establish itself as a separate
self-governing unit--Distinction of Freud’s work lies in
conception of central totality of consciousness; limitation of
Freud’s work consists in assigning totality of consciousness
to single individual--Conception of totality of personality
tenable only from point of view of inclusive societal
consciousness.
Chapter II 114
FORMULATION OF AN ORGANIC OR SOCIETAL BASIS OF INTERPRETATION
The mental life of the infant organism is wholly subjective
and is one with the organism’s inherent feeling--With
entrance of the ulterior motive appearing in the command and
prohibition of the parent there is the issue of personal
gain or loss (suggestion and repression)--Appearance of
self-consciousness and self-interest forces interruption
of the organism’s societal life and a separation from its
basic continuum--Maintenance of separativeness of individual
destroys organic integrity--There is need to stand apart
from self and view it as element within the larger organism
of mankind--Instinct of tribal preservation and not
self-preservation is the dominant urge among us.
Chapter III 134
THE ORGANIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
Development of the idea of the parallel between individual and
phyletic trends in unconscious manifestations--Unconscious
worship of self-image source of suggestion and
repression--Because of this self-image what man assumes to be
cerebration is fictitious brain-state withdrawn from continuity
with organic life--Where there is individual lesion, separation
among elements is followed by pain and recourse to remedial
aids, i.e. the organism as a whole demands relief--In the
organic societal whole the individual as separated element is
source of lesion but seeks to escape through symbolic disguise
the pain of his societal separation--Conflict is between part
and whole wherein individual is embodiment of both.
Chapter IV 154
ORGANIC ANALYSIS OF REPRESSION AND OF THE FACTOR OF RESISTANCE
FROM THE SOCIETAL VIEWPOINT
The resolution of repression or resistance is regarded by Freud
as the essential problem of psychoanalysis--Neurosis, according
to Freud, is life’s repression of sexuality--According to an
organismic attitude repression and sexuality are concomitant
and are equally the results in the individual of organic
disunity and interruption of function--The biology of
resistance is found in the breach in individual’s continuity
with life as confluent, organic whole--Health or disease,
psychologically or physiologically, depends upon whether the
cell functions integrally or separatively, congruently or
resistantly--In social fabric each element is against each--In
our unconsciousness we deny the reality of this biological
phylum embodied in our organic consciousness and underlying the
processes of our individual mentation--Sexuality, currently
confused with sex, is egoistic, infantile expression and
antithesis of organic expression of sex--Only continuity of the
confluent subjective sphere can make possible an analysis that
will synthesize the scattered elements of personality.
Chapter V 165
ORGANIC ANALYSIS OF REPRESSION AND OF THE FACTOR OF RESISTANCE
FROM THE INDIVIDUAL VIEWPOINT
Transference is an unconscious condition which involves as
much the analyst as the analysand--Resistance and repression
are the factors in this mutual situation--Under present
personalistic procedure in psychoanalysis the analyst deals
objectively with an inherently subjective situation--He
regards only the disparity of the patient and so preserves the
apparent differentiation which is the underlying cause of the
patient’s disorder--There is a confusion in psychoanalysis due
to the failure to discriminate between the mother-image and
the mother-organism--The analyst, being socially dissociated,
seeks to reinstate the comfort of his own childhood through an
unconscious self-interested response (pleasure or displeasure)
to the analysand--The transference which is thus introduced
by the unconscious attitude of the analyst cannot be analyzed
because of the analyst’s own involvement--This is the impasse
of the individualistic analysis--From a societal viewpoint the
analyst can be interested only in the patient’s delusion of
separateness and will direct his endeavour to an understanding
of the social repression which dissociates them both from the
common, generic consciousness.
Chapter VI 177
THE DREAM AND ITS ANALYSIS IN AN ORGANISMIC INTERPRETATION OF
THE NEUROSES
To analyze the dream from a basis that is equally separative
and repressed is to exchange the symbols of the individual’s
repression for analogous symbols of the social repression--The
night’s reaction, being individual, and the day’s reaction,
being social, both represent an endeavour to adjust vicariously
man’s societal disunity--The affective or subjective life
cannot be adjusted through the study of the objective
mechanisms that merely reflect it but only through the
subjective (conscious) reabsorption within us of the affects to
whose suggestion the dream is the mirrored reaction--The drama
and the dream are identical in mechanism--An organic mode of
consciousness can regard with equally objective clarity the
vicarious processes of the day and of the night.
Chapter VII 187
THE BIOLOGICAL SUBSTRATE OF THE NEUROTIC CONFLICT IN ITS
ORGANIC SIGNIFICANCE
Two types of reaction: the _autocentric_ who withdraws
_in toto_ and has completely negative attitude toward
his congeners, and the _allocentric_ who makes effort at
social compromise or adaptation (“sublimation”)--Both reactions
equally self-centered: autocentric (precoid, psychasthenic)
showing adaptation through individual dream; allocentric
(hysteric, hypomanic) through social dream--Biological
substrate of these reactions lies in lack of balance between
cerebro-spinal and sympathetic systems--In the preconscious
form preserved among animals no break between the two systems;
there is maintained rhythmic and harmonious co-ordination of
response--Period of Greek thought essentially allocentric;
Christianity essentially autocentric.
Chapter VIII 197
THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN SEXUALITY AND SEX IN RELATION TO
UNIFICATION AND ORGANIC MATING
Psychoanalysis, unconsciously influenced by a division based
on the bias of its own arbitrary alternatives, has assumed
contrasts of behaviour not warrantable from an organismic
conception--Such alternatives are “homosexuality” and
“heterosexuality”--The organic instinct of mating has become
distorted by the image system of “good” (conceding social
consensus) and “bad” (repudiating social consensus)--Both types
are response to social consensus and are ego-sexual--Sexuality
is effort of conjunction of peripheral and visceral spheres
while sex is effortless and non-personal conjugation
of organismic poles comprising male and female--Union
is of personality as realized in man and woman through
identification with life, the one embodying the peripheral,
allocentric component, the other the internal, autocentric
component--Organically, man is not opposite woman but each is
complement of other--Concept of intermediate sex is misnomer
for composite sex--Social demand of oppositeness necessitates
repression in male of female component and in female of male
component--In present stage of society’s development marriage
is mutual adjustment of ego-sexual claims, a pooling of the
private unconscious of each where each withdraws from an
organic place as a societal element--Biological significance
of unity of personality is conception of _principle of
primary identification_--Autocentric types as Buddha, Plato,
Christ, and allocentric personalities of Socrates, Napoleon and
Nietzsche equally manifest this urge of the inherent organism
of man--In organic integrity of personality is societal
instinct that is the composite life of the race.
Chapter IX 221
ULTIMATE RESOLUTION OF THE SOCIETAL NEUROSIS IN ITS SOCIAL
IMPLICATION
Back of the pretence of the social mind lies a basis of social
fear and mistrust--The mutual accommodations of external
agreement used to cloak the introversion of the individual--The
development of group analysis permits study of the resistance
of the social consensus with respect to the individual as well
as the resistance of the individual with respect to the social
consensus--Group analysis, like individual analysis, presents
an unconscious and bidimensional situation involving reaction
clusters which constitute a pooling of the unconscious of
the several members--This group situation offers opportunity
to secure relative and societal background against which the
individual may view in impersonal perspective his habitual
arbitrary and personal evaluations--According to the group
or relative conception the causative element of the neurosis
is societal or phyletic and correction must proceed upon a
societal or phyletic basis.
Chapter X 238
ULTIMATE RESOLUTION OF THE SOCIETAL NEUROSIS IN ITS PERSONAL
IMPLICATION
Demand for wider concept of organized consciousness of man
in order to replace disintegrating structures of present
social system--Need to dispel illusion of mental oppositeness
and the restraints of an alternative system of morality
which aims merely to establish temporary balance between
its opposites--Experimental basis for group conception here
formulated in practical experience of a few students--As the
societal and the individual are organically one in mode, the
unification of the individual is a step toward the unification
of the societal consciousness--Organismic (societal) group
differentiated from collective (social) cluster--The period
of man’s substitutive image-production first interrupted by
Darwin’s theory of evolution and further threatened by Freud’s
theory of the evolutionary processes of the unconscious--The
social basis of consciousness, however inadequately formulated,
invites an analytic approach to social or mass reactions,
exemplified in our national, political, industrial and
religious life.
Index 253
PREFACE
I do not know whether I can make clear in what manner the conception
embodied in the following pages first arose. Conceptions derived from
data of reason and observation necessarily proceed from a mental basis.
Scientific and philosophical treatises are the outcome primarily of
scientific or philosophical ideas. With both inductive and deductive
methods of reasoning the conclusions that flow from the assumptions are
our accepted basis of procedure. With the method of the present study,
however, we are upon other ground, for the inception of this work was
in no such wise; and yet to say that it is based upon no conceptual
premise would, of course, not be true. The difference is that what
follows here has been the outgrowth of events that were prior to and
independent of any conceptual formulation of them. Biological necessity
preceded and argument followed after. My meaning may for the moment
be best understood when it is considered that these events are the
processes of personal experience inseparable from the sequences here
embodied. While this is not the place for detailing personal history,
the presentation of a thesis as intimate as this would not be complete
without some concrete account of its origin.
Having years ago been “analyzed” in preparation for my work in
psychopathology, I had been for years duly “analyzing” others. It
unexpectedly happened one day, however, that while I was interpreting a
dream of a student-assistant, he made bold to challenge the honesty of
my analytic position, insisting that, as far as he was concerned, the
test of my sincerity would be met only when I should myself be willing
to accept from him the same analytic exactions I was now imposing
upon others. As may be readily judged, such a proposition seemed to me
nothing short of absurd. Had I not been “analyzed”? Needless to say
I had heard this proposal from patients many times before, but while
my reaction to the suggestion in the present instance was chiefly
one of amusement, my pride was not a little piqued at the intimation
it conveyed. So with the thought that in the interest of experiment
it could at least do no harm to humour for a time the waywardness of
inexperience, I conceded the arrangement.
Not many weeks after I had taken the patient’s chair and yielded him
mine I realized that a situation to which I had agreed with more or
less levity had assumed an aspect of the profoundest seriousness. My
“resistances” to my self-appointed analyst, far from being negligible,
were plainly insuperable, but there was now no turning back. The
analysis proceeded on its course from day to day and with it my
resistances took tighter hold upon me. The agreement to which I had
voluntarily lent myself was becoming painful beyond words. Whatever
empirical interest the situation may have held for me at the outset was
now wholly subordinated to the indignation and pain of the position to
which I had been brought.
It is possible to indicate only in their broadest lines the progressive
events of these trying months. I need hardly record the growing
sense of self-limitation and defeat that went hand in hand with this
daily advancing personal challenge, nor the corresponding efforts
of concealment in unconscious symbolizations and distortions on my
part. What calls for more vital emphasis, however, is the fact that
along with the deepening, if reluctant, realization of my intolerance
of self-defeat, there came gradually to me the realization that
my analyst, in changing places with me, had merely shifted to the
authoritarian vantage-ground I had myself relinquished and that the
situation had remained essentially unaltered still.
This was significant. It marked at once the opening of wholly new
vistas of experience. In the light of its discovery I began to sense
for the first time what had all along underlain my own analysis and
what, as I now see it, really underlies every analysis. I began to see
that the student before me, notwithstanding his undoubted sincerity of
purpose, presented a no less personal and proprietary attitude toward
me than I had held toward him and that all that had been needed was the
authoritarian background to bring this attitude to expression. With
the consciousness of this condition I saw what has been for me the
crucial revelation of the many years of my analytic work--that, in its
individualistic application, the attitude of the psychoanalyst and the
attitude of the authoritarian are inseparable.
As from day to day this realization came more closely home to me, and
with it the growing acceptance of the limitation and one-sidedness
of the personalistic critique in psychoanalysis, my personal
self-vindication and resistances began in the same measure to abate.
At the same time the analyst too, Mr. Clarence Shields, came at
last into a position to sense the personalism and resistance that
had unconsciously all along actuated his own reaction. From now
forward the direction of the inquiry was completely altered. The
analysis henceforth consisted in the reciprocal effort of each of
us to recognize within himself his attitude of authoritarianism and
autocracy toward the other. With this automatic relinquishment of the
personalistic or private basis and its replacement by a more inclusive
attitude toward the problems of human consciousness, there has been not
alone for myself but also for students and patients a gradual clearing
of our entire analytic horizon.
It will later become clearer how this newer formulation of
psychoanalysis on the wider basis of its more inclusive impersonal
meaning has occurred entirely apart from the commonly predicable
processes of logic. Only the accidental circumstance of a student’s
protest against my own personal bias, and my subsequent observation of
an identical personalism in himself, as empirically disclosed upon
our interchanging places, are answerable for the altered insight into
psychoanalysis that the recent years have afforded me--an insight
which the investigations of the small group of students working along
analytic lines identical with my own have more and more substantiated.
It was due, then, entirely to this unexpected turn of the tables, which
placed me in the rôle of the patient and the patient in the analytic
rôle, that I was fortuitously launched into six years of social
experimentation upon the discrepancies of an individualistic analysis.
If the outcome of the process has been the retraction of my earlier
analytic outlook, it has not been the expression of any personal acumen
or distinctive asset on my part.
The chance eventuality I have mentioned is alone responsible for
enforcing the relinquishment of my habitual personalistic basis in
psychoanalysis and bringing me to feel the need of a more comprehensive
interpretation of the unconscious. Coming to sense, through a wider
recognition of the unconscious, the correspondingly larger meaning
of the consciousness of man, I have come to feel the need of its
more adequate interpretation in such an organismic view as I have
here attempted to outline under the theme of “The Social Basis of
Consciousness.”
I cannot consistently cite authoritative reference in support of
this work. There is none. It is sponsored alone in the spirit of
common endeavour actuating the group of students who have united in
its common realization. But if I am loath to shift to others the
responsibility for my own venturesomeness, I need not forgo the
pleasure of acknowledging--as I do with whole-heartedness--the impetus
that was given me in the beginning of my psychoanalytic work through
the sympathy and encouragement of Dr. Adolf Meyer.
TRIGANT BURROW.
The Tuscany,
Baltimore, Maryland.
THE SOCIAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
INTRODUCTION
After sixteen years devoted to psychoanalytic work based on the
principles of Freud, I have come to a position which differs so
essentially from the followers of Freud as well as from his dissenters,
that I am impelled to set down some account of the development through
which my conceptions have passed, and to state as clearly as I can the
position to which they have led.
The conceptions which Freud has brought to the study of abnormal
and individual psychology have been of incalculable significance in
aiding us to understand the causes and mechanisms underlying mental
disharmonies. The personalistic basis, however, on which psychoanalysis
rests has not in my experience proved sufficiently broad to meet the
demands of a more inclusive societal psychology in its application
to the needs of human life. While, in reconstructing the mechanics
of the unconscious, psychoanalysis has given the impetus to a truer
comprehension of the many distorted expressions of individual
mentation, it has not as yet really uncovered the essential meaning
of our human problems as they touch the consciousness of man in its
organic reality.
To speak, however, of the organic reality of life is to enter upon
a new universe of consciousness. It is to acquire a wholly altered
concept of the inherent consciousness of man. This concept is not one
that is interpretable upon our accustomed individualistic basis. As its
envisagement is societal, its realization must necessarily be societal
also.
To-day it is not possible to contemplate the significance of
psychoanalysis without realizing the arbitrarily constricted point
of view that has come to characterize the popularizations of
psychoanalysis in their various phases. Psychoanalysis possesses
as yet no specific definition. Personalistic in conception, it is
personalistically interpreted, and its variations are to-day as
whimsical as they are many. By one process of handling, psychoanalysis
has become closely allied with Mysticism and New Thought, by another
with propagandist measures for scientific birth-control, by a third
with an authenticated programme of sexual licence, and with all it
is but a new form of application of the old programme of palliative
medication.
If, however, the essential truth of Freudian psychology, like all vital
scientific movements, has been attended by personalistic misconception
and even by the cruder aims of individual exploitation, it has been
equally attended by a genuine scientific concurrence of spirit such
as alone animates the disinterested conscience of the laboratory
investigator. In the midst of the cheap and shifting divagations of a
day, there have remained the sounder interpretations of at least a few
outstanding investigators. While neither Freudian nor anti-Freudian,
there are those to whom I, as well as others, owe the inspiration of
those more thoughtful evaluations that are based upon a steadfast
fidelity to the inclusive spirit of an evolutionary interpretation
of human pathology, sociological as well as biological. It is these
few students who, I feel, will welcome an interpretation of our human
processes that offers a more inclusive, organic comprehension of our
mental life.
But before undertaking the study of the organic psychology of man, it
will be necessary first to establish a position that is based upon
an organismic[1] or societal viewpoint as contrasted with a position
based upon a viewpoint that is systematized and personal. Many years of
psychoanalytic practice have led me to the conviction that the basis of
Freud’s psychology is inadequate to render completely conscious those
disorders of the personality the essential meaning of which is their
unconsciousness. The following essay, therefore, is an attempt to offer
a more adequate concept of the essential consciousness of man than I
feel has been attained through the interpretations of the unconscious
patterns embodied in the present system of psychoanalysis. I have come
to feel that what we have called analysis in the sense of our present
personalistic systems is just another application of the method of
suggestion, and that with us analysts, as with others, the method
involves a situation in which we are as truly the unconscious dupes of
the suggestive process we employ as are the unconscious subjects upon
whom we employ it.
After all, it is the fallacy of personalism and of differentiation in
our human relations which is the essential element in our unconscious
agencies of suggestion, and I cannot doubt that this same fallacy
underlies no less the constructions upon which we rest our analytic
procedure. In the work of psychoanalysis as in our human endeavours
everywhere, there enters unavoidably the personal bias that is
inseparable from the position of observation concomitant to the
observer. It is to abrogate this prejudice of personal partisanship and
differentiation besetting the intrinsic system of psychoanalysis as
well as of our private dogmatizations elsewhere, that I have undertaken
the investigations of which this study is in part the outcome.
With the growth of my experience in psychoanalysis, the factor that
has exerted the deepest influence in altering my outlook upon the
problems of the neuroses as upon the processes of life generally has
been the gradual, if reluctant, elimination of the personal equation
in relation to those problems. By the personal equation I mean the
unconscious and arbitrary tendency within us all to adopt _a personally
systematized mental attitude_ toward life in substitution for the
physiological reality of life itself. The technical procedure of Freud
necessarily rests upon this extrinsic mental attitude, whereas in
the work of my students and myself during the past several years our
position has tended increasingly toward the more inclusive fulfilment
of the personality as a whole. Only in an inclusive analysis are our
affects experienced upon a basis that is common and organic. Accidental
diversity cannot issue out of organic unity. When the elements of
consciousness will be truly unified, an association of conscious
personalities will be unified also. The reason why there are to-day as
many systems of psychoanalysis as there are psychoanalysts, is that
our assumed principle of conscious unity is in reality but a personal
principle of differentiation and unconsciousness.
Let me say at once, however, to anyone who may have lacked the
opportunity or the candour to verify within himself the essential
objective findings of Freud, and who is disposed to read into this
thesis a vindication of his personal reaction against Freud’s
formulations, that he will find this study in nowise adapted to
assuage his sense of outrage to injured sensibilities. Whatever may
be the value of this work, in the spirit of its presentation it is
in no sense a personal discrimination against the teaching of Freud
but rather it is the acknowledged outgrowth of that teaching. If in
our widened outlook we have outgrown the personal interpretations of
psychoanalysis, there is due our full acknowledgment that it is to
those interpretations that our position owes its rise. Far, then,
from representing an antagonistic exclusion of Freud’s theory of the
unconscious, our position embodies the wider inclusion of it in what
I feel is its more comprehensive interpretation on the basis of a
societal concept of consciousness.
In psychoanalysis as in the social systems amid which, unconsciously,
we are continually moving, we tend to gravitate toward an assumed
static centre or toward a so-called personal cause that is coincident
with our assumption of an absolute universe of consciousness. This
gravitation toward a personal centre of consciousness embodies, in
reality, a system that represents but the unconscious projection of
our own ego. We substitute this delusion of an artificial world of
causality for the reality of a universe of spontaneous sequence, not
realizing that we ourselves are the subjective expression of the same
organic sequence which we observe objectively in the world about
us. When we have learned to accept inherent sequence as organically
necessary, we shall no longer enforce unconscious causality as
presumably inevitable.
It is this very general fallacy of personal sponsorship which
constitutes the intricate disguise of our social unconscious and which
in our personalistic outlook we have not yet begun to grasp. Ourselves
unwitting participants in this illusion of personal determinism, we
have not yet begun to compass the _system of unconsciousness_ that
lurks beneath its gratuitous assumption of personal agency.
With a view to the analysis and replacement of this absolute or
self-determined attitude among us I have here offered what I conceive
to be the more universal and encompassing interpretation of the common
and organic consciousness of man. As, however, the field of Organic
Psychology has yet to take a recognized place among us, and as it is
a conception that is circumscribed only by the limits of life itself,
naturally this initial step toward its establishment offers but a
tentative view as to its real scope and meaning. Representing scarcely
more than a preliminary outline, this work will be seen to embody
but the merest syllabus in relation to further works based upon an
organismic theory of consciousness, that doubtless will gradually
be contributed to the increase of our understanding of life, both
individual and social. In its present form the thesis here developed
was first outlined in 1923.
PART I
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES
CHAPTER I
PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND IN LIFE
Now that the excitement following the inundation of psychoanalysis
has died down and the clinical territories most affected have been
once more built up and restocked, it is interesting to witness the
changes wrought in different quarters as a result of the general
havoc to habitual prepossessions. As we stand amid the debris of past
conceptions there is no question but that the sudden descent upon us of
Freud’s postulates has destroyed many old landmarks that shall not be
restored and that it has brought in a wealth of new material that has
altered no little the configuration of the old.
As I happen to have been of those who were carried in upon the current
of the general onsweep of new interpretations ushered in by Freud, my
experience forms the record of a reaction to that movement that is
internal because it is from the vantage-ground of a participant in
it. Many of these interpretations are of epoch-making significance in
their approach to mental disharmonies, but many, being immature and
unsound, only obstruct the passage that psychoanalysis has contributed
so splendidly to open. And so my position may be of interest to others
who, like myself, have earnestly tried to bring order and a permanent
coherence out of the large mass of conceptions that cluster about
Freud’s dynamic idea.
The theory of psychoanalysis rests on the conception that nervous
disorders are the substitutive manifestation of a repressed sexual
life; its basic position is that this substitutive factor is
responsible for neurotic processes and that it is the sexual impulse
for which recourse is sought in the process of substitution. This
position of psychoanalysis is, in its essential significance, now
generally accepted--the position, namely, which affirms the factor of
replacement as the essential account of nervous manifestations and
assumes the urge of the sexual instinct as the element replaced.
While, with other psychoanalysts, I am in full accord with this thesis,
my finding in regard to the relation of these two propositions to one
another is so entirely at variance with the prevailing psychoanalytic
view, and alters so fundamentally for me the ultimate interpretation
of psychoanalysis in its bearing upon the problems of consciousness,
that I shall make clearer the ideas expressed in this work if, at the
outset, I may state briefly in what manner my interpretation of this
relation differs from the accepted conception.
The difference lies in the fact that I do not regard this replacement
as _primarily_ a replacement for sexuality as we now know it. On the
contrary, sexuality, as manifested to-day amid the sophistications
of civilization, is itself a replacement for the organic unity of
personality arising naturally from the harmony of function that
pertains biologically to the primary infant psyche. This original mode
I have referred to in a previous work as the preconscious, and this
preconscious mode[2] I regard as the matrix of the mental life. The
spontaneous process of the organism’s unhindered growth through the
gradual development of experience or awareness from this unitary mode
as a basis is, in my interpretation, the meaning of consciousness.
The whole meaning of sexuality on the other hand is substitution,
compensation, repression. In a word, sexuality, as it has come to exist
socially to-day, is identical with the unconscious, while a unification
of personality is alone to be found through eliminating the recourses
of substitution and sexuality and thus reuniting the elements of the
conscious and organic modes now kept asunder through the interposition
of the unconscious.
Hence the modern substitutions existing under the name of sexuality,
whether repressed or indulged, are but a symptom of this denial of
man’s organic affective life. Sexuality, as it now exists, is not only
utterly unrelated to sex but it is intrinsically exclusive of sex. Sex
is life. It is life in its deepest significance. Sex is the spontaneous
expression of a natural hunger. In the instinct of sex there is felt a
yearning from the depths of man’s organism for mating and reproduction,
while sexuality is the personal coveting of momentary satisfaction in
mere superficial sensation. By sexuality, then, I mean something very
different from sex. I mean the restless, obsessive, over-stimulated
quest for temporary self-gratification that everywhere masquerades as
sex and is everywhere substituted for the strong, simple, quiet flow
of feeling that unites the organic and the conscious life in a single
stream and is the expression of personality in its native inherency.
With this altered conception other modifications have followed
which necessarily entail a distinct departure from certain accepted
psychoanalytic formulations. The organic denial and the restless
compensations and substitutions comprising the unconscious are, in
essence, the psychology of the mental reaction-average known as
normality. The popular analytic view places a premium upon this
manifestation of the collective unconscious and assigns the criterion
of normality as the desired goal of adaptation for the neurotically
repressed personality.
I cannot accept this view. For an analysis of the social unconscious
shows that the collective reaction embodied in the adaptations commonly
accepted as normal betrays a tendency to repression and replacement
that is no less an indication of disease-process than is the reaction
presented in the individual neurosis. Indeed, from the point of view of
constructive consciousness and health, our so-called normality is, of
the two, the less progressive type of reaction. In truth, normality,
in evading the issues of the unconscious, envisages less the processes
of growth and a larger consciousness than the neurotic type of
reaction, which, however blind its motivation, at least comes to grips
with the actualities of the unconscious.
It is the hall-mark of normality that, suspecting nothing, it takes
itself completely for granted. In the spirit of true conformity, it
accepts its expressions of the vicarious at their face value and
assumes the burden of its self-inflicted compensations with entire
complacency. The neurotic, on the other hand, at least senses the
inherent discrepancy in his life. He at least demurs in so far as to
withhold assent from the mass-compromise embodied in the substitutions
and connivances of the social unconscious. In a word, it is the
distinction of the neurotic personality that he is at least consciously
and confessedly “nervous.”
This, as far as I can see, is the chief distinction between the
condition represented in normal adaptations and that represented in
the neurosis. The distinction lies merely in the greater weight of
numbers. Normality, in its numerical strength, concedes acceptance to
the average-reaction and so yields it right of way. In normality the
unconscious carries the day, while in the neurosis it is pushed to the
wall. The distinction psychologically lies in the successful compromise
of the one as contrasted with the enforced doubt and self-questioning
of the other. On the one hand there is the compact security of the
social polity; on the other, there is the more sensitive isolation and
uncertainty of the individual unit.
From the point of view of life, therefore, many of our normal reactions
are psychologically as truly a manifestation of the distorted and
substitutive as are those more isolated manifestations we commonly
stigmatize as neurotic disharmonies. I cannot see but that the
element of the repressed and substitutive on which is based Freud’s
theory of the neuroses is an element that underlies the expression
of consciousness in all phases of its manifestation and that hence
underlies also the phase represented in normality. In brief, normality
too is nervous. Normality too, since it is actuated no less from
motives of the ulterior and vicarious, even though it supposedly
represents the criterion of adult consciousness, is no less an
expression of the distorted and symbolic. This distortion is to be seen
upon every hand in the restless greed and obsessive self-seeking that
underlie the national, industrial, political, social and religious
possessivism and competition which are the typical psychology of
the normal mind, notwithstanding its plausible exterior of human
progress and universal goodwill. Universality and goodwill are not
there. These are but the manifest symptoms embodied by the social
personality after it has undergone the distortion represented in the
substitutive reactions characteristic of the social neurosis, that is,
after it has been subjected to the mechanism of diplomatic repression
and modification. What is there, in reality, is the will-to-self and
the particular aim which best serves the narcistic advantages of the
individuals comprising the social unit in question. The mechanism is
identical with that which underlies the individual neurosis, namely,
the covert aim toward the satisfactions of self which constitute
unconsciousness.
Normality too, then, is neurotic. Normality too has its repressions and
its substitutions, its secret symbols and equivocations. The difference
is that as normality possesses the warrant of the institutionalized
and current, it enjoys the protection of the consensus. And just
as the neurotic fails to comprehend the meaning of this vicarious
manifestation in its individual expression within himself and is a
prey to the inscrutable symptoms in which his organism finds its
compensations, so we, who are accounted normal, as little suspect the
meaning of this same symptomatology existing in its social expression
within ourselves. The neurotic resolutely defends his unconscious
duplicity behind an ingenious charade of unconscious symbolism, and
we no less resolutely defend ours through recourse to an identical
device. But if we will look beyond the narrower confine of the clinic
and face squarely the logical issue of Freud’s thesis, we cannot avoid
the conclusion that it is an indictment of man’s consciousness in its
entirety. Hence normality too must make answer for its complicity in
the unconscious ruse of substitution and evasion which we observe in
its more intense reaction as the introversions of personality presented
in the obviously arrested expression we call neurotic.
If anyone is disposed to question this view, let him consider but
one symptomatic reaction recently manifested throughout the social
organism. Could there be anywhere imagined an unconscious reaction
more wasteful and destructive or one of wider scope or severer
intensity than the symptom-reaction represented by the war that has
recently convulsed the world? Or consider the equally unconscious
expression presented in the tendency to religious emotionalism that has
followed in the wake of this world-war, with the corresponding effort
towards compensation and self-propitiation through recourse to the
sentimental and spiritualistic. Yet all the while the existence and
the significance of the unconscious motives that are latent in the two
extremes of emotional reaction underlying these manifest expressions
have not yet begun to be suspected and reckoned with on any clear,
conscious, analytic basis.
What, then, is the meaning of this tendency to substitution as shown
in the reaction of the social as well as of the individual organism?
If sexuality is the element substituted for, what is the psychology of
this factor called sexuality? What is its meaning? In analyzing the
unconscious of the neurotic personality it has become gradually clearer
to me that the factor underlying and actuating the conflict Freud
describes as repressed sexuality is nothing else than the personal
desire of ascendancy or the lust of acquisition _concomitant with the
organism’s unconscious reversion upon its own image_.[3]
Sexuality, then, is but a larger word for self. Sexuality is the
effort to limit life to the ends of personal aggrandizement. It is
the greed of the self-limited personality to compass the whole, as
contrasted with the societal personality that is encompassed by the
whole. But, since the unconscious is the same under all forms, self
or sexuality, with its pride of possession, its lust of gain, is no
less the unconscious element underlying the psychology of the normal
reaction-average. And precisely as in the individual reaction these
unconscious wishes are manifested only in the disguised symbols and
substitutive equivalents portrayed in neurotic symptoms, so too
in the social organism these egocentric interests antagonistic to
consciousness and growth venture to express themselves only in the
corresponding substitutions of the mass unconscious.
Thus the unconscious represented in the social reaction we call
normality is no whit different from the unconscious represented in
the individual reaction observable as the neurosis. We are habitually
deceived by the give-and-take policy of normal adaptation with its
secret covenant of good manners and outward forms. But the apparent
difference between the social and the individual neurosis consists
merely in the fact that the poignancy of the conflict underlying the
symptomatology of the social personality is largely mitigated and
condoned by reason of the wider numerical distribution of the social
organism and the consequent freer dissemination of the elements
involved.
But, though of wider distribution, there underlies the expressions of
normality no less of conflict and repression than exists in the acuter
expression seen in the individual neurosis. In the personality of the
more sensitive or feeling type we think of as neurotic, this tendency
to self-acquisitiveness or sexuality and its organic incompatibility
with the physiological inherency of life become, as it were, stalled
and impacted within him; while in the social organism the discrepancy
of personality, occasioned by its sexuality or pride of ascendancy,
apparently entails no such organic blocking as that occurring in the
individual. But the pain and impaction are present nevertheless, and
are betrayed no less in the recourse to the substitutive and symbolic
manifestations, characteristic of our prevalent social hysterias, not
to mention the more violent disorders that crash upon the world in the
reactions of political and industrial dissension and in the fiercer
paroxysms of war.
Such is the meaning of our so-called normality. To a degree that is
quite unsuspected by us its psychology is unconsciousness, and the
psychology of unconsciousness is the psychology of the self-image
secretly worshipped under the habitual guises of symbolism and
replacement. It is time we should recognize that this recourse to
the vicarious image is the psychology of many of the reactions of
the normal as well as of the neurotic, that in ourselves, no less
than in the neurotic, there is the putting forward of that which
_stands for_--the exploitation, under countless different aspects, of
that which may be adroitly put _instead of_ rather than the simple
acceptance of that which _is_.
Part of the purpose of the present study, however, is to try to bring
into clearer light a substitutive reaction that is much nearer home. As
psychoanalysts we need to take into account a distortive process that
has a much closer bearing upon ourselves and our responsibility toward
the problems of our common social consciousness. For, of all the forms
of substitution to which normality has recourse, the form that seems
to me of deepest significance for us and that presents the most vital
need of analysis and understanding within ourselves, is the vicarious
expression growing out of the tendency to an extrinsic approach to
the problems of consciousness that has come to be embodied in the
formulated _system_ of psychoanalysis.
In the whole symptomatology of normality with its social expression
of the vicarious there is no symptom-complex that is of greater
significance than that embodied in the attempt to apply to the reality
of human life the _system_ of human life offered in psychoanalysis as
it is to-day interpreted and applied. For a system of psychoanalysis is
itself but a substitution for life, a theory of life in place of life
itself. The theory of psychoanalysis sets out with a premise; life does
not. Psychoanalysis offers a solution; life is its own solution.
It is not theory as theory at which I demur; it is theory as
application to the needs of human growth. From the point of view of the
theory of psychoanalysis this therapeutic recourse in the treatment of
nervous disorders seems to me completely adequate and true; but from
the point of view of life I have come to regard the application of the
system or theory of psychoanalysis to the problems of individual needs
as an utterly futile procedure. I have come to feel that what is here
of value in the text-book is utterly worthless in our daily relation to
human personality.
I would not, of course, be understood as repudiating theory as such.
Seen clearly as the extrinsic expression it is, theory undoubtedly
has its place, but its place is not in the earnest relationship of
one human being to another such as obtains in the confidence and
communication offered in the actuality of psychoanalysis. It has
not yet been recognized, however, that we who are psychoanalysts
are ourselves theorists, that we also are very largely misled by an
unconscious that is social, that we too are neurotic, in so far as
every expression but that of life in its native simplicity is neurotic.
Our disharmony, however, is a phase of that widely diffused neurosis
that exists under the prevailing social consensus represented in the
normal adaptation.[4]
And so, as I now see it, there is no more subtle form of substitution
or one that is more successful in its capacity to evade the censor of
consciousness and obtain the stamp of genuineness than the symptom
represented in the _theory_ of the reactions of human beings as a
replacement for the reality of these reactions in life itself. Personal
experience compels me to concede that it is such a symptom that is
comprised in the theory of psychoanalysis as it is widely operative in
the consultation rooms of psychoanalysts to-day.
We have assumed that, in envisaging the unconscious, psychoanalysis
presupposes a more inclusive position than is generally characteristic
of the theoretical or systematized clinician. But it is a far-reaching
commentary upon the analyst’s capacity of discrimination that he still
presumes to analyze another on the basis of a system or theory, as
though a neurosis which is an essentially subjective condition were
of the nature of an objective bodily lesion. A dissociation within
the personality may find its analogy in a bodily lesion but never
its understanding. In the field of objective phenomena, theory is
entirely commensurate with its application. After all, the theory of
a mechanism is but the description of the principle of its operation.
In the objective world such an objective description presents no
discrepancy. It is the application of the objective method to an
objective principle. The theory of the hydraulic press is perfectly
consistent with its application. Between theory and application there
is here complete conjunction. No disparate element intervenes to mar
the transition from the descriptive to the practical.
So too with the theory of psychoanalysis as long as it pertains to the
objective viewpoint of the text-book. But in the subjective sphere
a totally different situation is presented. In dealing with life in
its actuality, we are not dealing with the descriptive and objective.
Human life is subjective. It is something experienced, something felt.
Life is not theoretical; it is actual. It is not descriptive; it is
dynamic. Human life _is_; it is not a _theory_ of what is. Life, as
it is felt, is our ultimate subjective actuality. Subjectivity or
intrinsic feeling is the very basis of life. As such, feeling is life’s
reality and no theory of feeling is an adequate substitute for this
reality. And so the objective theory of psychoanalysis or the objective
theory of the motives of human life is wholly inapplicable to the
subjective experience or to the actuality of human life as it is felt
in individual personality.
We have not begun to reckon in the least understandingly with the
nature of the subjective as contrasted with the objective sphere
of life. We are, in fact, quite naïve in our attitude toward the
whole subjective field, preferring to adopt toward it either a
mood of beatific reverence and mysticism, in which we conjure
unwarranted images of “psychic phenomena” that are allied with man’s
pseudo-religious vagaries, or we adopt a pseudo-scientific attitude
which repudiates as nonexistent or regards as unworthy of serious
thought any phenomena that do not lend themselves to objective
observation. Neither position seems to me tenable. We may dismiss
at once the attitude of the occultists, for mysticism entertains
no argument. But there is the need to consider very seriously the
subjective field of scientific reasoning and to keep clearly before
us the distinctive and impassable interval between the subjective and
objective domains of scientific inquiry.
It is most true that objective observation is the sole method whereby
we may obtain knowledge concerning the phenomenal world. This is true
whether the knowledge concern substances themselves or the manner of
their interaction. But we forget that knowledge thus gained is always
knowledge _concerning_. If I consider any object--a book, a flower,
or a stone--all that my knowledge will ever yield me is restricted to
the attributes that pertain to the substance in hand. I observe that
the stone is smooth, hard, ovoid. Submitting it to certain physical
and chemical tests I learn still further about its qualities, and so,
little by little, bring myself into ever closer touch with the object
in question. But always my data furnish only _closer touch with_. The
essential matter informing the substance we recognize as stone remains
as inaccessible at the conclusion of an ultimate analysis as in the
beginning. It is still knowledge _concerning_ and my facts, however
widely accumulated, are but attributive. Thus the _essential_ nature
of the objects about us is not to be approached by a method that is
_unessential_ or attributive.
The same circumstance confronts us in dealing with the phenomenal
world of our own experience. Here too we proceed upon the method of
objective inquiry--a perfectly legitimate field of “observation.”
We posit and collate all manner of phenomena and note no end of
“reactions.” But always we are restricted to a knowledge _concerning_,
to data _in regard to_. In brief, we remain apart from--are ever
outside of the reaction observed. Not that we may hold the attitude
of the philosophers and assume the “existence” of a “metaphysical
essence” that is inaccessible to us. We need rather to recognize
that the alleged essence is merely that organic condition of matter
with which our conscious processes are not organically continuous.
There are, however, organic conditions or processes with which our
consciousness is continuous--namely, the organic processes occurring
within our own bodies and registering themselves within us as feeling.
It is this continuity registered within us as feeling that is an
essentially subjective state of mind and that must not be confused with
the objective state of mind that merely registers impressions of the
observable action or outer condition of such feeling processes. This
subjective continuity is organic and inherent. True, it is possible
through a shunting of interest or attention (repression or misplaced
affect) to divert the course of our organic processes from their
natural perception in consciousness. But this artificial situation
through which we divert organic process from conscious participation
and acknowledgment is the condition of unconsciousness.
My whole contention is precisely this: we are constantly attempting to
deal objectively or attributively with experiences that are subjective
and essential. We fail to understand that our knowledge _about_ our
feelings is but attributive, that it brings us no nearer the feelings
themselves; that our feelings are essential, physiological and that
we may no more know our essential feelings through _observation_ of
their _attributes_ than we may reach the essence of any object about us
through a knowledge of _its_ attributes.
The basis of this essay is precisely the recognition of this impossible
breach between the condition of consciousness produced through a
knowledge _about_ feeling and the condition of consciousness that is
the feeling itself, between the state of mind that is _commentative_
and the state of mind that is _functioning_. The former is objective,
the latter is subjective. The failure of our psychological methods to
recognize this intrinsic distinction is to my mind the failure of our
entire approach to the problems of mental and social disharmony. It is
this unwitting substitution of the _theory_ of human feelings for the
unannotated experience of the feelings themselves as recorded in our
interactive functioning as human beings that is the impossibility of
our present “method” of psychoanalysis.
This position is for me an all-important one. Upon the acceptance
or rejection of it, I believe, depends the growth or the decline of
psychoanalysis as an agency of release for the intrinsic needs of the
neurotic personality. To-day, under the impetus of psychoanalysis in
its theoretical or vicarious form, we are carrying theory to the point
of absurdity. There is now, for example, the psychoanalytic theory of
the nursery. Anxious young mothers are running about looking for texts
which will serve them as guides in the love of their children. They are
diligently searching upon every hand for the latest approved theory
of maternal love. And in response to the demand the popular literature
is supplying them with full details. But there are no librettos of the
nursery. Baedekers to motherhood are not to be had. The motherhood that
is true is a subjective relationship, and it is only subjectively that
it can be felt and understood.
I shall not forget the experience told me by a patient whose mother,
actuated by the theory of motherhood in its highest “scientific”
interpretation, undertook to enlighten her upon the significance of
sex. The incident left the most painful impression upon her. The
mother, having gathered courage for the performance of her maternal
duty, delivered her errand with a punctiliousness which from the point
of view of technique was irreproachable. She spoke out of the strictest
regard for the theory of motherhood. But unfortunately her theory left
out of account an item that needs to be reckoned with, namely, the
native simplicity of the consciousness of childhood. The woman spoke
out of the theory of a truth, but her child listened with the organic
susceptibility of truth itself. The mother had not accepted within
herself the actual significance of life, and so, in accordance with
the formality of a theory, was vicariously imposing its acceptance
upon her child. But childish perception pierces the veil of pedagogic
finesse. The rigid demeanour of her instructor readily disclosed the
discrepancy between the verbal recital and the utter lack of conscious
acceptance within herself. For the child, now a middle-aged woman, the
moment was an unforgettable one. She had witnessed in her mother an
outrage to organic truth, and the shock of that experience caused a
psychic disunity between mother and child from which there resulted an
introversion of personality that covered half a lifetime. And so, while
the theory of the nursery is from the point of view of theory wholly
irreproachable, it is from the point of view of the nursery wholly
absurd.
A lesson which parents have yet to learn is that the child is closer
to the heart of things than the grown-up--that the consciousness of
childhood stands in a far more truthful relationship to the actuality
of life, as it is, than the consciousness of the conventionalized and
sophisticated adult. For years it has been my feeling that beneath the
conflict of the neurotic personality there is reiterated an urge toward
the expression of this primal inherency of consciousness. To-day, it is
more than ever my view that in the neurotic reaction there is expressed
an inherent plea for the native simplicity and truth of this organic
consciousness. It becomes more and more clear to me that the pain of
these personalities is due solely to the organic discrepancy of an
unconsciousness and indirection within themselves, and that essentially
their urge is to bring themselves again into harmony with the law of
their personality by reuniting the needs of their consciousness with
the needs of their organic life.
As Nietzsche says: “May there not be--a question for
alienists--neuroses of health?”[5] This question for alienists is
indeed a vital one but it is one which, as far as I am aware, has
not as yet even dimly occurred to us. There is nowhere, it may be
noted, a clearer argument for Nietzsche’s hypothesis than Nietzsche’s
own neurosis. Unfortunately, however, alienists are still as little
interested in the positive processes that bespeak the organism’s
conscious health, as physicians in general are interested in the
positive processes that insure the organism’s physical health. But, as
long as the collective social mind remains the collective unconscious
mind, it is not to be expected that we shall approach the unconscious
of the individual, in either its psychic or in its somatic aspect, from
the basis of an inclusive consciousness and health. The question is
often asked whether insanity will ever become curable. The answer can
only be that the insanity of the individual cannot be curable as long
as there exists the insanity of the social mind about him. It is not
humanly possible for the psychiatrist to remedy conditions of mental
disorganization as long as he himself is part of a disorganized social
mind.
If the psychoanalyst, in applying to the lives of his patients a theory
of life, is himself unconsciously resorting to the self-protection
of the substitutive and symbolic; if the blocked personality of our
patients meets with a blocking in ourselves, with a compromise, a
theory, a something which stands as a _sign for_ rather than that
which _is_--a situation which offers a compromise mechanism identical
with that for which they have sought aid from us--then clearly the
way is not yet open for the release of the conflict within these
personalities. For a patient may be untrammelled only in so far as the
analyst is himself untrammelled.
In taking this attitude I do not make any personal claim for myself.
This position is not one to which I have come through the success of
my work but rather through its failure. For in the measure in which
I have adhered to the dictates of a preconceived normality, in just
that measure has my work defeated itself. Though I have for some time
theoretically disavowed the mental status represented in the normal
reaction, I have tended unconsciously all the while to ally myself with
this standardized brand of unconsciousness and thus, in my own work,
have inclined to hold to a theory of life rather than to its actuality.
Not, then, with the neurotic alone, but with us all, it would seem that
consciousness is mainly employed in efforts of self-protection and
evasion. Truly, consciousness makes cowards of us all. But this is not
consciousness in the sense of life and growth; it is consciousness in
the sense of retention and self. It is not a free consciousness; it is
consciousness with a reservation. It is not true consciousness; it is
unconsciousness.
In accordance with such a mode of consciousness each of us is elbowing
for a place for himself. Each is seeking more territory for his own
expansion. Each of us is an unconscious overlord striving to secure
the supremacy of his own “personality.” Universal and normal as this
reaction is, its tendency is obsessive and ill. I do not believe that
life is aggressive and that growth is concerned for itself. Personality
is impersonality. What is needed is the quiet acceptance of life in its
actuality. In this and this alone lies the opportunity for freedom and
growth.
We hear much to-day of the technique of psychoanalysis. In truth
there is no such thing. It is just another defence mechanism, just
another resistance to the actualities of life. As in all instances
of therapeutic specialization, the technique of psychoanalysis has
become a fetish with us. It has become a veritable complex, a disorder
from which I find patients actually suffering. The situation is quite
ridiculous. The more I think of it, the more I am convinced that
the so-called technique of psychoanalysis is but another hobgoblin
wherewith the unconscious tendency of professionalism with its egoistic
striving for preferment contrives to preserve its own separateness
and distinction. I confess that, in my own unconsciousness, I have
more than once laid stress upon the importance of the analytic
technique. But let us not be misled by what is called the technique of
psychoanalysis. It is but another subterfuge for the reality of life.
A technique of psychoanalysis is no more possible than a technique of
love or of friendship or of motherhood. There is a technique and a
very difficult technique of the _theory_ of psychoanalysis. But that
is quite a different thing. Psychoanalysis itself or, as its name
implies, the loosening or freeing of consciousness is nothing else than
the conscious acceptance of life. As such, it is the exact contrary
of the objective and technical. Life is not a technique. It does
not express itself in terms of technique. Technique is an objective
instrument. Life is a subjective experience. It is a joy or a sorrow,
a disappointment or an aspiration, and it can no more be handled from
the point of view of technique than it can be handled with the scalpel
of the anatomist.[6]
From these and similar reflections I have come to regard the formality
of applying a system of psychoanalysis to the life of an individual
as an actual hindrance rather than as an aid to the true expression
of his personality. It is but an added repression, blocking the very
way it attempts to open. For to meet the unconscious of a patient with
unconsciousness within oneself, is only to answer symbolic substitution
and indirection with the same substitution and indirection in an
altered, more subtle, socially plausible form.
The whole meaning, therefore, of an analysis that is actual and not
theoretical is the realization and acceptance on the part of the
analyst of the utmost unconscious symbolization and distortion within
himself. The analysis of a patient is the analysis of oneself. It
cannot be otherwise. And when I say analysis, I do not mean an analysis
that is a mere unconscious concession to normality--a giving vent
to the egoistic erotism of the individual by diffusing it among the
widely distributed elements of the social personality in the manifold
distortions of sexuality. I mean an analysis of personality in its
widest expression--an analysis through which the individual comes into
the conscious acceptance not only of the repression or distortion that
is personal and that is comprised within the individual introversion
we know as the neurosis, but of the distortion or substitution of
personality that is social and that constitutes the confederacy of
unconsciousness popularly endorsed as normality.
The prime requisite for clear, free, untrammelled work in the
analysis of human personality is the unqualified rejection of the
unconscious compromise embodied in the social reaction of normality.
The analyst who is not himself capitulating to the concession of the
social unconscious will repudiate the attitude of the psychotherapist
whose criterion is the restoration of his patient to a condition
of normality, and will take his stand against any recourse that is
based upon a programme of compromise and habituation. He will see
that normality is merely unconsciousness on a co-operative basis and
he will not be deceived by its insidious offers. It is only through
such an attitude of complete freedom within oneself that it is
possible to offer the opportunity of freedom to the personality of
the neurotic patient, the very heart of whose disharmony lies in an
inner repugnance, however bewildered and confused, to the untruth of
the social unconscious comprising his milieu. Viewed analytically,
normality is but the self-flattery through which we pretend we are not
unconscious. By so pretending, however, we are only furthering our
tendency to deeper unconsciousness.
As long as there is self-protection, there is self-limitation; as long
as there is self-limitation, we are necessarily setting a limitation
to the possibility of growth and consciousness in others. Only through
rejecting such protection may we come to accept the testimony of the
unconscious within ourselves. Otherwise, we ourselves become the
inhibitors rather than the liberators of consciousness; we who are
psychoanalysts become mere guardians of disease-processes instead of
the willing repositories of these unconscious factors, as they exist
in others, through our understanding and acceptance of these processes
as they exist within ourselves. For consciousness grows upon the
medium of consciousness. It cannot be nourished upon an extraneous
soil. Theories of consciousness are extraneous. In the presence of
the actuality of life, theories of life become mere intellectual
snobbery. Being wise, sophisticated and remote, they are inadequate
to meet life in its native simplicity. Bearing the testimonials of
authority, the credentials of office, they do not come low enough.
These insignia of rank only tend to intimidate personality in its
natural simplicity. What is needed for the release of the neurotic
individual is the personality who imposes nothing of his own and thus
allows the completest opportunity for the unfolding of the repressed
and introverted personality of others.
As psychoanalysis develops and our understanding deepens, it will be
seen that it is not scientific equipment alone but also directness
of outlook that make the psychoanalyst. It will be seen that the
personalities who are adapted to an understanding of the needs of
human life will not necessarily occupy places of importance amid the
distractions of affairs, but that their place may be an unobtrusive
one in which understanding for understanding’s sake will be their sole
concern. The various rules laid down by medical or other syndicates
with a view to determining what are the literal qualifications for a
psychoanalyst are wholly beside the point.[7] The qualifications for
understanding are not literal. Although we may formulate the most
meticulous of programmes setting forth the requirements of tuition,
it will be found that personality will, in the final count, override
them all. Besides, I cannot think that it is due entirely to the
accidents of chance that the spokesman for the adoption of this or
that recipe as a prerequisite to “sound training” in psychoanalysis
should unfailingly submit a menu that tallies in detail with his own
catalogue of merits. After all, psychoanalysis is a very large name
for a very simple thing. I well know that this statement offers a
delectable morsel to any who are disposed to misinterpret my meaning.
It will be readily regarded as recklessly casting aside as valueless
all the years of my own medical and psychological training. But the
responsibility for such a misinterpretation rests upon those who are
unable to distinguish between the culture that is applied academically
and the academy that is applied culturally. All that I mean is that
whosoever follows the calling of psychoanalysis is merely one who seeks
to understand and accept life as it is without intruding himself or
imposing his view or exerting his authority. Indeed psychoanalysis is
essentially the abrogation of authority. For the psychoanalyst is not
content but receptacle. Lacking method or design he offers nothing, but
is the recipient of all there is of human experience as subjectively
substantiated within himself.
But there enters here a consideration of vital importance and one
that has not yet been adequately reckoned with and understood. If the
psychoanalyst is to be the recipient, there must be those who stand to
him as recipient also. If he is to understand, he must be understood.
If the life of the analyst is to be a reality and not a system, he
himself must in reality participate in the life in which he invites
others to participate. If it is his thesis that human life cannot
subsist alone, that communication is life, that it is the very meaning
of consciousness, neither can he subsist without communication.
And so there need to be in the life of the analyst the personalities
with whom he may share, with whom he may communicate, who accept him
and are accepted by him in turn. For to analyze is to be analyzed, to
understand is to be understood. Needless to say these are conclusions
to which I have not come alone. I could not have. They are the outcome
of my own opportunity of participation and expression, as the need of
communication has come to unfold itself in my own experience.
Clearly, then, we who stand as the promoters of a new and untrammelled
consciousness must look carefully into our own lives to discover
whether we ourselves, as part of the social consciousness, are not
theorists rather than unified personalities actuated solely by the law
of understanding and of growth within ourselves. Clearly, we ourselves
must realize the completely vicarious and repressed element underlying
the expression of unconsciousness embodied in the social unrest of
normality, and, fearlessly repudiating this collective reaction of
substitution and evasion, break completely with the popular policies of
compromise and untruth underlying it. In this course we shall take our
stand for the freedom and clarity of a mode of consciousness that aims
solely toward the growth of self-understanding and communication. For
life is not a system, it is not a technique. Life is simple, and its
course is one of quiet flow. In so far as psychoanalysis is technical,
it is not life. In so far as its aim is normality, it is not free.
The choice is an unequivocal one. It is a choice between expediency
and truth, between fixity and growth. For the habitual or normal
mind whose criterion is expedience the choice is already determined;
but for the personality that is sensitive to the values of life, the
choice of growth is no less inevitable. It is organically so. Hence it
is for each of us to make his choice on which side he will take his
stand--whether, adhering to a theory of life, he will blindly protect
himself against the recognition and acknowledgment of the vicarious
element of normality and compromise within his own unconscious, or
whether he will stand for a mode of consciousness that flings away
every habitual protection and accepts only the conditions of life as
they unfold themselves in the development of his own personality as
well as in that of others. The outlook is really not ambiguous. The
question is whether life will be a theory or system corroborated by the
technical outfit of the consultation room or whether it will be the
deeply fulfilled experience that comprises consciousness in its organic
reality.
The definite biological theory on which this thesis rests implies an
organic or societal continuum as the essential basis of consciousness.
To understand this theory we shall be helped if, in the beginning,
we will seek to replace the more or less arbitrary divergences of
personal outlook with a conception that attempts to stand far enough
removed from this personal mode to contemplate within its more
ample formulation the personal outlook as well. For this purpose we
must discover, as far as possible, our tendency to personalistic
delimitation--a tendency due to the unconscious systematization of the
restricted individual unit--and in this way approach consciousness anew
from the more inclusive basis of its societal meaning.
CHAPTER II
A RELATIVE CONCEPT OF CONSCIOUSNESS--AN ANALYSIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN
ITS ETHNIC ORIGIN
In presenting a psychological discussion that presupposes the altered
basis of the relativists, I am under no illusion as to the wide
disparity between the mathematical conception of the relativists
in regard to the universe and the clinical preoccupations of a
psychopathologist. It is now conceded, however, that the theory
of relativity is not without its revolutionary influence upon our
scientific thought processes generally. And so, although I am not
competent to an appreciation of the theory of relativity in the
objective sense of the physicists, I hope I shall not seem presumptuous
in attempting a discussion of consciousness that demands as its basis a
viewpoint that is analogous to theirs.[8]
As I understand it, the inadequacy of the Newtonian system of astronomy
is its autogenous exclusion of data requisite to a principle which
presupposes a basis of universal applicability. Assuming an unqualified
absolute to reside within the limits of its own circumscribed area, it
posits a principle which fails to take account of factors operating
within the larger constellation wherein its own system is but a
contributory element. So that, in estimating the components requisite
to a more inclusive scale of computation, the Newtonian postulate
omits to reckon with the principle of the time-space element that
is constitutive of the extension intrinsic to itself and that is,
therefore, mathematically indispensable in an encompassment of the
universal and all-inclusive astronomical purview with respect to which
its own system becomes but relative and extrinsic.
Little by little the necessities of a widening outlook have demanded
a gradual broadening of conceptual principles generally. Of late I
have been led to views that appear to warrant the conclusion that, in
the sphere of psychic phenomena no less than in the realm of physics,
a system of absolutism, preclusive of data existing outside its own
autogenously circumscribed principle, wholly dominates our presumably
conscious world. Accordingly, if we are to reckon with consciousness
upon a true and inclusive basis, it is required that the system of
absolutism thus embodied shall give way to a conception of relativity
in the conscious sphere comparable to the principle of relativity in
the physical universe.[9]
I do not see why, in his mental and emotional reactions, man may not so
far free himself from the traditional superstitions of imbued inference
as to recognize at last that, even with respect to conceptions that are
the basis of his own mental operations, there is a difference between
the values that _seem_ and the values that _are_. I do not see why he
may not recognize that processes which he has hitherto regarded as
habitually inevitable are not by any means organically necessary, but
that the two may in fact be essentially contradictory one of the other.
If in the objective world man may ungird himself of the accustomed
limitations of a hitherto accepted Euclidean geometry, may he not
within the sphere of his subjective consciousness also rid himself of
prepossessions which, though they appear to us now as no less basic,
may ultimately prove equally non-essential?
We have recently waged a world-war which, according to the _state of
mind_ of its participants prior to its occurrence, was the admittedly
inevitable recourse, but which, in the opinion of thinking men
subsequent to its enactment, is now equally admitted to have been a
wholly unnecessary eventuality. How then, upon our present basis of
mentation, may we conclude what is an adequate criterion by which
we may determine a dependable process of thinking? If we may know
our states of mind only after we have vented the emotions that first
incited them, of what use is it to know them? If states of mind can
produce calamities that gather their toll of human life by the millions
and we can, by subsequently taking thought, come to regard them as
unnecessary, what must be felt toward states of mind that have produced
such calamities? Surely it is not the part of intelligence to feel
regret of a disaster only after the disaster has befallen. If disaster
need not befall, would it not be wiser to deplore it beforehand and so
avert the disaster? This would seem the logical course, but the truth
is that the logical course is not accessible to man in his present
state of unconsciousness. Man may think logically but he cannot be
warranted to act logically. For, in his present stage of development,
his actions are predominantly under the guidance of his emotions and
his thought can therefore only follow after.
Consciousness is the individual’s acquiescence in sequences that are
determined by the necessities of organic law. Unconsciousness is the
individual’s resistance to these organic processes. As consciousness
is anterior to its own realization, so unconsciousness ever follows
in the wake of its own event. We think to-day only in terms of what
ought to have been yesterday, and the event of to-morrow embodies
again the reaction to the issues of to-day. Thus our actions are
always but the unconscious reflections of the day preceding, and in
our unconsciousness it is only in the aftermath of the morrow that we
interpret the omens of to-day.
If man’s judgment is competent to apprehend the data of events
subsequent to their occurrence, why may it not be equally possible,
through our prior apperception of the mental states leading up to them,
to envisage the same events with the same clarity anteriorly and thus
forestall the useless mistakenness and destruction that now follow
inevitably with their enactment? Surely it is clear that, in continuing
to preserve unaltered this same state of mind whose world-wide
consequences we have just witnessed, we may be, at the present moment,
preparing a similar if not a yet greater catastrophe, the while we
are at the same moment as completely oblivious of it. Indeed, from a
position that is anterior to the emotional inducements to which our
mental states are inevitably subject in our present absolute view, it
will be seen that an unconscious and destructive disposition toward
life is as inseparable from an absence of self-cognizance on the part
of the social mind as the factors of disintegration and unconsciousness
are inseparable within the life-sequences of the individual unit.
In its necessary limitation with respect to the relativity of
consciousness in its universal compass, the constellated system of
processes which at present comprises the sphere of the mental life
will, in my view, ultimately appear analogous to the traditional
system of Newton with respect to the universe of relativity in the
encompassment of objective mathematics. As in the intrinsic principle
of absolutism comprising the Newtonian system of gravitation, so in the
self-determined principle of absolutism, comprising our present system
of psychology, a dimensional factor has been left out of account, the
inclusion of which completely shifts the basis of former calculations
and so distorts our habitual reckonings as to demand the fundamental
reconstruction of accepted values.
But while the principle of relativity comprehended by the objective
formulae of the physicists is mathematically beyond my reach, the
conception of relativity within the subjective life appears to me not
only compellingly clear, but organically necessary. Indeed, in the
absence of this conception of the relativity of consciousness, it is no
longer possible for me to reckon adequately with the processes of the
mental life. For in default of a working basis broad enough to embrace
the dimensional element of the system, individual and social, whereof
we ourselves are a component part, there is lacking the scientific
comprehensiveness requisite to a universal principle of evaluation.
It is worthy of note that between the objective or mathematical
theory of relativity of Einstein and the subjective or organismic
theory of relativity here considered there is to be traced, however
inconclusively, a philosophical parallelism that is significant.[10]
My feeling is, though as yet it is little more than an intimation
with me, that this cosmological parallel between the subjective and
objective spheres of relativity marks a concomitance that is consistent
throughout. I do not see how it could be otherwise since the subjective
and the objective spheres of life, embodying the bipolar aspects of
the phenomenal world, represent but obverse phases of one and the same
universe. The analogy that interests me here, however, has to do with
the feature that is equally the basis of the two modes of relativity,
namely, the feature which entails the abrogation of absolute standards
of evaluation and the recognition of the kinetic factor that is organic
to both. In the objective interpretation of astronomy this factor
comprises the mathematical space-time coefficient of the physicists’
fourth dimension; and in a subjective interpretation of consciousness
it comprises correspondingly the kinetic element that determines the
functional coefficient of the organic life as a whole.
The thought represented in “the organic life as a whole” is, like the
inclusive scheme of the physicists, to be understood only by exclusion,
that is, by exclusion of a point of view that is _not_ organic, or by
exclusion of the absolute system, individual and social, comprising our
present static basis of consciousness. As this organismic conception
of consciousness is relativity itself within the subjective sphere,
its encompassment can no more be apprehended in our present scheme of
psychological evaluation than the relativity of the physicists can be
apprehended on a static Newtonian basis.
Einstein’s theory of relativity is not intelligible on the absolute
basis of the older system of astronomy, of which conception the newer
mathematical theory is, by reason of its wider inclusiveness, the
logical replacement. Likewise, the theory of subjective relativity or
the organismic conception of consciousness cannot be understood on the
basis of the absolute principle resident in the Freudian conception of
the unconscious, of which principle the organismic conception is, by
inclusion, the more encompassing formulation.
Hence this organismic conception of consciousness, subsumed under
the postulate of relativity, will be understood only as we discard
entirely the absolute conception represented in our present system of
psychology. Because of our own absolutistic basis, we do not realize
that the absolutism intrinsic to the dynamic system of our present
individualistic conception of consciousness maintains a position that
is relatively not less static than the older descriptive systems of
consciousness in relation to the dynamic psychology of Freud. The
Freudian system is dynamic in respect to the system it has superseded
but static in respect to the principle by which it must now in turn,
I believe, be superseded, precisely as our own Newtonian system is
dynamic with respect to the older Ptolemaic system of astronomy it has
transcended but static with respect to the mathematical principle of
relativity which now in turn has transcended it.
Of course, the fact that the intrinsic limitation of our astronomical
systematization has led us arbitrarily to regard time and space as
absolute entities, rather than as the functional co-ordinates of
matter, has no immediate bearing whatever beyond the need of adjusting
a quite infinitesimal error in the astronomical reading of certain
minimal deflections. It does not in the least alter the practical
conduct of human affairs. For the grocer and the apothecary our
standards remain undisturbed. So also in the more intimate adaptations
of our human relations, the absolute basis of mensuration that has
actuated our reckonings with respect to the objective world about us
has not for a moment touched our subjective mode or the affective
sphere of our living. But when this artificial basis of self-determined
absolutism operates within the organic sphere of man’s affective life,
wherein is the very centre of his being, there are recorded errors
whose consequences reach to the core of life itself. It is here, in the
absolute system of evaluations pertaining to the affective reactions
of human conduct, that there is needed the correcture in reading
the deflection, both individual and social, that comprises man’s
unconsciousness.
We have yet to learn that it is in the common affects of men that there
resides the basis of their collective biology. Only in the affective
reactions comprising the native, organic continuum of life may we
trace the menstruum of our human consciousness. And so, in approaching
the affective or organic implications entailed through the arbitrary
systematization that is our own absolutism, we are entering upon the
study of the distorted sensations and reactions in which is embodied,
I believe, the essential pathology of consciousness represented in the
neuroses.
In considering the conception of the relativity of consciousness we
shall acquire a clearer insight into the more comprehensive scheme
subsumed under it, if we will begin with an analysis of the rudimentary
processes comprising our personal judgments and consider the elements
into which our primary impressions may be resolved.
Our judgments are formed from the material of our impressions or, as
we say, we reason from observation. This being so, what must be the
substance of our observations and what the nature of the processes
of reason thus derived? To observe is to stand apart from and record
the impressions reflected to us from the object observed. So that upon
consideration our observations are seen to consist of the _reflected
images_ or mental _pictures_ of the world of objects by which we are
surrounded. That is to say, impressions of objects consist of the
aspect or surface which is reflected to us from them and which is thus
mirrored in the reflecting surface of our own perceptions.
But in this very process of observation an unwarranted assumption
has already been posited in advance--the assumption, namely, that
the position intrinsic to the observer is an all-inclusive and
authentic one. Already it presumes a universe of which the onlooker’s
own self-limited position is the basis. It does not account for the
integral component that is the observer’s own organic dimension.
In brief, the very point of view of the observer lays claim to the
prerogative of an absolute cosmogony whereof he is himself the
unconsciously static, self-determined centre. Whatever the point of
view, it is invariably “the point of view” of the observer. So that
in constituting ourselves perceptual foci from which, according to
our self-appointed terms, we look out as from a background upon the
phenomena of life, we have unconsciously become artificially detached
spectators of a merely static _aspect_ of life. This is what I mean
by the autogenous exclusion of data extrinsic to the self-determined
system of which we ourselves are only a part, but which, in the
light of the relativity of consciousness as a whole, is revealed, on
the contrary, as an arbitrary system determined by our own static
absolutism. Regarded from the point of view of relativity, to adopt
such a detached, observational outlook toward life is to view it in the
merely flat, bidimensional plane of the image. It is not to experience
life through participation in the extension of its full-dimensional
actuality.
Upon analysis, then, our world of subjectively tabulated impressions
becomes but an artificial world reflecting the artificial
systematization that is our own detached observation of it. Our
unconsciousness is our failure to realize that bidimensional
reproductions of actuality are not actuality. Our own organisms as well
as the surrounding objects of actuality are elements that are equally
to be included in the organic continuum of our human experience. The
mental pictures comprising our bidimensional _impressions_ of objects,
however adequate as pictures, are not adequate as expressions of
actuality in the sense of the dynamic extension comprising our own
organic inclusion.
Contrary, therefore, to the casual assumption current among us, we
do not apprehend the objects about us as they exist in their cubic
outline, but only in the bidimensional “foreshortening” that is our
own mental or pictorial impression of them. Our so-called objective
apperception of the world of actuality is in fact superficial and
unreal. Our alleged world composed of impressions is pictorial rather
than actual. It is static rather than kinetic. In consequence of the
bidimensional visual plane in which our objective fields are reflected,
it is inevitable that our environmental actuality should appear in
the form of pictures before us. Looking out upon the world from a
bidimensional basis, we can perceive it only in terms of the reflected
image formed upon our own bidimensional mental background. It is due
also, then, to this contributing factor of a flat or reflected visual
image within ourselves that there is registered within ourselves a
flat or reflected mental image of the world about us. For in virtue
of the bidimensional picture in which our impressions are necessarily
reflected, our mental perception of objects is likewise necessarily
pictorial and bidimensional.[11]
Such is the probable ethnological account of this misconstruction
of actuality that underlies our mental world. The significance of
such a pictorial and artificially foreshortened representation of
the objective world and its mental influence in foreshortening the
tridimensions of actuality in general cannot be overstressed. We need
to realize the circumstance of our remote or bidimensional position
of merely mental or impressionistic observers. From this position the
mentally reflected and artificially pictorial outlook with which the
world of solidarity is individually viewed by us represents but the
portrait of life whereof the reality is the inclusiveness of life as
experienced through our subjective continuity as functional elements in
the organic whole. So that while it is most true that we reason from
observation, yet if our observation is imbued with a bidimensional
or superficial bias, then our reason is also influenced by this same
bidimensionally imbued bias. If our observation is not subjectively
inclusive of the objective world about us, in the same measure our
judgments are not inclusive of it.
It is this non-inclusiveness of consciousness that constitutes our
mental systematization. In this perceptual relationship to life, due to
our detached basis of interpretation of it upon grounds of the apparent
aspect rather than of its solid actuality, consists the arbitrary
absolutism of our present system of consciousness. Due to this organic
misconception of consciousness, we habitually prefer the picturesque
semblance of the aspect to the pragmatic inclusiveness of the actual.
This is why we tend to explain life rather than to live it. This is why
the adduced hypothesis of life counts with us more than life itself.
But an account of life that does not include the consciousness that
is our own kinetic function and repudiate the static pictures of life
arbitrarily projected by us does not compass life in the full orb of
its rounded actuality. A principle of life that does not embrace the
principle arising out of the bias of our own self-made systems of
personal absolutism and unconsciousness is not adequate to encompass
life in the rounded sum of its functional inclusiveness. It is needful
to recognize that, in the unconscious absolute underlying the personal
relatedness of each of us to every other, there is involved an organic
_resistance_ or a mutual repulsion among the elements of the societal
personality that forms an impasse to its concerted function. On the
contrary, in the mutual inclusiveness of our individual organisms as
elements within the confluent sum we thus compose, there is embodied
the organic continuum that underlies the societal organism of man as
a whole. It is this homogeneous substrate of man’s consciousness in
its totality that is implied in the principle of the relativity of
consciousness.
If, however, an ethnological account is adequate to explain the
remote, pictorial relation in which we stand with respect to the
world of objective actuality, such an account is not adequate to an
understanding of the pictorial view we have unconsciously come to
assume toward the world of subjective actuality or in relation to the
organisms with which we constitute a common species and with which,
being subjectively akin, we are organically identical. If phylogenetic
theory accounts for the deflections from reality of the reactions of
consciousness in the large, it does not account for the deflections
of consciousness in the particular reactions of the personality that
determine our relations to our individual fellows. Thus far we have
considered this absolute system comprising our personal basis only in
relation to the objective world or to the world of things; we have not
yet considered it subjectively or in relation to the individuals with
whom a common affectivity renders us organically identical. It is only
within the subjective sphere of our affects, representing man’s organic
racial continuum, that this distortion of our outlook is manifested in
its deepest poignancy.
It is, therefore, only in its ontogenetic mode that we may fully
realize the organic deviations within the consciousness of man, due to
his bidimensional and unreal apperception of his fellows, and to his
consequently false inferences resultant upon an artificially remote
and pictorial attitude toward them. It is here alone, I believe, that
is to be traced the philosophy of the deflections observable in the
above-mentioned reaction of personal resistance as it appears not only
in the difform reaction characterizing the isolated personality of
the neurotic individual, but also in the uniform reactions presented
in the _relatively no less deflected group-expressions comprising the
collective personality of the social consensus_. It has become more
and more clear to me that it is this error of our mental refraction,
due to the subjective deflection comprising the bidimensional judgment
of each in assuming a pictorial rather than a real relationship to
others, that is the essence of our resistances. In this surface
reflection, that is the personal attitude of each toward every other
and that embodies the psychology of our resistances, is represented
man’s traditional systematization, both individual and social. For, in
judging or viewing life on the _absolute_ basis of how it appears to
_me_, I automatically render it beholden to my personal interpretation
of it. In my autocratic attitude of onlooker I necessarily repudiate
the inherency of the individual or object looked on. Thus, as the
self-assumed centre of the universe, the individual is completely
detached psychically from the organic actuality of everything within
his observation, and, in his present mental attitude, whatever he
thinks that he knows and feels is unconsciously constrained by the
illusory supremacy of his personal wish. This is the insidious fallacy
of the reflected aspect. This constitutes the personal absolute or
systematization which, in dominating our present mode of consciousness,
completely distorts the universe of reality. It is such a reflective
attitude of personalism and unconsciousness that is our exclusion of
data that lie outside the system intrinsic to ourselves and that may be
included only in the fuller comprehension of an organic relativity.
This reflective attitude entails an autocratic interpretation of life
on the basis of one’s own personal evaluation, and its effect is to
sever the natural bond between the elements of the societal body. As
the inevitable concomitant of this habitually reflective attitude
toward life there is mental dissociation rather than an assimilative
participation such as may only be realized in the inclusiveness of
consciousness as an organic whole. Only an organic coalescence in
our common affectivity, as contrasted with our present attitude of
detached, bidimensional perception of one another, will open the course
to spontaneous development in yielding the natural way to the instinct
of mating and reproduction wherein alone is the basis of a constructive
societal life. For resistance is of the affective life. It is a
phenomenon that is essentially organic in that it marks an obstruction
within the societal personality of man in the relation _inter se_ of
the elements, individual and social, of which our societal personality
is composed. In our blind inversion of the essential processes of life,
we fail to recognize that there can be no healthful growth of the
organism apart from the soil to which it is indigenous. If isolation
and an artificial medium are death to the growth of vegetation, they
are death no less to the societal instinct of our common consciousness
in which is found the natural medium for the growth and activity of
man. In the measure in which we allow ourselves to participate in and
become intrinsic and contributory elements in the world of organic
actuality about us, will our pictorial mode of envisagement yield place
to the subjective experience of a dimensional inclusiveness that is
complete in its actuality. To view the world of actuality in its merely
static, cross-sectional appearance is to know only the photography of
life. Its kinetic reality may be known only through the subjective
inclusion of our organic participation in it.
We cannot return too often to original sources in repudiating
conceptions whereof they are the basis. We experience reality only in
the measure in which we disavow the symbols of unreality. In proportion
as we apprehend subjective fallacy may we encompass the reality
underlying it. It is where our conceptual constructions of life leave
off that our constructive conceptions of life begin. We have seen that
the mathematicians have come to regard as theoretically worthless those
objective calculations whose standards of evaluation are not measured
in accordance with the principle of an inclusive relativity. Likewise
a formulation of values in the subjective sphere of consciousness
lacks an adequate principle of evaluation if it does not rest upon the
relative principle comprising the organic and inclusive conception of
consciousness in its societal totality.
If, in the dissociation of the consciousness of man from his organic
individuality, he is unconsciously assuming a personal absolute that
is merely a reflection of the mass absolute assumed by the collective
social unconscious about him, then what we call the consciousness of
man with its presumable function of dependable evaluation is at all
times but a system of images, and his vaunted prerogative of a personal
absolute is only a dissociative reaction due to his own secondarily
adaptive systematization. Upon this basis, what we call our opinions
are, after all, not our opinions, and our so-called beliefs are not
beliefs at all. For all our formulations and systematizations with
respect to human consciousness are but rationalizations serving as
convenient foils for the blind assertion of the personal absolutism
that is but the autocratic prerogative of our own dissociation, both
individual and social.
While theoretically, the objective findings of Freud are of
unquestionable validity throughout, as has been fully corroborated
through the repeated investigations of those of us who have studied
the manifestations of the unconscious in ourselves and in others, my
researches within the last years have convinced me that our objective
finding is not the point--that what we have called the objective
evidence has been all along but our personal or adaptive evidence
and that, being unconsciously based upon habitual bidimensional
inference, this basis has no relation whatever to life in its organic
inclusiveness. The system of Freud is thus adequate only on the
adaptive basis of normality. _By normality I mean the consensus
comprising the personal absolute vested in the unconscious of the
collective mind determining the social average_.
It is disconcerting, I know, now that we have but recently settled
ourselves to enjoy in comfort the established principles of Freud’s
psychology, to think that we may be compelled through the requirements
of wider accommodation to seek other ground. Nevertheless, if the
position in which we have settled to study the complexes of men is
itself just another complex of the social mind whereof the individual
mind we would study is but a reproduction, it is clear that we have
no choice but to recognize the autonomy of our absolutistic values of
reckoning and to readjust our measures of consciousness in accordance.
Surely, if the whole meaning of our mental orientation is a
disorientation, if our rationality is everywhere but irrationality,
if with all of us alike the vicarious image comprising the reflection
of our systematized selves takes precedence over the native reality
of our primary organic individuality, there is no other course than
that we wipe the board clean and approach the problem of consciousness
completely anew. For, clearly, since our present process of mentation
is not spontaneous or from within out, it is necessarily adaptive or
from without in. Hence, as the reflection of the absolute principle
that is the personal basis of each, it can never lead to a realization
of the relativity of our conscious life nor to the acceptance of the
organic individuality that is the all-embracing life of man in the
inclusive principle wherein alone his consciousness truly resides.
It is the position of this thesis that, when we neglect to take account
of the _organic mass consciousness of man_ to which the personal
systems of men, single and collective, are but relative, we fail to
reckon with a significant dimension entering into the determination of
the subjective life of man. On the basis of the time-space extension
of the astronomers’ fourth dimension it is possible to compute errors
of deflection only through a conception of the universe which regards
our own planetary system as a function of and hence relative to a
more encompassing programme of planetary motion. Concomitantly, it
is possible to evaluate accurately man’s place in the subjective
scheme of consciousness only through a conception which regards
his present personal and social absolute as being itself relative
to a more comprehensive background comprising the relativity of
man’s consciousness as a whole. There is the need to recognize that
in the sphere of consciousness, as in the realm of physics, it is
in the kinetic dimension comprising the organic participation and
inclusiveness of life itself that consists the functional component
which actuates the other three dimensions and which, in uniting all,
embodies the relativity of consciousness as an organic reality.
In this transition from bidimensional picture to tridimensional
actuality, from contemplation of aspect to participation of function,
a gulf is spanned that bridges a most significant hiatus in the course
of man’s evolution. It is no less an interval than that which separates
the mode of man’s unconsciousness from the mode of his consciousness.
For in this transition we are no longer dealing with the mere static
dimension of the pictorially reflected _image_ of actuality, but there
enters the kinetic extension of an organic inclusiveness corresponding
to the functional or space-time extension of the physicists’ universe
of relativity--a universe which, in the psychological no less than in
the physical sphere, entails the abrogation of our prevailing system of
absolutism and its replacement through the conception of the relativity
of the conscious life as a whole.
With a view to measuring the deflections of personality, by and large,
in the light of the relativity of consciousness, it is necessary that
they be regarded first in the concrete expression of their individual
and social forms, and that subsequently we study these aberrations
of consciousness in the yet wider expression of their sociological
implications generally.
CHAPTER III
THE ORIGIN OF OUR INDIVIDUAL UNCONSCIOUS
In the preceding chapter I attempted to indicate the analogy between
the principle of relativity as set forth by the physicists and
what I described as the principle of relativity in the sphere of
consciousness. If the bipolar concomitance there outlined in its
phylogenetic aspect possesses sufficient warrant, a no less consistent
parallelism should be traceable in an ontogenetic concurrence of the
two theories as we come to consider the principle of the relativity of
consciousness in its individual implications.
If it is true in an ethnic comparison of mental values that a basis of
absolutism is no more tenable in computing aberrations occurring in the
sphere of consciousness than in the sphere of physics, it must also
be true that a basis of absolute evaluation is inadequate to account
for deflections of consciousness in its individual application. It
is admitted that in the physical universe a principle of absolutism
requires to be abandoned and a revaluation of standards established in
its stead because it fails to take account of data extrinsic to its own
static dimensions. Likewise, it would seem that, in the concomitant
sphere of consciousness, an absolute basis of determination would be
equally inadequate to reckon with data exclusive of its own absolute
principle of measure and that, accordingly, there is here too demanded
a restatement of values in terms of a more comprehensive conception.
In such an outlook the requisite readjustment is of so wide a scope
that I do not find it easy to contemplate, far less to actualize.
It involves no less a task than that of placing the fulcrum of one’s
mental processes upon a basis that lies outside the habitual domain
of one’s individual consciousness. For this reason the conception of
the organic inclusiveness of consciousness, here understood, is, from
our present individualistic viewpoint, a most difficult and elusive
one. It is a conception that is not possible of comprehension on the
basis of the static and absolute principle of consciousness that is
our present mode of evaluation. In this conception, the evolution of
individual knowledge enters the organismic sphere of the relative
and subjective. It is only relatively, therefore, or through our
subjective identification with it that we may participate in its
meaning. As this subjective experience is the flux of life itself, as
it is this component that is consciousness in process--the organic
tide whose stream we ourselves are, the while we are carried along
upon it--this experience is an extension which is, of its essence,
inaccessible to objective cognition. This is the veil which life in
its subjective reality draws across its features, rendering their
meaning for ever imperceptible to objective observation. Except through
the faint intimations of analogy, I cannot, of course, claim to do
more than merely indicate the existence of this subjective extension.
So that I must ask the reader to concede me the fullest measure of
his hospitality by following my trend with the utmost intuitive
participation on his own part. It is, after all, only in common that we
may sense our common part in respect to the relativity of consciousness
as a whole.
The child that is born amid the cultural influences of civilization
comes at an early age to learn the names of things. With these labels
he acquires his objective identification with the world about him. In
these symbols are the talismans that insure the safety of his future
wayfaring. They are indispensable to his proper equipment and an early
adeptness in their use is a wise and salutary provision. In this same
school in which the child is taught the handy designations for the
objects surrounding him, he learns also to recognize the nameless signs
of a certain immanent category called “right and wrong”--signs which,
through the accidental empiricism of spontaneous trial and error, he
comes likewise to sense and gradually to incorporate into the code of
his adaptation.
As with others, who have been inured to a curriculum of daily
adaptation from the impressionable years of earliest childhood, so
with ourselves, it is well-nigh impossible to study the virgin soil of
consciousness from our present adaptive premise without vitiating our
conclusions with the bias of our own adaptation. And yet it is clear
that an analysis of the reactions of consciousness, which fails to
include the primary elements of which it is composed, leaves out of
reckoning the basic ingredients of a structure which we are supposedly
analyzing in its elementary content.
For the past three years I have been occupied with the daily challenge
of my own habitual processes of adaptation--an inventorial procedure,
be it said, which proved of the utmost discomfort in the necessity it
disclosed for the fundamental reduction of personal assessments. The
outlook of these inquiries, even though they mark as yet but the merest
beginnings, will at least denote a tendency that cannot, I think, be
without interest nor, I hope, without incentive in the further approach
of others toward an envisagement of consciousness in its ultimate,
pre-adaptive composition.
The present study, then, forms part of the altered conceptual insight
into consciousness that was gradually induced through the spontaneous
sequence of a long continued and uninterrupted experiment in individual
reaction. The experiment consisted in repeatedly testing the personal
reflex under the hourly present conditions of mood-variation due to the
accidental release of affective stimuli arising from circumstantial
and unpredictable sources both internal and external to the ego. The
unprepossessing details of this brief excursion into the underworld of
personal motivation must be reserved for some subsequent chapter. I am
now concerned with the complete shift of basis which these experiments
have forced me to take account of in my attempts to reckon with the
recurring problems of consciousness as they are presented in the daily
routine of my analytic work.
Within the scope of the present thesis we shall have to do solely
with the mental reaction inculcated under the manifesto of our early
induced presentiment of “right and wrong” or of “good and bad”
with its concomitant incitement to _hope_ or _fear_ as reflected
in the unconscious attitude of _praise_ or _blame_ surrounding the
child. It is my conviction, based on the subjective test of personal
experimentation, _that the deeply entrenched root of our human
pathology is to be traced alone to the conflict incurred through
this suggestively induced image of right and wrong and that it is
profitless, therefore, to seek beyond the impasse of this unconscious
alternative for the ultimate source of neurotic reactions_.[12]
Because of some element implicit in the behaviour determining the
“right” or “wrong” adaptation of the individuals surrounding the child
in the formative period of his early growth, something is imposed upon
him that operates to check spontaneous impulse. The check I am speaking
of does not consist in the interdiction itself. Our admonitory “do” or
“don’t” is in itself quite harmless. Indeed these positive and negative
commands may serve an undoubtedly useful end. I have never known of
untoward nervous manifestations occurring among animals because of the
restraining warnings of maternal solicitude. On the contrary, such
mediation commonly proves an effective safeguard against misadventure.
Of the inhibiting influence itself, therefore, I am not speaking. What
I have in mind is something far subtler than this. It will demand our
most searching scrutiny if we are clearly to apprehend its meaning.
As I see this miscarriage of instinct incurred through our embargo of
good and bad, it is the cunning _pretence_ underlying the interdiction
which induces the reaction that works mischief in the child’s organism.
It is the insidious intimation of benefit or of harm inherent in the
tabooed act itself that is the pernicious instance. The destructive
occasion lies in the implied premium or forfeit appertaining to the
act as it recoils upon the child in automatic retaliation. I believe
that it is due to this enforced superstition of an arbitrary “good and
bad” that there have been wrought the spurious reactions of our human
consciousness. I believe that the utterly specious system of behaviour,
which surrounds us as social beings on every hand, is definitely due
to this falsely imbued suggestion of retributive sequence which, as
commonly inculcated in early childhood, has been prompted through the
implied mediation of invisible moral agencies. I furthermore believe
that it is this pretence, and its unconsciousness, that is the basis
of our adaptation, both individual and social, as embodied in the
artificial code of morality represented in the collective unconscious
of our present-day civilization.
What the adult arbiter of the child really has up his sleeve is the
child’s conformity to _him_ and _his_ convenience. Accordingly, the
parent or guardian lays down the proposition that a good little boy
doesn’t destroy costly bric-à-brac or that only a bad little girl would
play in the mud with her nice clean rompers on. Both these postulates
are utterly false as every sponsor for them knows. But that is not the
point. The point is that such statements are incomparably adapted to
the ends of adult commodity. The truer rendering of the proposition
in either instance would be to the effect that the misdemeanour in
question would occasion inconvenience or chagrin to the parent. But
so sincere a statement on the part of the parent might alienate the
child’s jealously coveted affection, as we commonly term the infantile
dependence we secretly tend to beget. Hence, the real motive of
interdiction must be hidden from the child and a comprehensive edict
cunningly invoked such as will place an effectual check upon him and
yet amply safeguard the parental interest. It is this bogus morality
which, by our unconscious social consent, the conscripted phantom
called “good and bad” is unanimously commissioned to represent.
Because of this attitude of pretence in others whereby the child is
tricked into complicity with the prevalent code about him, there
is begotten this self-same reaction of pretence within him. This
illusion that is in the air he learns to assimilate from others
through imitative affinity, and from now forward the ruse becomes
self-operative. What began as a social coup is continued as an
individual policy. The silent intimation of a mysteriously pervasive
immanence of “good and bad” having now been engendered, the child
henceforth responds automatically, not alone to the signals of
make-believe about him but to the signals of make-believe within him.
For in unconsciously succumbing to the contagion of the autocratic
system of “right and wrong” about him, this hobgoblin of arbitrary
make-believe becomes equally systematized within his own consciousness.
Accordingly, the pretence involved in interdictions of conduct
(fear-blame reaction) is accompanied by the mental suggestion of
“wrong” or “bad,” and the pretence underlying the inducements of
conduct (hope-praise reaction) is accompanied by the mental suggestion
of “right” or “good”--_that is, of good or bad as it reverts upon
the individual from the point of view of his personal advantage as
reflected in the image of the parent_.
An analysis, however, does not reach elementary principles if it merely
discovers motives prompted by suggestion and repression corresponding
to the two opposed factors of inducement and interdiction actuating
human behaviour. It is not enough to invoke in explanation the
sweeping denominator “self-consciousness.” Such an account is historic
or psychological; it is not organic or biological. It is, I believe,
only as we unearth the mental reaction _intrinsic_ to the organism
when it responds to the subjective inference of right or wrong in its
personal inflection that we shall reach the basic element responsible
for the organism’s inhibited mental states.[13]
One would think, as we look about us to-day at the utterly destructive
processes, social and political, that have been incited throughout
entire nations of individuals “brought up” in this vicarious fashion,
that the spectacle would give us pause. But we have had a too thorough
bringing-up ourselves. Our own bringing-up has seen to it that we
shall not look about us and learn what _is_ but that we shall only
respond to the suggestion about us and acquiesce in what _seems_. If
we should really look about us and see unflinchingly into the meaning
of things, our children would do so too, but that would be subversive
of their proper up-bringing. This is the self-contradictory element in
the adult’s “education” of the child. In truth, it is not possible to
“bring up” a child at all. One may let a child grow up, naturally, as
a plant, tending only the soil about its roots, or one may hinder its
growth. But to bring a child up by moulding its personality to one’s
own is organically contradictory. A child comes up, if at all, only of
himself or in accordance with the law of his own growth.
If it is true, then, that this factor of pretence is the ultimate
element in the dissociations of consciousness, what is the nature of
this factor of pretence actuating our behaviour? As has been said, in
order to secure a substratum adequate to build upon, it is requisite
that we forgo at the outset our present conceptions based upon a system
of valuations which presupposes an absolute principle of consciousness.
It should be understood, therefore, that it is from the fundamentally
altered premise of a relative basis of consciousness that the present
thesis sets out.
In an objective view of the components of man’s consciousness, it
may be seen that there are three determinants of the affective life,
namely, one’s own self, the selves by whom one is surrounded, and the
positive or negative reactions of the self in respect to other selves
such as comprise our progressive or regressive interrelationships one
to another. So that, to return to the analogy of the physical world,
a diagram outlining man’s affective life would represent a contour of
three components. There is first the dimension consisting of oneself;
second, the collateral dimension, with its extension backward to one’s
parents and forward to one’s offspring and comprising in general one’s
social congeners, singly and collectively; and third, the societal
extension representing the reactions that depend upon the co-ordination
or non-co-ordination of individuals in the assimilative processes
of their common activities. Thus our subjective or affective life,
statically considered, is as truly tridimensional in its actuality
as our cognitive or objective world, statically considered, is
tridimensional in its actuality. Nevertheless, as was pointed out in
the preceding chapter, our cognitive apprehension of the world of
objects about us invariably presents an outline corresponding to the
bidimensional or pictorial aspect that is our perceptual image of it.
So in the subjective sphere, it may also be shown that our affective
reactions invariably present a pictorial or bidimensional plane
analogous to the bidimensional impressions comprising our objective
perceptions, and that they are due in the subjective as in the
objective sphere to the unconscious factor of the personal equation.
But, to adhere to the test of experiment, it has been my analytic
experience growing out of the study of personal reaction that, owing
to the distortion of affect within our actual daily life, we do not
in fact participate in the tridimensional actuality that truly
comprises our affective world. On the contrary, owing to the rebuff
to spontaneous impulse incurred through the system of self-conscious
diplomacy reflected in the social pretence of “right and wrong” as
first voiced by the parent and seconded on all sides by the community
about us, the real world of affects is unconsciously replaced by an
artificial cosmogony whose outline is limited to only two components,
namely, the self plus the immediate interest to the self as derived
from the selves (collateral dimension) by whom the individual is
surrounded (advantage or disadvantage, good or bad, praise or blame).
Thus our affective reactions invariably present a merely pictorial or
bidimensional area corresponding to the two extensions comprising the
personal element of the self plus the element of advantage for the
self from other selves. Because of this personal foreshortening of
our affects to the artificial dimensions of self and self-interest,
our subjective experience of tridimensional actuality is reported
not in the reality of its three essential determinants but in the
pictorial aspect of the two-dimensional plane that is our personal and
autogenous reflection of it. It is, then, the substance of these pages
that, just as the world of cubic actuality is mentally foreshortened
into a bidimensional aspect of actuality determined by our static and
autogenous perception of it, so our world of affects is correspondingly
reduced to the bidimensional or pictorial aspect that is our socially
reflected impression of it.
This brings us again to the question we were speaking of--the reaction
of pretence into which the child is early inducted. It was to help
clear away the difficulties surrounding this early adaptive reaction
of our subjective life that I turned to the consideration of the
dimensional components that comprise our affective world. We have
seen that the essence of this element of pretence is its implication
of retroactive gain or loss intrinsic to the social act itself and
automatically returning upon its agent. Coming a little closer
still, we see that this attitude of behaviour imposed upon the child
upon grounds of its retributive sequence is induced in him through
the cunningly conveyed intimation that such has been the personal
experience of those about him--that they have learned from experience
and so are qualified to give warning that “good” behaviour is requited
in reward or pleasure to one’s self and conversely “bad” behaviour is
requited in penalty or pain to one’s self.
My position is that an attitude toward the child which posits at the
outset of life a world of affective actuality, comprised of his own
_ego_ plus his own egoistic advantage, arbitrarily contracts life to
the unreal aspect of a mere two-dimensional image. It is to dispose the
mind of the child in such a way that its entire universe of feeling is
limited to a mere picture of life consisting of the flat and lifeless
image of his personal or social adaptation in the light of his personal
or social gain. It transforms the reality of life into a reflection of
oneself in a world of self-reflections like one’s own. In other words,
in falsely premising the bidimensional plane of one’s personal image as
the basis of actuality, we substitute at the outset a primary condition
of unreality for the inherent reality of life.
From the altered angle of a relative and inclusive attitude toward the
problems of consciousness, I am led to think that this artificially
contracted outlook is the real crux of the dilemma of the unconscious.
I have come to think that these two factors--the factor of oneself and
the factor of social advantage for oneself--are insufficient, that
there is omitted a third factor essential to a completely rounded
consciousness and that in the absence of it the other two present but a
static and artificial image of life rather than life in the functional
inclusiveness of its full-dimensional reality. I refer to the component
of our societal co-ordination--to the factor of man’s organic continuum
in the functional extension of his interrelationship with others. I
believe that it is the miscarriage of instinct with respect to this
societal co-ordination that is answerable for the artificial recoil of
self-interest represented in our fancied apparitions of good or bad as
seen from the limited point of view of one’s individual advantage. In
the flat bidimensional plane which, in the absence of the inclusive
societal factor, only reflects the pictorial aspect of actuality in the
image of the self, there is lacking the rounded extension that is the
full complement of life in its inclusive, societal meaning. To what
degree we substitute this reflected aspect of life for the reality
of an all-inclusive participation in life in its full-dimensional
extension--if my own experience in this regard is any guide--has not as
yet begun to be suspected by us.
This primary societal component of consciousness must not be confused
with our secondary and adaptive social relationships. Our social
adaptation is as self-reflective and unconscious as our individual
adaptation. By the societal component I mean the organic continuity
of consciousness that unites the individuals of the species into a
confluent whole. In the social adaptation of its members, on the
contrary, there is registered merely the collective response to
the reaction of pretence that we have just seen in its individual
expression as our personal foreshortening of life to the bidimensional
image. In the reduction of life to the image of self in the light
of one’s self-advantage, whether individual or social, consists the
adaptive system that is the personal pretence within and about us.
In this inversion of life that is the mirrored impression of each,
as reflected in the aspect of others, is the systematization that is
man’s unconsciousness. It is our non-inclusiveness of others that is
the systematization of each. It is this perceptual interpretation of
life on the basis of a reflected or bidimensional impression, limiting
life to self and self’s advantage that is, I repeat, the meaning of our
unconsciousness, both individual and social.
In studying this reaction of pretence in the social mind as reflected
in the reactions of the individual, we are met with the need of a
fundamental reconstruction of values in our reckoning with human
personality as in our measures of consciousness generally. For, in
this artificial gauge of conduct measured by standards of personal
advantage, we find established in the individual a criterion of life
that rests upon an unwarranted assumption of personal supremacy. This
private criterion has become the arbitrarily assumed prerogative of
each of us with respect to every other. For, through this distortion
of the universe of reality into the unreal, bidimensional cosmogony
that is one’s self-reflection of it, there is unconsciously built up
within us a mental adaptation whose basis is an inflexible assumption
of personal absolutism and autocracy.
In the ultimate reduction of analysis it may be seen that what we
have, through Freud’s teaching, come to recognize as the reaction
of _resistance_, within the individual personality, resolves itself
into nothing else than this private prerogative of the personal
absolute. The assumption of this personal principle of absolutism
in the subjective sphere embodying the psychology of resistance is
analogous to the absolute principle of evaluation applied to the
physical universe--a principle which the physicists have lately
shown is not competent to meet the test of universal applicability,
for the reason that, in the absolutism of its own premise, it fails
to account for data extrinsic to the static absolutism it embodies.
Correspondingly, in the sphere of consciousness the absolute principle
of personal evaluation comprising the adaptive basis of the individual
is inadequate to stand as the universal principle requisite to an
organismic inclusion of consciousness in its societal totality.
As was pointed out in the last chapter, the social mind interprets its
objects of perception in the bidimensional aspect of its own pictorial
and flat reflection of them. Likewise, our individual mentation, in its
adaptive response to the retributive implications of so-called “right
and wrong” or “good and bad,” recoils no less upon a two-dimensional
plane in the affective reaction that is limited to the component of
self plus the component of pleasure or pain for oneself. This flat,
static impression of life, comprising the arbitrary systematization
that is the personal absolute of each, is inadequate to stand as
a universal principle whereby we may evaluate the phenomena of
consciousness in the full round of its organic compass.
In substituting the judicial absolute of personal interest for our
inclusive participation as relative elements in the full-dimensional
reality of life as a whole, we have unconsciously adopted a basis which
fails to reckon with our individual selves as contributory elements
in the more encompassing unit which our individualistic basis now
mistakenly presumes to include. Our present basis is, therefore, not
an inclusive one. In so far as the individual rests his theory of
consciousness upon an individualistic basis, his theory cannot include
the larger whole wherein the individual is himself but a contributing
element. The consciousness of the isolated individual cannot encompass
consciousness in its societal inclusiveness. Only consciousness in
its societal inclusiveness can encompass the consciousness of the
individual.
In the measure in which we, as an organic group, come to adopt the
conception of consciousness that accepts the intrinsic reality of
our common societal life, we shall learn to repudiate the personal
absolute that is our individual resistance and, correspondingly, to
participate in an inclusiveness of consciousness with respect to which
the individual is but a relative and adaptive component.
CHAPTER IV
THE UNCONSCIOUS FACTOR WITHIN THE SOCIAL SYSTEM
Whatever is true of the individual singly, is true of the individual
collectively. Whatever is observable as neurotic process within
the isolated personality of the hysteric or precoid, is equally
observable as neurotic process in the collective personality of the
social mind. The attitude of psychopathology, which ascribes to the
social consensus, represented in the average-reaction commonly called
“normality,” a criterion of constructive consciousness and health, and
which, accordingly, seeks to correct the deflections of the aberrant
neurotic personality in accordance with this limited outlook, is itself
an expression of the bidimensional limitation that bases its system
of consciousness upon an absolute principle of evaluation. After all,
normality, like gravitation, is a mental abstraction. Our consensual
normality is but the systematized abstraction embodying the absolute
of its own unconscious basis, and, in its personal absolutism, stands
opposed to a principle of relativity in the mental sphere. It is only
as we abrogate the absolute standards now vested in the prevailing
social systems about us and measure their dimensions in terms of
the principle of an organic relativity, that we shall be enabled to
challenge the element of personal systematization within ourselves
and so encompass life in the actuality of a universal and inclusive
consciousness.
Personal survival has been, from the beginning of man’s history, the
chief concern of his self-interest. Inventing medicine with a view to
his security here, fabricating religion with a view to his security
hereafter, he has safeguarded his preservation for the moment through
recourse to “cure,” and for the future through recourse to “salvation.”
Even in the interchanges of our casual social relationships, there is
still preserved within the folk-mind the vestiges of this dualistic
self-interest. Upon our meeting, it is the accustomed reaction to make
mutual inquiry into the condition of health of one another. “How are
you?” or “How-do-you-do?” we ask. Similarly, in parting we commend each
other to the clemencies of the future with the expression, “Good-bye,”
that is, “God be with you.” In the obvious apprehensiveness underlying
this unconscious attitude of the social mind there is in one instance
the implicit conviction that we are wicked and in the other that we are
sick! Both these reactions, however, merely betray the state of anxiety
reflected in the fundamental condition of mind that is our ethnic
self-consciousness.
In earlier times these two anxiety trends of the folk unconscious were
duly sponsored through the common rites of medical and religious fetish
under the combined auspices of a single functionary or guardian who, as
priest or soothsayer, dispensed the benefits accruing from both. The
fact is, I suppose, that the tribal medicine-man with his magic potion
and amulet is psychologically, as well as ethnologically, our true
progenitor. For to-day we observe the preservation of this concomitance
of function between the two systems, represented by the science of
medicine on the one hand and by the philosophy of religion on the
other, in the current social phenomenon of our widely flourishing
“sciences of mental healing” with their unescapable unconsciousness
in metaphysical and theosophical implications. Aside, however, from
historical analogies, the stupendous influence upon the societal mind
of ecclesiastical and therapeutic canon cannot be denied.
Because of this preservation in our midst of such ancient repositories
of human thought and conduct as are represented in the affiliated
principles contained in the dogmas of church and psychotherapeutic
system, a consideration of the psychology common to both these forms
of our social adaptation cannot fail to help us understand the basic
elements that enter into the making of our social personality. As
illustration, let us consider on the one hand the Roman Church and on
the other the system of psychoanalysis. The Roman Church represents
at one and the same time both traditionally the longest established
and politically the most compact organization of the many religious
sects existing throughout our Western civilization. The system of
psychoanalysis, representing as it does the most modern conception of
medical psychology, possesses such scientific authority as only the
ablest students of philosophy and medicine are qualified to bring to
the substantiation of its principles. An analysis, therefore, of the
social psychology that equally underlies and actuates the position of
both these systems will not, I think, be without profit in the present
study.
Due to the sophistication that was early begotten among the members of
our human species through the limitation of man’s consciousness to the
bidimensional alternative of a consensual “good and bad,” it is natural
that we should find this same tendency to personal systematization
expanded into the collective or social form we observe in the group
reaction that is embodied in state or sect. Thus, from an organismic
viewpoint, we should expect to discover the same resistances within
the social as within the individual organism. Nor need we be surprised
if, upon analysis, it should be disclosed that this social resistance
represents likewise the bidimensional impasse comprised of our personal
self-reflection.
Throughout the unconscious period of man’s bidimensional arrest
commonly called ancient times, a period belonging chronologically to
the past but pertaining psychologically to the present as well as to
the future for probably an indefinite term, the attitude of the Church
toward incipient doubt or heresy was, is and for ever shall be to
apply the remedy of prayer and, failing this recourse, to apply the
penalty of excommunication.
From the vantage point of the psychoanalyst’s disinterested and
extrinsic angle of vision, such a policy appears manifestly unsound
and without warrant. From his position of detached observer, it seems
to him arbitrary and presumptive. And yet it must be conceded that,
from the intrinsic viewpoint of a socially consolidated organization
compact with the autogenous authority of infallibility, such a position
is by no means inconsistent. A supremacy that is self-originated is
self-operative. Autocratic prerogative and unimpeachable authority are
here conterminous. Indeed the solidarity of the Church is unassailable
precisely in that its premise and its conclusion are mutually
inclusive. For inasmuch as both premise and conclusion are equally
based upon the assumption of the personal absolute or the private
prerogative of the system they embody, all access to it is summarily
barred. If the Church precludes all question, dismisses all opposition,
it is wholly within its self-determined rights. For by these same
tokens all question, all argument, being of its nature extrinsic to
its autogenic system, savours _de facto_ of the aforesaid heresy of
doubt and, as such, is automatically driven out of court as connoting
_a priori_ the presumptive fallacy of trespass. This relegation to
itself of divine and hence unquestionable authority is the theological
doctrine of self-actuative truth assumed by the Church to underlie
its official pronunciamentos when it formally declares them to be _ex
cathedra_.
I offer this preamble not without advisement. In its intimation of
the heretical tendency of the present thesis, it will give to those
to whom such tendency is unwelcome the opportunity to seal their ears
against it. At the same time it will give to those of more pliant
sympathies due notice of the undisguised aim of the present inquiry
toward the adoption of a more comprehensive and open-minded outlook
among us. For the trend of this thesis is in its intention confessedly
subversive of the socially authorized version of truth now vested in
the autogenous systematization that has come to underlie the principle
of us psychoanalysts.
I do not know to what extent it is humanly possible, but, in so far
as may be, let us adopt for the moment, at least mentally, a position
of impersonal disinterestedness toward the social consensus in which
we ourselves, as psychoanalysts, are also corporate elements. It will
then become clear, I think, that the socially authenticated system,
representative of us Freudians, embodies an unconscious attitude
closely analogous to that of the social system embodied in the attitude
of autogenous authority underlying the personal absolutism of the Roman
Church.
To observe this element of social unconsciousness underlying the
principle of Roman Catholicism has for us all a certain invigorating
tang. With such a discovery there comes the refreshing release that
is the spur to renewed investigation. It is the heartening response
of the organism to its sense of conscious acumen. But, to observe
the operation of the social unconscious within the autogenous
systematization of principles which insures social coherence within
our own consensus, entails a contemplation that is not pleasant. This
contemplation disturbs the habitual repose of settled conviction that
is our own security. It is to apply the acid test of self-analysis to
our own socially systematized assumption of private prerogative and
authority. Yet an attitude of impersonal disinterestedness presupposes
that our inquiry shall proceed without regard to personal security.
This attitude, indeed, is one which we ourselves have demanded of our
patients as being an analytically basic one. It is, therefore, upon
this understanding alone that an inquiry, which in its disregard of the
personal equation is committed to a course equally unflattering to us
all, may hope to be accorded an unbiased consideration. Surely in any
other attitude the name of psychoanalyst can become only a term of
opprobrium among us.
Let us, then, consider this factor of private prerogative or of the
personal absolute, inseparable from the mental attitude expressed in
the phenomenon of social systematization which we see in the Church’s
position of assumed infallibility toward its postulants, and seek to
discover whether this same tendency to social systematization may not
lurk within our own psychoanalytic ranks. Let us see whether we, too,
are not actuated by an unconscious element of personal absolutism that
obstructs the freer and more adult mode of consciousness such as it is
our avowed aim to attain.
In mentioning the unconscious element of absolutism constituting the
closed compartment within a socially organized system of principles, I
have cited Catholicism merely as a convenient paradigm. Protestantism
or Mohammedanism are, in their assumption of self-appointed
prerogative, not less indefensible on the same ground, for the element
of the personal absolute underlies no less the private assumption
of each. By reason of its higher degree of organization, however,
Catholicism more fittingly illustrates the absolutism of its social
polity in relation to this phenomenon of doubt or defection occurring
among its members. This is its aptness in affording a convenient
position of comparison with our own socially organized system of
psychoanalysis in respect to the phenomenon of defection as envisaged
by us.
Within the body of precepts comprising our own organization, the
accepted mark of defection is a _resistance_, and the remedy we apply
is analysis. For, with ourselves, analysis is explicitly the only
effective means of overcoming the intractable tendencies which, in the
determination of our organized principles of adjudication, constitute
the sole need of our patient. In the event that the patient should
remain so far recalcitrant as not to embrace the opportunity we offer
him to accept our socially systematized interpretation of truth as it
touches his own particular needs, he is automatically excluded from
participation in the agencies of regeneration such as it is our special
delegation to dispense. Whence there follows our regrettable but none
the less inevitable ultimatum of “inferior type of personality” and his
coincident elimination from the pale.
It is, of course, clear that the actuality of the phenomenon of
resistance in the patient can no more be denied than the actuality of
the phenomenon of doubt in the penitent. Moreover, in accordance with
the ruling of psychoanalysis, our specification of the condition when
we posit a resistance is as indisputable as is the specification of
the Church when it posits a doubt as the underlying disorder of the
individual postulant. In either case there is the position that the
individual is impervious to the benefits of the system whose principles
he is, in the judgment of the system, in need of embracing. Indeed,
it is precisely this factor of doubt in the one case, as it is the
factor of resistance in the other, that is the whole occasion of the
individual’s quest of a means of adjusting this division within his
personality whereof doubt or resistance is the idiopathic index.
The actual fact, then, of a resistance within the personality is
beyond question. The fact is one that is equally admitted on the
side of the individual as on the side of the organization, on the
side of the defendant as on the side of the arraignment. But what
is to be done about it does not as yet seem to me by far so clearly
determined. I know, of course, that it is our attitude, based upon the
repeated experience of us all, that any objection to psychoanalysis
is invariably traceable to the resistance of the objector. This is a
psychoanalytic corollary. It is accepted as universal among us all.
So that a resistance to psychoanalysis is very justly, in the view of
psychoanalysts, as self-convicting as is a doubt in the view of the
Church. And from the point of view of psychoanalysis no less than of
the Church the position of these two systems rests upon an undoubtedly
sound basis, if we may be guided by the consensus of their several
adherents as attested by the experience of each.
But the question which has of late come to engross my interest is
_whether these points of view are sound as embodied in their respective
systems_--whether, from a broader basis of envisagement, the intrinsic
attitude of ourselves may not lend itself to an altered interpretation;
whether there may not exist a criterion that transcends the scope of
our present analytic outlook when we claim that the only possible
motive for questioning our psychoanalytic position is found to lie
in the resistance of the individual; whether, in brief, the socially
entrenched systematization comprising the psychoanalytic affiliation
possesses sufficient warrant for impugning the personally entrenched
systematization comprising the individual. For, if the fallacy of
the personal absolute underlies the systematization represented in
the social consensus, in what way does the rigidity of the social
prerogative differ from the systematized prerogative constituting the
resistance of the individual?[14]
For the purposes of our inquiry we shall be obliged to dismiss for
the moment our habitual personalistic criteria of interpretation. We
shall have to recognize, first of all, that what we call the individual
is by no means the fresh and native expression of individuality pure
and simple that we are accustomed to assume, but rather that he is an
individuation resulting from the repressive forces acting upon him
from the environmental social aggregate in which he is himself but
an intrinsic and contributory element. For every individual arising
amid the influences of the social system is but a special application
of the social system about him. Whatever the code of the consensus,
the individual is necessarily but an offprint of it--a new impression
of the original by-laws. There is, therefore, the need to turn our
attention not to the individuated excerpt of the system but to the
original document wherein the system is primarily set forth. There is
the need to discard the individual form and to occupy ourselves with
the societal mould whereof the individual form is but the subsequent
reproduction.
Assuming the broader outlook of this more encompassing sociological
position, I think we shall come to see that the difference between
the reaction of doubt, as interpreted by the Church, and the reaction
of resistance, as interpreted by psychoanalysis, is, after all, only
apparent--that the difference is by no means an inherent one, but that
it is due merely to the altered circumstance of shade and light, so to
speak, in which the two reactions are diversely reflected by reason of
the contrasting sociological settings amid which the two phenomena have
appeared among us.
As regards the sociological manifestation embodied in the Church,
contrary to its age-old contention that doubt or question automatically
indicated apostasy which reflexly discredited its adherent, it has long
been shown experientially that such doubt or defection might be very
logically and honourably entertained. Not only this, but it has been
further made manifest that it is due precisely to the entertainment of
such an attitude of debate toward the socially systematized consensus,
represented in the Church, that there have arisen those far-reaching
investigations of science out of which has sprung the splendid
renaissance of modern thought with its accompanying incentive to human
progress.
Hence the question that presents itself is this: May it not also
be that, quite beyond the scope of envisagement of those of us who
are intrinsic to the analytic consensus, there are motives inviting
question of our position which do not fall within the category of
resistance? May it not be that, from a position of extrinsic or
impersonal evaluation, we shall obtain so inclusive a survey of the
phenomenon of resistance on the one side and of the social phenomenon
of organized systematization representing the establishment on the
other, that the two reactions may be included in an encompassment that
is equally hospitable to both? Surely it cannot be denied that, laying
aside all consideration of personal involvement, the question of such a
possibility is not without its vista of interest.
With a view to a fair appraisement of the contrast between the type
of defection manifesting itself as doubt and the type of defection
manifesting itself as resistance, there is first the need to take
account of the widely dissimilar sociological aspect of the period in
which doubt was originally viewed by the Church, as compared with the
sociological countenance of the times in which resistance is viewed by
ourselves, and, accordingly, to consider the difference between the
two phenomena in the light of the contrasting sociological backgrounds
surrounding each.
From this sociological angle the factor that immediately attracts our
notice is the essentially negative, self-deprecatory character of
the doubt-reaction in respect to the ancient dogmas of the Church.
We note the sense of personal inadequacy that is its characteristic
sign. We mark its habitually shamefaced, self-depreciative mien. For
doubt, be it remembered, first arose as the self-accusing attitude of
the subservient individual who lived under the social domination of
monarchical forms of government in a period of man’s history when,
owing to his subjugation to the unconscious suzerainty of a fanciful
father-complex, he meekly bowed in servile obedience to the socially
systematized authority arbitrarily vested in Church and State, as
personified in the office of Pope and King. Under the prevalent
domination of this image of indisputable authority, men’s social
criterion resided in the apparent consensus of the _personal absolute_,
social and individual, representing the particular individuation of
a single man, rather than in the common supremacy of our impersonal
relativity comprising the generic individuality of mankind.[15]
But the social mind has in the last few centuries undergone a
significant metamorphosis. To-day we have to reckon with this. We have
to take into account the tremendous expansion of the consciousness
of man sociologically and, from the point of view of the historical
record of man’s rapid sociological ascent, mark the characterological
difference in the temper of the individual’s defection to-day as
compared with his defection of yesterday. In the implication of the
rights of individual freedom of thought implied in the defection of
doubt, the predominant factor was the individual’s acknowledgment
of his personal remissness, of his unseemly presumptiveness toward
the social constitution about him. Under the socially systematized
autocracy of the Church’s absolutism, the individuality of man dared
not stand erect and maintain the freedom of his individual expression.
But in the present hour the consciousness of man proclaims itself a
freer manifestation. Under the impetus of our sociological progress,
man’s individuality has more and more come into its own. And, though
the socially organized prerogative has still the upper hand in respect
to individuality, there are signs abroad to-day which are a significant
advertisement of man’s urge toward an expression of individuality that
is an earnest of yet wider sociological horizons ahead. I think that
it is due in no small measure to the advent of this factor of man’s
sociological rehabilitation that there is seen to-day the completely
altered character of the individual’s resistance as it recoils before
the element of personal absolutism embodied in the systematized
consensus of psychoanalysis.
Despite its undoubted unconsciousness and personal systematization,
note the essentially ruddier countenance of resistance as compared
with doubt. A resistance, unlike doubt, is no admission of ineptitude.
Subsisting under the sponsorship of a new and freer sociological
order, resistance is fashioned of sterner stuff. It is no personal
deprecation; it is a sociological affirmation. Far from being an
abject confession of individual weakness, it is a proud assertion of
individual strength. For although in the phenomenon of resistance there
is to be seen the equally unconscious motive that is the protest of the
individual absolute against the arbitrary domination of the socially
systematized absolute comprising the popular consensus, there underlies
this protest something that is more virile than this. There is here,
I believe, a reaction that demands and that will ultimately have the
consideration that is its due. Though the Church, while pre-eminent,
might easily dispose of doubt, in our own democratic day it is doubt
that has disposed of the Church. It seems to me that, unless we
psychoanalysts recognize the group-form of unconsciousness underlying
the social systematization embodied in the position of psychoanalysis
when it pronounces the resistance of the individual as _de facto_
anathema, without regard to the possible propriety of its remonstrance,
we, like our less conscious analogue, the Church, shall ultimately find
ourselves hoist with our own petard.
While the fact of resistance and of its unconscious motivation is
admittedly true, yet to meet a patient’s assertion of individual right
with the mere assertion of the group-right, which is the unconscious
protectorate of the organized system, is certainly not to answer the
patient’s need from the point of view of a larger and more encompassing
mode of consciousness. If the assumption of arbitrary prerogative or
of the personal absolute represented in the reaction of individual
systematization is the meaning of resistance, then the private
prerogative or the personal absolute underlying the systematization
of the social consensus is no less a manifestation of resistance. For
the attitude of systematization and of absolutism in the individual
is necessarily but the reflection of a prior social systematization to
which the individual’s adaptation is but a secondary response.
Clearly it is not possible for the socially systematized consensus
embodied in Church, State or psychotherapeutic system to afford the
requisite condition of release from a resistance thus constituted,
when its own systematization is itself the social or group embodiment
of this self-same reaction of resistance. In the nip-and-tuck attitude
between the resistance of the system comprising the single individual
and the resistance of the system comprising the social corporation of
individuals, there stands the organic impasse of two mutually opposed
absolutes. In the autocratic position of each neither may yield,
for in the absolutism of both each represents an identical state of
unconscious impaction. As neither the individual nor the consensus, in
its enfolded self-systematization, is as yet conscious of the process
in which it is the blindly contributing element, both factors represent
but altered aspects of the common delusion of the social adaptation of
man, single and collective, namely, the delusion of the supremacy of
the will-to-self or the unconscious autocracy of the personal absolute.
Naturally, I cannot speak of these inadequacies of consciousness from
a remote or detached position. Needless to say, since I am at this
moment a contributing part of this social maelstrom comprising the
system about me, I am no less embroiled than others in its social
fallacy. So that what is here very inadequately apprehended by me as a
theory is, I confess, still less adequately accepted by me as a living,
integral experience. Let it not be thought, then, for a moment that, in
presenting the social basis of consciousness that is the substance of
this thesis, I am under any illusion as to my own inaptness to embody
in myself the personal expression of the conception whereof this essay
offers the organismic interpretation.
It is, however, only in the measure in which this less personal mode
of approach becomes actual for me that my work with others grows in
significance and in constructiveness of purpose. In this light I have
come to feel more and more that it is only as we regard life from
the point of view of man’s generic individuality that we shall truly
encompass the meaning of the neurosis, either individual or social,
in its true organic assessment. In this more inclusive outlook we
shall gradually come to realize, I think, that the neurosis, whether
appearing in the arbitrary systematization of the individual or in
that of the group consensus, consists essentially in the substitution
of the personal absolute that is our secondary individuation for the
impersonal relativity that is our primary individuality. In this
outlook we shall come to see that it is only in the common inherency of
life that is comprised the consciousness of man in the fullness of its
meaning.
Resistance, then, is the personal systematization of men as contrasted
with the unsponsored individuality of man. The individual unit like
the social unit is but an arbitrary system, and in the resistance
of each of us is to be seen the self-determined cosmogony that is
the individual fallacy of us all. Whether this personal prerogative
embodied in a resistance has its expression in the single individual or
in the collection of individuals comprising the social aggregate, the
factor of systematization holding its guarantee of inalienable rights
under the syndicate of our common unconscious, is, I believe, the very
kernel of the world-wide dissociation which we now diagnose as the
neurosis of the individual.
Thus, through this systematization of each one, there is repudiated the
individuality of each other. In the personal absolute of the private
consciousness of each, there is denied the relativity of the common
consciousness of all. It is this systematization that is the meaning
of repression. It is this personal prerogative that is the essence of
resistance. And so, in the _unconscious system_ that is within and
about us there is summed up, I believe, the entire philosophy of the
neurosis. Being ourselves intrinsic to the system, both individual
and social, it is no more possible to deal with it objectively in
its social than in its individual phase. Our only approach is the
subjective approach. Only subjectively is it possible for each of us
to envisage completely the system of repression within him that is
his individual reflection of the social system of repression outside
him. In thus relinquishing the absolute principle that is merely
the autocracy of our privately arbitrated system of personalism and
unconsciousness, we are in a position to forgo the unconscious absolute
comprising our own resistance and to accept in its stead the relative
inclusiveness of our conscious life as a unified and organic whole.
CHAPTER V
SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS FROM A VIEWPOINT OF
RELATIVITY
Oscar Wilde says in one of his plays: “There are in the world two
tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting
it.” The epigram is peculiarly apt in telling us what appears, on the
surface, to be true. But what appears on the surface to be true is not
necessarily true inherently. Unquestionably there are these two fatal
antitheses in life and in them undoubtedly is summed up whatever there
is of tragedy in our human lot. But, in reducing life to these two
issues of getting and of not getting what one wants, we fail to realize
that these contrasting reactions are secondary to a condition of mind
artificially induced in ourselves at the expense of a prior state of
consciousness that is in its essence not antithetic but unitary.
Each of us is born in the midst of an established system whose password
is conformity to its prescribed norm. Each of us becomes an automatic
compartment within the systematized consensus that comprises its basis.
The price of our initiation into this adaptive system is the forfeit of
our primary individuality, and by the terms of its automatic statutes
tuition is compulsory. Automatic obedience to traditional authority
is the retroactive principle of its constitution. “Right” or “wrong”
is the slogan of its guild. In the autogenous postulate of good or
bad that is its absolute basis, our adaptive system stands rigidly
opposed to a conception of truth such as comprises the relative and
all-inclusive principle of consciousness in its organismic significance.
In the light of this ulterior motive of good or bad--of this adaptive
response that is the secondary and reflected impression of each--is
measured the conduct of us all. According as we see ourselves in this
mirror of the systematized and prescribed norm is conditioned our
happiness or unhappiness, our comfort or displeasure. But always the
mirror of each that is the criterion of others stands as a solid wall
confronting us. Reflected in the features of this one our bearing is
quite pleasing; mirrored in the reaction of that one our countenance
is not so prepossessing. And so it happens that, as we go on in life,
we tend more and more to place ourselves in positions in which we may
obtain the most flattering “likeness” of ourselves. Correspondingly,
we tend to avoid those reflectors that distort our features to our
own discomforting. In this way we come to “like” some people and to
“dislike” others. So that, according to this account of our adaptation,
what is called “ourselves” in the vernacular of the system about us is
merely the reflection of ourselves as reproduced by the system itself.
In truth, because of the system of personal reflections amid which we
move, our judgments are throughout undependable. We have no opinions,
we merely reflect opinions. We have no perceptions, we have only
preperceptions. We do not verify feeling through senses that are
native to us, we imitate feeling by means of impressions that are
extraneous to us. Thus there are great gaps within the sphere of our
supposedly consistent experience--gaps involving wide intervals between
our feeling and our reason, between processes that are organic and
processes that are conscious. Our attempts to bridge these intervals
have constantly led us astray and thus has come to pass the system
of inconsistencies that is the unconscious. For, in this void of his
reality man can only substitute the images that are his unreality,
and no image may substitute for reality, no theory of life replace
the organic consistency of life itself. Yet in our dissociative
preferences we continually mistake the _image_ of that which is for
that which _really_ is. Nor do we at all realize to what extent the
actual masquerades as real. What is there, for example, more actual
than illusion, yet what is there less real? An individual actually has
a delusion but it is not on this account real. The voices he hears are
actual to him (do they not call him by name?) but we who are outside
his system know very well that they are not real.[16]
My position is that, in our response to the impressions arising from
the social system about us, our inferences are no more dependable than
those arising from the private systems of the insane. Our confusion,
like theirs, is the unconscious breach between perceptions that are
true and impressions that are inferred, between life that is function
and life that is merely enactment. It is again the disparity between
life as a system or theory, and life itself. All of us are familiar
with the inconsistency of people who, in order that life may prove
comfortable in theory, devote their entire energies to making it
miserable in practice. It is the inconsistency of unconsciousness
with its inevitable alternation between the opposed extensions of a
bidimensional image of life in place of the all-inclusiveness of life
in its functional reality. It is the personal absolute underlying the
consensual social system within and about us.
If this absolute embodied in the system is, then, a standard that is
but arbitrary and artificial, each of us, since he is a reflection of
such a specious criterion, is himself but a personal representation of
this same absolute. If the individual is but a reflection of the system
of rules representing the collection of individuals comprising the
social consensus about him, then the consciousness of man, in both its
social and individual manifestations, represents an absolute that is
throughout false and undependable. If, in brief, our standard of truth
rests upon our own self-reflection in a social system that is itself
self-reflected, then the evaluation of the individual, as of the social
organism about us, comprises throughout a merely fictitious image, and
our criteria of verity are everywhere spurious and without support.
In the artificial pretence of “good and bad” or of “right and wrong”
that represents the arbitrarily reflected _aspect_ of life based upon
the personal absolute of each, life, as I have said, is henceforth
contracted into the opposite alternatives determined by the two
components that comprise one’s own pleasure or one’s own pain. This
shifting choice imposed by the contrary issues inseparable from our
bidimensional outlook confronts us on every hand, and it is this
limitation of us all to the artificial bidimension of personal loss or
gain that reduces life to the tragedy of getting or of not getting what
one wants.
Such a division of personality as this personal bias unconsciously
entails, amounts to nothing short of a compulsion neurosis, the scope
of which involves our entire social consciousness. The symptomatology
of this mental division within the social personality finds its
projection in such familiar antitheses as heaven or hell, love or
hate, peace or war, idealist or materialist, Stoic or Hedonist, Jew or
Gentile, aristocrat or proletarian, and so on _ad infinitum_. For such
are our ever-shifting alternatives of getting or not getting as they
are reflected in the assumption of private advantage underlying the
so-called “good” and “bad” that is the preliminary outfit of us all.
In this eternal whether-or-no that is our superstitious alternation
between good and bad lies the meaning of the social division
constituting the reaction unconsciously sponsored under the shifting
incertitudes of our popular forms and moralities. In our trembling
vacillations between the ever-pressing issues of personal advantage,
as apprehended through our superinduced images of “good” or “bad,” is
the substance of the obsessive oscillations of will commonly saluted
as man’s conscience, a reaction, however, in whose irresolutions an
eminent psychologist long ago discovered the element of hesitation that
tends to make cowards of us all.
This perpetual reflection of the self in the mirror of self-interest so
operates as to invert completely the natural processes of life. Due to
this unconscious distortion of reality, our every experience is viewed
in the light of the fanciful image that is our own self-projection.
On the basis of the absolute premise of self, that is the result of
our own recoil upon the image of our own self-interest, everything is
subordinated to the bidimensional component comprising our own personal
aspect. For example, this inverted image of self, determining the
personal absolute of each, underlies the delusion commonly concealed
under what is popularly known as our “right.” After all, what is
held most dear within each of us is this private reservation that is
one’s own “right.” Indeed, it is no other factor than this alleged
prerogative or “right” of the individual based upon his autogenous
assumption of personal absolutism that, as already stated, is our
unconscious “resistance” both individual and social. Taking our
stand upon the inflexible basis that is the individual resistance or
personal absolute of each, we approach life wholly from the position
of this personal bias on the ground that it is our right. It is the
preservation of this personal right that is the sole propriety of
the law. But the laws of men as they appertain to personal claim and
title are the direct antithesis of the law of man as it pertains to
the organic unity of his life. In truth, what is called the rights of
private ownership is shown upon analysis to be the ownership of private
rights.
We do not see--being wholly won over to a policy of unconscious
self-interest we will not see--that our so-called “right” is not a
reality inherent in the conditions of life itself, but that it is an
illusion secondarily derived from our personal reaction to the system
of autocracy that is the unconscious self-interest of the social
unconscious everywhere about us. Here we find the psychological
concomitance between the reaction of resistance and the process of
inversion, between the bidimensional aspect reflecting one’s own
image and the unconscious illusion of the personal absolute assumed
to be the private “right” of every individual. For, in the measure in
which one’s outlook upon reality is restricted to a bidimensional or
pictorial aspect of reality, one’s range of perception is necessarily
confined to alternations of self-advantage or to the issues of good
and bad such as are determined by the autocratic absolute of one’s own
personal right. From the fixed background of personal right we can
look out upon the world about us only from the angle of our personal
satisfaction. In this outlook the sole test of human experience narrows
itself to the question as to whether an issue bodes good or ill _for
me_. My personal right being my standard of measure, every value will
be weighed by me in accordance with its reading. Here, you see, is the
very essence of inversion. Here in this element of personal prerogative
the introversions of unconsciousness are to be traced to their
biological root. Thus, in this repercussion of consciousness embodied
in our assumption of personal right, we come upon the very nucleus of
the neurosis.
I believe that in this bidimensional alternation of our unconscious
self-reflection existing within the societal personality lies the
basis of our social mania of competition, as it is the basis of our
tireless discussions and altercations within the various spheres of
man’s activity. It is again the obsessive shift of our compulsive
self-interest, and our social alternations of competition merely
reflect our own oppositeness. I believe that this delusion of
self-interest is the sole validity of our vaunted “opinions” as of
the endless wranglings and disputations and outstrivings that actuate
our social interests generally. The claim that we go to war because
our “right” is disputed is not true. We go to war because in the
fallacy of our personal absolutism our assumed right is held by us to
be indisputable. Far from possessing warrant for what is called our
“right” to institute war, it is precisely because of the presumptive
and illusory nature of our arrogated right that we are driven to this
alternative of immeasurable wrong. The fact is not that we are right
because we think such and such to be true, but that in our compulsive
response to unavoidable alternative we think such and such to be true
in vindication of our assumed right. In other words, our “rightness”
is not the natural result of our logic but our logic is the enforced
result of our “rightness.” By reason of this secret reservation of
personal prerogative within each of us, everything is made subservient
to this autocratic absolute of our individual right. If it is true,
then, that the self-assurance and inflexibility of the personal
absolute within each presents the true account of the mental and social
rigidity comprising our resistances, there is here a significant
commentary upon our so-called adult social consciousness.[17]
This mechanism of unconscious autocracy underlies our sociological
reactions in a degree that is beyond our suspecting, and it is to the
social no less than to the individual consciousness that we must turn
for a solution. If we disregard the individual implications of the
social neurosis, it is not possible to envisage the social implications
of the individual neurosis. Due to the subjective concomitance between
the individual and the social aspects of consciousness, to attempt to
deal with one and not with the other entails a contradiction that is
organic. Just as in the individual personality there are alternations
of will entailing contrarieties of mood that correspond to getting or
not getting what one wants, so in the social personality there are
these same alternations of will with their corresponding antitheses of
mood depending upon our getting and not getting what we want.
The element of failure in Christianity is the element of the
bidimensional in Christianity. Christ repudiates the consensus and
the consensus exacts his life in return. Judas betrays Christ and in
expiation exacts his own life. In the real motto of Christianity “Do
unto others as ye would have others do unto you” there is betrayed
the familiar alternative of secret self-interest. It reveals at once
the mark of arrangement, of bargain, of conduct-with-a-view-to that
here, as always, is the private guarantee of personal advantage.
In the note of reciprocity underlying the Lord’s prayer, with its
“Forgive _us_, as _we_ forgive,” the bidimensional is at a premium.
Only this bidimensional basis is adequate to account for the constant
dissensions--religious, national, political and economic--that exist
throughout the world of Christianity under the name of “right.”
The truth is that the consciousness of man is not secure within itself,
and our right is the protection of our own insecurity. An insidious
division underlies the personality of man. Beneath his outer show of
amity and covenant there resides a restless self-doubt, an anxious
fear, a divided will. At the heart of his consciousness there is a
deep-seated uncertainty driving him to temporary appeasements which
can find issue only in the alternations of getting or of not getting
what he wants. It is everywhere the aspect of the personal advantage
under a new and altered guise. It is everywhere the alternation
of self-interest, with its bilateral illusion of advantage or
disadvantage, due to our fear-ridden obsession of “good and bad.”
The vacillations of this illusive alternative likewise explain the
anxious fascination of the shifting incertitudes of “fate.” Here in
the uncertain eventualities of chance is the irresistible appeal of
our endless speculations in enterprise and game. In the indispensable
element of suspense that lends pith to the drama there is again echoed
this artificial note of self-division. For that which constitutes
dramatic suspense merely sustains the converse extension inseparable
from a bidimensional situation, and the interest of the drama, as
of all art-forms based upon the element of conflict or of periodic
alternation, is its unconscious projection of the dual issues that
reflect the shifting bidimensions of our social self-inversions.
With the descent of the curtain upon the bidimensional situation
with which the accustomed drama invariably closes, there remains,
in essence unaltered, the same situation upon which it first arose.
This is why it is always necessary at the end to create an artificial
situation such as will temporarily satisfy the demands of a _seeming_
conclusion and bring the episode to a halt. But a conclusion in the
sense of a resolution of elements is not possible. The drama that is
built upon the dilemma of the bidimensional is inevitably committed to
one or the other of its two horns. Thus the end can be designed only
with reference to one of the two alternatives in accordance with the
unconscious ambivalence of author as of onlooker. And so the question
of termination rests always upon the issue as to whether the audience
shall smile and be pleased with itself (comedy) or weep and feel sorry
for itself (tragedy) according as it gets or does not get what it wants.
The art of the dramatist is, therefore, in the final accounting always
constrained. It is this exigency that causes to be perpetrated in the
name of dramatic precedent the unpardonable affronts to organic verity
which we are constantly witnessing. In real life a girl, who has had a
liaison with a man with whom her relationship has been wholly sexual
or self-interested, does not confide the secret of her inadvertence
to a subsequent suitor with whom she is now “in love” upon a no less
self-interested basis. Such a course involves an organic contradiction.
She knows in her heart that in the unconscious concealment of his
equally secret self-interest in her it is as intolerable to him to
have the secret of his illusion disturbed as it is intolerable to her
to disturb her own. But in the drama the psychological verities are
thrown to the winds, and the heroine, to the artificial delight of
a bilaterally disposed audience, tells everything that has been in
the “past” exactly as she would not tell it, and to the one person
who hears it exactly as he would not hear it. But with drama that is
bidimensional we must put an ending somewhere!
Such are the organic discrepancies with which our ablest writers,
whether in the form of the drama, the novel or the screen, still
continue to banter us. The reason is to be sought in the unconscious
and compulsive bondage which they themselves are under with respect to
the illusion of the alternative that is their own self-reflective basis.
It is this illusion of unconscious self-reflection that explains also
the greater fascination of the bidimensional _picture_ we see sketched
upon the wall or presented in the pages of literature as contrasted
with the inherent _experience_ that is the tridimensional actuality of
our daily life. It explains our greater pleasure in the surroundings
which one’s art may contemplate or portray than in the surroundings
which one’s life may by participation fill and render beautiful.
For art as image is the portrayal of unreality; art as life is the
expression of reality. Art to-day is merely the distinction of the
individual interpreter. It is unrelated to the conscious aims of days
and dreams that may be shared in common among all people. The truth
is that in our prepossession with the bidimensional and pictorial our
interest is centred far more in the distractions of art as image than
in the inclusiveness of art as life.
This illusion of the pictorial aspect with which we replace the world
of tridimensional actuality finds nowhere a happier vehicle than in the
mechanical bidimension afforded through the medium of illusion achieved
by the motion-picture. There is no device better adapted to reproduce
the flat, scenic aspect such as gives the real zest to our dreams. For
through the device of the motion-picture there is reflected the social
drama that comprises our day, just as through the device of the dream
there is reflected the individual drama that comprises our night. It
is in this illusory _bidimension_ of the photo-play that we are so much
at home. We like its facile reproduction of ourselves. This is why we
can accept without remonstrance the childishly naïve sequences standing
for plot as represented in the bidimension of the screen. The same
narrative would appear too utterly obvious and banal to pass muster
in the solid perspective of the spoken drama, but presented upon the
screen it finds ready acceptance, because in the motion-picture there
is reproduced the pictorial aspect that corresponds to the habitual
aspect of self-reflection that is our own image. We like moving
pictures because we are moving pictures.
This element of unconscious dramatization, prompting the activities of
the normal mind, we need somehow to realize within us. We need somehow
to realize that in the manifestations of the unconscious comprising
the collective enactment of the social drama around us there is this
same reduction of actuality to aspect. _For in the active motor images
of the social mind with its manifold gestures of a self-reflective
actuality there is inherently no less unreality than in the passive
sensory images of the individual mind in the private theatre of its
self-reflective phantasy-building._ Yet so involved are we now in
our retroactive processes that in our purblind efforts toward their
presumably conscious readjustment we still proceed retroactively. Such
is the futility of our personalistic methods of dream-analysis, as it
is the futility of our personalistic envisagement of the disorders of
affect comprising the neuroses.
In view of this central defect of our mental vision, whereby it is
contracted into the artificial bidimension of the self- or dream-image,
our outlook is everywhere distorted. Being vitiated throughout with the
prejudice of the circumscribed and personal, our affective response is
not spontaneous and true. As our subjective feeling is self-reflective
or self-interested, our perception is necessarily pictorial and unreal.
So that in our presumable contemplation of the objective world
of reality, the experience that reaches us is not reality. On the
contrary, in the element of the wish or dream that is our bias toward
actuality, the aspect perceived is merely a foreshortened projection
of the fanciful image of self. It lacks the tridimensional depth and
solidarity of an inclusive reality.
This habit of personal dogmatization and autocracy has induced in us
an autocracy of the mental processes generally. Our representations
of the aspect have become, throughout, the organic antithesis of our
participation in the real. From a basis of unreal images we can only
reproduce unreal images. Out of a mental system of false impressions
we can only elaborate impressions that are false. It is precisely this
flat unreality of the pictorial, whether fanciful or actual, that lends
to all our so-called “art” its obsessive fascination. Not only is there
a distortion of reality in the flat mental picture we form of it, but
in the necessarily detached adaptation of the mere onlooker each of us
becomes unconsciously an arbitrary centre of personal opinionativeness.
Each one stands as a sort of solar centre within a planetary system
comprising his own self-determined affects. He thus reflects the
universe surrounding him, and it is thus by him defined. And there has
come to be built up in each of us in respect also to the world of art a
system of personalism or unconsciousness that is well-nigh logic-proof
in its absolutism.
Thus every stimulus--every impression that reaches our self-conscious
mental retina falls upon the flat, self-reflecting surface of the wish,
the dream or the personal _right_ of each. Of such is the supposedly
cognitive reaction underlying our “beliefs,” of such is the presumably
affective reaction we express as “love.” But belief and love trace
their etymology to a common organic root that unhappily betrays the
equally illusory origin of each. In the Anglo-Saxon _leof_, meaning
lief or wish or bias, both reactions are reduced to a single motivation
that is the tell-tale of their phantastic import. And as belief and
love (inverse cognition and inverse affect) are the very tissue of our
personalistic consciousness, we may begin to understand to what extent
the wish or the preconception comprising the bidimensional self-image
underlies our every perception!
And so, after all, our world of “actuality” is not more real than our
world of phantasy, our day not less self-reflective and unconscious
than our night, our waking not less apparitional than our sleep. For
both alike are motivated by the arbitrary reflection that is the
inverted process of the will-to-self. As yet we do not realize that
the personal absolute embodying our so-called “right,” motivated
as it is by self-reflection and unconsciousness, is as truly the
product of our day-dream as the wish, motivated by unconscious
self-reflection, is the product of our night-dream. We do not as
yet see that the wish or self-satisfaction comprising the sleeping
dream of our individual unconscious is itself but a reproduction
of the wish or self-satisfaction comprising the waking dream of
our social unconscious. We have yet to recognize that here again
in the oscillations of its unconscious _form_ is to be traced the
bidimensional alternation of our own self-reflection as determined by
the “good” or “bad” aspect that is our social as well as our individual
advantage.
Here, in the contrasting circumstances of its affiliation with the
social unconscious on the one hand and of its personal isolation within
the individual unconscious on the other, is doubtless the dynamic
element determining the vacillation of form that comprises the periodic
alternations of the sociological bidimension generally. After all,
what is “good” for me is that which is socially approved, what is
“bad” for me is that which brings me into disfavour with the social
consensus composing my environment. If the social unconscious about me
is willing to connive with my individual unconscious and applaud my
egoistic self-strivings, all is well. If, on the contrary, it withholds
acquiescence and repudiates my self-inverted interests, my state is
a correspondingly unhappy one. This accounts for our artificial
dependence upon the social give-and-take with which we hedge ourselves
about and is the basis of the periodic alternations of mood that
make up our day. Being unconscious, one is a prey to the unconscious
about him. Being self-reflective, one reacts to the impressions of a
self-reflective environment. This oscillation of mood, depending upon
whether our adaptation toward the social consensus is assimilative or
discordant, explains also the alternations of mood observable in the
contrasting reactions characteristic of certain pathological states,
as it is the basis of the daily variation of mood registered in the
neurotic and in the normal constitution. It is here, too, that is
found the basis of the pleasure-pain shift represented in our mood
alternations of elation and depression, whether existing in the diurnal
variations characterizing our normal mood alternations or in the more
pronounced reactions characterizing the extremes of affective tone
presented in manic-depressive insanity.
It cannot be too strongly urged that, however intrinsically opposite
these extremes of mood may seem, they are in essence identical. For,
in reality, these seeming antitheses represent but the obverse aspects
of one and the same bidimensional portrait of personal advantage.
As regards this intrinsic identity between such seemingly opposite
mood-tones it is interesting to note the etymological concurrence in
the Anglo-Saxon root _saed_ (English sot, meaning filled), in which
we find alike the source of such apparently unrelated derivatives of
current usage as the words _sad_ and _satisfied_. There is, indeed, an
unescapable concomitance in the mental attitudes of joy and sorrow, of
elation and depression, of satisfaction and sadness. This coincidence
is but an altered form of the common alternative of good and bad, of
praise and blame, of getting and of not getting, and, as always, its
presence denotes the conflict involved in our inverted self-interest.
Doubtless to this bidimensional alternation are also traceable such
sociological antitheses as one may witness in the contrary reactions
expressed in our various economic and political factions. This
one, failing to suspect the element of traditional self-reflection
determining his so-called party affiliation, registers his personal
allegiance under the socially augmented symbol or principle embodying
the standard that is _his_ private absolutism or right; that one,
no less oblivious of the part he is automatically enacting in his
character of party promoter, assumes the symbolic rôle that tends to
further the party principle representative of the absolute criterion
that is _his_ right. So, too, are to be explained the alternations
of reaction represented in the social antitheses of prohibition
and anti-prohibition. The anti-prohibitionists are by imputation
the ultra-liberal, the prohibitionists are by imputation the
ultra-conservative element, but both are in point of fact equally the
dupes of the personal reaction that is their own self-reflection. For
both, in their unconscious response to what is commonly called “early
training,” equally embody expressions of their original infantile
reaction to the opposed issues involved in the social pretence of
“good” and “bad.”
Extending into every phase of our social life, it is this bilateral
motive that is likewise the failure of the schools. With credit,
praise or privilege and their opposites (depending upon whether the
child “succeeds” or “fails” as judged by the bidimensional standard of
good and bad, of praise or blame constituting the arbitrary _picture_
of his personal conduct), it happens that, through an unconscious
substitution of the image of the child’s person for the function of
the child’s personality, the entire incentive of the schools becomes
ulterior and artificial. The so-called liberal schools of to-day are
in no better case. Despite their much ado about advanced methods that
will give greater freedom to the child they afford mere imitations of
freedom. But this is freedom in aspect, not in function. It is merely
the ideal of freedom contemplating its own image. Thus it is futile to
attempt to alter our situation through recourse to mere progressive
methods of education. The elimination of formal standards of efficiency
is likewise unavailing. For the ulterior is present still. We find
it present in the bidimensional attitude that actuates the entire
pedagogic system with its underlying idea of _preparation_. Apparently
it is not realized that this element of the preparatory or ulterior is
the criterion also of the teachers, being likewise the basis of their
own promotion as it is the standard of promotion in the world at large.
But whatever is preparatory is based upon the illusion of the personal
image. It is commentative, premeditated, moralistic, and substitutes
a mental impression of life in place of life itself. When we offer an
image of life for which we seek to “prepare” the child, the very basis
of our educational programme becomes pictorial and untrue. Life knows
naught of images in the personal sense. Life is the functioning of
interests in constructive activities. The rewards of such activities
flow naturally out of them and consist in a common earning for daily
needs in common daily pursuits. The child, if given the opportunity,
will learn to construct useful and beautiful things and his only reward
will be the natural reward accruing from the intrinsic value, social
and æsthetic, of the work produced. When schools will have become the
productive plants of natural childish industry, there will not any
longer be the absurd invention by the schools of ulterior rewards such
as now supply the artificial stimulus necessary to lend vitality to
their essential dullness. It will not be necessary for teachers to
stimulate the industry of their pupils through resort to extraneous
“merits” in palliation for their own lack of joy in the natural
creativeness of spontaneous childhood.
There is, perhaps, no more subtle expression of the bidimensional
replacement than in the psychological counter-impaction of the marital
neurosis. In this conjugal vis-à-vis unconscious self-reflection
is at flood-tide. This is why, in the opposite extensions of the
conjugal conflict, there are presented concomitantly in husband
and wife such familiar antitheses as are presented alternately in
the single individual, as, for example, the opposed reactions of
mania and depression, the psychasthenic and hysterical extremes,
as well as the contrasts of homosexuality and paranoia. Where such
reciprocal conditions exist, the opposite rôles are in every instance
unconsciously assumed, of course, with entire consistency by the
opposite parties in question. This explains also the anomaly presented
in so seemingly contradictory a spectacle as that of a man of outwardly
serious deportment enjoying vicariously, through the cosmetics and
extravagances of self-adornment worn by a narcistically inverted wife,
the satisfactions of an unconscious exhibitionism. It is the law of
the marital neurosis, as of the balance-scale, that its termini are
diametrically opposite and that their variation is inverse one to
another.
The unconscious mechanism described by Freud under the term “psychic
ambivalence” (Bleuler) is of all reactions perhaps the least
understood, but, because of its invariable association with neurotic
processes, it is as important biologically as any of the mechanisms
that psychoanalysis has disclosed to us. Yet again, in this quality
of contrast inherent in the manifestations of neurotic states, there
are represented merely the two opposed extremes of reaction due to the
division of impulse that is inseparable from the alternation of aspect
we have traced to the illusion of the bidimensional self-image. This
replacement, as we have seen, occurs normally as well as neurotically,
socially as well as individually. It is again the to-and-fro of the
pendulum of good and bad. It is again but the oscillation that is our
obsessive reaction to the make-believe of the self-reflective and
ulterior.
The truth is that we prefer our impressions of life to an understanding
of life, and in the ambivalence of our response toward others, our
reaction is friendly or antagonistic only in the degree in which they
correspond or fail to correspond with our personally preconceived
impressions. In the present ambivalent scheme of things, the ultimate
poignancy of one’s grief is the element of secret pleasure it affords
to others. The daily newspapers, seeking unconsciously to make capital
of our human frailty in this regard, are ever alert to publish
under glaringly conspicuous head-lines the most startling crimes
and calamities. Under captions giving notice of some inexpressible
“Horror” (a term supposedly conveying a sense of repugnance) they
attain in fact their most intriguing effects. The newspapers are wise.
They have read us before giving themselves to us to read and so are
canny to supply the grim details we love to hear of another’s loss or
hurt.[18] It is this isolation of sorrow that is its desolation and
its bitterness. Yet it may be traced wholly to the unconscious tyranny
of this bidimensional division within us that we find the pleasure we
do find, however adroitly repressed, in the unhappiness or calamity
of those about us. It is, of course, not another’s calamity that is
the real cause of our satisfaction, but in the ambivalence of our
attitude as we contemplate his misfortune we feel, by contrast, or in
a _comparative_ count so much _more_ fortunate than he. It is again
but the projection of the bidimensional division within each of us
individually as a reflection of the division within all of us socially.
In this comparison of ourselves with others there is again reflected
the bidimensional alternative that is the fanciful self-advantage of
the personal image.
Turn where we will, this same phenomenon of mental alternation based
on the bidimensional image looms ineffaceably before us. Opposed to
the _mental image_ “male” we project the _mental image_ “female,”
in contrast to the _concept_ “religion” we place the _concept_
“science,” against the _psychological attitude_ of the artist
stands the _psychological reaction_ of the critic. Because of this
mentally pictorial outlook among us, we fail to realize that in the
unconsciously objective approach of the artist there is embodied an
attitude that is as truly a criticism or evaluation of life as is the
objective attitude of the critic toward the expression of the artist.
We do not realize that in our unconscious personal alternation an
element of criticism or evaluation everywhere substitutes the fallacy
of a mental state toward life for the conscious reality of a state
of life itself. Our bidimensional self-reflection is thus equally
the impediment of art as of life. The insidious element of personal
self-reflection is the fatal decoy no less of portrayer than of
participant.
On the other hand, in the spirit of the more subjective artist
what we sense is his insistent sway toward a self-realization that
is impersonal. We feel that in the measure in which he yields it
submission his expression becomes less and less a reproduction of life
and more and more an actualization of life itself. This is because
in the thought or feeling expressed through the art-forms of such a
personality, he is himself not so much the causative or self-conscious
agent reflecting a state of mind _in relation to_ life as it seems, but
rather the conscious link in a sequence that _identifies_ him with a
condition of life as it is. Thus again the truer the artist, the more
he tends to round the orbit of his personality in a conscious universe
of relativity; the more imitative the artist, the more he tends to
oscillate uncertainly between the alternate phases that merely reflect
the assumed absolute of his own ego.
So it is with our alternations, social and individual, pathological
and normal, as they exist on every hand. There is the precoid and the
hysteric, the homosexual and the paranoiac, the religionist and the
sceptic, the moralist and the voluptuary. It is the world-old tragedy
of getting and not getting what one wants, and in the self-satisfaction
of the one as in the self-abnegation of the other the element of
self-consequence is equal and identical. It is the ineptitude of virtue
that it is but the bidimensional reverse of vice. Generosity, like
humility, contains its ambivalent element of pride. Though from time
to time we may dispense no slight favours, yet always we demand to
hold the reins of power within our own hands. Let our protégés presume
for a moment to assert their own individuality and straightway we rein
them in. Indeed, if we will look into this, we shall realize that it
is precisely the person toward whom we are most lavish of beneficence
that is the one of whose native and unsponsored expression we are most
jealously critical. The fact is that our virtues are really too good
to be true and that our amenities, after all, reflect only our own
self-advantage. Thus, from the point of view of good and bad, our lusts
and our repressions are but interchangeable adaptations of the central
theme of self, and in the alternations entailed in the popularly
conceded distinctions assumed as morality and immorality there is
preserved under merely reversed aspects this identical fetish of one’s
own self-image.
Even in the sphere of psychology itself there is this same division
inseparable from the personal absolute or the private arrogation
that underlies the assumed right of each individual as reflected in
our social contrasts of good and bad. For example, the propriety
of studying the “merely motor expressions” of the behaviourists is
regarded with grave question by the introspectionists, while the
behaviourists as ardently doubt whether introspective studies are the
legitimate matter of psychology at all. The futility of dissension is
again its two-sidedness. What we omit to reckon with when we consider
the vying of these two schools with one another is the element of the
personal prerogative within them that unconsciously goads each to an
intolerance of the other. For all “rights” being mutually opposed to
and exclusive of one another, the “right,” or opinion, underlying
any system except the system that is one’s own is, of its nature,
inadmissible. In the irreconcilable assertions of the multifarious
opinions of men, whether occurring in group or in single expression,
there is always to be traced this underlying motive of personal right
corresponding to the private prerogative of each. By rights I do
not mean the natural rights that are universal and common, but the
personal rights that are autocratic and pre-emptive. But whether our
divisions be national, political, religious, economic, professional
or familial, their underlying meaning is the same. So that, in this
antithetical “response” characterizing the periodic alternations of
our bidimensional self-reflection, there is registered a reaction
of the organism that invariably escapes the attention of either
disputant--the reaction, namely, of the will-to-self or of the private
privilege coincident with an absolute basis of adjudication. As long
as there remains this element of unconscious alternation due to the
self-reflective interest that now actuates human motives, students of
science, also, are as powerless to bring to their problems an attitude
of disinterestedness as are our national delegates when they attempt to
consider the problems involving all the subtle self-interest of a peace
conference.
The really classic division of opinion in the world--the division
that is of major importance even amid academic fields of thought--is
the conflict between Science and Religion. That the religionists, in
claiming the undoubted authenticity of sources confirmatory of the
truth of revealed religion, have offered indisputable “proof” of the
validity of their position, cannot be denied. That the scientists’
assertion of the doctrine of spontaneous evolution as opposed to
the revealed truths of Theism rests equally upon the evidence of
incontrovertible “proof” leaves likewise no room for doubt. In both
instances, however, the proofs of each are acceptable only to the
advocates of their own particular view and not to the advocates of the
view that is opposite their own. But of what avail are the proofs of a
position which are valid only in the minds which have anteriorly set
out to prove it? What dependence is to be placed in the intellectual
verifications of truth which are acceptable only to intellects which
demonstrate them but which, in the view of those of an opposite trend,
remain for ever inaccessible? These are reflections which necessarily
force us to question very seriously our objective intellectualizations.
If, in so wide and vital a division as that between Religion and
Science, the “logic” on which is based the claim of each is so
completely without meaning, beyond its facility to flatter established
prepossessions, it is time that our “reasoning” upon all issues be
summoned to account on suspicion that our position is, in every
instance, merely the unconscious alternation due to the bidimensional
image of gain or loss that is one’s personal self-reflection.
This blindness of the personal restriction within our subjective life
is the more interesting when one considers the far more impersonal
outlook that often characterizes man’s consciousness within the
sphere of his objective interests. With the growing expanse of man’s
consciousness there has arisen the widely inclusive and impersonal
field of preventive medicine with its essential preoccupation with
the communal weal. Through this wider sociological approach we have
come gradually to realize the incomparably greater significance of
activities directed toward safeguarding the health of the community
or of the group-life as contrasted with interests directed to the
personal cure of the individual as a single element within the social
group. We have begun to recognize that where, through recourse to
measures of public hygiene, it is possible to control the general
sources of disease, conditions are rendered such that there may be no
need to treat disease-process within the single individual. In Panama,
for example, where, through a far-reaching programme of civic hygiene,
the malaria-breeding organism has been almost wholly exterminated,
the medical and sociological functions of the community have become
so completely merged that with the appearance of the disease-bearing
Anopheles it is no longer the physician but the civic authorities who
are consulted.
Such are the signs of the broadening communal spirit that is coming
to influence more and more the various measures of improvement amid
the objective conditions of life about us. But, within the subjective
sphere of man’s activities, his outlook is no whit more encompassing
to-day than in the moment of his earliest quickenings of consciousness.
The reason is not far to seek. Man’s subjective life is throughout
overlaid and oppressed by his inverted obsession of personal
acquisition. Viewing everything in the light of the reflection cast by
his own image, a broad communal programme of life is for him as yet
subjectively impossible. An outlook that would render his position a
relative one and reveal it as but contributory to the organic life as a
whole would straightway menace the illusion of his personal prerogative
and rob him of what is now for him the basis of all his experience and
the sum of his personality. He does not see that his “experience,” by
reason of its inverted absolutism, wholly lacks the support of reality.
He does not see that what he calls his personality is his successful
collusion in the collective unconscious about him at the price of his
habitual concession to impressions not primarily his own. This is why
the psychopathologist is still futilely endeavouring to understand
his patients from the static, personal standpoint of his own dogmatic
absolutism rather than from the position of a relative and inclusive
interpretation of consciousness. This is why the objective analyst
remains always outside the real problem of the social disharmony
represented in the nervous and mental disorders of the individuals
by whom he is confronted. The truth is, he is himself a part of the
disorder which in his unconscious absolutism he is presuming to treat
in others. The tendency is one that exists among us all. For the taint
of an absolutism within the social personality involves each of us
equally as a contributing element in its fictitious structure. Hence
the ultimate futility of our constantly shifting “methods.” Hence the
ever-recurring therapeutic fads that represent first one and then
another absolute system of cure. But though each such system may for
a while claim our support, in due course it fades again and is in
turn succeeded by another in accordance with the varying phases of
our social alternations. Our enthusiasm, as well as its decline, must
after all be reckoned merely as the alternate reverberations of the
social consciousness in response to the unconscious alternations of the
bidimensional absolute which has its existence in the individual and of
which the social manifestation is but a reproduction.
As the neurosis is generic, involving the social system no less than
the individual element, the system of psychoanalysis, as well as the
individuals composing it, is equally included under its indictment.
From Freud, therefore, as from the rest of us there is due the
acknowledgment of the inevitable part occupied by psychoanalysis in
the systematization or unconsciousness that is the social neurosis.
The private assumption of each of us to the contrary notwithstanding,
we who have followed Freud could not possibly have been inspired in
our work by a conscious interest in the disorders of personality
represented in the social anomaly of the neurosis. Being ourselves
unconsciously involved in the social neurosis about us, we have been
urged forward through an unconscious or _personal_ interest in
order to divert our minds from our own implication in its _social_
significance. To this end it has been unconsciously our endeavour to
direct assiduous attention only to the specific manifestations of the
neurosis as it exists in individuals supposedly other than ourselves.
_In brief, we have been diligently occupied with the objective study
of the neurosis in its obvious appearance in others as individuals
presumably separate from ourselves, in order to escape the subjective
acknowledgment of its actual presence within ourselves as contributory
and interrelated elements in our common social consciousness_.
With each of us, the real motive has been the unconscious grudge of
our personal involvement in a world-wide enslavement to an artificial
precept such as can only oscillate between the alternations resultant
upon our self-limited bidimension of “good and bad.” When we can
lay aside the incentives of personal self-defence and view our own
reactions with impartial self-composure, we shall realize that it
has been our own unconscious that first quickened the compensative
defence-reactions which later culminated in the objective system we
know to-day as psychoanalysis. For, with psychoanalysis as with other
systems, its real incitement is found in the inevitable “come-back”
that is the organism’s response to its sense of affront before the
illusion of the self-image. Again, it is the automatic alternation
resultant upon a basis of counter-relatedness inseparable from the
delusion of the personal absolute as contrasted with the relativity of
the individual in respect to life as an organic whole. Again, it is the
artificial presupposition of our own “rightness” that is the strongest
determinative of our conduct, and to this secret autocracy that is our
own personal absolutism we have rendered everything subservient.
Men like to say that God created them, but in truth it is they who
have created “God.” We like to employ this anthropomorphic image of
absolute authority to our personal advantage. Rewarding the good and
punishing the bad in accordance with the alternations coincident with
the bidimensional aspect of an absolute Deity, this image of supreme
authority represents merely the projection of the personal absolute
based on the alternations of our own self-reflection. I do not doubt
that beneath this vicarious image of a fanciful father-supremacy there
ever remains the true and abiding principle that is the underlying
reality of life. But, in the place of this principle of reality that is
the unsponsored soul of man, we have timidly substituted such temporary
cheats as are adapted only to lull our fancies with imperialistic
dreams of personal empire. Indeed, in the personal projection actuating
the social anomaly of religious belief the inverted bias comprising
our own self-image has its strongest lodgment. It is here that the
collective mind has tricked itself to its collective undoing. For
in the current expression of our social inversion resident in this
absolute arbiter of the moral law or of “good and bad” lies the
very nucleus of our human pathology. And it is my position that
the pretence, underlying the personal adjustment based upon early
inculcated issues of self-interest and concealed beneath our specious
determinants of “good” and “bad,” is no less the underlying fallacy of
psychoanalysis. For, in its attempt to offset neurotic disharmonies
due to an unconscious repression of the sexual life of the individual,
psychoanalysis has recourse to adjustments that are the mere
_alternative_ of repression--a repression legislated by the dictates
of an equally unconscious and repressed society, be its expression
opportunistic, sublimative, or _en règle_.
Thus psychoanalysis, likewise, presents a policy that is but a
desperate alternation between the only two issues that are available
on the basis of the absolute criterion such as inevitably obtains
in our present bidimensional or pictorially constellated scheme of
consciousness, namely, a policy in which the reaction of the individual
can only be in the direction of the reverse or opposite extension.
Hence, however personally displeasing to us, there is the need that
we who are psychoanalysts somehow recognize that we, also, are
unconsciously subordinated to the moral dilemma that is the reflection
of our own self-interest. There is the need that we see clearly that
psychoanalysis, too, is still under the domination of a falsely imbued
impression of good and bad with its attendant issue in the alternations
of an unconscious social resistance.
This illusory antithesis of getting or of not getting what one wants,
this irreconcilable ache of man’s unconscious is traceable again
and again to the false assumptions of a self-reflective absolutism
as arrogated by the individual as a single part or element in
contradistinction to our organic consciousness as a whole. It is in the
absolutism of the part that consists the dissociation of the whole;
it is in the relativity of the part that consists the integrity of
the whole. Within the sphere of man’s consciousness our fallacies of
observation lie in the absolutism of the observer. On the other hand,
in surrendering the bidimensional or pictorial illusion inseparable
from the fixed position of the observer for the tridimensional
actuality of our organic participation in life as an inclusive
totality, we automatically yield it the full-dimensional component
comprising the extension that is our confluent societal unity and
which, in abrogating the artificial image of a personal and unconscious
absolute, constitutes life in the encompassing scheme of the relativity
of consciousness. In such a scheme there is offered to the dissociated
personality, single and social, neurotic and normal, a readjustment
that is fundamental. I believe it is only in the acceptance of the
societal consciousness of man that there lies the ultimate step for
each of us. For the principle of the relativity of consciousness is an
organically unequivocal one. In its individual realization consists our
societal integrity. In its societal realization consists our individual
integrity. Only in the co-ordination of the two lies the fulfilment of
our organic personality.
PART II
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES
Personally, I am more and more convinced that the cure for
sentiment, as for all the weakened forms of strong things, is
not to refuse to feel it, but to get to feel _more_ in it. This
seems to me to make the whole difference between a true and a
false ‘asceticism.’ The false goes for getting rid of what one
is afraid of; the true goes for using it and making it serve.
The one empties, the other fills; the one abstracts, the other
concentrates. Don’t you think half the troubles of life come from
being wrongly _afraid_ of things--especially afraid of oneself?
(February, 1890.)
Richard Lewis Nettleship.
CHAPTER I
ANALYSIS OF FREUD’S DYNAMIC AND INDIVIDUALISTIC CONCEPTION OF THE
NEUROSES
The following pages are an endeavour to determine the conditions,
social and individual, that constitute the health of the mental
organism. What the health of the mental organism is, has not as
yet been adequately described. On the somatic side, of course, one
defines health as the harmonious functioning of the parts comprising
the organism as a whole. But, as regards the constitution of the
mental life in its totality, we have no such inclusive interpretation
of the condition requisite to harmonious functioning. Although the
psychopathologist is constantly engaged in efforts to restore the
distorted mind to a condition of harmony and health, one finds nowhere
a satisfactory statement as to just what constitutes the state of
harmony which it is his avowed purpose to establish. Health, of course,
is synonymous with the harmony of the whole. But from the point of
view of consciousness we have not even determined as yet what is the
organism as a whole or what are the parts constitutive of it. The
psychiatrist is habitually preoccupied with the outer features of
mental disharmony which the method of extrinsic observation has brought
to his personal notice. It is evident, therefore, that his conception
of consciousness is automatically withheld from a subjective inclusion
of the organism in its entirety, and that it compasses only the
particular aspect that falls within the limits of his own particular
observation. It is this discrepancy which I should like, if possible,
to isolate from its present personal involvement, with a view to the
possibility of a clearer understanding of our mental problems. To this
end my recourse can only be such an objective inquiry as may be the
more hospitable because of its subjective inclusiveness.
In pre-Freudian days, as is well known, the psychopathologist who
had to do with a nervous disorder turned quite automatically in the
direction to which the patient pointed, or to the symptom indicated.
Whether a paralysis, an obsession, a phobia or what not, this symptom
or sign constituted for the physician no less than for the patient the
exclusive focus of interest. Thus in the domain of nervous and mental
disharmonies the entire field of inquiry occupied itself in earlier
times with a mere obvious index of disease rather than with the disease
itself.
With the advent of Freud the situation became wholly changed. Through
his discovery that the disturbance was neither _what_ nor _where_ it
appeared to be from the clinical point of view, Freud came to explain
it upon grounds which led to a fundamentally altered conception of
the hysterias and their kindred manifestations. Viewing the situation
as a dynamic one, Freud regarded the symptom in question in the light
of an unruly element within the central personality, whence, in his
view, this central personality became, as it were, the controlling seat
of government. It was Freud’s position that this presiding principle
must be held amenable for fostering within its domain so discordant
an element as that whereof the symptom gave notice, and accordingly,
it was to this central principle that Freud henceforth addressed his
investigations.
This position of Freud’s, in which he regards the essential mechanism
of the neurosis as a symptom-substitution representing in substance a
psychic transposition or a shift of affect from intrinsic source to
arbitrary aspect, embodies the whole significance of psychoanalysis.
It is a significance that marks the outset of our understanding of the
real nature of the neuroses. For it was this conception that first
posited as the background of consciousness an integral personality,
from which, as a basis, it was sought to discover the factors operative
in causing the division within it represented by the neurosis. But just
as the enduring distinction of Freud’s work lies in this conception of
a central totality of personality constituting the substrate of the
conscious life, so its limitation consists precisely in the erroneous
position to which Freud assigned this totality of consciousness. I
believe that the many inconsistencies and half-baked deductions of
psychoanalysis, with the consequent deadlock to a truly comprehensive
interpretation of the neuroses, are due precisely to this limitation
of the conception of the neurosis within the bounds of the individual
consciousness. When we have realized that this conception of a totality
of personality is biologically tenable only _from the point of view
of an inclusive societal consciousness and not of the circumscribed
individual consciousness_, we shall, I believe, have taken the
essential step toward dispelling the confusion and lack of coherence
within the psychoanalytic system as it now stands.
As one looks back, it is not difficult to see how Freud’s necessarily
conventional, clinical point of view--the outgrowth of personal
inclination and tradition--unconsciously bound him to a conceptual
outlook that was necessarily circumscribed and limited, and how he was
thus unwittingly led into a contradiction of the ultimate significance
of the very conception which he had himself originated.
In the nature of Freud’s postulate that a psychic transposition
is the basis of the neurosis, his thesis assumes a breach in the
integrity of consciousness. This breach within consciousness is due
to the effort of a delimited area within it to establish itself as
a separate, self-governing unit. His position envisages a conflict
entailing a dissociation of the personality due to the secession of
one or more of its integral constituents. Hence the real crux of
Freud’s thesis was the determination of the essential incompatibility
between an _independent part_ (dissociation) and the _coherent whole_
(unification) within the sphere of consciousness--a conception which
seems to me as beautiful as it is true. But in the bias of Freud’s
own individualistically circumscribed consciousness, with the
inevitable separation or dissociation it entailed, Freud failed to
recognize the implication of his own thesis. He did not see that he
was himself unconsciously held within a position bearing the essential
feature of the very disorder which presumably he was regarding from
a non-partisan, unified point of view. He did not see that his own
position was precisely that of a separate, delimited unit, within the
totality of consciousness, represented in the dissociation of his own
personal bias. There is here a consideration which Freud, and the rest
of us along with Freud, have permitted to pass by completely unnoticed,
due to our own unconscious embroilment within the limitations of our
circumscribed individual consciousness. While theoretically advocating
unification as the basis of consciousness, Freud was himself actually
seeking unconsciously to reconcile with it a dissociation within
himself. It is this self-circumventing illusion of the restricted
individualistic consciousness which, if one may judge from the degree
to which it has underlain my own work and that of others, is the
essential fallacy of psychoanalysis.
In reality, then, Freud set out to account for the seemingly actual
upon grounds of the seemingly actual. He did not see that the very
medium of human experience, as _seemingly_ actual and as commonly
accepted by us to be actual, is in truth already biased by impressions
that are only virtual. In short, Freud did not realize that our own
so-called consciousness is unconsciousness. He assumed that the
analysis or self-examination to which he subjected himself and his
patients was disinterested and authentic in its inclusiveness of the
personality as a whole. And all the while he failed to realize that the
personality as a whole, as embodied in the self-limited consciousness
of the individual, is itself imbued with all the prejudice of
self-interest and with all the bias of dissociation constitutive of
the habitual medium of our collective unconscious. As this habitual
medium is actuated by individual tradition and separativeness, it is
necessarily based throughout upon motives of personal preference. With
an outlook distorted by personal preference (the unconscious wish), it
is not possible to view the processes of life and its disharmonies with
freedom and clarity. From a standpoint of private prejudice it is not
possible to envisage private prejudice. Unconsciousness cannot compass
unconsciousness. The wish cannot assail the wish. In our present mode
of personalism and unconsciousness the attainment of consciousness
is of its nature an impossible task. Thus the bias of Freud renders
untenable the position of Freud when he assumes the abrogation of bias,
since his position has itself arisen from the unsuspected bias of his
own habituated or preferential mode.
It is this unconsciousness within ourselves which we psychoanalysts
have let escape us and which necessarily gives to our work, for all
its impressiveness, the conventional curtailment of the vicarious and
unreal. As an illustration of what I mean, there is somewhere in the
“Traumdeutung” an amusingly acute psychoanalytic touch in Freud’s
interpretation of the dream of a patient. This patient had on one day
stoutly protested that dreams were not invariable wish-fulfilments,
and on the following day she brought to Freud a dream in which she was
represented planning a summer outing with her mother-in-law whom she
cordially disliked. Here, she said, was proof that dreams were not
necessarily wish-fulfilments, and a superficial glance would seem to
give her the decisive score. But Freud was alert. “Quite the contrary,”
he replied with analytic acuity, “you have only furnished additional
proof that dreams _are_ wish-fulfilments, for it is precisely in
your wish to prove to me that dreams are not wish-fulfilments that
you have dreamed that you are going summering with your detested
mother-in-law--a dream which could not more amply satisfy your wish to
prove the incorrectness of my theory.” So speaks Freud with triumphant
naïveté, and, with a complacency that is no less naïve, we who are
Freudians are still applauding with unstinted assent the subjective
fallacy of his objective logic.
Like Freud, we have not seen that every dream of our own contains no
less the identical wish to prove ourselves right. Like Freud, we have
not seen that it is our wish that the dream shall contain the element
of a basic and invariable sexual factor in substantiation of the thesis
of us Freudians. It is the fallacy of the dreamer in the foregoing
incident that she sets out with the absolutism of the personal premise;
but so do we--the premise, namely, of personal “rightness.” Thus we are
in no different case from the patient whom Freud cites as manufacturing
a dream to prove her position right. But while the wish of this
dreamer--in its purpose in direct opposition to our own--stands out
in sharp, unmistakable outline before us, our own wish--in its nature
identical with hers, namely, the wish to prove ourselves right--remains
enveloped still in the obfuscating mists of our own unconscious. There
is here the organic inaccessibility of the wish to the wisher, of the
dream to the dreamer. There is here the blindness of the unconscious
preference with its basis in the personal absolute, and it is the need
of us Freudians to recognize that the blight of its inconsistency is
upon us all.[19]
How dominant is Freud’s own individuating wish or personal preference
one may realize who reads his essay on “The History of the
Psychoanalytic Movement” and witnesses the bitterness of his feeling
toward any who gainsay him. How strongly we share with Freud the
influence of personal bias may be seen in our own bitterness when
others would gainsay us. It is so with us all. It is the morbid
compulsion of self-vindication that underlies all “rightness.” It is
the habitual illusion of our own self-centralization, a less wieldy but
more explicit term for what we have come to know theoretically--that
is, in other people and as in no way touching our own personal
feeling--as the unconscious wish-motive. For self-vindication and the
unconscious wish are one.
And so, objectively, Freud is quite “right” in asserting that a basic
sexual factor underlies the dream. Do not his own and his patients’
dreams prove him so? And Jung is, objectively, no less “right” in
claiming that Freud is mistaken--that dreams are not primarily
motivated by a sexual wish. Do not his dreams and those of his patients
equally corroborate _his_ view? And so with Adler and his theory, and
so with any of us and his theory. For notwithstanding that the theories
of all of us are severally opposed one to another, yet all of us are
equally “right,” as may be equally substantiated by the dreams of each.
The explanation is simple. The “rightness” of each is the wish of each
and the wish is father to the dream!