FORMULATION OF AN ORGANIC OR SOCIETAL BASIS OF INTERPRETATION
Within the various fields of scientific investigation, there is the
established precept that we set out from the simplest assignable
elements as a basis for all future inquiry. Of such, for example, is
the ground-structure of the chemical and the biological sciences, and
it is likewise upon ultimately irreducible units that the furthest
abstractions of mathematics rest their foundation. But in our approach
to the biological elements of consciousness we have proceeded upon no
such soundly established principle. Unconsciously presupposing here
and taking for granted there, we have reasoned from premises that
have lacked the warrant of elementary support. Hence in the study of
consciousness we have, in our unconsciousness, unwittingly slurred our
obligations to the very first principle of scientific method.
This circumstance, however, is not one toward which we need feel
scornful. Our blunder has been inevitable. In the study of the elements
of consciousness a factor is introduced into scientific reckoning that
completely reverses habitual perspectives, and to trace with scientific
conscientiousness this inexorable reversal of the personal mode
requires of the student very special laboratory qualification. For, in
turning to the study of the basis of consciousness, we are ourselves
the primary elements of our own inquiry. Ourselves unconscious, we have
attempted to fold back upon ourselves and, from a basis of prejudice,
to recapture our primary, unprejudiced basis. From a now sophisticated
personal _adaptation_ of consciousness we have sought to regain the
native, unsophisticated _principle_ of consciousness of which our
personal adaptation is the unconscious abrogation. Clearly, this task
is of its nature self-contradictory. Only in the measure in which we
realize that unconsciousness is our habitual mode and so allow it
to cease automatically to dominate our lives may we come to study
dispassionately the essential structure of consciousness through an
unbiased examination of the primary elements of which it is composed.
Life has its beginnings in a continuous organic medium. Within this
common organic medium our original infant organisms constitute
identical elements. What we later regard as individuals are but
corpuscles in a homogeneous, societal tissue. Organically, or from
the point of view of their common and inherent affectivity, there
exists no discrimination among these elements. Race or national
separation, social or caste distinction have not entered into them.
These are divergences that have no place in the organic origins of
life. As integral members of an original organic matrix, the elements
representing our primary infant organisms are no more differentiated
psychically one from another than they are psychically differentiated
from the life-source or the maternal organisms from which they have
sprung. The mental life, being as yet wholly subjective and unaware,
is simple, unitary. It is one with the organism’s inherent feeling.
Subjective feeling, indeterminate and unqualified, is, in the primary
organism, the sum of experience, the compass of life. Primarily the
organism’s subjective feeling is its all. And as with the growing
perception of outer objects life enlarges, this subjective mode
is unaltered still. Our primary objective experience merges into
continuity with inherent feeling. It is added to, included in the
subjective life. So that in its incipient rapport with the world of
objectivity, life maintains still a fluid, undifferentiated, confluent
mode. For life is primarily affective. In the affect consists men’s
common ground. In the subjective affect lies organic bed-rock. Here in
the common inherency of native feeling is the primal menstruum of our
human consciousness.
But there suddenly comes an interruption to this state of unification.
The parent, as spokesman of a world of unconscious collusion in the
defence of self or the exploitation of separativeness, strikes in
sharply upon this unitary mode of being with a wedge of interdiction
that marks the beginning of a cleavage within the personality which
the subsequent years tend increasingly to widen and secure.[20] With
the sudden arrest of this early, unified mode through the entrance of
the extraneous strictures of command and prohibition (suggestion or
repression), the personality of the organism becomes automatically
divided. For with command or reproof there is introduced the element
of the ulterior. Organic harmony and confluence are no more. Into the
life of confluence is now thrust the rude encroachment of personal
motive--of motive based upon the outcome of promise or threat, of
gain or forfeit. The inherent flow, the organic current of experience
is now artificially checked. Henceforward expression is no longer
spontaneous. Instead, a programme of conduct-with-a-view-to takes its
place and becomes the dominant order of our activities. In the face of
every summons the question must first be weighed--Will it be well or
ill with _me?_ Upon the issue of gain or loss depends the response--the
issue of gain or loss for the now separated, individuated organism.
An adjustment to the ends of self-interest is demanded. Everything is
at stake; a fitting policy must be devised and the proper combination
must be sought. Thus is obtruded self-consciousness, self-interest or
that separation from its basic continuum that is incidental to the
interruption of the organism’s essential life, and with it a new mode
of consciousness embodying a fundamental opposition to the primary
unity of life now takes its rise.
Is it not clear that the condition here described is nothing other
than a dissociation of consciousness, that this interpolation of the
self-motive involves a division of the personality in which there is
presented the identical reaction that we have come to know as the
essential mechanism of the neurosis? If so, then life in our present
mode of adaptation is throughout a dissociation. That such is actually
the case is the position of the present thesis. For it maintains
that division of personality, or the neurosis, has its basis in this
incipient cleavage embodied in the separation of the individual element
from its original organic continuum through the interdiction of the
organism’s early unitary mode, while integrity of the personality, on
the other hand, is represented alone in the preservation throughout the
growth of the individual element of its primary organic confluence.
Such a postulate is indeed very sweeping. It will be readily protested
that it is too sweeping--that in effect it claims that the whole
civilized world is in the grip of a mental dissociation, that it has
its being, founds its organization upon a basis of unconsciousness. I
can only answer that, however sweeping such a statement may seem in
theory, this social implication of the neurosis is amply supported
in actuality. For the unconscious reactions of the social mind about
oneself are reflected unconsciously within oneself, the individual
being but an element in our common consciousness. If one will permit
himself to be sufficiently subjective in his own life to view with
objective disinterestedness the reflections within himself of these
unconscious reactions of the social mind, there will be little ground
for protest against such an implication.
This indictment of the entire social mind, however, may rest upon
no scant or uncertain foundation. We may not deal with so broad
an issue with the personal conclusiveness of a merely dynamic or
individualistic interpretation. Our approach must needs be genetic
in its scope. We must take account of those integrations which mark
the era of man’s first awareness and which reach back to the nebulous
sources of consciousness itself. For the thoughtful student will
demand to know the phylogenetic origin of this universal tendency to
interdiction toward her offspring on the part of the mother. Whence
_her_ self-consciousness, he will ask. One’s answer must be largely
intuitional, by which I suppose we mean that it must be gathered from
sources that are coloured by intimations arising from one’s own organic
life.
It would appear that in his separativeness man has inadvertently fallen
a victim to the developmental exigencies of his own consciousness.
Captivated by the phylogenetically new and unwonted spectacle of his
own image, it would seem that he has been irresistibly arrested before
the mirror of his own likeness and that in the present self-conscious
phase of his mental evolution he is still standing spell-bound
before it. That such is the case with man is not remarkable. For
the appearance of the phenomenon of consciousness marked a complete
severance from all that was his past. Here was broken the chain of
evolutionary events whose links extended back through the nebulous
aeons of our remotest ancestry, and in this first moment of his
consciousness man stood, for the first time, _alone!_ It was in this
moment that he was “created,” as the legend runs, “in the image and
likeness of God.” For breaking with the teleological traditions of his
agelong biology, man now became suddenly _aware_.
That man’s spirit should have quailed before the wonderment of
so complete an emancipation is not surprising. Sensing his utter
isolation in the face of so strange, so unwonted a realization, he
could only cling desperately to the one visible and concrete sign of
the prenascent world from which he had newly emerged--to the urgent
and ineradicable actuality of _himself_, the one and only link that
remained to bind man to the vast and hitherto uninterrupted continuum
of his primordial past. Yet turn where he would, the organic hiatus
had now been made and its inexorable breach yawned wide and inevitable
before him. Unable as yet to endure the contemplation of his new
freedom and the limitless expanse it spread before him, equally unable
to recross again the gulf he had lately spanned and recover the paths
of his original instinctiveness and automatism, the soul of man stood
divided against itself. For man could now neither venture forth nor
yet return again. In his division he could only grope blindly amid
uncertain ways. Before him stretched the stern demands of consciousness
and reality, behind him lay the fictitious decoys of a phantastic and
immemorial preconscious. His choice lay between the two, yet he was
incompetent to follow either. It is, it seems to me, the intermediate
stage in man’s development, comprised of these two contending issues
and entailing the irreconcilable conflict of which each individual’s
experience is a recapitulation, that is the phylogeny of the
unconscious. This is the experience of us all as it expresses itself in
the self-consciousness that underlies the personal adaptation of each,
through our gradually enforced awareness of the self.
Considered also ontogenetically, the development of consciousness,
contrary to accepted tenets, has by no means proceeded upon a
fluent and harmonious course.[21] In its very birth consciousness
embodies a biological recoil--an organic impaction. Its very
unfolding is an infolding, its begetting a misbegetting. For the
rudiment of consciousness is self-consciousness. In its origin it
is self-reflexive, self-relational. That is, consciousness in its
inception entails the fallacy of _a self as over against other selves_.
It is in this inevitable _faux pas_ of man’s earliest awareness, of
his original self-consciousness (original sin), that consists the error
or lapse in the process of his evolution. In this factor of development
marked by the recoil of our self-consciousness or by the inference
of our counter-relatedness is to be traced the momentary decline in
the progressive curve of man’s organic evolution. Yet such temporary
recessions embody the operation of laws that are entirely within the
order of our developmental descent. In the first dawnings of new and
untried possibilities, it often happens that, as growth proceeds,
conditions that are later to become assets in the developmental scheme
are in their rudimentary phase very burdensome liabilities. The infant
that has not yet learned to walk is wont to crawl with much ease and
impunity, but with the finer adjustment of walking once acquired he may
now move about his world in an upright posture with far greater agility
and comfort than the movement of crawling could ever have afforded
him. And yet many are the rude impacts and ineptitudes that attend the
gradual acquisition of his new endowment. And so the developmental
possibility offered man through his attainment of the stage of
self-awareness is not less an onward stage in his evolution because in
his awkward unaccustomedness he employs it to his own undoing. It is
one of the glories of his growth which he may temporarily dim but not
permanently extinguish.
With the further unfolding of the consciousness of man, or with his
increasing awareness, there followed the recognition of the objective
intervals between his congeners severally and between himself and
them. His external senses of their very nature apprised him of such
intervals, as, for example, those in relation to time and to space.
With growing experience his perception of interval between himself and
his fellows grew more and more insistent. It became indeed the basis
of his operations. Besides, there were intervals which were not only
spatial and temporal but intervals or differences that were attributive
or circumstantial in their nature, such as vocal and featural
differences, differences of sex, size, colour and of texture.
With this constantly growing, steadily deepening impression of
difference, interval or separation in point of external characters,
with this habitual looking out upon external or objective
differentiation or _otherness_, something happened to the consciousness
of man. That which happened was the _faux pas_ in his evolution to
which I have just alluded. For, through the suggestive influence of
repeated observation of objective interval or discontinuity, man fell
a victim to a trick of his own consciousness, and, from implications
of disparity in the sphere of his peripheral contacts, he erroneously
_inferred_ differentiations in the sphere of his internal, nuclear,
organic life. From data of observation in the field of his objective
relationships he unconsciously drew analogous conclusions in regard to
the essential continuities of his common, subjective consciousness,
and so applied to the primary and inherent mode of his experience
deductions which were warranted only with respect to the mode of his
outer or objective awareness. From a difference of envelope he assumed
a difference of content. From a dissimilarity of outer and accidental
character he implied a disparity in the realm of his organic and
essential life. _Thus arose the initial confusion accruing from the
employment of objective method in terms of the subjective mode_.
It is my position that the fallacy involved in confusing the separate
or objective with the confluent or subjective mode has become the very
warp and woof of the collective mind, as it is the biological basis
of the displacements characterizing the pathological references of
the insane. Dealing cognitively (objectively) with our affects and
affectively (subjectively) with our cognitions, we fail to envisage
what is actually before us. Where there are two individuals--oneself,
let us say, as compared with someone else--because of the dissociated
_feeling_ content with which each regards the other, our presumably
objective judgment rests upon a complete subjective misconception.
It is, of course, perfectly in order that people be demarcated
by us one from another and from ourselves by characters that are
external and accidental, and that this discrimination prevail even
when such distinguishing characteristics are of a mental nature. But
despite all such accidental differences, the original, inherent,
organic life that is the underlying essence of any two individuals is
common and identical. However different spatially, traditionally and
characterologically, there is between them the essential bond of an
inherent continuity, of an organic confluence.
It is interesting how the folk mind betrays its need of this underlying
subjective unity in its effort to offset the objective tendencies of
differentiation. In its desire to express its feeling of amity, its
sense of mutual understanding, the habitual mind automatically employs
the phrase, “It makes no difference.” For example, if one has been
unintentionally thoughtless of another, he is at once put at ease with
the reassurance that “it makes no difference”--it being obviously felt
that difference is the essential condition against which the social
mind must preserve itself. Similarly we say, “It is no matter” or “It
is immaterial”--a material or objective basis of relationship being
evidently likewise sensed as an impediment to unity. There is the same
implication in the disparaging intimation contained in the phrase,
“He has an object in view.” And more telling still is the coalescence
of the two affiliated ideas of matter and disunity in the use of the
single stem-ending employed in the words “object” and “objection,” the
evident implication being that _object_ and _obstacle_, or _objection_,
are subjectively indistinguishable.
It seems to me that even such seemingly trivial etymological evidences
betray the organic intolerance of differentiation within the sphere
of the subjective life. However habituated we may have become to the
subjective inferences of interval due to the objective report of our
external senses, beneath these outer and accidental demarcations there
is the persistent assertion of an underlying principle of unification
and continuity. In our own customary dissociated feeling we lose sight
of this completely, and, because of the confusion of modes within
ourselves, our judgment of others as being subjectively different from
us reaches the point of actual criticism and resentment.
A child early illustrates this tendency to erroneous inference when he
refers to inanimate objects about him--a toy or household object--a
disposition to thwart his will. For example, he will grow angry at some
intractable plaything and strike or abuse it in peevish retaliation.
And it is the unfortunate habit of unwise parents--that is, of parents
generally--to encourage the child’s delusive tendency with some such
corroborative remark as “naughty chair” (or whatever the offending
instrument may be) and even to carry their complicity to the extent of
themselves inflicting punishment upon the object in question.[22]
This tendency to erroneous inference in the mental sphere is the
fallacy of an objective method of psychiatry, as it is the underlying
misapprehension of the clinical approach of psychopathology
generally.[23] Indeed, this misconception is responsible for many of
the inadvertencies of reason that exist throughout our scientific
ranks. It would seem, after all, that the people who know most are
precisely those who suspect least. If the psychiatrist is asked what
is dementia præcox, his answer consists merely in recounting the signs
or symptoms “indicative” of the disorder. If he is directly confronted
with the symptoms or indications of the disorder, he will tell you that
they represent dementia præcox. With such a confusion in the mind of
the psychiatrist one may well judge the confusion existing in the minds
of people generally, and with this subjective confusion in ourselves
one gains readily an idea of the kind of instruction which the student
of psychiatry is now offered as a preparation for understanding the
psychology of insanity! It does not occur to the psychopathologist to
inquire what it is that constitutes the inherent condition whereof
the specific symptoms as well as the generic term for them are but
the pathological index. It does not occur to him to ask, in regard
to this and other disease-processes, what it is that underlies the
label as well as the appearances labelled. But unconsciously misled by
the superficial or cognitive _aspect_ of the real disharmony, he can
only shift uncertainly from sign to countersign. The reason is that,
lacking a societal encompassment of mental disorders, the psychiatrist
does not recognize that a subjective condition is to be found alone
within himself--that the condition for which, in his unconsciousness,
he is now seeking the objective account is accessible only within
the subjective processes of his own unconscious, as it is accessible
subjectively only within the unconscious of mankind at large.
Because of this confusion within ourselves we fail to recognize that
delusion is essentially of the affective mode, that its cognitive
expression is but its secondary rationalization--a symbolic picture
presented in lieu of the corresponding affect denied. It is this
type of “reasoning” that is responsible for the tendency one sees
everywhere within philosophical circles to make dark the things that
are clear. Descartes’ dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” is the keynote
to this cognitive fallacy. The tendency, as I said, even of us who
are psychopathologists to evade the recognition of the element of
unconscious replacement here--confounding cognitive form with affective
actuality--is due, as always, to the bias of this self-same replacement
within ourselves. Being social participants in the transposition of
affect that is the societal neurosis, it cannot be otherwise. Hence
this confusion between our perceptual and our affective modes is
throughout a basic one, and as it is general in its origin it is
necessarily general in its results.
We commonly accept the assumption that mysticism is an emanation of the
Hindoo consciousness, when in point of fact the Hindoo consciousness
is an emanation of mysticism. In truth, mysticism is a replacement
that is not more endemic to India than to England or to America. For
in mysticism there is expressed merely this underlying fallacy of
reference that is habitual to unconsciousness generally. Mysticism
is thus as symptomatic of our matter-of-fact normality as of the
most occult form of transcendentalism. Psychologically, the normal
mind is synonymous with the mystical mind. Such a replacement is,
then, no isolated eventuality signalized in some sporadic neurosis or
psychosis but, by reason of its ethnic scope, it underlies no less the
genial illusion of the collective social mind presented in the form
of amalgamated unconsciousness habitually disguised under the social
symptomatology of our so-called “normality.” Because of the automatic
and unconscious transposition of modes that characterizes our mental
processes at their present stage of development, the situation is one
that obtains among us all. In the organismic sense we are none of
us thinking clearly because we are none of us feeling clearly. This
fallacy of implied subjective differentiation is the whole meaning of
unconsciousness and the basis of all delusion. I believe that it is
upon this deep-seated fallacy of affect incident to the development in
man of consciousness or of self-awareness that rests the foundation of
the social as of the individual neurosis.
The situation with us is indeed a serious one. Except for one’s
faith in the ultimate triumph of the forces of integration over
the disintegrative tendencies of our evolution, the mind could
only despair at the contemplation of the vicious circle of mutual
self-destructiveness in which our present attitude of unconsciousness
involves us. As difference or discrepancy in the subjective or organic
mode is, from the point of view of the continuity and cohesion of the
species, self-destructive, the maintenance of such separateness entails
for each individual a desperate loss of his sense of organic integrity.
Under the blindness of the retroactive self-defence to which his
erroneously assumed separateness inevitably drives him, he fights the
more desperately to maintain his artificial individualistic oneness,
and, the more desperately he contends, the further he defeats the
acceptance of his true organic oneness. It is the inevitable fallacy of
our disparate modes.
Freud, then, is right when in seeking to solve the riddle of the
neuroses he addresses himself to the personality as a whole. But
he is wrong in positing a personal or preferential localization of
this central personality as he does when he places this integral
consciousness within the bounds of the separative individual.
This is to frustrate at the outset the aim of understanding the
processes of consciousness through succumbing oneself to the very
mode of unconsciousness which supposedly it is one’s purpose to
comprehend. It is an instance of one’s intentionally honest effort
toward self-understanding failing to escape the pitfall of personal
preference in its very outreaching toward the unprejudiced and true.
The separative or the personal _is_ unconsciousness. Discontinuity
and unconsciousness are conterminous. Thus we are again and again
brought back to the impasse which is our refusal to realize that the
individual, as a self-appointed, unconscious unit, is but a separate
and dissociated _part_, that only as the individual accepts his place
as an integral, confluent part in the common, societal personality does
he become a conscious, unified _whole_.
There is, then, the need to clear our vision through adopting the
larger, more organismic viewpoint. There is the need to stand apart
from the self and view it as the element that it is within the larger
organism of mankind. From the organismic point of view the individual
is as truly an element in the larger co-ordinated total comprising the
ethnic organism of man, as the manifold cells comprising the individual
body are elements in the larger whole constituting his individual
organism. We have not as yet reckoned with the consolidated unity of
this common societal entity. We have not reckoned with its organic urge
in its influence upon human destiny. In our preoccupation with the
dynamic or individualistic conception of the libido or of individual
aggression, we have not reckoned with the genetic or organic urge that
actuates the unitary race consciousness in its societal cohesion.
It is commonly taught by the schoolmen that self-preservation is
the first law of nature. I do not believe it. I believe that the
instinct of tribal preservation is by far the dominant urge among us.
I believe that this instinct takes precedence over the impulse of
self-maintenance to a degree that renders individual life insignificant
in comparison. In face of the reflex assertion of the impulse of
race-preservation the individual is brushed heedlessly aside. A
group of miners will without thought descend one after another into
a gas-filled chamber to rescue a fellow-workman from death and one
after another share the fate of their comrade. We all know countless
instances of this rescue-impulse as a response to the organic instinct
of race unity.[24] Nor is it confined to these more sensational
expressions of the impulse. The scientist in his laboratory toiling
daily with indefatigable energy, receiving usually a remuneration
that is not adequate to his actual needs and too often without even
the sympathetic appreciation on the part of his environment of the
significance of his quest, as it relates to the communal need he
would serve, expresses equally this same organic instinct of racial
solidarity. Yet I do not lose sight of the secret unconsciousness
and separativeness that actuate also the unconscious and adaptive
reactions of even the most earnest and gifted of these thoughtful,
patient investigators. I am not unaware of the delusions of competition
and petty jealousy existing even among the ranks of the scientific
student. I am not blinking the facts of his personal vanity, of his
pride of place and distinction. I will not deny how like a child
he is when, on the day of college commencement, he is afforded the
opportunity to parade to music in cap and gown and vari-coloured
academic emblems in order that, having assembled with his colleagues,
he may unite in praise of an archaic deity in thanksgiving for His
all-wise discrimination in having personally called him to the best of
conceivable institutions in the best of conceivable lands, etc., etc.
But, notwithstanding the obviously disparate regression observable in
these vestiges of obsolete nursery rudiments, there is yet, extending
beneath it all, the surge of an earnest, unifying purpose that embraces
the confluent needs of human growth as offered in interests pursuant of
common, social ends.
It is the inherent urge actuating this common societal impulse, as
contrasted with the narrower motives of separateness and self, that
is envisaged in an organismic point of view. I believe that through
this organismic outlook alone we shall come to embody the meaning of
the neurosis in its true, impartial significance. In this conception
we shall be in a position to view differentiation, under whatsoever
form it manifests itself, as the fallacy of self-sufficiency, as the
delusion of separateness that it is. Whether presented in the more
restricted, individualistic expression of an hysterical hemiplegia,
for example, or under the wider social aspect, let us say, of national
militarism, we shall no longer study the mere manifest content embodied
in the obvious symptom or signal--a focal hemiplegia or a focal
militarism--but we shall address ourselves, in each instance, to the
societal personality as a whole that underlies each and that comprises
for both the organic totality of consciousness. We shall realize that
in that totality lies the responsibility for the division among its
elements expressed alike in both manifestations. We shall see that in
these two seemingly widely dissimilar instances, one expressing itself
within the individual man, the other within the nations of men, the
situation is the same. In one, differentiation is caused by a breach
in the neural continuity of the organism as symbolized by the inert,
functionally disaffected segment within the individual; in the other,
by a breach in the societal continuity of the organism represented
in the functional anomaly of manic self-assertion and segmentation
within the social body as symbolized in the separative reaction that
has lately so disorganized the Western World. However different in
outer form, in both reactions there is alike expressed an unconscious
assertion of autocracy or the will-to-self as opposed to the confluent
life of the organism as a whole. And it is only as we view these
expressions, one individual, the other social, as identical reactions
and study them in an identical spirit of interpretation, that we shall
recognize the essential principle of our biology exemplified in them,
namely, the inherent inviolability of the confluent life of the
organism, both individual and societal. Only in this organismic outlook
shall we come to understand the true significance of the neuroses in
the sense of really encompassing the disharmony embodied in them.
_It should be clearly understood that in the view of this thesis it is
not a question of discrimination between the social and the individual,
but between the societal and the individual societally conceived on
the one hand and the social and the individual individualistically
conceived on the other._
From this position we have yet to encompass clearly the neurotic
disharmony, individual or societal. We have yet to encompass in its
real significance what is the most blatant expression of its societal
embodiment. Because of our dissociative, individualistic outlook we
have yet to consider the psychopathology underlying the phenomenon
of war. We have failed to interpret its psychology in the light of
the mental attitude that underlies and actuates it. We do not realize
that the settlement of war is properly the concern not of politics
but of psychiatry. Here, as elsewhere, we shrink from unearthing the
actuality of the interred affect, preferring to preserve its image
in the fanciful balm of our own illusions. Our horror of war is thus
centred solely upon the façade it presents and not upon the inherent
significance of war. Accordingly, our concern is merely to alter
the aspect, the cognitive form, the mental picture, and, under this
altered semblance due to our bidimensional alternation, we still retain
the same affect submerged in the unconscious grievance of national
separateness and antagonism. There is here the subjective fallacy of
the transposed affect and the ancient metonymy of all unconsciousness.
A conspicuous symptom of our societal pathology is the subjective
illusion underlying the latent “belief” that diplomatic overtures
between nations are competent to cope with the essential disharmonies
which, from time to time, tend to issue in the social symptomatology
of war, but which are, in reality, due to causative factors deeply
rooted in the psychopathology of man’s societal disunity. While not
questioning the outstanding objective advantage of such superficial
covenants as may secure to the social confederacies of nations at least
a temporary cessation of their outward expressions of hostility, these
surface amenities touch in no way the essential disorder. The real
cause lies deeper and the real remedy must penetrate deeper. For the
delusion of difference between nations, like the delusion of difference
between individuals, is but the objective reflection of the subjective
differentiation existing within the nation itself--a differentiation
that is comparable to this same objective reflection existing within
the individual as a subjective component of the national organism.
Just as the conflict underlying the neurosis of the individual is truly
understood only through an analysis in the individual of the vicarious
reactions that underlie it, so an understanding of the conflict
underlying the neurosis that is societal may be attained only through
an appreciation of the substitutive reactions of the group-mind as
disclosed through an analysis of the group-consciousness.
Seen clearly, man’s restlessness to-day is, after all, the restlessness
of intercepted growth. The tremors we are experiencing at this moment
throughout the political and economic world undoubtedly owe their
impulse to the awakening of a new order of consciousness. In the
seething undercurrent of discontent throughout the social organism at
the present time there is seen the symptom of a repression that is no
longer reconcilable with the growing consciousness of that organism. As
in the individual personality a condition of repression that has become
too long pent must inevitably break forth in an ultimate overthrow of
reason, so in the collection of individuals comprising the societal
organism the ultimate response to a too long sustained repression can
issue only in a correspondingly overwhelming disruption of the social
personality.
In what has just been experienced sociologically as the World War, man
is afforded an organic warning of the impending disintegration which
lurks unseen beneath the surface crust of immediate and temporary
social adaptations within the depths of his unconscious. In that
far-sweeping manifestation there are felt the first rumblings of a
sociological disturbance that bodes the utter destruction of our old
order of habituations, and in that desperate expression of man’s
social unconscious there is evident the need in which he stands of an
earnest and far-searching self-analysis. For as overwhelming as is the
catastrophe of the present war--and present it is--this catastrophe is
but the detonator preceding the crash that is to come--a crash that
has been gathering momentum within the unconscious of the race through
centuries past and that will descend upon the world with inevitable
fatality in the absence of a more societal and inclusive reckoning
among us.
Without the recognition of the meaning of our disaffection,
sociological as well as personal, without a more conscious realization
of the social involvement of our personal separateness, it will not
be possible for the creative forces resident within the personality
of man to come into their natural fruition. But thus to encompass
the organic disaffection that actuates the neurosis is _to include
it within ourselves_. Thus to realize discrepancy is to make real
within ourselves, where they exist in all their completeness, the
division and antagonism of the disparate consciousness, be its
countenance individualistic or social. Such a realization--such a
comprehension of life in its manifold unconsciousness is a subjective,
organic experience. The process is one that entails the slow divorce
of self from the long habituations of our narrow domesticities,
personal, familial and national. It involves the gradual sundering
of the artificial sophistications of self-consciousness with which
our childhood has been enclosed and in which were early laid the
foundations of the dissociation that has now become automatic in the
overwhelming impetus of its social involvement. The essence, then,
of an understanding that truly encompasses the neurosis, consists
in the recognition of our collective unconsciousness through the
realization of a disaffection within and among ourselves as elements of
a dissociated body-social.