THE ORGANIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
In submitting a thesis which takes the position that the significance
of the neurosis is its societal implication, and which lays the burden
of its adjustment upon the societal mind at large, I fully realize
that I am offering no welcome thought. The illusion of the separate
self as all-sufficient and omnipotent is too obdurate not to regard
with suspicion any attempt to dislodge it. Whatever the postulate,
belief or argument, there lurks beneath it, in the mind of each of us,
the unconscious determination to preserve intact the secret illusion
of his own separateness. As long, however, as this affective fallacy
underlies the reactions of our collective mentality, all efforts toward
a reconstruction of society upon grounds of a more conscious and adult
adaptation are futile. The adaptive and compensatory nature of the
normal or collective mind occasions dissociation in all the activities
arising out of it. With our mental outlook based upon illusion, our
reactions are illusory. No matter how imposing in their manifest
content, they are fundamentally spurious and undependable. For having
been organically dissociated through the interdiction of the parent,
normality is necessarily self-conscious and vicarious. This accounts
for the ease with which the normal mind resorts to the replacements
represented in mysticism. In the manifold expressions of mysticism
the social mind finds its ulterior placations. This accounts for the
habitual self-propitiations underlying its cherished superstitions
and “beliefs,” and explains the whole meaning of the man-made
immanence represented in the vicariously projected image of invincible
omnipotence we call “God”--an image with which we childishly seek
to ally ourselves in order to sustain our impotent separateness. Men
are tenacious of the substitution that is their “God” in a degree far
beyond their suspecting. It is in vain that they pretend to throw Him
off in the mere insolence of their reactionary “disbelief.” In their
very challenge is His sovereignty reaffirmed. For wherever there is
dogmatism there is doubt, and beliefs that are denied are unconsciously
not less fixed and ineradicable than beliefs that are affirmed. As
long as there is unconsciousness so long will men be a prey to its
tyrannical alternatives. Though they break or kiss the rod, it is upon
them still.
Man will be slow to relinquish this symbol of God popularly employed
by him as a defence against the free, unsponsored growth of his own
spirit. It is a symbol, as are all symbols of the unconscious, that
has been erected by us as a protection for the disparate self against
the confluent life of our common organism. Indeed it is precisely in
this collective illusion that is man’s most desperate recourse. Yet,
in our very extremity and in the very tenacity with which we cling to
this illusion, there is to be seen, as always, a symbol for which the
only warrant is the profound reality that underlies it. In so far as
the organically true is denied, there inevitably ensues the vicariously
false, and the insistence of the substituted equivalent is invariably
the more intense in proportion to the urge of the organic need
withheld. It is organic law.
Recalling the past, it is interesting to consider how conscientiously
we have carried the biological method of research into the various
objective fields of scientific inquiry. Yet, in regard to the
subjective sphere wherein our own reality resides, we have persistently
befuddled our perceptions through an unconscious adherence to the
childish tenets of fear and superstition, instead of studying the
phylogenetic account of our inherent mental descent in the spirit
of objective disinterestedness. For, unconsciously yielding
habitual perceptions the supreme place even in the laboratories of
consciousness, as embodied in the researches of analysis itself, we
have continued to preserve the unconscious image of self habitually
disguised under our personal interpretation of God. Restoring the
form of the idol from time to time by covering the rent with a
temporarily stouter fabric whenever the straw has appeared, we have
continued to maintain the self-flattering programme of our vicarious
and self-protected image-worship. Men apparently do not yet begin
to recognize that the socially consolidated aberration constituting
their image of God is an illusion that is identical with the
individual expression long recognized by psychiatry under the clinical
characterization of “ideas of reference.” Still seriously discoursing
of the symbol called “God,” they assume that their _image_ possesses an
actuality apart from their own imagining.
More significant still, however, is the fact that psychiatry too has
its God. Objectively defining ideas of reference in others, we have
failed to reckon with the subjective presence of this same replacement
within ourselves. While we psychiatrists would carefully note the
tendency to transposed affects within the arbitrary systems of the
insane, we have wholly missed count of this same tendency within our
own autocratic system. Among psychiatrists the favoured Deity is
Dementia Præcox. The symptoms, reactions and prognostications assigned
to the image implied in this arbitrary superscription attain with us
to a quite endless category. And such is the subtlety with which the
insidious tendency to the vicarious (affective displacement) secretly
insinuates itself even into the courts of the elect, that individual
personality is again and again led into the unsuspected trap that is
our habitual confusion of the symbol for the reality that underlies it.
In truth “Dementia Præcox,” the disease, is but the symbolic
projection of dementia præcox, the actuality, ever resident in our
generic unconsciousness. As it is the primary state of the infant
psyche, its rudiment is preserved in the unconscious of us all.[25]
The understanding and acceptance of this biological substrate of
consciousness within oneself offers the only condition of its solution.
In this subjective course lies the whole significance of a really
organic analysis. To hold a theoretical, objective attitude toward the
insanities is to remain under the thrall of the social unconscious. To
preserve our own repressions by attempting to deny this preconscious
factor within ourselves is merely to perpetuate this regressive trend
under its present symbolic guise. Theoretical substitution is the
big-stick of normality of which an objective analysis is the butt-end.
To maintain the normal, psychiatric, adaptive outlook is to be
repressed, vicarious, theoretical. And by our attitude of aloofness we
merely preserve in unconscious form in ourselves the symptom-complex
we stigmatize as dementia præcox in others. But we cannot alleviate a
mental disorder from which we stand apart. It is only as we accept the
testimony of its rudimentary presence within our own consciousness that
its significance in the consciousness of others may become clear.
Of dementia præcox, the disease, psychiatry is in fact more a cause
than a cure, just as mothers and doctors who habitually hold to a
mental attitude of personal ministration and concern, however handy
they may be in untoward emergency, are more an occasion than a remedy
for disease in general. And so the real disorder, after all, is not
dementia præcox but psychiatry. When the psychiatrist will have come
to understand dementia præcox or the preconscious within himself,
this objective figment of his own disordered consciousness will
spontaneously vanish.
To-day, the symbol of the social mind that is called “God”--the symbol
under which man has worshipped himself so confidingly throughout the
ages--is gradually losing its symbolic adequacy and, as is typical when
the foothold of man’s unconscious threatens to be dislodged, he is
hastily replacing his shattered idol with an image that bears a new,
a subtler and a more plausible disguise. Even in schools representing
developments of the Freudian psychology and presumably devoted to
impartial analytic inquiry into man’s unconscious, we find this same
unconscious self-worship shifted from the broken image of “God” to a
merely revarnished symbol set up upon the same altar and called by
the newer name of “Love.” Though the form is altered, the substance
remains the same. It is again man’s self-love projected into the
spurious objective that best lends to it the flattering security of the
seemingly real.
I do not say that there is not in life an essential unity or love. I do
not say that there is not for man an answer to the need he feels in his
relentless but misguided pursuit of such an underlying reality. What I
do say is that the unity he may find is the substance whereof the unity
he is seeking is but the shadow; that in his unconsciousness he has
not yet begun to seek the reality that is the need of his essential,
organic life; and that, failing the reality which resides alone in
the confluent, unified life of our common consciousness, he has
pursued the temporary and personal satisfactions whereof such fanciful
image-projections as “God” and “Love” are but hysterical replacements.
What is significant is the fact that, under however subtle a guise
he may clothe it, every individual in the great confederacy of
“normality” entertains and is actuated by some form of “belief”--a
“belief” either in “God” or “Love” or in some other concept that is
the emotional equivalent of these more general fabrications of our
collective unconscious.[26] But in the image fashioned of belief
there is seen the inevitable process of compensation vicariously
exacted of us by virtue of our denying the fulfilment of the organic
reality of life. The dissociated mind can of necessity observe only
dissociatively. In its repudiation of reality it resorts perforce to
vicarious images of reality. It is for this reason that the normal mind
is the mystical mind. In its organic disunity it cannot be otherwise.
Although it seek under manifold signs and symptoms to conceal the
tell-tale of its stigma, its blight is betrayed by countless evidences
of its dissociation from the societal or organic personality. And it
is not in the nature of the _object_ that consists the element of
the mystical in our human pathology but in the _mode_ in which the
object is regarded.[27] The objects of man’s mystical devotion offer
an infinitely varied range. They may readily be presented by a host
of images expressing the widest discrepancy in manifest content--for
example, one’s conception of the cosmogony, “the true artist,” a
scientific discovery, the “error of mortal mind,” one’s exchequer,
“to-morrow” with its ever receding illusion of postponement, or a
cult of mental healing with texts setting forth the ultimate solution
of life; or, on the other hand, an autogenic sexual fetish, as one’s
body, the unreal image one causes to stand for one’s mother, a
favourite offspring, “God,” or “the superlative woman.” Among certain
people a very popular vehicle for the mystical mode is one’s “voice.”
To-day, too, there are people who talk in subdued whispers of the
spiritual virtues of raw foods and who dilate by the hour upon the
merits of lettuce--as though it were the millennium. Then there is
to be noted the high place in mystical sanctuaries which the family
escutcheon occupies among its votaries. There are people extant (I
confess I am one of them) who still tend to entertain the belief that
a reality underlies the social concept “good family.” And--comedy of
comedies!--such is the subtlety with which the element of the mystical
or of vicarious self-worship evades the reality of consciousness that
the very “sincerity” with which one comes to “relinquish” such objects
of infantile illusion may itself actually rank among the spurious
images of this identical category! Seriously fancying herself well
on toward the goal of her analysis, if not quite arrived, one of my
patients remarked to another: “I want nothing.” It was spoken very
gently, almost imperceptibly, so in keeping was the rendering with the
spirit of its author. But it is evident that at least she wanted to
be regarded as _not_ wanting anything, else she would have felt no
occasion to remark her detached state. But how exquisite the subtlety
here! Another says: “I want to get rid of _things_, that I may be
more free.” Getting rid of things or husbanding them may equally
fall within the mystical or dissociated mode. As for one’s “freedom”
there is no object, unless it be one’s “truth,” that constitutes a
more popular idol under which to hide the mystical fetish of one’s
secret self-worship. But whatever the vehicle, that which gives
to it the hall-mark of the mystical is its quality of an inner,
esoteric experience possessing an indefinable, transcendental meaning
revealed alone to the peculiarly favoured possessor. Observe here the
characteristic element of distinction, the factor of favouritism, the
inseparable paranoid element of special delegation. For the object,
after all, as every object of the unconscious, is no other than the
self or the parent from the point of view respectively of the parent
or the self, and our civilized world of boasted normality becomes upon
investigation but a nursery of ungrown childhood, filled to overflowing
with bogus Gods and goblins!
As the child lost in the street anxiously scans the face of every
passer-by in the hope of discovering the features of his mother, so
the grown-up, who has lost the quiet continuity of his organic life
and flounders amid a world of dissociative habituations and ulterior
ends, eagerly searches the countenances of all whom he meets, in the
driving urge to incarnate anew the cherished image of _his_ mother.
The difference is that everywhere and in every one he finds her. And
not his mother alone but his father, his brothers, his sisters, uncles
and aunts, and with them (such is the magic of unconsciousness) the
whole array of traditional furnishings reminiscent of his childhood’s
scenery. For as his images are born of his fancy, his fancy may create
them at his will. Thus the world at large is but the family at large
and the social _genre_ but the mother.
In contemplating this identification of “the world” with one’s mother
we come to sense more intimately the real significance in normality
of the widely featured phenomenon of suggestibility. As suggestion is
the affirmative expression whereof repression is the negative form,
suggestion, like repression, is but the operation upon the individual
of the will of the consensus, of which we all, of course, are the only
too willing dupes. For just as our succumbing to repression is the
individual’s rejection of the consensual mind, so our succumbing to
suggestion is the individual’s acquiescence in the consensual mind. So
that, whether the impetus be the factor of suggestion or of repression,
whether it be offered in the positive inducements to “good” behaviour
or in the negative disparagements to “bad” behaviour, in either case
one is but fancifully subjecting himself to the domination of the
parental will in the expanded guise of the consensual unconscious.
Contrary to popular belief, suggestion is no clinical specific; it is a
social pandemic. The doctor does not wield it, it wields him. So that
as suggestion and repression, or the will of normality (normality means
“accepted rule” by the way), are but the will of the parent, it is the
will of the parent that is really the “power” of suggestion. And as
the influence exerted by suggestion, like the influence exerted by the
parent, is based upon the mental precept of good and bad, suggestion
like repression is necessarily separative in its effect. For its
self-reflective tendency necessarily induces in us the inversion of
self-worship. Again it is the discontinuity of the dissociative self in
the separatism of its own unconsciously induced image.
When we come to contemplate this childishness in ourselves, we are
naturally loath to admit that all our beliefs are but make-beliefs, and
our privately cherished convictions of certitude but the compensatory
assumptions of mysticism and dissociation. To the man who entertains
the inner conviction that the girl of his heart is just the one
woman in the whole world for him, it were futile to point out his
inconsistency by recalling an identical “belief” maintained no less
stoutly by him a few months ago in regard to his last year’s beloved.
It were as futile as to attempt to expound to a paranoiac, who has
proof that he is descended from Napoleon, that he is the unconscious
prey to unwarranted ideas of grandeur. Both of these esoterists will
only look you blandly in the face and explain to you compassionately
that “you just do not understand.”
Truly, of the tissue of illusion is the fabric of unconsciousness,
whether presented under the form of hysteria, mysticism or suggestion.
All being alike dissociative, all are alike inaccessible to the
arguments of an organic logic. And more and more it seems to me that
when we who are psychoanalysts consider _our_ unconscious preoccupation
with the concept, the symbolic equivalent, the theory of consciousness
as a substitute for the daily lived actuality of man’s organic life
in its totality, there is due the admission that psychoanalysis too,
as it now exists among us, is itself no less an equivocation, a
“belief,” an hysterical replacement for the common, organic confluence
of our societal life. Indeed, precisely because of its high claim as
representing the court of ultimate conscious appeal, psychoanalysis
requires to be brought to book more than any other of the manifold
dissociative reactions coming under an indictment that envisages our
collective, social unconscious. We who are psychoanalysts talk of the
joyous enfranchisement of consciousness and growth as compared with
the palsying limitations of unconsciousness and regression, when all
the while we neglect to impeach the unconsciousness of our own lives
and the narrow interests of personalism and self that govern them.
Because in our own normality we are ourselves so comfortably ensconced
in the social security of the collective unconscious about us, we fail
to recognize our own embroilment in it. And so, in the impregnable
solidarity of mere mass supremacy, our own assumed validity passes
unchallenged by us.
To cite an example that is closest to me: I have repeatedly held
forth to patients concerning the potential joy inherent in adult love
regarded in the light of the unifying principle of life, as though
I myself participated in its subjective actuality in the simple,
undifferentiated mode of my own daily living, when in fact I was only
unconsciously exploiting the vicarious concept or symbol or theory of
love, such as can only stand in the way of and obstruct the organic
significance of love in its actuality. Thus, in spite of ourselves,
unconsciousness makes disparate elements of us all. Indeed, it may
more truly be said “because of ourselves” rather than “in spite of
ourselves,” for, in an organic sense, self (the separative entity) and
disparity are synonymous.
But, however serious a situation that involves a world-wide neurosis,
we may not take it tragically. The tragedy of it, after all, is only
the unconsciousness of it. When we shall have truly analyzed the drama
of the unconscious which now we but enact, there can be no tragedy, for
the fabric of tragedy is woven merely of the elements of human “fate”
in its embodiment of the unconscious. There is the need, however, to
view our situation thoughtfully. Consciousness, in the sense of a true
comprehension of life, will come into its own only when we have learned
to look upon the humiliating spectacle of our dissociated selves with
what enforced forbearance we can temporarily command. Our present
attitude will continue to endure until more and more the disheartening
sense of our disparities becomes accepted by us in an outlook that,
having grown inclusive, has become our automatic and habitual mode.
Paradoxical as it may sound, consciousness has turned the heads of us
all! As it has turned them in a direction that has been inward upon
our own image, each of us, as a result, has built of his individual
organism a little separate entity unto himself--an entity which in
its organic dissociation from life as a whole is necessarily wrought
of a spurious fibre. Developmentally man is the biological snob
_par excellence_. Scorning the slower accretions of growth that
can alone imbue him with true biological culture, in his effort “to
attain” he has attempted to pass too hastily from his humble category
of vertebrate to the more socially elevated plane of “cerebrate.”
The result is that what he assumes to be cerebration is really but
a fictitious brain-state that has become entirely withdrawn from
continuity with his organic life. So that from the point of view of
consciousness in the sense of an integral mental life--the especial
mark whereby we claim prerogative over all other species--man is, by
this very token, the least integrant of them all!
And yet, when we think of it, our predicament is really no shame to
us. Consciousness is, after all, a very recent asset among us. That
we should treasure it narrowly, personally, is but the inevitable
entail of its slow, laborious evolution. It is as if, in our societal
separativeness, our race had grown grey before its childhood had
begun and we were now out of breath keeping pace with ourselves. For
it is only our separativeness that has prematurely burdened us with
the crushing weight of self-imposed responsibilities such as are
the concomitant toll of our hallucinated self-sufficiency. Unlike
the adult, the spontaneous joy of children is their whole-hearted
participation in the free, impersonal radiation of life. Unlike
ourselves, their personal importance has not yet defeated their
impersonal significance. As yet they do not live under the curse of
a dogma of conduct. Theirs is no creed of behaviour that is of one
cloth with an enforced pretence of “goodness.” Their lives are not
a daily concession to fanciful needs of self-protection against an
arbitrarily predicated world of “evil.” Adult vigilance, however, early
inculcates its delusion of separateness--of a self to be defended
against other selves--and its dissociative influence is slowly imparted
to the confiding mind of childhood. In a world of dissociation this
universal suggestion acts with powerful effectiveness, and the child
of yesterday, having once been inducted into the general guild of
secret mistrust and compensatory behaviourism and grown to parenthood,
may be safely trusted to pass on without question the secret code of
differentiation, self-distinction and disharmony to the offspring by
which he is in turn succeeded.
When God called Adam and took him to task for going about naked (for
eating of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”), asking him
if he felt no sense of shame, Adam’s prompt response was to betake
himself to the bushes overcome with embarrassment. Whereas obviously
the logical response on Adam’s part would have been: “By no means. I
am the outcome of your own handicraft and if there is any flaw in the
product it is not for me to feel chagrin.” As a matter of fact, Adam
was in nowise different from the rest of us. But there he crouched,
submissively answerable for the work of his creator and there he has
got us all crouching ever since! God, of course, employed the familiar
parental recourse and intimidated Adam, calling from afar to him in
his place of hiding. As was calculated, the strategy was completely
effective and promptly brought Adam to his knees. All of which legend
is but the allegorical statement of the simple organic truth that shame
has first to be artificially induced in us before it can be experienced
by us. Division or shame having been put into us, of course we feel
division or shame.[28]
If we have become aware of ourselves and of our unprotectedness, it has
been quite in the order of our evolution. But by the same process it is
now high time for us to realize that there is no need of protection,
and accordingly to come out of hiding and recognize that our fear and
our self-protection, being alike identical with the myth of Adam’s
indiscretion, are alike induced in us by the identical process of an
external word of repression or command thrust in upon an essentially
inherent and consonant mode.
In the absence of our realization of this blunder into which we have
fallen, from generation to generation we unconsciously repudiate the
natural unity of our common life in favour of a life prompted by
sophistication and disparity. Ourselves begotten of alien affects,
our feelings in turn breed diverse cross-strains which can issue
only in equally hybrid reactions. We refuse to see that the “evil,”
alike with the “good,” is naught but the delusion of separateness
extraneously induced in us through our artificial self-consciousness.
This subjective division within us is the essential meaning of
the all-pervasive bogey of our so-called incest-awe. As I see it,
incest-awe is the organic inconsistency of this division within the
organically indivisible sphere of man’s essential feeling. Normality
is unconsciously under its thrall because, through its organic
disunity, normality has unconsciously placed itself under its sentence.
Psychically normality _is_ incestuous and hence its awe. The degree
of its awe or guilt-revulsion is precisely the measure of its psychic
inbreeding. The more organically unwelcome the infolding, the more
organically outraged or neurotic the personality, and, accordingly,
the greater the awe or feeling-conflict resultant upon our unconscious
intimations of organic “guilt.” Our sexual self-consciousness is the
perennial fig-leaf of early tradition foliating anew in our critical
Twentieth Century. It is the division of the self of behaviour from
the self of spontaneity, of the self as disparate entity from the self
as an integral element in our common organic life that is the meaning
of the incest-awe as of the neurosis, in its social as well as in its
individual expression.
When once we have assumed the broader organismic outlook, we shall see
that, beyond a more extended compass of vision, there is really nothing
of an innovation in this societal mode of envisagement. In respect to
all systems coming under scientific observation, we have habitually
entertained a biological conception of the relation _inter se_ of the
elements to their aggregate that is identical with the conception
offered in the present theme. Hitherto the area generally considered
has merely been circumscribed within narrower limits, that is all. When
we shall have learned to move aside from our personal involvement in
it, we shall see presented an organic phenomenon which upon examination
consists of a dissociation within the societal organism. We shall see
that this dissociation involves disharmony in respect to the mental
and social relationships of the unit-elements or individuals that
comprise ourselves and constitute _inter se_ the larger biological
aggregate of our common consciousness. Maintaining our impersonal
angle of envisagement and turning to the idea of the sum of the more
circumscribed biological aggregate constituting the individual, we see
that this dissociation is, in reality, identical with the dissociation
within the individual organism that manifests itself as impairment of
harmony in respect to the physiological or functional relationships of
the units or cells comprising _its_ ultimate elements. When we lose
sight of our place as common elements within the organic aggregate of
mankind--as in the absence of an encompassing organismic point of view
we must--we tend to separate arbitrarily the biological continuity of
the two spheres, the individual and the societal. Because of our own
subjective involvement we fail to recognize that the societal sphere,
in the more inclusive sense, is the aggregate whereof the individual is
the unit, precisely as in the more circumscribed physiological view
the body cells are the units of which the individual is himself the
aggregate. Between the two spheres there is a progressive continuity.
There is no interruption of the organic transition from one to the
other. For the psychological or the societal and the functional or
physiological are continuous.[29]
It is evident that every bodily lesion consists of a _separation_ among
the elements of the impaired part. If among the cells of the liver,
for example, there is produced the condition of disharmony or disease
represented by a state of inflammation, there inevitably occurs some
partition, some breach in or interruption of their concerted function,
or of the function of the organism as a whole. The unfailing signal
wherewith the individual is apprised of the destructive process is the
reaction subjectively registered as _pain_ or a sympathetic awareness
on the part of the aggregate organism of the disordered condition of
these elements constituting a part of itself. Such a disordered state
or lesion being thus reported to the central system, as it were, the
immediate response is an outcry of pain and a prompt recourse to
remedial aids. The organism as a whole, experiencing pain, reflexly
demands relief, for the reason that impairment of the organism in
any of its parts is a menace to its integrity as a whole. That is to
say, when any one of us as an aggregate experiences pain in any part
whereof he is the whole--when he experiences some local inflammation or
separation within the elements of a part or organ within himself, he
promptly directs his efforts toward its alleviation. But in the organic
whole comprising the societal aggregate whereof he, as an individual,
is the contributive element or part, the situation, as we shall in a
moment see, is wholly altered. As related parts or elements within the
larger organic aggregate, it is we ourselves who are the separative
process--the circumscribed area of inflammation.
It is essential to bear in mind that the organic pathology of this
biological lesion or separation that is the individual’s dissociation
from the inherent continuum of his organic, racial congeners is a
condition that is conterminous with the individual’s division or
separation within himself. For organically there is no difference
between himself and his congeners. Thus in respect to this societal
lesion the individual element bears a twofold relation, an intrinsic
and an extrinsic one. The element as an _individual_ within the
societal organism on the one hand is the _source_ of the lesion. And
on the other hand, as an organic _participant_ in the confluent race
consciousness, this same element or individual _experiences_ the lesion
as a menace to the integrity of his own organic consciousness or of his
confluent life as a whole. The individual is thus the contained and the
container, the stimulus and the response. Herein lies the unassuageable
poignancy of the neurotic conflict. It is a conflict between the part
and the whole, wherein the individual is the embodiment of both.
Since he is unconsciously the part while inherently the whole, his
conflict is one that is concomitantly individual and societal, for the
individual and the societal factors are organically inseparable.
Just as in a comprehensive inquiry into the structural development
of the organism it is necessary to consider not only the biological
characters occurring in the development of the individual but also the
corresponding characters observable in the development of the race,
so in an organismic study of consciousness it is necessary that we
keep in mind the essential parallelism between its individual and its
phyletic trends. Analogous to what we know of the facts of comparative
biology in the structural sphere, the organic consciousness of man,
which we see expressed ontogenetically in the essential continuity
of the individual personality, finds its phylogenetic expression in
the inherent continuity of the societal organism. Accordingly, as the
miscarriage of this primary continuity of consciousness is to be seen
in the dissociation of the single personality, so the miscarriage
of man’s societal personality is correspondingly to be seen in the
social dissociation of the collective unconscious. After all, the
consciousness of the individual is but the consciousness of the race
in miniature, and the personal dissociation within the individual is,
therefore, only the miniature expression of the social dissociation
within our societal consciousness. In other words, as one’s individual
organism is a replica of the social organism, the dissociation of
the social mind is identical with the dissociation of the individual
mind. For, since the societal and the individual factors of evolution
are identical in their course, the social and the personal factors
of dissociation are also identical. Hence the dissociation that is
personal is necessarily social; the neurosis we study in the individual
is necessarily concomitant to a neurosis within the wider social polity.
Let us now compare the difference in the subjective reaction of the
individual according as he is himself the aggregate experiencing pain
in any part of _his_ organism, or as he is himself a part unconsciously
contributing to the lesion within the organism comprising our common
societal aggregate. As central system presiding over his own
individual organism we have seen his prompt recourse to agencies of
relief at the least trespass upon the integrity of any organ or part
within himself. But observe the total reversal of reaction when he
himself, as a single individual element, is the pathological instance
threatening the integrity of the organic aggregate that encompasses
him as a single individual element. Mark how he struggles _in blind
collusion with_ the disruptive process he unconsciously or separatively
embodies. Such is precisely the behaviour of the neurotic individual
and such is precisely the meaning of his “resistance.” For in such a
situation he seeks recourse to every conceivable avenue of evasion and
of symbolic disguise in order to escape the protests of pain in the
central inherent system resident in the common societal consciousness
and experienced by him in its continuum with his own essential life. In
the spirit of his behaviour he is exactly comparable to an individual
who, on succumbing to a local disease-process, would seek to stifle
the organism’s premonitory pain in order to aid the toxic invasion
and further its ravage within his own tissues! Such, however, in our
unconsciousness is precisely the case with each of us. Each of us, in
his misguided, ingrown self-interest, constituting in himself the pain
and impairment that operate within and against the organic societal
aggregate, contends in his self-protection not against but in favour
of the disease-process which, from the point of view of the societal,
organic life, is his own destruction. He seeks not its interruption but
its continuance, not its remedy but its aggravation, precisely as the
inflammatory process in any organ within the body seeks to maintain its
separateness and prolong to a fatal issue the destructive process in
the individual.
It is characteristic of separateness that it fights desperately for
its own separative ends. Separateness, being destructive, must operate
destructively. It would even seem that this self-destructive tendency
on the part of the isolated component is the penalty imposed by the
societal organism to safeguard itself against the tendency--among any
of its elements as parts--to infringe upon the integral sum of elements
constituting the organic whole. But if the separateness of the part
is its own destruction, concomitantly the confluence of the whole is
its own conservation. If the neurotic regarded individually, or as the
embodiment within himself of a societal lesion, is an expression of
separatism and pathology, the neurotic viewed organically, or as the
embodiment within himself of the societal continuum, is no less an
expression of confluence and health. If, in the first instance, he is
himself the disorder that is his own separatism and unconsciousness,
in the second he is the integration that is his own confluence and
consciousness. It is this constructive aspect of the neuroses of
which we have not yet taken account and of which we may take due
cognizance only upon the basis of a wider, organismic interpretation of
these disorders of the personality. It is the understanding of these
disharmonies in the light of their congeneric significance, and their
encompassment as morbid processes operating within the separative
individual organism to obstruct the function of the societal organism
as a whole, that is the significance of an organismic formulation of
the neuroses.