ORGANIC ANALYSIS OF REPRESSION AND OF THE FACTOR OF RESISTANCE FROM THE
SOCIETAL VIEWPOINT
The psychic phenomenon with which Freud was confronted in the very
inception of his work was the element of repression and its concomitant
reflection in the objective reaction of resistance. The resolution of
this factor of repression or resistance Freud came very early to regard
as the essential problem of psychoanalysis. But, as we have seen,
Freud’s conception of resistance was inevitably coloured by his own
individualistic monocular, and in consequence it was not possible for
him to view the neurosis of the individual in its societal implication.
Lacking a societal basis of interpretation, he could not see that
the resentment toward one’s fellows comprising the individual’s
social resistance is merely the individual’s objective evasion of the
subjective disaffection within his own essential organism. Mistaking
the mere symbol of the individual for the inherent continuity of
individuality, Freud could not see the biology of resistance as the
breach it is in the individual’s continuity with life as a confluent,
organic whole.
From an organismic viewpoint, the individual’s reaction of resistance
or his effort to project upon his fellows the pain of his subjective
curtailment and repression only illustrates further the essential
_sociology of the neuroses_. In the fuller light of a societal basis
it may be seen that the mechanism of social replacement embodying
resistance is purely symptomatic of the individual’s constraint
toward a surface rationalization of his own inherent grievance. His
grudge is not personal, it is societal. It is not logical, it is
biological. Residing wholly within himself, it involves only himself.
His tendency to _refer_ his grievance to the attitude of others is
due to his own separative habituation and to his consequent effort to
escape the _seeming_ isolation of his biological responsibility toward
it. And so the problem of resistance is central, not peripheral. Like
its close kin charity (if not its very self in the garb of religious
sentimentalism) the relinquishment of resistance is a benison that
begins at home. It may not be inculcated through theoretical precept
nor through the subtlest refinement of a technique based upon a
system of analysis, but only through our actual participation in the
societal confluence that is its underlying biology. Our very theory
of resistance as an impediment to life is itself a resistance. For no
formulation of life can function as life. It is only life itself in
its organic confluence that may abrogate the separateness that is the
essence of resistance. Whether in the societal or in the individual
sphere, whether in the sphere we arbitrarily designate as psychological
(mental) or in that we call functional (physiological), the question
of health or disease hangs solely upon the issue as to whether the
element--cell or system--functions integrally or separatively,
congruently or resistantly. Under the limitations of a dissociative
reaction toward the confluent, societal organism as a whole, such
as constitutes our present socially affective mode, the individual
organism cannot but react disaffectedly, and hence further the
disruptive tendencies that breed disharmony within its own life. The
dissociated organism can function only dissociatively.
If it is true of the world at large that each is against each,
if throughout the tissue of the societal fabric every element is
maintaining its own separateness against every other element, where
may there be found a way to restore the condition of societal
confluence that is the basis of man’s inherent life? Clearly, if this
separation from the organic life takes place within the individual, its
reconcilement must take place also within the individual. As, however,
the individual is but a replica of every other individual--an organic
world in miniature in the complex of sensations and emotions comprising
his own personality--the reconcilement of the organic conflict within
himself, or his own unification of personality as an integral part
of the continuum uniting the whole, is also the reconcilement and
the unification of himself with his congeners. Naturally, such a
reconcilement cannot be the achievement of the individual as a separate
social unit, but only of the individual as an integral element in the
organic unit of our common life.
It is just here that there needs to be unearthed the essential fallacy
of Freud, as of us all--a fallacy that has been the inevitable outcome
of a habit of reasoning that is inseparable from the disparate
social unit and its dissociative mode. Precluding within himself a
participation in the organic societal mode, it was, of course, not
possible that Freud should take account, in any inclusive organismic
sense, of causative elements lying within this mode. Reasoning from
the biased premises of an unconscious separatism, he could reckon only
with elements falling within the scope of the separative mode, that is,
he could only reckon personally--I mean in the sense of dissociatively
rather than integrally.
In Freud’s conception of the neurosis the condition embodies a
repression of sexuality. That is, sexuality, regarded as synonymous
with the sexual instinct, is posited as the primary factor of which
the attitude of repression is a subsequent issue. In other words,
sexuality or the “libido,” as commonly understood (the separative
will-to-self[30] in the view of the present interpretation) is in
Freud’s formulation the basic, antecedent element, and repression
(whatever the occasion--lack of adequate outlet perhaps or the
inadmissible character of the sexual impulse) is the organism’s
automatic recourse operating as a result. So that Freud assigns the
cause of a mental disharmony to the subject’s repressed sexuality,
and the basis of his analytic procedure has been very logically the
endeavour to remedy the situation through an adjustment of the sexual
life. Accordingly, it is the essence of the individualistic position
of Freud that the neurosis is represented in life’s repression of
sexuality; while it is the essence of the organismic attitude here
defined that the neurosis consists in sexuality’s repression of life.
In brief, according to the dynamic conception of Freud, the basis
from which individual life takes its origin is represented in a
heterogeneous substrate that is biologically discrete and “polymorph
perverse”; whereas in the genetic conception of the present formulation
life traces its source to a homogeneous matrix that is organically
confluent and unitary.[31]
In the light of a conception which assumed that the integrity of
consciousness resides within the personality of the individual,
Freud’s confusion was inevitable. Yet viewed even from the standpoint
of the individual, the factors of repression and sexuality can be
regarded only in the light of organic concomitants. Under whichever of
these alternate forms of reaction it may appear, both forms are the
inevitable extremes of the dilemma due to the conflict that has been
artificially created within the organism. Both are the individual’s
restless evasion and substitution following inevitably upon its
separation from its primary organic source. Although repression and
sexuality are organic concomitants, being simultaneous in their
occurrence and in their efficacy equal and contrary, the factor of
repression is dynamically the prior instance. This is true precisely in
the sense that the pressure of my hand as I lay it upon the table is
dynamically the prior stimulus, though the two elements involved--my
hand and the table--are from the point of view of the respective
pressures exerted by each, mutually coincident and equal. Considered
in the light of individualistic consciousness (unconsciousness),
repression with its actuation in the alternative of infantile fear
or “goodness” and sexuality with its compensatory reaction in the
alternative of infantile defiance or “badness” are inseparable and
conterminous. For repression and sexuality are equally the _result_
in the individual of the factor of organic disunity in the societal
consciousness. There is the need to emphasize the fact that the
reaction of sexuality as it abounds among us is currently confused with
the basic instinct of sex. In point of fact sexuality is the direct
antithesis of this organic expression.
The vast mass of the literature of sexuality embraced under sexology,
with its voluminous representation of man’s symbolic relation to life,
will some day undoubtedly appear comparable in value to the equally
formidable array of literary compilations that discourse of God and of
man’s extraordinarily complex relationship to Him included in a no less
voluminous theology. As articulate in form, as sympathetic in treatment
and as logical in development as both these themes undoubtedly are,
it will ultimately be seen, I believe, that both are equally open
to serious criticism and both on identical grounds, namely, that
in respect to the matter of each, there is no matter there. I mean
literally that, in default of the objective reality of the subjects
treated under the two discussions by their respective authors, both
treatises are in their nature utterly spurious. In Ellis as in Calvin,
in Freud as in Aquinas, the sexuality envisaged in one system no less
than the divinity envisaged in the other lacks a basis of reality. Both
are vicarious rationalizations of the collective unconscious due to the
effort to compensate its repression of the organic integrity of our
common, societal consciousness. The concept “God” in the one instance,
and its counterpart, obsessive sexuality in the other, are in the
meantime made to serve the expedience of temporary symbols.
It is noteworthy that man is the only species of the animal world whose
communal life requires for its regulation a system either of sexology
or of theology. Concomitantly, one cannot but remark the far stronger
co-operative instinct existing among the animals and the consequently
incalculably greater societal solidarity of our less “conscious”
kinsfolk as compared with our own![32]
Approaching the problem of the neurosis anew from the vantage coign
of a more inclusive, integral background, I have come to regard the
factors of sexuality and repression as standing to each other in a
relationship that is the exact reverse of that assumed by Freud--the
factor of repression being from this altered viewpoint the primary
_cause_ and sexuality the incidental _result_ entailed by it.
To make clear what I mean, it is necessary to view the societal
aggregate, with its basis in our organic consciousness, as an entity
distinct from that of the separative individual unit with its basis
in our dissociated unconscious. The element of repression is incident
to the interruption of our functional participation in the unitary
race consciousness. The separative, dissociated attitude of mind that
precipitates the obsessive, dissociated and resistant individual is a
development consequent upon this interruption. So that it is only as
we come to recognize our need to include the sphere of man’s integral
organic life that the conception of repression as a factor anterior to
sexuality may be understood in its biological import. To this end our
conception of the organic societal consciousness needs to acquire the
coherency of clearer form and definition. We need to take account of
the original, racial solidarity of man’s consciousness and to consider
the interpenetrations of common instincts and habits that originally
ramified throughout the undifferentiated mental tissue of our common
species, knitting its contributing elements into a unitary, homogeneous
organism.[33] We need to form a clearer image of the uniform,
co-ordinated _one-mindedness_ of this primordial, “multi-cellular”
organism that was man. In brief, we need to recognize the _individual_
that was originally the aggregate consciousness of the race. For,
to consider man’s phylogeny at this period of his evolution is to
consider a unitary organism. It is to break through the prejudice of
the separative mode of individual men and reckon immediately with the
unified principle of consciousness as a whole, from which only later
there diverged the separative elements represented in the dissociated
units we ourselves now comprise, but which unified principle survives
to-day unaltered in the common unity of our confluent societal
personality.[34]
Such is the parent organism from which we trace the course of our
psychobiological descent. Such is the parent organism from which we
trace as well our psychobiological dissent! For it is evident that
at a certain stage in the growth of this nuclear, racial organism
there must have arisen those first faint stirrings which subsequently
entailed man’s earliest reckonings with the nebulous beginnings of
his self-awareness. This reaction whereby mind for the first time
grew aware of itself was thus a societal reaction. It involved the
aggregate, not the element. Its scope was ethnic, not individual.
It was the primal awareness of man’s organic consciousness. In our
unconsciousness we deny the reality of this biological phylum embodied
in our organic consciousness and underlying the processes of our
individual mentation. For this reason we seek perforce to appease our
organic need through the imaginary solaces of a fanciful immanence
that is but the unconscious _symbol_ of the immanent and encompassing
actuality of this common consciousness. In our unconsciousness we deny
the collateral immediacy of our societal inclusiveness and for this
reason we project the lineal image of indefinite extension composing
man’s dream of a personal life eternal. Denying our organic unity of
compass, we compensate in a fanciful unity of duration. Denied his
societal participation in a communal earth, man’s need can only vent
itself in the private illusion of a sectarian heaven. After all, life
in its reality is immediate. Philosophy _ad infinitum_ to the contrary
notwithstanding, there is no “time” like the present! When we can enter
heartily into the realization of the “pseudo” quality of our mental
unctions, we may begin to sense more closely the organic inevitableness
of such symbolic equivalents as the generic folk-image of “God” and
the infinite corps of His understudies, impressed one after another
into the service of man’s inverted narcism. We may, then, realize that
nowhere is nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum more vigorously asserted
than in the organic intolerance of consciousness toward the voids of
unreality. We may, then, understand how, upon the slightest suspension
of reality in the sphere of consciousness, a symbolic surrogate will
inevitably fill the rift with a punctuality that is automatic. This
is reality’s ultimate test of reality. It is the unfailing standard
of the organism in its measure of the actual. Here is truth’s organic
criterion.
In their original organic commonness, individuals were complete and
sufficient. They were undisturbed by the separative attitude of mind
that mars our present development with competition and dissension.
They did not spend their days in self-interested comparison. They had
not yet come into the conflict of a self-conscious image-worship.
In this sense--that the mental tissue of our common species was
then undifferentiated--the aggregate consciousness of the race was
synonymous with the consciousness of the individual. It was an
organically unified consciousness.
Through the organic violation on the other hand, involved in the primal
recoil of self-consciousness within this societal organism, there is to
be traced the biological history of our mental and social disharmonies.
Here, I believe, is to be traced the inception of man’s collective
unconscious and the phylogeny of the societal neurosis. Under the
authority of this long-standing and consolidated system of repression
the individual is born, and still under its shadow he enters upon the
course of his development as an individual. It is this organized Mafia
of societal repression, with its enormous weight of traditional and
conventional authority--this repression within the collective societal
unconscious, with its ready initiation of each new subject--that is
the causative factor in the secondary reaction which we observe in
the individual as “repression of sexuality.” In our own unconscious
fealty to the system about us we fail utterly to comprehend that _the
repression which we observe in the individual is the result of a prior
cause lying outside of the individual and that it consists of the
repression within the collective, racial unconscious acting concertedly
from without upon the now detached individual unit_.
It is important to distinguish between the social prohibition
operating upon the discrete element or individual as a response to
popular covenant, and the societal prohibition that operates within
the confluent aggregate and is coincident with our organic separation
from man’s primary societal consciousness. The former is the result
collectively of the latter, just as the neurotic repression is the
result of it individually. For the societal repression is primary and
the social reaction is a repression subsidiary to it.
To understand aright the essential conception of this thesis, it is
necessary to have clearly in mind the basis upon which it rests. This
basis is the distinction between the element that is societal and the
element that is social, between the factor that is sex and the factor
that is sexuality. It should be remembered that sexuality, whether
in its social or in its individual manifestation, is here throughout
regarded as an egoistic and infantile expression resultant upon the
alternatives of secret self-interest secondarily induced in the
individual in response to this same substitution and repression in the
mind of the consensus about him. It is here held that the neurosis is a
condition which indicts not the individual alone but society in general
and that it consists in the substitution of this obsessive reaction
of sexuality for the basic and inherent instinct of sex--that sex is
an instinct that pertains not only to mating but to the unity of our
congeneric life which, when unintercepted, is the function confluently
of man’s conscious and organic life.
If it is true that the societal repression resident within the race
is the factor that is the cause of the individual’s sexuality, it
is evident that no amount of preoccupation with the individual
factor or with the element of sexuality will avail to release a
neurosis the source of which resides in the societal repression. The
causative factor, then, that resides within the societal unconscious
is the subjective factor to which the individual’s sexuality (or its
counterpart, the individual’s repression) is the resulting objective
response. As repression or sexuality of their nature constitute
division, clearly they can have no place in the confluent subjective
life. And as the neurosis is primarily a disharmony of the confluent
subjective sphere, it is upon the continuities of this sphere alone
that we must depend for the efficacy of an analysis that retains as its
aim--the only logical aim of analysis--the recomposition or synthesis
of the scattered elements of the personality into the organic unit of
their original aggregate.