THE BIOLOGICAL SUBSTRATE OF THE NEUROTIC CONFLICT IN ITS ORGANIC
SIGNIFICANCE
In studying the neurotic diathesis one recognizes the existence of two
marked reaction-types more or less clearly delineated one from another
in mood and _tempo_, though they equally sustain the same central
_motif_. The vicarious method of dream-analysis described in the last
chapter as having all the appearance of adequacy, when inherently it
is invalid, is especially characteristic of one of these two types
of personality. The two types may be distinguished by the contrast
between their specific reactions to the original repressive incident
occasioning the organism’s primary dissociation.
I am not in sympathy, however, with the _implication_ in the
discrimination of types demarcated as “introvert” and “extravert.”
These terms imply, as they are meant to imply, an essential difference
of type rather than a circumstantial difference of reaction. In general
the extravert is rather approvingly regarded in the light of a “jolly
good fellow,” as contrasted with the introvert whose disaffectivity,
on the contrary, tends to be regarded with an undisguised slant.
As if the jolly good-fellowship of the hysterical type, with all
its aggressiveness and ebullience, were not as truly a substitutive
alternative resultant upon repression as is the reaction of his more
silent, ingrown confrère of the opposite type! As if the affable,
effervescent type were not as truly “shut-out” as his psychological
vis-à-vis is “shut-in”! Psychiatry has a great deal to say about
the shut-in type of personality but it has nothing to say about the
shut-out type of personality. Yet of the two the latter is by no means
a less serious form of dissociation, and certainly it is by far the
more widespread in its results.
There are, then, two types of reaction to be discriminated. There is
the type of individual who upon the initial stimulus to defence has
recourse to a tactic of unconditional retreat. He simply withdraws
_in toto_, and his attitude toward his congeners is thenceforward
completely negative. He no longer sees nor is seen by them. They
are so far outside his ken that their existence is not for a moment
admitted by him. Excluded from the range of his actualities he does not
even concede them an hypothetical status. Such is the _autocentric_
individual. This personality is the subsequent precoid, if in his
withdrawal he does not even so much as pretend acknowledgment of
the external world; he is the later psychasthenic, or normal of the
socially detached type, if he adopts the more temperate policy of a
seeming _rapprochement_. In either case, enclosed within a system all
his own, he lives entirely apart from the world of actuality, ruling
alone (and of course supreme) over his self-determined cosmogony.
Then there is the type of personality whose course is the exact
opposite of that just described, the difference of reaction being due
to the modifying conditions, “constitutional” for aught I know, that
attend the repressive occasion. With this type of personality, due
to the fact that the arresting instance overtakes him, as it were,
in the open, retreat is automatically barred. He is surprised in
the act, discovered with the goods in his possession. Detection and
apprehension are here simultaneous. Unable to deny the actuality of the
situation, his instinctive recourse is in the direction of a desperate
effort to palliate the attending circumstances. Resort to an alibi
being out of the question, he seeks to exculpate himself by adopting
a policy of a more or less truckling servility. He would atone his
offence by propitiating his accusers and so winning a recommendation
of leniency. Such is the _allocentric_ type of personality. This type
may be seen either in the so-called normal individual of the socially
adaptive reaction or in the definitely efflorescent or hysterical
neurotic, according respectively as he succeeds in conniving in the
social pretence and unconsciousness about him and thus saves his
own neck, or as he fails in his effort at social compromise--the
process flatteringly known to-day as “sublimation.” In this event his
failure of adaptation is due to the stronger urge within him of the
factors that are allied with the underlying communism of his organic
consciousness but which in his mental dissociation he is unable to
co-ordinate with his innate experience.
Viewed biologically these two types represent, as I see them, a
functional over-emphasis _in the individual_ of the reactions
pertaining to one or the other of the two fundamental co-ordinated
systems underlying the biology of man’s confluent life and determining,
when in balanced relation to one another, the integral health of the
organism. I refer to the cerebro-spinal and the sympathetic nervous
systems. The opposite recourses of behaviour, manifested in the two
psychological types just cited, represent, I believe, the two extremes
of reaction resultant upon the disturbed balance between these two
systems coincident with the factor of repression.
In the preconscious form of life[40] preserved among the animals, there
has occurred no break between these two fundamental systems. In the
feline series, for example, one observes the same graceful, organic
undulations in the movements actuated by the voluntary muscles or in
the reactions presided over by the cerebro-spinal system, as occur
in the rhythmic and harmonious co-ordinations that characterize the
function of the internal viscera controlled by the sympathetic ganglia.
With man the picture is a very different one. Upon the introduction
of suggestion or repression and their concomitant interdiction to
his inherent feeling, there resulted an organic cleavage within his
personality. Coincident with this artificial summons to an adaptive
and ulterior response, the spheres of reaction corresponding to these
two systems within the organism of man were henceforth divided.
Affective responses within the organism’s subjective nuclear life, with
its physiological substrate in the vasomotor and visceral reactions
(sympathetic system), were no longer correlated with affective
responses which, having their substrate in the nuclei of the brain and
spinal cord (cerebro-spinal system), pertain to the objective, external
adaptations observable in the organism’s voluntary activities. Hence,
from this moment forward the co-ordination between the two systems
became automatically impaired, and there could no longer be the smooth,
uninterrupted confluence of function that originally united the two
systems into a single co-ordinated unit.
The disintegrating effect of this artificial cleavage between these
two reciprocal systems occurs only in the constituent that marks the
adaptive cerebral reactions or in the segment or terminal mediating
the relationships _socially_ of the individual elements _inter
se_. In the central or visceral system the organic unities remain
intact. Here in the depths of man’s organic being, actuated by his
involuntary, instinctive life, the disparity of separateness cannot
enter. Here is unbroken continuum. Here the organism is susceptible
to no interstitial flaw. In this central, involuntary system which is
organically common and confluent throughout the species, the extraneous
element of repression with its reaction in disparate, ulterior quests
is automatically excluded, for in its native inherency the organism
is one and indivisible. It is the peripheral portion of our organisms
with its specialization into the external sense-organs, through which
is mediated our recognition of objective difference or interval and
through which occurs, as has been said, our consequent inference of
intrinsic differentiation. In the peripheral system, therefore, the
fallacy of separateness due to this biological fission may be enforced
with seeming success. In a word, it is only in our social and external
relations that the fallacy of organic differentiation works havoc in
any positive or active sense.
In this generic schema is probably represented the physiological
substrate of the schism within the organism caused by the impact from
without of the trauma of repression, and there is represented as well
the basis of the resultant contrast of reaction-types in accordance as
the repression tends more strongly toward one or the other side of the
divided reaction.
Replacing essential continuity with mere contiguity, or the unity of
our organic life with the superficial gestures of an outer code, the
_normal_ of the hysterical type may rub surfaces, as it were, and play
desperately at the game of vicarious unity. We see this everywhere
exemplified among the devotees of normality in reactions that are
apparently confluent but that are, in reality, determined cerebrally or
peripherally in response to the division within the unitary organism
of man. Such are the expressions to be seen, for example, in our
religious hobnobbings, our spurious social covenants, our ingenious
political and economic affiliations, and in the superficial flatteries
and connivances common to normality generally. How definitely such
vicarious reactions are an infringement upon man’s organic life is
readily seen in the unfailing equalization that follows swiftly upon
them, exacting their inevitable toll in the ultimate retributive
penalties of national and industrial wars, of social and political
dissension and in the world-wide expression of disaffection that marks
the social periphery of our self-plumed “civilization.”
On the other hand the _neurotic_ of the hysterical type, by reason
of the greater sensitiveness of his organism, is held within the
grip of this organic conflict. It permits him neither to fawn nor to
defy whole-heartedly, but because of the irreconcilable urge of this
inner conflict it keeps him ever torn between its two extremes. As an
expression of the allocentric reaction he lives within a system that
is divided against itself, sensing throughout life, only intuitively,
the unassuageable pain of his division.
In direct contrast with this reaction the autocentric type lives within
a system that is completely dissociated from the common, congeneric
life. But, though the system is in itself uniform throughout, he
suffers no less the affliction of his life’s incompleted cycle
because of his organic separation from the socially reciprocal,
peripheral system. The allocentric seeks in vain to atone to
himself for his extradition from the co-ordinated organism in the
spurious compensations of a peripherally (socially) separative
system. The autocentric would annul the pain of his separation from
the co-ordinated organism in the futile appeasements of a central
(individual) system which, in its insulation, represents no less his
complete dissociation from the world of actuality. The one would repair
the organic breach within him through recourse to conciliations that
lie exclusively within the social sphere (peripheral dissociation).
The other would resort to reparations, which, being wholly enclosed
within the _ego_, embody exclusively the individual factor (central
dissociation). In brief, the allocentric sees himself as _picture_
in the world outside of him. The autocentric sees the world outside
of him as picture _within_ himself. If the conduct of the latter
personifies the smoke-screen, the conduct of the former is typical of
the red-herring!
Here again we witness the vacillations between the social consensus and
our personal resistance to its behests, between the opposed factors of
suggestion and of repression, of personal advantage and of personal
disadvantage, due to our unconscious alternatives of good and bad. In
the disorganization pertaining to these two reciprocally dissociated
spheres--the cerebral and the visceral--our unconsciousness consists,
in either case, in the individual’s inability to realize a unification
of personality comprised of the balanced inclusion of the two through
the co-ordination of the organic and the conscious spheres of his
experience.
It is my view that in the phenomena of repression or of sexuality
artificial symbols are substituted for the natural gestures represented
in the innate feelings of life and sex. In substituting the manifold
symbols of expression for the natural gestures of spontaneous feeling,
there is manifested a dissociation of the consciousness of man of which
the union of his nuclear and peripheral fields of feeling (affectivity)
is the biological basis. Just as the gesture is the motor expression of
its concomitant sensory reaction, so is the symbol the motor expression
of the sensory _repression_ concomitant to it. As the gesture is
the organic accompaniment of reality, the symbol is the vicarious
barrier against reality. We find the sponsorship for the symbol in
unconsciousness or in a mode that is personal, systematized, repressed,
while the gesture has its sponsorship in a mode of consciousness or in
a confluence of feeling that is impersonal, societal, organic.
If one may speak of ethnic modes, it may be said that in what is called
the period of Greek thought--with its preference for form to substance,
for “the good” conceived rather as beauty than as truth, for life felt
more in its outward line than in its inner meaning--there is ethnically
reflected the allocentric or peripheral type of reaction. A close
sympathy with all that pertains to this early period of Greek culture
is certainly characteristic of the strongly marked types of this
reaction.
On the other hand, the era of Christ and of the psychasthenic reaction
of Christianity, with its lugubrious reversal of the Greek _motif_,
is a mode one finds pre-eminently adapted to the autocentric type
of character, with its apotheosis of the symbols of love, of truth
and of the spirit. Said Christ: “The spirit is more than flesh,”
thus controverting the tendency of the Greek ideal, and an ascetic
Christianity has flocked to him. But in the eidolon of Greek as of
Christian there is offered again but the symbol. In the organic
incompleteness of each there is presented only the inadequacy of the
letter, of that which serves as a sign. In the first it is form,
colour, substance; in the second it is the word, the concept, the
spirit. To-day there are not wanting indications that there awaits
man a period that is confluent of the two in which these symbolic or
separative racial modes shall become absorbed in a unification of word
and of substance. This moment of man’s organic realization within
himself of the integrity of life in its totality will usher in a
sociological renascence when man’s life will embody a mode in which the
spirit _is_ flesh.[41]
The contrasting systems here denoted as allocentric and autocentric,
corresponding to the contrast between the cerebral, peripheral or
social mode of reaction on the one hand and the visceral, central
or nuclear reaction-type on the other, merely mark anew a very old
and commonly recognized division. Here in this more physiological
envisagement of it there is offered merely a different conceptual
basis. There is an analogous division in the experimental
psychologists’ discrimination between motor and sensory. Doubtless also
in the contrast more rhetorically defined as romantic and classical
there is contemplated the same division of types, not to mention
the contrasted reaction-types popularly known as temperamental and
phlegmatic.[42]
It is needful to remember that the allocentric type of individual
is, within the peripheral division of his cerebro-social system, as
truly self-centred as is the autocentric type within the central,
visceral division of his sympathetic system. The difference is that
the allocentric embodies dissociation in his seeming adaptation toward
the social dream that is his day, and the autocentric in his seeming
adaptation toward the individual dream that is his night. Every
psychiatrist is familiar with the facility with which the dementia
præcox patient may analyze his own dreams. But what avails his
facility? He is by very virtue of it not less but rather more shut in,
for his “analysis” is but the trick through which he subtly evades the
social demands existing outside his own centrally dissociated mode. At
all times he holds the stage of his self-determined drama, viewing the
spectacle of it not as onlooker but as producer. What he permits you
to see is but a play within a play, conceived and enacted within the
theatre of his own mind. And so in the autocentric type embodied in
the psychasthenic personality--the reaction of the type of normal or
neurotic that is related to the precoid in its extreme expression--one
may be led quite far from the touchstone of reality by reason of the
very simplicity and quite genuine correctness of his “analysis.” And
so no less with the allocentric type and the equally plausible decoys
of _his_ illusory system. What is needed is our realization that in
the projections of one as in the _intrajections_ of the other there
is equally embodied the identical purpose of self-withdrawal from the
common medium of reality.
Most significant of all is the need that the psychoanalyst realize,
on the one hand, the peripherally determined tendencies of his own
socially compensative reactions or of his own allocentric normality,
and, on the other, the centrally biased trends of his own insularly
compensative adjustments or of his own autocentric adaptation. Failing
to accept, through his own analysis, the possibility of the completely
theatrical or symbolic nature of the so-called actualities of his own
day as they tend to be expressed in the immediate moment at hand, he
may himself easily succumb to the fallacy of a too ready credence
(analyst’s wish-fulfilment) in judging the validity of a patient’s
presumable self-envisagement. This unconscious alternative which we
trace again and again throughout the varying manifestations of the
mind of man, whether in its single or in its collective expression,
whether in the immediate reaction of the individual or in the remoter
adaptations of the race mind, is equally the unconscious actuation
underlying the system of psychoanalysis.
It would seem to mark some strange miscarriage in our sociological
progress that a dualistic system, such as psychoanalysis, should have
arisen as an emanation of Jewish thought, when one considers the
essentially monotheistic tradition of the Hebrew consciousness. In this
sense the sociological reaction of the Hebrew mind manifested in the
dualistic principle of Freud, as exemplified in his basic theory of
psychic ambivalence, would seem to denote some inadvertence in racial
perception. Monotheism with its principle of a universal immanence
of good is clearly a sublimation of the unitary preconscious mode
(autocentric), just as the dualistic theism of the Gentiles, with its
basis in the alternatives of good and evil, is the sublimation of an
irreconcilable unconscious mode (allocentric). May it not be that
unconsciously psychoanalysis is a Semitic repudiation of the basal law
of Moses and of its preconscious principle of an underlying unity,
precisely as Christianity is an unconscious repudiation of the same
unitary precept as exemplified preconsciously in the teachings of
Christ? May it not be, too, that these unconscious alternatives now
actuating the dualistic systems of Jew and Gentile will ultimately
resolve themselves into an organic monism of accord which, in the
societal encompassment of each, will become equally understanding and
inclusive through the united consciousness of both?