THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN SEXUALITY AND SEX IN RELATION TO UNIFICATION
AND ORGANIC MATING
In the impatience of the industrial laboratory to meet the public
need, it happens not infrequently that, through an omission of
adequate qualitative tests due to the unusual haste of production,
an inferior grade of material is distributed such as would not have
been produced under more temperate circumstances. The time has come to
acknowledge that through a like inadvertence many of the products of
psychoanalysis are seriously open to criticism upon the same grounds.
Owing to overhasty construction and to a lack of requisite tests of
their genuineness, an appreciable deficiency has occurred in the
quality of the material produced. Due to this occasion psychoanalysis
is answerable for engendering in the public mind certain conceptions
which are utterly without a basis in fact. Coupled with this want of
moderation, certain publicity experts have disseminated a wide range
of literature embodying a mass of disastrous misapprehension. In mere
zeal for a market they have circulated it broadcast amid all manner
of suggestible, because unconscious, individuals and communities.
Unconscious doctrines, however, cannot be promulgated except from
unconscious sources. When psychoanalysis has achieved a sufficiently
impersonal and far-reaching outlook to apply to itself in reality
the same tests which it is now applying to others in theory, it
will realize the need of recalling, as far as is possible, the many
conceptual products of its overhasty output and of offering instead a
more scientifically controlled and a more adequately tested summation
of views such as are suited to serve as an ultimate interpretation of
human consciousness.[43]
There is a characterological aspect of human consciousness which
psychoanalysis has yet to consider. By character I do not mean the
habituations of personal bigotry. I have in mind a characterology
that is racial and that furthers the conscious integrations of man
as expressive of his societal life as a whole. Thus far, instead of
regarding the personality of man as a societal aggregate assembled of
the elements comprising individual men, psychoanalysis has tended to
create artificial divisions within this organic unity. Unconsciously
influenced by a division based upon the bias of its own arbitrary
alternatives, psychoanalysis has assumed contrasts of behaviour which
completely lack the foundations of an organismic inclusiveness.
Perhaps the most unwarranted of such conceptual contrasts, because
most harmful and far-reaching in the confusion it entails, is the
artificial discrimination connoted under the terms homosexuality
and heterosexuality. From an organismic viewpoint the alternatives
presupposed in such a distinction are traceable alone to the
unconscious ambivalence within the psychoanalytic system itself. From
an inclusive position it will be seen that in the systematization
underlying the contrasting concepts homo- and heterosexuality, the
psychoanalyst himself has fallen a prey to the contrasting images of
hope and fear, “good” and “bad,” underlying the alternatives of his own
absolute system.
In a situation that is organically false, an organically false reaction
is the inevitable response. As long as sentimentality--the unconscious
projection of the flattering likeness of one’s own ego--dominates,
as now, all clinical procedure, the tendency to inversion or
image-substitution that underlies the psychoanalytic system itself will
necessarily render what is now the purely fanciful isolation of the
so-called homosexual complex inaccessible to consciousness.
It is the tacit assumption among psychoanalysts as among sexologists
generally that the condition described by Freud as unconscious
“homosexuality” deserves recognition as a true biological phenomenon,
and accordingly they tend to concede it place in the social scheme.
Since the analytic approach is not societal, the analyst necessarily
gives to the homosexual inversion a position that is positive and
static. Whether the case is regarded as “curable” or “incurable” it
is customarily treated as an objective disease-entity. Many instances
of so-called “analysis” that I have known have consisted in nothing
else than overcoming through suggestion (consensual assurance) a
patient’s social resistance to this type of adaptation, notwithstanding
that to this end there were pressed into clinical service the
external adjustments of active heterosexuality. This conception is as
unfortunate as it is unnecessary. The adaptation of the homosexual
disorientation within the societal consciousness is organically as
impossible as is the adaptation of the disorientations of paranoia in
the organically societal aggregate. “Normally” the adaptation of both
phases of inversion are a commonplace, but that it is so is but an
added commentary on normality and its collective unconsciousness.
That the natural expression of sex is the union between man and woman
is indisputable. The concomitance between the sex of man and the sex of
woman is self-evident. Being organic, this reproductive convergence of
the male and female of a species is a process that occurs spontaneously
and without intervention. No dissertation is required to establish
this view. There is, however, the need to set forth clearly a factor
entering into human behaviour that is not spontaneous and to render
conscious the conditions now obtaining unconsciously among us through
the artificial intervention of this extraneous factor. When we spoke
of the reactions of the child to the early influences of inducement
and prohibition (suggestion and repression) corresponding respectively
to the mental images of good and bad, we saw that “good” coincides
with the individual’s personal advantage as reflected in the social
approval about him, and that “bad” represents his personal disadvantage
as likewise reflected in his social surroundings. In the presumptive
absolute of our arbitrary images of good and bad, the system of
behaviour thus unconsciously begotten in us assumes sponsorship even of
the primary and organic instinct of mating. Not even this fundamental
impulse of our human behaviour is safe from the infringements of our
self-reflective alternatives of good and bad with their attendant
measures of individual advantage. Accordingly, the organic and inherent
impulse of mating is henceforward seen from the point of view of
personal self-interest. A common, societal instinct of reproduction
experiences thus the inversion of a secret, personal aim.
This secret element of personal advantage and acquisitiveness that has
come to mar the free and natural expression of man’s mating impulse
is fully attested in the covert self-consciousness that characterizes
his “in-love” attitude. In the alternative attitude of good and bad
that necessarily limits him to the issues of advantage or disadvantage
for himself, man no longer approaches the essentially unitary instinct
of love with unity in himself. Either there is the response in the
individual that is “good” in that it concedes the social exaction
(positive suggestion of self-advantage), or the response that is
“bad” in that it repudiates the social consensus (negative suggestion
of self-disadvantage, i.e., repression). In the first instance the
individual accepts the alternative of the socially approved adaptation
of heterosexuality, in the second the individual’s reaction issues in
the alternative of the socially repudiated adaptation of homosexuality.
In either alternative the factor of psychic inversion and self-interest
is equally decisive. In the first it is presented in the form that is
the individual’s response to the consensual suggestion, in the second
it is presented in the form that is his response to the consensual
repression. What is significant is the fact that, as each type of
response is an alternation on the basis of the social suggestion or the
social repression answering, in the first instance, to the desire of
personal gain or approval and, in the second, to the fear of personal
loss or disfavour, both types of response, in returning upon self and
self-interest for their satisfaction, are equally _ego-sexual_.
As is universally the case with reactions based on the unconscious
contrasts of good and bad, in the choice of either alternative there
are preserved the elements actuating both. In the heterosexual
alternative there is the unconscious presence of the homosexual
component, in the homosexual alternative there is the unconscious
presence of the heterosexual component. The reason is that the
underlying factor that equally determines each of these seemingly
opposed reactions is the deeper unconscious inversion of man’s
ego-sexuality with its inevitable alternatives of self-advantage based
upon our artificial differentiations of good and bad.
The conclusion is unavoidable that we shall have to reconstruct
entirely our conception of the interrelationship of man and woman
in respect to the instinct of sex. As has been said before, hetero-
and homosexuality are purely fictitious discriminations. Like the
distinctions presumably expressed by the conception extravert and
introvert, they embody no discrimination _in kind_ whatever, but are
terms for the alternative aspects of one and the same thing. As the
concept connoted by these terms may with advantage be replaced by the
concept connoted by the terms allocentric and autocentric, so the
concept expressed by the terms heterosexuality and homosexuality may
with propriety give way to a concept such as we may correspondingly
express by the terms _allosexual_ and _autosexual_--terms which do not
indicate a difference of content between two reactions but merely an
alternation of aspect in one and the same reaction. With a view, then,
to what I feel will afford a clearer and more encompassing outlook
upon the problems of our human adjustment, both individual and social,
I shall, wherever convenient, dispense with the term “homosexuality,”
because of the needlessly misleading stigma it imposes upon the
individual, and use instead of _homosexual_ the term _autosexual_;
correspondingly, instead of the term _heterosexual_, with its equally
misleading social implication of “right” comportment, the expression
_allosexual_ will be used, it being understood that by these contrasts
I mean the dual alternations of self-love due to man’s unconscious
repudiation of the organic instinct of sex in favour of the personal
inversions of sexuality.
Sexuality is the _effort_ of conjunction of peripheral and visceral
spheres, but because of the interposition of the personal or
self-reflexive element, with its necessarily inverse aim, there results
on the one hand (socially) the mere apposition of periphery with
periphery, entailing an inverse erotism or autosexuality in the form
of narcism (self-reflection), or unconscious homosexuality proper;
and on the other (centrally) the mere (psychic) enfolding of visceral
with visceral, entailing an inverse erotism in the form of autoerotism
or ego-sexuality proper. Sex, on the contrary, is the spontaneous,
effortless and non-personal conjugation of the organismic poles
comprising male and female. This distinction between sexuality and sex
explains the ulterior quality of a sophisticated and self-conscious
“in-love” state representing _contrast_, in replacement for the
organismic love-state representing _identification_. Hence sexuality is
but the temporary self-appeasement of a reciprocal adjustment, whereas
sex is the permanent self-realization of a mutual co-ordination.[44]
A consideration that cannot fail to be of interest to the psychoanalyst
is the obviously complementary relation of the two types, the
allocentric and the autocentric, in respect to one another, and its
undoubted significance as regards the instinct of mating among the more
conscious personalities such as we should expect to follow the unifying
process of analysis. The marked unconscious affinities observable
between the two types I take to be a fact of general recognition
among psychoanalysts if not among the laity itself. But unconscious
affinities, being infantile or adaptive in character, are obviously
attachments of an ego-sexual nature. It is an organic corollary,
however, which in its social implication is unconsciously blinked by
psychopathologists, that an individual who is infantile or unweaned
or ego-sexual is in his objective sexual interest also _de facto_
ego-sexual--ego-sexuality here being nothing else than the extension
of the ego-sexual or autoerotic mode into the sexual objective of
another individual. If, as would appear, normality is the expression of
the unweaned and unconscious mode of society generally, it is not to
be wondered at that the admission of this fact has been so generally
suppressed, since there follows logically the distasteful conclusion
that, unconsciously, normality or society in general, which includes us
all, is ego-sexually constellated.
Accustomed as we are to think so much more readily in objective than in
subjective terms, the conception of ego-sexuality as the determinant of
the relationship between persons of the opposite sex, or the conception
of our supposedly “normal” or “heterosexual” society as being in
essence ego-sexual, has not yet entered the analytic consciousness, nor
is it likely to do so without a violent storm of social protest and
“resistance.” But the typical expression of sexual union, as it exists
among “normals,” is redolent of this inverted bias. The folk-reaction
of the social mind represented in the custom of marriage, if clearly
confronted, reveals throughout the unmistakable signs of this
alternative. If we note carefully the countenance of this social
reaction, we cannot fail to observe that its instigation is based upon
the mutual desire to mollify, to “please.”
Hence, marriage is for the most part a process of mutual adjustment
of the ego-sexual claims upon one another of the two parties
involved. After all, the “oneness” of marriage is an achievement
due to the pooling of the private unconscious of the two parties to
the arrangement. It is the permanent coalition of the unconscious
of both, collectively, with a view to the temporary guarantees of
each, severally. For marriage is an arrangement in accordance with
the terms of which each party to the covenant secretly withdraws
from his organic place as a societal element, in exchange for his
fanciful sovereignty as a circumscribed domestic aggregate! That
is, in marriage two unconscious elements have merged into a single
unconscious entity. Through the self-reflection one achieves in his
unconscious mate, through the self-reduplication he achieves in his
unconsciously begotten offspring, one’s family is again but the
unconscious of the individual freshly reinforced through a subtle
recourse to symbolic replacement. It is the substitution of the single,
self-limited social group for the all-inclusive, organic consonance
of the societal aggregate. Thus the social cluster comprising the
family is but the _symbol_ of the societal unity comprising one’s own
confluent life. The transaction is, in reality, nothing else than the
unconscious reinstatement of the early childish mode of separateness,
fear and dependence, such as actuated the mental bias of one’s own
domestic traditions. In the marriage and homemaking of each of us
there is but the unconscious transmission of the marriage and home
of our parents.[45] For as the child is nurtured amid a codified
system of opinionativeness, this self-reflective (suggestive) habit
about him engenders a self-reflective habit within him. Having early
formed an image of himself in the social reflection with which he is
surrounded, he begins early to examine his own reactions from the
sector of this habitual self-reflection. It is in this reflection of
the self that consists the repercussion of consciousness constitutive
of self-consciousness or the manifestation we unconsciously personify
as _behaviour_--an off-hand term for a reaction which we have not yet
begun half adequately to analyze.
As self-consciousness is of its nature personal and adaptive, it
does not lend itself to analysis on the static basis of a merely
adaptive and personal premise. Its true analysis is the realization
on an inclusive basis of a genetic and relativistic principle of
consciousness. In the mere match-making of our pictorial affects, human
relationship has become throughout artificial. It is this private
impersonation of affects which we have substituted for the common
unity of our real affects. In this mutual comparison of reflected
impressions our relation to one another becomes a superficial and
meaningless balancing of one affect against another. This artificial
substitutive quality has entered even into the expression of man’s
mating and reproductive impulse, and it is blindly venting itself
to-day in the merely mutual attritions of our so-called sexual life.
But this suggestive, substitutive image-systematization of sexuality
is the direct antithesis to the unification and spontaneity of sex.
Where there is unity of spirit, the symbol of unity expressed in
bodily congress assumes a totally different significance. Sexuality is
the mere apposition of bodies in place of a unity of spirit. In this
apposition of the personal is the very abrogation of personality. It
is the mark of sexuality that it is autocratic and exclusive; it is
the mark of sex that it is relative and inclusive. This bidimension or
image-substitution of sexuality is the psychological mechanism of our
sexual resistances. For resistances, after all, are but the irksome
oppression of our habitually enforced adjacencies. For this reason
marriage is habituative, suggestive, inverted.
Wherever conditions require the isolation together of any two normal
individuals though of the same sex, over a protracted period, there
appear very unexpected phenomena in the mental reactions of the two
with respect to one another. These reactions may be noted not only
where their isolation is due to the accidents of circumstance, but also
where it is due to voluntary withdrawal from habitual associations
in the mutual interest of a common pursuit. The observation is
noteworthy that, in such instances, the dreams of each individual show
a persistently autosexual trend whose invariable object is the other,
while, on the other hand, the fancies of their days’ dreams disclose a
no less persistent criticism and repugnance on the part of each toward
the other. It is the more interesting that this identical ego-sexual
reaction (secret antagonism) is found also in two persons of unlike
sex under the mental conditions of isolation involved in the mutual
pursuance of self-interests represented in the bilateral attitude of
marriage.
It is not inevitable that marriage should be the expression of
inversion we make of it at present. Marriage is inverted or ego-centred
not because of an organic necessity but because, in its mistakenness of
form or its violation of the organic inherencies, marriage, like all
mere external forms, is not biological but symbolic. In the present
stage of society’s arrested growth marriage is not the outcome of a
mode of societal confluence but of a mode of personal preference.
It is the unconscious enforcement of a self-predicated want, not
the conscious acceptance of an organically determined need. When I
speak of marriage, I have not in mind the permanent union of man and
woman that is biological and true and that is the natural basis of
our human society. I refer to the _mental attitude_ toward marriage
that we have come to substitute unconsciously for marriage itself. In
place of the bipolar position of man and woman, we have substituted
the bidimensional attitude of male and female. Because of this mental
attitude of “marriage,” people whose lives might be mutually necessary
become, on the contrary, merely inevitable to one another. It is again
our paramount image of self with its resultant reflection in the
bidimensional picture. But whatever is pictorial is personal, whatever
is personal is factional, and wherever there lurks the unconscious
element of the factional or separative, union is organically
interdicted.
Glancing even superficially at the obvious aim toward the mutual
exchange of egoistic satisfactions and at the give-and-take of
superficial coquetries and accommodations generally characterizing
the marriage relationship, there is ample evidence of the completely
infantile, undeveloped, ego-sexual nature of the motives determining
such unions. If one considers the large number of women who are
supported by men in the capacity of sexual partners, and observes their
obsessive self-ornamentation, their voluptuous exaggerations of dress
and manner, their liberal use of perfume and cosmetics with which to
enhance their personal appeal, and considers correspondingly the large
sums of money contributed annually by their votaries in maintenance
of such sexual commodities, the ego-sexual character of such mutual
arrangements is not far to seek.
In contrast with this state of affairs in the sexual life of “normals,”
it has for some time interested me to observe the unconscious
autosexuality invariably presented by neurotic individuals. The
unconscious character of it, whether latent or actual, always manifests
itself in a privately repressed, unsatisfactory form or in a form
that invariably entails conflict. It has long seemed to me that this
repressed and tormenting expression of the tendency to the enfolded
satisfactions of autosexuality, or to the unconscious extension of
one’s ego-sexuality to others of one’s own sex, is but the aim of
the personality toward an organic unification deflected into the
symbolic form represented in _bodily_ identification or in objective
likeness.[46] It has further seemed to me that such a symbolically
distorted urge, if converted into its true meaning, would issue in
an organic identification representing a completer, more conscious
order of union. I am not unmindful that in the fixity of our own
symbolic substitutions our tendency is to make such organic conceptions
needlessly difficult of assimilation. In a paper read before a
psychoanalytic meeting several years ago[47] I gave expression to this
same view, and my meaning was so completely misconceived that I was
actually quoted subsequently as having said that I considered neurotic
autosexuality (I then suggested the use of the term homo-phyllism)
to embody a “higher expression of love” than that represented in
allosexuality. Such a statement could not be otherwise interpreted
than as an outspoken advocacy of homosexuality! It is, of course, not
to be denied that the union _typified_ in the allosexual relationship
is alone an adequate expression of sex-unity. But it is adequate only
as organic unity or conscious love, not as sexuality or self-love, the
basis on which at present it very generally rests.
Biologically, autosexuality cannot be other than essentially infantile
and regressive in character and as such it runs counter to the basic
aims of analysis. But emphasis should be placed upon our need of
recognizing to what a very large extent actual autosexuality exists
under the objective symbols of allosexuality. Marriage, I repeat, as
it largely obtains in the present stage of society, fairly teems with
this infantile mode of sexuality. As the dominant impulse between
“lovers” with their coy, infantile aim of secret self-satisfaction
amply attests, the relationship, under whatever guise of exterior
circumstance it may be concealed, is necessarily egoistic or autosexual.
I feel sure that sooner or later it will be recognized that
allosexuality and autosexuality are synonymous, that these seemingly
contrary adaptations are really but alternate aspects of one and
the same thing. Sooner or later it will be seen that, while the
neurosis entails in every instance an autosexual undercurrent, it
is an expression of autosexuality that is organically intolerable,
and that the social adaptation underlying normality is equally
the unconscious expression of a collectively assimilated ego- or
autosexuality. Thus our pseudo-normality is an unconsciously conceded
(socially assimilated) inversion to this infantile mode of sexuality in
substitution for the original organic instinct of sex. This is why it
has seemed to me that in the neurotic reaction, for all its distortion,
there is presented a progressive urge of evolution--that in the very
distortion of the neurotic personality there is the premonition of a
type of a clearer, more conscious social order. In his distorted effort
to assimilate to himself a vicarious, objective (bodily) likeness,
the neurotic expresses symbolically, unconsciously, an inherent urge
toward a subjective, organic identification. In this view normality
with its allosexual reaction is psychologically more autosexual than
the reaction we recognize as unconscious or neurotic autosexuality.
Although this repressed expression is symbolically the more infantile
and regressive of the two, yet, of the two, it is potentially far the
more competent to the truly complemental relationship whose fulfilment
is merely symbolized in the allosexual adaptation as it commonly exists
among us. What really underlies the conflict of the neurotic or the
unconsciously autosexual is his organic urge toward a completer oneness
of life. His autosexuality is but symbolic. It is a disposition the
essence of which is what I have elsewhere called “homophyllic”[48]
and the organic culmination of which can be realized only in the
unification of the complementary systems embodied in a corresponding
monophyllic union.
In the beginning of my analytic work I fully believed with other
psychoanalysts that there was a condition of neurotic or “unconscious
homosexuality” distinguishable from what I then believed to exist
conversely as “heterosexuality.” I was too theoretical, habituative,
academic, too limited in the freedom of unsystematized observation to
recognize that sexuality, as it now exists socially, is everywhere
of one cloth, that all sexuality being narcistic is “homosexuality,”
that it is of its nature an expression of the infantile desire of
self-supremacy, of self-seeking, of self-gratification, that, in a
word, sexuality is synonymous with autosexuality or ego-erotism. As
homosexuality is but the projection socially of what is ego-sexuality
individually, sexuality or ego-erotism is the very essence of
homosexuality or homo-erotism. But, like the rest of my confrères, it
was my habit to refer the question of health or disorder of adaptation
to the artificial distinction between heterosexuality and “unconscious
homosexuality” respectively. In other words, my criterion of health
and growth was formerly the merely unconscious conventionalization of
sex, the mere procuring for it, as it were, the external formality of
the social blessing. It is only in the last years that I have seen in
its fuller clarity that health is essentially unity and identity of
personality as contrasted with the introversions of an unconsciously
alternative adaptation. Only in the last years have I seen that as
life and sex are one, so are self-worship and sexuality one, and that
the real contrast as seen in the light of the health and growth of
the organism, whether individual or societal, is the contrast between
the organic instinct of sex on the one hand and the introversions of
sexuality on the other.[49]
It is the unerring test of unconscious autosexuality that the quest
that manifestly registers itself under this artificial form of
expression can find its answer only in a realization which, in its
true sex determination (love), is latently the precise reverse of this
expression. In the attitude of lust and autosexuality toward the male
there is presaged love or sex toward the woman; in the attitude of lust
or autosexuality toward the female is the earnest of love or sex toward
the man. On the contrary, it is the unfailing test of the delusionally
systematized autosexuality (ego-sexuality), which is social or
“normal,” that the quest thus recorded in its manifest content can
find its satisfaction only in the no less manifest “reliefs” of a
_seemingly_ opposite sexual determination (allosexuality). In the
self-lusts (autosexuality) of the male, his objective is the body of
the female with her autosexuality or self-lusts; in the self-lusts
(autosexuality) of the female, her objective is the body of the male
and his self-lusts or autosexuality. In the satisfactions of these
objective conquests lies the whole meaning of sexuality, as in the
inclusiveness of a subjective unification lies the meaning of love.
The type of union biologically natural and fitting is that between
man and woman as unified personalities. But in the present repressed,
vicarious, infantile state of the individual and society, such a union
is as yet in very large measure merely a type. To make of the union
of personalities something more than a type--to make of it an organic
reality--there is needed some such unification within each through
the personality of the other as would be realized in a relationship
representing the union of the two complementary systems, the peripheral
and central, the societal and individual. The separation of these
two systems we have seen to be the response to external repression
from without, and in the re-uniting of these artificially separated
complements there would be re-established the originally confluent
organism, individual and societal, such as alone embodies the free and
unified personality.
Union is not a thing of body in the contrasts of male and female with
their artificial dissociation from life. The female in her rôle of
costly _objet d’art_ and the male as collector of such wares do not
approach in this mere surface affinity a consummation even remotely
akin to any such organic reality. No man or woman ever understood the
other’s body who has not understood the other’s mind; no man or woman
ever understood the other’s mind, who has not understood the body of
the other. It is only in an organic identification such as is inclusive
of both that there is fulfilled the united understanding, in both,
of the mind and body of each. Union is of personality as realized in
man and woman through the fulfilment in each of their identification
with life in its totality, the one (male or female) embodying the
peripheral, societal, allocentric complement, the other (male or
female) the internal, central, autocentric complement, the two divided
personalities realizing in the welding of each with each the organic
unity of both.
In saying “male or female” I am advisedly avoiding assigning
specifically either sex element to either organic rôle. In general the
societal or peripheral rôle and the visceral or central rôle would
seem analogous to the respective rôles of male and female, in the
fact that the former is more fittingly adapted biologically to the
external demands of life as hunter and provider and the latter to the
more retired, enclosed conditions of life pertaining to the functions
of conservation and maternity. There is the further parallel that in
the female the reproductive organs are organs of receptivity, lying
deeper, more centrally within her organism, while those of the male
are more contiguous to the external skeletal tissues and are invasive
in function. Nevertheless, because of the frequent transposition
between the two sexes of the traits supposedly specific of each--a far
more frequent transposition than the conventional division between
the sexes affords opportunity to observe, the woman being often the
more aggressive, the man the more retired of the two--to assign
forehandedly one or the other complement to one or the other sex is
arbitrary and without warrant. This is true particularly in respect to
the distinction between the neurotic exaggerations of type described
as auto- and allocentric, in which the conventional psychosexual
differentiations are practically indeterminable.
These and kindred reflections lead me to feel that the term
“opposite” sex is subjectively an unfortunate misnomer. To the
neurotic especially, whose life has been crippled through repression
in response to external opposition, all “oppositeness” is felt as
a menace. Consider the inhibiting intimidations to the subjective
child, resulting from the implied oppositeness between teacher and
pupil, that characterizes the attitude of our prevailing pedagogical
systems. Consider to what extent our systems of education are really
barriers to education. In the very idea of oppositeness the child is
instinctively revolted. His organism shrinks from it as from a blow.
It is under such circumstances that, in his sense of the oppositeness
of the sexes, the individual’s unconscious recourse is to the sex that
is not opposite his own. Yet here too, as we have seen, he has only
turned to the objective symbol of unity, and the inherent opposition
remains. For the symbol of unity or that which stands instead of unity
is itself opposition. Thus in the neurotic’s unconscious recourse to
this symbolic or autosexual form of identification the opposition or
separation is only accented anew.
Organically, or from the point of view of personality, woman is not
opposite to man but each is the complement of the other. As in a
current of electricity the flow between its two termini is dependent
not upon their opposition but upon the functional confluence between
its positive and negative poles, each being incomplete in the absence
of the other, so is the relationship of sex between two organisms; it
is confluent and not opposite, it is of the nature of complement and
not of contrast. And so the need of the neurotic, as of the normal
individual, is such a completion of his personality in the organic
complement of his mate as is co-extensive with his unification with
life in its organic compass.
In the symbolic unification or unconscious autosexuality represented
in an objective likeness or bodily identification there is but
the short-circuiting of a true organic unification. Where it has
occurred in personalities of a high intellectual or social order,
the phenomenon has tended to be accounted for through recourse to
a conceptual accommodation that is more generous than scientific.
A plea has been advanced for the acceptance of the comrade-love of
such individuals on grounds of the high character of the expression
of their inverted tendency. To this end there has been invoked the
conception of an “intermediate sex.” But in this undoubtedly hospitable
envisagement there is to be seen the sentimentality that is as always
but inverted sentiment. The conception of an intermediate sex is
the creation of an intermediate imagination. An intermediate sex is
a biological solecism. It represents the attempt of a divided mind
to reconcile a divided state of feeling that is prior to it. It is
again the arbitrary assumption of opposition and the vicious circle
of separateness and unconsciousness. As for the high order of many
of its representatives, there is no high order of infantilism or
autosexuality. The existence of a high order, moral and intellectual,
of this type only imposes upon its representatives the greater societal
obligation to understand and encompass its meaning. Their need is to
relinquish the infantile distortion of life symbolized in this inverted
bias of their unconscious autosexuality, and concurrently to enter into
the organic realization of their innate consonance. It is only when
this organic inherency has become disturbed, whether neurotically or
normally, singly or societally, that there occurs the reflex effort
toward vicarious restitution, resulting either in the exaggerations
of self-assertiveness or in an over-emphasized self-derogation
representing respectively the spurious bravadoes of an alternative
maleness on the one hand and the artificial propitiations of an
alternative femaleness on the other.
As has been said, because of our objective, perceptual attitude toward
one another, our contacts, whether mediated through visual, auditory,
tactile or other stimuli, are necessarily superficial and attributive.
This superficial registry of stimuli includes also the sphere of our
sexological responses. Thus in civilized man the sexual reaction, in
both male and female, is restricted to the superficial sexual zones.
Because of man’s repression of this essential sphere of his feeling,
the natural flow of the sexual impulse is artificially intercepted.
Hence the genital stimulus in man is limited to the superficial
tactile organs. It does not radiate to the deeper visceral structures
constituting its nuclear terminus--in the male the rectal, prostatic
and crural zones, in the female the rectal, the deeper vaginal zones
and the cervix uteri (the homologue in the female of the prostate in
the male). It is because of this intercepted radiation of the natural
sexual response that there has arisen the necessity for the formulation
of an “anal complex”--a complex that is regarded by psychoanalysts as
existing quite sporadically in certain neurotic individuals and that is
by no means recognized as a condition common to the race of civilized
man! For naturally with the interception of the sexual impulse at its
nuclear pole, or with repression of the visceral sex zone, there can
only result in its stead a “complex” and along with it such artificial
sexual adaptations as have been described as intermediate. In addition
to this repression of our organic sex feeling there has occurred a
corresponding compensation in the sphere of the mental and social
life, which in the woman has led to the social adoption of the rôle
corresponding to the _mental image_ female and in the man to the
_mental image_ male.
Among the lower orders of animals the distinction between male and
female entails no organic opposition. In one and the same organism this
bipolar condition is undifferentiated and self-contained. On the other
hand, with the mental sophistication connoted under the distinction
man and woman we have come to assume the presence of an artificial
opposition between the male and female organism. With the male element
or organism we demand the mental and physical attributes we arbitrarily
posit as “man,” with the female element or organism we demand the
mental and physical attributes we arbitrarily posit as “woman.” Thus
we repudiate the polarity that is confluent of the two elements male
and female and exact of the organism we discriminate as man that it
repudiate the characteristics we discriminate as woman, and of the
organism we discriminate as woman that it repudiate the characteristics
we distinguish as man.
This arbitrary, unbiological dictum necessitates that a “man” shall
repress the female component within him notwithstanding that his
organism is compounded of it along with the male element. Conversely,
it makes obligatory upon the woman that she repress the male element
within her notwithstanding that it is a no less constituent factor than
the female element in composing the bipolar quality essential to the
unity of her organism.
With this artificial condition and its edict of enforced repression
there often occurs such a one-sided development within the organism
that the result is the exaggerated reaction we see in the bilateral
extremes we have described as good and bad, as saint and sinner. It is
interesting to observe, though, that upon analysis one discovers within
the repressed sphere of the sinner’s personality all the factors that
constitute the personality of the saint, and that within the repressed
sphere of the saint’s personality, there are disclosed all the elements
that constitute the personality of the sinner.
Such findings as we owe to our deeper penetration into individual
psychology make clearer the superficiality of our normal, social
distinctions. They afford us reason to believe that when psychiatry
has loosed itself of its superficial acceptations we shall find
that wherever the bipolar life of the organism, male or female, is
permitted to fulfil its natural expression there will be no longer the
repressed or unconscious instigation to such exaggerated distortions or
over-compensations as now issue as a result of the organic repression
of these artificially dual phases. We shall then recognize that the
“intermediate sex” is a fallacy due to discriminations that arise from
a disregard of the inclusive nature of sex. What is really apprehended
by the term intermediate sex is the _composite sex_ whereof the
unification of personality within every individual, normal as well as
neurotic, is the inherent embodiment. It is in this concomitance of the
social and nuclear systems that consists the organic co-ordination
of the individual element. Without it there is lacking the organic
correlation of the societal aggregate such as is the essential biology
of man.
The organismic postulate here proposed sets out from the conception of
a _principle of primary identification_ within the original psychic
organism as the biological basis of consciousness.[50] Upon this
principle rests the biological significance of the unity of personality
that comprises the consonance of life, individual and societal. The
essence of the neurotic diathesis, socially and singly, is merely the
reflection within the individual of these surface diversifications of
external suggestion or repression, as more and more they infringe upon
this original consonance of the organism. This gradual replacement
of our original unity and inherency by the external inducements
of the extraneous and alternative is the whole significance of
unconsciousness. This, in reality, is the meaning of the manifold
dissimilitudes of men as compared with the unified personality of man.
If, in the androgynous personalities represented in such autocentric
types as Buddha, Plato or Christ, there is manifested this unifying
urge of the inherent organism of man, so the allocentric personalities
of Socrates, of Napoleon and of Nietzsche are equally expressive of
this same composite urge. If this unifying urge of man’s common sex
incited the genius of an Hypatia in centuries past, it has directed
no less in our own times the creative impulse underlying the genius
of George Eliot or of Olive Schreiner. In the contemplation of such
genius we see presented the unity and concentration of personality that
is the real meaning of the artist as contrasted with the extraneous
dissipations and diversities of the average reaction-type. It is this
unity of personality that is the source of the artist’s creativeness
as it is the inspiration of his genius. This composite quality of
the sex life explains the gentler intuitions we often find in the
personality of a man. There is undoubtedly the feminine in man though
as yet he stands in fear of it. It does not wrangle or contend. It
does not calculate success. The feminine in man is the artist in man.
It is because of this that there can be in the societal unity of the
artist’s intuitive instinct no place for the illusion that is called
“the public.” To him “the public” is but the collective repudiation
of the common soul of man--a repudiation that corresponds to this
same disavowal within the private soul of each of us. Unmoved by its
clamorous demands, the artist feels within these manifestations of the
public mind the common soul that underlies it, and senses within it
the pain of denied needs identical with his own. This is the unfailing
intuition of the artist. It is because of this sense of the unity of
life that no artist was ever yet successful, that his triumph or his
failure are above all public concern.
And so by “the artist” I mean the quality of personality that is
enticed by no external advantage, that entertains no indirection, is
unmoved by the inverse compensations of egoism and the unconscious
wish. Such a quality is organically, societally self-contained and
subsists without object. It does not sue for favour nor seek to
please. In this confluence of the personality of the artist as of the
neurotic, in this creative concentration of man’s genius, whether
articulate or denied, is embodied the societal instinct that is the
composite life of the race. This organic integrity of personality that
is the composite life of man and that is organically inseparable from
the unifying urge embodied in the impulse of mating has its clearest
intimations in the affirmations of the artist as in the frustrations of
the neurotic. In the unifying urge represented in these two opposite
extremes of reaction--an urge which shall neither impose nor accept an
adjustment extraneous to the inherent personality--is expressed the
demand for a self-realization in a unification which, being organic,
is all-inclusive.[51]
Only in such a conjunction will man realize his original mode of
societal confluence. When such a conjunction will enable him truly
to realize in the instinct of mating the deepest need of his being,
union will no longer as now be _represented_ through juxtaposition in
the mere physical symbol of bodily interpenetration, but it will _be_
through unification the societal reality of an organic intussusception.