ULTIMATE RESOLUTION OF THE SOCIETAL NEUROSIS IN ITS PERSONAL IMPLICATION
I well recognize that in its matter this essay offers little that is
new. What I have sought to do is rather to speak of our human reactions
in the large from the basis of the altered consciousness of the handful
of men and women whose group experience, as gradually it has grown
and gathered strength and cohesion among us, has permitted the more
subjective or societal realization of these reactions. But though it
is true that there is little that is new in the matter of this essay,
yet, in so far as the collective differences existing among us as a
group have been allowed slowly to diffuse themselves gradually into the
solution of our common acceptance of one another, it seems to me that
in its mode at least our position offers an approach that brings us a
step closer to the increasingly urgent problem of our human adjustment.
After all, the intrinsic mode underlying our conception is the real
significance of our conception. To understand our position the
reader’s only recourse is to repudiate the bidimensional alternatives
of extrinsic moralities based upon precepts of a personalistic or
self-restricted behaviourism. For the position of this thesis will be
little understood in the light of the accustomed interpretations of
the conventional social mind. Because of the unconscious bias of its
own mental absolute it will appear to the social polity that, in the
altered attitude here outlined, the social polity is threatened at its
very foundations. In its tenacious hold upon habitual prepossessions
the organized consensus does not realize that these foundations are
already tottering. It will not see that in order to further the
replacement of the already disintegrating structures of our present
social system, a more widely envisioning concept of the organized
consciousness of man must needs be invoked. In some way, though, there
must first be brought home to each of us the realization that there
can be no true unity within the societal organism as long as we are a
prey to impressions that are but the give-and-take reflection of mental
attitudes existing mutually in one another. As long as we fail to
identify the tyranny of mental attitudes within the social unconscious
with the reflection of similar tyrannical mental attitudes within the
personalism and defection of each of us, man cannot rise to the reality
of an organized social consciousness. As long, for example, as we fail
to understand that when a mental attitude in others pleases or incenses
us, it is necessarily but the reflection of a corresponding mental
attitude in ourselves, we shall continue to praise or punish such
mental attitudes, together with the acts resulting from them, with the
mere retaliative measures of personal reward or redress. So that our
attitude will continue to be, as now, the mere pro-and-con reaction to
impressions determined by the unconscious self-reflection of our own
“good and bad.”
It is precisely this illusion of mental oppositeness that we need
to dispel. Harmony will follow automatically once we have accepted
in its societal significance the affective unity of life. With this
realization there will be no further need of the restraints of
an alternative principle of morality which, in its bidimensional
legislation, aims to establish merely a temporary balance between
essential opposites. With the elimination of the individual hope-fear
alternation the whole incitement to personal infringement will have
been removed. What inducement will I have to cheat a man if he is
myself? Or betray a woman if she is I? To what purpose will I seek
to enslave another to my whim (call it love, marriage or what you
will) if between us there is the acceptance of an organic compliance
that allows the realization in each of the common unity of both? Why
would I seek to outdo anyone in the invidious competitions of what is
called “success,” if I know clearly that success comprises only the
self-reflective distinctions existing within the unconscious of the
social mind in response to the spurious incentives of the personal
alternative as it exists within the unconscious of the individual mind?
Our prevailing personalistic basis is not applicable to an organismic
viewpoint, because a policy that is self-reflective in the unconscious
is self-contradictory in consciousness. Unity or consciousness of
personality is organically preclusive of whatever is personal or
unconscious in the personality. For every wish that is attained an
equal disappointment is incurred. For every satisfaction that is
secured a corresponding denial is imposed. To fulfil one’s wish
is to abjure one’s reality. Asking is its own postponement, as
striving is its own defeat. This inner homology between desire and
its non-attainment is alike the hope and the despair of atoning to
oneself unconsciously or personally for what is one’s need consciously
or societally. As with compulsion-replacements elsewhere, the real
occasion of prayer is one’s unanswerable attitude of mind in prayer.
In the self-compensation of man’s want as an individual organism, he
necessarily repudiates his inherent consonance as a societal organism.
Thus our personal dearth and our personal plenty are organically the
same. As the part embodied in one’s personal wish (unconsciousness)
is intrinsically opposed to the whole embodied in one’s societal
unity (consciousness), to desire is at the same time to fail of
attainment as well as to covet. This is the paradox of our personalism
and unconsciousness, as it is the impasse of the personal absolute
underlying it. In the personal opportunism of the unconscious wish we
would fancifully summon the processes of life to ourselves in place
of contributing our individual function as common participants in
the reality of these processes. Our contradiction, after all, is the
division within ourselves, and the real impasse as always is the
self-image embodied in the delusive alternative of good and bad.
I know, of course, that much that I have tried to set down in these
pages has been said many times before and by those more competent
of expression than I. Indeed, in its objective envisagement,
the recognition among us of differences, personal, national and
international, has become a commonplace. Even in the columns of our
daily news items, these conditions of societal defection are mentioned
time and again in the casual tone of the matter of course. Among
the current comments one reads, for example: “The task of saving
civilization seems rather hopeless when it doesn’t promise an immediate
and private profit”; “When a statesman says he despairs of the world
he means that he despairs of getting what he wants”; “All nations seem
agreed that chaos may result unless other nations forsake their evil
ways”; “Civilization is just a slow process of envisioning more rights
to fight for”; and so on without end.
But no amount of objective observation, however astute, will
avail in clearing personal outlooks. Too easily is one’s mere
observation, however right and seemingly true, the embodiment of
secret self-satisfaction and detachment. Personalistic observation,
far from resolving the affective illusion of the onlooker, serves
only to accentuate it. Dissociation within another individual that
is observed by us but that does not quicken us to a realization of
our own implication, automatically embeds us still deeper in the
fixity of our own unconscious personalism. There is need to withdraw
from our accustomed observations and to include within ourselves the
dissociation that seems to lie outside of us but that is, in fact,
the unconscious projection of our own dissociation. In this affective
illusion of the onlooker, we are ever hoping merely to convince others
of the disinterestedness of our interference with them. A disinterested
interference is biologically impossible. To wish to convince others is
to be unconvinced ourselves. True disinterestedness consists alone in
our own self-realization.
The familiar French saying, “Tout comprendre est tout pardonner” is,
like so much that is proverbial, _almost_ true. It has assembled the
right elements but in the wrong order. It gives to the letter dynamic
priority over the spirit.[58] It is hysterical replacement refurbished
in the condensation of the epigram. It is but the literature of the
neurosis. If we transpose the equation in such manner as to convert
intellectual values into their organic terms, the proposition
resolves itself into a form that is, I believe, much nearer the
answer to the problem of our human pathology: To forgive all is to
understand all. I have only this in mind in saying that the neurosis
is societal, that it is common. This is what I mean in saying that
differentiation is unconsciousness and that the factor of societal
repression or the societal factor of separatism is anterior to the
separatism of sexuality or to the factor of our individual repression.
As the societal and the individual are organically one in mode, the
unification of the individual is at least a step toward the unification
of our societal consciousness. This is all I have in mind in speaking
of consciousness as the encompassment of life. It is a mode of
consciousness that is inclusive and that reconciles within itself the
disparity that is social.
All this I had at first “in mind” only. It was, I confess, a theory
with me and, like all such substitutive replacements, the theory
held for me only an unconscious or symbolic significance. There was
lacking in myself the recognition that the theoretical is identical
with the symbolic. And so my position in stating that the theory
of analysis is the neurosis of the analyst has lacked its personal
acknowledgment within my own consciousness. Truly, unconsciousness
cannot envisage unconsciousness. Secret separateness cannot encompass
secret separateness. The division of each of us is the division within
himself. The real grudge is one’s own grudge. After all, there is only
one vice and that, paradoxically, is the virtue of being better than
other people. Yet so tenacious are we of this our solitary shortcoming,
that we will acknowledge all other “faults” rather than disclaim this
one. But the task of ourselves as the task of our patients is the
recognition of our own personalism and resentment. It is to forgive all
_within ourselves_, that we may understand all within others who are
societally no less ourselves. It is to realize that the whole intricate
problem of our “understanding” is but the retributive fabrication of
our own unforgiveness.
It is just here that the repressed and isolated individual resolutely
balks. Such a solution, he declares, offers nothing for him. He does
not discover in it an advantage for himself. Quite true. In his
unconscious sense, there is nothing for him. His self-seeking is itself
the very kernel of his delusion. It is only in the disparate bias of
his arbitrary individualism (I do not say individuality) that he can
apprehend anything so dissociative as an advantage for himself as a
separate individual. It is only as the wilful, defiant, separative
child that he is, that he would seek the treasure of life for himself,
that he comes demanding a governmental form embodying a system of
monarchical autocracy whereof he is to be the supreme ruler, when,
in truth, life is of its very essence an organic democracy and the
individual an element in its societal confluence. In the quandary of
his organic involution the neurotic, if one might so crudely express
it, is literally “hell-bent” on attaining heaven. He does not see,
for he will not see, that life and self are irreconcilable. On the
contrary, with every available device, with every recourse of subtlety
and with ever more enticing symbols, he seeks to decoy the common, free
gift of life into the circumscribed and artificial confines of his own
self-bias.
In this deflection of his mental outlook he is far from the basis from
which his experience originally set out--the organic basis in which
the secret of life is its commonness and in which the commonness and
the joy of it are one. As the analysis proceeds, synchronous with the
gradual acceptance on the part of the patient of his mistakenness and
of his growing responsibility toward this mistakenness through the
widening of his societal outlook, there comes his automatic awakening
to the realization of the inherent confluence of life in its utmost
fulfilment. It is a slow process this that demands our reversal from an
habitual attitude of disparity and separation to one of participation
and confluence, from self and unconsciousness to consciousness and
life, but it is the inevitable task of an analysis that bases its
procedure upon an organismic conception of consciousness in its
relative inclusiveness.
I am under no illusion as to the futility of reckoning upon any
far-reaching assent to such a thesis as this. I know well that a
thesis which confronts the securely entrenched ranks of the social
unconscious is, in general, predetermined to defeat. In this
unpromising outlook, however, I am not dismayed. Were I guided solely
by personal inclination I would endeavour at least to narrow the scope
of a challenge such as this. I would, for instance, absolve myself from
the obligation of recording so sweeping and unwelcome an indictment as
that which lays to the door of normality in the large the imputation
of autosexuality and infantilism. To many, such a statement will seem
extravagant, bizarre, unwarranted. So that, if I would propitiate my
readers through the presentation of a more acceptable thesis, I should
naturally wish, if I may not wholly withdraw this statement, at least
to palliate its implications.
But as this statement seems to me essentially true, as it is the very
crux of this thesis that unconsciousness is social and not individual,
that the collective unconscious is the anterior factor to which the
individual factor involving the neurosis is but the reflex response;
as the central issue upon which my entire position must stand or fall
is the conviction that the _responsibility for the neurosis rests
upon the societal consciousness in its ontogenetic phase within each
of us_; and above all, since my indictment of the social unconscious
is one from which I am no more exempted than others, to withhold such
a statement would be nothing other than the hesitation to affirm my
real conviction and so retain the servility and introversion of my own
social unconsciousness. This position is precisely the expression of
what I believe to be the essential embodiment of the neurosis, and my
wish to keep silent would be nothing else than my own unconscious wish
not to relinquish the neurosis in which I share as a social element
within it. Upon closer view, my unconscious fear becomes merely my wish
to save my own individuation and unconsciousness at the expense of the
participatory, societal confluence that alone constitutes consciousness.
This, as I think of it, is interesting, for upon reflection it grows
still clearer that my reluctance would be again the neurosis within
myself or the retention of the very separateness I am presumably
undertaking to observe. After all, my irresolution would amount to
my withholding not the statement but myself. It would represent my
preference (as always it is my preference unconsciously) to withhold
myself from my organic place as a confluent part in the societal
aggregate. Instead of being one, therefore, with every other element
comprising it, it would mean that I preferred to retain the illusion
of my own disparateness, phantastically hoping in my dissociative mode
thus to comprise in my individual self the self-possession that alone
pertains to the acceptance of one’s share in our common, societal
aggregate.
And so I have come to believe that, however unwelcome the imputation,
it is only the societal indictment as it applies to oneself personally
that affords the real opportunity of release from the neurosis of
society. It is the illusion of differentiation that is the essence
of the neurosis. It is the fallacy of our personal separateness that
is the meaning of our societal discord. Through our mutual analyses
and also in the contacts of our daily living as a subjectively
organized group, we have come to realize that this subtle attitude of
disaffection is extraneous to the essential life of man. Affective
conditions recognized as results outside of us are affective conditions
unrecognized as causes within us. Subjectively, societally, they are
the same. From a relative or organismic basis there is no difference.
Just as cosmically or in the objective universe there is no absolute
time and space, so organically or in the subjective universe there
is no absolute cause and effect. As objectively time and space are
“relative to moving systems,” so subjectively cause and effect are
relative to organic sequences. Accordingly, our need is to recognize
the implication of the unconscious not as directed against others
nor against oneself, but as including oneself equally with others in
constituting together in our common life a single, societal unit.
There will, I know, be much misunderstanding in regard to what has
been set down in these pages. If, by chance, the conventional artist
should read this thesis, he will tell you that he understands and that
he accepts it fully, on the ground that he finds its full realization
within his own intuitions. But the artist will be mistaken. Should
the conventional scientist read it, he will tell you that it is not
possible to find substantiation for such a thesis within the scope of
his authenticated formulations and that therefore he cannot understand
or accept it. But the scientist will also be mistaken. Both will be
quite right objectively, but this is, in itself, to miss the meaning of
a conception that is essentially subjective.[59] This thesis has been
felt and written from an intrinsically relative mode, and it is only
from an intrinsically relative mode that it can be felt and understood.
As yet the artist knows feeling only in the absolute form of the images
that exist within himself; as yet the scientist knows feeling only in
the absolute form of the images that exist outside himself. The one
lives within the dreams (fanciful formulations) arising within the
personal system that is individual; the other lives within the concepts
(theoretical formulations) transmitted to him from the personal
system that is social. Yet I do not doubt that among both artists and
scientists, as well as among many people who are technically neither
artist nor scientist, there will be those who will partake more or
less consciously of what is here more or less consciously partaken of.
In the form of its presentation it is inevitably restricted to the
objective symbol of the written word; nevertheless, in the subjective
encompassment of each that is its common inclusion of both, it may
equally reach and unite the basic personalities of poet and craftsman,
of male and female, of artist and scientist.
In this sense and in this spirit of a common involvement in the
unconscious of my fellows, I feel that to some, at least, my meaning
will seem clear and my motive not untoward. For there are those
who, like myself, are only “normal” under duress and who secretly
revolt against the compromising yoke of the social as well as of the
individual unconscious. It is for these that I have written. To speak
fearlessly and with freedom to the few, who are fearless and free
enough to understand, means far more to me and will, I believe, prove
ultimately far more fruitful in making clear the real meaning of our
human need than half-hearted statements muttered with bated breath and
trimmed to suit the fear-ridden prepossessions of the collective mind
as it tends in its blind autocracy to dominate the clearer vision of us
all.
The more I consider the factor of one’s personal hesitancy to entrust
himself unreservedly to the societal aggregate through unbosoming
his own unconscious wish to repress his share in its collective
dissociation, the more it is clear to me that in this very symptom of
one’s own--for such it is--lies the strongest corroboration of the
impersonal or societal interpretation of the neurosis. For, as I have
said, it is the acceptance of the oneness of each of us individually
within the encompassing societal organism as an aggregate that alone
points the way to our release from the fear or separateness that is the
neurosis of the societal organism.
To consider the instinct of the societal bond without mentioning its
influence in the development of the formulations that have resulted
from the conceptions of Freud, would be to waive acknowledgment of
the very determinants which have made possible the present societal
interpretation. Abstract truths are the personal relics of genius;
their vindication in the concrete text of experience is the heritage of
our common consciousness. If the significance of personality lies in
the organismic consciousness of man, the springs of all creative genius
are to be traced to this common source. This organic consanguinity is
the very essence of genius. Holding its incisive course against all
obstacle, this societal urge makes of genius the socially solitary
expression that it is. The source of genius is nuclear, original,
essential. Moving amid the surface crusts of “types” which in their
restriction of outer contact may only absorb or reflect the impressions
about them, genius eradiates from the common centre of our societal
organism sustained by an impulse that is cosmic. For this reason, it is
the unalterable sentence of genius that it break with every accustomed
adherence. It is its law that it raise itself out of habitual inertias
and see straight and clear, beyond all temporary immediacies, into the
unfurbished truth of things. In this wise, in face of the personal
criticism and resentment of the very world whose progress it was the
all-engrossing effort of his genius to further, Sigmund Freud saw and
reported what he saw, fearless, determined and alone. There is no more
isolated appointment than this to which genius is summoned. It is in
this appointment and in the societal implication of it, that lies
the real significance of Freud. Should we fail to realize this, we
would ourselves be overlooking the societal urge that is phyletically
inherent in Freud’s psychology.
In the course of our development the period of men’s substitutive
image-production was first interrupted through the return to reality
inaugurated by Darwin’s theory of evolution. What still remained over
in man’s mental life has been further threatened by Freud’s theory of
the evolutionary processes of the unconscious. When the evolutionary
theories of Darwin and Freud are carried to their ultimate social
conclusion, the result will be the entire repudiation of man’s
image-production and a re-uniting of his organic and conscious life
into a single constructive whole.
In an essentially psychological study of this kind in which the effort
has been made to trace the mechanisms of unconscious processes in their
social application, there is not place for discussing the practical
outcome, political, economic and industrial, that must follow through
the very altered position of man’s conscious outlook as a result of
a more inclusive interpretation of our societal background. It is
impossible to conjecture the influence upon man’s behaviour socially
and nationally that would result from a complete dispelling from his
mind of the images that now occupy the place of his organic reality.
How much the reaction that is ostensibly the most disastrous in our
social life--the reaction of war--is due to the obsession of the social
mind with mere images having no reality, it would only be extravagant
to attempt to surmise. But these are practical considerations that must
occupy us in subsequent discussions if the basis here outlined in its
fundamental biology shall be found of value amid the growing processes
of man’s thought.
There is a further statement I wish to make. In this statement I should
like to be understood as speaking in the fullest sincerity of which
I am capable, my feeling being uninfluenced either by sentimental
modesty or by any deprecatory wish to refer to extraneous agencies
the sponsorship for this record. This thesis in a very true sense is
not my thesis--it represents no intellectual achievement of mine.
On consideration it will readily be seen that of its very nature it
could not be my thesis. The outgrowth of automatic conditions stoutly
resisted by me, it is the product of environmental circumstances over
which I had no control. It was exacted under pain of repudiating
in actuality the theoretical interpretations for which my work has
stood. It is the outcome of inevitable concession to the ordeal of
facing in its grim detail the fabric of substitution and disparity
composing the structure of my own daily living. Convictions have been
wrung from me against my own personal will, against every tradition
about me and in spite of every effort of subtlety on my part to escape
their exactions. Through many months I have fought their acceptance
over every step of the way. As, little by little, a more relative and
societal conviction has been borne in upon me, it has proved that the
realization I have so long and so resolutely resisted has been the
actuality of my own separatism and unconsciousness, as contrasted
with the undifferentiated, organic life of which my personal work has
been but the theory. It is because this work in its actuality is the
expression of an urge common to life, sweeping aside in the strength of
its organic tide every claim to personal consideration, that there is
due the acknowledgment that it has come to expression unbeholden to me,
that its motive has been, as far as humanly possible, not personal but
societal.
The organic theory here offered has been advanced by me hitherto on
grounds of mere conceptual intuitions. Its present form embodies
in its spirit of an impersonal, affective participation, however
imperfectly fulfilled, the subjective record of an organic experience.
In its plea for a wider acceptance of the common fellowship of man’s
native consciousness, I well realize that it is only with the years
that we may hope to yield it fuller accord.
I shall be glad if this embodiment of whatever societal acceptance may
have found expression in these pages may bring a clearer meaning, a
quieter understanding to any whose need has been deep and unfulfilled.
For my own part, this expression is the response to what is the
deepest demand of my own life--the need for the organic unification of
personality that I feel resides alone in the common consciousness of
man.
INDEX
Absolutism--
in affects, 39, 227
in present system of consciousness, 33, 43, 63, 104, 227
in psychoanalysis, 67, 68, 73, 101
in the Church, 66-68, 73
_see also_ Personal absolute
Adler, 113, 174
Affects, 115, 121, 130, 178, 205, 227
Affective life, 115, 125
components, 57, 58, 62
Allocentric and autocentric--
complementary, 203, 213
definition, 188
reactions, 191-196, 218
Allosexuality--
and autosexuality, 207, 208, 211
definition, 201, 202
identical basis, 209
_see also_ Sex
Alternative--
bidimensional, 80-85, 93, 96, 97, 226-228, 239
in art and drama, 85-87, 96
in psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychopathology, 97, 100-103,
229-233
individual expressions of, 88-91
occurrence in group analysis, 223, 224, 236
social expressions of, 85, 92-95, 99, 102, 207
_see also_ “Good and bad”
Ambivalence, 86, 94, 196, 228
_see also_ Alternative
“Anal complex,” 216
Analysis--
aim of, 26, 137, 164, 165, 166
_see also_ Dream; Group analysis; Psychoanalysis
Aquinas, 158
Art, 87, 96, 183
Artist, 96, 218, 219
Autocentric--
_see_ Allocentric
Autosexuality, 206, 215, 244
_see also_ Allosexuality
Besant, Annie, 139
Belief, 47, 143
Bidimensional plane, 41, 42, 58, 60, 62, 104
_see also_ Alternative; Relativity of consciousness
Bleuler, 94
Buddha, 218
Calvin, 158
Cerebro-spinal nervous system, 189-192, 194
Childhood--
consciousness of, 22, 23, 145
imposition of social images upon, 52-55, 58, 59, 92, 93, 116, 123,
132, 145, 213
Christ, 218
Christianity, 85, 193, 196
Church--
as social systematization, 65-75
Claparède, 156
Collective unconscious--
_see_ Social unconscious
Complexes, 47, 72
Compulsion neurosis, 81
Consciousness--
absolutism of present system, 43, 44
as unconsciousness, 24, 110, 111, 114, 115, 119, 143
definition, 119
individualistic compared with societal, 51, 62, 109, 144
ontogenesis, 119-121
phylogenesis, 118, 160, 162
relativity of, 32-40, 48
unification of, 122, 126, 169, 173, 212, 218, 242
_see also_ Dissociation; Self-consciousness; Societal concept of
consciousness
Darwin, 249
Dementia præcox, 124, 136, 137, 195, 203
Depression, 91, 94
Descartes, 124
Differentiation, 129, 169, 178, 242
delusion of, 120-122, 125, 131
Dissociation--
individual and social, 45-47, 76, 109, 110, 132, 144, 148-153, 155,
176, 185, 241
Division of personality, 81, 85, 95, 147, 222
genesis of, 116-119
physiological substrate, 189-191
_see also_ Dissociation; Neurosis; Repression
Doubt--
attitude of Church toward, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71
compared with resistance, 71-74
Drama, 85-88, 182, 183
Dream, 178-183, 185, 195
analysis, 88, 176, 177, 184
and personal absolute, 90, 111-113
and wish, 89
Eddington, A. S., 32
Education, 92, 93, 214
_see also_ Childhood
Ego-sexuality, 201-203, 206-208
_see also_ Sex
Einstein, 32, 36, 37, 38, 186
Eliot, George, 218
Ellis, Havelock, 158
Extravert, 187, 201
Family, 204, 234, 235
Feeling--
as subjective experience, 20, 21, 115
Freud, 1, 4, 5, 9, 14, 38, 47, 101, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113,
126, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 174, 199, 204, 236, 248, 249
Freudian analysis, 1-5, 38, 47, 138, 168, 172, 231
Freud’s theory--
of the neuroses, 12, 14, 37, 94, 108, 109, 126, 156, 157, 196,
228, 229, 236, 237
of resistance, 61, 154
“Good and bad”--
as image of personal advantage, 55, 59, 62, 81, 85, 90, 192, 200
bidimensional alternative, 53, 58, 62, 65, 78, 81, 91, 102, 103,
201, 227, 239
pretence underlying, 54-56, 58, 92
_see also_ Image
Group analysis, 131, 223-226, 234-238, 246
Heterosexuality--
_see_ Allosexuality; Homosexuality; Sex
Homophyllic, 208, 210
Homosexuality, 94, 97, 199, 211
and heterosexuality, 198, 200-202, 210
and paranoia, 174, 175
_see also_ Sex
Hysteria, 63, 97, 143, 189, 191
social, 16
Ideas of reference, 136, 223
Image, 40-42
as substitution, 16
basis of marriage, 207
basis of sexuality, 14, 15
bidimensional, 53, 57-59, 226-228
contrasted with reality, 41, 79
of male and female, 96, 216
of parent, 55, 103, 173, 235
_see also_ “Good and bad”; Mother-image; Social images
Incest-Awe, 147, 148
Individual--
as systematization, 70, 76
as separative element, 126, 150, 152, 153, 160, 243
as societal element, 115, 117, 127, 130, 148, 156
Infantilism, 215, 244
Insanity, 23, 24, 91, 124, 137
_see also_ Neurosis; Social neurosis
Instinct, 60, 127
common societal, 200
organic instinct of sex, 202
Introvert, 187, 201
Jung, 113, 156, 204, 205
Kropotkin, P., 159
Libido, 156
Mania, 91, 94
Marriage, 93, 94, 204, 206-209
Masturbation, 211
Meyer, Adolf, xx
Mood-alternation, 91, 94
Mother-image, 141, 172, 234
Mysticism, 125, 134, 139-142
Napoleon, 218
Narcism, 157, 202
Nettleship, Richard Lewis, 106
Neurosis, 15, 76, 77, 83, 102, 117
and sexuality, 157, 173, 174, 209, 237
marital, 93, 94
source, 53, 125, 169, 173
_see also_ Normality; Social neurosis
Neurotic personality, 13-16, 24, 44, 168, 191, 214, 243, 244
and organic consciousness, 11, 12, 23, 153, 209
Newton, 35, 36
Newtonian system, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38
Nietzsche, 23, 130, 218, 247
Normality--
and personal absolute, 47, 63
and sexuality, 173, 203, 209, 244
as criterion, 11, 27, 30
as neurotic manifestation, 12-16, 175, 176, 191
mysticism in, 125, 134, 139-141
unconsciousness of, 26, 27, 147, 179, 181, 203
Objective observation, 18
within subjective sphere, 19-21, 51, 121-124, 167, 176, 178
Organismic--
definition, 3
_see also_ Societal concept of consciousness
Paranoia--
and homosexuality, 174, 175
Paranoiac, 94, 97, 143, 199
Personal absolute, 102, 103
and war, 83
as resistance, 61, 62, 76, 82, 84
as right, 82, 83, 90, 92, 98, 112
in psychoanalysis, 73, 101, 102
underlying social system, 45-48, 63, 70, 72-76, 80-84, 240
_see also_ Absolutism; Resistance; Will-to-self
Personal equation, 4
Plato, 218
Precoid, 63, 97, 195
Preconscious mode, 10, 119, 137, 189, 196
Primary identification, 115, 116
principle of, 218
Psychasthenic, 94, 193, 195
Psychiatrist, 107, 124, 136, 223
Psychiatry, 123, 136, 137, 183, 187
Psychoanalysis--
alternative in, 103, 196, 198, 229-233
as social systematization, 65, 67-76, 101
as theory, 17-19, 21, 25
duration of treatment, 230-233
impasse in, 109, 172, 223, 224
misconceptions, 2, 197
personal absolute in, 3, 73, 101, 102
position of, 9, 10, 229
unconscious element in, 3, 143, 167, 234
_see also_ Analysis; Group analysis
Psychoanalyst--
attitude toward patient, 24, 166-172, 181, 183, 195, 229, 230,
232-234
involvement in social unconscious, 110, 111, 183, 184, 222, 223
qualifications of, 28, 29
Psychology, 5, 33, 36, 38, 65, 97
Psychopathology, 63, 100, 101, 123, 124, 223
of war, 130
Ptolemaic system, 38
Relativity of consciousness, 32-40, 43, 45, 48, 51, 57-62, 104, 246
Religion, 64, 96, 98, 99
Repression--
and bipolarity, 216, 217
and sexuality, 156-159, 162, 163, 174, 193, 215, 242
and suggestion, 55, 142, 189, 192, 200, 201, 218
individual and social, 7, 13, 15, 30, 76, 77, 131, 154, 162, 163
physiological substrate, 189-193
Resistance--
as personal absolute, 61, 62, 76, 82, 84, 230
attitude of psychoanalysis toward, 69-76
compared with doubt, 71-74
individual and social, 43-45, 65, 75, 76, 152, 154, 155
Schreiner, Olive, 218
Self--
and sexuality, 15, 173, 200, 201, 210, 211
image of, 16, 58-61, 79, 82, 83, 141
preservation and race-preservation, 127
Self-consciousness, 116, 118-120, 125, 132, 147, 161, 162, 205
Sex--
and sexuality, 11, 156-159, 163, 193, 200-217, 237
as organic unity, 11, 163, 199, 208-212, 220
intermediate, 214, 215, 217
oppositeness in, 211, 213, 214, 216
Sexuality, 15
as replacement, 10, 163
_see also_ Repression; Sex
Shields, Clarence, xix, 233
Social images, 96, 102, 135-138, 161, 229
and childhood, 51-55, 58, 59, 92, 93
as distortion of reality, 87-90
_see also_ Image; Mother-image
Social neurosis, 101, 125, 130-133, 162, 245
and images, 229
individual implication, 84, 246
Social unconscious, 117, 133, 162, 222, 223, 228, 245
as basis of normality, 11-14, 26, 27, 44, 47, 176
_see also_ Unconsciousness
Societal concept of consciousness, 31, 45, 46, 127-131, 148, 149,
160-163
_see also_ Relativity of consciousness
Socrates, 218
Subjective sphere--
_see_ Feeling; Objective observation
Sublimation, 189
Suggestion--
_see_ Repression
Sympathetic nervous system, 189-192, 194
Transference, 167, 172, 230
Unconsciousness, 5, 15, 111, 126, 135, 144, 173, 178, 183-185, 192,
193, 204, 234
as resistance, 34, 76
underlying normality, 47, 125
_see also_ Consciousness; Dissociation; Social unconscious
War, 14, 16, 34, 35, 83, 129-132, 249
Wilde, Oscar, 78
Will-to-self, 13, 75, 90, 98, 129, 156
Wish, 89, 111-113, 173, 180, 195, 232
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FOOTNOTES
[1] The word “organismic” refers to the feelings and reactions common
to the social body regarded as a coherent, integral organism. The term
organismic, as I use it in its social application, is identical with
the term organic in its individual application. The difference is that
the term organismic is employed in a more generic sense. But in general
the usages, organic and organismic, are interchangeable.
[2] “The Preconscious or the Nest Instinct,” a thesis presented in
outline at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, Boston, Mass., May 25, 1917.
[3] “Social Images versus Reality,” _The Journal of Abnormal Psychology
and Social Psychology_, Vol. XIX, No. 3, Oct.-Dec., 1924.
[4] “Our Social Evasion,” _Medical Journal and Record_, Vol. CXXIII,
No. 12, June 16, 1926.
[5] “Giebt es vielleicht--eine Frage für Irrenärzte--Neurosen der
Gesundheit?”--Nietzsche’s _Werke_. Erste Abt., Band I. _Die Geburt der
Tragödie._ Leipzig, 1903.
[6] An instance of this inversion of natural expression is seen in
the system of technique that is the obsession _par excellence_ of
singers. In the art of singing, as correspondingly in any art of life,
technique is applicable only to the theory of vocalization but not to
the actuality of spontaneous musical expression.
[7] I realize that a patient should have the protection of the medical
expert’s knowledge. This means that the analyst, if not himself
a physician, should be directly associated with the office of a
physician. We know, of course, that charlatanry exists no less within
the medical profession than elsewhere; yet while a medical degree is in
no sense a certificate of personal sincerity, it is a social surety of
professional responsibility. On the other hand, I have yet to hear the
suggestion offered that a physician who is not himself a psychoanalyst
should be closely associated with the office of a psychoanalyst. It
seems odd, as one thinks of it, that this provision should not have
been offered by those who have been conscientious enough to recognize
the reverse need. As a matter of fact, the number of instances in which
mental disorders are mistaken for somatic conditions is incomparably
greater than those in which there is failure to recognize the existence
of the somatic component. If it is important that the analyst should
be competent to trace the source of structural diseases, the internist
should be equally competent to trace the source of mental disharmonies.
[8] “To free our thought from the fetters of space and time is an
aspiration of the poet and the mystic, viewed somewhat coldly by
the scientist who has too good reason to fear the confusion of
loose ideas likely to ensue. If others have had a suspicion of the
end to be desired it has been left to Einstein to show the way to
rid ourselves of these ‘terrestrial adhesions to thought.’ And in
removing our fetters he leaves us, not (as might have been feared)
vague generalities for the ecstatic contemplation of the mystic,
but a precise scheme of world-structure to engage the mathematical
physicist.”--A. S. Eddington, F.R.S., “The Theory of Relativity and its
Influence on Scientific Thought,” _The Scientific Monthly_, Vol. XVI,
No. 1, Jan. 1923.
[9] It is, of course, not possible to trace through mathematical
intricacies a detailed analogy between the cosmic theory of relativity,
as it bears upon the objective data of an abstruse calculus, and the
organic theory of relativity, as it bears upon the subjective data of
the all-inclusive principle of psychology here regarded as the basis of
a universally comprehensive scheme of consciousness. The comparison has
significance for me merely in the aptness of its theoretical alignment
with a conception of consciousness which includes data extrinsic to our
habitual psychological system, i.e. the system intrinsic to ourselves
and commonly accepted as the totality of consciousness.
[10] Newton observed the universe from the point of view of his fixed
position upon the earth. Einstein observes the universe from the point
of view of all possible positions within the universe. Likewise our
present-day systems of psychology regard the conditions of life from
the position of observation that is one’s individual point of view
toward them. In the conception here advanced these conditions, on the
contrary, are regarded from points of view that are socially relative
to and inclusive of all possible positions of observation.
The reader will recall that the conceptions of the physicists first
led them to a theory of special relativity through their calculations
of uniform motion, while their deductions came only later to embrace
data pertaining to difform motion, or to motion that is not uniform,
as contained under the conception of general relativity. With regard
to the theory of relativity in the subjective sphere, it was upon
noting the habitual deflections from a predictable organic constant,
observable in the erratic reactions of the neurotic personality,
that the conception of relativity in the sphere of consciousness
first occurred to me. It was only subsequently that the relativity of
consciousness as applied to the uniform reactions characteristic of
the collective social mind came to shape itself into the organismic
conception of relativity here outlined as the underlying principle of
consciousness.
While representing in no sense a detailed correlation between them,
there is nevertheless a certain analogy, not only in the manner of
inception of the objective and subjective theories with respect to
the observation first of difform or abnormal deviation, and later
of discrepancies of normal or uniform reactions; but there is also
this further concomitance between the two aspects of the principle.
The Newtonian hypothesis takes account of motion or reaction in the
planetary system only in the large, while the theory of Einstein is
adequate in contemplating the motion of planets both in the large
and in the small. Conversely, our present Freudian theory of the
unconscious takes care of the reactions of the personality in the
small or in an individual or particular sense, while the theory of the
relativity of consciousness regards personality not only individually
or particularly (whether regarded singly or in its collective social
expression) but also societally or in the sense of consciousness in its
universal or organismic meaning.
[11] This psychobiological misconception is doubtless also aided
in large measure by the physiological conditions of our visual
organs of perception and by the bidimensional surface upon which
our impressions of objects are received. Because of the disposition
of the nerve terminals of the retina upon a flat or bidimensional
area, our visual perception of objects is limited to impressions of a
flat or bidimensional plane. If by means of binocular accommodation
objects present to us the appearance of “depth,” it is of course not
to direct visual perception that we owe our sense of perspective but
to stereoscopic inference, seconded by our stereognostic experience
of tridimensional solidity. Hence, what is actually “perceived” upon
looking at an object of three dimensions is a visual facet, as it
were, due to our own mentally flattened “cross-section” of the solid
object before us as determined by the particular aspect of it that
is momentarily presented to view. I think it cannot be doubted that
this mechanism of our visual perception is a contributing factor in
influencing our tendency to “see” mentally. One says “I see” when he
means “I understand.” There is the same implication in saying that one
“sees” the logic of such and such a statement. So, too, we speak of
a “mental point of view” or of “intellectual vision.” This illusory
character of our mental percepts probably owes its explanation also in
part to the fact that our visual sense is the sense that best permits a
distant and detached observation _of_ rather than a contact _with_ the
surrounding world.
[12] “Our Mass Neurosis,” _The Psychological Bulletin_, Vol. 23, No. 6,
June, 1926.
[13] “The Reabsorbed Affect and Its Elimination,” _British Journal of
Medical Psychology_, Vol. VI, Part 3.
[14] “Speaking of Resistances,” address before the Sixteenth Annual
Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, New York City, June
10, 1926. _Psyche_, No. 27, January, 1927.
[15] “The Heroic Rôle--An Historical Retrospect,” _Psyche_, No. 25,
July, 1926.
[16] Needless to say the distinction here made between “actual” and
“real” is used very specifically.
[17] “Insanity a Social Problem,” _The American Journal of Sociology_,
Vol. XXXII, No. I, Part I, July, 1926.
[18] I recall an incident that occurred several years ago in the office
of a prominent newspaper that well illustrates this point. A member of
the staff was called to the phone to receive the details of a drowning,
word of which had just been reported. One can picture the professional
zeal with which he turned to the phone, alert with the eagerness of
expectant acquisition. If a moment later he dropped the receiver
and drew back with a sudden cry of horror, his whole face gradually
altering to a look of dejection and pain, it was not because he had
been disappointed in the expectation of a thrilling item of news. Not
at all. The item was as tragic in its details as one could wish. The
disappointment lay only in the fact that, on inquiring the name of
the boy who had been drowned, he learned that it was his own son. It
was only this circumstance, then, that explained why his countenance
suddenly changed from satisfaction to pain. A matter of information
which was to have been sold to his readers as a delectable item of
news concerning the drowning of another man’s son became a poignant
sorrow when the self-same news related to his own son. And so, upon
examination, it may be seen that what really happened was an unexpected
shift of affect due to the sudden alternation of the personal motive
through the reversal of the bidimensional vantage.
[19] “Psychoanalytic Improvisations and the Personal Equation,” _The
Psychoanalytic Review_, Vol. XIII, No. 2, April, 1926.
[20] Consider the legend of the origin of the life of man as symbolized
through the intuitions of the folk unconscious recorded in the Book of
Genesis. For its discussion see “The Origin of the Incest-Awe,” _The
Psychoanalytic Review_, Vol. V, No. 3, July, 1918.
[21] The term “consciousness” is used by the writer in two different
senses, the one having to do with the mental sophistication of
individual awareness, the other with consciousness regarded as an
inclusive racial principle. The reader must rely upon the context for
the distinction between the restricted individualistic interpretation
on the one hand and the organismic interpretation on the other.
[22] This mistaken tendency of inference has so far laid hold upon us
as to mislead our perceptions even in respect to judgments concerning
data which lie altogether within the objective mode. To cite an
instance of homely type quite remote from the present argument:--when
we speak of two buckets of water, drawn from a common source, in
reality our concept is buckets of two waters. For the accident of their
separation in space and of the demarcation of the bulk of each by the
outline of its container leads the mind, habituated to the fallacy of
subjective inference, to posit a difference or a _twoness of essence_
where there is but a difference or twoness of outer circumstance or
accidental condition. Hence there results a concept not of two buckets
but of two waters, whereas the apparently two waters dipped from the
same source are essentially one.
[23] “The Need of an Analytic Psychiatry,” _The American Journal of
Psychiatry_, Vol. VI, No. 3, January, 1927.
[24] An example of the blindly impulsive character of this instinct
often recurs to me. I was standing with a lady on the shore of Lake
Zürich. A sudden storm arose and we could see plainly that two young
men in a sail-boat well out in the middle of the lake had lost complete
control of their craft. To the crowd that had gathered on the quays it
was evident from the way the sail was jibing from side to side that the
boat would overturn. A number of launches began hurrying toward it.
As the boat capsized, throwing the men into the lake, my companion,
suddenly tearing off her gloves, dashed toward the water. I managed to
seize her just as she reached the water’s edge. On my rallying her and
inquiring just what might be her plans with reference to two men a full
quarter of a mile out in the lake and closely surrounded by competent
rescue parties, she was unable to account for her impulsive reaction
beyond declaring that she “just couldn’t let them drown like that!”
Here was an individual with as goodly a share of unconscious egotism
as the rest of us, but in whom at the sight of danger to others the
self-instinct was completely subordinated to the organic behests of our
common societal instinct.
[25] “Character and the Neuroses,” _The Psychoanalytic Review_, Vol. I,
No. 2, February, 1914.
[26] We overlook the fact that it is not the content of a belief but
rather the mere condition of believing that determines its errancy or
truth. The word _belief_, as has been said, is a derivative of the
Anglo-Saxon _leof_, meaning _preference_, but we do not recognize that
what one “believes” is merely what one _wants to think_. There are
undoubtedly as many devout believers among the devotees of Science
as of Religion, and upon inquiry we should probably find that the
pet _beliefs_ of the scientist rest upon as unreasoning an attitude
of mind as those of the religionist. The point is that whatever is
thus believed in response to personal preference is arbitrary and
doctrinaire, be it evolution, relativity, or God.
[27] It is really the element of secret emotionalism that constitutes
mysticism. It is again a phase of the private alternative whereby
we get what we want. What is called “intellectual mysticism” is but
a secondary rationalization of this emotional element. But there is
need of discrimination. While it is true that conceptions arising
from intuitional inference may readily be begotten of emotionalism,
yet the same inferences when based upon biological analogy cease to
be mystical. Nietzsche’s “primordial unity,” because biologically
inferred, seems to me a quite unemotional and inclusive conception. In
the biological consistency that unites the most highly differentiated
species with the lowest single unicellular organism, the mind
straightway finds substantiation for Nietzsche’s conception. Whereas
the “metaphysical unity” of the religionists is, on the contrary,
a wholly mystical conception. Through this postulate the mind is
immediately involved in such vagaries as one connects with the doctrine
of transubstantiation or with the flights of Annie Besant and her
astral bodies!
But one can perhaps still more aptly illustrate the distinction
in question by considering the totally opposed meanings--the one
intellectual, the other emotional--contained in the word “vibrations”
according as it is used by the scientist in regard to mathematically
mensurable physical wave-lengths or as it is employed by the
“hypersensitive personality” to describe certain sensations presumably
recorded somewhere in the region of the epigastrium in response to
subtle but invisible “psychic communications.” In defining the term
mystical one must not fail to include the attitude of mind that leads
one scientist, who has failed to understand the investigations of
another, to refer to those investigations as mystical. I am inclined
to feel somewhat strongly on this point because of the fact that my
conception of the primary biological unity of the organism and its
influence upon the subsequent development of the personality has
tended to be regarded quite arbitrarily in the light of a mystical
interpretation. (See note 1, page 10.)
[28] There is a story reminiscent of juvenile days in my own home that
is to the point. An older brother, then between four and five years of
age, was being given his bath in the nursery as was customary in those
days. Hanging above the mantel was a picture of the Sistine Madonna.
The youngster being freed of his clothing ran skipping about the room.
His governess happened to be present, and being duly horrified or,
what is more probable as I remember her, acting in response to a sense
of duty, she gently chid him for his lack of modesty, saying “Jesus
doesn’t love little boys who go about that way.” The child looked up
at the picture of the nude infant with doubtless a more discerning
sympathy with Jesus’ views than grown-ups are wont to attribute to the
wisdom of childhood, and looking his would-be instructress quietly in
the eyes he replied incontrovertibly: “He does it hisse’f!”
If the story of my brother’s life should ever be fully told, as some
day I hope it may, it will help us realize the unerring fatality of an
early enforced system of repression and its logical effect upon the
individual’s subsequent life as upon its close.
[29] The biological (organic) continuity between the societal
or psychological and the functional or physiological spheres is
interesting in view of their obvious homologies as shown in the
marked suggestive influences which we see passing over from the
psychological sphere and affecting the processes pertaining to the
functional or physiological sphere and doubtless operating no less in
the reverse direction. One wonders without undue presumption how many
so-called “organic” diseases are not primarily functional and hence
functionally modifiable through the integral, societal agency of an
organic analysis, provided, of course, that the separative process
has not already crystallized into the static condition of structural
alteration. At least it is clear that many so-called physical
derangements need to be frankly regarded in the light of sheer somatic
hysterias. See “The Psychological Analysis of So-called Neurasthenic
and Allied States,” _The Journal of Abnormal Psychology_, Vol. VIII,
1913-14, page 246, note 1.
An analogous condition is demonstrable in the physical universe in the
fact that the phenomena of gravitation (such as planetary motion) and
the phenomena of electricity (including the motion of light) have been
proved to be so intimately related to one another as to be regarded now
by the physicists “as parts of one vast system embracing all Nature.”
[30] The Southern negro has a definition of libido that is biologically
truer than that of either Freud, Jung or Claparède. He refers to
inadequacy of the sexual life as a lack of “ambition.”
[31] It should be recalled that in the view of the present thesis
sexuality as it exists socially among us is, in essence, narcistic
throughout and that hence sexuality, including so-called _normal_
sexuality, is, in my conception, a repression, and must be definitely
discriminated from the spontaneous and biological expression embodied
in the native instinct of sex. (See p. 10.)
[32] One may find the objective evidence of this statement amply set
forth in P. Kropotkin’s _Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution_. Here
Kropotkin traces in a very conclusive way the presence of the societal
instinct in the lower animals and in primitive man. Kropotkin errs,
however, when he reaches the levels of development expressed in the
social organizations of man. For he fails to discriminate between the
instinct of societal solidarity that is the natural cohesion of a
species and the quite premeditated and ulterior expressions of social
accord represented in the mutual self-interests of man’s collective
adaptations.
[33] “An Ethnic Aspect of Consciousness,” _The Sociological Review_,
Vol. XIX, No. 1, January, 1927.
[34] If, in the flash of so brief an interval of time (speaking
ethnologically) as fifty years or so, a plan were effected involving
the complete segregation from one another of all the individuals
comprising the societal organism of the species, the result,
notwithstanding the many millions of years required for the gradual
evolution of the race up to the present time, would be its complete
extermination! Such a consideration allows us to realize, at least
objectively, how closely interwoven are the elements comprising our
societal organism and how dependent is the integrity of the whole upon
the organic participation of its parts.
[35] A striking instance of psychoanalytic unconsciousness may be
seen in the analyst’s quite naïve attitude toward his own unconscious
need for such infantile pacifiers as he finds in the obsessive use of
tobacco. That such diversions are no more adult than the use of the
rubber ring or nipple of his infancy he does not for a moment suspect,
the concomitance of such practices with the oral eroticism of his
childhood having only a _theoretical_ significance for him. The truth
is, the psychoanalyst _wants to smoke_. Of course, it is not consistent
with his teaching and if he is to have his way in the matter some
process must be devised that will make it consistent. And so in his
authoritarian suzerainty he forthwith decrees that the patient who
objects to a smoke-filled room is a prey to unseemly resistances, and
that his or her attitude of mind, not the analyst’s, must be promptly
looked into with a view to summary treatment.
[36] Let me say at once that this nomadic young lady did me the
honour to remark that she sensed immediately upon meeting me that
_my_ attitude was entirely different from that of other analysts. Of
this she made haste to assure me at the outset. In thinking of it, a
wince gives place to a smile as I recall the trustful complacency with
which I benignly accepted as a statement of fact the cunning decoys of
this seraphically unconscious individual, her flattering reassurances
seeming to me at the time clearly to indicate the very rare perceptions
of this unusually discerning young person! The aftermath as it has come
to pass in the brief succeeding years enables me unhesitatingly to aver
that my severely reproved colleagues were at least not more unconscious
than I.
[37] See note 1, page 15.
[38] See note 1, page 56.
[39] See note 1, page 10.
[40] See note 1, page 10.
[41] Perhaps this distinction of type has its societal counterpart
also in the opposite psychological reactions embodied in the esoteric
tendencies of Catholicism with its markedly autocentric organization,
as compared with Protestantism’s more allocentric trends. The
difference between the two types of reaction is also seen in the broad
geographical contrast that separates the consciousness of Asia from
that of Europe.
[42] See discussion of opposed reaction-types independently determined
by M. Geiger, “Neue Complicationsversuche,” _Philos. Studien_,
XVIII, 1903, pp. 347-436 and also by myself, _The Determination of
the Position of a Momentary Impression in the Temporal Course of a
Moving Visual Impression_, The Johns Hopkins Studies in Philosophy and
Psychology, No. 3, The Psychological Review, Psychological Monographs,
Vol. XI, No. 4, September, 1909.
[43] “Psychiatry as an Objective Science,” _British Journal of Medical
Psychology_, Vol. V, Part 4.
[44] Narcism (homo-erotism) is a reversion of interest representing
a sexual reaction to the pictorial affect or to the personal image.
Autoerotism (ego-erotism) represents an arrest of the individual’s
sexuality due to its impact with the personal image or with the social
self-reflection about him. Narcism embodies the reflection of the
individual’s erotism in its social phase. Autoerotism is the absorption
of the individual’s erotism in its personal phase. Autoerotism is
thus central and represents the retroversion or interception by the
organism of its efferent interests. This occurs in the individual
inversion expressed in the sensory images of dementia præcox. Narcism
is peripheral and is expressed in the social inversion pertaining
equally to the motor images of homosexuality as to the sensory images
of paranoia.
[45] While a student of Jung’s in the early days of psychoanalysis,
at the time when Jung was the very organ of Freud’s genius, the clear
emanation of his spirit, I remarked to him one day that I had come to
the conclusion that the neurotic individual inevitably married his
mother. Jung’s reply, alert as a flash, was characteristic of his
brilliant, inclusive scope of vision. “I have come to the conclusion,”
he said, “that _every_ individual inevitably marries his mother.”
[46] The word _like_ is from Anglo-Saxon _gelic_, compounded of _ge_,
meaning together, and _lic_, meaning body.
[47] “Convention in Psychoanalysis and Its Interpretative Inhibitions,”
a paper read at the Eighth Annual Meeting of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, Atlantic City, May 10, 1918.
[48] See note 2, page 208.
[49] In a recent meeting of psychopathologists a paper was presented
which described the results of a questionnaire that had been
distributed among the students of one of our prominent American
universities, the object of which was to learn the nature of the sexual
life of the college students. The figures compiled from the answers
submitted showed in the author’s view a surprisingly high percentage
of masturbation and homosexuality. But what is of interest is the fact
that in the interpretation of the author of the paper, as well as in
that of every member who participated in the discussion, the concept
of masturbation was restricted solely to personal practices on the
part of the single individual, while the concept of homosexuality
was confined entirely to the manifestation of sexual interests or
activities occurring between persons of the same sex! Apparently it
was not suspected that these manifest expressions of autoerotism or
homosexuality are the least widespread or significant forms of its
occurrence, that the really important and far-reaching expression of
these disorders of instinct occurs in the latent form represented in
the symbolic substitutions of heterosexuality as commonly practised,
for example, in houses of prostitution. Yet these latter expressions
were avowedly regarded as real expressions of heterosexuality and,
accordingly, its devotees were naïvely interpreted as presenting a
psychological adaptation which showed a frank contrast to that of
their “homosexual” confrères! It is hopeless to expect any scientific
understanding of anomalies of reaction that pertain to our subjective
life as long as scientists themselves persist in confusing the
objective appearances under which these anomalies are disguised for the
subjective actuality of these anomalies themselves.
[50] “The Genesis and Meaning of ‘Homosexuality’”--a development of
_the principle of identification or the primary subjective phase of
consciousness_. See _The Psychoanalytic Review_, Vol. IV, No. 3, July,
1917.
[51] It is not by accident but by some inner, intuitive design that
man has adopted the symbol he employs as the sign of infinity. In
the mark of the mathematicians--consisting of two circles that are
one, one circle that is two, wherein is neither beginning nor end--is
expressed the character of the infinite and all-inclusive in a form of
conjunction so complete as not to be susceptible of possible increment.
[52] The reader is reminded that this book was outlined in 1923. From
that time to the time of publication (1927), the group analysis,
proceeding along the lines indicated in this chapter, has further
substantiated the thesis here stated.
[53] See note 1, page 53.
[54] See note 1, page 15.
[55] We are warned, of course, that this new shift of technique will
arouse in us unprecedented resistances. But let us be wary lest we
capitulate too easily to this ready-to-hand ogre of “resistances”; for
by the same token we have been warned throughout these analytic years
that we must expect unprecedented resistances to the former dictum of
psychoanalysis--a dictum which imposed without parley or mitigation a
rigid analytic policy of non-interference. Our inconsistency is but
another instance of the automatic illogic of the alternative, of the
inevitable compulsion of the personal criterion.
[56] “The Group Method of Analysis,” _The Psychoanalytic Review_, Vol.
XIV, 1927, “The Laboratory Method in Psychoanalysis,” _The American
Journal of Psychiatry_, Vol. V, No. 3, January, 1926.
[57] It should be clearly explained that _group analysis is not my
analysis of the group but that it is the group’s analysis of me or
of any other individual_. In our laboratory usage, “group” does not
mean a collection of individuals. It means a phyletic principle of
observation. This phyletic principle of observation as applied to the
individual and to the aggregate is the whole significance of group
analysis.
[58] I hold that the word “spirit” employed in its biological
connotation belongs to the legitimate equipment of the laboratory.
Because the religionists have carried it off and perverted it to
sentimental uses, I shall not surrender the claim of the scientist upon
it. And so by “spirit” I do not wish to indicate anything akin to the
ghostly itinerants reputed to stalk o’ nights, nor to that beneficent
impulse that moves people to cheer the afternoon of life by “doing
good” when the infelicities of age or infirmity have dulled the edge of
less salutary proclivities. Neither have I in mind any philosophical
concept whatever, nor least of all a conception savouring of a
religious purport, all of which seem to me equally apparitional. I mean
merely man’s innate, unprompted or unchecked feeling as expressive of
his organic life. That which in man responds to natural beauty, actual
or inferred, is of the sphere of the spirit as I use the term.
[59] “There are ages, when the rational and the intuitive man stand
side by side, the one full of fear of the intuition, the other full of
scorn for the abstraction; the latter just as irrational as the former
is inartistic.” Nietzsche, _Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays_.