largest class of sexually abnormal individuals are those whose external
appearance is almost or quite feminine, but who possess male instincts.
It is at least probable that examination will show that they, too, or
many of them, will be of the type described above--males with delayed
activation of testis, a consequent classification as female at birth,
and a girl’s upbringing, with male instincts arising in the unhappy
creature at puberty.
It is the fashion nowadays to write down abnormal sexual psychology
wholly to the account of the mind, to an abnormal development with
causes entirely psychological. It is clear, however, that if some
abnormal individuals can be cured by implantation, and others are
abnormal owing to an early failure of activation, this conception falls
to the ground, and the Freudian is robbed of some of his most cherished
examples.
In any case, the work on animals definitely shows that, unless the
mechanism of activation of instinct by gonad secretion has altered
between animal and man more than we have any right to postulate a
priori, the quality of gonad secretion and the balance of all the
endocrines has to be taken into account far more than is done by the
average psycho-analyst.
This, however, is not to say that the genesis of our attitude towards
sex, our sexual behaviour, and our general mental organization in so
far as modified by sex, is not normally determined for the most part
by purely psychological causes. If there is a physical abnormality,
this will react upon the mental; but in the vast majority of cases
the physical variation will not take the individual beyond the limits
of normality, and when the normal physical limits are not exceeded,
the wide range of mental variation still observable is to be ascribed
to psychological causes. In other words, abnormal sexual behaviour
and instinct may be due either to physiological or psychological
abnormality, and the latter is probably the commoner cause.
I am not competent to attempt to treat of the vast and complex
psychological aspect of the sex-problem which the analytical
psychologists have opened up to such an extent within the last few
years; I can only deal with it in the broadest way, and content myself
rather with stating than with solving problems.
As regards the place of sex in our mental organization, there are two
contradictory extremes possible. Either all ideas connected with the
physical side of sex may be repressed with great vehemence, and the
sexual contribution to various emotions ignored or dismissed, while a
constant attempt is made at sublimation; or else there is little or no
repression beyond that necessitated by convention and custom, sexual
matters are taken at their physical face value, and sublimation is not
consciously attempted and exists only to a negligible amount.
There is no doubt that the first alternative represents one of the
commonest neuroses of modern life, and one in which an interpretation
on principles made familiar by psycho-analysis is the most
satisfactory. Repression, through whatever cause initiated (and
psychologists, I understand, are coming more and more to recognize
that chronic misuse of the mind as well as single violent shocks may
be effective), leads to a more or less complete dissociation of two
parts of the mind, of which one only is in the main connected with
the conscious personal life. As a result, curious phenomena are met
with. There is, it is true, a constant effort necessary to keep life
a-going with the aid of an incomplete mental organization; but when
satisfaction is attained, its very rarity brings with it a certain
glow, an irradiation of peculiarly pleasurable nature. Furthermore,
dissociation in most cases is not complete; now and again, and
especially when there is successful sublimation--in some people when in
love, in others with religious ecstasy, in others again with some form
of art--now and again re-association of the parts occurs, and there is
an extraordinary sense of the irruption of some vast beneficent force,
some great extra-personal flood of soul, into the meagre stream of
everyday life. The lives of a certain number of saints and ascetics,
mystics and poets, abound with phenomena of this sort; and apparently
the sense of value attaching to the occasional complete attainment of
such satisfactory states of the soul, combined with the conscious daily
quest for sublimation which is inevitable when the most important part
of the primitive emotions are repressed, is such a vivid experience
that it satisfies the mind and enables such persons to carry on, and to
do work sometimes of the highest value.
On the other hand, men and women with this type of mental development
naturally tend to be unstable; they cannot be sure of their capacity,
whether for routine work or creative thought or spiritual experience,
from day to day. Their mental life has a tendency to wear thin, their
sense of effort and struggle to increase and lead to breakdown. It
is in the long run an unsatisfactory way of organizing the psyche,
because the conscious mind has less than it ought to have upon which to
fall back.
The opposite extreme is equally unsatisfactory. If individuals of the
first type are trying to build high without adequate foundations, those
of the second are mistaking the foundations for a complete building.
A dissociation of a different type occurs in them--a dissociation due
to lack of use, to a mere failure to connect up that part of the mind
concerned with sexual emotion with a great many of the mind’s other
activities. Thus the sexual side has few and lower values associated
with it than it might, and other possibilities of thought and feeling
and action remain as mere possibilities, never realized in actuality.
The result is a definitely incomplete personality of a more or less
arrested or rudimentary type.
Those are the extremes: of course there are all intermediates between
them. They may crop up with apparent spontaneity, determined more
by the hereditary constitution of the man or woman than by external
happenings: or they may be mainly or at least largely determined by the
accidents of the environment during the period before maturity. One
of the most potent factors in the environment will be the attitude of
the parents towards sexual matters. On the one hand they may adopt the
common, horror-stricken attitude towards sex, hushing it up, making
it clear to the sensitive mind of childhood that there is something
thoroughly bad about it, and so laying the best possible foundations
for future repression. Or, on the other hand, they may openly adopt
the psycho-analytic view as to the rôle of sex in the development of
mind, may further believe that the fullest analysis and self-knowledge
is always desirable, and may accordingly be pointing out to the
child interpretations of its actions and sayings in terms of sex,
familiarizing it with sex from the outset, not merely not discouraging
but actually encouraging reference to sexual matters. This will tend,
_ceteris paribus_, to the development of a mind in which many of the
more complex mental operations will not usually persist because the
subject will be continually unbuilding them into their constituent
parts, of which sex will be the most unvarying and important.
Both these types are to my judgment obviously unsatisfactory. The ideal
organization of the mind must be one in which first there is a minimum
of waste of energy, secondly a maximum realization of potentiality.
The operations of mind may further be thought of from two different
angles--a subserving the biological needs of the organism, or as
ends in themselves. From the first point of view, thought is action
_in posse_: efficiency and full utilization of energy are here the
requirements, and it is obvious that any method which even partially
separates one part of the mental organization from the rest must be a
poor one, that a refusal to face any portion of reality, such as, in
our special case, the physical side of sex, must put the organism at a
disadvantage in a world in which that portion of reality plays, as it
obviously does, an important rôle.
The correct type of organization is one of the type which has been
developed over and over again in the course of evolution, for
different functions: it is the hierarchical one, in which some parts
are dominant, others subordinate, the dominant parts helpless without
the subordinate, the subordinate different, through the fact of their
subordination, from what they would otherwise have been, doing most of
the hard work, but under the guidance of the dominant. Only in this way
is a unitary organization arrived at in which there is the minimum of
waste, of antagonism between the parts.
The psycho-analysts have, by analysing the pathology of mind, shown
us how waste of energy may arise in particular cases, and so make it
easier for us to avoid it in general.
One may recognize the merits of Freud as an investigator without
accepting all or even the majority of his conclusions. As the late
W. H. Rivers pointed out, Freud will always be remembered in the
history of psychology because he introduced new ideas and new methods
into the science. Previous workers had discovered the realm of the
subconscious; but they had not discovered the real nature of its
relation to the rest of the mental organization. Freud pointed out
that there was often a biological value attached to the power of
forgetting as well as to that of remembering, and that in any case
in most of us a large amount of experience is rendered unconscious by
suppression, or an attempt made to force it into the unconscious by
repression. He and his followers and other schools of psychologists
have pointed out the importance of unresolved conflicts in determining
thought and behaviour, and have made it clear that in the ordinary
civilized community of to-day a large proportion of those conflicts
arise out of difficulties connected with the sex-instinct. And, even
if we reject the extreme claims made by many Freudians, we must admit
that psycho-analysis has shown that many cases of actual perversion
of instinct may be cured by analytic methods, and that sex occupies a
very much larger space in the mind than was previously supposed. It
had not been previously supposed, because of the fact that it tends to
appear in consciousness in disguised form--either sublimated and thus
intertwined with other emotions and instincts or with unusual objects,
or else rationalized as something else, or kept below the surface of
consciousness as an unfulfilled wish; and because there is a resistance
in most of us to recognizing its importance.
This revolution in our thought has proved very unpalatable to many. In
just the same way as a large proportion of Darwin’s opponents opposed
him because they believed that to accept man’s simian origin was a
repulsive degradation, so many of the opponents of psycho-analysis
oppose it because they believe that to ascribe this huge rôle to sex
in the genesis of our psyche is a repulsive degradation.
To my mind there are two very general questions which the student of
human sex psychology now has to face, if he takes not necessarily
the whole but the central theses of psycho-analysis, however much
pruned, as proven. The first is this: granted that sex does play such
a large part, especially in early years, in the genesis of our mental
organization, is it desirable that the average adult or adolescent
should, by analysis, be given full self-knowledge on the subject?
The second is this: granted that sex does penetrate into more corners
of mind in man than in lower organisms, is this really a regrettable
thing, or can we find any grounds for believing it to be desirable or
biologically progressive?
To answer this we shall have to go back a little to first principles,
and consider, however briefly, certain facts as to the march of
evolution.
Evolution is essentially progressive. It proceeds on the whole in
a certain direction, and that direction is on the whole towards a
realization of what seems to us to have positive value. The direction,
however, as a matter of fact, is most striking when we consider the
maximum level attained, much less so when we consider the average, not
at all when we look at the minimum.
The method or mechanism of progress may differ in different types,
and it does differ in man from that which is found in other mammals.
In most higher animals progress is brought about chiefly by natural
selection operating upon individuals, although in a few forms selection
operates chiefly upon groups of communities: in both cases the changes
in the inherited constitution of the species are the important
changes. In man, however, in all except the very early stages of
his development, changes in inherited constitution have been small
and unimportant, and the chief changes of evolutionary significance
have been those in tradition; selection among individuals has been
of relatively little importance, and selection has fallen mainly
upon groups and, to an ever-increasing extent, upon their ideas and
traditions.
In spite of differences in method as between different types of
organism, the tendency has been in the same direction--towards
a possibility of greater control, greater independence, greater
complexity, and greater regulation or harmony.
Looked at from the evolutionary point of view, the moving, dynamic
point of view, we have to think of human sex-psychology in yet another
way. So far we have been treating it as what it is; now we must think
of what it may become.
The general rule in evolution--the natural and obvious rule--is that
acquisitions are not thrown away when change occurs, but built upon,
utilized for some new function. The endostyle of the lowest chordates,
part of a very primitive type of feeding mechanism, was converted,
when they changed their mode of life, into the thyroid gland: the
parathyroids develop from the remains of the gill-apparatus when
gills are discarded for lungs: the secondary sexual differences which
originate as accidental consequence of the primary difference between
the sexes are, over and over again, elaborated into special characters
employed in courtship.
So the sex-instinct and its associated emotion, at first simply one
among a number of separate and scarcely-correlated instincts, has in
man become the basis for numerous new mental functions. It can enter
into the composition of various emotions, though its character is often
disguised and its presence often undetected. It contributes to some of
the most exalted states of mind which we can experience. The sexual
relationship, which in lower animals involves neither contact nor even
propinquity, but simply simultaneous discharge of reproductive cells,
and in most animals is a purely temporary affair, is very different
in man. Even in those birds and non-human mammals in which the sexes
remain associated for long periods or permanently, the different
departments of life are more in water-tight compartments, the psychical
activity is subordinate to the physiological: in man the physiological
side, though of course still basic and necessary, is more--and can
be much more--subordinate to the psychological, and all parts of the
mental life interpenetrate to a much greater extent; so that the
sex-instinct may become transformed by a psychological process roughly
analogous to the transformation of physical energy, and reappear in
altered guise in various other activities of mind.
If we look at the matter broadly, we see that man is in a period of
evolutionary transition as regards sex. We found previously that the
greatest change connected with sex which has been made in the evolution
of higher animals was the change by which there was evolved a brain
and mind with associated sense-organs in which accurate perception of
objects at a distance could occur, a mechanism which really dominated
the working of the organism as a whole, and in which memory and emotion
seemed to play an important part. Once this happened, the sex-instinct
could be linked up with general emotional reactions and connected with
external objects capable of inducing emotion.
What was the result? That in every group possessing such a type of
mind, epigamic characters of a beautiful or striking or bizarre
nature were evolved. This first linking-up of sex with mind produced,
eventually, a large proportion of the beauty of the organic world. It
coloured and adorned not only many a bird, but even newts and fish
and spiders; it helped elicit song and music from mere sounds and
noises; it moulded our own bodies, coloured our lips and eyes, and
everywhere helped in adding grace to mere serviceableness; it saw to it
that, as St. Paul puts it, “even our uncomely parts have an abundant
comeliness.” But, as we have just pointed out, its connection with the
mind’s higher centres was in all pre-human forms still temporary, under
the control of cyclical physiological changes, and the mind as a whole
was still constructed in compartments, so that different instincts
and different experiences did not necessarily or even usually come in
contact with each other.
The next great change is being made now; it concerns a further
development of mind and a consequent fresh mode of connection of sex
with mental life. As we have outlined above, this change in mind
consists in the tendency towards uniting the different parts of the
psyche, both those portions given by heredity and the modification due
to experience, into a single organic whole, and in making this whole
more dominant over the other aspects of the organism; the consequent
tendency as regards the relationship of sex to the organism is towards
taking it out of its single groove, its water-tight compartment, and
bringing it into more complete and more permanent union with the rest
of the mind. Furthermore, the main change and the consequent change as
regards sex are both of a biologically progressive nature.
We are now, I think, owing to our taking this broad biological view,
in a better position to make up our minds as to some at least of the
difficulties which beset us to-day in any attempt to deal squarely
with the relation of sex to human life. It is true that some of
these difficulties are permanent. The synthesis of a unitary and
comprehensive mental organization can never be an easy task. The
child is endowed with a number of instinctive tendencies which, as
in animals, each tend whenever aroused to occupy the whole mental
field to the exclusion of all others, producing divergence and lack
of co-ordination instead of unity and organization. Then again, the
experience of any one individual may be highly unusual. For the child
to co-ordinate his various tendencies with each other and with his
own experience and with the tradition and experience of the race must
always be difficult, and there will always be some failures.
There is another permanent difficulty, a biological disharmony, in the
fact that sexual maturity in man comes several years before general
maturity, and that again, at least in any state of civilization which
we can at present imagine as practicable, several years before the
economic possibility of marriage. There will always be crises of
adolescence; there will always be suffering and difficulty due to this
disharmony in time between the origin of the full sexual instinct and
the possibility of its proper satisfaction.
However, granted these permanent difficulties, there are others which
may be reduced or made to disappear. Granted that we have to organize
our minds into a whole, we can see the general plan on which we
should aim at organizing it. We must aim first at having no barriers
between different parts of the mind. Every attempt must be made in
the education of children to prevent there being a stigma attached
to one whole section of mental life, and so to avoid its partial or
total dissociation from the rest. On the other hand, the absence of
barriers does not imply the absence of any relation of subordination or
dominance of one part to another. One of the most important biological
generalizations is that progressive evolution is accompanied by the
rise of one part to dominance and, whenever there are many parts to be
considered, by the arrangement of the rest in some form of hierarchy,
each part being subordinate to one above, dominant to one below. It
is such a hierarchy which we must try to construct in our mental
organization.
It is obviously impossible here to go into the whole question of
values and ideals, but it is clear to any one who has given the
briefest reflection to the subject that there are certain values,
æsthetic, intellectual, and moral, which are ultimate for the mind of
man, certain ideals--of truth and honesty, intellectual satisfaction,
righteousness or at least freedom from the sense of sin or guilt,
completeness and self-realization, unselfishness and serviceableness
and so forth--which (though perhaps in varying proportions) are by
common consent accepted as the highest: and further that the greater
the attempt to deepen and broaden these, to increase their mental
intensity and to widen their range and association, the more they
tend to emerge into something increasingly unitary, in which it is
seen that honesty is also beautiful and useful, that intellectual
satisfaction is in the long run serviceable to the community, that
unselfishness to be effective requires thought and will besides mere
altruistic emotion, that one of the greatest aids to any genuine
righteousness is an æsthetic love of beautiful things that prevents our
doing ugly things, and so _ad infinitum_.
The proper way, then, to build the sex instinct into the mental system
is not to have its stimulation cause a merely physiological and
uninhibited desire for its gratification, nor to bring about a forcible
repression and an attempt to break connection between it and the other
parts of the mind.
The desirable method is to have free connection between it and the
dominant ideas, so that its stimulation brings about a stimulation of
them too. This leads, as a matter of experience, to the incorporation
of the sexual emotion in the dominant ideas, or we had better say an
interpenetration of one with the other, so that the sexual emotion is
no longer simply sexual emotion, but is become part of something very
much larger and very much better. Let the great writers say in their
few words what I should say much worse in many.
Wordsworth’s “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused”
opens a window on to the general process of sublimation: and Blake’s
description of the physical union of the sexes as “that ... on which
the soul expands her wing” is an epitome of a particular aspect of
our particular problem. Or again, when St. Paul says “Am I not free?”
or “All things are lawful unto me,” he means that by subordinating all
sides of himself to his highest ideals, he has reached that state in
which what he does is right to him because he only wants to do what
is right. (True that, as he himself confesses, he is not always able
to keep in that state: but when he is in it, he attains that complete
freedom which is the subordination of lower to higher desire.)
Physiologically speaking, the activation of the sex instinct, when the
connection is made in this way, arouses the higher centres, and these
react upon the centres connected with the sex instinct, modifying their
mode of action. The nett result is thus that both act simultaneously
to produce a single whole of a new type. Processes of this nature
are common in the nervous system, as has been shown for instance by
Hughlings Jackson, Head, and Rivers.[39]
Thus the higher, dominant parts of the mind are strengthened by their
connection with such lower parts as the simple sex instinct, and the
sex instinct is able to play a rôle in any operation of the mind,
however exalted, in which emotion is in any way concerned. Rivers
believes that the actual conflict between controlled and controlling
parts of the mind is a potent generator of mental “energy”; and adds,
“whatever be the source of the energy, however, we can be confident
that by the process of sublimation the lives upon which it is expended
take a special course, and in such case it is not easy to place any
limit to its activity. We do not know how high the goal that it may
reach.”[40]