A NEW TECHNIQUE OF THINKING[6]
The prevailing theory is that men who make important decisions in
politics can be trained to use their minds wisely by disciplinary
training in the practices of logical thought. Legal training is
supposed to mold the mind to ways of dealing with the world which
subordinate whim to principle. Formal instruction in the social
sciences is intended to equip the mind for the detached consideration
of social consequences, and everyone agrees that this implies a
large measure of self-awareness for the sake of reducing the play of
prejudice.
The nature of logical thought has been carefully examined by an array
of able writers. Their conclusions may be provisionally reported by
saying that logic is a guided form of mental operation. It is not
something marked off from impulse, but a progressive elaboration
and differentiation of impulse. It proceeds by the affirmation of a
starting-point, which is in fact a vague indication of the goal to be
reached, and develops by the criticism of the material which appears
in consciousness according to its relevance to the end in view. If
the judge begins by wanting to settle a controversy consistently with
precedents, he has indicated in advance the shadowy outline of the
desired termination of his efforts. If an administrator wants to reduce
complaints against his handling of the postal service, he starts with
a different mental set from the judge, but, like the mental set of the
latter, his first act is to bring into view the state of affairs which
he hopes to find when he quits thinking. He is accustomed to guide the
operations of his mind by this preliminary characterization of the
terminus sought. No thinker can haul into the center of attention the
material which indicates how the terminal situation is to be attained.
The thinker must wait attentively for whatever appears. If he wants
to deal with such a simple practical matter as getting to the railway
station, and his mind continues to fill with images of the one he left
behind him, his accustomed means of asserting control is to reiterate
the practical end and to hope that he can “keep his mind on” taxicabs
or autobusses. Alternating with periods of reiteration and expectancy
and illumination are episodes of “No” and “Yes,” which evidence the
existence of guided thought.
It would be misleading to stop with this formal description of the
characteristics of logical thinking. Logical thinking is not a
hocus-pocus to be applied here and there and everywhere. The previewing
of events presupposes familiarity with the sorts of events to which
the previewing relates. It usually involves analysis of the contingent
future in the light of analogies with the past, which is simply a
means of refining general familiarity through systematic methods of
inspecting reality. General knowledge of lending and borrowing must
be supplemented, for many purposes, by detailed examination of the
quantitative dimensions of various routines. The precise nature of the
relationship between changes in the rediscount rate and the price of
call money requires analysis far beyond impressionistic familiarity.
There need be no illusion that the specification of the terminal
situation provides an immovable constant for thought. We can imply, as
we have implied, that logical thinking begins by sketching a figure on
the canvass and leaves the details to be filled in during the course of
the thinking. But the starting-point is often subject to many shifts,
and the initial sketch is more or less subject to remaking. The judge
who starts in pursuit of consistency-with-precedent characteristically
must add conformity-to-principles-of-policy. A plurality of ends is
always involved, and usually appears.
Everybody knows that the pluralism of ends goes far beyond “official”
ends. A sophisticated and discerning judge may discover an embarrassing
conflict in the controlling precedents, and cast about for other social
purposes than conformity-to-precedent to guide him. He may scrutinize
the principal economic, cultural, and political changes in the society
in which he operates, and discern the appearance of a new set of rising
dominant values, and decide to diminish the cost of social change by
seeking to facilitate their introduction. If this hypothetical judge
believes that he should not consciously enact his private prejudices
into law, and if the social values are so confused that uncertainty
rules, the judge is well advised to flip a coin (in chambers) and
govern his decision accordingly. If the judge finds himself favorably
disposed toward any alternative to begin with, he will take himself
as an object of investigation to determine the extent and origin of
his prejudice. His logic thus involves the use of self-scrutiny for
the exposure of private values which load the dice for or against
a particular point of view. Besides the values which are “public,”
there are complicating values which are the residue of one’s “private”
history.
All these points are stressed in greater or less degree in the current
writing on the use of the mind. The avowed purpose of our professional
schools is to increase the amount of logical reflection in the world,
and the set complaint is that people somehow or another manage to think
very clumsily. In spite of our best efforts to disseminate logicality,
people are always “letting their prejudices run away with them,” even
when they have a baggage of good intentions.
The stock alibi for the failure of the schools to improve the
character of thinking among those who hold positions of power is
that the human mind offers a perverse opacity to the rays of reason.
Somehow or other our training doesn’t take; but this is attributed
not to the deficiencies of logic but to the resistances to it. All
this is reminiscent of the reply of the Christian to the taunt that
Christianity has failed. He says that Christianity isn’t to blame, but
the lack of it. The logicians say that the cure of bad logic is more
and better logic. If the human mind refuses to be educated, that’s just
too bad.
Our thesis is that our faith in logic is misplaced. Exclusive
emphasis upon logic (even where logic is adroitly used) incapacitates
rather than fits the mind to function as a fit instrument of reality
adjustment.
The supposition that emotional aberrations are to be conquered by
heroic doses of logical thinking is a mistake. The absence of effective
logic is a symptom of a disease which logic cannot itself cure. We have
been misled by supposing that the mind can rely upon a single technique
of operation when this isolated technique has serious limitations.
A totally different technique of thinking is needed to get on with
the task of ridding the mind of the distorting results of unseen
compulsions. Since our schools have found no place for the cultivation
of this additional technique of thinking, our judges and administrators
and policy-makers are turned loose on the world armed with faith in
logic and incapable of making their minds safe for logic. Logical
thinking is but one of the special methods of using the mind, and
cannot itself achieve an adequate inspection of reality because it is
unable to achieve self-knowledge without the aid of other forms of
thinking.
The technique of free-fantasy offers many points of contrast with
logical thinking. It is unguided rather than guided association. From
a given starting-point, no effort is bent toward the exclusion of the
trivial, the trite, the embarrassing, the filthy, the nonsensical. The
mind is permitted to run hither and yon. It is hospitable to everything
which germinates in the mind, and is subject only to the effort to
steer clear of the molds of logical thinking. There is no specific
definition of an objective, and no intermittent intervention in the
flow of material to register its pertinence or impertinence to this
rather specific objective.
Free-fantasy is not to be confused with free word associations which
begin with simple stimulus words and end when the first few words
which pop into the mind are put down. Free-fantasy is not a momentary
relaxation of selective criticism, but prolonged emancipation from
logical fetters.
Free-fantasy differs from the ordinary daydream, the night dream, and
the visions which arise in sleeping or waking by the circumstance that
it is embarked upon with the vague, generalized purpose of rendering
available new subject matter for logical thought. The frequent
interventions which characterize logical procedures are suspended,
the better to serve the ultimate purposes of reality adjustment.
Daydreaming which is not used for this general purpose does not
represent a technique for using the mind.
The ultimate paradox of logical thinking is that it is self-destroying
when it is too sedulously cultivated. It asserts its own prerogatives
by clamping down certain restrictive frames of reference upon the
activity of the mind, and presently ends in impoverishing the activity
which it purports to guide into creative channels. It becomes
intolerant of the immediate, unanalyzed, primitive abundance of the
mind, and by so doing destroys its own source.
More seriously, too, for the mind which is engaged with social life,
logical procedures exclude from the mind the most important data about
the self. Directed thinking, whether about the self or something
else as an object, is impatient of the seemingly trivial, and this
impatience with the seemingly trivial is the rationally acceptable
guise in which the impulse to avoid rigorous self-scrutiny gets itself
accepted. The mind which is freely fantasying produces distasteful
evidence of the facts about the self which the socialized self wants to
avoid. This is why free-fantasy is not learned by rote, but achieved
through trying experiences, usually under prolonged supervision.
There are wide individual differences in acquiring the technique
of free-fantasy. Logical controls are often so gradually released
that progress is almost imperceptible for several weeks of daily
contact with a psychoanalytic interviewer. Frequently, of course,
the logical controls fall away quite rapidly, and the exposure of
the underlying preoccupations proceeds apace. Freud developed the
technique, and drills his subjects, largely in relation to their
dreams, but this is in no sense its exclusive application. The purpose
of the psychoanalytic interview is not served if the patient is merely
relieved of a few annoying symptoms; its purpose is to equip him with
a means of handling his mind which will enable him to go it alone. In
developing the free-fantasy procedure, Freud added a powerful tool
to the repertory of those who would use their mind with some hope
of disentangling themselves from the compulsive domination of many
vestigial remains of their “private” histories.
It is quite possible to train people to use the free-fantasy method
with considerable success and to outfit them with a device which they
can use in the ordinary problems of professional and private life.[7]
The instances which I shall presently adduce are from the fantasies
which were produced by a judge in the course of a series of interviews
which he undertook after his curiosity about the method had been
aroused by the therapeutic treatment of a member of his family. Any
specific allusions are disguised.
One day the judge commented at the beginning of the interview that
a certain attorney irritated him in some unexplained way. He found
himself acutely conscious of his own prejudice against the man, and
in trying to deal fairly with him often leaned over backward and
showed him an embarrassing favoritism in sustaining his objections.
There was always a struggle to hold the balance even. This seemed to
indicate the conspicuous operation of some unrecognized set of motives
in relation to this particular individual. The judge, who was already
partly skilled in the use of free-fantasy, began to report whatever
came into his mind at the mention of the attorney, without regard to
logic or scruple. “Cigar smoke ... black cigar ... vile and pungent
and stuffy ... corridor ... courtroom ...,” and so on and on. The word
“corridor” reappeared several times in the course of his associations,
and the interviewer initiated a new chain by using the word as a
stimulus. After some time, there came up a vivid memory of an incident
in the corridor of the law school where the judge had studied. A
fellow-student, who was a man with a great reputation as a promising
mind, dropped cigar ashes by accident on the judge’s overcoat. The
judge remembered his angry impulse to “sock” the offender, an impulse
which he instantly subdued, and that he accepted the apology, which
seemed to end the incident. Associations were continued to find why the
brilliant rival had so incensed the judge, and the trail led back to
certain incidents and reveries in early adolescence, but this material
is not relevant here. The connection of his hostility toward his former
rival with the attorney before him was due to one of the attorney’s
mannerisms, which recalled the way the student had flecked ashes
off the end of his cigar. When this tie was exposed, the compulsive
animosity and the overcompensatory reactions disappeared from the
attitude of the judge in relation to the attorney.
Another illustrative detail may be taken almost at random from the
record. On one occasion the judge began to enumerate the three
principal alternatives which lay before him in deciding a pending case.
He remembered two of them but hesitated several seconds before the
third came into his mind. This led him to remember that he had often
casually noticed that this third possibility seemed to elude him,
although on reflection he felt that it deserved as much attention as
the other two. He began spontaneously to relax and report everything
that crossed his mind, and produced a long string of catch phrases
from law and politics like “freedom of contract,” “life, liberty,
and pursuit of happiness,” “freedom of speech and assembly.” He
presently noted that a picture was forming of one of his old law-school
classrooms. He felt that someone was just about to speak to him, and
had to resist the temptation to turn around. Then there came across
his mind a long series of incidents in which one of his law professors
was the principal figure. This teacher was reputed to possess a
mastermind and a caustic tongue; and the judge, though he had always
wanted to make a great impression on him, had met with no particular
success. The professor had a habit of using his most ironic tone of
voice when he spoke of “this freedom of contract.” Now it happened
that the attorney who was arguing for alternative No. 3 before the
court pronounced the word “freedom” with unction. This aroused in the
judge’s mind the ironic tone of the old professor’s voice, and this
in turn brought back the rather humiliating failure he had been in
his efforts to impress the professor. He now exhibited a tendency to
repress everything connected with the episode, including the attorney’s
argument.
The world about us is much richer in meanings than we consciously
see. These meanings are continually cutting across our ostensible
criteria of judgment, and compulsively distorting the operations of
the mind whose quest for an objective view of reality is consciously
quite sincere. Good intentions are not enough to widen the sphere
of self-mastery. There must be a special technique for the sake of
exposing the hidden meanings which operate to bind and cripple the
processes of logical thought. With practice one may wield the tool
of free-fantasy with such ruthless honesty that relevant material
comes very quickly to the focus of attention which we call “waking
consciousness.”
It would be possible to fill many volumes with illustrations of the
hitherto unseen meanings which have been discovered by men and women
who have learned to use the free-fantasy technique. They have often
been able to find how and why their emotions tended to be aroused
favorably or unfavorably toward individuals of their own or the
opposite sex who exhibited certain traits, and to understand why they
tended to choose certain secretaries, to sponsor certain protégés, and
to be impressed by certain witnesses and attorneys. They have been
able to inspect the phraseology of law, politics, and culture, and to
extricate themselves from many of the logically irrelevant private
meanings which they read into it.
Freud developed the technique of free-fantasy well over a quarter of
a century ago, but it is still beyond the pale of the schools. Our
professional and graduate schools make no effort to readjust their
methods to fit the minds of future men of authority for self-knowledge.
The sententious admonitions to “know thyself” are no adequate
substitute for special discipline in the ways of self-understanding.
We have tried to cure the failures of logical training by homeopathic
doses of sermonizing, rather than by the discipline of supplementary
techniques of using the mind. The mind is a fit instrument of
reality testing when both blades are sharpened--those of logic and
free-fantasy. Until this fundamental proposition is adequately
comprehended, the professional training of our judges, administrators,
and theorists will continue to furnish discipline in self-deception
rather than self-analysis.