The servant girl at the Manse has had an illegitimate child, and Meg
Caddam, the out-worker at East Mains is cutting her dead. Thus the
gossip of Mrs. Macdonald. Meg Caddam is the unmarried mother of three.
I have noticed again and again that the most severe critic of the
unmarried mother is the unmarried mother, and I have many a time
wondered at the fact. Now I know the explanation; it is the familiar
Projection of a Reproach. Meg feels guilty because of her three
children, but her guilt is repressed, driven down into the unconscious.
She dare not allow her conscious mind to face the truth, for then the
truth would lower her self-respect; it would be unpleasant, out of
harmony with her ego-ideal. But it is easy for her to project this
inner reproach on to someone else, hence her blaming of the Manse
lassie. Meg Caddam is really condemning herself, but she does not know
it.
I used to despise the Meg Caddams as hypocrites, but, poor souls, they
are not hypocrites. Their condemnation of their fallen sisters is
genuine. It is wonderful how we all manage to divide our minds into
compartments. Sandy Marshall of Brigs Farm is a most religious man,
yet the other day he was fined for watering his milk. It is unjust to
say that his religion is hypocritical. What happens is that his
religion is shut up in one compartment of his mind, and his dishonesty
is shut up in another compartment . . . and there is no direct
communication between the compartments.
The mind is like one of the older railway carriages; education's task
is to convert the old carriage into a new corridor carriage with
communication between the compartments. Meg Caddam's own transgression
against current morality is locked up in one compartment; her
condemnation of the Manse girl is in another compartment. There is an
unconscious communication, but there is no conscious communication. I
don't know what Meg would say if a cruel friend pointed out to her that
she also was a fallen woman.
I think that the gossip of this village mostly consists of projected
reproaches. Liz Ramsay, an old maid and the super-gossip of Tarbonny,
came into the schoolhouse this morning.
"Do ye ken this," she said to Mrs. Macdonald, "it's my opeenion that
Mrs. Broon died o' neglect. I went to the door the day afore she died
to speer hoo she was, and her daughter cam to the door, and do ye ken
this? That lassie was smiling . . . _smilin'_ . . . and her auld
mother upstairs at death's door. Eh, Mrs. Macdonald, she's a heartless
woman that Mary Broon. She killed her mother by neglect, that's what
she did."
After she had gone I said to Mrs. Macdonald: "Who nursed Liz's mother
when she died last June?"
"Nobody," said Mrs. Macdonald grimly. "Liz had too much gossip to
retail in the village, and I'm told that Liz was seldom in the house."
I think I am guessing fairly rightly when I say that Liz feels guilty
of neglecting her own mother, and like Meg Caddam she projects the
reproach on to someone else.
* * * * * *
Last Friday night I gave a lecture to the literary Society in Tarby,
our nearest town. I chose the subject of forgetting, and I told the
audience of Freud and his great work in connection with the
unconscious. To-day's _Tarby Herald_ in reporting the lecture prints
phonetically the spelling "Froid," but the _Tarby Observer_ goes one
better when it says: "Mr. Neill is an exponent of the new science of
Cycloanalysis."
Which reminds me of a painful episode that took place when I was
eighteen. I was much enamoured of a young university student, and I
always strove to gain her favour by being interested in the things she
liked. One day she informed me that she intended to take the
Psychology class at St. Andrews the following session. I had never
heard the word before, and I made a bold guess that it had something to
do with cycles. In consequence we talked at cross purposes for a while.
"I'd love a subject like that," I said warmly.
"Most of it will be experimental psychology," she said.
My enthusiasm increased. I thought of the many experiments I had tried
with my old cushion-tyred cycle.
"Excellent!" I cried. "A sort of training in inventing. Cranks, eh?"
At that time my one ambition in life was to invent a folding crank that
would give double power on hills.
The lady looked at me sharply.
"Why cranks?" she demanded. "I don't see it. Psychology has nothing
to do with crystal-gazing you know."