CONCLUSION
It has been said that there is no scrap of knowledge concerning the
remotest star which will not, sooner or later, be found to have its
bearing upon the problems of human life, and we may well ask what the
science of human nature itself has to contribute to the solution of our
daily problems.
The practical application of psychology has certain well-defined
spheres. Its bearing upon education has long been recognised, and
much valuable work done in relation to the study of the child mind.
The psychology of fatigue, in relation to industrial efficiency, has
also found recognition as a branch of applied science not without its
practical value. The field of social problems is still largely awaiting
exploration, and there can be little doubt that the study of the
psychology of the criminal and unemployable would yield results of the
greatest social value.
At the present moment, it is the field of abnormal psychology that
holds the focus of attention. That inestimably valuable results are
being obtained in this field of study no one can dispute, but its value
is not confined to the relief of disease alone, but, as the research
is progressing deeper, to the revelation of the conditions that give
rise to disease. Just as the study of pathology gave us the science
of hygiene, so the study of mental diseases is showing us the way
to healthier thinking. It is teaching us that any abnormal attitude
towards life will produce mental discomfort, if not actual disease, and
it is showing us, just as physiological hygiene has shown us, that if
the developing intelligence of man leads him to depart from primitive
conditions wherein the instincts are sufficient guides, then he must
also apply his reason to the new problems to which the new conditions
give rise, and not leave the solution of these to instincts which
are only fitted for the simplest form of functioning. The instinct
of combativeness, or the instinct of flight, will not conduct the
evolutions of a modern army, and neither will the primitive impulses
enable man to live well and happily in conditions which elaborate
mental processes have built up--as witness the terrible prevalence
of unsolved sex problems beneath the fair show of our civilisation.
Two-thirds, if not more, of nerve trouble have their origin in the
efforts of a primitive instinct to function under civilised conditions
and its failure to make the adaptation. We need to take our instincts
out of the region of the subconscious and apply our reason to them if
we are to solve the problems that press upon us.
Throughout this book it will have been seen that stress has been laid
upon the functioning and activity of those levels of the mind that are
below the threshold of consciousness, and that it has been pointed out
that the instincts, and not the reason, are the key to the human mind.
But it has also been shown that the mind is in a state of evolution,
and that reason, as its latest development, has an equal biological
significance with the instincts of sex and self-preservation, and that
we can no more afford to ignore the higher attributes of the human mind
than we can afford to deny their true place to the primitive.
Briefly, the primitive man lies at the base of our being, but the
divine man stands at its apex, and we, in our ascent, are in a
transition stage, with subconscious and superconscious not yet
correlated in the conscious mind. We do not see our past and future
save in the dim pictures of dream and vision, by the uncertain gleam
of intuition rather than the clear light of reason, and no solution of
any human problem, either social or psychological, can be valid which
does not look to the future as well as the past. Hitherto psychology
has sought its standards of normality in the primitive and subhuman,
forgetting that the flower of humanity is a natural product as well as
its weeds; that religion, charity and idealism are as much a part of
human nature as those primitive instincts which give rise to unnameable
crimes. A psychology which looks to the past can show us causes, but
it is only a psychology which looks to the future which can find us
cures. Evolution did not cease its progress when it produced the cave
man guarding his family, but evolved the “Save the Children Fund,”
which before the echoes of the last shot had died away was sending
succour to the helpless young of an enemy herd.
A psychology which bases its philosophy upon a return to the primitive,
especially if that psychology undertakes the solution of human
problems, individual or collective, is ignoring the data of evolution.
We know that all life originated in the sea, and that the young of
many species still pass the first phase of their life in the water.
When, however, they have come ashore, and the gills have given place
to lungs, they cease to be water creatures, and the structural traces
of their origin are vestigial and not functional, and a frog can be
drowned as easily as any other air-breathing creature, despite his
tadpole past. So it is with the human psyche, unquestionably it has
passed through a primitive phase in the course of its development, but
if, in an effort to remedy some faulty development, it be thrust back
to that phase after evolving to a higher one, it will perish as surely
as the frog thrust under water. It should be the aim of psychotherapy,
not to reduce the mind to its primitive elements and point of view,
but rather to help humanity to make that transition from the lower to
the higher which evolution is forcing upon us, whether we will or no.
Adaptation to environment is the key to life, and the environment to
which an individual must be aided to adjust himself, if such aid be
sought, is not that environment which, generation by generation, is
receding further into the past, but that future which hour by hour is
becoming the present, and from which there is no escape.
It should be the aim of psychotherapy to work out the arc which
evolution is describing, and to set the feet of racial wanderers upon
its path. It is a futile and dangerous philosophy which proposes a
return to the past as an escape from the present.
Geology, zoology, sociology, and comparative psychology, all show us
the evolution of that which is simple into that which is complex, from
the cave man, with his few needs and problems, to the complications
of a modern industrial society. And we see in the little segment of
the evolutionary arc with which we are most closely concerned that
the chief factor is the herd instinct which is pressing us all the
time towards a more complete socialisation of humanity, and that
any adaptation which an individual makes must be in relation to his
integration as a social unit and not to his needs as a solitary
individual.
Diagnostic and descriptive psychology must be distinguished from
remedial psychology of which we have had all too little. Research on
the abnormal mind alone will not give us the key to a healthy life,
we must study social psychology as well as individual psychology,
because man is a social animal, and his mental processes are determined
by this fact; any adaptation he makes, and adaptation is the basis of
psychotherapy, must be in relation to his social group as well as to
his own subconscious wishes; it is not enough to bring these wishes
into the light of consciousness, they must be synthesised with the
rest of the personality, to the social organisation of which that
personality is a unit, and to the great evolutionary drift of which
even the race itself is but a partial expression. Psychotherapy may
begin with the primitive, but it must end with the divine, for both are
integral factors in the human mind.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Spelling and grammatical errors on page 81 (Chapter XXI) have been left
unchanged.