NEUROSIS AND EUGENICS
In my work on Psychopathology I lay special stress on the fact that
the psychopathic individual has a predisposition to dissociative
states. Early experiences and training in childhood enter largely
into the formation of such a predisposition. Still, there is
no doubt that a sensitive nervous system is required--a brain
susceptible to special stimuli of the external environment. This,
of course, does not mean that the individual must suffer from
stigmata of degeneration. On the contrary, it is quite possible,
and in many patients we actually find it to be so, that the
psychopathic individual may be even of a superior organization. _It
is the sensitivity and the delicacy of nervous organization that
make the system susceptible to injurious stimulations, to which a
lower form of organization could be subjected with impunity._
An ordinary clock can be handled roughly without disturbance of
its internal workings, but the delicate and complicated mechanism
of a chronometer requires careful handling and special, favorable
conditions for its normal functioning. Unfavorable conditions are
more apt to affect a highly complex mechanism than a roughly made
instrument. It is quite probable that it is the superior minds
and more highly complex mental and nervous organizations that
are subject to psychopathic states or states of dissociation. Of
course, unstable minds are also subject to dissociative states,
but we must never forget the fact that highly organized brains, on
account of their very complexity, are apt to become unstable under
unfavorable conditions. A predisposition to dissociation may occur
either in degenerative minds or in minds superior to the average.
_Functional psychosis requires a long history of dissociated,
subconscious shocks, suffered by a highly or lowly organized
nervous system, a long history dating back to early childhood._
As Mosso puts it: “The vivid impression of a strong emotion may
produce the same effect as a blow on the head or some physical
shock.” We may, however, say that no functional psychosis, whether
somatopsychosis or psychoneurosis, can ever be produced simply
by physical shocks. _In all functional psychoses there must
be a mental background, and it is the mental background alone
that produces the psychosis and determines the character of the
psychopathic state._
_Fear is an important factor in the etiology of psychopathic
affections which include somatopsychoses and psychoneuroses._
To regard fear as “error,” as do some sectarians, is absurd, and
is certainly unscientific. Abnormal fear which is the basis of
all functional nervous or psychopathic maladies, is essentially
a pathological process affecting the organs in general and the
nervous system in particular in as definite a way as the invasion
and infection of the organism by various species of bacteria,
bacilli, and other micro-organisms which attack the individual
during his lifetime.
Like infectious diseases, the deviations, abnormalities, and
excesses of the fear instinct are _acquired_ by the individual in
the course of his relations with the external environment, and are
as real and substantial as are syphilis, smallpox, diphtheria,
cholera, and the bubonic plague. To regard them as imaginary or
to relegate them to the action of Providence or to heredity is
theoretically a misconception, and practically a great danger to
humanity.
There is nowadays a veritable craze for heredity and eugenics.
Biology is misconceived, misinterpreted, and misapplied to social
problems, and to individual needs and ailments. Everything is
ascribed to heredity, from folly and crime to scratches and
sneezes. The goddess Heredity is invoked at each flea-bite--_in
morsu pulicis Deum invocare_.
Even war is supposed to be due to the omnipotent deity of Heredity.
Superior races by their patriotism and loyalty destroy the weak
and the helpless, and relentlessly exterminate all peaceful tribes.
Such warlike stock comes of superior clay. The dominant races have
some miraculous germ-plasm, special “unit characters,” wonderful
dominant “units” which, like a precious heritage, these races
transmit unsullied and untarnished to their descendants.
Wars, carnage, butcheries make for progress, culture, and
evolution. Our boasted civilization with its “scientific” business
thoroughness and its ideal of “efficiency” attempts to carry into
effect this quasi-evolutionary doctrine--this apotheosis of brute
force under the aegis of science. The eugenic belief is really
a recrudescence of the ancient savage superstition of the magic
virtues of noble blood and of divine king stock.
All nervous, mental, neuropathic, and psychopathic maladies are
supposed to be a matter of heredity. If people are poor, ignorant,
superstitious, stupid, degraded, brutal, and sick, the eugenists
unhesitatingly put it all down to poor stock.
The eugenic remedy is as simple as it is believed to be
efficacious: Introduce by legislation “efficient” laws favoring
“eugenic” marriage, and teach the masses control of births. The
select and chosen stock alone should multiply--the millennium is
then bound to come. Such is the doctrine of our medico-biological
sages.
“Scientific” farmers and breeders of vegetables, fruits, and
cattle are regarded as competent judges of human “breeders.”
Agriculturists and horticulturists set themselves up as advisers
in “the business of raising good crops of efficient children.”
Bachelors, spinsters, and the childless generally, are specially
versed in eugenic wisdom and pedagogics.
All social ills and individual complaints are referred to one main
source--heredity. With the introduction of eugenic legislation,
with the sterilization of the socially unfit, among whom the
greatest men and women may be included, with the breeding of good
“orthodox, common stock,” and with eugenic Malthusian control
of births, all evil and diseases on earth will cease, while the
Philistine “superman” will reign supreme forevermore.
In the Middle Ages all diseases and epidemics, all wars, all social
and private misfortunes were considered as visitations of Divine
wrath. The fear instinct held sway, terrorizing poor, deluded
humanity. In modern times our would-be eugenic science refers all
ills of the flesh and woes of the mind to an outraged Heredity.
The dark ages had resort to prayers, fasts, and penitence, while
our age childishly pins its faith to the miraculous virtues and
rejuvenating, regenerative powers of legislative eugenic measures,
and to the eugenic Malthusian control of births.
Our scientists in eugenics gather hosts of facts, showing by
elaborate statistical figures that the family history of neurotics
reveals stigmata of degeneration in the various members of the
family. The eugenic inquirers do not stop for a moment to think
over the fact that the same sort of evidence can be easily brought
in the case of most people. In fact, the eugenists themselves,
when inquiring into the pedigree of talent and genius, invariably
find somewhere in the family some form of disease or degeneration.
This sort of “scientific” evidence leads some eugenic speculators,
without their noticing the _reductio ad absurdum_, to the curious
conclusion or generalization that degeneration is present in the
family history of the best and the worst representatives of the
human race.
The so-called scientific method of the eugenists is faulty, in
spite of the rich display of colored plates, stained tablets,
glittering biological speculations, brilliant mathematical
formulae, and complicated statistical calculations. The eugenists
pile Ossa on Pelion of facts by the simple method of enumeration
which Bacon and the thinkers coming after him have long ago
condemned as puerile and futile. From the savage’s belief in
sympathetic, imitative magic with its consequent superstitions,
omens, and taboos down to the articles of faith and dogmas of the
eugenists, we find the same faulty, primitive thought, guided by
the puerile, imbecile method of simple enumeration, and controlled
by the wisdom of the logical _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_.
What would we say of the medical man who should claim that measles,
mumps, cholera, typhoid fever, yellow fever, malaria, tetanus,
and various other infectious diseases are hereditary by quoting
learnedly long tables of statistics to the effect that for several
generations members of the same family suffered from the same
infectious diseases? What would we say of the medical advice
forbidding marriage to individuals whose family history reveals
the presence of exanthemata? We stamp out epidemics not by eugenic
measures, but by the cleansing of infectious filth, and by the
extermination of pathogenic micro-organisms.
Every human being has a predisposition to smallpox, cholera,
tetanus, bubonic plague, typhus fever, malaria, and to like
infectious diseases, but there is no inherent necessity for
everyone to fall a victim to the action of pathogenic organisms,
if the preventive and sanitary conditions are good and proper. No
one is immune against the action of bullets, cannon balls, shells,
and torpedoes, or to the action of various poisons, organic and
inorganic, but one is not doomed by fate to be killed by them, if
one does not expose himself to their deadly action.
Every living organism is, by the very nature of its cellular
tissues, predisposed to wounding by sharp instruments, or to the
burning action of fire, but this does not mean an inherent organic
weakness to which the organism must necessarily submit and perish.
We are all of us predisposed to get injured and possibly killed,
when we fall down from a high place, or when we are run over by an
automobile or by a locomotive, but there is no fatalistic necessity
about such accidents, if care is taken that they should not occur.
We may be predisposed to neurosis by the very nature of complexity,
delicacy, and sensitivity inherent in the structure of a highly
organized nervous system, and still we may remain healthy and
strong all our life long, provided we know how to keep away from
noxious agencies. The creed of the inevitable fatality of neurosis
is as much of a superstition as the Oriental belief in the fatalism
of infectious diseases, plagues, and accidents of all kinds.
Such fatalistic superstitions are dangerous, fatal, because they
distract the attention from the actual cause and from the requisite
prophylactic measures.
We go far afield in search for the remote source of our troubles,
when the cause is close at hand. We need only open our eyes to see
the filth of our towns, the foul, loathsome slums of our cities,
the miserable training, the wretched education given to our
children, in order to realize at a glance the source of our ills
and ailments. We should lay the guilt at the door of our social
order. We starve our young. We starve our children physically and
mentally. We piously sacrifice our tender children and the flower
of our youth to the greedy, industrial Moloch of a military,
despotic, rapacious plutocracy.
Witness semi-civilized Europe with its lauded culture brutally
shedding the blood of its youth and manhood on the altar of
commercial patriotism! It is not heredity, it is the vicious
conditions of life that stunt the physical, nervous, and mental
growth of our young generation. When we are confronted with the
miserable, degraded, crippled forms of our life, we fall back
cheerfully on some remote grandparent, and credulously take refuge
in the magic panacea of eugenics.
The practical aspect is clear. Psychopathic neurosis in its two
varieties, somatopsychosis and psychoneurosis, is not hereditary,
but _acquired_. We should not shift the blame on former generations
and have resort to eugenics, but we must look to the improvement of
mental hygienic conditions of early childhood, and to the proper
education of the individual.
It is easy to put the blame on grandparents,--they are dead and
cannot defend themselves. Could they arise from their graves,
they could tell some bitter truths to their descendants who are
ready to shift responsibility to other people’s shoulders. It is
about time to face the truth fairly and squarely, a truth which
is brought out by recent investigations in psychopathology, that
no matter where the _fons et origo_ of neurosis be, whether in
self-preservation and its accompanying fear instinct, the condition
of life primordial, or in the other forms of self-preservation,
_the formation of psychopathic neurosis with all its characteristic
protean symptoms is not hereditary, but acquired. Neurosis arises
within the life cycle of the individual; it is due to faulty
training and harmful experience of early child life._
Future medicine will be largely prophylactic, preventive, sanitary,
hygienic, dietetic. What holds true of medicine in general holds
true of that particular branch of it that deals with neurosis.
The treatment will become largely prophylactic, preventive,
educational, or pedagogic. It is time that the _medical and
teaching profession should realize that functional neurosis is not
congenital, not inborn, not hereditary, but is the result of a
defective, fear-inspiring education in early child life_.
The psychopathic diathesis can be overcome by dispelling the
darkness of ignorance and credulity with their false fears
and deceptive hopes, above all, by fortifying the critical,
controlling, guiding consciousness. Let in sun and air into the
obscure cobwebbed regions of the child and man. The gloom and the
ghosts of the fear instinct are dispersed by the light of reason.
As the great Roman poet, Lucretius, well puts it:
“Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
Non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
Discutiant, sed naturæ species ratioque.”[14]
FOOTNOTE:
[14] Darkness and terror of the soul are not dispelled by the rays
of the sun and glittering shafts of the day, but by the rational
aspect of nature.