path: root/78616-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78616 ***


                           The Social Basis of
                              Consciousness

                      A Study in Organic Psychology
                   Based upon a Synthetic and Societal
                         Concept of the Neuroses

                                   BY
                             TRIGANT BURROW
                              M.D., Ph.D.


                                NEW YORK
                     HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY, INC.
             LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.
                                  1927




                 _THE SOCIAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS_

      Chapter I, Part I, was first published in _The Journal of
      Nervous and Mental Disease_, and Chapter II, Part I, in _The
      Psychoanalytic Review_. Acknowledgment is made to the Editors
      for permission to include these papers in the present volume.


                      PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
         THE EDINBURGH PRESS, 9 AND 11 YOUNG STREET, EDINBURGH


                _I am that which began;
                  Out of me the years roll;
                Out of me God and man;
                  I am equal and whole;
          God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily;
                I am the soul._
                                     “Hertha.”--Swinburne.




                                CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

  Preface                                                             xv

  Introduction                                                         1

    Significance of Freud’s basic conception--Misconceptions
    in psychoanalysis due to present personalistic
    basis--Psychoanalysis entails the element of personal
    differentiation and sponsorship presented in other therapeutic
    systems--Need for abrogation of personal equation--Societal
    concept an outgrowth of essential objective findings of
    Freud--This thesis an initial presentation of an organismic
    interpretation of human consciousness.


                                 PART I

                     THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

  Chapter I                                                            9

    PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND IN LIFE

    Theory of psychoanalysis rests upon conception that nervous
    disorders are substitutive manifestation of repressed sexual
    life--Sexuality itself, however, as now existing, symptomatic
    of repression and quite preclusive of the organic instinct of
    sex--Popular analytic view places a premium upon the reaction
    embodied in normality but substitution and repression in
    this collective reaction identical with the unconscious of
    neurotic individuals--Substitution of self-image for reality,
    present in reactions of normal, is not as yet recognized by
    psychoanalysis--Psychoanalysis remains in so far a theory
    only--In truth, the neurotic personality is index of the urge
    toward an essential organic mode of consciousness--Continuity
    with organic processes registered as subjective feeling cannot
    be approached by objective methods--The insanity of the
    individual not to be cured as long as there is the insanity of
    the social mind about him.

  Chapter II                                                          32

    A RELATIVE CONCEPT OF CONSCIOUSNESS: AN ANALYSIS OF
    CONSCIOUSNESS IN ITS ETHNIC ORIGIN

    The Newtonian system assumes an unqualified absolute and
    fails to take account of factors operating within the larger
    system in which it is itself an element--In the sphere of
    psychic phenomena a similar system of absolutism dominates our
    presumably conscious world--Analysis of our judgments reveals
    the assumption that the position intrinsic to the observer
    is all-inclusive and authentic--But our world of impressions
    is artificial and reflects the artificial systematization
    that fails to include our own organisms--This autocratic
    interpretation of life is based on a bidimensional or image
    system which in its arbitrary and personal evaluation distorts
    the universe of reality--Normality is consensus comprising the
    personal absolute vested in the unconscious of the collective
    mind--Need to replace pictorial mode by organic coalescence
    in common affectivity--Personal systems of men, single and
    collective, are but relative with respect to an organic
    societal consciousness--Concept of relativity of consciousness
    abrogates absolute standard and embraces dimensional element of
    the system, individual and social, of which we ourselves are a
    component part--Transition from bidimensional (contemplation of
    aspect) to tridimensional (participation in function) affords
    basis for measuring deflections of personality, socially as
    well as individually.

  Chapter III                                                         50

    THE ORIGIN OF OUR INDIVIDUAL UNCONSCIOUS

    Organic societal consciousness can be comprehended only
    through subjective identification with it--Discussion of
    the tridimensional reality of human consciousness with
    its three determinants--Present phase of consciousness
    admits only the bidimensional image--The position of the
    bidimensional elements “right and wrong” as incorporated
    in the life of the child--Advantage of the parent the real
    motive underlying this moral bidimension--Long-continued
    experiments with personal mood reactions as substantiation
    of view that induced image of right and wrong is at the root
    of human psychopathology--Non-inclusiveness of others is
    meaning of unconsciousness, individual and social--Present
    social adaptation is merely collective response, not societal
    extension of consciousness--Substitution of the absolute of
    personal interest for inclusive participation as relative
    elements affords no basis for inclusion of larger whole in
    which the individual is a contributing element.

  Chapter IV                                                          63

    THE UNCONSCIOUS FACTOR WITHIN THE SOCIAL SYSTEM

    Daily reactions betray state of anxiety in the social
    mind--These anxieties, sponsored in earlier times by medical
    and religious fetish, still substantiated by the systems of
    medicine and religion--Organic analysis of the element of
    social authority--The systems of psychoanalysis and the Roman
    Church as paradigms--Factor of resistance in psychoanalysis
    analogous to factor of doubt in religion--The systematization
    comprising the social corporation of individuals as much an
    aspect of the unconscious autocracy of the personal absolute as
    the systematization of the individual--In the conflict between
    these two mutually opposed absolutes (socially systematized
    authority and the resistance of the individual) there is an
    organic impasse.

  Chapter V                                                           78

    SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS FROM A VIEWPOINT
    OF RELATIVITY

    The established system demands conformity to its prescribed
    norm--The limitation of life to a bidimensional alternative of
    one’s own pleasure or one’s own pain results in division of
    personality and in compulsion neurosis involving the entire
    social consciousness--Bidimensional replacements in social
    system found in art, science, education, marriage, etc.--The
    mood alternations of the individual are but obverse aspects of
    the same bidimensional portrait of personal advantage--This
    element of unconscious alternation bars unbiased observation
    of the personal absolute--In the field of preventive
    medicine the personal cure of the individual subordinated to
    safeguarding of community health--But within the subjective
    sphere there is resistance to an approach that would consider
    the individual’s position as part of a societal unity because
    such an approach would menace the illusion of personal
    prerogative--Psychopathologists equally involved unconsciously
    in the social neurosis--In an objective study of the neurosis
    the psychopathologist escapes the subjective acknowledgment
    of its presence within himself--Possibility of fundamental
    readjustment for dissociated personality lies only in surrender
    socially of bidimensional or pictorial illusion in favour of
    tridimensional actuality.


                                PART II

                     THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

  Chapter I                                                          107

    ANALYSIS OF FREUD’S DYNAMIC AND INDIVIDUALISTIC CONCEPTION OF
    THE NEUROSES

    Freud’s theory assumes breach in integrity of consciousness due
    to effort of delimited area to establish itself as a separate
    self-governing unit--Distinction of Freud’s work lies in
    conception of central totality of consciousness; limitation of
    Freud’s work consists in assigning totality of consciousness
    to single individual--Conception of totality of personality
    tenable only from point of view of inclusive societal
    consciousness.

  Chapter II                                                         114

    FORMULATION OF AN ORGANIC OR SOCIETAL BASIS OF INTERPRETATION

    The mental life of the infant organism is wholly subjective
    and is one with the organism’s inherent feeling--With
    entrance of the ulterior motive appearing in the command and
    prohibition of the parent there is the issue of personal
    gain or loss (suggestion and repression)--Appearance of
    self-consciousness and self-interest forces interruption
    of the organism’s societal life and a separation from its
    basic continuum--Maintenance of separativeness of individual
    destroys organic integrity--There is need to stand apart
    from self and view it as element within the larger organism
    of mankind--Instinct of tribal preservation and not
    self-preservation is the dominant urge among us.

  Chapter III                                                        134

    THE ORGANIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

    Development of the idea of the parallel between individual and
    phyletic trends in unconscious manifestations--Unconscious
    worship of self-image source of suggestion and
    repression--Because of this self-image what man assumes to be
    cerebration is fictitious brain-state withdrawn from continuity
    with organic life--Where there is individual lesion, separation
    among elements is followed by pain and recourse to remedial
    aids, i.e. the organism as a whole demands relief--In the
    organic societal whole the individual as separated element is
    source of lesion but seeks to escape through symbolic disguise
    the pain of his societal separation--Conflict is between part
    and whole wherein individual is embodiment of both.

  Chapter IV                                                         154

    ORGANIC ANALYSIS OF REPRESSION AND OF THE FACTOR OF RESISTANCE
    FROM THE SOCIETAL VIEWPOINT

    The resolution of repression or resistance is regarded by Freud
    as the essential problem of psychoanalysis--Neurosis, according
    to Freud, is life’s repression of sexuality--According to an
    organismic attitude repression and sexuality are concomitant
    and are equally the results in the individual of organic
    disunity and interruption of function--The biology of
    resistance is found in the breach in individual’s continuity
    with life as confluent, organic whole--Health or disease,
    psychologically or physiologically, depends upon whether the
    cell functions integrally or separatively, congruently or
    resistantly--In social fabric each element is against each--In
    our unconsciousness we deny the reality of this biological
    phylum embodied in our organic consciousness and underlying the
    processes of our individual mentation--Sexuality, currently
    confused with sex, is egoistic, infantile expression and
    antithesis of organic expression of sex--Only continuity of the
    confluent subjective sphere can make possible an analysis that
    will synthesize the scattered elements of personality.

  Chapter V                                                          165

    ORGANIC ANALYSIS OF REPRESSION AND OF THE FACTOR OF RESISTANCE
    FROM THE INDIVIDUAL VIEWPOINT

    Transference is an unconscious condition which involves as
    much the analyst as the analysand--Resistance and repression
    are the factors in this mutual situation--Under present
    personalistic procedure in psychoanalysis the analyst deals
    objectively with an inherently subjective situation--He
    regards only the disparity of the patient and so preserves the
    apparent differentiation which is the underlying cause of the
    patient’s disorder--There is a confusion in psychoanalysis due
    to the failure to discriminate between the mother-image and
    the mother-organism--The analyst, being socially dissociated,
    seeks to reinstate the comfort of his own childhood through an
    unconscious self-interested response (pleasure or displeasure)
    to the analysand--The transference which is thus introduced
    by the unconscious attitude of the analyst cannot be analyzed
    because of the analyst’s own involvement--This is the impasse
    of the individualistic analysis--From a societal viewpoint the
    analyst can be interested only in the patient’s delusion of
    separateness and will direct his endeavour to an understanding
    of the social repression which dissociates them both from the
    common, generic consciousness.

  Chapter VI                                                         177

    THE DREAM AND ITS ANALYSIS IN AN ORGANISMIC INTERPRETATION OF
    THE NEUROSES

    To analyze the dream from a basis that is equally separative
    and repressed is to exchange the symbols of the individual’s
    repression for analogous symbols of the social repression--The
    night’s reaction, being individual, and the day’s reaction,
    being social, both represent an endeavour to adjust vicariously
    man’s societal disunity--The affective or subjective life
    cannot be adjusted through the study of the objective
    mechanisms that merely reflect it but only through the
    subjective (conscious) reabsorption within us of the affects to
    whose suggestion the dream is the mirrored reaction--The drama
    and the dream are identical in mechanism--An organic mode of
    consciousness can regard with equally objective clarity the
    vicarious processes of the day and of the night.

  Chapter VII                                                        187

    THE BIOLOGICAL SUBSTRATE OF THE NEUROTIC CONFLICT IN ITS
    ORGANIC SIGNIFICANCE

    Two types of reaction: the _autocentric_ who withdraws
    _in toto_ and has completely negative attitude toward
    his congeners, and the _allocentric_ who makes effort at
    social compromise or adaptation (“sublimation”)--Both reactions
    equally self-centered: autocentric (precoid, psychasthenic)
    showing adaptation through individual dream; allocentric
    (hysteric, hypomanic) through social dream--Biological
    substrate of these reactions lies in lack of balance between
    cerebro-spinal and sympathetic systems--In the preconscious
    form preserved among animals no break between the two systems;
    there is maintained rhythmic and harmonious co-ordination of
    response--Period of Greek thought essentially allocentric;
    Christianity essentially autocentric.

  Chapter VIII                                                       197

    THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN SEXUALITY AND SEX IN RELATION TO
    UNIFICATION AND ORGANIC MATING

    Psychoanalysis, unconsciously influenced by a division based
    on the bias of its own arbitrary alternatives, has assumed
    contrasts of behaviour not warrantable from an organismic
    conception--Such alternatives are “homosexuality” and
    “heterosexuality”--The organic instinct of mating has become
    distorted by the image system of “good” (conceding social
    consensus) and “bad” (repudiating social consensus)--Both types
    are response to social consensus and are ego-sexual--Sexuality
    is effort of conjunction of peripheral and visceral spheres
    while sex is effortless and non-personal conjugation
    of organismic poles comprising male and female--Union
    is of personality as realized in man and woman through
    identification with life, the one embodying the peripheral,
    allocentric component, the other the internal, autocentric
    component--Organically, man is not opposite woman but each is
    complement of other--Concept of intermediate sex is misnomer
    for composite sex--Social demand of oppositeness necessitates
    repression in male of female component and in female of male
    component--In present stage of society’s development marriage
    is mutual adjustment of ego-sexual claims, a pooling of the
    private unconscious of each where each withdraws from an
    organic place as a societal element--Biological significance
    of unity of personality is conception of _principle of
    primary identification_--Autocentric types as Buddha, Plato,
    Christ, and allocentric personalities of Socrates, Napoleon and
    Nietzsche equally manifest this urge of the inherent organism
    of man--In organic integrity of personality is societal
    instinct that is the composite life of the race.

  Chapter IX                                                         221

    ULTIMATE RESOLUTION OF THE SOCIETAL NEUROSIS IN ITS SOCIAL
    IMPLICATION

    Back of the pretence of the social mind lies a basis of social
    fear and mistrust--The mutual accommodations of external
    agreement used to cloak the introversion of the individual--The
    development of group analysis permits study of the resistance
    of the social consensus with respect to the individual as well
    as the resistance of the individual with respect to the social
    consensus--Group analysis, like individual analysis, presents
    an unconscious and bidimensional situation involving reaction
    clusters which constitute a pooling of the unconscious of
    the several members--This group situation offers opportunity
    to secure relative and societal background against which the
    individual may view in impersonal perspective his habitual
    arbitrary and personal evaluations--According to the group
    or relative conception the causative element of the neurosis
    is societal or phyletic and correction must proceed upon a
    societal or phyletic basis.

  Chapter X                                                          238

    ULTIMATE RESOLUTION OF THE SOCIETAL NEUROSIS IN ITS PERSONAL
    IMPLICATION

    Demand for wider concept of organized consciousness of man
    in order to replace disintegrating structures of present
    social system--Need to dispel illusion of mental oppositeness
    and the restraints of an alternative system of morality
    which aims merely to establish temporary balance between
    its opposites--Experimental basis for group conception here
    formulated in practical experience of a few students--As the
    societal and the individual are organically one in mode, the
    unification of the individual is a step toward the unification
    of the societal consciousness--Organismic (societal) group
    differentiated from collective (social) cluster--The period
    of man’s substitutive image-production first interrupted by
    Darwin’s theory of evolution and further threatened by Freud’s
    theory of the evolutionary processes of the unconscious--The
    social basis of consciousness, however inadequately formulated,
    invites an analytic approach to social or mass reactions,
    exemplified in our national, political, industrial and
    religious life.

  Index                                                              253




PREFACE


I do not know whether I can make clear in what manner the conception
embodied in the following pages first arose. Conceptions derived from
data of reason and observation necessarily proceed from a mental basis.
Scientific and philosophical treatises are the outcome primarily of
scientific or philosophical ideas. With both inductive and deductive
methods of reasoning the conclusions that flow from the assumptions are
our accepted basis of procedure. With the method of the present study,
however, we are upon other ground, for the inception of this work was
in no such wise; and yet to say that it is based upon no conceptual
premise would, of course, not be true. The difference is that what
follows here has been the outgrowth of events that were prior to and
independent of any conceptual formulation of them. Biological necessity
preceded and argument followed after. My meaning may for the moment
be best understood when it is considered that these events are the
processes of personal experience inseparable from the sequences here
embodied. While this is not the place for detailing personal history,
the presentation of a thesis as intimate as this would not be complete
without some concrete account of its origin.

Having years ago been “analyzed” in preparation for my work in
psychopathology, I had been for years duly “analyzing” others. It
unexpectedly happened one day, however, that while I was interpreting a
dream of a student-assistant, he made bold to challenge the honesty of
my analytic position, insisting that, as far as he was concerned, the
test of my sincerity would be met only when I should myself be willing
to accept from him the same analytic exactions I was now imposing
upon others. As may be readily judged, such a proposition seemed to me
nothing short of absurd. Had I not been “analyzed”? Needless to say
I had heard this proposal from patients many times before, but while
my reaction to the suggestion in the present instance was chiefly
one of amusement, my pride was not a little piqued at the intimation
it conveyed. So with the thought that in the interest of experiment
it could at least do no harm to humour for a time the waywardness of
inexperience, I conceded the arrangement.

Not many weeks after I had taken the patient’s chair and yielded him
mine I realized that a situation to which I had agreed with more or
less levity had assumed an aspect of the profoundest seriousness. My
“resistances” to my self-appointed analyst, far from being negligible,
were plainly insuperable, but there was now no turning back. The
analysis proceeded on its course from day to day and with it my
resistances took tighter hold upon me. The agreement to which I had
voluntarily lent myself was becoming painful beyond words. Whatever
empirical interest the situation may have held for me at the outset was
now wholly subordinated to the indignation and pain of the position to
which I had been brought.

It is possible to indicate only in their broadest lines the progressive
events of these trying months. I need hardly record the growing
sense of self-limitation and defeat that went hand in hand with this
daily advancing personal challenge, nor the corresponding efforts
of concealment in unconscious symbolizations and distortions on my
part. What calls for more vital emphasis, however, is the fact that
along with the deepening, if reluctant, realization of my intolerance
of self-defeat, there came gradually to me the realization that
my analyst, in changing places with me, had merely shifted to the
authoritarian vantage-ground I had myself relinquished and that the
situation had remained essentially unaltered still.

This was significant. It marked at once the opening of wholly new
vistas of experience. In the light of its discovery I began to sense
for the first time what had all along underlain my own analysis and
what, as I now see it, really underlies every analysis. I began to see
that the student before me, notwithstanding his undoubted sincerity of
purpose, presented a no less personal and proprietary attitude toward
me than I had held toward him and that all that had been needed was the
authoritarian background to bring this attitude to expression. With
the consciousness of this condition I saw what has been for me the
crucial revelation of the many years of my analytic work--that, in its
individualistic application, the attitude of the psychoanalyst and the
attitude of the authoritarian are inseparable.

As from day to day this realization came more closely home to me, and
with it the growing acceptance of the limitation and one-sidedness
of the personalistic critique in psychoanalysis, my personal
self-vindication and resistances began in the same measure to abate.
At the same time the analyst too, Mr. Clarence Shields, came at
last into a position to sense the personalism and resistance that
had unconsciously all along actuated his own reaction. From now
forward the direction of the inquiry was completely altered. The
analysis henceforth consisted in the reciprocal effort of each of
us to recognize within himself his attitude of authoritarianism and
autocracy toward the other. With this automatic relinquishment of the
personalistic or private basis and its replacement by a more inclusive
attitude toward the problems of human consciousness, there has been not
alone for myself but also for students and patients a gradual clearing
of our entire analytic horizon.

It will later become clearer how this newer formulation of
psychoanalysis on the wider basis of its more inclusive impersonal
meaning has occurred entirely apart from the commonly predicable
processes of logic. Only the accidental circumstance of a student’s
protest against my own personal bias, and my subsequent observation of
an identical personalism in himself, as empirically disclosed upon
our interchanging places, are answerable for the altered insight into
psychoanalysis that the recent years have afforded me--an insight
which the investigations of the small group of students working along
analytic lines identical with my own have more and more substantiated.
It was due, then, entirely to this unexpected turn of the tables, which
placed me in the rôle of the patient and the patient in the analytic
rôle, that I was fortuitously launched into six years of social
experimentation upon the discrepancies of an individualistic analysis.
If the outcome of the process has been the retraction of my earlier
analytic outlook, it has not been the expression of any personal acumen
or distinctive asset on my part.

The chance eventuality I have mentioned is alone responsible for
enforcing the relinquishment of my habitual personalistic basis in
psychoanalysis and bringing me to feel the need of a more comprehensive
interpretation of the unconscious. Coming to sense, through a wider
recognition of the unconscious, the correspondingly larger meaning
of the consciousness of man, I have come to feel the need of its
more adequate interpretation in such an organismic view as I have
here attempted to outline under the theme of “The Social Basis of
Consciousness.”

I cannot consistently cite authoritative reference in support of
this work. There is none. It is sponsored alone in the spirit of
common endeavour actuating the group of students who have united in
its common realization. But if I am loath to shift to others the
responsibility for my own venturesomeness, I need not forgo the
pleasure of acknowledging--as I do with whole-heartedness--the impetus
that was given me in the beginning of my psychoanalytic work through
the sympathy and encouragement of Dr. Adolf Meyer.

                                                       TRIGANT BURROW.

    The Tuscany,
  Baltimore, Maryland.




THE SOCIAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS




INTRODUCTION


After sixteen years devoted to psychoanalytic work based on the
principles of Freud, I have come to a position which differs so
essentially from the followers of Freud as well as from his dissenters,
that I am impelled to set down some account of the development through
which my conceptions have passed, and to state as clearly as I can the
position to which they have led.

The conceptions which Freud has brought to the study of abnormal
and individual psychology have been of incalculable significance in
aiding us to understand the causes and mechanisms underlying mental
disharmonies. The personalistic basis, however, on which psychoanalysis
rests has not in my experience proved sufficiently broad to meet the
demands of a more inclusive societal psychology in its application
to the needs of human life. While, in reconstructing the mechanics
of the unconscious, psychoanalysis has given the impetus to a truer
comprehension of the many distorted expressions of individual
mentation, it has not as yet really uncovered the essential meaning
of our human problems as they touch the consciousness of man in its
organic reality.

To speak, however, of the organic reality of life is to enter upon
a new universe of consciousness. It is to acquire a wholly altered
concept of the inherent consciousness of man. This concept is not one
that is interpretable upon our accustomed individualistic basis. As its
envisagement is societal, its realization must necessarily be societal
also.

To-day it is not possible to contemplate the significance of
psychoanalysis without realizing the arbitrarily constricted point
of view that has come to characterize the popularizations of
psychoanalysis in their various phases. Psychoanalysis possesses
as yet no specific definition. Personalistic in conception, it is
personalistically interpreted, and its variations are to-day as
whimsical as they are many. By one process of handling, psychoanalysis
has become closely allied with Mysticism and New Thought, by another
with propagandist measures for scientific birth-control, by a third
with an authenticated programme of sexual licence, and with all it
is but a new form of application of the old programme of palliative
medication.

If, however, the essential truth of Freudian psychology, like all vital
scientific movements, has been attended by personalistic misconception
and even by the cruder aims of individual exploitation, it has been
equally attended by a genuine scientific concurrence of spirit such
as alone animates the disinterested conscience of the laboratory
investigator. In the midst of the cheap and shifting divagations of a
day, there have remained the sounder interpretations of at least a few
outstanding investigators. While neither Freudian nor anti-Freudian,
there are those to whom I, as well as others, owe the inspiration of
those more thoughtful evaluations that are based upon a steadfast
fidelity to the inclusive spirit of an evolutionary interpretation
of human pathology, sociological as well as biological. It is these
few students who, I feel, will welcome an interpretation of our human
processes that offers a more inclusive, organic comprehension of our
mental life.

But before undertaking the study of the organic psychology of man, it
will be necessary first to establish a position that is based upon
an organismic[1] or societal viewpoint as contrasted with a position
based upon a viewpoint that is systematized and personal. Many years of
psychoanalytic practice have led me to the conviction that the basis of
Freud’s psychology is inadequate to render completely conscious those
disorders of the personality the essential meaning of which is their
unconsciousness. The following essay, therefore, is an attempt to offer
a more adequate concept of the essential consciousness of man than I
feel has been attained through the interpretations of the unconscious
patterns embodied in the present system of psychoanalysis. I have come
to feel that what we have called analysis in the sense of our present
personalistic systems is just another application of the method of
suggestion, and that with us analysts, as with others, the method
involves a situation in which we are as truly the unconscious dupes of
the suggestive process we employ as are the unconscious subjects upon
whom we employ it.

After all, it is the fallacy of personalism and of differentiation in
our human relations which is the essential element in our unconscious
agencies of suggestion, and I cannot doubt that this same fallacy
underlies no less the constructions upon which we rest our analytic
procedure. In the work of psychoanalysis as in our human endeavours
everywhere, there enters unavoidably the personal bias that is
inseparable from the position of observation concomitant to the
observer. It is to abrogate this prejudice of personal partisanship and
differentiation besetting the intrinsic system of psychoanalysis as
well as of our private dogmatizations elsewhere, that I have undertaken
the investigations of which this study is in part the outcome.

With the growth of my experience in psychoanalysis, the factor that
has exerted the deepest influence in altering my outlook upon the
problems of the neuroses as upon the processes of life generally has
been the gradual, if reluctant, elimination of the personal equation
in relation to those problems. By the personal equation I mean the
unconscious and arbitrary tendency within us all to adopt _a personally
systematized mental attitude_ toward life in substitution for the
physiological reality of life itself. The technical procedure of Freud
necessarily rests upon this extrinsic mental attitude, whereas in
the work of my students and myself during the past several years our
position has tended increasingly toward the more inclusive fulfilment
of the personality as a whole. Only in an inclusive analysis are our
affects experienced upon a basis that is common and organic. Accidental
diversity cannot issue out of organic unity. When the elements of
consciousness will be truly unified, an association of conscious
personalities will be unified also. The reason why there are to-day as
many systems of psychoanalysis as there are psychoanalysts, is that
our assumed principle of conscious unity is in reality but a personal
principle of differentiation and unconsciousness.

Let me say at once, however, to anyone who may have lacked the
opportunity or the candour to verify within himself the essential
objective findings of Freud, and who is disposed to read into this
thesis a vindication of his personal reaction against Freud’s
formulations, that he will find this study in nowise adapted to
assuage his sense of outrage to injured sensibilities. Whatever may
be the value of this work, in the spirit of its presentation it is
in no sense a personal discrimination against the teaching of Freud
but rather it is the acknowledged outgrowth of that teaching. If in
our widened outlook we have outgrown the personal interpretations of
psychoanalysis, there is due our full acknowledgment that it is to
those interpretations that our position owes its rise. Far, then,
from representing an antagonistic exclusion of Freud’s theory of the
unconscious, our position embodies the wider inclusion of it in what
I feel is its more comprehensive interpretation on the basis of a
societal concept of consciousness.

In psychoanalysis as in the social systems amid which, unconsciously,
we are continually moving, we tend to gravitate toward an assumed
static centre or toward a so-called personal cause that is coincident
with our assumption of an absolute universe of consciousness. This
gravitation toward a personal centre of consciousness embodies, in
reality, a system that represents but the unconscious projection of
our own ego. We substitute this delusion of an artificial world of
causality for the reality of a universe of spontaneous sequence, not
realizing that we ourselves are the subjective expression of the same
organic sequence which we observe objectively in the world about
us. When we have learned to accept inherent sequence as organically
necessary, we shall no longer enforce unconscious causality as
presumably inevitable.

It is this very general fallacy of personal sponsorship which
constitutes the intricate disguise of our social unconscious and which
in our personalistic outlook we have not yet begun to grasp. Ourselves
unwitting participants in this illusion of personal determinism, we
have not yet begun to compass the _system of unconsciousness_ that
lurks beneath its gratuitous assumption of personal agency.

With a view to the analysis and replacement of this absolute or
self-determined attitude among us I have here offered what I conceive
to be the more universal and encompassing interpretation of the common
and organic consciousness of man. As, however, the field of Organic
Psychology has yet to take a recognized place among us, and as it is
a conception that is circumscribed only by the limits of life itself,
naturally this initial step toward its establishment offers but a
tentative view as to its real scope and meaning. Representing scarcely
more than a preliminary outline, this work will be seen to embody
but the merest syllabus in relation to further works based upon an
organismic theory of consciousness, that doubtless will gradually
be contributed to the increase of our understanding of life, both
individual and social. In its present form the thesis here developed
was first outlined in 1923.




PART I

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES




CHAPTER I

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND IN LIFE


Now that the excitement following the inundation of psychoanalysis
has died down and the clinical territories most affected have been
once more built up and restocked, it is interesting to witness the
changes wrought in different quarters as a result of the general
havoc to habitual prepossessions. As we stand amid the debris of past
conceptions there is no question but that the sudden descent upon us of
Freud’s postulates has destroyed many old landmarks that shall not be
restored and that it has brought in a wealth of new material that has
altered no little the configuration of the old.

As I happen to have been of those who were carried in upon the current
of the general onsweep of new interpretations ushered in by Freud, my
experience forms the record of a reaction to that movement that is
internal because it is from the vantage-ground of a participant in
it. Many of these interpretations are of epoch-making significance in
their approach to mental disharmonies, but many, being immature and
unsound, only obstruct the passage that psychoanalysis has contributed
so splendidly to open. And so my position may be of interest to others
who, like myself, have earnestly tried to bring order and a permanent
coherence out of the large mass of conceptions that cluster about
Freud’s dynamic idea.

The theory of psychoanalysis rests on the conception that nervous
disorders are the substitutive manifestation of a repressed sexual
life; its basic position is that this substitutive factor is
responsible for neurotic processes and that it is the sexual impulse
for which recourse is sought in the process of substitution. This
position of psychoanalysis is, in its essential significance, now
generally accepted--the position, namely, which affirms the factor of
replacement as the essential account of nervous manifestations and
assumes the urge of the sexual instinct as the element replaced.

While, with other psychoanalysts, I am in full accord with this thesis,
my finding in regard to the relation of these two propositions to one
another is so entirely at variance with the prevailing psychoanalytic
view, and alters so fundamentally for me the ultimate interpretation
of psychoanalysis in its bearing upon the problems of consciousness,
that I shall make clearer the ideas expressed in this work if, at the
outset, I may state briefly in what manner my interpretation of this
relation differs from the accepted conception.

The difference lies in the fact that I do not regard this replacement
as _primarily_ a replacement for sexuality as we now know it. On the
contrary, sexuality, as manifested to-day amid the sophistications
of civilization, is itself a replacement for the organic unity of
personality arising naturally from the harmony of function that
pertains biologically to the primary infant psyche. This original mode
I have referred to in a previous work as the preconscious, and this
preconscious mode[2] I regard as the matrix of the mental life. The
spontaneous process of the organism’s unhindered growth through the
gradual development of experience or awareness from this unitary mode
as a basis is, in my interpretation, the meaning of consciousness.
The whole meaning of sexuality on the other hand is substitution,
compensation, repression. In a word, sexuality, as it has come to exist
socially to-day, is identical with the unconscious, while a unification
of personality is alone to be found through eliminating the recourses
of substitution and sexuality and thus reuniting the elements of the
conscious and organic modes now kept asunder through the interposition
of the unconscious.

Hence the modern substitutions existing under the name of sexuality,
whether repressed or indulged, are but a symptom of this denial of
man’s organic affective life. Sexuality, as it now exists, is not only
utterly unrelated to sex but it is intrinsically exclusive of sex. Sex
is life. It is life in its deepest significance. Sex is the spontaneous
expression of a natural hunger. In the instinct of sex there is felt a
yearning from the depths of man’s organism for mating and reproduction,
while sexuality is the personal coveting of momentary satisfaction in
mere superficial sensation. By sexuality, then, I mean something very
different from sex. I mean the restless, obsessive, over-stimulated
quest for temporary self-gratification that everywhere masquerades as
sex and is everywhere substituted for the strong, simple, quiet flow
of feeling that unites the organic and the conscious life in a single
stream and is the expression of personality in its native inherency.

With this altered conception other modifications have followed
which necessarily entail a distinct departure from certain accepted
psychoanalytic formulations. The organic denial and the restless
compensations and substitutions comprising the unconscious are, in
essence, the psychology of the mental reaction-average known as
normality. The popular analytic view places a premium upon this
manifestation of the collective unconscious and assigns the criterion
of normality as the desired goal of adaptation for the neurotically
repressed personality.

I cannot accept this view. For an analysis of the social unconscious
shows that the collective reaction embodied in the adaptations commonly
accepted as normal betrays a tendency to repression and replacement
that is no less an indication of disease-process than is the reaction
presented in the individual neurosis. Indeed, from the point of view of
constructive consciousness and health, our so-called normality is, of
the two, the less progressive type of reaction. In truth, normality,
in evading the issues of the unconscious, envisages less the processes
of growth and a larger consciousness than the neurotic type of
reaction, which, however blind its motivation, at least comes to grips
with the actualities of the unconscious.

It is the hall-mark of normality that, suspecting nothing, it takes
itself completely for granted. In the spirit of true conformity, it
accepts its expressions of the vicarious at their face value and
assumes the burden of its self-inflicted compensations with entire
complacency. The neurotic, on the other hand, at least senses the
inherent discrepancy in his life. He at least demurs in so far as to
withhold assent from the mass-compromise embodied in the substitutions
and connivances of the social unconscious. In a word, it is the
distinction of the neurotic personality that he is at least consciously
and confessedly “nervous.”

This, as far as I can see, is the chief distinction between the
condition represented in normal adaptations and that represented in
the neurosis. The distinction lies merely in the greater weight of
numbers. Normality, in its numerical strength, concedes acceptance to
the average-reaction and so yields it right of way. In normality the
unconscious carries the day, while in the neurosis it is pushed to the
wall. The distinction psychologically lies in the successful compromise
of the one as contrasted with the enforced doubt and self-questioning
of the other. On the one hand there is the compact security of the
social polity; on the other, there is the more sensitive isolation and
uncertainty of the individual unit.

From the point of view of life, therefore, many of our normal reactions
are psychologically as truly a manifestation of the distorted and
substitutive as are those more isolated manifestations we commonly
stigmatize as neurotic disharmonies. I cannot see but that the
element of the repressed and substitutive on which is based Freud’s
theory of the neuroses is an element that underlies the expression
of consciousness in all phases of its manifestation and that hence
underlies also the phase represented in normality. In brief, normality
too is nervous. Normality too, since it is actuated no less from
motives of the ulterior and vicarious, even though it supposedly
represents the criterion of adult consciousness, is no less an
expression of the distorted and symbolic. This distortion is to be seen
upon every hand in the restless greed and obsessive self-seeking that
underlie the national, industrial, political, social and religious
possessivism and competition which are the typical psychology of
the normal mind, notwithstanding its plausible exterior of human
progress and universal goodwill. Universality and goodwill are not
there. These are but the manifest symptoms embodied by the social
personality after it has undergone the distortion represented in the
substitutive reactions characteristic of the social neurosis, that is,
after it has been subjected to the mechanism of diplomatic repression
and modification. What is there, in reality, is the will-to-self and
the particular aim which best serves the narcistic advantages of the
individuals comprising the social unit in question. The mechanism is
identical with that which underlies the individual neurosis, namely,
the covert aim toward the satisfactions of self which constitute
unconsciousness.

Normality too, then, is neurotic. Normality too has its repressions and
its substitutions, its secret symbols and equivocations. The difference
is that as normality possesses the warrant of the institutionalized
and current, it enjoys the protection of the consensus. And just
as the neurotic fails to comprehend the meaning of this vicarious
manifestation in its individual expression within himself and is a
prey to the inscrutable symptoms in which his organism finds its
compensations, so we, who are accounted normal, as little suspect the
meaning of this same symptomatology existing in its social expression
within ourselves. The neurotic resolutely defends his unconscious
duplicity behind an ingenious charade of unconscious symbolism, and
we no less resolutely defend ours through recourse to an identical
device. But if we will look beyond the narrower confine of the clinic
and face squarely the logical issue of Freud’s thesis, we cannot avoid
the conclusion that it is an indictment of man’s consciousness in its
entirety. Hence normality too must make answer for its complicity in
the unconscious ruse of substitution and evasion which we observe in
its more intense reaction as the introversions of personality presented
in the obviously arrested expression we call neurotic.

If anyone is disposed to question this view, let him consider but
one symptomatic reaction recently manifested throughout the social
organism. Could there be anywhere imagined an unconscious reaction
more wasteful and destructive or one of wider scope or severer
intensity than the symptom-reaction represented by the war that has
recently convulsed the world? Or consider the equally unconscious
expression presented in the tendency to religious emotionalism that has
followed in the wake of this world-war, with the corresponding effort
towards compensation and self-propitiation through recourse to the
sentimental and spiritualistic. Yet all the while the existence and
the significance of the unconscious motives that are latent in the two
extremes of emotional reaction underlying these manifest expressions
have not yet begun to be suspected and reckoned with on any clear,
conscious, analytic basis.

What, then, is the meaning of this tendency to substitution as shown
in the reaction of the social as well as of the individual organism?
If sexuality is the element substituted for, what is the psychology of
this factor called sexuality? What is its meaning? In analyzing the
unconscious of the neurotic personality it has become gradually clearer
to me that the factor underlying and actuating the conflict Freud
describes as repressed sexuality is nothing else than the personal
desire of ascendancy or the lust of acquisition _concomitant with the
organism’s unconscious reversion upon its own image_.[3]

Sexuality, then, is but a larger word for self. Sexuality is the
effort to limit life to the ends of personal aggrandizement. It is
the greed of the self-limited personality to compass the whole, as
contrasted with the societal personality that is encompassed by the
whole. But, since the unconscious is the same under all forms, self
or sexuality, with its pride of possession, its lust of gain, is no
less the unconscious element underlying the psychology of the normal
reaction-average. And precisely as in the individual reaction these
unconscious wishes are manifested only in the disguised symbols and
substitutive equivalents portrayed in neurotic symptoms, so too
in the social organism these egocentric interests antagonistic to
consciousness and growth venture to express themselves only in the
corresponding substitutions of the mass unconscious.

Thus the unconscious represented in the social reaction we call
normality is no whit different from the unconscious represented in
the individual reaction observable as the neurosis. We are habitually
deceived by the give-and-take policy of normal adaptation with its
secret covenant of good manners and outward forms. But the apparent
difference between the social and the individual neurosis consists
merely in the fact that the poignancy of the conflict underlying the
symptomatology of the social personality is largely mitigated and
condoned by reason of the wider numerical distribution of the social
organism and the consequent freer dissemination of the elements
involved.

But, though of wider distribution, there underlies the expressions of
normality no less of conflict and repression than exists in the acuter
expression seen in the individual neurosis. In the personality of the
more sensitive or feeling type we think of as neurotic, this tendency
to self-acquisitiveness or sexuality and its organic incompatibility
with the physiological inherency of life become, as it were, stalled
and impacted within him; while in the social organism the discrepancy
of personality, occasioned by its sexuality or pride of ascendancy,
apparently entails no such organic blocking as that occurring in the
individual. But the pain and impaction are present nevertheless, and
are betrayed no less in the recourse to the substitutive and symbolic
manifestations, characteristic of our prevalent social hysterias, not
to mention the more violent disorders that crash upon the world in the
reactions of political and industrial dissension and in the fiercer
paroxysms of war.

Such is the meaning of our so-called normality. To a degree that is
quite unsuspected by us its psychology is unconsciousness, and the
psychology of unconsciousness is the psychology of the self-image
secretly worshipped under the habitual guises of symbolism and
replacement. It is time we should recognize that this recourse to
the vicarious image is the psychology of many of the reactions of
the normal as well as of the neurotic, that in ourselves, no less
than in the neurotic, there is the putting forward of that which
_stands for_--the exploitation, under countless different aspects, of
that which may be adroitly put _instead of_ rather than the simple
acceptance of that which _is_.

Part of the purpose of the present study, however, is to try to bring
into clearer light a substitutive reaction that is much nearer home. As
psychoanalysts we need to take into account a distortive process that
has a much closer bearing upon ourselves and our responsibility toward
the problems of our common social consciousness. For, of all the forms
of substitution to which normality has recourse, the form that seems
to me of deepest significance for us and that presents the most vital
need of analysis and understanding within ourselves, is the vicarious
expression growing out of the tendency to an extrinsic approach to
the problems of consciousness that has come to be embodied in the
formulated _system_ of psychoanalysis.

In the whole symptomatology of normality with its social expression
of the vicarious there is no symptom-complex that is of greater
significance than that embodied in the attempt to apply to the reality
of human life the _system_ of human life offered in psychoanalysis as
it is to-day interpreted and applied. For a system of psychoanalysis is
itself but a substitution for life, a theory of life in place of life
itself. The theory of psychoanalysis sets out with a premise; life does
not. Psychoanalysis offers a solution; life is its own solution.

It is not theory as theory at which I demur; it is theory as
application to the needs of human growth. From the point of view of the
theory of psychoanalysis this therapeutic recourse in the treatment of
nervous disorders seems to me completely adequate and true; but from
the point of view of life I have come to regard the application of the
system or theory of psychoanalysis to the problems of individual needs
as an utterly futile procedure. I have come to feel that what is here
of value in the text-book is utterly worthless in our daily relation to
human personality.

I would not, of course, be understood as repudiating theory as such.
Seen clearly as the extrinsic expression it is, theory undoubtedly
has its place, but its place is not in the earnest relationship of
one human being to another such as obtains in the confidence and
communication offered in the actuality of psychoanalysis. It has
not yet been recognized, however, that we who are psychoanalysts
are ourselves theorists, that we also are very largely misled by an
unconscious that is social, that we too are neurotic, in so far as
every expression but that of life in its native simplicity is neurotic.
Our disharmony, however, is a phase of that widely diffused neurosis
that exists under the prevailing social consensus represented in the
normal adaptation.[4]

And so, as I now see it, there is no more subtle form of substitution
or one that is more successful in its capacity to evade the censor of
consciousness and obtain the stamp of genuineness than the symptom
represented in the _theory_ of the reactions of human beings as a
replacement for the reality of these reactions in life itself. Personal
experience compels me to concede that it is such a symptom that is
comprised in the theory of psychoanalysis as it is widely operative in
the consultation rooms of psychoanalysts to-day.

We have assumed that, in envisaging the unconscious, psychoanalysis
presupposes a more inclusive position than is generally characteristic
of the theoretical or systematized clinician. But it is a far-reaching
commentary upon the analyst’s capacity of discrimination that he still
presumes to analyze another on the basis of a system or theory, as
though a neurosis which is an essentially subjective condition were
of the nature of an objective bodily lesion. A dissociation within
the personality may find its analogy in a bodily lesion but never
its understanding. In the field of objective phenomena, theory is
entirely commensurate with its application. After all, the theory of
a mechanism is but the description of the principle of its operation.
In the objective world such an objective description presents no
discrepancy. It is the application of the objective method to an
objective principle. The theory of the hydraulic press is perfectly
consistent with its application. Between theory and application there
is here complete conjunction. No disparate element intervenes to mar
the transition from the descriptive to the practical.

So too with the theory of psychoanalysis as long as it pertains to the
objective viewpoint of the text-book. But in the subjective sphere
a totally different situation is presented. In dealing with life in
its actuality, we are not dealing with the descriptive and objective.
Human life is subjective. It is something experienced, something felt.
Life is not theoretical; it is actual. It is not descriptive; it is
dynamic. Human life _is_; it is not a _theory_ of what is. Life, as
it is felt, is our ultimate subjective actuality. Subjectivity or
intrinsic feeling is the very basis of life. As such, feeling is life’s
reality and no theory of feeling is an adequate substitute for this
reality. And so the objective theory of psychoanalysis or the objective
theory of the motives of human life is wholly inapplicable to the
subjective experience or to the actuality of human life as it is felt
in individual personality.

We have not begun to reckon in the least understandingly with the
nature of the subjective as contrasted with the objective sphere
of life. We are, in fact, quite naïve in our attitude toward the
whole subjective field, preferring to adopt toward it either a
mood of beatific reverence and mysticism, in which we conjure
unwarranted images of “psychic phenomena” that are allied with man’s
pseudo-religious vagaries, or we adopt a pseudo-scientific attitude
which repudiates as nonexistent or regards as unworthy of serious
thought any phenomena that do not lend themselves to objective
observation. Neither position seems to me tenable. We may dismiss
at once the attitude of the occultists, for mysticism entertains
no argument. But there is the need to consider very seriously the
subjective field of scientific reasoning and to keep clearly before
us the distinctive and impassable interval between the subjective and
objective domains of scientific inquiry.

It is most true that objective observation is the sole method whereby
we may obtain knowledge concerning the phenomenal world. This is true
whether the knowledge concern substances themselves or the manner of
their interaction. But we forget that knowledge thus gained is always
knowledge _concerning_. If I consider any object--a book, a flower,
or a stone--all that my knowledge will ever yield me is restricted to
the attributes that pertain to the substance in hand. I observe that
the stone is smooth, hard, ovoid. Submitting it to certain physical
and chemical tests I learn still further about its qualities, and so,
little by little, bring myself into ever closer touch with the object
in question. But always my data furnish only _closer touch with_. The
essential matter informing the substance we recognize as stone remains
as inaccessible at the conclusion of an ultimate analysis as in the
beginning. It is still knowledge _concerning_ and my facts, however
widely accumulated, are but attributive. Thus the _essential_ nature
of the objects about us is not to be approached by a method that is
_unessential_ or attributive.

The same circumstance confronts us in dealing with the phenomenal
world of our own experience. Here too we proceed upon the method of
objective inquiry--a perfectly legitimate field of “observation.”
We posit and collate all manner of phenomena and note no end of
“reactions.” But always we are restricted to a knowledge _concerning_,
to data _in regard to_. In brief, we remain apart from--are ever
outside of the reaction observed. Not that we may hold the attitude
of the philosophers and assume the “existence” of a “metaphysical
essence” that is inaccessible to us. We need rather to recognize
that the alleged essence is merely that organic condition of matter
with which our conscious processes are not organically continuous.
There are, however, organic conditions or processes with which our
consciousness is continuous--namely, the organic processes occurring
within our own bodies and registering themselves within us as feeling.
It is this continuity registered within us as feeling that is an
essentially subjective state of mind and that must not be confused with
the objective state of mind that merely registers impressions of the
observable action or outer condition of such feeling processes. This
subjective continuity is organic and inherent. True, it is possible
through a shunting of interest or attention (repression or misplaced
affect) to divert the course of our organic processes from their
natural perception in consciousness. But this artificial situation
through which we divert organic process from conscious participation
and acknowledgment is the condition of unconsciousness.

My whole contention is precisely this: we are constantly attempting to
deal objectively or attributively with experiences that are subjective
and essential. We fail to understand that our knowledge _about_ our
feelings is but attributive, that it brings us no nearer the feelings
themselves; that our feelings are essential, physiological and that
we may no more know our essential feelings through _observation_ of
their _attributes_ than we may reach the essence of any object about us
through a knowledge of _its_ attributes.

The basis of this essay is precisely the recognition of this impossible
breach between the condition of consciousness produced through a
knowledge _about_ feeling and the condition of consciousness that is
the feeling itself, between the state of mind that is _commentative_
and the state of mind that is _functioning_. The former is objective,
the latter is subjective. The failure of our psychological methods to
recognize this intrinsic distinction is to my mind the failure of our
entire approach to the problems of mental and social disharmony. It is
this unwitting substitution of the _theory_ of human feelings for the
unannotated experience of the feelings themselves as recorded in our
interactive functioning as human beings that is the impossibility of
our present “method” of psychoanalysis.

This position is for me an all-important one. Upon the acceptance
or rejection of it, I believe, depends the growth or the decline of
psychoanalysis as an agency of release for the intrinsic needs of the
neurotic personality. To-day, under the impetus of psychoanalysis in
its theoretical or vicarious form, we are carrying theory to the point
of absurdity. There is now, for example, the psychoanalytic theory of
the nursery. Anxious young mothers are running about looking for texts
which will serve them as guides in the love of their children. They are
diligently searching upon every hand for the latest approved theory
of maternal love. And in response to the demand the popular literature
is supplying them with full details. But there are no librettos of the
nursery. Baedekers to motherhood are not to be had. The motherhood that
is true is a subjective relationship, and it is only subjectively that
it can be felt and understood.

I shall not forget the experience told me by a patient whose mother,
actuated by the theory of motherhood in its highest “scientific”
interpretation, undertook to enlighten her upon the significance of
sex. The incident left the most painful impression upon her. The
mother, having gathered courage for the performance of her maternal
duty, delivered her errand with a punctiliousness which from the point
of view of technique was irreproachable. She spoke out of the strictest
regard for the theory of motherhood. But unfortunately her theory left
out of account an item that needs to be reckoned with, namely, the
native simplicity of the consciousness of childhood. The woman spoke
out of the theory of a truth, but her child listened with the organic
susceptibility of truth itself. The mother had not accepted within
herself the actual significance of life, and so, in accordance with
the formality of a theory, was vicariously imposing its acceptance
upon her child. But childish perception pierces the veil of pedagogic
finesse. The rigid demeanour of her instructor readily disclosed the
discrepancy between the verbal recital and the utter lack of conscious
acceptance within herself. For the child, now a middle-aged woman, the
moment was an unforgettable one. She had witnessed in her mother an
outrage to organic truth, and the shock of that experience caused a
psychic disunity between mother and child from which there resulted an
introversion of personality that covered half a lifetime. And so, while
the theory of the nursery is from the point of view of theory wholly
irreproachable, it is from the point of view of the nursery wholly
absurd.

A lesson which parents have yet to learn is that the child is closer
to the heart of things than the grown-up--that the consciousness of
childhood stands in a far more truthful relationship to the actuality
of life, as it is, than the consciousness of the conventionalized and
sophisticated adult. For years it has been my feeling that beneath the
conflict of the neurotic personality there is reiterated an urge toward
the expression of this primal inherency of consciousness. To-day, it is
more than ever my view that in the neurotic reaction there is expressed
an inherent plea for the native simplicity and truth of this organic
consciousness. It becomes more and more clear to me that the pain of
these personalities is due solely to the organic discrepancy of an
unconsciousness and indirection within themselves, and that essentially
their urge is to bring themselves again into harmony with the law of
their personality by reuniting the needs of their consciousness with
the needs of their organic life.

As Nietzsche says: “May there not be--a question for
alienists--neuroses of health?”[5] This question for alienists is
indeed a vital one but it is one which, as far as I am aware, has
not as yet even dimly occurred to us. There is nowhere, it may be
noted, a clearer argument for Nietzsche’s hypothesis than Nietzsche’s
own neurosis. Unfortunately, however, alienists are still as little
interested in the positive processes that bespeak the organism’s
conscious health, as physicians in general are interested in the
positive processes that insure the organism’s physical health. But, as
long as the collective social mind remains the collective unconscious
mind, it is not to be expected that we shall approach the unconscious
of the individual, in either its psychic or in its somatic aspect, from
the basis of an inclusive consciousness and health. The question is
often asked whether insanity will ever become curable. The answer can
only be that the insanity of the individual cannot be curable as long
as there exists the insanity of the social mind about him. It is not
humanly possible for the psychiatrist to remedy conditions of mental
disorganization as long as he himself is part of a disorganized social
mind.

If the psychoanalyst, in applying to the lives of his patients a theory
of life, is himself unconsciously resorting to the self-protection
of the substitutive and symbolic; if the blocked personality of our
patients meets with a blocking in ourselves, with a compromise, a
theory, a something which stands as a _sign for_ rather than that
which _is_--a situation which offers a compromise mechanism identical
with that for which they have sought aid from us--then clearly the
way is not yet open for the release of the conflict within these
personalities. For a patient may be untrammelled only in so far as the
analyst is himself untrammelled.

In taking this attitude I do not make any personal claim for myself.
This position is not one to which I have come through the success of
my work but rather through its failure. For in the measure in which
I have adhered to the dictates of a preconceived normality, in just
that measure has my work defeated itself. Though I have for some time
theoretically disavowed the mental status represented in the normal
reaction, I have tended unconsciously all the while to ally myself with
this standardized brand of unconsciousness and thus, in my own work,
have inclined to hold to a theory of life rather than to its actuality.
Not, then, with the neurotic alone, but with us all, it would seem that
consciousness is mainly employed in efforts of self-protection and
evasion. Truly, consciousness makes cowards of us all. But this is not
consciousness in the sense of life and growth; it is consciousness in
the sense of retention and self. It is not a free consciousness; it is
consciousness with a reservation. It is not true consciousness; it is
unconsciousness.

In accordance with such a mode of consciousness each of us is elbowing
for a place for himself. Each is seeking more territory for his own
expansion. Each of us is an unconscious overlord striving to secure
the supremacy of his own “personality.” Universal and normal as this
reaction is, its tendency is obsessive and ill. I do not believe that
life is aggressive and that growth is concerned for itself. Personality
is impersonality. What is needed is the quiet acceptance of life in its
actuality. In this and this alone lies the opportunity for freedom and
growth.

We hear much to-day of the technique of psychoanalysis. In truth
there is no such thing. It is just another defence mechanism, just
another resistance to the actualities of life. As in all instances
of therapeutic specialization, the technique of psychoanalysis has
become a fetish with us. It has become a veritable complex, a disorder
from which I find patients actually suffering. The situation is quite
ridiculous. The more I think of it, the more I am convinced that
the so-called technique of psychoanalysis is but another hobgoblin
wherewith the unconscious tendency of professionalism with its egoistic
striving for preferment contrives to preserve its own separateness
and distinction. I confess that, in my own unconsciousness, I have
more than once laid stress upon the importance of the analytic
technique. But let us not be misled by what is called the technique of
psychoanalysis. It is but another subterfuge for the reality of life.
A technique of psychoanalysis is no more possible than a technique of
love or of friendship or of motherhood. There is a technique and a
very difficult technique of the _theory_ of psychoanalysis. But that
is quite a different thing. Psychoanalysis itself or, as its name
implies, the loosening or freeing of consciousness is nothing else than
the conscious acceptance of life. As such, it is the exact contrary
of the objective and technical. Life is not a technique. It does
not express itself in terms of technique. Technique is an objective
instrument. Life is a subjective experience. It is a joy or a sorrow,
a disappointment or an aspiration, and it can no more be handled from
the point of view of technique than it can be handled with the scalpel
of the anatomist.[6]

From these and similar reflections I have come to regard the formality
of applying a system of psychoanalysis to the life of an individual
as an actual hindrance rather than as an aid to the true expression
of his personality. It is but an added repression, blocking the very
way it attempts to open. For to meet the unconscious of a patient with
unconsciousness within oneself, is only to answer symbolic substitution
and indirection with the same substitution and indirection in an
altered, more subtle, socially plausible form.

The whole meaning, therefore, of an analysis that is actual and not
theoretical is the realization and acceptance on the part of the
analyst of the utmost unconscious symbolization and distortion within
himself. The analysis of a patient is the analysis of oneself. It
cannot be otherwise. And when I say analysis, I do not mean an analysis
that is a mere unconscious concession to normality--a giving vent
to the egoistic erotism of the individual by diffusing it among the
widely distributed elements of the social personality in the manifold
distortions of sexuality. I mean an analysis of personality in its
widest expression--an analysis through which the individual comes into
the conscious acceptance not only of the repression or distortion that
is personal and that is comprised within the individual introversion
we know as the neurosis, but of the distortion or substitution of
personality that is social and that constitutes the confederacy of
unconsciousness popularly endorsed as normality.

The prime requisite for clear, free, untrammelled work in the
analysis of human personality is the unqualified rejection of the
unconscious compromise embodied in the social reaction of normality.
The analyst who is not himself capitulating to the concession of the
social unconscious will repudiate the attitude of the psychotherapist
whose criterion is the restoration of his patient to a condition
of normality, and will take his stand against any recourse that is
based upon a programme of compromise and habituation. He will see
that normality is merely unconsciousness on a co-operative basis and
he will not be deceived by its insidious offers. It is only through
such an attitude of complete freedom within oneself that it is
possible to offer the opportunity of freedom to the personality of
the neurotic patient, the very heart of whose disharmony lies in an
inner repugnance, however bewildered and confused, to the untruth of
the social unconscious comprising his milieu. Viewed analytically,
normality is but the self-flattery through which we pretend we are not
unconscious. By so pretending, however, we are only furthering our
tendency to deeper unconsciousness.

As long as there is self-protection, there is self-limitation; as long
as there is self-limitation, we are necessarily setting a limitation
to the possibility of growth and consciousness in others. Only through
rejecting such protection may we come to accept the testimony of the
unconscious within ourselves. Otherwise, we ourselves become the
inhibitors rather than the liberators of consciousness; we who are
psychoanalysts become mere guardians of disease-processes instead of
the willing repositories of these unconscious factors, as they exist
in others, through our understanding and acceptance of these processes
as they exist within ourselves. For consciousness grows upon the
medium of consciousness. It cannot be nourished upon an extraneous
soil. Theories of consciousness are extraneous. In the presence of
the actuality of life, theories of life become mere intellectual
snobbery. Being wise, sophisticated and remote, they are inadequate
to meet life in its native simplicity. Bearing the testimonials of
authority, the credentials of office, they do not come low enough.
These insignia of rank only tend to intimidate personality in its
natural simplicity. What is needed for the release of the neurotic
individual is the personality who imposes nothing of his own and thus
allows the completest opportunity for the unfolding of the repressed
and introverted personality of others.

As psychoanalysis develops and our understanding deepens, it will be
seen that it is not scientific equipment alone but also directness
of outlook that make the psychoanalyst. It will be seen that the
personalities who are adapted to an understanding of the needs of
human life will not necessarily occupy places of importance amid the
distractions of affairs, but that their place may be an unobtrusive
one in which understanding for understanding’s sake will be their sole
concern. The various rules laid down by medical or other syndicates
with a view to determining what are the literal qualifications for a
psychoanalyst are wholly beside the point.[7] The qualifications for
understanding are not literal. Although we may formulate the most
meticulous of programmes setting forth the requirements of tuition,
it will be found that personality will, in the final count, override
them all. Besides, I cannot think that it is due entirely to the
accidents of chance that the spokesman for the adoption of this or
that recipe as a prerequisite to “sound training” in psychoanalysis
should unfailingly submit a menu that tallies in detail with his own
catalogue of merits. After all, psychoanalysis is a very large name
for a very simple thing. I well know that this statement offers a
delectable morsel to any who are disposed to misinterpret my meaning.
It will be readily regarded as recklessly casting aside as valueless
all the years of my own medical and psychological training. But the
responsibility for such a misinterpretation rests upon those who are
unable to distinguish between the culture that is applied academically
and the academy that is applied culturally. All that I mean is that
whosoever follows the calling of psychoanalysis is merely one who seeks
to understand and accept life as it is without intruding himself or
imposing his view or exerting his authority. Indeed psychoanalysis is
essentially the abrogation of authority. For the psychoanalyst is not
content but receptacle. Lacking method or design he offers nothing, but
is the recipient of all there is of human experience as subjectively
substantiated within himself.

But there enters here a consideration of vital importance and one
that has not yet been adequately reckoned with and understood. If the
psychoanalyst is to be the recipient, there must be those who stand to
him as recipient also. If he is to understand, he must be understood.
If the life of the analyst is to be a reality and not a system, he
himself must in reality participate in the life in which he invites
others to participate. If it is his thesis that human life cannot
subsist alone, that communication is life, that it is the very meaning
of consciousness, neither can he subsist without communication.

And so there need to be in the life of the analyst the personalities
with whom he may share, with whom he may communicate, who accept him
and are accepted by him in turn. For to analyze is to be analyzed, to
understand is to be understood. Needless to say these are conclusions
to which I have not come alone. I could not have. They are the outcome
of my own opportunity of participation and expression, as the need of
communication has come to unfold itself in my own experience.

Clearly, then, we who stand as the promoters of a new and untrammelled
consciousness must look carefully into our own lives to discover
whether we ourselves, as part of the social consciousness, are not
theorists rather than unified personalities actuated solely by the law
of understanding and of growth within ourselves. Clearly, we ourselves
must realize the completely vicarious and repressed element underlying
the expression of unconsciousness embodied in the social unrest of
normality, and, fearlessly repudiating this collective reaction of
substitution and evasion, break completely with the popular policies of
compromise and untruth underlying it. In this course we shall take our
stand for the freedom and clarity of a mode of consciousness that aims
solely toward the growth of self-understanding and communication. For
life is not a system, it is not a technique. Life is simple, and its
course is one of quiet flow. In so far as psychoanalysis is technical,
it is not life. In so far as its aim is normality, it is not free.

The choice is an unequivocal one. It is a choice between expediency
and truth, between fixity and growth. For the habitual or normal
mind whose criterion is expedience the choice is already determined;
but for the personality that is sensitive to the values of life, the
choice of growth is no less inevitable. It is organically so. Hence it
is for each of us to make his choice on which side he will take his
stand--whether, adhering to a theory of life, he will blindly protect
himself against the recognition and acknowledgment of the vicarious
element of normality and compromise within his own unconscious, or
whether he will stand for a mode of consciousness that flings away
every habitual protection and accepts only the conditions of life as
they unfold themselves in the development of his own personality as
well as in that of others. The outlook is really not ambiguous. The
question is whether life will be a theory or system corroborated by the
technical outfit of the consultation room or whether it will be the
deeply fulfilled experience that comprises consciousness in its organic
reality.

The definite biological theory on which this thesis rests implies an
organic or societal continuum as the essential basis of consciousness.
To understand this theory we shall be helped if, in the beginning,
we will seek to replace the more or less arbitrary divergences of
personal outlook with a conception that attempts to stand far enough
removed from this personal mode to contemplate within its more
ample formulation the personal outlook as well. For this purpose we
must discover, as far as possible, our tendency to personalistic
delimitation--a tendency due to the unconscious systematization of the
restricted individual unit--and in this way approach consciousness anew
from the more inclusive basis of its societal meaning.




CHAPTER II

A RELATIVE CONCEPT OF CONSCIOUSNESS--AN ANALYSIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN
ITS ETHNIC ORIGIN


In presenting a psychological discussion that presupposes the altered
basis of the relativists, I am under no illusion as to the wide
disparity between the mathematical conception of the relativists
in regard to the universe and the clinical preoccupations of a
psychopathologist. It is now conceded, however, that the theory
of relativity is not without its revolutionary influence upon our
scientific thought processes generally. And so, although I am not
competent to an appreciation of the theory of relativity in the
objective sense of the physicists, I hope I shall not seem presumptuous
in attempting a discussion of consciousness that demands as its basis a
viewpoint that is analogous to theirs.[8]

As I understand it, the inadequacy of the Newtonian system of astronomy
is its autogenous exclusion of data requisite to a principle which
presupposes a basis of universal applicability. Assuming an unqualified
absolute to reside within the limits of its own circumscribed area, it
posits a principle which fails to take account of factors operating
within the larger constellation wherein its own system is but a
contributory element. So that, in estimating the components requisite
to a more inclusive scale of computation, the Newtonian postulate
omits to reckon with the principle of the time-space element that
is constitutive of the extension intrinsic to itself and that is,
therefore, mathematically indispensable in an encompassment of the
universal and all-inclusive astronomical purview with respect to which
its own system becomes but relative and extrinsic.

Little by little the necessities of a widening outlook have demanded
a gradual broadening of conceptual principles generally. Of late I
have been led to views that appear to warrant the conclusion that, in
the sphere of psychic phenomena no less than in the realm of physics,
a system of absolutism, preclusive of data existing outside its own
autogenously circumscribed principle, wholly dominates our presumably
conscious world. Accordingly, if we are to reckon with consciousness
upon a true and inclusive basis, it is required that the system of
absolutism thus embodied shall give way to a conception of relativity
in the conscious sphere comparable to the principle of relativity in
the physical universe.[9]

I do not see why, in his mental and emotional reactions, man may not so
far free himself from the traditional superstitions of imbued inference
as to recognize at last that, even with respect to conceptions that are
the basis of his own mental operations, there is a difference between
the values that _seem_ and the values that _are_. I do not see why he
may not recognize that processes which he has hitherto regarded as
habitually inevitable are not by any means organically necessary, but
that the two may in fact be essentially contradictory one of the other.
If in the objective world man may ungird himself of the accustomed
limitations of a hitherto accepted Euclidean geometry, may he not
within the sphere of his subjective consciousness also rid himself of
prepossessions which, though they appear to us now as no less basic,
may ultimately prove equally non-essential?

We have recently waged a world-war which, according to the _state of
mind_ of its participants prior to its occurrence, was the admittedly
inevitable recourse, but which, in the opinion of thinking men
subsequent to its enactment, is now equally admitted to have been a
wholly unnecessary eventuality. How then, upon our present basis of
mentation, may we conclude what is an adequate criterion by which
we may determine a dependable process of thinking? If we may know
our states of mind only after we have vented the emotions that first
incited them, of what use is it to know them? If states of mind can
produce calamities that gather their toll of human life by the millions
and we can, by subsequently taking thought, come to regard them as
unnecessary, what must be felt toward states of mind that have produced
such calamities? Surely it is not the part of intelligence to feel
regret of a disaster only after the disaster has befallen. If disaster
need not befall, would it not be wiser to deplore it beforehand and so
avert the disaster? This would seem the logical course, but the truth
is that the logical course is not accessible to man in his present
state of unconsciousness. Man may think logically but he cannot be
warranted to act logically. For, in his present stage of development,
his actions are predominantly under the guidance of his emotions and
his thought can therefore only follow after.

Consciousness is the individual’s acquiescence in sequences that are
determined by the necessities of organic law. Unconsciousness is the
individual’s resistance to these organic processes. As consciousness
is anterior to its own realization, so unconsciousness ever follows
in the wake of its own event. We think to-day only in terms of what
ought to have been yesterday, and the event of to-morrow embodies
again the reaction to the issues of to-day. Thus our actions are
always but the unconscious reflections of the day preceding, and in
our unconsciousness it is only in the aftermath of the morrow that we
interpret the omens of to-day.

If man’s judgment is competent to apprehend the data of events
subsequent to their occurrence, why may it not be equally possible,
through our prior apperception of the mental states leading up to them,
to envisage the same events with the same clarity anteriorly and thus
forestall the useless mistakenness and destruction that now follow
inevitably with their enactment? Surely it is clear that, in continuing
to preserve unaltered this same state of mind whose world-wide
consequences we have just witnessed, we may be, at the present moment,
preparing a similar if not a yet greater catastrophe, the while we
are at the same moment as completely oblivious of it. Indeed, from a
position that is anterior to the emotional inducements to which our
mental states are inevitably subject in our present absolute view, it
will be seen that an unconscious and destructive disposition toward
life is as inseparable from an absence of self-cognizance on the part
of the social mind as the factors of disintegration and unconsciousness
are inseparable within the life-sequences of the individual unit.

In its necessary limitation with respect to the relativity of
consciousness in its universal compass, the constellated system of
processes which at present comprises the sphere of the mental life
will, in my view, ultimately appear analogous to the traditional
system of Newton with respect to the universe of relativity in the
encompassment of objective mathematics. As in the intrinsic principle
of absolutism comprising the Newtonian system of gravitation, so in the
self-determined principle of absolutism, comprising our present system
of psychology, a dimensional factor has been left out of account, the
inclusion of which completely shifts the basis of former calculations
and so distorts our habitual reckonings as to demand the fundamental
reconstruction of accepted values.

But while the principle of relativity comprehended by the objective
formulae of the physicists is mathematically beyond my reach, the
conception of relativity within the subjective life appears to me not
only compellingly clear, but organically necessary. Indeed, in the
absence of this conception of the relativity of consciousness, it is no
longer possible for me to reckon adequately with the processes of the
mental life. For in default of a working basis broad enough to embrace
the dimensional element of the system, individual and social, whereof
we ourselves are a component part, there is lacking the scientific
comprehensiveness requisite to a universal principle of evaluation.

It is worthy of note that between the objective or mathematical
theory of relativity of Einstein and the subjective or organismic
theory of relativity here considered there is to be traced, however
inconclusively, a philosophical parallelism that is significant.[10]
My feeling is, though as yet it is little more than an intimation
with me, that this cosmological parallel between the subjective and
objective spheres of relativity marks a concomitance that is consistent
throughout. I do not see how it could be otherwise since the subjective
and the objective spheres of life, embodying the bipolar aspects of
the phenomenal world, represent but obverse phases of one and the same
universe. The analogy that interests me here, however, has to do with
the feature that is equally the basis of the two modes of relativity,
namely, the feature which entails the abrogation of absolute standards
of evaluation and the recognition of the kinetic factor that is organic
to both. In the objective interpretation of astronomy this factor
comprises the mathematical space-time coefficient of the physicists’
fourth dimension; and in a subjective interpretation of consciousness
it comprises correspondingly the kinetic element that determines the
functional coefficient of the organic life as a whole.

The thought represented in “the organic life as a whole” is, like the
inclusive scheme of the physicists, to be understood only by exclusion,
that is, by exclusion of a point of view that is _not_ organic, or by
exclusion of the absolute system, individual and social, comprising our
present static basis of consciousness. As this organismic conception
of consciousness is relativity itself within the subjective sphere,
its encompassment can no more be apprehended in our present scheme of
psychological evaluation than the relativity of the physicists can be
apprehended on a static Newtonian basis.

Einstein’s theory of relativity is not intelligible on the absolute
basis of the older system of astronomy, of which conception the newer
mathematical theory is, by reason of its wider inclusiveness, the
logical replacement. Likewise, the theory of subjective relativity or
the organismic conception of consciousness cannot be understood on the
basis of the absolute principle resident in the Freudian conception of
the unconscious, of which principle the organismic conception is, by
inclusion, the more encompassing formulation.

Hence this organismic conception of consciousness, subsumed under
the postulate of relativity, will be understood only as we discard
entirely the absolute conception represented in our present system of
psychology. Because of our own absolutistic basis, we do not realize
that the absolutism intrinsic to the dynamic system of our present
individualistic conception of consciousness maintains a position that
is relatively not less static than the older descriptive systems of
consciousness in relation to the dynamic psychology of Freud. The
Freudian system is dynamic in respect to the system it has superseded
but static in respect to the principle by which it must now in turn,
I believe, be superseded, precisely as our own Newtonian system is
dynamic with respect to the older Ptolemaic system of astronomy it has
transcended but static with respect to the mathematical principle of
relativity which now in turn has transcended it.

Of course, the fact that the intrinsic limitation of our astronomical
systematization has led us arbitrarily to regard time and space as
absolute entities, rather than as the functional co-ordinates of
matter, has no immediate bearing whatever beyond the need of adjusting
a quite infinitesimal error in the astronomical reading of certain
minimal deflections. It does not in the least alter the practical
conduct of human affairs. For the grocer and the apothecary our
standards remain undisturbed. So also in the more intimate adaptations
of our human relations, the absolute basis of mensuration that has
actuated our reckonings with respect to the objective world about us
has not for a moment touched our subjective mode or the affective
sphere of our living. But when this artificial basis of self-determined
absolutism operates within the organic sphere of man’s affective life,
wherein is the very centre of his being, there are recorded errors
whose consequences reach to the core of life itself. It is here, in the
absolute system of evaluations pertaining to the affective reactions
of human conduct, that there is needed the correcture in reading
the deflection, both individual and social, that comprises man’s
unconsciousness.

We have yet to learn that it is in the common affects of men that there
resides the basis of their collective biology. Only in the affective
reactions comprising the native, organic continuum of life may we
trace the menstruum of our human consciousness. And so, in approaching
the affective or organic implications entailed through the arbitrary
systematization that is our own absolutism, we are entering upon the
study of the distorted sensations and reactions in which is embodied,
I believe, the essential pathology of consciousness represented in the
neuroses.

In considering the conception of the relativity of consciousness we
shall acquire a clearer insight into the more comprehensive scheme
subsumed under it, if we will begin with an analysis of the rudimentary
processes comprising our personal judgments and consider the elements
into which our primary impressions may be resolved.

Our judgments are formed from the material of our impressions or, as
we say, we reason from observation. This being so, what must be the
substance of our observations and what the nature of the processes
of reason thus derived? To observe is to stand apart from and record
the impressions reflected to us from the object observed. So that upon
consideration our observations are seen to consist of the _reflected
images_ or mental _pictures_ of the world of objects by which we are
surrounded. That is to say, impressions of objects consist of the
aspect or surface which is reflected to us from them and which is thus
mirrored in the reflecting surface of our own perceptions.

But in this very process of observation an unwarranted assumption
has already been posited in advance--the assumption, namely, that
the position intrinsic to the observer is an all-inclusive and
authentic one. Already it presumes a universe of which the onlooker’s
own self-limited position is the basis. It does not account for the
integral component that is the observer’s own organic dimension.
In brief, the very point of view of the observer lays claim to the
prerogative of an absolute cosmogony whereof he is himself the
unconsciously static, self-determined centre. Whatever the point of
view, it is invariably “the point of view” of the observer. So that
in constituting ourselves perceptual foci from which, according to
our self-appointed terms, we look out as from a background upon the
phenomena of life, we have unconsciously become artificially detached
spectators of a merely static _aspect_ of life. This is what I mean
by the autogenous exclusion of data extrinsic to the self-determined
system of which we ourselves are only a part, but which, in the
light of the relativity of consciousness as a whole, is revealed, on
the contrary, as an arbitrary system determined by our own static
absolutism. Regarded from the point of view of relativity, to adopt
such a detached, observational outlook toward life is to view it in the
merely flat, bidimensional plane of the image. It is not to experience
life through participation in the extension of its full-dimensional
actuality.

Upon analysis, then, our world of subjectively tabulated impressions
becomes but an artificial world reflecting the artificial
systematization that is our own detached observation of it. Our
unconsciousness is our failure to realize that bidimensional
reproductions of actuality are not actuality. Our own organisms as well
as the surrounding objects of actuality are elements that are equally
to be included in the organic continuum of our human experience. The
mental pictures comprising our bidimensional _impressions_ of objects,
however adequate as pictures, are not adequate as expressions of
actuality in the sense of the dynamic extension comprising our own
organic inclusion.

Contrary, therefore, to the casual assumption current among us, we
do not apprehend the objects about us as they exist in their cubic
outline, but only in the bidimensional “foreshortening” that is our
own mental or pictorial impression of them. Our so-called objective
apperception of the world of actuality is in fact superficial and
unreal. Our alleged world composed of impressions is pictorial rather
than actual. It is static rather than kinetic. In consequence of the
bidimensional visual plane in which our objective fields are reflected,
it is inevitable that our environmental actuality should appear in
the form of pictures before us. Looking out upon the world from a
bidimensional basis, we can perceive it only in terms of the reflected
image formed upon our own bidimensional mental background. It is due
also, then, to this contributing factor of a flat or reflected visual
image within ourselves that there is registered within ourselves a
flat or reflected mental image of the world about us. For in virtue
of the bidimensional picture in which our impressions are necessarily
reflected, our mental perception of objects is likewise necessarily
pictorial and bidimensional.[11]

Such is the probable ethnological account of this misconstruction
of actuality that underlies our mental world. The significance of
such a pictorial and artificially foreshortened representation of
the objective world and its mental influence in foreshortening the
tridimensions of actuality in general cannot be overstressed. We need
to realize the circumstance of our remote or bidimensional position
of merely mental or impressionistic observers. From this position the
mentally reflected and artificially pictorial outlook with which the
world of solidarity is individually viewed by us represents but the
portrait of life whereof the reality is the inclusiveness of life as
experienced through our subjective continuity as functional elements in
the organic whole. So that while it is most true that we reason from
observation, yet if our observation is imbued with a bidimensional
or superficial bias, then our reason is also influenced by this same
bidimensionally imbued bias. If our observation is not subjectively
inclusive of the objective world about us, in the same measure our
judgments are not inclusive of it.

It is this non-inclusiveness of consciousness that constitutes our
mental systematization. In this perceptual relationship to life, due to
our detached basis of interpretation of it upon grounds of the apparent
aspect rather than of its solid actuality, consists the arbitrary
absolutism of our present system of consciousness. Due to this organic
misconception of consciousness, we habitually prefer the picturesque
semblance of the aspect to the pragmatic inclusiveness of the actual.
This is why we tend to explain life rather than to live it. This is why
the adduced hypothesis of life counts with us more than life itself.
But an account of life that does not include the consciousness that
is our own kinetic function and repudiate the static pictures of life
arbitrarily projected by us does not compass life in the full orb of
its rounded actuality. A principle of life that does not embrace the
principle arising out of the bias of our own self-made systems of
personal absolutism and unconsciousness is not adequate to encompass
life in the rounded sum of its functional inclusiveness. It is needful
to recognize that, in the unconscious absolute underlying the personal
relatedness of each of us to every other, there is involved an organic
_resistance_ or a mutual repulsion among the elements of the societal
personality that forms an impasse to its concerted function. On the
contrary, in the mutual inclusiveness of our individual organisms as
elements within the confluent sum we thus compose, there is embodied
the organic continuum that underlies the societal organism of man as
a whole. It is this homogeneous substrate of man’s consciousness in
its totality that is implied in the principle of the relativity of
consciousness.

If, however, an ethnological account is adequate to explain the
remote, pictorial relation in which we stand with respect to the
world of objective actuality, such an account is not adequate to an
understanding of the pictorial view we have unconsciously come to
assume toward the world of subjective actuality or in relation to the
organisms with which we constitute a common species and with which,
being subjectively akin, we are organically identical. If phylogenetic
theory accounts for the deflections from reality of the reactions of
consciousness in the large, it does not account for the deflections
of consciousness in the particular reactions of the personality that
determine our relations to our individual fellows. Thus far we have
considered this absolute system comprising our personal basis only in
relation to the objective world or to the world of things; we have not
yet considered it subjectively or in relation to the individuals with
whom a common affectivity renders us organically identical. It is only
within the subjective sphere of our affects, representing man’s organic
racial continuum, that this distortion of our outlook is manifested in
its deepest poignancy.

It is, therefore, only in its ontogenetic mode that we may fully
realize the organic deviations within the consciousness of man, due to
his bidimensional and unreal apperception of his fellows, and to his
consequently false inferences resultant upon an artificially remote
and pictorial attitude toward them. It is here alone, I believe, that
is to be traced the philosophy of the deflections observable in the
above-mentioned reaction of personal resistance as it appears not only
in the difform reaction characterizing the isolated personality of
the neurotic individual, but also in the uniform reactions presented
in the _relatively no less deflected group-expressions comprising the
collective personality of the social consensus_. It has become more
and more clear to me that it is this error of our mental refraction,
due to the subjective deflection comprising the bidimensional judgment
of each in assuming a pictorial rather than a real relationship to
others, that is the essence of our resistances. In this surface
reflection, that is the personal attitude of each toward every other
and that embodies the psychology of our resistances, is represented
man’s traditional systematization, both individual and social. For, in
judging or viewing life on the _absolute_ basis of how it appears to
_me_, I automatically render it beholden to my personal interpretation
of it. In my autocratic attitude of onlooker I necessarily repudiate
the inherency of the individual or object looked on. Thus, as the
self-assumed centre of the universe, the individual is completely
detached psychically from the organic actuality of everything within
his observation, and, in his present mental attitude, whatever he
thinks that he knows and feels is unconsciously constrained by the
illusory supremacy of his personal wish. This is the insidious fallacy
of the reflected aspect. This constitutes the personal absolute or
systematization which, in dominating our present mode of consciousness,
completely distorts the universe of reality. It is such a reflective
attitude of personalism and unconsciousness that is our exclusion of
data that lie outside the system intrinsic to ourselves and that may be
included only in the fuller comprehension of an organic relativity.

This reflective attitude entails an autocratic interpretation of life
on the basis of one’s own personal evaluation, and its effect is to
sever the natural bond between the elements of the societal body. As
the inevitable concomitant of this habitually reflective attitude
toward life there is mental dissociation rather than an assimilative
participation such as may only be realized in the inclusiveness of
consciousness as an organic whole. Only an organic coalescence in
our common affectivity, as contrasted with our present attitude of
detached, bidimensional perception of one another, will open the course
to spontaneous development in yielding the natural way to the instinct
of mating and reproduction wherein alone is the basis of a constructive
societal life. For resistance is of the affective life. It is a
phenomenon that is essentially organic in that it marks an obstruction
within the societal personality of man in the relation _inter se_ of
the elements, individual and social, of which our societal personality
is composed. In our blind inversion of the essential processes of life,
we fail to recognize that there can be no healthful growth of the
organism apart from the soil to which it is indigenous. If isolation
and an artificial medium are death to the growth of vegetation, they
are death no less to the societal instinct of our common consciousness
in which is found the natural medium for the growth and activity of
man. In the measure in which we allow ourselves to participate in and
become intrinsic and contributory elements in the world of organic
actuality about us, will our pictorial mode of envisagement yield place
to the subjective experience of a dimensional inclusiveness that is
complete in its actuality. To view the world of actuality in its merely
static, cross-sectional appearance is to know only the photography of
life. Its kinetic reality may be known only through the subjective
inclusion of our organic participation in it.

We cannot return too often to original sources in repudiating
conceptions whereof they are the basis. We experience reality only in
the measure in which we disavow the symbols of unreality. In proportion
as we apprehend subjective fallacy may we encompass the reality
underlying it. It is where our conceptual constructions of life leave
off that our constructive conceptions of life begin. We have seen that
the mathematicians have come to regard as theoretically worthless those
objective calculations whose standards of evaluation are not measured
in accordance with the principle of an inclusive relativity. Likewise
a formulation of values in the subjective sphere of consciousness
lacks an adequate principle of evaluation if it does not rest upon the
relative principle comprising the organic and inclusive conception of
consciousness in its societal totality.

If, in the dissociation of the consciousness of man from his organic
individuality, he is unconsciously assuming a personal absolute that
is merely a reflection of the mass absolute assumed by the collective
social unconscious about him, then what we call the consciousness of
man with its presumable function of dependable evaluation is at all
times but a system of images, and his vaunted prerogative of a personal
absolute is only a dissociative reaction due to his own secondarily
adaptive systematization. Upon this basis, what we call our opinions
are, after all, not our opinions, and our so-called beliefs are not
beliefs at all. For all our formulations and systematizations with
respect to human consciousness are but rationalizations serving as
convenient foils for the blind assertion of the personal absolutism
that is but the autocratic prerogative of our own dissociation, both
individual and social.

While theoretically, the objective findings of Freud are of
unquestionable validity throughout, as has been fully corroborated
through the repeated investigations of those of us who have studied
the manifestations of the unconscious in ourselves and in others, my
researches within the last years have convinced me that our objective
finding is not the point--that what we have called the objective
evidence has been all along but our personal or adaptive evidence
and that, being unconsciously based upon habitual bidimensional
inference, this basis has no relation whatever to life in its organic
inclusiveness. The system of Freud is thus adequate only on the
adaptive basis of normality. _By normality I mean the consensus
comprising the personal absolute vested in the unconscious of the
collective mind determining the social average_.

It is disconcerting, I know, now that we have but recently settled
ourselves to enjoy in comfort the established principles of Freud’s
psychology, to think that we may be compelled through the requirements
of wider accommodation to seek other ground. Nevertheless, if the
position in which we have settled to study the complexes of men is
itself just another complex of the social mind whereof the individual
mind we would study is but a reproduction, it is clear that we have
no choice but to recognize the autonomy of our absolutistic values of
reckoning and to readjust our measures of consciousness in accordance.

Surely, if the whole meaning of our mental orientation is a
disorientation, if our rationality is everywhere but irrationality,
if with all of us alike the vicarious image comprising the reflection
of our systematized selves takes precedence over the native reality
of our primary organic individuality, there is no other course than
that we wipe the board clean and approach the problem of consciousness
completely anew. For, clearly, since our present process of mentation
is not spontaneous or from within out, it is necessarily adaptive or
from without in. Hence, as the reflection of the absolute principle
that is the personal basis of each, it can never lead to a realization
of the relativity of our conscious life nor to the acceptance of the
organic individuality that is the all-embracing life of man in the
inclusive principle wherein alone his consciousness truly resides.

It is the position of this thesis that, when we neglect to take account
of the _organic mass consciousness of man_ to which the personal
systems of men, single and collective, are but relative, we fail to
reckon with a significant dimension entering into the determination of
the subjective life of man. On the basis of the time-space extension
of the astronomers’ fourth dimension it is possible to compute errors
of deflection only through a conception of the universe which regards
our own planetary system as a function of and hence relative to a
more encompassing programme of planetary motion. Concomitantly, it
is possible to evaluate accurately man’s place in the subjective
scheme of consciousness only through a conception which regards
his present personal and social absolute as being itself relative
to a more comprehensive background comprising the relativity of
man’s consciousness as a whole. There is the need to recognize that
in the sphere of consciousness, as in the realm of physics, it is
in the kinetic dimension comprising the organic participation and
inclusiveness of life itself that consists the functional component
which actuates the other three dimensions and which, in uniting all,
embodies the relativity of consciousness as an organic reality.

In this transition from bidimensional picture to tridimensional
actuality, from contemplation of aspect to participation of function,
a gulf is spanned that bridges a most significant hiatus in the course
of man’s evolution. It is no less an interval than that which separates
the mode of man’s unconsciousness from the mode of his consciousness.
For in this transition we are no longer dealing with the mere static
dimension of the pictorially reflected _image_ of actuality, but there
enters the kinetic extension of an organic inclusiveness corresponding
to the functional or space-time extension of the physicists’ universe
of relativity--a universe which, in the psychological no less than in
the physical sphere, entails the abrogation of our prevailing system of
absolutism and its replacement through the conception of the relativity
of the conscious life as a whole.

With a view to measuring the deflections of personality, by and large,
in the light of the relativity of consciousness, it is necessary that
they be regarded first in the concrete expression of their individual
and social forms, and that subsequently we study these aberrations
of consciousness in the yet wider expression of their sociological
implications generally.




CHAPTER III

THE ORIGIN OF OUR INDIVIDUAL UNCONSCIOUS


In the preceding chapter I attempted to indicate the analogy between
the principle of relativity as set forth by the physicists and
what I described as the principle of relativity in the sphere of
consciousness. If the bipolar concomitance there outlined in its
phylogenetic aspect possesses sufficient warrant, a no less consistent
parallelism should be traceable in an ontogenetic concurrence of the
two theories as we come to consider the principle of the relativity of
consciousness in its individual implications.

If it is true in an ethnic comparison of mental values that a basis of
absolutism is no more tenable in computing aberrations occurring in the
sphere of consciousness than in the sphere of physics, it must also
be true that a basis of absolute evaluation is inadequate to account
for deflections of consciousness in its individual application. It
is admitted that in the physical universe a principle of absolutism
requires to be abandoned and a revaluation of standards established in
its stead because it fails to take account of data extrinsic to its own
static dimensions. Likewise, it would seem that, in the concomitant
sphere of consciousness, an absolute basis of determination would be
equally inadequate to reckon with data exclusive of its own absolute
principle of measure and that, accordingly, there is here too demanded
a restatement of values in terms of a more comprehensive conception.

In such an outlook the requisite readjustment is of so wide a scope
that I do not find it easy to contemplate, far less to actualize.
It involves no less a task than that of placing the fulcrum of one’s
mental processes upon a basis that lies outside the habitual domain
of one’s individual consciousness. For this reason the conception of
the organic inclusiveness of consciousness, here understood, is, from
our present individualistic viewpoint, a most difficult and elusive
one. It is a conception that is not possible of comprehension on the
basis of the static and absolute principle of consciousness that is
our present mode of evaluation. In this conception, the evolution of
individual knowledge enters the organismic sphere of the relative
and subjective. It is only relatively, therefore, or through our
subjective identification with it that we may participate in its
meaning. As this subjective experience is the flux of life itself, as
it is this component that is consciousness in process--the organic
tide whose stream we ourselves are, the while we are carried along
upon it--this experience is an extension which is, of its essence,
inaccessible to objective cognition. This is the veil which life in
its subjective reality draws across its features, rendering their
meaning for ever imperceptible to objective observation. Except through
the faint intimations of analogy, I cannot, of course, claim to do
more than merely indicate the existence of this subjective extension.
So that I must ask the reader to concede me the fullest measure of
his hospitality by following my trend with the utmost intuitive
participation on his own part. It is, after all, only in common that we
may sense our common part in respect to the relativity of consciousness
as a whole.

The child that is born amid the cultural influences of civilization
comes at an early age to learn the names of things. With these labels
he acquires his objective identification with the world about him. In
these symbols are the talismans that insure the safety of his future
wayfaring. They are indispensable to his proper equipment and an early
adeptness in their use is a wise and salutary provision. In this same
school in which the child is taught the handy designations for the
objects surrounding him, he learns also to recognize the nameless signs
of a certain immanent category called “right and wrong”--signs which,
through the accidental empiricism of spontaneous trial and error, he
comes likewise to sense and gradually to incorporate into the code of
his adaptation.

As with others, who have been inured to a curriculum of daily
adaptation from the impressionable years of earliest childhood, so
with ourselves, it is well-nigh impossible to study the virgin soil of
consciousness from our present adaptive premise without vitiating our
conclusions with the bias of our own adaptation. And yet it is clear
that an analysis of the reactions of consciousness, which fails to
include the primary elements of which it is composed, leaves out of
reckoning the basic ingredients of a structure which we are supposedly
analyzing in its elementary content.

For the past three years I have been occupied with the daily challenge
of my own habitual processes of adaptation--an inventorial procedure,
be it said, which proved of the utmost discomfort in the necessity it
disclosed for the fundamental reduction of personal assessments. The
outlook of these inquiries, even though they mark as yet but the merest
beginnings, will at least denote a tendency that cannot, I think, be
without interest nor, I hope, without incentive in the further approach
of others toward an envisagement of consciousness in its ultimate,
pre-adaptive composition.

The present study, then, forms part of the altered conceptual insight
into consciousness that was gradually induced through the spontaneous
sequence of a long continued and uninterrupted experiment in individual
reaction. The experiment consisted in repeatedly testing the personal
reflex under the hourly present conditions of mood-variation due to the
accidental release of affective stimuli arising from circumstantial
and unpredictable sources both internal and external to the ego. The
unprepossessing details of this brief excursion into the underworld of
personal motivation must be reserved for some subsequent chapter. I am
now concerned with the complete shift of basis which these experiments
have forced me to take account of in my attempts to reckon with the
recurring problems of consciousness as they are presented in the daily
routine of my analytic work.

Within the scope of the present thesis we shall have to do solely
with the mental reaction inculcated under the manifesto of our early
induced presentiment of “right and wrong” or of “good and bad”
with its concomitant incitement to _hope_ or _fear_ as reflected
in the unconscious attitude of _praise_ or _blame_ surrounding the
child. It is my conviction, based on the subjective test of personal
experimentation, _that the deeply entrenched root of our human
pathology is to be traced alone to the conflict incurred through
this suggestively induced image of right and wrong and that it is
profitless, therefore, to seek beyond the impasse of this unconscious
alternative for the ultimate source of neurotic reactions_.[12]

Because of some element implicit in the behaviour determining the
“right” or “wrong” adaptation of the individuals surrounding the child
in the formative period of his early growth, something is imposed upon
him that operates to check spontaneous impulse. The check I am speaking
of does not consist in the interdiction itself. Our admonitory “do” or
“don’t” is in itself quite harmless. Indeed these positive and negative
commands may serve an undoubtedly useful end. I have never known of
untoward nervous manifestations occurring among animals because of the
restraining warnings of maternal solicitude. On the contrary, such
mediation commonly proves an effective safeguard against misadventure.
Of the inhibiting influence itself, therefore, I am not speaking. What
I have in mind is something far subtler than this. It will demand our
most searching scrutiny if we are clearly to apprehend its meaning.

As I see this miscarriage of instinct incurred through our embargo of
good and bad, it is the cunning _pretence_ underlying the interdiction
which induces the reaction that works mischief in the child’s organism.
It is the insidious intimation of benefit or of harm inherent in the
tabooed act itself that is the pernicious instance. The destructive
occasion lies in the implied premium or forfeit appertaining to the
act as it recoils upon the child in automatic retaliation. I believe
that it is due to this enforced superstition of an arbitrary “good and
bad” that there have been wrought the spurious reactions of our human
consciousness. I believe that the utterly specious system of behaviour,
which surrounds us as social beings on every hand, is definitely due
to this falsely imbued suggestion of retributive sequence which, as
commonly inculcated in early childhood, has been prompted through the
implied mediation of invisible moral agencies. I furthermore believe
that it is this pretence, and its unconsciousness, that is the basis
of our adaptation, both individual and social, as embodied in the
artificial code of morality represented in the collective unconscious
of our present-day civilization.

What the adult arbiter of the child really has up his sleeve is the
child’s conformity to _him_ and _his_ convenience. Accordingly, the
parent or guardian lays down the proposition that a good little boy
doesn’t destroy costly bric-à-brac or that only a bad little girl would
play in the mud with her nice clean rompers on. Both these postulates
are utterly false as every sponsor for them knows. But that is not the
point. The point is that such statements are incomparably adapted to
the ends of adult commodity. The truer rendering of the proposition
in either instance would be to the effect that the misdemeanour in
question would occasion inconvenience or chagrin to the parent. But
so sincere a statement on the part of the parent might alienate the
child’s jealously coveted affection, as we commonly term the infantile
dependence we secretly tend to beget. Hence, the real motive of
interdiction must be hidden from the child and a comprehensive edict
cunningly invoked such as will place an effectual check upon him and
yet amply safeguard the parental interest. It is this bogus morality
which, by our unconscious social consent, the conscripted phantom
called “good and bad” is unanimously commissioned to represent.

Because of this attitude of pretence in others whereby the child is
tricked into complicity with the prevalent code about him, there
is begotten this self-same reaction of pretence within him. This
illusion that is in the air he learns to assimilate from others
through imitative affinity, and from now forward the ruse becomes
self-operative. What began as a social coup is continued as an
individual policy. The silent intimation of a mysteriously pervasive
immanence of “good and bad” having now been engendered, the child
henceforth responds automatically, not alone to the signals of
make-believe about him but to the signals of make-believe within him.
For in unconsciously succumbing to the contagion of the autocratic
system of “right and wrong” about him, this hobgoblin of arbitrary
make-believe becomes equally systematized within his own consciousness.
Accordingly, the pretence involved in interdictions of conduct
(fear-blame reaction) is accompanied by the mental suggestion of
“wrong” or “bad,” and the pretence underlying the inducements of
conduct (hope-praise reaction) is accompanied by the mental suggestion
of “right” or “good”--_that is, of good or bad as it reverts upon
the individual from the point of view of his personal advantage as
reflected in the image of the parent_.

An analysis, however, does not reach elementary principles if it merely
discovers motives prompted by suggestion and repression corresponding
to the two opposed factors of inducement and interdiction actuating
human behaviour. It is not enough to invoke in explanation the
sweeping denominator “self-consciousness.” Such an account is historic
or psychological; it is not organic or biological. It is, I believe,
only as we unearth the mental reaction _intrinsic_ to the organism
when it responds to the subjective inference of right or wrong in its
personal inflection that we shall reach the basic element responsible
for the organism’s inhibited mental states.[13]

One would think, as we look about us to-day at the utterly destructive
processes, social and political, that have been incited throughout
entire nations of individuals “brought up” in this vicarious fashion,
that the spectacle would give us pause. But we have had a too thorough
bringing-up ourselves. Our own bringing-up has seen to it that we
shall not look about us and learn what _is_ but that we shall only
respond to the suggestion about us and acquiesce in what _seems_. If
we should really look about us and see unflinchingly into the meaning
of things, our children would do so too, but that would be subversive
of their proper up-bringing. This is the self-contradictory element in
the adult’s “education” of the child. In truth, it is not possible to
“bring up” a child at all. One may let a child grow up, naturally, as
a plant, tending only the soil about its roots, or one may hinder its
growth. But to bring a child up by moulding its personality to one’s
own is organically contradictory. A child comes up, if at all, only of
himself or in accordance with the law of his own growth.

If it is true, then, that this factor of pretence is the ultimate
element in the dissociations of consciousness, what is the nature of
this factor of pretence actuating our behaviour? As has been said, in
order to secure a substratum adequate to build upon, it is requisite
that we forgo at the outset our present conceptions based upon a system
of valuations which presupposes an absolute principle of consciousness.
It should be understood, therefore, that it is from the fundamentally
altered premise of a relative basis of consciousness that the present
thesis sets out.

In an objective view of the components of man’s consciousness, it
may be seen that there are three determinants of the affective life,
namely, one’s own self, the selves by whom one is surrounded, and the
positive or negative reactions of the self in respect to other selves
such as comprise our progressive or regressive interrelationships one
to another. So that, to return to the analogy of the physical world,
a diagram outlining man’s affective life would represent a contour of
three components. There is first the dimension consisting of oneself;
second, the collateral dimension, with its extension backward to one’s
parents and forward to one’s offspring and comprising in general one’s
social congeners, singly and collectively; and third, the societal
extension representing the reactions that depend upon the co-ordination
or non-co-ordination of individuals in the assimilative processes
of their common activities. Thus our subjective or affective life,
statically considered, is as truly tridimensional in its actuality
as our cognitive or objective world, statically considered, is
tridimensional in its actuality. Nevertheless, as was pointed out in
the preceding chapter, our cognitive apprehension of the world of
objects about us invariably presents an outline corresponding to the
bidimensional or pictorial aspect that is our perceptual image of it.
So in the subjective sphere, it may also be shown that our affective
reactions invariably present a pictorial or bidimensional plane
analogous to the bidimensional impressions comprising our objective
perceptions, and that they are due in the subjective as in the
objective sphere to the unconscious factor of the personal equation.

But, to adhere to the test of experiment, it has been my analytic
experience growing out of the study of personal reaction that, owing
to the distortion of affect within our actual daily life, we do not
in fact participate in the tridimensional actuality that truly
comprises our affective world. On the contrary, owing to the rebuff
to spontaneous impulse incurred through the system of self-conscious
diplomacy reflected in the social pretence of “right and wrong” as
first voiced by the parent and seconded on all sides by the community
about us, the real world of affects is unconsciously replaced by an
artificial cosmogony whose outline is limited to only two components,
namely, the self plus the immediate interest to the self as derived
from the selves (collateral dimension) by whom the individual is
surrounded (advantage or disadvantage, good or bad, praise or blame).
Thus our affective reactions invariably present a merely pictorial or
bidimensional area corresponding to the two extensions comprising the
personal element of the self plus the element of advantage for the
self from other selves. Because of this personal foreshortening of
our affects to the artificial dimensions of self and self-interest,
our subjective experience of tridimensional actuality is reported
not in the reality of its three essential determinants but in the
pictorial aspect of the two-dimensional plane that is our personal and
autogenous reflection of it. It is, then, the substance of these pages
that, just as the world of cubic actuality is mentally foreshortened
into a bidimensional aspect of actuality determined by our static and
autogenous perception of it, so our world of affects is correspondingly
reduced to the bidimensional or pictorial aspect that is our socially
reflected impression of it.

This brings us again to the question we were speaking of--the reaction
of pretence into which the child is early inducted. It was to help
clear away the difficulties surrounding this early adaptive reaction
of our subjective life that I turned to the consideration of the
dimensional components that comprise our affective world. We have
seen that the essence of this element of pretence is its implication
of retroactive gain or loss intrinsic to the social act itself and
automatically returning upon its agent. Coming a little closer
still, we see that this attitude of behaviour imposed upon the child
upon grounds of its retributive sequence is induced in him through
the cunningly conveyed intimation that such has been the personal
experience of those about him--that they have learned from experience
and so are qualified to give warning that “good” behaviour is requited
in reward or pleasure to one’s self and conversely “bad” behaviour is
requited in penalty or pain to one’s self.

My position is that an attitude toward the child which posits at the
outset of life a world of affective actuality, comprised of his own
_ego_ plus his own egoistic advantage, arbitrarily contracts life to
the unreal aspect of a mere two-dimensional image. It is to dispose the
mind of the child in such a way that its entire universe of feeling is
limited to a mere picture of life consisting of the flat and lifeless
image of his personal or social adaptation in the light of his personal
or social gain. It transforms the reality of life into a reflection of
oneself in a world of self-reflections like one’s own. In other words,
in falsely premising the bidimensional plane of one’s personal image as
the basis of actuality, we substitute at the outset a primary condition
of unreality for the inherent reality of life.

From the altered angle of a relative and inclusive attitude toward the
problems of consciousness, I am led to think that this artificially
contracted outlook is the real crux of the dilemma of the unconscious.
I have come to think that these two factors--the factor of oneself and
the factor of social advantage for oneself--are insufficient, that
there is omitted a third factor essential to a completely rounded
consciousness and that in the absence of it the other two present but a
static and artificial image of life rather than life in the functional
inclusiveness of its full-dimensional reality. I refer to the component
of our societal co-ordination--to the factor of man’s organic continuum
in the functional extension of his interrelationship with others. I
believe that it is the miscarriage of instinct with respect to this
societal co-ordination that is answerable for the artificial recoil of
self-interest represented in our fancied apparitions of good or bad as
seen from the limited point of view of one’s individual advantage. In
the flat bidimensional plane which, in the absence of the inclusive
societal factor, only reflects the pictorial aspect of actuality in the
image of the self, there is lacking the rounded extension that is the
full complement of life in its inclusive, societal meaning. To what
degree we substitute this reflected aspect of life for the reality
of an all-inclusive participation in life in its full-dimensional
extension--if my own experience in this regard is any guide--has not as
yet begun to be suspected by us.

This primary societal component of consciousness must not be confused
with our secondary and adaptive social relationships. Our social
adaptation is as self-reflective and unconscious as our individual
adaptation. By the societal component I mean the organic continuity
of consciousness that unites the individuals of the species into a
confluent whole. In the social adaptation of its members, on the
contrary, there is registered merely the collective response to
the reaction of pretence that we have just seen in its individual
expression as our personal foreshortening of life to the bidimensional
image. In the reduction of life to the image of self in the light
of one’s self-advantage, whether individual or social, consists the
adaptive system that is the personal pretence within and about us.
In this inversion of life that is the mirrored impression of each,
as reflected in the aspect of others, is the systematization that is
man’s unconsciousness. It is our non-inclusiveness of others that is
the systematization of each. It is this perceptual interpretation of
life on the basis of a reflected or bidimensional impression, limiting
life to self and self’s advantage that is, I repeat, the meaning of our
unconsciousness, both individual and social.

In studying this reaction of pretence in the social mind as reflected
in the reactions of the individual, we are met with the need of a
fundamental reconstruction of values in our reckoning with human
personality as in our measures of consciousness generally. For, in
this artificial gauge of conduct measured by standards of personal
advantage, we find established in the individual a criterion of life
that rests upon an unwarranted assumption of personal supremacy. This
private criterion has become the arbitrarily assumed prerogative of
each of us with respect to every other. For, through this distortion
of the universe of reality into the unreal, bidimensional cosmogony
that is one’s self-reflection of it, there is unconsciously built up
within us a mental adaptation whose basis is an inflexible assumption
of personal absolutism and autocracy.

In the ultimate reduction of analysis it may be seen that what we
have, through Freud’s teaching, come to recognize as the reaction
of _resistance_, within the individual personality, resolves itself
into nothing else than this private prerogative of the personal
absolute. The assumption of this personal principle of absolutism
in the subjective sphere embodying the psychology of resistance is
analogous to the absolute principle of evaluation applied to the
physical universe--a principle which the physicists have lately
shown is not competent to meet the test of universal applicability,
for the reason that, in the absolutism of its own premise, it fails
to account for data extrinsic to the static absolutism it embodies.
Correspondingly, in the sphere of consciousness the absolute principle
of personal evaluation comprising the adaptive basis of the individual
is inadequate to stand as the universal principle requisite to an
organismic inclusion of consciousness in its societal totality.

As was pointed out in the last chapter, the social mind interprets its
objects of perception in the bidimensional aspect of its own pictorial
and flat reflection of them. Likewise, our individual mentation, in its
adaptive response to the retributive implications of so-called “right
and wrong” or “good and bad,” recoils no less upon a two-dimensional
plane in the affective reaction that is limited to the component of
self plus the component of pleasure or pain for oneself. This flat,
static impression of life, comprising the arbitrary systematization
that is the personal absolute of each, is inadequate to stand as
a universal principle whereby we may evaluate the phenomena of
consciousness in the full round of its organic compass.

In substituting the judicial absolute of personal interest for our
inclusive participation as relative elements in the full-dimensional
reality of life as a whole, we have unconsciously adopted a basis which
fails to reckon with our individual selves as contributory elements
in the more encompassing unit which our individualistic basis now
mistakenly presumes to include. Our present basis is, therefore, not
an inclusive one. In so far as the individual rests his theory of
consciousness upon an individualistic basis, his theory cannot include
the larger whole wherein the individual is himself but a contributing
element. The consciousness of the isolated individual cannot encompass
consciousness in its societal inclusiveness. Only consciousness in
its societal inclusiveness can encompass the consciousness of the
individual.

In the measure in which we, as an organic group, come to adopt the
conception of consciousness that accepts the intrinsic reality of
our common societal life, we shall learn to repudiate the personal
absolute that is our individual resistance and, correspondingly, to
participate in an inclusiveness of consciousness with respect to which
the individual is but a relative and adaptive component.




CHAPTER IV

THE UNCONSCIOUS FACTOR WITHIN THE SOCIAL SYSTEM


Whatever is true of the individual singly, is true of the individual
collectively. Whatever is observable as neurotic process within
the isolated personality of the hysteric or precoid, is equally
observable as neurotic process in the collective personality of the
social mind. The attitude of psychopathology, which ascribes to the
social consensus, represented in the average-reaction commonly called
“normality,” a criterion of constructive consciousness and health, and
which, accordingly, seeks to correct the deflections of the aberrant
neurotic personality in accordance with this limited outlook, is itself
an expression of the bidimensional limitation that bases its system
of consciousness upon an absolute principle of evaluation. After all,
normality, like gravitation, is a mental abstraction. Our consensual
normality is but the systematized abstraction embodying the absolute
of its own unconscious basis, and, in its personal absolutism, stands
opposed to a principle of relativity in the mental sphere. It is only
as we abrogate the absolute standards now vested in the prevailing
social systems about us and measure their dimensions in terms of
the principle of an organic relativity, that we shall be enabled to
challenge the element of personal systematization within ourselves
and so encompass life in the actuality of a universal and inclusive
consciousness.

Personal survival has been, from the beginning of man’s history, the
chief concern of his self-interest. Inventing medicine with a view to
his security here, fabricating religion with a view to his security
hereafter, he has safeguarded his preservation for the moment through
recourse to “cure,” and for the future through recourse to “salvation.”
Even in the interchanges of our casual social relationships, there is
still preserved within the folk-mind the vestiges of this dualistic
self-interest. Upon our meeting, it is the accustomed reaction to make
mutual inquiry into the condition of health of one another. “How are
you?” or “How-do-you-do?” we ask. Similarly, in parting we commend each
other to the clemencies of the future with the expression, “Good-bye,”
that is, “God be with you.” In the obvious apprehensiveness underlying
this unconscious attitude of the social mind there is in one instance
the implicit conviction that we are wicked and in the other that we are
sick! Both these reactions, however, merely betray the state of anxiety
reflected in the fundamental condition of mind that is our ethnic
self-consciousness.

In earlier times these two anxiety trends of the folk unconscious were
duly sponsored through the common rites of medical and religious fetish
under the combined auspices of a single functionary or guardian who, as
priest or soothsayer, dispensed the benefits accruing from both. The
fact is, I suppose, that the tribal medicine-man with his magic potion
and amulet is psychologically, as well as ethnologically, our true
progenitor. For to-day we observe the preservation of this concomitance
of function between the two systems, represented by the science of
medicine on the one hand and by the philosophy of religion on the
other, in the current social phenomenon of our widely flourishing
“sciences of mental healing” with their unescapable unconsciousness
in metaphysical and theosophical implications. Aside, however, from
historical analogies, the stupendous influence upon the societal mind
of ecclesiastical and therapeutic canon cannot be denied.

Because of this preservation in our midst of such ancient repositories
of human thought and conduct as are represented in the affiliated
principles contained in the dogmas of church and psychotherapeutic
system, a consideration of the psychology common to both these forms
of our social adaptation cannot fail to help us understand the basic
elements that enter into the making of our social personality. As
illustration, let us consider on the one hand the Roman Church and on
the other the system of psychoanalysis. The Roman Church represents
at one and the same time both traditionally the longest established
and politically the most compact organization of the many religious
sects existing throughout our Western civilization. The system of
psychoanalysis, representing as it does the most modern conception of
medical psychology, possesses such scientific authority as only the
ablest students of philosophy and medicine are qualified to bring to
the substantiation of its principles. An analysis, therefore, of the
social psychology that equally underlies and actuates the position of
both these systems will not, I think, be without profit in the present
study.

Due to the sophistication that was early begotten among the members of
our human species through the limitation of man’s consciousness to the
bidimensional alternative of a consensual “good and bad,” it is natural
that we should find this same tendency to personal systematization
expanded into the collective or social form we observe in the group
reaction that is embodied in state or sect. Thus, from an organismic
viewpoint, we should expect to discover the same resistances within
the social as within the individual organism. Nor need we be surprised
if, upon analysis, it should be disclosed that this social resistance
represents likewise the bidimensional impasse comprised of our personal
self-reflection.

Throughout the unconscious period of man’s bidimensional arrest
commonly called ancient times, a period belonging chronologically to
the past but pertaining psychologically to the present as well as to
the future for probably an indefinite term, the attitude of the Church
toward incipient doubt or heresy was, is and for ever shall be to
apply the remedy of prayer and, failing this recourse, to apply the
penalty of excommunication.

From the vantage point of the psychoanalyst’s disinterested and
extrinsic angle of vision, such a policy appears manifestly unsound
and without warrant. From his position of detached observer, it seems
to him arbitrary and presumptive. And yet it must be conceded that,
from the intrinsic viewpoint of a socially consolidated organization
compact with the autogenous authority of infallibility, such a position
is by no means inconsistent. A supremacy that is self-originated is
self-operative. Autocratic prerogative and unimpeachable authority are
here conterminous. Indeed the solidarity of the Church is unassailable
precisely in that its premise and its conclusion are mutually
inclusive. For inasmuch as both premise and conclusion are equally
based upon the assumption of the personal absolute or the private
prerogative of the system they embody, all access to it is summarily
barred. If the Church precludes all question, dismisses all opposition,
it is wholly within its self-determined rights. For by these same
tokens all question, all argument, being of its nature extrinsic to
its autogenic system, savours _de facto_ of the aforesaid heresy of
doubt and, as such, is automatically driven out of court as connoting
_a priori_ the presumptive fallacy of trespass. This relegation to
itself of divine and hence unquestionable authority is the theological
doctrine of self-actuative truth assumed by the Church to underlie
its official pronunciamentos when it formally declares them to be _ex
cathedra_.

I offer this preamble not without advisement. In its intimation of
the heretical tendency of the present thesis, it will give to those
to whom such tendency is unwelcome the opportunity to seal their ears
against it. At the same time it will give to those of more pliant
sympathies due notice of the undisguised aim of the present inquiry
toward the adoption of a more comprehensive and open-minded outlook
among us. For the trend of this thesis is in its intention confessedly
subversive of the socially authorized version of truth now vested in
the autogenous systematization that has come to underlie the principle
of us psychoanalysts.

I do not know to what extent it is humanly possible, but, in so far
as may be, let us adopt for the moment, at least mentally, a position
of impersonal disinterestedness toward the social consensus in which
we ourselves, as psychoanalysts, are also corporate elements. It will
then become clear, I think, that the socially authenticated system,
representative of us Freudians, embodies an unconscious attitude
closely analogous to that of the social system embodied in the attitude
of autogenous authority underlying the personal absolutism of the Roman
Church.

To observe this element of social unconsciousness underlying the
principle of Roman Catholicism has for us all a certain invigorating
tang. With such a discovery there comes the refreshing release that
is the spur to renewed investigation. It is the heartening response
of the organism to its sense of conscious acumen. But, to observe
the operation of the social unconscious within the autogenous
systematization of principles which insures social coherence within
our own consensus, entails a contemplation that is not pleasant. This
contemplation disturbs the habitual repose of settled conviction that
is our own security. It is to apply the acid test of self-analysis to
our own socially systematized assumption of private prerogative and
authority. Yet an attitude of impersonal disinterestedness presupposes
that our inquiry shall proceed without regard to personal security.
This attitude, indeed, is one which we ourselves have demanded of our
patients as being an analytically basic one. It is, therefore, upon
this understanding alone that an inquiry, which in its disregard of the
personal equation is committed to a course equally unflattering to us
all, may hope to be accorded an unbiased consideration. Surely in any
other attitude the name of psychoanalyst can become only a term of
opprobrium among us.

Let us, then, consider this factor of private prerogative or of the
personal absolute, inseparable from the mental attitude expressed in
the phenomenon of social systematization which we see in the Church’s
position of assumed infallibility toward its postulants, and seek to
discover whether this same tendency to social systematization may not
lurk within our own psychoanalytic ranks. Let us see whether we, too,
are not actuated by an unconscious element of personal absolutism that
obstructs the freer and more adult mode of consciousness such as it is
our avowed aim to attain.

In mentioning the unconscious element of absolutism constituting the
closed compartment within a socially organized system of principles, I
have cited Catholicism merely as a convenient paradigm. Protestantism
or Mohammedanism are, in their assumption of self-appointed
prerogative, not less indefensible on the same ground, for the element
of the personal absolute underlies no less the private assumption
of each. By reason of its higher degree of organization, however,
Catholicism more fittingly illustrates the absolutism of its social
polity in relation to this phenomenon of doubt or defection occurring
among its members. This is its aptness in affording a convenient
position of comparison with our own socially organized system of
psychoanalysis in respect to the phenomenon of defection as envisaged
by us.

Within the body of precepts comprising our own organization, the
accepted mark of defection is a _resistance_, and the remedy we apply
is analysis. For, with ourselves, analysis is explicitly the only
effective means of overcoming the intractable tendencies which, in the
determination of our organized principles of adjudication, constitute
the sole need of our patient. In the event that the patient should
remain so far recalcitrant as not to embrace the opportunity we offer
him to accept our socially systematized interpretation of truth as it
touches his own particular needs, he is automatically excluded from
participation in the agencies of regeneration such as it is our special
delegation to dispense. Whence there follows our regrettable but none
the less inevitable ultimatum of “inferior type of personality” and his
coincident elimination from the pale.

It is, of course, clear that the actuality of the phenomenon of
resistance in the patient can no more be denied than the actuality of
the phenomenon of doubt in the penitent. Moreover, in accordance with
the ruling of psychoanalysis, our specification of the condition when
we posit a resistance is as indisputable as is the specification of
the Church when it posits a doubt as the underlying disorder of the
individual postulant. In either case there is the position that the
individual is impervious to the benefits of the system whose principles
he is, in the judgment of the system, in need of embracing. Indeed,
it is precisely this factor of doubt in the one case, as it is the
factor of resistance in the other, that is the whole occasion of the
individual’s quest of a means of adjusting this division within his
personality whereof doubt or resistance is the idiopathic index.

The actual fact, then, of a resistance within the personality is
beyond question. The fact is one that is equally admitted on the
side of the individual as on the side of the organization, on the
side of the defendant as on the side of the arraignment. But what
is to be done about it does not as yet seem to me by far so clearly
determined. I know, of course, that it is our attitude, based upon the
repeated experience of us all, that any objection to psychoanalysis
is invariably traceable to the resistance of the objector. This is a
psychoanalytic corollary. It is accepted as universal among us all.
So that a resistance to psychoanalysis is very justly, in the view of
psychoanalysts, as self-convicting as is a doubt in the view of the
Church. And from the point of view of psychoanalysis no less than of
the Church the position of these two systems rests upon an undoubtedly
sound basis, if we may be guided by the consensus of their several
adherents as attested by the experience of each.

But the question which has of late come to engross my interest is
_whether these points of view are sound as embodied in their respective
systems_--whether, from a broader basis of envisagement, the intrinsic
attitude of ourselves may not lend itself to an altered interpretation;
whether there may not exist a criterion that transcends the scope of
our present analytic outlook when we claim that the only possible
motive for questioning our psychoanalytic position is found to lie
in the resistance of the individual; whether, in brief, the socially
entrenched systematization comprising the psychoanalytic affiliation
possesses sufficient warrant for impugning the personally entrenched
systematization comprising the individual. For, if the fallacy of
the personal absolute underlies the systematization represented in
the social consensus, in what way does the rigidity of the social
prerogative differ from the systematized prerogative constituting the
resistance of the individual?[14]

For the purposes of our inquiry we shall be obliged to dismiss for
the moment our habitual personalistic criteria of interpretation. We
shall have to recognize, first of all, that what we call the individual
is by no means the fresh and native expression of individuality pure
and simple that we are accustomed to assume, but rather that he is an
individuation resulting from the repressive forces acting upon him
from the environmental social aggregate in which he is himself but
an intrinsic and contributory element. For every individual arising
amid the influences of the social system is but a special application
of the social system about him. Whatever the code of the consensus,
the individual is necessarily but an offprint of it--a new impression
of the original by-laws. There is, therefore, the need to turn our
attention not to the individuated excerpt of the system but to the
original document wherein the system is primarily set forth. There is
the need to discard the individual form and to occupy ourselves with
the societal mould whereof the individual form is but the subsequent
reproduction.

Assuming the broader outlook of this more encompassing sociological
position, I think we shall come to see that the difference between
the reaction of doubt, as interpreted by the Church, and the reaction
of resistance, as interpreted by psychoanalysis, is, after all, only
apparent--that the difference is by no means an inherent one, but that
it is due merely to the altered circumstance of shade and light, so to
speak, in which the two reactions are diversely reflected by reason of
the contrasting sociological settings amid which the two phenomena have
appeared among us.

As regards the sociological manifestation embodied in the Church,
contrary to its age-old contention that doubt or question automatically
indicated apostasy which reflexly discredited its adherent, it has long
been shown experientially that such doubt or defection might be very
logically and honourably entertained. Not only this, but it has been
further made manifest that it is due precisely to the entertainment of
such an attitude of debate toward the socially systematized consensus,
represented in the Church, that there have arisen those far-reaching
investigations of science out of which has sprung the splendid
renaissance of modern thought with its accompanying incentive to human
progress.

Hence the question that presents itself is this: May it not also
be that, quite beyond the scope of envisagement of those of us who
are intrinsic to the analytic consensus, there are motives inviting
question of our position which do not fall within the category of
resistance? May it not be that, from a position of extrinsic or
impersonal evaluation, we shall obtain so inclusive a survey of the
phenomenon of resistance on the one side and of the social phenomenon
of organized systematization representing the establishment on the
other, that the two reactions may be included in an encompassment that
is equally hospitable to both? Surely it cannot be denied that, laying
aside all consideration of personal involvement, the question of such a
possibility is not without its vista of interest.

With a view to a fair appraisement of the contrast between the type
of defection manifesting itself as doubt and the type of defection
manifesting itself as resistance, there is first the need to take
account of the widely dissimilar sociological aspect of the period in
which doubt was originally viewed by the Church, as compared with the
sociological countenance of the times in which resistance is viewed by
ourselves, and, accordingly, to consider the difference between the
two phenomena in the light of the contrasting sociological backgrounds
surrounding each.

From this sociological angle the factor that immediately attracts our
notice is the essentially negative, self-deprecatory character of
the doubt-reaction in respect to the ancient dogmas of the Church.
We note the sense of personal inadequacy that is its characteristic
sign. We mark its habitually shamefaced, self-depreciative mien. For
doubt, be it remembered, first arose as the self-accusing attitude of
the subservient individual who lived under the social domination of
monarchical forms of government in a period of man’s history when,
owing to his subjugation to the unconscious suzerainty of a fanciful
father-complex, he meekly bowed in servile obedience to the socially
systematized authority arbitrarily vested in Church and State, as
personified in the office of Pope and King. Under the prevalent
domination of this image of indisputable authority, men’s social
criterion resided in the apparent consensus of the _personal absolute_,
social and individual, representing the particular individuation of
a single man, rather than in the common supremacy of our impersonal
relativity comprising the generic individuality of mankind.[15]

But the social mind has in the last few centuries undergone a
significant metamorphosis. To-day we have to reckon with this. We have
to take into account the tremendous expansion of the consciousness
of man sociologically and, from the point of view of the historical
record of man’s rapid sociological ascent, mark the characterological
difference in the temper of the individual’s defection to-day as
compared with his defection of yesterday. In the implication of the
rights of individual freedom of thought implied in the defection of
doubt, the predominant factor was the individual’s acknowledgment
of his personal remissness, of his unseemly presumptiveness toward
the social constitution about him. Under the socially systematized
autocracy of the Church’s absolutism, the individuality of man dared
not stand erect and maintain the freedom of his individual expression.

But in the present hour the consciousness of man proclaims itself a
freer manifestation. Under the impetus of our sociological progress,
man’s individuality has more and more come into its own. And, though
the socially organized prerogative has still the upper hand in respect
to individuality, there are signs abroad to-day which are a significant
advertisement of man’s urge toward an expression of individuality that
is an earnest of yet wider sociological horizons ahead. I think that
it is due in no small measure to the advent of this factor of man’s
sociological rehabilitation that there is seen to-day the completely
altered character of the individual’s resistance as it recoils before
the element of personal absolutism embodied in the systematized
consensus of psychoanalysis.

Despite its undoubted unconsciousness and personal systematization,
note the essentially ruddier countenance of resistance as compared
with doubt. A resistance, unlike doubt, is no admission of ineptitude.
Subsisting under the sponsorship of a new and freer sociological
order, resistance is fashioned of sterner stuff. It is no personal
deprecation; it is a sociological affirmation. Far from being an
abject confession of individual weakness, it is a proud assertion of
individual strength. For although in the phenomenon of resistance there
is to be seen the equally unconscious motive that is the protest of the
individual absolute against the arbitrary domination of the socially
systematized absolute comprising the popular consensus, there underlies
this protest something that is more virile than this. There is here,
I believe, a reaction that demands and that will ultimately have the
consideration that is its due. Though the Church, while pre-eminent,
might easily dispose of doubt, in our own democratic day it is doubt
that has disposed of the Church. It seems to me that, unless we
psychoanalysts recognize the group-form of unconsciousness underlying
the social systematization embodied in the position of psychoanalysis
when it pronounces the resistance of the individual as _de facto_
anathema, without regard to the possible propriety of its remonstrance,
we, like our less conscious analogue, the Church, shall ultimately find
ourselves hoist with our own petard.

While the fact of resistance and of its unconscious motivation is
admittedly true, yet to meet a patient’s assertion of individual right
with the mere assertion of the group-right, which is the unconscious
protectorate of the organized system, is certainly not to answer the
patient’s need from the point of view of a larger and more encompassing
mode of consciousness. If the assumption of arbitrary prerogative or
of the personal absolute represented in the reaction of individual
systematization is the meaning of resistance, then the private
prerogative or the personal absolute underlying the systematization
of the social consensus is no less a manifestation of resistance. For
the attitude of systematization and of absolutism in the individual
is necessarily but the reflection of a prior social systematization to
which the individual’s adaptation is but a secondary response.

Clearly it is not possible for the socially systematized consensus
embodied in Church, State or psychotherapeutic system to afford the
requisite condition of release from a resistance thus constituted,
when its own systematization is itself the social or group embodiment
of this self-same reaction of resistance. In the nip-and-tuck attitude
between the resistance of the system comprising the single individual
and the resistance of the system comprising the social corporation of
individuals, there stands the organic impasse of two mutually opposed
absolutes. In the autocratic position of each neither may yield,
for in the absolutism of both each represents an identical state of
unconscious impaction. As neither the individual nor the consensus, in
its enfolded self-systematization, is as yet conscious of the process
in which it is the blindly contributing element, both factors represent
but altered aspects of the common delusion of the social adaptation of
man, single and collective, namely, the delusion of the supremacy of
the will-to-self or the unconscious autocracy of the personal absolute.

Naturally, I cannot speak of these inadequacies of consciousness from
a remote or detached position. Needless to say, since I am at this
moment a contributing part of this social maelstrom comprising the
system about me, I am no less embroiled than others in its social
fallacy. So that what is here very inadequately apprehended by me as a
theory is, I confess, still less adequately accepted by me as a living,
integral experience. Let it not be thought, then, for a moment that, in
presenting the social basis of consciousness that is the substance of
this thesis, I am under any illusion as to my own inaptness to embody
in myself the personal expression of the conception whereof this essay
offers the organismic interpretation.

It is, however, only in the measure in which this less personal mode
of approach becomes actual for me that my work with others grows in
significance and in constructiveness of purpose. In this light I have
come to feel more and more that it is only as we regard life from
the point of view of man’s generic individuality that we shall truly
encompass the meaning of the neurosis, either individual or social,
in its true organic assessment. In this more inclusive outlook we
shall gradually come to realize, I think, that the neurosis, whether
appearing in the arbitrary systematization of the individual or in
that of the group consensus, consists essentially in the substitution
of the personal absolute that is our secondary individuation for the
impersonal relativity that is our primary individuality. In this
outlook we shall come to see that it is only in the common inherency of
life that is comprised the consciousness of man in the fullness of its
meaning.

Resistance, then, is the personal systematization of men as contrasted
with the unsponsored individuality of man. The individual unit like
the social unit is but an arbitrary system, and in the resistance
of each of us is to be seen the self-determined cosmogony that is
the individual fallacy of us all. Whether this personal prerogative
embodied in a resistance has its expression in the single individual or
in the collection of individuals comprising the social aggregate, the
factor of systematization holding its guarantee of inalienable rights
under the syndicate of our common unconscious, is, I believe, the very
kernel of the world-wide dissociation which we now diagnose as the
neurosis of the individual.

Thus, through this systematization of each one, there is repudiated the
individuality of each other. In the personal absolute of the private
consciousness of each, there is denied the relativity of the common
consciousness of all. It is this systematization that is the meaning
of repression. It is this personal prerogative that is the essence of
resistance. And so, in the _unconscious system_ that is within and
about us there is summed up, I believe, the entire philosophy of the
neurosis. Being ourselves intrinsic to the system, both individual
and social, it is no more possible to deal with it objectively in
its social than in its individual phase. Our only approach is the
subjective approach. Only subjectively is it possible for each of us
to envisage completely the system of repression within him that is
his individual reflection of the social system of repression outside
him. In thus relinquishing the absolute principle that is merely
the autocracy of our privately arbitrated system of personalism and
unconsciousness, we are in a position to forgo the unconscious absolute
comprising our own resistance and to accept in its stead the relative
inclusiveness of our conscious life as a unified and organic whole.




CHAPTER V

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS FROM A VIEWPOINT OF
RELATIVITY


Oscar Wilde says in one of his plays: “There are in the world two
tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting
it.” The epigram is peculiarly apt in telling us what appears, on the
surface, to be true. But what appears on the surface to be true is not
necessarily true inherently. Unquestionably there are these two fatal
antitheses in life and in them undoubtedly is summed up whatever there
is of tragedy in our human lot. But, in reducing life to these two
issues of getting and of not getting what one wants, we fail to realize
that these contrasting reactions are secondary to a condition of mind
artificially induced in ourselves at the expense of a prior state of
consciousness that is in its essence not antithetic but unitary.

Each of us is born in the midst of an established system whose password
is conformity to its prescribed norm. Each of us becomes an automatic
compartment within the systematized consensus that comprises its basis.
The price of our initiation into this adaptive system is the forfeit of
our primary individuality, and by the terms of its automatic statutes
tuition is compulsory. Automatic obedience to traditional authority
is the retroactive principle of its constitution. “Right” or “wrong”
is the slogan of its guild. In the autogenous postulate of good or
bad that is its absolute basis, our adaptive system stands rigidly
opposed to a conception of truth such as comprises the relative and
all-inclusive principle of consciousness in its organismic significance.

In the light of this ulterior motive of good or bad--of this adaptive
response that is the secondary and reflected impression of each--is
measured the conduct of us all. According as we see ourselves in this
mirror of the systematized and prescribed norm is conditioned our
happiness or unhappiness, our comfort or displeasure. But always the
mirror of each that is the criterion of others stands as a solid wall
confronting us. Reflected in the features of this one our bearing is
quite pleasing; mirrored in the reaction of that one our countenance
is not so prepossessing. And so it happens that, as we go on in life,
we tend more and more to place ourselves in positions in which we may
obtain the most flattering “likeness” of ourselves. Correspondingly,
we tend to avoid those reflectors that distort our features to our
own discomforting. In this way we come to “like” some people and to
“dislike” others. So that, according to this account of our adaptation,
what is called “ourselves” in the vernacular of the system about us is
merely the reflection of ourselves as reproduced by the system itself.

In truth, because of the system of personal reflections amid which we
move, our judgments are throughout undependable. We have no opinions,
we merely reflect opinions. We have no perceptions, we have only
preperceptions. We do not verify feeling through senses that are
native to us, we imitate feeling by means of impressions that are
extraneous to us. Thus there are great gaps within the sphere of our
supposedly consistent experience--gaps involving wide intervals between
our feeling and our reason, between processes that are organic and
processes that are conscious. Our attempts to bridge these intervals
have constantly led us astray and thus has come to pass the system
of inconsistencies that is the unconscious. For, in this void of his
reality man can only substitute the images that are his unreality,
and no image may substitute for reality, no theory of life replace
the organic consistency of life itself. Yet in our dissociative
preferences we continually mistake the _image_ of that which is for
that which _really_ is. Nor do we at all realize to what extent the
actual masquerades as real. What is there, for example, more actual
than illusion, yet what is there less real? An individual actually has
a delusion but it is not on this account real. The voices he hears are
actual to him (do they not call him by name?) but we who are outside
his system know very well that they are not real.[16]

My position is that, in our response to the impressions arising from
the social system about us, our inferences are no more dependable than
those arising from the private systems of the insane. Our confusion,
like theirs, is the unconscious breach between perceptions that are
true and impressions that are inferred, between life that is function
and life that is merely enactment. It is again the disparity between
life as a system or theory, and life itself. All of us are familiar
with the inconsistency of people who, in order that life may prove
comfortable in theory, devote their entire energies to making it
miserable in practice. It is the inconsistency of unconsciousness
with its inevitable alternation between the opposed extensions of a
bidimensional image of life in place of the all-inclusiveness of life
in its functional reality. It is the personal absolute underlying the
consensual social system within and about us.

If this absolute embodied in the system is, then, a standard that is
but arbitrary and artificial, each of us, since he is a reflection of
such a specious criterion, is himself but a personal representation of
this same absolute. If the individual is but a reflection of the system
of rules representing the collection of individuals comprising the
social consensus about him, then the consciousness of man, in both its
social and individual manifestations, represents an absolute that is
throughout false and undependable. If, in brief, our standard of truth
rests upon our own self-reflection in a social system that is itself
self-reflected, then the evaluation of the individual, as of the social
organism about us, comprises throughout a merely fictitious image, and
our criteria of verity are everywhere spurious and without support.

In the artificial pretence of “good and bad” or of “right and wrong”
that represents the arbitrarily reflected _aspect_ of life based upon
the personal absolute of each, life, as I have said, is henceforth
contracted into the opposite alternatives determined by the two
components that comprise one’s own pleasure or one’s own pain. This
shifting choice imposed by the contrary issues inseparable from our
bidimensional outlook confronts us on every hand, and it is this
limitation of us all to the artificial bidimension of personal loss or
gain that reduces life to the tragedy of getting or of not getting what
one wants.

Such a division of personality as this personal bias unconsciously
entails, amounts to nothing short of a compulsion neurosis, the scope
of which involves our entire social consciousness. The symptomatology
of this mental division within the social personality finds its
projection in such familiar antitheses as heaven or hell, love or
hate, peace or war, idealist or materialist, Stoic or Hedonist, Jew or
Gentile, aristocrat or proletarian, and so on _ad infinitum_. For such
are our ever-shifting alternatives of getting or not getting as they
are reflected in the assumption of private advantage underlying the
so-called “good” and “bad” that is the preliminary outfit of us all.

In this eternal whether-or-no that is our superstitious alternation
between good and bad lies the meaning of the social division
constituting the reaction unconsciously sponsored under the shifting
incertitudes of our popular forms and moralities. In our trembling
vacillations between the ever-pressing issues of personal advantage,
as apprehended through our superinduced images of “good” or “bad,” is
the substance of the obsessive oscillations of will commonly saluted
as man’s conscience, a reaction, however, in whose irresolutions an
eminent psychologist long ago discovered the element of hesitation that
tends to make cowards of us all.

This perpetual reflection of the self in the mirror of self-interest so
operates as to invert completely the natural processes of life. Due to
this unconscious distortion of reality, our every experience is viewed
in the light of the fanciful image that is our own self-projection.
On the basis of the absolute premise of self, that is the result of
our own recoil upon the image of our own self-interest, everything is
subordinated to the bidimensional component comprising our own personal
aspect. For example, this inverted image of self, determining the
personal absolute of each, underlies the delusion commonly concealed
under what is popularly known as our “right.” After all, what is
held most dear within each of us is this private reservation that is
one’s own “right.” Indeed, it is no other factor than this alleged
prerogative or “right” of the individual based upon his autogenous
assumption of personal absolutism that, as already stated, is our
unconscious “resistance” both individual and social. Taking our
stand upon the inflexible basis that is the individual resistance or
personal absolute of each, we approach life wholly from the position
of this personal bias on the ground that it is our right. It is the
preservation of this personal right that is the sole propriety of
the law. But the laws of men as they appertain to personal claim and
title are the direct antithesis of the law of man as it pertains to
the organic unity of his life. In truth, what is called the rights of
private ownership is shown upon analysis to be the ownership of private
rights.

We do not see--being wholly won over to a policy of unconscious
self-interest we will not see--that our so-called “right” is not a
reality inherent in the conditions of life itself, but that it is an
illusion secondarily derived from our personal reaction to the system
of autocracy that is the unconscious self-interest of the social
unconscious everywhere about us. Here we find the psychological
concomitance between the reaction of resistance and the process of
inversion, between the bidimensional aspect reflecting one’s own
image and the unconscious illusion of the personal absolute assumed
to be the private “right” of every individual. For, in the measure in
which one’s outlook upon reality is restricted to a bidimensional or
pictorial aspect of reality, one’s range of perception is necessarily
confined to alternations of self-advantage or to the issues of good
and bad such as are determined by the autocratic absolute of one’s own
personal right. From the fixed background of personal right we can
look out upon the world about us only from the angle of our personal
satisfaction. In this outlook the sole test of human experience narrows
itself to the question as to whether an issue bodes good or ill _for
me_. My personal right being my standard of measure, every value will
be weighed by me in accordance with its reading. Here, you see, is the
very essence of inversion. Here in this element of personal prerogative
the introversions of unconsciousness are to be traced to their
biological root. Thus, in this repercussion of consciousness embodied
in our assumption of personal right, we come upon the very nucleus of
the neurosis.

I believe that in this bidimensional alternation of our unconscious
self-reflection existing within the societal personality lies the
basis of our social mania of competition, as it is the basis of our
tireless discussions and altercations within the various spheres of
man’s activity. It is again the obsessive shift of our compulsive
self-interest, and our social alternations of competition merely
reflect our own oppositeness. I believe that this delusion of
self-interest is the sole validity of our vaunted “opinions” as of
the endless wranglings and disputations and outstrivings that actuate
our social interests generally. The claim that we go to war because
our “right” is disputed is not true. We go to war because in the
fallacy of our personal absolutism our assumed right is held by us to
be indisputable. Far from possessing warrant for what is called our
“right” to institute war, it is precisely because of the presumptive
and illusory nature of our arrogated right that we are driven to this
alternative of immeasurable wrong. The fact is not that we are right
because we think such and such to be true, but that in our compulsive
response to unavoidable alternative we think such and such to be true
in vindication of our assumed right. In other words, our “rightness”
is not the natural result of our logic but our logic is the enforced
result of our “rightness.” By reason of this secret reservation of
personal prerogative within each of us, everything is made subservient
to this autocratic absolute of our individual right. If it is true,
then, that the self-assurance and inflexibility of the personal
absolute within each presents the true account of the mental and social
rigidity comprising our resistances, there is here a significant
commentary upon our so-called adult social consciousness.[17]

This mechanism of unconscious autocracy underlies our sociological
reactions in a degree that is beyond our suspecting, and it is to the
social no less than to the individual consciousness that we must turn
for a solution. If we disregard the individual implications of the
social neurosis, it is not possible to envisage the social implications
of the individual neurosis. Due to the subjective concomitance between
the individual and the social aspects of consciousness, to attempt to
deal with one and not with the other entails a contradiction that is
organic. Just as in the individual personality there are alternations
of will entailing contrarieties of mood that correspond to getting or
not getting what one wants, so in the social personality there are
these same alternations of will with their corresponding antitheses of
mood depending upon our getting and not getting what we want.

The element of failure in Christianity is the element of the
bidimensional in Christianity. Christ repudiates the consensus and
the consensus exacts his life in return. Judas betrays Christ and in
expiation exacts his own life. In the real motto of Christianity “Do
unto others as ye would have others do unto you” there is betrayed
the familiar alternative of secret self-interest. It reveals at once
the mark of arrangement, of bargain, of conduct-with-a-view-to that
here, as always, is the private guarantee of personal advantage.
In the note of reciprocity underlying the Lord’s prayer, with its
“Forgive _us_, as _we_ forgive,” the bidimensional is at a premium.
Only this bidimensional basis is adequate to account for the constant
dissensions--religious, national, political and economic--that exist
throughout the world of Christianity under the name of “right.”

The truth is that the consciousness of man is not secure within itself,
and our right is the protection of our own insecurity. An insidious
division underlies the personality of man. Beneath his outer show of
amity and covenant there resides a restless self-doubt, an anxious
fear, a divided will. At the heart of his consciousness there is a
deep-seated uncertainty driving him to temporary appeasements which
can find issue only in the alternations of getting or of not getting
what he wants. It is everywhere the aspect of the personal advantage
under a new and altered guise. It is everywhere the alternation
of self-interest, with its bilateral illusion of advantage or
disadvantage, due to our fear-ridden obsession of “good and bad.”

The vacillations of this illusive alternative likewise explain the
anxious fascination of the shifting incertitudes of “fate.” Here in
the uncertain eventualities of chance is the irresistible appeal of
our endless speculations in enterprise and game. In the indispensable
element of suspense that lends pith to the drama there is again echoed
this artificial note of self-division. For that which constitutes
dramatic suspense merely sustains the converse extension inseparable
from a bidimensional situation, and the interest of the drama, as
of all art-forms based upon the element of conflict or of periodic
alternation, is its unconscious projection of the dual issues that
reflect the shifting bidimensions of our social self-inversions.

With the descent of the curtain upon the bidimensional situation
with which the accustomed drama invariably closes, there remains,
in essence unaltered, the same situation upon which it first arose.
This is why it is always necessary at the end to create an artificial
situation such as will temporarily satisfy the demands of a _seeming_
conclusion and bring the episode to a halt. But a conclusion in the
sense of a resolution of elements is not possible. The drama that is
built upon the dilemma of the bidimensional is inevitably committed to
one or the other of its two horns. Thus the end can be designed only
with reference to one of the two alternatives in accordance with the
unconscious ambivalence of author as of onlooker. And so the question
of termination rests always upon the issue as to whether the audience
shall smile and be pleased with itself (comedy) or weep and feel sorry
for itself (tragedy) according as it gets or does not get what it wants.

The art of the dramatist is, therefore, in the final accounting always
constrained. It is this exigency that causes to be perpetrated in the
name of dramatic precedent the unpardonable affronts to organic verity
which we are constantly witnessing. In real life a girl, who has had a
liaison with a man with whom her relationship has been wholly sexual
or self-interested, does not confide the secret of her inadvertence
to a subsequent suitor with whom she is now “in love” upon a no less
self-interested basis. Such a course involves an organic contradiction.
She knows in her heart that in the unconscious concealment of his
equally secret self-interest in her it is as intolerable to him to
have the secret of his illusion disturbed as it is intolerable to her
to disturb her own. But in the drama the psychological verities are
thrown to the winds, and the heroine, to the artificial delight of
a bilaterally disposed audience, tells everything that has been in
the “past” exactly as she would not tell it, and to the one person
who hears it exactly as he would not hear it. But with drama that is
bidimensional we must put an ending somewhere!

Such are the organic discrepancies with which our ablest writers,
whether in the form of the drama, the novel or the screen, still
continue to banter us. The reason is to be sought in the unconscious
and compulsive bondage which they themselves are under with respect to
the illusion of the alternative that is their own self-reflective basis.

It is this illusion of unconscious self-reflection that explains also
the greater fascination of the bidimensional _picture_ we see sketched
upon the wall or presented in the pages of literature as contrasted
with the inherent _experience_ that is the tridimensional actuality of
our daily life. It explains our greater pleasure in the surroundings
which one’s art may contemplate or portray than in the surroundings
which one’s life may by participation fill and render beautiful.
For art as image is the portrayal of unreality; art as life is the
expression of reality. Art to-day is merely the distinction of the
individual interpreter. It is unrelated to the conscious aims of days
and dreams that may be shared in common among all people. The truth
is that in our prepossession with the bidimensional and pictorial our
interest is centred far more in the distractions of art as image than
in the inclusiveness of art as life.

This illusion of the pictorial aspect with which we replace the world
of tridimensional actuality finds nowhere a happier vehicle than in the
mechanical bidimension afforded through the medium of illusion achieved
by the motion-picture. There is no device better adapted to reproduce
the flat, scenic aspect such as gives the real zest to our dreams. For
through the device of the motion-picture there is reflected the social
drama that comprises our day, just as through the device of the dream
there is reflected the individual drama that comprises our night. It
is in this illusory _bidimension_ of the photo-play that we are so much
at home. We like its facile reproduction of ourselves. This is why we
can accept without remonstrance the childishly naïve sequences standing
for plot as represented in the bidimension of the screen. The same
narrative would appear too utterly obvious and banal to pass muster
in the solid perspective of the spoken drama, but presented upon the
screen it finds ready acceptance, because in the motion-picture there
is reproduced the pictorial aspect that corresponds to the habitual
aspect of self-reflection that is our own image. We like moving
pictures because we are moving pictures.

This element of unconscious dramatization, prompting the activities of
the normal mind, we need somehow to realize within us. We need somehow
to realize that in the manifestations of the unconscious comprising
the collective enactment of the social drama around us there is this
same reduction of actuality to aspect. _For in the active motor images
of the social mind with its manifold gestures of a self-reflective
actuality there is inherently no less unreality than in the passive
sensory images of the individual mind in the private theatre of its
self-reflective phantasy-building._ Yet so involved are we now in
our retroactive processes that in our purblind efforts toward their
presumably conscious readjustment we still proceed retroactively. Such
is the futility of our personalistic methods of dream-analysis, as it
is the futility of our personalistic envisagement of the disorders of
affect comprising the neuroses.

In view of this central defect of our mental vision, whereby it is
contracted into the artificial bidimension of the self- or dream-image,
our outlook is everywhere distorted. Being vitiated throughout with the
prejudice of the circumscribed and personal, our affective response is
not spontaneous and true. As our subjective feeling is self-reflective
or self-interested, our perception is necessarily pictorial and unreal.
So that in our presumable contemplation of the objective world
of reality, the experience that reaches us is not reality. On the
contrary, in the element of the wish or dream that is our bias toward
actuality, the aspect perceived is merely a foreshortened projection
of the fanciful image of self. It lacks the tridimensional depth and
solidarity of an inclusive reality.

This habit of personal dogmatization and autocracy has induced in us
an autocracy of the mental processes generally. Our representations
of the aspect have become, throughout, the organic antithesis of our
participation in the real. From a basis of unreal images we can only
reproduce unreal images. Out of a mental system of false impressions
we can only elaborate impressions that are false. It is precisely this
flat unreality of the pictorial, whether fanciful or actual, that lends
to all our so-called “art” its obsessive fascination. Not only is there
a distortion of reality in the flat mental picture we form of it, but
in the necessarily detached adaptation of the mere onlooker each of us
becomes unconsciously an arbitrary centre of personal opinionativeness.
Each one stands as a sort of solar centre within a planetary system
comprising his own self-determined affects. He thus reflects the
universe surrounding him, and it is thus by him defined. And there has
come to be built up in each of us in respect also to the world of art a
system of personalism or unconsciousness that is well-nigh logic-proof
in its absolutism.

Thus every stimulus--every impression that reaches our self-conscious
mental retina falls upon the flat, self-reflecting surface of the wish,
the dream or the personal _right_ of each. Of such is the supposedly
cognitive reaction underlying our “beliefs,” of such is the presumably
affective reaction we express as “love.” But belief and love trace
their etymology to a common organic root that unhappily betrays the
equally illusory origin of each. In the Anglo-Saxon _leof_, meaning
lief or wish or bias, both reactions are reduced to a single motivation
that is the tell-tale of their phantastic import. And as belief and
love (inverse cognition and inverse affect) are the very tissue of our
personalistic consciousness, we may begin to understand to what extent
the wish or the preconception comprising the bidimensional self-image
underlies our every perception!

And so, after all, our world of “actuality” is not more real than our
world of phantasy, our day not less self-reflective and unconscious
than our night, our waking not less apparitional than our sleep. For
both alike are motivated by the arbitrary reflection that is the
inverted process of the will-to-self. As yet we do not realize that
the personal absolute embodying our so-called “right,” motivated
as it is by self-reflection and unconsciousness, is as truly the
product of our day-dream as the wish, motivated by unconscious
self-reflection, is the product of our night-dream. We do not as
yet see that the wish or self-satisfaction comprising the sleeping
dream of our individual unconscious is itself but a reproduction
of the wish or self-satisfaction comprising the waking dream of
our social unconscious. We have yet to recognize that here again
in the oscillations of its unconscious _form_ is to be traced the
bidimensional alternation of our own self-reflection as determined by
the “good” or “bad” aspect that is our social as well as our individual
advantage.

Here, in the contrasting circumstances of its affiliation with the
social unconscious on the one hand and of its personal isolation within
the individual unconscious on the other, is doubtless the dynamic
element determining the vacillation of form that comprises the periodic
alternations of the sociological bidimension generally. After all,
what is “good” for me is that which is socially approved, what is
“bad” for me is that which brings me into disfavour with the social
consensus composing my environment. If the social unconscious about me
is willing to connive with my individual unconscious and applaud my
egoistic self-strivings, all is well. If, on the contrary, it withholds
acquiescence and repudiates my self-inverted interests, my state is
a correspondingly unhappy one. This accounts for our artificial
dependence upon the social give-and-take with which we hedge ourselves
about and is the basis of the periodic alternations of mood that
make up our day. Being unconscious, one is a prey to the unconscious
about him. Being self-reflective, one reacts to the impressions of a
self-reflective environment. This oscillation of mood, depending upon
whether our adaptation toward the social consensus is assimilative or
discordant, explains also the alternations of mood observable in the
contrasting reactions characteristic of certain pathological states,
as it is the basis of the daily variation of mood registered in the
neurotic and in the normal constitution. It is here, too, that is
found the basis of the pleasure-pain shift represented in our mood
alternations of elation and depression, whether existing in the diurnal
variations characterizing our normal mood alternations or in the more
pronounced reactions characterizing the extremes of affective tone
presented in manic-depressive insanity.

It cannot be too strongly urged that, however intrinsically opposite
these extremes of mood may seem, they are in essence identical. For,
in reality, these seeming antitheses represent but the obverse aspects
of one and the same bidimensional portrait of personal advantage.
As regards this intrinsic identity between such seemingly opposite
mood-tones it is interesting to note the etymological concurrence in
the Anglo-Saxon root _saed_ (English sot, meaning filled), in which
we find alike the source of such apparently unrelated derivatives of
current usage as the words _sad_ and _satisfied_. There is, indeed, an
unescapable concomitance in the mental attitudes of joy and sorrow, of
elation and depression, of satisfaction and sadness. This coincidence
is but an altered form of the common alternative of good and bad, of
praise and blame, of getting and of not getting, and, as always, its
presence denotes the conflict involved in our inverted self-interest.

Doubtless to this bidimensional alternation are also traceable such
sociological antitheses as one may witness in the contrary reactions
expressed in our various economic and political factions. This
one, failing to suspect the element of traditional self-reflection
determining his so-called party affiliation, registers his personal
allegiance under the socially augmented symbol or principle embodying
the standard that is _his_ private absolutism or right; that one,
no less oblivious of the part he is automatically enacting in his
character of party promoter, assumes the symbolic rôle that tends to
further the party principle representative of the absolute criterion
that is _his_ right. So, too, are to be explained the alternations
of reaction represented in the social antitheses of prohibition
and anti-prohibition. The anti-prohibitionists are by imputation
the ultra-liberal, the prohibitionists are by imputation the
ultra-conservative element, but both are in point of fact equally the
dupes of the personal reaction that is their own self-reflection. For
both, in their unconscious response to what is commonly called “early
training,” equally embody expressions of their original infantile
reaction to the opposed issues involved in the social pretence of
“good” and “bad.”

Extending into every phase of our social life, it is this bilateral
motive that is likewise the failure of the schools. With credit,
praise or privilege and their opposites (depending upon whether the
child “succeeds” or “fails” as judged by the bidimensional standard of
good and bad, of praise or blame constituting the arbitrary _picture_
of his personal conduct), it happens that, through an unconscious
substitution of the image of the child’s person for the function of
the child’s personality, the entire incentive of the schools becomes
ulterior and artificial. The so-called liberal schools of to-day are
in no better case. Despite their much ado about advanced methods that
will give greater freedom to the child they afford mere imitations of
freedom. But this is freedom in aspect, not in function. It is merely
the ideal of freedom contemplating its own image. Thus it is futile to
attempt to alter our situation through recourse to mere progressive
methods of education. The elimination of formal standards of efficiency
is likewise unavailing. For the ulterior is present still. We find
it present in the bidimensional attitude that actuates the entire
pedagogic system with its underlying idea of _preparation_. Apparently
it is not realized that this element of the preparatory or ulterior is
the criterion also of the teachers, being likewise the basis of their
own promotion as it is the standard of promotion in the world at large.
But whatever is preparatory is based upon the illusion of the personal
image. It is commentative, premeditated, moralistic, and substitutes
a mental impression of life in place of life itself. When we offer an
image of life for which we seek to “prepare” the child, the very basis
of our educational programme becomes pictorial and untrue. Life knows
naught of images in the personal sense. Life is the functioning of
interests in constructive activities. The rewards of such activities
flow naturally out of them and consist in a common earning for daily
needs in common daily pursuits. The child, if given the opportunity,
will learn to construct useful and beautiful things and his only reward
will be the natural reward accruing from the intrinsic value, social
and æsthetic, of the work produced. When schools will have become the
productive plants of natural childish industry, there will not any
longer be the absurd invention by the schools of ulterior rewards such
as now supply the artificial stimulus necessary to lend vitality to
their essential dullness. It will not be necessary for teachers to
stimulate the industry of their pupils through resort to extraneous
“merits” in palliation for their own lack of joy in the natural
creativeness of spontaneous childhood.

There is, perhaps, no more subtle expression of the bidimensional
replacement than in the psychological counter-impaction of the marital
neurosis. In this conjugal vis-à-vis unconscious self-reflection
is at flood-tide. This is why, in the opposite extensions of the
conjugal conflict, there are presented concomitantly in husband
and wife such familiar antitheses as are presented alternately in
the single individual, as, for example, the opposed reactions of
mania and depression, the psychasthenic and hysterical extremes,
as well as the contrasts of homosexuality and paranoia. Where such
reciprocal conditions exist, the opposite rôles are in every instance
unconsciously assumed, of course, with entire consistency by the
opposite parties in question. This explains also the anomaly presented
in so seemingly contradictory a spectacle as that of a man of outwardly
serious deportment enjoying vicariously, through the cosmetics and
extravagances of self-adornment worn by a narcistically inverted wife,
the satisfactions of an unconscious exhibitionism. It is the law of
the marital neurosis, as of the balance-scale, that its termini are
diametrically opposite and that their variation is inverse one to
another.

The unconscious mechanism described by Freud under the term “psychic
ambivalence” (Bleuler) is of all reactions perhaps the least
understood, but, because of its invariable association with neurotic
processes, it is as important biologically as any of the mechanisms
that psychoanalysis has disclosed to us. Yet again, in this quality
of contrast inherent in the manifestations of neurotic states, there
are represented merely the two opposed extremes of reaction due to the
division of impulse that is inseparable from the alternation of aspect
we have traced to the illusion of the bidimensional self-image. This
replacement, as we have seen, occurs normally as well as neurotically,
socially as well as individually. It is again the to-and-fro of the
pendulum of good and bad. It is again but the oscillation that is our
obsessive reaction to the make-believe of the self-reflective and
ulterior.

The truth is that we prefer our impressions of life to an understanding
of life, and in the ambivalence of our response toward others, our
reaction is friendly or antagonistic only in the degree in which they
correspond or fail to correspond with our personally preconceived
impressions. In the present ambivalent scheme of things, the ultimate
poignancy of one’s grief is the element of secret pleasure it affords
to others. The daily newspapers, seeking unconsciously to make capital
of our human frailty in this regard, are ever alert to publish
under glaringly conspicuous head-lines the most startling crimes
and calamities. Under captions giving notice of some inexpressible
“Horror” (a term supposedly conveying a sense of repugnance) they
attain in fact their most intriguing effects. The newspapers are wise.
They have read us before giving themselves to us to read and so are
canny to supply the grim details we love to hear of another’s loss or
hurt.[18] It is this isolation of sorrow that is its desolation and
its bitterness. Yet it may be traced wholly to the unconscious tyranny
of this bidimensional division within us that we find the pleasure we
do find, however adroitly repressed, in the unhappiness or calamity
of those about us. It is, of course, not another’s calamity that is
the real cause of our satisfaction, but in the ambivalence of our
attitude as we contemplate his misfortune we feel, by contrast, or in
a _comparative_ count so much _more_ fortunate than he. It is again
but the projection of the bidimensional division within each of us
individually as a reflection of the division within all of us socially.
In this comparison of ourselves with others there is again reflected
the bidimensional alternative that is the fanciful self-advantage of
the personal image.

Turn where we will, this same phenomenon of mental alternation based
on the bidimensional image looms ineffaceably before us. Opposed to
the _mental image_ “male” we project the _mental image_ “female,”
in contrast to the _concept_ “religion” we place the _concept_
“science,” against the _psychological attitude_ of the artist
stands the _psychological reaction_ of the critic. Because of this
mentally pictorial outlook among us, we fail to realize that in the
unconsciously objective approach of the artist there is embodied an
attitude that is as truly a criticism or evaluation of life as is the
objective attitude of the critic toward the expression of the artist.
We do not realize that in our unconscious personal alternation an
element of criticism or evaluation everywhere substitutes the fallacy
of a mental state toward life for the conscious reality of a state
of life itself. Our bidimensional self-reflection is thus equally
the impediment of art as of life. The insidious element of personal
self-reflection is the fatal decoy no less of portrayer than of
participant.

On the other hand, in the spirit of the more subjective artist
what we sense is his insistent sway toward a self-realization that
is impersonal. We feel that in the measure in which he yields it
submission his expression becomes less and less a reproduction of life
and more and more an actualization of life itself. This is because
in the thought or feeling expressed through the art-forms of such a
personality, he is himself not so much the causative or self-conscious
agent reflecting a state of mind _in relation to_ life as it seems, but
rather the conscious link in a sequence that _identifies_ him with a
condition of life as it is. Thus again the truer the artist, the more
he tends to round the orbit of his personality in a conscious universe
of relativity; the more imitative the artist, the more he tends to
oscillate uncertainly between the alternate phases that merely reflect
the assumed absolute of his own ego.

So it is with our alternations, social and individual, pathological
and normal, as they exist on every hand. There is the precoid and the
hysteric, the homosexual and the paranoiac, the religionist and the
sceptic, the moralist and the voluptuary. It is the world-old tragedy
of getting and not getting what one wants, and in the self-satisfaction
of the one as in the self-abnegation of the other the element of
self-consequence is equal and identical. It is the ineptitude of virtue
that it is but the bidimensional reverse of vice. Generosity, like
humility, contains its ambivalent element of pride. Though from time
to time we may dispense no slight favours, yet always we demand to
hold the reins of power within our own hands. Let our protégés presume
for a moment to assert their own individuality and straightway we rein
them in. Indeed, if we will look into this, we shall realize that it
is precisely the person toward whom we are most lavish of beneficence
that is the one of whose native and unsponsored expression we are most
jealously critical. The fact is that our virtues are really too good
to be true and that our amenities, after all, reflect only our own
self-advantage. Thus, from the point of view of good and bad, our lusts
and our repressions are but interchangeable adaptations of the central
theme of self, and in the alternations entailed in the popularly
conceded distinctions assumed as morality and immorality there is
preserved under merely reversed aspects this identical fetish of one’s
own self-image.

Even in the sphere of psychology itself there is this same division
inseparable from the personal absolute or the private arrogation
that underlies the assumed right of each individual as reflected in
our social contrasts of good and bad. For example, the propriety
of studying the “merely motor expressions” of the behaviourists is
regarded with grave question by the introspectionists, while the
behaviourists as ardently doubt whether introspective studies are the
legitimate matter of psychology at all. The futility of dissension is
again its two-sidedness. What we omit to reckon with when we consider
the vying of these two schools with one another is the element of the
personal prerogative within them that unconsciously goads each to an
intolerance of the other. For all “rights” being mutually opposed to
and exclusive of one another, the “right,” or opinion, underlying
any system except the system that is one’s own is, of its nature,
inadmissible. In the irreconcilable assertions of the multifarious
opinions of men, whether occurring in group or in single expression,
there is always to be traced this underlying motive of personal right
corresponding to the private prerogative of each. By rights I do
not mean the natural rights that are universal and common, but the
personal rights that are autocratic and pre-emptive. But whether our
divisions be national, political, religious, economic, professional
or familial, their underlying meaning is the same. So that, in this
antithetical “response” characterizing the periodic alternations of
our bidimensional self-reflection, there is registered a reaction
of the organism that invariably escapes the attention of either
disputant--the reaction, namely, of the will-to-self or of the private
privilege coincident with an absolute basis of adjudication. As long
as there remains this element of unconscious alternation due to the
self-reflective interest that now actuates human motives, students of
science, also, are as powerless to bring to their problems an attitude
of disinterestedness as are our national delegates when they attempt to
consider the problems involving all the subtle self-interest of a peace
conference.

The really classic division of opinion in the world--the division
that is of major importance even amid academic fields of thought--is
the conflict between Science and Religion. That the religionists, in
claiming the undoubted authenticity of sources confirmatory of the
truth of revealed religion, have offered indisputable “proof” of the
validity of their position, cannot be denied. That the scientists’
assertion of the doctrine of spontaneous evolution as opposed to
the revealed truths of Theism rests equally upon the evidence of
incontrovertible “proof” leaves likewise no room for doubt. In both
instances, however, the proofs of each are acceptable only to the
advocates of their own particular view and not to the advocates of the
view that is opposite their own. But of what avail are the proofs of a
position which are valid only in the minds which have anteriorly set
out to prove it? What dependence is to be placed in the intellectual
verifications of truth which are acceptable only to intellects which
demonstrate them but which, in the view of those of an opposite trend,
remain for ever inaccessible? These are reflections which necessarily
force us to question very seriously our objective intellectualizations.
If, in so wide and vital a division as that between Religion and
Science, the “logic” on which is based the claim of each is so
completely without meaning, beyond its facility to flatter established
prepossessions, it is time that our “reasoning” upon all issues be
summoned to account on suspicion that our position is, in every
instance, merely the unconscious alternation due to the bidimensional
image of gain or loss that is one’s personal self-reflection.

This blindness of the personal restriction within our subjective life
is the more interesting when one considers the far more impersonal
outlook that often characterizes man’s consciousness within the
sphere of his objective interests. With the growing expanse of man’s
consciousness there has arisen the widely inclusive and impersonal
field of preventive medicine with its essential preoccupation with
the communal weal. Through this wider sociological approach we have
come gradually to realize the incomparably greater significance of
activities directed toward safeguarding the health of the community
or of the group-life as contrasted with interests directed to the
personal cure of the individual as a single element within the social
group. We have begun to recognize that where, through recourse to
measures of public hygiene, it is possible to control the general
sources of disease, conditions are rendered such that there may be no
need to treat disease-process within the single individual. In Panama,
for example, where, through a far-reaching programme of civic hygiene,
the malaria-breeding organism has been almost wholly exterminated,
the medical and sociological functions of the community have become
so completely merged that with the appearance of the disease-bearing
Anopheles it is no longer the physician but the civic authorities who
are consulted.

Such are the signs of the broadening communal spirit that is coming
to influence more and more the various measures of improvement amid
the objective conditions of life about us. But, within the subjective
sphere of man’s activities, his outlook is no whit more encompassing
to-day than in the moment of his earliest quickenings of consciousness.
The reason is not far to seek. Man’s subjective life is throughout
overlaid and oppressed by his inverted obsession of personal
acquisition. Viewing everything in the light of the reflection cast by
his own image, a broad communal programme of life is for him as yet
subjectively impossible. An outlook that would render his position a
relative one and reveal it as but contributory to the organic life as a
whole would straightway menace the illusion of his personal prerogative
and rob him of what is now for him the basis of all his experience and
the sum of his personality. He does not see that his “experience,” by
reason of its inverted absolutism, wholly lacks the support of reality.
He does not see that what he calls his personality is his successful
collusion in the collective unconscious about him at the price of his
habitual concession to impressions not primarily his own. This is why
the psychopathologist is still futilely endeavouring to understand
his patients from the static, personal standpoint of his own dogmatic
absolutism rather than from the position of a relative and inclusive
interpretation of consciousness. This is why the objective analyst
remains always outside the real problem of the social disharmony
represented in the nervous and mental disorders of the individuals
by whom he is confronted. The truth is, he is himself a part of the
disorder which in his unconscious absolutism he is presuming to treat
in others. The tendency is one that exists among us all. For the taint
of an absolutism within the social personality involves each of us
equally as a contributing element in its fictitious structure. Hence
the ultimate futility of our constantly shifting “methods.” Hence the
ever-recurring therapeutic fads that represent first one and then
another absolute system of cure. But though each such system may for
a while claim our support, in due course it fades again and is in
turn succeeded by another in accordance with the varying phases of
our social alternations. Our enthusiasm, as well as its decline, must
after all be reckoned merely as the alternate reverberations of the
social consciousness in response to the unconscious alternations of the
bidimensional absolute which has its existence in the individual and of
which the social manifestation is but a reproduction.

As the neurosis is generic, involving the social system no less than
the individual element, the system of psychoanalysis, as well as the
individuals composing it, is equally included under its indictment.
From Freud, therefore, as from the rest of us there is due the
acknowledgment of the inevitable part occupied by psychoanalysis in
the systematization or unconsciousness that is the social neurosis.
The private assumption of each of us to the contrary notwithstanding,
we who have followed Freud could not possibly have been inspired in
our work by a conscious interest in the disorders of personality
represented in the social anomaly of the neurosis. Being ourselves
unconsciously involved in the social neurosis about us, we have been
urged forward through an unconscious or _personal_ interest in
order to divert our minds from our own implication in its _social_
significance. To this end it has been unconsciously our endeavour to
direct assiduous attention only to the specific manifestations of the
neurosis as it exists in individuals supposedly other than ourselves.
_In brief, we have been diligently occupied with the objective study
of the neurosis in its obvious appearance in others as individuals
presumably separate from ourselves, in order to escape the subjective
acknowledgment of its actual presence within ourselves as contributory
and interrelated elements in our common social consciousness_.

With each of us, the real motive has been the unconscious grudge of
our personal involvement in a world-wide enslavement to an artificial
precept such as can only oscillate between the alternations resultant
upon our self-limited bidimension of “good and bad.” When we can
lay aside the incentives of personal self-defence and view our own
reactions with impartial self-composure, we shall realize that it
has been our own unconscious that first quickened the compensative
defence-reactions which later culminated in the objective system we
know to-day as psychoanalysis. For, with psychoanalysis as with other
systems, its real incitement is found in the inevitable “come-back”
that is the organism’s response to its sense of affront before the
illusion of the self-image. Again, it is the automatic alternation
resultant upon a basis of counter-relatedness inseparable from the
delusion of the personal absolute as contrasted with the relativity of
the individual in respect to life as an organic whole. Again, it is the
artificial presupposition of our own “rightness” that is the strongest
determinative of our conduct, and to this secret autocracy that is our
own personal absolutism we have rendered everything subservient.

Men like to say that God created them, but in truth it is they who
have created “God.” We like to employ this anthropomorphic image of
absolute authority to our personal advantage. Rewarding the good and
punishing the bad in accordance with the alternations coincident with
the bidimensional aspect of an absolute Deity, this image of supreme
authority represents merely the projection of the personal absolute
based on the alternations of our own self-reflection. I do not doubt
that beneath this vicarious image of a fanciful father-supremacy there
ever remains the true and abiding principle that is the underlying
reality of life. But, in the place of this principle of reality that is
the unsponsored soul of man, we have timidly substituted such temporary
cheats as are adapted only to lull our fancies with imperialistic
dreams of personal empire. Indeed, in the personal projection actuating
the social anomaly of religious belief the inverted bias comprising
our own self-image has its strongest lodgment. It is here that the
collective mind has tricked itself to its collective undoing. For
in the current expression of our social inversion resident in this
absolute arbiter of the moral law or of “good and bad” lies the
very nucleus of our human pathology. And it is my position that
the pretence, underlying the personal adjustment based upon early
inculcated issues of self-interest and concealed beneath our specious
determinants of “good” and “bad,” is no less the underlying fallacy of
psychoanalysis. For, in its attempt to offset neurotic disharmonies
due to an unconscious repression of the sexual life of the individual,
psychoanalysis has recourse to adjustments that are the mere
_alternative_ of repression--a repression legislated by the dictates
of an equally unconscious and repressed society, be its expression
opportunistic, sublimative, or _en règle_.

Thus psychoanalysis, likewise, presents a policy that is but a
desperate alternation between the only two issues that are available
on the basis of the absolute criterion such as inevitably obtains
in our present bidimensional or pictorially constellated scheme of
consciousness, namely, a policy in which the reaction of the individual
can only be in the direction of the reverse or opposite extension.
Hence, however personally displeasing to us, there is the need that
we who are psychoanalysts somehow recognize that we, also, are
unconsciously subordinated to the moral dilemma that is the reflection
of our own self-interest. There is the need that we see clearly that
psychoanalysis, too, is still under the domination of a falsely imbued
impression of good and bad with its attendant issue in the alternations
of an unconscious social resistance.

This illusory antithesis of getting or of not getting what one wants,
this irreconcilable ache of man’s unconscious is traceable again
and again to the false assumptions of a self-reflective absolutism
as arrogated by the individual as a single part or element in
contradistinction to our organic consciousness as a whole. It is in the
absolutism of the part that consists the dissociation of the whole;
it is in the relativity of the part that consists the integrity of
the whole. Within the sphere of man’s consciousness our fallacies of
observation lie in the absolutism of the observer. On the other hand,
in surrendering the bidimensional or pictorial illusion inseparable
from the fixed position of the observer for the tridimensional
actuality of our organic participation in life as an inclusive
totality, we automatically yield it the full-dimensional component
comprising the extension that is our confluent societal unity and
which, in abrogating the artificial image of a personal and unconscious
absolute, constitutes life in the encompassing scheme of the relativity
of consciousness. In such a scheme there is offered to the dissociated
personality, single and social, neurotic and normal, a readjustment
that is fundamental. I believe it is only in the acceptance of the
societal consciousness of man that there lies the ultimate step for
each of us. For the principle of the relativity of consciousness is an
organically unequivocal one. In its individual realization consists our
societal integrity. In its societal realization consists our individual
integrity. Only in the co-ordination of the two lies the fulfilment of
our organic personality.




PART II

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES


  Personally, I am more and more convinced that the cure for
  sentiment, as for all the weakened forms of strong things, is
  not to refuse to feel it, but to get to feel _more_ in it. This
  seems to me to make the whole difference between a true and a
  false ‘asceticism.’ The false goes for getting rid of what one
  is afraid of; the true goes for using it and making it serve.
  The one empties, the other fills; the one abstracts, the other
  concentrates. Don’t you think half the troubles of life come from
  being wrongly _afraid_ of things--especially afraid of oneself?
  (February, 1890.)

  Richard Lewis Nettleship.




CHAPTER I

ANALYSIS OF FREUD’S DYNAMIC AND INDIVIDUALISTIC CONCEPTION OF THE
NEUROSES


The following pages are an endeavour to determine the conditions,
social and individual, that constitute the health of the mental
organism. What the health of the mental organism is, has not as
yet been adequately described. On the somatic side, of course, one
defines health as the harmonious functioning of the parts comprising
the organism as a whole. But, as regards the constitution of the
mental life in its totality, we have no such inclusive interpretation
of the condition requisite to harmonious functioning. Although the
psychopathologist is constantly engaged in efforts to restore the
distorted mind to a condition of harmony and health, one finds nowhere
a satisfactory statement as to just what constitutes the state of
harmony which it is his avowed purpose to establish. Health, of course,
is synonymous with the harmony of the whole. But from the point of
view of consciousness we have not even determined as yet what is the
organism as a whole or what are the parts constitutive of it. The
psychiatrist is habitually preoccupied with the outer features of
mental disharmony which the method of extrinsic observation has brought
to his personal notice. It is evident, therefore, that his conception
of consciousness is automatically withheld from a subjective inclusion
of the organism in its entirety, and that it compasses only the
particular aspect that falls within the limits of his own particular
observation. It is this discrepancy which I should like, if possible,
to isolate from its present personal involvement, with a view to the
possibility of a clearer understanding of our mental problems. To this
end my recourse can only be such an objective inquiry as may be the
more hospitable because of its subjective inclusiveness.

In pre-Freudian days, as is well known, the psychopathologist who
had to do with a nervous disorder turned quite automatically in the
direction to which the patient pointed, or to the symptom indicated.
Whether a paralysis, an obsession, a phobia or what not, this symptom
or sign constituted for the physician no less than for the patient the
exclusive focus of interest. Thus in the domain of nervous and mental
disharmonies the entire field of inquiry occupied itself in earlier
times with a mere obvious index of disease rather than with the disease
itself.

With the advent of Freud the situation became wholly changed. Through
his discovery that the disturbance was neither _what_ nor _where_ it
appeared to be from the clinical point of view, Freud came to explain
it upon grounds which led to a fundamentally altered conception of
the hysterias and their kindred manifestations. Viewing the situation
as a dynamic one, Freud regarded the symptom in question in the light
of an unruly element within the central personality, whence, in his
view, this central personality became, as it were, the controlling seat
of government. It was Freud’s position that this presiding principle
must be held amenable for fostering within its domain so discordant
an element as that whereof the symptom gave notice, and accordingly,
it was to this central principle that Freud henceforth addressed his
investigations.

This position of Freud’s, in which he regards the essential mechanism
of the neurosis as a symptom-substitution representing in substance a
psychic transposition or a shift of affect from intrinsic source to
arbitrary aspect, embodies the whole significance of psychoanalysis.
It is a significance that marks the outset of our understanding of the
real nature of the neuroses. For it was this conception that first
posited as the background of consciousness an integral personality,
from which, as a basis, it was sought to discover the factors operative
in causing the division within it represented by the neurosis. But just
as the enduring distinction of Freud’s work lies in this conception of
a central totality of personality constituting the substrate of the
conscious life, so its limitation consists precisely in the erroneous
position to which Freud assigned this totality of consciousness. I
believe that the many inconsistencies and half-baked deductions of
psychoanalysis, with the consequent deadlock to a truly comprehensive
interpretation of the neuroses, are due precisely to this limitation
of the conception of the neurosis within the bounds of the individual
consciousness. When we have realized that this conception of a totality
of personality is biologically tenable only _from the point of view
of an inclusive societal consciousness and not of the circumscribed
individual consciousness_, we shall, I believe, have taken the
essential step toward dispelling the confusion and lack of coherence
within the psychoanalytic system as it now stands.

As one looks back, it is not difficult to see how Freud’s necessarily
conventional, clinical point of view--the outgrowth of personal
inclination and tradition--unconsciously bound him to a conceptual
outlook that was necessarily circumscribed and limited, and how he was
thus unwittingly led into a contradiction of the ultimate significance
of the very conception which he had himself originated.

In the nature of Freud’s postulate that a psychic transposition
is the basis of the neurosis, his thesis assumes a breach in the
integrity of consciousness. This breach within consciousness is due
to the effort of a delimited area within it to establish itself as
a separate, self-governing unit. His position envisages a conflict
entailing a dissociation of the personality due to the secession of
one or more of its integral constituents. Hence the real crux of
Freud’s thesis was the determination of the essential incompatibility
between an _independent part_ (dissociation) and the _coherent whole_
(unification) within the sphere of consciousness--a conception which
seems to me as beautiful as it is true. But in the bias of Freud’s
own individualistically circumscribed consciousness, with the
inevitable separation or dissociation it entailed, Freud failed to
recognize the implication of his own thesis. He did not see that he
was himself unconsciously held within a position bearing the essential
feature of the very disorder which presumably he was regarding from
a non-partisan, unified point of view. He did not see that his own
position was precisely that of a separate, delimited unit, within the
totality of consciousness, represented in the dissociation of his own
personal bias. There is here a consideration which Freud, and the rest
of us along with Freud, have permitted to pass by completely unnoticed,
due to our own unconscious embroilment within the limitations of our
circumscribed individual consciousness. While theoretically advocating
unification as the basis of consciousness, Freud was himself actually
seeking unconsciously to reconcile with it a dissociation within
himself. It is this self-circumventing illusion of the restricted
individualistic consciousness which, if one may judge from the degree
to which it has underlain my own work and that of others, is the
essential fallacy of psychoanalysis.

In reality, then, Freud set out to account for the seemingly actual
upon grounds of the seemingly actual. He did not see that the very
medium of human experience, as _seemingly_ actual and as commonly
accepted by us to be actual, is in truth already biased by impressions
that are only virtual. In short, Freud did not realize that our own
so-called consciousness is unconsciousness. He assumed that the
analysis or self-examination to which he subjected himself and his
patients was disinterested and authentic in its inclusiveness of the
personality as a whole. And all the while he failed to realize that the
personality as a whole, as embodied in the self-limited consciousness
of the individual, is itself imbued with all the prejudice of
self-interest and with all the bias of dissociation constitutive of
the habitual medium of our collective unconscious. As this habitual
medium is actuated by individual tradition and separativeness, it is
necessarily based throughout upon motives of personal preference. With
an outlook distorted by personal preference (the unconscious wish), it
is not possible to view the processes of life and its disharmonies with
freedom and clarity. From a standpoint of private prejudice it is not
possible to envisage private prejudice. Unconsciousness cannot compass
unconsciousness. The wish cannot assail the wish. In our present mode
of personalism and unconsciousness the attainment of consciousness
is of its nature an impossible task. Thus the bias of Freud renders
untenable the position of Freud when he assumes the abrogation of bias,
since his position has itself arisen from the unsuspected bias of his
own habituated or preferential mode.

It is this unconsciousness within ourselves which we psychoanalysts
have let escape us and which necessarily gives to our work, for all
its impressiveness, the conventional curtailment of the vicarious and
unreal. As an illustration of what I mean, there is somewhere in the
“Traumdeutung” an amusingly acute psychoanalytic touch in Freud’s
interpretation of the dream of a patient. This patient had on one day
stoutly protested that dreams were not invariable wish-fulfilments,
and on the following day she brought to Freud a dream in which she was
represented planning a summer outing with her mother-in-law whom she
cordially disliked. Here, she said, was proof that dreams were not
necessarily wish-fulfilments, and a superficial glance would seem to
give her the decisive score. But Freud was alert. “Quite the contrary,”
he replied with analytic acuity, “you have only furnished additional
proof that dreams _are_ wish-fulfilments, for it is precisely in
your wish to prove to me that dreams are not wish-fulfilments that
you have dreamed that you are going summering with your detested
mother-in-law--a dream which could not more amply satisfy your wish to
prove the incorrectness of my theory.” So speaks Freud with triumphant
naïveté, and, with a complacency that is no less naïve, we who are
Freudians are still applauding with unstinted assent the subjective
fallacy of his objective logic.

Like Freud, we have not seen that every dream of our own contains no
less the identical wish to prove ourselves right. Like Freud, we have
not seen that it is our wish that the dream shall contain the element
of a basic and invariable sexual factor in substantiation of the thesis
of us Freudians. It is the fallacy of the dreamer in the foregoing
incident that she sets out with the absolutism of the personal premise;
but so do we--the premise, namely, of personal “rightness.” Thus we are
in no different case from the patient whom Freud cites as manufacturing
a dream to prove her position right. But while the wish of this
dreamer--in its purpose in direct opposition to our own--stands out
in sharp, unmistakable outline before us, our own wish--in its nature
identical with hers, namely, the wish to prove ourselves right--remains
enveloped still in the obfuscating mists of our own unconscious. There
is here the organic inaccessibility of the wish to the wisher, of the
dream to the dreamer. There is here the blindness of the unconscious
preference with its basis in the personal absolute, and it is the need
of us Freudians to recognize that the blight of its inconsistency is
upon us all.[19]

How dominant is Freud’s own individuating wish or personal preference
one may realize who reads his essay on “The History of the
Psychoanalytic Movement” and witnesses the bitterness of his feeling
toward any who gainsay him. How strongly we share with Freud the
influence of personal bias may be seen in our own bitterness when
others would gainsay us. It is so with us all. It is the morbid
compulsion of self-vindication that underlies all “rightness.” It is
the habitual illusion of our own self-centralization, a less wieldy but
more explicit term for what we have come to know theoretically--that
is, in other people and as in no way touching our own personal
feeling--as the unconscious wish-motive. For self-vindication and the
unconscious wish are one.

And so, objectively, Freud is quite “right” in asserting that a basic
sexual factor underlies the dream. Do not his own and his patients’
dreams prove him so? And Jung is, objectively, no less “right” in
claiming that Freud is mistaken--that dreams are not primarily
motivated by a sexual wish. Do not his dreams and those of his patients
equally corroborate _his_ view? And so with Adler and his theory, and
so with any of us and his theory. For notwithstanding that the theories
of all of us are severally opposed one to another, yet all of us are
equally “right,” as may be equally substantiated by the dreams of each.
The explanation is simple. The “rightness” of each is the wish of each
and the wish is father to the dream!




CHAPTER II

FORMULATION OF AN ORGANIC OR SOCIETAL BASIS OF INTERPRETATION


Within the various fields of scientific investigation, there is the
established precept that we set out from the simplest assignable
elements as a basis for all future inquiry. Of such, for example, is
the ground-structure of the chemical and the biological sciences, and
it is likewise upon ultimately irreducible units that the furthest
abstractions of mathematics rest their foundation. But in our approach
to the biological elements of consciousness we have proceeded upon no
such soundly established principle. Unconsciously presupposing here
and taking for granted there, we have reasoned from premises that
have lacked the warrant of elementary support. Hence in the study of
consciousness we have, in our unconsciousness, unwittingly slurred our
obligations to the very first principle of scientific method.

This circumstance, however, is not one toward which we need feel
scornful. Our blunder has been inevitable. In the study of the elements
of consciousness a factor is introduced into scientific reckoning that
completely reverses habitual perspectives, and to trace with scientific
conscientiousness this inexorable reversal of the personal mode
requires of the student very special laboratory qualification. For, in
turning to the study of the basis of consciousness, we are ourselves
the primary elements of our own inquiry. Ourselves unconscious, we have
attempted to fold back upon ourselves and, from a basis of prejudice,
to recapture our primary, unprejudiced basis. From a now sophisticated
personal _adaptation_ of consciousness we have sought to regain the
native, unsophisticated _principle_ of consciousness of which our
personal adaptation is the unconscious abrogation. Clearly, this task
is of its nature self-contradictory. Only in the measure in which we
realize that unconsciousness is our habitual mode and so allow it
to cease automatically to dominate our lives may we come to study
dispassionately the essential structure of consciousness through an
unbiased examination of the primary elements of which it is composed.

Life has its beginnings in a continuous organic medium. Within this
common organic medium our original infant organisms constitute
identical elements. What we later regard as individuals are but
corpuscles in a homogeneous, societal tissue. Organically, or from
the point of view of their common and inherent affectivity, there
exists no discrimination among these elements. Race or national
separation, social or caste distinction have not entered into them.
These are divergences that have no place in the organic origins of
life. As integral members of an original organic matrix, the elements
representing our primary infant organisms are no more differentiated
psychically one from another than they are psychically differentiated
from the life-source or the maternal organisms from which they have
sprung. The mental life, being as yet wholly subjective and unaware,
is simple, unitary. It is one with the organism’s inherent feeling.
Subjective feeling, indeterminate and unqualified, is, in the primary
organism, the sum of experience, the compass of life. Primarily the
organism’s subjective feeling is its all. And as with the growing
perception of outer objects life enlarges, this subjective mode
is unaltered still. Our primary objective experience merges into
continuity with inherent feeling. It is added to, included in the
subjective life. So that in its incipient rapport with the world of
objectivity, life maintains still a fluid, undifferentiated, confluent
mode. For life is primarily affective. In the affect consists men’s
common ground. In the subjective affect lies organic bed-rock. Here in
the common inherency of native feeling is the primal menstruum of our
human consciousness.

But there suddenly comes an interruption to this state of unification.
The parent, as spokesman of a world of unconscious collusion in the
defence of self or the exploitation of separativeness, strikes in
sharply upon this unitary mode of being with a wedge of interdiction
that marks the beginning of a cleavage within the personality which
the subsequent years tend increasingly to widen and secure.[20] With
the sudden arrest of this early, unified mode through the entrance of
the extraneous strictures of command and prohibition (suggestion or
repression), the personality of the organism becomes automatically
divided. For with command or reproof there is introduced the element
of the ulterior. Organic harmony and confluence are no more. Into the
life of confluence is now thrust the rude encroachment of personal
motive--of motive based upon the outcome of promise or threat, of
gain or forfeit. The inherent flow, the organic current of experience
is now artificially checked. Henceforward expression is no longer
spontaneous. Instead, a programme of conduct-with-a-view-to takes its
place and becomes the dominant order of our activities. In the face of
every summons the question must first be weighed--Will it be well or
ill with _me?_ Upon the issue of gain or loss depends the response--the
issue of gain or loss for the now separated, individuated organism.
An adjustment to the ends of self-interest is demanded. Everything is
at stake; a fitting policy must be devised and the proper combination
must be sought. Thus is obtruded self-consciousness, self-interest or
that separation from its basic continuum that is incidental to the
interruption of the organism’s essential life, and with it a new mode
of consciousness embodying a fundamental opposition to the primary
unity of life now takes its rise.

Is it not clear that the condition here described is nothing other
than a dissociation of consciousness, that this interpolation of the
self-motive involves a division of the personality in which there is
presented the identical reaction that we have come to know as the
essential mechanism of the neurosis? If so, then life in our present
mode of adaptation is throughout a dissociation. That such is actually
the case is the position of the present thesis. For it maintains
that division of personality, or the neurosis, has its basis in this
incipient cleavage embodied in the separation of the individual element
from its original organic continuum through the interdiction of the
organism’s early unitary mode, while integrity of the personality, on
the other hand, is represented alone in the preservation throughout the
growth of the individual element of its primary organic confluence.

Such a postulate is indeed very sweeping. It will be readily protested
that it is too sweeping--that in effect it claims that the whole
civilized world is in the grip of a mental dissociation, that it has
its being, founds its organization upon a basis of unconsciousness. I
can only answer that, however sweeping such a statement may seem in
theory, this social implication of the neurosis is amply supported
in actuality. For the unconscious reactions of the social mind about
oneself are reflected unconsciously within oneself, the individual
being but an element in our common consciousness. If one will permit
himself to be sufficiently subjective in his own life to view with
objective disinterestedness the reflections within himself of these
unconscious reactions of the social mind, there will be little ground
for protest against such an implication.

This indictment of the entire social mind, however, may rest upon
no scant or uncertain foundation. We may not deal with so broad
an issue with the personal conclusiveness of a merely dynamic or
individualistic interpretation. Our approach must needs be genetic
in its scope. We must take account of those integrations which mark
the era of man’s first awareness and which reach back to the nebulous
sources of consciousness itself. For the thoughtful student will
demand to know the phylogenetic origin of this universal tendency to
interdiction toward her offspring on the part of the mother. Whence
_her_ self-consciousness, he will ask. One’s answer must be largely
intuitional, by which I suppose we mean that it must be gathered from
sources that are coloured by intimations arising from one’s own organic
life.

It would appear that in his separativeness man has inadvertently fallen
a victim to the developmental exigencies of his own consciousness.
Captivated by the phylogenetically new and unwonted spectacle of his
own image, it would seem that he has been irresistibly arrested before
the mirror of his own likeness and that in the present self-conscious
phase of his mental evolution he is still standing spell-bound
before it. That such is the case with man is not remarkable. For
the appearance of the phenomenon of consciousness marked a complete
severance from all that was his past. Here was broken the chain of
evolutionary events whose links extended back through the nebulous
aeons of our remotest ancestry, and in this first moment of his
consciousness man stood, for the first time, _alone!_ It was in this
moment that he was “created,” as the legend runs, “in the image and
likeness of God.” For breaking with the teleological traditions of his
agelong biology, man now became suddenly _aware_.

That man’s spirit should have quailed before the wonderment of
so complete an emancipation is not surprising. Sensing his utter
isolation in the face of so strange, so unwonted a realization, he
could only cling desperately to the one visible and concrete sign of
the prenascent world from which he had newly emerged--to the urgent
and ineradicable actuality of _himself_, the one and only link that
remained to bind man to the vast and hitherto uninterrupted continuum
of his primordial past. Yet turn where he would, the organic hiatus
had now been made and its inexorable breach yawned wide and inevitable
before him. Unable as yet to endure the contemplation of his new
freedom and the limitless expanse it spread before him, equally unable
to recross again the gulf he had lately spanned and recover the paths
of his original instinctiveness and automatism, the soul of man stood
divided against itself. For man could now neither venture forth nor
yet return again. In his division he could only grope blindly amid
uncertain ways. Before him stretched the stern demands of consciousness
and reality, behind him lay the fictitious decoys of a phantastic and
immemorial preconscious. His choice lay between the two, yet he was
incompetent to follow either. It is, it seems to me, the intermediate
stage in man’s development, comprised of these two contending issues
and entailing the irreconcilable conflict of which each individual’s
experience is a recapitulation, that is the phylogeny of the
unconscious. This is the experience of us all as it expresses itself in
the self-consciousness that underlies the personal adaptation of each,
through our gradually enforced awareness of the self.

Considered also ontogenetically, the development of consciousness,
contrary to accepted tenets, has by no means proceeded upon a
fluent and harmonious course.[21] In its very birth consciousness
embodies a biological recoil--an organic impaction. Its very
unfolding is an infolding, its begetting a misbegetting. For the
rudiment of consciousness is self-consciousness. In its origin it
is self-reflexive, self-relational. That is, consciousness in its
inception entails the fallacy of _a self as over against other selves_.
It is in this inevitable _faux pas_ of man’s earliest awareness, of
his original self-consciousness (original sin), that consists the error
or lapse in the process of his evolution. In this factor of development
marked by the recoil of our self-consciousness or by the inference
of our counter-relatedness is to be traced the momentary decline in
the progressive curve of man’s organic evolution. Yet such temporary
recessions embody the operation of laws that are entirely within the
order of our developmental descent. In the first dawnings of new and
untried possibilities, it often happens that, as growth proceeds,
conditions that are later to become assets in the developmental scheme
are in their rudimentary phase very burdensome liabilities. The infant
that has not yet learned to walk is wont to crawl with much ease and
impunity, but with the finer adjustment of walking once acquired he may
now move about his world in an upright posture with far greater agility
and comfort than the movement of crawling could ever have afforded
him. And yet many are the rude impacts and ineptitudes that attend the
gradual acquisition of his new endowment. And so the developmental
possibility offered man through his attainment of the stage of
self-awareness is not less an onward stage in his evolution because in
his awkward unaccustomedness he employs it to his own undoing. It is
one of the glories of his growth which he may temporarily dim but not
permanently extinguish.

With the further unfolding of the consciousness of man, or with his
increasing awareness, there followed the recognition of the objective
intervals between his congeners severally and between himself and
them. His external senses of their very nature apprised him of such
intervals, as, for example, those in relation to time and to space.
With growing experience his perception of interval between himself and
his fellows grew more and more insistent. It became indeed the basis
of his operations. Besides, there were intervals which were not only
spatial and temporal but intervals or differences that were attributive
or circumstantial in their nature, such as vocal and featural
differences, differences of sex, size, colour and of texture.

With this constantly growing, steadily deepening impression of
difference, interval or separation in point of external characters,
with this habitual looking out upon external or objective
differentiation or _otherness_, something happened to the consciousness
of man. That which happened was the _faux pas_ in his evolution to
which I have just alluded. For, through the suggestive influence of
repeated observation of objective interval or discontinuity, man fell
a victim to a trick of his own consciousness, and, from implications
of disparity in the sphere of his peripheral contacts, he erroneously
_inferred_ differentiations in the sphere of his internal, nuclear,
organic life. From data of observation in the field of his objective
relationships he unconsciously drew analogous conclusions in regard to
the essential continuities of his common, subjective consciousness,
and so applied to the primary and inherent mode of his experience
deductions which were warranted only with respect to the mode of his
outer or objective awareness. From a difference of envelope he assumed
a difference of content. From a dissimilarity of outer and accidental
character he implied a disparity in the realm of his organic and
essential life. _Thus arose the initial confusion accruing from the
employment of objective method in terms of the subjective mode_.

It is my position that the fallacy involved in confusing the separate
or objective with the confluent or subjective mode has become the very
warp and woof of the collective mind, as it is the biological basis
of the displacements characterizing the pathological references of
the insane. Dealing cognitively (objectively) with our affects and
affectively (subjectively) with our cognitions, we fail to envisage
what is actually before us. Where there are two individuals--oneself,
let us say, as compared with someone else--because of the dissociated
_feeling_ content with which each regards the other, our presumably
objective judgment rests upon a complete subjective misconception.
It is, of course, perfectly in order that people be demarcated
by us one from another and from ourselves by characters that are
external and accidental, and that this discrimination prevail even
when such distinguishing characteristics are of a mental nature. But
despite all such accidental differences, the original, inherent,
organic life that is the underlying essence of any two individuals is
common and identical. However different spatially, traditionally and
characterologically, there is between them the essential bond of an
inherent continuity, of an organic confluence.

It is interesting how the folk mind betrays its need of this underlying
subjective unity in its effort to offset the objective tendencies of
differentiation. In its desire to express its feeling of amity, its
sense of mutual understanding, the habitual mind automatically employs
the phrase, “It makes no difference.” For example, if one has been
unintentionally thoughtless of another, he is at once put at ease with
the reassurance that “it makes no difference”--it being obviously felt
that difference is the essential condition against which the social
mind must preserve itself. Similarly we say, “It is no matter” or “It
is immaterial”--a material or objective basis of relationship being
evidently likewise sensed as an impediment to unity. There is the same
implication in the disparaging intimation contained in the phrase,
“He has an object in view.” And more telling still is the coalescence
of the two affiliated ideas of matter and disunity in the use of the
single stem-ending employed in the words “object” and “objection,” the
evident implication being that _object_ and _obstacle_, or _objection_,
are subjectively indistinguishable.

It seems to me that even such seemingly trivial etymological evidences
betray the organic intolerance of differentiation within the sphere
of the subjective life. However habituated we may have become to the
subjective inferences of interval due to the objective report of our
external senses, beneath these outer and accidental demarcations there
is the persistent assertion of an underlying principle of unification
and continuity. In our own customary dissociated feeling we lose sight
of this completely, and, because of the confusion of modes within
ourselves, our judgment of others as being subjectively different from
us reaches the point of actual criticism and resentment.

A child early illustrates this tendency to erroneous inference when he
refers to inanimate objects about him--a toy or household object--a
disposition to thwart his will. For example, he will grow angry at some
intractable plaything and strike or abuse it in peevish retaliation.
And it is the unfortunate habit of unwise parents--that is, of parents
generally--to encourage the child’s delusive tendency with some such
corroborative remark as “naughty chair” (or whatever the offending
instrument may be) and even to carry their complicity to the extent of
themselves inflicting punishment upon the object in question.[22]

This tendency to erroneous inference in the mental sphere is the
fallacy of an objective method of psychiatry, as it is the underlying
misapprehension of the clinical approach of psychopathology
generally.[23] Indeed, this misconception is responsible for many of
the inadvertencies of reason that exist throughout our scientific
ranks. It would seem, after all, that the people who know most are
precisely those who suspect least. If the psychiatrist is asked what
is dementia præcox, his answer consists merely in recounting the signs
or symptoms “indicative” of the disorder. If he is directly confronted
with the symptoms or indications of the disorder, he will tell you that
they represent dementia præcox. With such a confusion in the mind of
the psychiatrist one may well judge the confusion existing in the minds
of people generally, and with this subjective confusion in ourselves
one gains readily an idea of the kind of instruction which the student
of psychiatry is now offered as a preparation for understanding the
psychology of insanity! It does not occur to the psychopathologist to
inquire what it is that constitutes the inherent condition whereof
the specific symptoms as well as the generic term for them are but
the pathological index. It does not occur to him to ask, in regard
to this and other disease-processes, what it is that underlies the
label as well as the appearances labelled. But unconsciously misled by
the superficial or cognitive _aspect_ of the real disharmony, he can
only shift uncertainly from sign to countersign. The reason is that,
lacking a societal encompassment of mental disorders, the psychiatrist
does not recognize that a subjective condition is to be found alone
within himself--that the condition for which, in his unconsciousness,
he is now seeking the objective account is accessible only within
the subjective processes of his own unconscious, as it is accessible
subjectively only within the unconscious of mankind at large.

Because of this confusion within ourselves we fail to recognize that
delusion is essentially of the affective mode, that its cognitive
expression is but its secondary rationalization--a symbolic picture
presented in lieu of the corresponding affect denied. It is this
type of “reasoning” that is responsible for the tendency one sees
everywhere within philosophical circles to make dark the things that
are clear. Descartes’ dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” is the keynote
to this cognitive fallacy. The tendency, as I said, even of us who
are psychopathologists to evade the recognition of the element of
unconscious replacement here--confounding cognitive form with affective
actuality--is due, as always, to the bias of this self-same replacement
within ourselves. Being social participants in the transposition of
affect that is the societal neurosis, it cannot be otherwise. Hence
this confusion between our perceptual and our affective modes is
throughout a basic one, and as it is general in its origin it is
necessarily general in its results.

We commonly accept the assumption that mysticism is an emanation of the
Hindoo consciousness, when in point of fact the Hindoo consciousness
is an emanation of mysticism. In truth, mysticism is a replacement
that is not more endemic to India than to England or to America. For
in mysticism there is expressed merely this underlying fallacy of
reference that is habitual to unconsciousness generally. Mysticism
is thus as symptomatic of our matter-of-fact normality as of the
most occult form of transcendentalism. Psychologically, the normal
mind is synonymous with the mystical mind. Such a replacement is,
then, no isolated eventuality signalized in some sporadic neurosis or
psychosis but, by reason of its ethnic scope, it underlies no less the
genial illusion of the collective social mind presented in the form
of amalgamated unconsciousness habitually disguised under the social
symptomatology of our so-called “normality.” Because of the automatic
and unconscious transposition of modes that characterizes our mental
processes at their present stage of development, the situation is one
that obtains among us all. In the organismic sense we are none of
us thinking clearly because we are none of us feeling clearly. This
fallacy of implied subjective differentiation is the whole meaning of
unconsciousness and the basis of all delusion. I believe that it is
upon this deep-seated fallacy of affect incident to the development in
man of consciousness or of self-awareness that rests the foundation of
the social as of the individual neurosis.

The situation with us is indeed a serious one. Except for one’s
faith in the ultimate triumph of the forces of integration over
the disintegrative tendencies of our evolution, the mind could
only despair at the contemplation of the vicious circle of mutual
self-destructiveness in which our present attitude of unconsciousness
involves us. As difference or discrepancy in the subjective or organic
mode is, from the point of view of the continuity and cohesion of the
species, self-destructive, the maintenance of such separateness entails
for each individual a desperate loss of his sense of organic integrity.
Under the blindness of the retroactive self-defence to which his
erroneously assumed separateness inevitably drives him, he fights the
more desperately to maintain his artificial individualistic oneness,
and, the more desperately he contends, the further he defeats the
acceptance of his true organic oneness. It is the inevitable fallacy of
our disparate modes.

Freud, then, is right when in seeking to solve the riddle of the
neuroses he addresses himself to the personality as a whole. But
he is wrong in positing a personal or preferential localization of
this central personality as he does when he places this integral
consciousness within the bounds of the separative individual.
This is to frustrate at the outset the aim of understanding the
processes of consciousness through succumbing oneself to the very
mode of unconsciousness which supposedly it is one’s purpose to
comprehend. It is an instance of one’s intentionally honest effort
toward self-understanding failing to escape the pitfall of personal
preference in its very outreaching toward the unprejudiced and true.
The separative or the personal _is_ unconsciousness. Discontinuity
and unconsciousness are conterminous. Thus we are again and again
brought back to the impasse which is our refusal to realize that the
individual, as a self-appointed, unconscious unit, is but a separate
and dissociated _part_, that only as the individual accepts his place
as an integral, confluent part in the common, societal personality does
he become a conscious, unified _whole_.

There is, then, the need to clear our vision through adopting the
larger, more organismic viewpoint. There is the need to stand apart
from the self and view it as the element that it is within the larger
organism of mankind. From the organismic point of view the individual
is as truly an element in the larger co-ordinated total comprising the
ethnic organism of man, as the manifold cells comprising the individual
body are elements in the larger whole constituting his individual
organism. We have not as yet reckoned with the consolidated unity of
this common societal entity. We have not reckoned with its organic urge
in its influence upon human destiny. In our preoccupation with the
dynamic or individualistic conception of the libido or of individual
aggression, we have not reckoned with the genetic or organic urge that
actuates the unitary race consciousness in its societal cohesion.

It is commonly taught by the schoolmen that self-preservation is
the first law of nature. I do not believe it. I believe that the
instinct of tribal preservation is by far the dominant urge among us.
I believe that this instinct takes precedence over the impulse of
self-maintenance to a degree that renders individual life insignificant
in comparison. In face of the reflex assertion of the impulse of
race-preservation the individual is brushed heedlessly aside. A
group of miners will without thought descend one after another into
a gas-filled chamber to rescue a fellow-workman from death and one
after another share the fate of their comrade. We all know countless
instances of this rescue-impulse as a response to the organic instinct
of race unity.[24] Nor is it confined to these more sensational
expressions of the impulse. The scientist in his laboratory toiling
daily with indefatigable energy, receiving usually a remuneration
that is not adequate to his actual needs and too often without even
the sympathetic appreciation on the part of his environment of the
significance of his quest, as it relates to the communal need he
would serve, expresses equally this same organic instinct of racial
solidarity. Yet I do not lose sight of the secret unconsciousness
and separativeness that actuate also the unconscious and adaptive
reactions of even the most earnest and gifted of these thoughtful,
patient investigators. I am not unaware of the delusions of competition
and petty jealousy existing even among the ranks of the scientific
student. I am not blinking the facts of his personal vanity, of his
pride of place and distinction. I will not deny how like a child
he is when, on the day of college commencement, he is afforded the
opportunity to parade to music in cap and gown and vari-coloured
academic emblems in order that, having assembled with his colleagues,
he may unite in praise of an archaic deity in thanksgiving for His
all-wise discrimination in having personally called him to the best of
conceivable institutions in the best of conceivable lands, etc., etc.
But, notwithstanding the obviously disparate regression observable in
these vestiges of obsolete nursery rudiments, there is yet, extending
beneath it all, the surge of an earnest, unifying purpose that embraces
the confluent needs of human growth as offered in interests pursuant of
common, social ends.

It is the inherent urge actuating this common societal impulse, as
contrasted with the narrower motives of separateness and self, that
is envisaged in an organismic point of view. I believe that through
this organismic outlook alone we shall come to embody the meaning of
the neurosis in its true, impartial significance. In this conception
we shall be in a position to view differentiation, under whatsoever
form it manifests itself, as the fallacy of self-sufficiency, as the
delusion of separateness that it is. Whether presented in the more
restricted, individualistic expression of an hysterical hemiplegia,
for example, or under the wider social aspect, let us say, of national
militarism, we shall no longer study the mere manifest content embodied
in the obvious symptom or signal--a focal hemiplegia or a focal
militarism--but we shall address ourselves, in each instance, to the
societal personality as a whole that underlies each and that comprises
for both the organic totality of consciousness. We shall realize that
in that totality lies the responsibility for the division among its
elements expressed alike in both manifestations. We shall see that in
these two seemingly widely dissimilar instances, one expressing itself
within the individual man, the other within the nations of men, the
situation is the same. In one, differentiation is caused by a breach
in the neural continuity of the organism as symbolized by the inert,
functionally disaffected segment within the individual; in the other,
by a breach in the societal continuity of the organism represented
in the functional anomaly of manic self-assertion and segmentation
within the social body as symbolized in the separative reaction that
has lately so disorganized the Western World. However different in
outer form, in both reactions there is alike expressed an unconscious
assertion of autocracy or the will-to-self as opposed to the confluent
life of the organism as a whole. And it is only as we view these
expressions, one individual, the other social, as identical reactions
and study them in an identical spirit of interpretation, that we shall
recognize the essential principle of our biology exemplified in them,
namely, the inherent inviolability of the confluent life of the
organism, both individual and societal. Only in this organismic outlook
shall we come to understand the true significance of the neuroses in
the sense of really encompassing the disharmony embodied in them.

_It should be clearly understood that in the view of this thesis it is
not a question of discrimination between the social and the individual,
but between the societal and the individual societally conceived on
the one hand and the social and the individual individualistically
conceived on the other._

From this position we have yet to encompass clearly the neurotic
disharmony, individual or societal. We have yet to encompass in its
real significance what is the most blatant expression of its societal
embodiment. Because of our dissociative, individualistic outlook we
have yet to consider the psychopathology underlying the phenomenon
of war. We have failed to interpret its psychology in the light of
the mental attitude that underlies and actuates it. We do not realize
that the settlement of war is properly the concern not of politics
but of psychiatry. Here, as elsewhere, we shrink from unearthing the
actuality of the interred affect, preferring to preserve its image
in the fanciful balm of our own illusions. Our horror of war is thus
centred solely upon the façade it presents and not upon the inherent
significance of war. Accordingly, our concern is merely to alter
the aspect, the cognitive form, the mental picture, and, under this
altered semblance due to our bidimensional alternation, we still retain
the same affect submerged in the unconscious grievance of national
separateness and antagonism. There is here the subjective fallacy of
the transposed affect and the ancient metonymy of all unconsciousness.

A conspicuous symptom of our societal pathology is the subjective
illusion underlying the latent “belief” that diplomatic overtures
between nations are competent to cope with the essential disharmonies
which, from time to time, tend to issue in the social symptomatology
of war, but which are, in reality, due to causative factors deeply
rooted in the psychopathology of man’s societal disunity. While not
questioning the outstanding objective advantage of such superficial
covenants as may secure to the social confederacies of nations at least
a temporary cessation of their outward expressions of hostility, these
surface amenities touch in no way the essential disorder. The real
cause lies deeper and the real remedy must penetrate deeper. For the
delusion of difference between nations, like the delusion of difference
between individuals, is but the objective reflection of the subjective
differentiation existing within the nation itself--a differentiation
that is comparable to this same objective reflection existing within
the individual as a subjective component of the national organism.

Just as the conflict underlying the neurosis of the individual is truly
understood only through an analysis in the individual of the vicarious
reactions that underlie it, so an understanding of the conflict
underlying the neurosis that is societal may be attained only through
an appreciation of the substitutive reactions of the group-mind as
disclosed through an analysis of the group-consciousness.

Seen clearly, man’s restlessness to-day is, after all, the restlessness
of intercepted growth. The tremors we are experiencing at this moment
throughout the political and economic world undoubtedly owe their
impulse to the awakening of a new order of consciousness. In the
seething undercurrent of discontent throughout the social organism at
the present time there is seen the symptom of a repression that is no
longer reconcilable with the growing consciousness of that organism. As
in the individual personality a condition of repression that has become
too long pent must inevitably break forth in an ultimate overthrow of
reason, so in the collection of individuals comprising the societal
organism the ultimate response to a too long sustained repression can
issue only in a correspondingly overwhelming disruption of the social
personality.

In what has just been experienced sociologically as the World War, man
is afforded an organic warning of the impending disintegration which
lurks unseen beneath the surface crust of immediate and temporary
social adaptations within the depths of his unconscious. In that
far-sweeping manifestation there are felt the first rumblings of a
sociological disturbance that bodes the utter destruction of our old
order of habituations, and in that desperate expression of man’s
social unconscious there is evident the need in which he stands of an
earnest and far-searching self-analysis. For as overwhelming as is the
catastrophe of the present war--and present it is--this catastrophe is
but the detonator preceding the crash that is to come--a crash that
has been gathering momentum within the unconscious of the race through
centuries past and that will descend upon the world with inevitable
fatality in the absence of a more societal and inclusive reckoning
among us.

Without the recognition of the meaning of our disaffection,
sociological as well as personal, without a more conscious realization
of the social involvement of our personal separateness, it will not
be possible for the creative forces resident within the personality
of man to come into their natural fruition. But thus to encompass
the organic disaffection that actuates the neurosis is _to include
it within ourselves_. Thus to realize discrepancy is to make real
within ourselves, where they exist in all their completeness, the
division and antagonism of the disparate consciousness, be its
countenance individualistic or social. Such a realization--such a
comprehension of life in its manifold unconsciousness is a subjective,
organic experience. The process is one that entails the slow divorce
of self from the long habituations of our narrow domesticities,
personal, familial and national. It involves the gradual sundering
of the artificial sophistications of self-consciousness with which
our childhood has been enclosed and in which were early laid the
foundations of the dissociation that has now become automatic in the
overwhelming impetus of its social involvement. The essence, then,
of an understanding that truly encompasses the neurosis, consists
in the recognition of our collective unconsciousness through the
realization of a disaffection within and among ourselves as elements of
a dissociated body-social.




CHAPTER III

THE ORGANIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS


In submitting a thesis which takes the position that the significance
of the neurosis is its societal implication, and which lays the burden
of its adjustment upon the societal mind at large, I fully realize
that I am offering no welcome thought. The illusion of the separate
self as all-sufficient and omnipotent is too obdurate not to regard
with suspicion any attempt to dislodge it. Whatever the postulate,
belief or argument, there lurks beneath it, in the mind of each of us,
the unconscious determination to preserve intact the secret illusion
of his own separateness. As long, however, as this affective fallacy
underlies the reactions of our collective mentality, all efforts toward
a reconstruction of society upon grounds of a more conscious and adult
adaptation are futile. The adaptive and compensatory nature of the
normal or collective mind occasions dissociation in all the activities
arising out of it. With our mental outlook based upon illusion, our
reactions are illusory. No matter how imposing in their manifest
content, they are fundamentally spurious and undependable. For having
been organically dissociated through the interdiction of the parent,
normality is necessarily self-conscious and vicarious. This accounts
for the ease with which the normal mind resorts to the replacements
represented in mysticism. In the manifold expressions of mysticism
the social mind finds its ulterior placations. This accounts for the
habitual self-propitiations underlying its cherished superstitions
and “beliefs,” and explains the whole meaning of the man-made
immanence represented in the vicariously projected image of invincible
omnipotence we call “God”--an image with which we childishly seek
to ally ourselves in order to sustain our impotent separateness. Men
are tenacious of the substitution that is their “God” in a degree far
beyond their suspecting. It is in vain that they pretend to throw Him
off in the mere insolence of their reactionary “disbelief.” In their
very challenge is His sovereignty reaffirmed. For wherever there is
dogmatism there is doubt, and beliefs that are denied are unconsciously
not less fixed and ineradicable than beliefs that are affirmed. As
long as there is unconsciousness so long will men be a prey to its
tyrannical alternatives. Though they break or kiss the rod, it is upon
them still.

Man will be slow to relinquish this symbol of God popularly employed
by him as a defence against the free, unsponsored growth of his own
spirit. It is a symbol, as are all symbols of the unconscious, that
has been erected by us as a protection for the disparate self against
the confluent life of our common organism. Indeed it is precisely in
this collective illusion that is man’s most desperate recourse. Yet,
in our very extremity and in the very tenacity with which we cling to
this illusion, there is to be seen, as always, a symbol for which the
only warrant is the profound reality that underlies it. In so far as
the organically true is denied, there inevitably ensues the vicariously
false, and the insistence of the substituted equivalent is invariably
the more intense in proportion to the urge of the organic need
withheld. It is organic law.

Recalling the past, it is interesting to consider how conscientiously
we have carried the biological method of research into the various
objective fields of scientific inquiry. Yet, in regard to the
subjective sphere wherein our own reality resides, we have persistently
befuddled our perceptions through an unconscious adherence to the
childish tenets of fear and superstition, instead of studying the
phylogenetic account of our inherent mental descent in the spirit
of objective disinterestedness. For, unconsciously yielding
habitual perceptions the supreme place even in the laboratories of
consciousness, as embodied in the researches of analysis itself, we
have continued to preserve the unconscious image of self habitually
disguised under our personal interpretation of God. Restoring the
form of the idol from time to time by covering the rent with a
temporarily stouter fabric whenever the straw has appeared, we have
continued to maintain the self-flattering programme of our vicarious
and self-protected image-worship. Men apparently do not yet begin
to recognize that the socially consolidated aberration constituting
their image of God is an illusion that is identical with the
individual expression long recognized by psychiatry under the clinical
characterization of “ideas of reference.” Still seriously discoursing
of the symbol called “God,” they assume that their _image_ possesses an
actuality apart from their own imagining.

More significant still, however, is the fact that psychiatry too has
its God. Objectively defining ideas of reference in others, we have
failed to reckon with the subjective presence of this same replacement
within ourselves. While we psychiatrists would carefully note the
tendency to transposed affects within the arbitrary systems of the
insane, we have wholly missed count of this same tendency within our
own autocratic system. Among psychiatrists the favoured Deity is
Dementia Præcox. The symptoms, reactions and prognostications assigned
to the image implied in this arbitrary superscription attain with us
to a quite endless category. And such is the subtlety with which the
insidious tendency to the vicarious (affective displacement) secretly
insinuates itself even into the courts of the elect, that individual
personality is again and again led into the unsuspected trap that is
our habitual confusion of the symbol for the reality that underlies it.

In truth “Dementia Præcox,” the disease, is but the symbolic
projection of dementia præcox, the actuality, ever resident in our
generic unconsciousness. As it is the primary state of the infant
psyche, its rudiment is preserved in the unconscious of us all.[25]
The understanding and acceptance of this biological substrate of
consciousness within oneself offers the only condition of its solution.
In this subjective course lies the whole significance of a really
organic analysis. To hold a theoretical, objective attitude toward the
insanities is to remain under the thrall of the social unconscious. To
preserve our own repressions by attempting to deny this preconscious
factor within ourselves is merely to perpetuate this regressive trend
under its present symbolic guise. Theoretical substitution is the
big-stick of normality of which an objective analysis is the butt-end.
To maintain the normal, psychiatric, adaptive outlook is to be
repressed, vicarious, theoretical. And by our attitude of aloofness we
merely preserve in unconscious form in ourselves the symptom-complex
we stigmatize as dementia præcox in others. But we cannot alleviate a
mental disorder from which we stand apart. It is only as we accept the
testimony of its rudimentary presence within our own consciousness that
its significance in the consciousness of others may become clear.

Of dementia præcox, the disease, psychiatry is in fact more a cause
than a cure, just as mothers and doctors who habitually hold to a
mental attitude of personal ministration and concern, however handy
they may be in untoward emergency, are more an occasion than a remedy
for disease in general. And so the real disorder, after all, is not
dementia præcox but psychiatry. When the psychiatrist will have come
to understand dementia præcox or the preconscious within himself,
this objective figment of his own disordered consciousness will
spontaneously vanish.

To-day, the symbol of the social mind that is called “God”--the symbol
under which man has worshipped himself so confidingly throughout the
ages--is gradually losing its symbolic adequacy and, as is typical when
the foothold of man’s unconscious threatens to be dislodged, he is
hastily replacing his shattered idol with an image that bears a new,
a subtler and a more plausible disguise. Even in schools representing
developments of the Freudian psychology and presumably devoted to
impartial analytic inquiry into man’s unconscious, we find this same
unconscious self-worship shifted from the broken image of “God” to a
merely revarnished symbol set up upon the same altar and called by
the newer name of “Love.” Though the form is altered, the substance
remains the same. It is again man’s self-love projected into the
spurious objective that best lends to it the flattering security of the
seemingly real.

I do not say that there is not in life an essential unity or love. I do
not say that there is not for man an answer to the need he feels in his
relentless but misguided pursuit of such an underlying reality. What I
do say is that the unity he may find is the substance whereof the unity
he is seeking is but the shadow; that in his unconsciousness he has
not yet begun to seek the reality that is the need of his essential,
organic life; and that, failing the reality which resides alone in
the confluent, unified life of our common consciousness, he has
pursued the temporary and personal satisfactions whereof such fanciful
image-projections as “God” and “Love” are but hysterical replacements.

What is significant is the fact that, under however subtle a guise
he may clothe it, every individual in the great confederacy of
“normality” entertains and is actuated by some form of “belief”--a
“belief” either in “God” or “Love” or in some other concept that is
the emotional equivalent of these more general fabrications of our
collective unconscious.[26] But in the image fashioned of belief
there is seen the inevitable process of compensation vicariously
exacted of us by virtue of our denying the fulfilment of the organic
reality of life. The dissociated mind can of necessity observe only
dissociatively. In its repudiation of reality it resorts perforce to
vicarious images of reality. It is for this reason that the normal mind
is the mystical mind. In its organic disunity it cannot be otherwise.
Although it seek under manifold signs and symptoms to conceal the
tell-tale of its stigma, its blight is betrayed by countless evidences
of its dissociation from the societal or organic personality. And it
is not in the nature of the _object_ that consists the element of
the mystical in our human pathology but in the _mode_ in which the
object is regarded.[27] The objects of man’s mystical devotion offer
an infinitely varied range. They may readily be presented by a host
of images expressing the widest discrepancy in manifest content--for
example, one’s conception of the cosmogony, “the true artist,” a
scientific discovery, the “error of mortal mind,” one’s exchequer,
“to-morrow” with its ever receding illusion of postponement, or a
cult of mental healing with texts setting forth the ultimate solution
of life; or, on the other hand, an autogenic sexual fetish, as one’s
body, the unreal image one causes to stand for one’s mother, a
favourite offspring, “God,” or “the superlative woman.” Among certain
people a very popular vehicle for the mystical mode is one’s “voice.”
To-day, too, there are people who talk in subdued whispers of the
spiritual virtues of raw foods and who dilate by the hour upon the
merits of lettuce--as though it were the millennium. Then there is
to be noted the high place in mystical sanctuaries which the family
escutcheon occupies among its votaries. There are people extant (I
confess I am one of them) who still tend to entertain the belief that
a reality underlies the social concept “good family.” And--comedy of
comedies!--such is the subtlety with which the element of the mystical
or of vicarious self-worship evades the reality of consciousness that
the very “sincerity” with which one comes to “relinquish” such objects
of infantile illusion may itself actually rank among the spurious
images of this identical category! Seriously fancying herself well
on toward the goal of her analysis, if not quite arrived, one of my
patients remarked to another: “I want nothing.” It was spoken very
gently, almost imperceptibly, so in keeping was the rendering with the
spirit of its author. But it is evident that at least she wanted to
be regarded as _not_ wanting anything, else she would have felt no
occasion to remark her detached state. But how exquisite the subtlety
here! Another says: “I want to get rid of _things_, that I may be
more free.” Getting rid of things or husbanding them may equally
fall within the mystical or dissociated mode. As for one’s “freedom”
there is no object, unless it be one’s “truth,” that constitutes a
more popular idol under which to hide the mystical fetish of one’s
secret self-worship. But whatever the vehicle, that which gives
to it the hall-mark of the mystical is its quality of an inner,
esoteric experience possessing an indefinable, transcendental meaning
revealed alone to the peculiarly favoured possessor. Observe here the
characteristic element of distinction, the factor of favouritism, the
inseparable paranoid element of special delegation. For the object,
after all, as every object of the unconscious, is no other than the
self or the parent from the point of view respectively of the parent
or the self, and our civilized world of boasted normality becomes upon
investigation but a nursery of ungrown childhood, filled to overflowing
with bogus Gods and goblins!

As the child lost in the street anxiously scans the face of every
passer-by in the hope of discovering the features of his mother, so
the grown-up, who has lost the quiet continuity of his organic life
and flounders amid a world of dissociative habituations and ulterior
ends, eagerly searches the countenances of all whom he meets, in the
driving urge to incarnate anew the cherished image of _his_ mother.
The difference is that everywhere and in every one he finds her. And
not his mother alone but his father, his brothers, his sisters, uncles
and aunts, and with them (such is the magic of unconsciousness) the
whole array of traditional furnishings reminiscent of his childhood’s
scenery. For as his images are born of his fancy, his fancy may create
them at his will. Thus the world at large is but the family at large
and the social _genre_ but the mother.

In contemplating this identification of “the world” with one’s mother
we come to sense more intimately the real significance in normality
of the widely featured phenomenon of suggestibility. As suggestion is
the affirmative expression whereof repression is the negative form,
suggestion, like repression, is but the operation upon the individual
of the will of the consensus, of which we all, of course, are the only
too willing dupes. For just as our succumbing to repression is the
individual’s rejection of the consensual mind, so our succumbing to
suggestion is the individual’s acquiescence in the consensual mind. So
that, whether the impetus be the factor of suggestion or of repression,
whether it be offered in the positive inducements to “good” behaviour
or in the negative disparagements to “bad” behaviour, in either case
one is but fancifully subjecting himself to the domination of the
parental will in the expanded guise of the consensual unconscious.
Contrary to popular belief, suggestion is no clinical specific; it is a
social pandemic. The doctor does not wield it, it wields him. So that
as suggestion and repression, or the will of normality (normality means
“accepted rule” by the way), are but the will of the parent, it is the
will of the parent that is really the “power” of suggestion. And as
the influence exerted by suggestion, like the influence exerted by the
parent, is based upon the mental precept of good and bad, suggestion
like repression is necessarily separative in its effect. For its
self-reflective tendency necessarily induces in us the inversion of
self-worship. Again it is the discontinuity of the dissociative self in
the separatism of its own unconsciously induced image.

When we come to contemplate this childishness in ourselves, we are
naturally loath to admit that all our beliefs are but make-beliefs, and
our privately cherished convictions of certitude but the compensatory
assumptions of mysticism and dissociation. To the man who entertains
the inner conviction that the girl of his heart is just the one
woman in the whole world for him, it were futile to point out his
inconsistency by recalling an identical “belief” maintained no less
stoutly by him a few months ago in regard to his last year’s beloved.
It were as futile as to attempt to expound to a paranoiac, who has
proof that he is descended from Napoleon, that he is the unconscious
prey to unwarranted ideas of grandeur. Both of these esoterists will
only look you blandly in the face and explain to you compassionately
that “you just do not understand.”

Truly, of the tissue of illusion is the fabric of unconsciousness,
whether presented under the form of hysteria, mysticism or suggestion.
All being alike dissociative, all are alike inaccessible to the
arguments of an organic logic. And more and more it seems to me that
when we who are psychoanalysts consider _our_ unconscious preoccupation
with the concept, the symbolic equivalent, the theory of consciousness
as a substitute for the daily lived actuality of man’s organic life
in its totality, there is due the admission that psychoanalysis too,
as it now exists among us, is itself no less an equivocation, a
“belief,” an hysterical replacement for the common, organic confluence
of our societal life. Indeed, precisely because of its high claim as
representing the court of ultimate conscious appeal, psychoanalysis
requires to be brought to book more than any other of the manifold
dissociative reactions coming under an indictment that envisages our
collective, social unconscious. We who are psychoanalysts talk of the
joyous enfranchisement of consciousness and growth as compared with
the palsying limitations of unconsciousness and regression, when all
the while we neglect to impeach the unconsciousness of our own lives
and the narrow interests of personalism and self that govern them.
Because in our own normality we are ourselves so comfortably ensconced
in the social security of the collective unconscious about us, we fail
to recognize our own embroilment in it. And so, in the impregnable
solidarity of mere mass supremacy, our own assumed validity passes
unchallenged by us.

To cite an example that is closest to me: I have repeatedly held
forth to patients concerning the potential joy inherent in adult love
regarded in the light of the unifying principle of life, as though
I myself participated in its subjective actuality in the simple,
undifferentiated mode of my own daily living, when in fact I was only
unconsciously exploiting the vicarious concept or symbol or theory of
love, such as can only stand in the way of and obstruct the organic
significance of love in its actuality. Thus, in spite of ourselves,
unconsciousness makes disparate elements of us all. Indeed, it may
more truly be said “because of ourselves” rather than “in spite of
ourselves,” for, in an organic sense, self (the separative entity) and
disparity are synonymous.

But, however serious a situation that involves a world-wide neurosis,
we may not take it tragically. The tragedy of it, after all, is only
the unconsciousness of it. When we shall have truly analyzed the drama
of the unconscious which now we but enact, there can be no tragedy, for
the fabric of tragedy is woven merely of the elements of human “fate”
in its embodiment of the unconscious. There is the need, however, to
view our situation thoughtfully. Consciousness, in the sense of a true
comprehension of life, will come into its own only when we have learned
to look upon the humiliating spectacle of our dissociated selves with
what enforced forbearance we can temporarily command. Our present
attitude will continue to endure until more and more the disheartening
sense of our disparities becomes accepted by us in an outlook that,
having grown inclusive, has become our automatic and habitual mode.

Paradoxical as it may sound, consciousness has turned the heads of us
all! As it has turned them in a direction that has been inward upon
our own image, each of us, as a result, has built of his individual
organism a little separate entity unto himself--an entity which in
its organic dissociation from life as a whole is necessarily wrought
of a spurious fibre. Developmentally man is the biological snob
_par excellence_. Scorning the slower accretions of growth that
can alone imbue him with true biological culture, in his effort “to
attain” he has attempted to pass too hastily from his humble category
of vertebrate to the more socially elevated plane of “cerebrate.”
The result is that what he assumes to be cerebration is really but
a fictitious brain-state that has become entirely withdrawn from
continuity with his organic life. So that from the point of view of
consciousness in the sense of an integral mental life--the especial
mark whereby we claim prerogative over all other species--man is, by
this very token, the least integrant of them all!

And yet, when we think of it, our predicament is really no shame to
us. Consciousness is, after all, a very recent asset among us. That
we should treasure it narrowly, personally, is but the inevitable
entail of its slow, laborious evolution. It is as if, in our societal
separativeness, our race had grown grey before its childhood had
begun and we were now out of breath keeping pace with ourselves. For
it is only our separativeness that has prematurely burdened us with
the crushing weight of self-imposed responsibilities such as are
the concomitant toll of our hallucinated self-sufficiency. Unlike
the adult, the spontaneous joy of children is their whole-hearted
participation in the free, impersonal radiation of life. Unlike
ourselves, their personal importance has not yet defeated their
impersonal significance. As yet they do not live under the curse of
a dogma of conduct. Theirs is no creed of behaviour that is of one
cloth with an enforced pretence of “goodness.” Their lives are not
a daily concession to fanciful needs of self-protection against an
arbitrarily predicated world of “evil.” Adult vigilance, however, early
inculcates its delusion of separateness--of a self to be defended
against other selves--and its dissociative influence is slowly imparted
to the confiding mind of childhood. In a world of dissociation this
universal suggestion acts with powerful effectiveness, and the child
of yesterday, having once been inducted into the general guild of
secret mistrust and compensatory behaviourism and grown to parenthood,
may be safely trusted to pass on without question the secret code of
differentiation, self-distinction and disharmony to the offspring by
which he is in turn succeeded.

When God called Adam and took him to task for going about naked (for
eating of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”), asking him
if he felt no sense of shame, Adam’s prompt response was to betake
himself to the bushes overcome with embarrassment. Whereas obviously
the logical response on Adam’s part would have been: “By no means. I
am the outcome of your own handicraft and if there is any flaw in the
product it is not for me to feel chagrin.” As a matter of fact, Adam
was in nowise different from the rest of us. But there he crouched,
submissively answerable for the work of his creator and there he has
got us all crouching ever since! God, of course, employed the familiar
parental recourse and intimidated Adam, calling from afar to him in
his place of hiding. As was calculated, the strategy was completely
effective and promptly brought Adam to his knees. All of which legend
is but the allegorical statement of the simple organic truth that shame
has first to be artificially induced in us before it can be experienced
by us. Division or shame having been put into us, of course we feel
division or shame.[28]

If we have become aware of ourselves and of our unprotectedness, it has
been quite in the order of our evolution. But by the same process it is
now high time for us to realize that there is no need of protection,
and accordingly to come out of hiding and recognize that our fear and
our self-protection, being alike identical with the myth of Adam’s
indiscretion, are alike induced in us by the identical process of an
external word of repression or command thrust in upon an essentially
inherent and consonant mode.

In the absence of our realization of this blunder into which we have
fallen, from generation to generation we unconsciously repudiate the
natural unity of our common life in favour of a life prompted by
sophistication and disparity. Ourselves begotten of alien affects,
our feelings in turn breed diverse cross-strains which can issue
only in equally hybrid reactions. We refuse to see that the “evil,”
alike with the “good,” is naught but the delusion of separateness
extraneously induced in us through our artificial self-consciousness.
This subjective division within us is the essential meaning of
the all-pervasive bogey of our so-called incest-awe. As I see it,
incest-awe is the organic inconsistency of this division within the
organically indivisible sphere of man’s essential feeling. Normality
is unconsciously under its thrall because, through its organic
disunity, normality has unconsciously placed itself under its sentence.
Psychically normality _is_ incestuous and hence its awe. The degree
of its awe or guilt-revulsion is precisely the measure of its psychic
inbreeding. The more organically unwelcome the infolding, the more
organically outraged or neurotic the personality, and, accordingly,
the greater the awe or feeling-conflict resultant upon our unconscious
intimations of organic “guilt.” Our sexual self-consciousness is the
perennial fig-leaf of early tradition foliating anew in our critical
Twentieth Century. It is the division of the self of behaviour from
the self of spontaneity, of the self as disparate entity from the self
as an integral element in our common organic life that is the meaning
of the incest-awe as of the neurosis, in its social as well as in its
individual expression.

When once we have assumed the broader organismic outlook, we shall see
that, beyond a more extended compass of vision, there is really nothing
of an innovation in this societal mode of envisagement. In respect to
all systems coming under scientific observation, we have habitually
entertained a biological conception of the relation _inter se_ of the
elements to their aggregate that is identical with the conception
offered in the present theme. Hitherto the area generally considered
has merely been circumscribed within narrower limits, that is all. When
we shall have learned to move aside from our personal involvement in
it, we shall see presented an organic phenomenon which upon examination
consists of a dissociation within the societal organism. We shall see
that this dissociation involves disharmony in respect to the mental
and social relationships of the unit-elements or individuals that
comprise ourselves and constitute _inter se_ the larger biological
aggregate of our common consciousness. Maintaining our impersonal
angle of envisagement and turning to the idea of the sum of the more
circumscribed biological aggregate constituting the individual, we see
that this dissociation is, in reality, identical with the dissociation
within the individual organism that manifests itself as impairment of
harmony in respect to the physiological or functional relationships of
the units or cells comprising _its_ ultimate elements. When we lose
sight of our place as common elements within the organic aggregate of
mankind--as in the absence of an encompassing organismic point of view
we must--we tend to separate arbitrarily the biological continuity of
the two spheres, the individual and the societal. Because of our own
subjective involvement we fail to recognize that the societal sphere,
in the more inclusive sense, is the aggregate whereof the individual is
the unit, precisely as in the more circumscribed physiological view
the body cells are the units of which the individual is himself the
aggregate. Between the two spheres there is a progressive continuity.
There is no interruption of the organic transition from one to the
other. For the psychological or the societal and the functional or
physiological are continuous.[29]

It is evident that every bodily lesion consists of a _separation_ among
the elements of the impaired part. If among the cells of the liver,
for example, there is produced the condition of disharmony or disease
represented by a state of inflammation, there inevitably occurs some
partition, some breach in or interruption of their concerted function,
or of the function of the organism as a whole. The unfailing signal
wherewith the individual is apprised of the destructive process is the
reaction subjectively registered as _pain_ or a sympathetic awareness
on the part of the aggregate organism of the disordered condition of
these elements constituting a part of itself. Such a disordered state
or lesion being thus reported to the central system, as it were, the
immediate response is an outcry of pain and a prompt recourse to
remedial aids. The organism as a whole, experiencing pain, reflexly
demands relief, for the reason that impairment of the organism in
any of its parts is a menace to its integrity as a whole. That is to
say, when any one of us as an aggregate experiences pain in any part
whereof he is the whole--when he experiences some local inflammation or
separation within the elements of a part or organ within himself, he
promptly directs his efforts toward its alleviation. But in the organic
whole comprising the societal aggregate whereof he, as an individual,
is the contributive element or part, the situation, as we shall in a
moment see, is wholly altered. As related parts or elements within the
larger organic aggregate, it is we ourselves who are the separative
process--the circumscribed area of inflammation.

It is essential to bear in mind that the organic pathology of this
biological lesion or separation that is the individual’s dissociation
from the inherent continuum of his organic, racial congeners is a
condition that is conterminous with the individual’s division or
separation within himself. For organically there is no difference
between himself and his congeners. Thus in respect to this societal
lesion the individual element bears a twofold relation, an intrinsic
and an extrinsic one. The element as an _individual_ within the
societal organism on the one hand is the _source_ of the lesion. And
on the other hand, as an organic _participant_ in the confluent race
consciousness, this same element or individual _experiences_ the lesion
as a menace to the integrity of his own organic consciousness or of his
confluent life as a whole. The individual is thus the contained and the
container, the stimulus and the response. Herein lies the unassuageable
poignancy of the neurotic conflict. It is a conflict between the part
and the whole, wherein the individual is the embodiment of both.
Since he is unconsciously the part while inherently the whole, his
conflict is one that is concomitantly individual and societal, for the
individual and the societal factors are organically inseparable.

Just as in a comprehensive inquiry into the structural development
of the organism it is necessary to consider not only the biological
characters occurring in the development of the individual but also the
corresponding characters observable in the development of the race,
so in an organismic study of consciousness it is necessary that we
keep in mind the essential parallelism between its individual and its
phyletic trends. Analogous to what we know of the facts of comparative
biology in the structural sphere, the organic consciousness of man,
which we see expressed ontogenetically in the essential continuity
of the individual personality, finds its phylogenetic expression in
the inherent continuity of the societal organism. Accordingly, as the
miscarriage of this primary continuity of consciousness is to be seen
in the dissociation of the single personality, so the miscarriage
of man’s societal personality is correspondingly to be seen in the
social dissociation of the collective unconscious. After all, the
consciousness of the individual is but the consciousness of the race
in miniature, and the personal dissociation within the individual is,
therefore, only the miniature expression of the social dissociation
within our societal consciousness. In other words, as one’s individual
organism is a replica of the social organism, the dissociation of
the social mind is identical with the dissociation of the individual
mind. For, since the societal and the individual factors of evolution
are identical in their course, the social and the personal factors
of dissociation are also identical. Hence the dissociation that is
personal is necessarily social; the neurosis we study in the individual
is necessarily concomitant to a neurosis within the wider social polity.

Let us now compare the difference in the subjective reaction of the
individual according as he is himself the aggregate experiencing pain
in any part of _his_ organism, or as he is himself a part unconsciously
contributing to the lesion within the organism comprising our common
societal aggregate. As central system presiding over his own
individual organism we have seen his prompt recourse to agencies of
relief at the least trespass upon the integrity of any organ or part
within himself. But observe the total reversal of reaction when he
himself, as a single individual element, is the pathological instance
threatening the integrity of the organic aggregate that encompasses
him as a single individual element. Mark how he struggles _in blind
collusion with_ the disruptive process he unconsciously or separatively
embodies. Such is precisely the behaviour of the neurotic individual
and such is precisely the meaning of his “resistance.” For in such a
situation he seeks recourse to every conceivable avenue of evasion and
of symbolic disguise in order to escape the protests of pain in the
central inherent system resident in the common societal consciousness
and experienced by him in its continuum with his own essential life. In
the spirit of his behaviour he is exactly comparable to an individual
who, on succumbing to a local disease-process, would seek to stifle
the organism’s premonitory pain in order to aid the toxic invasion
and further its ravage within his own tissues! Such, however, in our
unconsciousness is precisely the case with each of us. Each of us, in
his misguided, ingrown self-interest, constituting in himself the pain
and impairment that operate within and against the organic societal
aggregate, contends in his self-protection not against but in favour
of the disease-process which, from the point of view of the societal,
organic life, is his own destruction. He seeks not its interruption but
its continuance, not its remedy but its aggravation, precisely as the
inflammatory process in any organ within the body seeks to maintain its
separateness and prolong to a fatal issue the destructive process in
the individual.

It is characteristic of separateness that it fights desperately for
its own separative ends. Separateness, being destructive, must operate
destructively. It would even seem that this self-destructive tendency
on the part of the isolated component is the penalty imposed by the
societal organism to safeguard itself against the tendency--among any
of its elements as parts--to infringe upon the integral sum of elements
constituting the organic whole. But if the separateness of the part
is its own destruction, concomitantly the confluence of the whole is
its own conservation. If the neurotic regarded individually, or as the
embodiment within himself of a societal lesion, is an expression of
separatism and pathology, the neurotic viewed organically, or as the
embodiment within himself of the societal continuum, is no less an
expression of confluence and health. If, in the first instance, he is
himself the disorder that is his own separatism and unconsciousness,
in the second he is the integration that is his own confluence and
consciousness. It is this constructive aspect of the neuroses of
which we have not yet taken account and of which we may take due
cognizance only upon the basis of a wider, organismic interpretation of
these disorders of the personality. It is the understanding of these
disharmonies in the light of their congeneric significance, and their
encompassment as morbid processes operating within the separative
individual organism to obstruct the function of the societal organism
as a whole, that is the significance of an organismic formulation of
the neuroses.




CHAPTER IV

ORGANIC ANALYSIS OF REPRESSION AND OF THE FACTOR OF RESISTANCE FROM THE
SOCIETAL VIEWPOINT


The psychic phenomenon with which Freud was confronted in the very
inception of his work was the element of repression and its concomitant
reflection in the objective reaction of resistance. The resolution of
this factor of repression or resistance Freud came very early to regard
as the essential problem of psychoanalysis. But, as we have seen,
Freud’s conception of resistance was inevitably coloured by his own
individualistic monocular, and in consequence it was not possible for
him to view the neurosis of the individual in its societal implication.
Lacking a societal basis of interpretation, he could not see that
the resentment toward one’s fellows comprising the individual’s
social resistance is merely the individual’s objective evasion of the
subjective disaffection within his own essential organism. Mistaking
the mere symbol of the individual for the inherent continuity of
individuality, Freud could not see the biology of resistance as the
breach it is in the individual’s continuity with life as a confluent,
organic whole.

From an organismic viewpoint, the individual’s reaction of resistance
or his effort to project upon his fellows the pain of his subjective
curtailment and repression only illustrates further the essential
_sociology of the neuroses_. In the fuller light of a societal basis
it may be seen that the mechanism of social replacement embodying
resistance is purely symptomatic of the individual’s constraint
toward a surface rationalization of his own inherent grievance. His
grudge is not personal, it is societal. It is not logical, it is
biological. Residing wholly within himself, it involves only himself.
His tendency to _refer_ his grievance to the attitude of others is
due to his own separative habituation and to his consequent effort to
escape the _seeming_ isolation of his biological responsibility toward
it. And so the problem of resistance is central, not peripheral. Like
its close kin charity (if not its very self in the garb of religious
sentimentalism) the relinquishment of resistance is a benison that
begins at home. It may not be inculcated through theoretical precept
nor through the subtlest refinement of a technique based upon a
system of analysis, but only through our actual participation in the
societal confluence that is its underlying biology. Our very theory
of resistance as an impediment to life is itself a resistance. For no
formulation of life can function as life. It is only life itself in
its organic confluence that may abrogate the separateness that is the
essence of resistance. Whether in the societal or in the individual
sphere, whether in the sphere we arbitrarily designate as psychological
(mental) or in that we call functional (physiological), the question
of health or disease hangs solely upon the issue as to whether the
element--cell or system--functions integrally or separatively,
congruently or resistantly. Under the limitations of a dissociative
reaction toward the confluent, societal organism as a whole, such
as constitutes our present socially affective mode, the individual
organism cannot but react disaffectedly, and hence further the
disruptive tendencies that breed disharmony within its own life. The
dissociated organism can function only dissociatively.

If it is true of the world at large that each is against each,
if throughout the tissue of the societal fabric every element is
maintaining its own separateness against every other element, where
may there be found a way to restore the condition of societal
confluence that is the basis of man’s inherent life? Clearly, if this
separation from the organic life takes place within the individual, its
reconcilement must take place also within the individual. As, however,
the individual is but a replica of every other individual--an organic
world in miniature in the complex of sensations and emotions comprising
his own personality--the reconcilement of the organic conflict within
himself, or his own unification of personality as an integral part
of the continuum uniting the whole, is also the reconcilement and
the unification of himself with his congeners. Naturally, such a
reconcilement cannot be the achievement of the individual as a separate
social unit, but only of the individual as an integral element in the
organic unit of our common life.

It is just here that there needs to be unearthed the essential fallacy
of Freud, as of us all--a fallacy that has been the inevitable outcome
of a habit of reasoning that is inseparable from the disparate
social unit and its dissociative mode. Precluding within himself a
participation in the organic societal mode, it was, of course, not
possible that Freud should take account, in any inclusive organismic
sense, of causative elements lying within this mode. Reasoning from
the biased premises of an unconscious separatism, he could reckon only
with elements falling within the scope of the separative mode, that is,
he could only reckon personally--I mean in the sense of dissociatively
rather than integrally.

In Freud’s conception of the neurosis the condition embodies a
repression of sexuality. That is, sexuality, regarded as synonymous
with the sexual instinct, is posited as the primary factor of which
the attitude of repression is a subsequent issue. In other words,
sexuality or the “libido,” as commonly understood (the separative
will-to-self[30] in the view of the present interpretation) is in
Freud’s formulation the basic, antecedent element, and repression
(whatever the occasion--lack of adequate outlet perhaps or the
inadmissible character of the sexual impulse) is the organism’s
automatic recourse operating as a result. So that Freud assigns the
cause of a mental disharmony to the subject’s repressed sexuality,
and the basis of his analytic procedure has been very logically the
endeavour to remedy the situation through an adjustment of the sexual
life. Accordingly, it is the essence of the individualistic position
of Freud that the neurosis is represented in life’s repression of
sexuality; while it is the essence of the organismic attitude here
defined that the neurosis consists in sexuality’s repression of life.
In brief, according to the dynamic conception of Freud, the basis
from which individual life takes its origin is represented in a
heterogeneous substrate that is biologically discrete and “polymorph
perverse”; whereas in the genetic conception of the present formulation
life traces its source to a homogeneous matrix that is organically
confluent and unitary.[31]

In the light of a conception which assumed that the integrity of
consciousness resides within the personality of the individual,
Freud’s confusion was inevitable. Yet viewed even from the standpoint
of the individual, the factors of repression and sexuality can be
regarded only in the light of organic concomitants. Under whichever of
these alternate forms of reaction it may appear, both forms are the
inevitable extremes of the dilemma due to the conflict that has been
artificially created within the organism. Both are the individual’s
restless evasion and substitution following inevitably upon its
separation from its primary organic source. Although repression and
sexuality are organic concomitants, being simultaneous in their
occurrence and in their efficacy equal and contrary, the factor of
repression is dynamically the prior instance. This is true precisely in
the sense that the pressure of my hand as I lay it upon the table is
dynamically the prior stimulus, though the two elements involved--my
hand and the table--are from the point of view of the respective
pressures exerted by each, mutually coincident and equal. Considered
in the light of individualistic consciousness (unconsciousness),
repression with its actuation in the alternative of infantile fear
or “goodness” and sexuality with its compensatory reaction in the
alternative of infantile defiance or “badness” are inseparable and
conterminous. For repression and sexuality are equally the _result_
in the individual of the factor of organic disunity in the societal
consciousness. There is the need to emphasize the fact that the
reaction of sexuality as it abounds among us is currently confused with
the basic instinct of sex. In point of fact sexuality is the direct
antithesis of this organic expression.

The vast mass of the literature of sexuality embraced under sexology,
with its voluminous representation of man’s symbolic relation to life,
will some day undoubtedly appear comparable in value to the equally
formidable array of literary compilations that discourse of God and of
man’s extraordinarily complex relationship to Him included in a no less
voluminous theology. As articulate in form, as sympathetic in treatment
and as logical in development as both these themes undoubtedly are,
it will ultimately be seen, I believe, that both are equally open
to serious criticism and both on identical grounds, namely, that
in respect to the matter of each, there is no matter there. I mean
literally that, in default of the objective reality of the subjects
treated under the two discussions by their respective authors, both
treatises are in their nature utterly spurious. In Ellis as in Calvin,
in Freud as in Aquinas, the sexuality envisaged in one system no less
than the divinity envisaged in the other lacks a basis of reality. Both
are vicarious rationalizations of the collective unconscious due to the
effort to compensate its repression of the organic integrity of our
common, societal consciousness. The concept “God” in the one instance,
and its counterpart, obsessive sexuality in the other, are in the
meantime made to serve the expedience of temporary symbols.

It is noteworthy that man is the only species of the animal world whose
communal life requires for its regulation a system either of sexology
or of theology. Concomitantly, one cannot but remark the far stronger
co-operative instinct existing among the animals and the consequently
incalculably greater societal solidarity of our less “conscious”
kinsfolk as compared with our own![32]

Approaching the problem of the neurosis anew from the vantage coign
of a more inclusive, integral background, I have come to regard the
factors of sexuality and repression as standing to each other in a
relationship that is the exact reverse of that assumed by Freud--the
factor of repression being from this altered viewpoint the primary
_cause_ and sexuality the incidental _result_ entailed by it.

To make clear what I mean, it is necessary to view the societal
aggregate, with its basis in our organic consciousness, as an entity
distinct from that of the separative individual unit with its basis
in our dissociated unconscious. The element of repression is incident
to the interruption of our functional participation in the unitary
race consciousness. The separative, dissociated attitude of mind that
precipitates the obsessive, dissociated and resistant individual is a
development consequent upon this interruption. So that it is only as
we come to recognize our need to include the sphere of man’s integral
organic life that the conception of repression as a factor anterior to
sexuality may be understood in its biological import. To this end our
conception of the organic societal consciousness needs to acquire the
coherency of clearer form and definition. We need to take account of
the original, racial solidarity of man’s consciousness and to consider
the interpenetrations of common instincts and habits that originally
ramified throughout the undifferentiated mental tissue of our common
species, knitting its contributing elements into a unitary, homogeneous
organism.[33] We need to form a clearer image of the uniform,
co-ordinated _one-mindedness_ of this primordial, “multi-cellular”
organism that was man. In brief, we need to recognize the _individual_
that was originally the aggregate consciousness of the race. For,
to consider man’s phylogeny at this period of his evolution is to
consider a unitary organism. It is to break through the prejudice of
the separative mode of individual men and reckon immediately with the
unified principle of consciousness as a whole, from which only later
there diverged the separative elements represented in the dissociated
units we ourselves now comprise, but which unified principle survives
to-day unaltered in the common unity of our confluent societal
personality.[34]

Such is the parent organism from which we trace the course of our
psychobiological descent. Such is the parent organism from which we
trace as well our psychobiological dissent! For it is evident that
at a certain stage in the growth of this nuclear, racial organism
there must have arisen those first faint stirrings which subsequently
entailed man’s earliest reckonings with the nebulous beginnings of
his self-awareness. This reaction whereby mind for the first time
grew aware of itself was thus a societal reaction. It involved the
aggregate, not the element. Its scope was ethnic, not individual.
It was the primal awareness of man’s organic consciousness. In our
unconsciousness we deny the reality of this biological phylum embodied
in our organic consciousness and underlying the processes of our
individual mentation. For this reason we seek perforce to appease our
organic need through the imaginary solaces of a fanciful immanence
that is but the unconscious _symbol_ of the immanent and encompassing
actuality of this common consciousness. In our unconsciousness we deny
the collateral immediacy of our societal inclusiveness and for this
reason we project the lineal image of indefinite extension composing
man’s dream of a personal life eternal. Denying our organic unity of
compass, we compensate in a fanciful unity of duration. Denied his
societal participation in a communal earth, man’s need can only vent
itself in the private illusion of a sectarian heaven. After all, life
in its reality is immediate. Philosophy _ad infinitum_ to the contrary
notwithstanding, there is no “time” like the present! When we can enter
heartily into the realization of the “pseudo” quality of our mental
unctions, we may begin to sense more closely the organic inevitableness
of such symbolic equivalents as the generic folk-image of “God” and
the infinite corps of His understudies, impressed one after another
into the service of man’s inverted narcism. We may, then, realize that
nowhere is nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum more vigorously asserted
than in the organic intolerance of consciousness toward the voids of
unreality. We may, then, understand how, upon the slightest suspension
of reality in the sphere of consciousness, a symbolic surrogate will
inevitably fill the rift with a punctuality that is automatic. This
is reality’s ultimate test of reality. It is the unfailing standard
of the organism in its measure of the actual. Here is truth’s organic
criterion.

In their original organic commonness, individuals were complete and
sufficient. They were undisturbed by the separative attitude of mind
that mars our present development with competition and dissension.
They did not spend their days in self-interested comparison. They had
not yet come into the conflict of a self-conscious image-worship.
In this sense--that the mental tissue of our common species was
then undifferentiated--the aggregate consciousness of the race was
synonymous with the consciousness of the individual. It was an
organically unified consciousness.

Through the organic violation on the other hand, involved in the primal
recoil of self-consciousness within this societal organism, there is to
be traced the biological history of our mental and social disharmonies.
Here, I believe, is to be traced the inception of man’s collective
unconscious and the phylogeny of the societal neurosis. Under the
authority of this long-standing and consolidated system of repression
the individual is born, and still under its shadow he enters upon the
course of his development as an individual. It is this organized Mafia
of societal repression, with its enormous weight of traditional and
conventional authority--this repression within the collective societal
unconscious, with its ready initiation of each new subject--that is
the causative factor in the secondary reaction which we observe in
the individual as “repression of sexuality.” In our own unconscious
fealty to the system about us we fail utterly to comprehend that _the
repression which we observe in the individual is the result of a prior
cause lying outside of the individual and that it consists of the
repression within the collective, racial unconscious acting concertedly
from without upon the now detached individual unit_.

It is important to distinguish between the social prohibition
operating upon the discrete element or individual as a response to
popular covenant, and the societal prohibition that operates within
the confluent aggregate and is coincident with our organic separation
from man’s primary societal consciousness. The former is the result
collectively of the latter, just as the neurotic repression is the
result of it individually. For the societal repression is primary and
the social reaction is a repression subsidiary to it.

To understand aright the essential conception of this thesis, it is
necessary to have clearly in mind the basis upon which it rests. This
basis is the distinction between the element that is societal and the
element that is social, between the factor that is sex and the factor
that is sexuality. It should be remembered that sexuality, whether
in its social or in its individual manifestation, is here throughout
regarded as an egoistic and infantile expression resultant upon the
alternatives of secret self-interest secondarily induced in the
individual in response to this same substitution and repression in the
mind of the consensus about him. It is here held that the neurosis is a
condition which indicts not the individual alone but society in general
and that it consists in the substitution of this obsessive reaction
of sexuality for the basic and inherent instinct of sex--that sex is
an instinct that pertains not only to mating but to the unity of our
congeneric life which, when unintercepted, is the function confluently
of man’s conscious and organic life.

If it is true that the societal repression resident within the race
is the factor that is the cause of the individual’s sexuality, it
is evident that no amount of preoccupation with the individual
factor or with the element of sexuality will avail to release a
neurosis the source of which resides in the societal repression. The
causative factor, then, that resides within the societal unconscious
is the subjective factor to which the individual’s sexuality (or its
counterpart, the individual’s repression) is the resulting objective
response. As repression or sexuality of their nature constitute
division, clearly they can have no place in the confluent subjective
life. And as the neurosis is primarily a disharmony of the confluent
subjective sphere, it is upon the continuities of this sphere alone
that we must depend for the efficacy of an analysis that retains as its
aim--the only logical aim of analysis--the recomposition or synthesis
of the scattered elements of the personality into the organic unit of
their original aggregate.




CHAPTER V

ORGANIC ANALYSIS OF REPRESSION AND OF THE FACTOR OF RESISTANCE FROM THE
INDIVIDUAL VIEWPOINT


As the causative element in the neuroses is societal or subjective,
an analysis that proceeds upon the objective tack of uncovering a
patient’s complexes is futile. If I am objectively interested in a
patient’s separative, dissociative expressions--in the infinite variety
of his sexualities or infantilisms, it is traceable alone to the
retention of this same unconscious mode within my own personality. In
this situation the analytic procedure is such as bids fair to extend to
an indefinite duration. But if, on the contrary, my own mode is organic
and inclusive, my interest in the patient and my whole relationship to
him will rest upon an organic, confluent basis. I shall be interested
not in the dark secrets of sexuality which he may bring himself to
divulge but in the delusion of separateness that leads him to suppose
that my own sexuality or the desperate recourses of separatism and
repression within myself are less dark than his own. Indeed, arguing
merely from presumptive evidence, my absorbing interest in the subject
of the neurosis would of itself make it a safe conjecture that my
own reaction to the societal repression or my own sexual conflicts
must have been by far the greater of the two. But neither is this the
point. The point is that our sins are common because our lives are not
common, and that the patient’s sole need is his understanding of the
causative factor in the reaction of separation and repression of the
collective mind as it may be realized by him in the relationship of his
personality to my own. My sole endeavour, then, will be directed to an
understanding on his part of the cause of his neurotic separatism or of
the societal repression which, in dissociating him from the congeneric
consciousness common to us both, artificially creates his illusion of
difference between us.

Lacking this realization of the societal involvement of the neurosis,
there necessarily ensues a personal involvement in the analysis that
invites situations which not infrequently attain to an acute crisis.
The only remedy is the realization through one’s own analysis of one’s
own societal disaffection. The only recourse is the complete reversal
of one’s own pictorial or introverted habits of experience. It will
not be easy. To accept voluntary subjection to conditions involving
involuntary pain will not become a popular pastime. But it is the only
way in which we may be made aware of our social involvement in the
societal neurosis about us. It is the only way by which we may come
to take a conscious part _in_ and not be an unconscious part _of_ the
analysis.

Never in the drama of human vicissitude has there been staged anything
more ironical than the spectacle of an analyst’s perplexity when the
patient, having become by implication a “cure,” fails to acquiesce
in the principle she is now understood to illustrate. For presumably
the time has arrived at which she (for the sake of dramatic interest
let us say “she”) should naturally wish to withdraw from treatment.
Unhappily, however, she entertains no such intention. On the contrary,
in implacable defiance of analytical canons, she still stoutly
maintains the unabated actuality of her neurosis and offers forthwith
irrefutable vindication of her position in the sudden recrudescence
of her incipient symptoms. In face of the undeniable testimony, the
situation is untoward in the extreme. For at this point the patient’s
attitude toward the analyst is such as can be only adequately expressed
by her in the language of the poet who wrote: “All the current of my
being sets to thee,” and in the interest of a busy practice, if to
no other end, it is urgent that a channel be promptly provided into
which to divert the stream! This is the real climax of the situation.
Its tenseness is further heightened at this point by the introduction
of that most delicate and difficult process in the technique called
“analyzing the transference”! The fact is the transference will not
analyze. It never does. That is the difficulty of this very delicate
phase. At this juncture we cast frantically about for an “interest” for
the patient, that is, an interest other than ourselves--marriage, art,
social service, something, anything! The truth is, our analysis has
failed of its aim, and in our extremity we are driven to seek shelter
under the cover of a subterfuge. It is this subterfuge which consists
in an effort toward what is called, in scientific phraseology, “the
sublimation of the patient’s sexuality” and is the closing act of our
little comedy. As the curtain is finally rung down (the management
is fortunate if it drops without a hitch), it descends upon a much
perplexed psychoanalyst. He feels distinctly that something went wrong.
He is not certain just what it was, but knows that, whatever it was,
the fault lay entirely with the patient. But the circumambient gods,
as one’s fancy pictures, who from their remote recesses have witnessed
until now with unsubdued mirth the transient episode of our unconscious
charade, observing the wretched fate of the patient in her unanswered
need, suddenly alter their mood from levity to grave concern as they
thoughtfully remark one to another in their own wise way that the
essential catastrophe, after all, is the unconscious of the analyst and
that the real drama has but just begun.

However unpalatable the admission, here is the whole crux of the
matter. We have dealt objectively with an inherently subjective
situation. Our approach has been cognitive, not affective. It has been
personal, not inclusive. Again we have merely looked out, not in. Again
it is the illusion of the organic interval, and our problem has eluded
us in the common fallacy of objective reference.

In a list of precepts for psychoanalysts (“precepts” for the
elimination of repressions scarcely requires comment!) there is offered
this naïve word of admonition: “Don’t forget that the neurotic’s chief
dictum is: ‘I am not as other men are.’” But here again the analyst
characteristically fails to recognize that such a dictum is by no means
the private monopoly of the “neurotic.” He overlooks the fact that it
is equally the tendency of us all and (what is of crucial importance)
most especially of the analyst himself in the very utterance of
his dictum. For in imputing to others this unconscious fallacy of
self-distinction, he is in the same breath necessarily assuming the
same distinction for himself--the distinction, namely, that he is
himself in so far “not like other men” as to be privileged to tell
them of the presence of this fallacy within themselves. Of course the
analyst will say: “Well with me, you see, it is different.” But this
is precisely what the patient says, as it is what every one says. And
here we come once more to the heart of the matter, namely, that as the
neurosis is societal the self-distinction underlying it is necessarily
the particular claim of every individual within the societal body. In
this situation the analyst inevitably regards only the disparity of
“the other fellow,” a result which I feel to be typical of the error
of the Freudian analysis.[35] But “who decries the loved decries the
lover.” In the true sense--in the sense of our organic life--there is
no other fellow. Our interpretation of his apparent differentiation
from us is but our own projection of the differentiation within
ourselves, just as his interpretation of our apparent differentiation
from him is but his projection of the division within himself. It
is this unadmitted division within each of us that has created the
illusion of our organic separateness from one another. For this reason
it is only as we accept the subjective task of realizing the spurious
fabric of our own separateness and self-sufficiency that we may come to
realize it within our patient by virtue of our inherent identification
with him. Thus, to realize our division through participation with
another is to pierce the delusion of our mutual separateness and
unconsciousness and so to become mutually united again through the
acceptance of our common organic life.

Based upon the organismic conception here outlined, clearly this
subjective recourse can be the only logical position of the analyst.
For, in the light of this conception, the neurosis or the separate mode
was originally induced in the immature organism through the external
suggestion of the individual in closest contact with it operating to
dissociate it from its primary, organic mode. In consequence, the
dissociated consciousness thus artificially induced can be restored to
the mode of unification and confluence only by substituting for the
superimposed suggestive contact--the predominant social repression
embodied in the parent--the presence of a personality whose tendency
is preponderantly of the confluent, societal mode. It is clear that
in this conception the analysis of a patient, in the sense of his
realization and acceptance of life, presupposes as a rigid organic
condition the prior analysis and acceptance of life on the part of the
analyst. In impaling the cause of this separatism, delusionally assumed
by the patient to reside within himself alone but in reality having its
residence in our common social repression, the analyst’s preoccupation
can only be with this same delusional arrogation of separateness as it
occurs within himself. This means nothing less than that the life of
the analyst must in its consciousness completely encompass the life of
the analysand in its unconsciousness. This, I know, is a large demand.
It is to realize in oneself a breadth of consciousness that embraces
in its scope nothing less than the totality of unconsciousness in its
entire social aspect. It is to include within oneself the collective
unconscious or the far span of normality in all its separateness
and sexuality. In brief, it is to open the way to a reversal of the
unconscious situation now prevailing in which societal men encompass
individual man, and to achieve the mode of consciousness in which
societal man encompasses individual men.

I remember a young woman journalist coming one day into my study on
the pretext of illness but in reality to look me over. She had been
the rounds of the New York analysts, she said, having been “analyzed”
by first one and then another, though I doubt whether any of the able
physicians cited by her would have dignified the interviews in any
such terms. But while herself unconscious, indeed quite paranoid,
she made a remark which has since seemed to me highly significant.
She said that we psychoanalysts appear actuated by an unconscious
attitude of antagonism toward our patients, that we seem motivated by
a determination “to get even.” In the spirit in which it was made, the
remark was obviously a projection and not a judgment, but I think the
criticism is in general true--certainly it has proved true in my own
case. For the analyst is either unconsciously pleased with the patient
who gives him his confidence or he is unconsciously displeased at his
withholding it. In other words, the attitude of the analyst is not
uninfluenced by personal or egoistic predilection.[36] Here, then, is
straightway the factor of unconsciousness, of separation and hence
antagonism in the analyst.

But if the analyst consciously senses the patient’s situation, he sees
without bias that the patient--being of a separative, unconscious
mode--will, and inevitably must, act in every instance from motives of
unconsciousness. If he confides in the analyst, he does so solely in
the hope of winning for himself the good-will of the analyst (positive
infantile affect or suggestion); if he is silent or evasive, it is
because he doubts the advantage to himself of sharing his confidence
(negative infantile affect or repression). The psychoanalyst who would
reckon consciously with a patient’s life may be moved by neither one
nor the other manifestation. Both are outside the mode of reality.
Both are expressions of dissociation. Neither attitude will touch
the analyst affectively if he is truly within his own life. If,
on the other hand, he is himself dissociated, whether normally or
neurotically--in the collusion of the group-expression or in single
isolation--and is ever seeking to reinstate in the present moment
the mother-comfort of his own childhood, he will necessarily either
receive the unconsciously motivated confidence of his patient with
the unconscious satisfaction of self-interest (infantile egotism) or
he will respond to his patient’s unconsciously withheld confidence
with the no less unconscious dissatisfaction of self-interest
defeated (infantile egotism thwarted). In one case he manifests the
sentimentality of unconscious sympathy and approbation, in the other
the equally sentimental reaction of unconscious resentment and hate. In
either case it is to be partisan, separative, personal, unconscious.
This unsuspected personalism or unconsciousness within ourselves makes
it easier for us to condone the personalism or unconsciousness in
another, rather than understand it. Because of the greater significance
to us of our own personal grievance as compared with our understanding
of the impersonal needs of life as a unitary experience, our sympathy
is automatically enlisted on the side of the patient’s personal
grievance. In brief, we prefer to sympathize with the suffering
of an organism rather than with the organism that suffers. This
characterological weakness in our analytic system renders the analyst
an easy mark for the sentimentalizing reveries of the neurotic patient.
It is thus a far cry from “Freud,” the psychological conception as it
tends toward the more unitary formulation and co-ordination of the
problem of neurotic disharmonies, to “Freud” the father-complex as it
tends unconsciously to dominate the consciousness of patient as of
follower.

_The admission that has eventually to be made without qualifying
reservation is that the transference upon which we have laid such
stress as an objective scientific phenomenon is in truth a state of
mind subjectively induced in the patient in direct response to the
attitude of unconsciousness on the part of the analyst himself_.
It is just here, in the dissociated attitude of analyst toward
analysand, that there stands the inevitable impasse to the personal
or individualistic analysis of Freud. Here is the futile revolution
within a vicious circle that is the fallacy of its individualistic
viewpoint. It needs to be repeated that the sexual or the personal,
in the sense of the separative, is itself unconscious. Its primary
source is the reaction originally induced in the organism by the
disunity of the social unconscious as voiced by the parent. We shall be
helped if we keep in mind that much of the confusion of psychoanalysis
is due to the failure of psychoanalysts to realize that there is a
distinction between the mother-image and the mother-organism. We must
ultimately come to see that, due to the dissociative or bidimensional
attitude on the part of the mother, the child automatically replaces
the biological reality of the parent organism with the artificial
_image_ of the parent[37] induced by the parental command. Following
the investigations of the last years it has come to be my definite
conviction that it is this element of the pictorial and statutory,
as reflected in the parent-image, that is the real impediment to
consciousness and the sole meaning of “unconsciousness.”

The suggestive instance (image) of the parental organism, due to
the early influence of separatism operating upon it, savours wholly
of a repressive, non-confluent attitude. It necessarily tends,
therefore, through the gradual inculcation of the ulterior, separative,
behaviouristic mode, to dissociate more and more from its original
biology, the immature organism within its range. As the neurotic
diathesis is induced through the surface diversifications of external
suggestion infringing upon the original consonance of the organism,
as unconsciousness is diversity of outer aspect in contrast with
the concentration of consciousness and personality in its inner
confluence, the resolving of the neurotic conflict lies in recalling
the personality from its precipitation into the manifold quests of
external compensations to the original integrity of its essential
unitary life. In this process of rehabilitation there is abrogated
the ceaseless urge toward the unconscious fulfilment of the _wish_,
through the restoration of the native impetus of life in a conscious
fulfilment of _function_. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that
the original incitement to the neurosis is, from an individualistic
basis, external. This reaction within the individual to a prohibition
acting from without constitutes the whole significance of the attitude
of separatism, of self-seeking and of self-defence that are synonymous
with the repressed sexuality of the neurotic personality. But there is
the need to recognize that this same attitude is also synonymous with
the released sexuality which is “normally” regarded at the present
time as a true expression of life. This so-called normal expression,
however, in its obsessive self-seeking and in its obvious kinship with
secondary dissociative reactions, stands at the very opposite pole to
sex as the instinct of life in its organic significance.

The automatic release of the reaction of self-defence that is the
reflex response to the irritant of organic prohibition is biologically
significant. For with the extraneous interception of the organic
mode or at the instance of prohibition, the individual is reflexly
stimulated to a compensatory effort to replace this mode with the
vicarious mode of self-defence. There is here the psychological
concomitance between organic interdiction and organic recoil, between
repression or curtailment of personality and sexuality or the
retroactive impulse to individual aggression. In this connection it is
interesting to note the etymological agreement of the ideas of defence
and prohibition in the French word _défense_ meaning prohibition. There
is psychological warrant for assuming that the relation between these
two words is more innate than accidental.

This psychological parallelism between repression or self-love and
sexuality or self-defence, between the egoistic wish and the suspicion
of interference with its fulfilment, underlies the identity of
the phenomenon of homosexuality and that of paranoia. Students of
psychoanalysis have tended to regard the reflections of these reactions
as distinct manifestations, viewing them as contradictions rather than
as concomitants, as opposites rather than as alternatives, as different
phases of reaction rather than as different aspects of the same phase.
Freud, for example, lays emphasis upon the factor of sexuality, giving
it the place of dominant importance in the neurotic conflict, while
Adler asserts that it is the factor of the individual’s egotism that
is of central importance in the causation of the disharmony. These
seemingly opposed views are, in reality, the same. One envisages
the somatic, the other the psychic aspect of a condition that is
nuclear and common. Their seeming difference is merely the inevitable
limitation of an objective and absolute mode of approach. In either
case it is the symbolic manifestation that is confronted. Whether
the reaction is represented in lust of body (homosexuality) or in
pride of mind (paranoia), in both conditions the aspect contemplated
is again the mere symptomatic index. In each is expressed but the
secondary response to a deeper, more encompassing factor that has its
substrate in our common consciousness. In each it is the semblance of
the individual personality replacing the actuality of the societal
personality. Each is the objective resultant of a subjective impediment
to the confluent, organic life. In both there is represented but the
superficial aspect, one expressing itself clinically in the symbolic
anomaly of homosexuality, the other, in the symbolic anomaly of
paranoia.

Thus far the interest of these anomalies, as far as psychoanalysts are
concerned, has been their implication as it touches the psychopathology
of the isolated or neurotic personality. Far more significant, however,
is the bearing of these manifestations upon the psychobiology of the
social organism as a whole. That these distortions of personality
exist in a larval stage in the group-neurosis of “normality” is a
circumstance with which the psychopathologist needs yet to reckon
in his wider office of clinical sociologist. Naturally we have not
yet begun to suspect the presence of these unsavoury elements,
homosexuality and paranoia, in the unconscious of “normality,” and as
normality enjoys the security of mutual protective agreement among its
constituents, the existence of these unseemly maladjustments within
its ranks will long be treated by us with stolid disavowal. It is the
distinguishing feature of the naïve countenance of normality that it
experiences no need of self-questioning. A delusion that has become
socially buttressed in the mutual reciprocities of its unconscious
adherents is indeed impregnable.

Human consciousness, however, will not be understood nor a clearer,
saner life opened to man until he has repudiated the unconscious,
vicarious or separative as it exists in its securest, most widespread
and most aggressive form, that is, in the _socially systematized
delusion comprising the collective unconscious of our vaunted
“normality.”_ For if normality, so-called, is in reality a dissociation
existing under the protective mask of society, how can we who are
normal or collectively dissociated comprehend dissociation in the
neurotic personality? How can the actor be at the same time onlooker?
How can subject and object co-exist in the selfsame content? How, in
brief, is it possible for unawareness to envisage unawareness? Surely
it is clear that the dreamer is of necessity partisan to his dream, and
that the contemplation of a dream from within a dream is subversive of
the very principle of consciousness. For knowledge being awareness _of_
or _in regard to_, demands as its condition the two contrasting factors
of a subject looking upon and an object looked upon. If normality is
mere collective unconsciousness and therefore itself an artificially
induced neurosis--if it is a condition of unconsciousness produced
through the influence of external suggestion and therefore represents
in itself a secondary dissociative state, how is it possible to fulfil
the requisite condition of consciousness in respect to the two factors
of subject and object in the matter of our consideration of the dreams
of our patients? As my own work has in the last years come to adopt a
more and more inclusive organismic viewpoint, I have become convinced
that what we psychoanalysts _in our present personal and objective
interpretation_ consider “dream-analysis,” and in regard to which we
have taken ourselves and our patients so seriously, is utterly futile
and invalid. I am convinced that, in the mood in which dream-analysis
is now applied, it is itself the expression of an hysterical symptom--a
cognitive replacement within the social unconscious comprising the
arbitrarily assumed group-differentiation “psychoanalyst.”




CHAPTER VI

THE DREAM AND ITS ANALYSIS IN AN ORGANISMIC INTERPRETATION OF THE
NEUROSES


The dream of the individual together with the individualistic
analysis of the dream presents a most difficult and as yet untried
field. There is here required a technique that is as elusive as it
is unprecedented. For such a technique must include the unconscious
complicity of the analyst in the social or image basis from which he
analyzes. For it is only impersonally and confluently that we may
understand what is personal and separative in another. To approach the
dreamer’s separative attitude of repression and self-defence toward
the elements of his dream, in an attitude of our own that is socially
no less separative and repressed, is to invite a situation in which
we merely exchange the dissociative symbols of the sleep state for
analogous symbols in the waking state. It is to replace refraction
and distortion as they occur in the individual repression, with its
symbolic wish-fulfilment in dreams, for refraction and distortion as
they occur in the social repression, with its symbolic wish-fulfilment
in “beliefs.” For this reason, having come to view the unconscious in
its waking and in its sleeping expression from the point of view of the
common, organic mode, I have reached the conviction that the conception
of dream-analysis as it has been entertained by us is throughout a
misconception, that to speak at all of dream “analysis” from the
personal or separative viewpoint is self-delusive. For our so-called
dreams of the night are but the unaccepted realities of the day, the
so-called realities of our day but the unaccepted dreams of the night.
The night’s reaction is individualistic, the day’s reaction is social.
Both are identical in their method as in their aim. Both represent the
endeavour, through futile recourse to symbolic or “would-be” measures
of recommunication, to adjust vicariously and upon a separative basis
the organic outrage to life’s inherent unity. It is the self-determined
illusion of our societal disaffection. It is the lure of the symbolic
in its mock pursuits of the personal and separative. It is the vicious
circle of all unconsciousness vainly rotating upon the phantom axis of
its own unreality.

In view of the repercussion of consciousness that is the essence of
man’s unconsciousness, the attitude that will best liberate us from our
infolding tendencies of mentation lies in a conception that regards
unconsciousness as a self-reflexive mode throughout. Such an attitude
will clearly demarcate our tendency toward the peripheral or social
distribution of the mental images comprising our _mirrored_ affects
as contrasted with the societal conservation of our _real_ affects
in the conscious fulfilment of our common personality. As long as we
fail to realize this generic basis we shall continue to suffer from
the delusion of our own organic disunity, and there will necessarily
persist the vicarious shunting of affect into the distributive
expressions of anger, duplicity and antagonism constitutive of
resistance. Since our affects are organically common, if we do not
permit them expression in universal confluence, they must inevitably
seek an expression that is scattered and random. And so we need to
recognize that we may not adjust our affective or subjective life
through the study of the objective mechanism of the images or dreams
that merely reflect it, but only through the subjective (conscious)
reabsorption within us of the displaced and socially distributed
affects to whose suggestion the dream, by day or by night, is the
mirrored reaction.[38]

In an organismic view _differentiation is unconsciousness_. That is,
the dissociated self or the separative element is, by reason of its
organic anomalousness, necessarily at odds with self. For this reason
there is inevitably entailed the universal conflict of unconsciousness,
collective and single, that is man’s disunity, social as well as
individualistic, “normal” as well as “neurotic.” Such is the disparity
that is reflected in his dreams, sleeping and waking. The diversity
of our fabrications, social and individual, is the diversity of our
_selves_. Our complex is our complexity. In very truth “_our_ little
life is rounded with a sleep.” We waken only to alter the form of our
dream. Throughout the diurnal cycle the dream-state remains unbroken,
and all efforts of analysis in our unconscious, separative mode are
helpful only in accentuating the powerlessness of consciousness in its
present state of differentiation. In the separative mode the elements
of the personality are unassembled, and the result is an absence of
organic coherence, of an essential unity such as may alone be the
basis of a truthful inquiry into the unconscious processes of man’s
inversion. In my own case (the only case upon which any of us may
occupy himself profitably is one’s own) it has become clear that my
attitude toward the night is predetermined by my attitude toward the
day. If I have kept personal and repressed my real feeling during the
day, the secret of my dissociation will be kept faithfully throughout
the night, and upon waking in the morning such camouflage as will
successfully hide my separativeness will have been already established
by my own order prior to the waking moment.

It would seem that sleep is the beneficent leveller, that mentally as
well as physically its function is restorative, that it is the solvent
and the dissolvent of our fancied differentiations, of our artificial,
fear-begotten defences against one another. It would seem that it is
for man the opportunity of organic rehabilitation, that in this period
of withdrawal and quiescence after the restless day of self-seeking and
antagonism there is a palliative and conciliatory process at work.[39]
After all, diplomacy and lying are wearying in their exactions, and
in this period marked by an absence of social pretences and of the
strain of our separative adjustments, consciousness undoubtedly tends
to reassert its common, primal mode with images that promote and do not
impede organic function--joyous images, expressive of common need, of
organic participation, of concerted, confluent function. After all, our
dreams are but the shadows our lives cast behind them when we stand in
the light of our own personality.

It is only as we become one with this inherent personality through
an acceptance of the unity of life in its entirety that the shadows
comprising our dreams, sleeping and waking, may be truly resolved.
Since our dreams of the night only tend to restore the equilibrium
which the day has destroyed, our dreams are only in so far distorted
as our day is distorted. In so far as the day is an evasion of the
recognition of the infantile wish, with its corresponding entail of
over-compensation and atonement, in so far does the dream reproduce
again the identical wish of the day after having recourse to the
extravagance and distortion requisite to its disguise. When in our
day’s reactions we shall have entered upon an organic, confluent mode
of consciousness, our dreams will be one with the organic confluence
of the day, furthering in their harmonious imagery the quiet process
of the day’s constructiveness. It will then be realized that sleep is
but the day’s diastole, that just as the period of diastolic relax
following the rhythmic contraction of the heart has a function that
is reciprocal and harmonious in relation to the systolic impulse, so
in the rhythmic cycle of our day its period of rest is reciprocal and
continuous with, not contradictory and opposed to, the constructive
function of the day’s activities. The dreams of the separative mode,
on the other hand, only occlude and congest the avenues of our
sleep-consciousness. These obstructive travesties effect a complete
deadlock due to the confluent organism’s ineffectual effort to arrest
and clarify these separative trends that are reflections even in
sleep of the unlived, fear-ridden, organically discordant experience
comprising the day.

With our present habitually tutored day, the very approach of our
awaking automatically prompts us to don a costume of disguise before
we rise to move again amid the tedious maze of masked players who,
like ourselves, have lost the reality of life’s organic meaning. As
long as one’s feeling is thus resolutely set against the surrender of
his artificial defences, as long as one fears to remove the mask of
pretence covering his personality, no amount of intellectualization,
of mental analysis, of theoretical “truths” (I have tried them all!)
will avail to lift his repression and admit him to the simple reality
of his common, organic feeling. It is in vain that we seek the truth.
Truth, as it is customarily conceived, is but the theory whereof life,
as it may be lived, is the reality. To seek the truth is again to
pursue the phantom of our own mental imagery. For reality disappoints
all formulation. No symbol may stand for equivalence but only for
equivocation. The lesson the psychoanalyst has yet to learn is that
reality has no substitutes, that no _seeming_, however plausible, may
replace that which _is_. It is this lesson--the very lesson we presume
to teach our patients--of which all our work is as yet but an empty
recitation. Accordingly, no amount of intuitional or theoretical acumen
on the part of the analyst can do other than thwart a patient’s need of
self-realization. Such intellectualism on the part of the analyst is
the substitution that is _his_ neurosis. Recourse to intellectuality
is his concession to the socially current repression and substitution
which in our collective unconsciousness we credit as normality, never
once suspecting, in the strength of our numerical security, that
_normality is but the collective dream-state of man’s waking life_.

Because of the psychological identity between the dream that is
our day, with its dramatization in the objective furniture of
cubic actuality, and the dream that is our night, with its scenic
reproduction in flat, pictorial outline, an individualistic analysis
in the sense of an encompassing realization is of its nature precluded.
Only as we can come to stand apart from both, and view them in their
proper light as symbolic phenomena divorced from life, may they be
assessed in their true relation and thus analyzed in the only sense
that gives meaning to the term. But this is not a merely mental
process. This is to actualize organic life in our daily experience
with such sincerity as to realize within ourselves the spuriousness
of our habitual, dissociated mode. It is so to include the dream
outside the dream, constituted of the separative day with which the
separative night is enclosed, that we shall have automatically entered
upon the mode of self-unification which is one with a societally
unified, confluent consciousness. The essential mark of such a mode of
consciousness is that, in its subjective consonance, it regards with an
equally objective clarity the vicarious processes of the day and of the
night.

Our attitude of the day is amply illustrated by our attitude toward
our dramas. As our lives are based upon unconsciousness, our dramas as
well as our dreams are also necessarily based upon unconsciousness.
Since the logic of the dream is inverted, it is essential to reverse
the dream’s unconscious motive in order to understand its fallacious
sequences. The drama equally represents the interplay of unconscious
motives. Based thus upon the inverse processes of unconsciousness, its
logic is also necessarily inverse. And so in order to understand the
drama, its motive must likewise be observed in its reverse trend. In
other words, the drama and the dream are identical in their essential
mechanism. When the psychopathologist is confronted with the drama of
_actual life_--the inverse process represented in the neurosis--his
immediate recourse should be to intercept as far as possible the
inharmonious development of the patient’s life history and, having
completely reversed its underlying motive in the light of conscious
perspectives, to unravel its meaning through carefully retracing
discoverable inadvertencies of development to their logical source.

In this function the analyst’s attitude toward the human drama
presented in the neurosis of his patient becomes identical with his
attitude toward the dreams of his patient. One would naturally expect
that his attitude toward the drama of the stage would be equally
logical. But a societal analysis fails to justify this expectation. For
such is the elusive tenacity of the seemingly actual, as it appears in
the dissociative recourses of the social mind, that the psychoanalyst,
too, continues to regard the bidimensional _aspect_ of life presented
in the drama as a conscious form of art. In consequence it comes to
pass that a train of unconsciously destructive events which he deplores
as an expression of life in the clinic is applauded by him as an
expression of art in the theatre. The same untoward sequences, which in
clinical retrospect are _viewed_ with compassion, are in the process of
their theatrical portrayal _experienced_ with delight.

I do not see how such inconsistencies between our collective and our
individual reactions to unconsciousness are separable from the present
confusion that exists between the objective and the subjective spheres
of consciousness. Because of this confusion, in our dissociation we
take pleasure in participating in the dramatic representation of the
identical processes of unconsciousness which, subsequently contemplated
as actuality, we interpret only as pain. This inconsistency between
our subjective and objective reactions accounts also for the many
discrepancies in the psychiatrist’s personal attitude toward the dramas
of the clinic and the drama within his own home. It explains how it
happens that we, who are seemingly competent to trace an individual’s
neurosis directly to the influences that have unconsciously surrounded
him as a child, will yet unconsciously surround our own children with
these selfsame influences. Surely never was the “other fellow” so
abused and ourselves so tricked as in our psychiatric clinics when, in
our self-conscious formulation of the occasion of his confusion, we
deem ourselves less unconscious than he.

As it is the especial métier of the unconscious to convert the actual
into the seeming, its subtlest attainment is the conversion of what
is most actual into what is most seeming. If of realization itself it
may effect a semblance, it is the ultimate achievement in unconscious
ventriloquy. If of analysis itself it may make a pseudo-analysis, it
has secured its entrenchment through a technical recourse that is
wellnigh impregnable. Through such a strategic manœuvre one often
attains a quite faultless analysis of a dream, when all the while
the realization is but seeming. As the dream is but the reflected
image or “negative” of yesterday’s duplicities and introversions, an
attempt to capture and “analyze” it from the retrospective standpoint
of the replacement and introversion of the day, is but to retain
unaltered and unalterable the unconscious embroilment of one’s
self-delusive introversion. Yet, with the practised dexterity of our
habitual sleight-of-hand methods of analysis, we still pursue the
futile industry of our objective dream-trapping, idly endeavouring
to drag the travesty of the day’s distortions embodied in the dream
into the self-conscious analytic dissecting-room. In truth, the
real need is that we surrender the analytic dissecting-room and all
its paraphernalia of symbolic technique to the common reality which
underlies it, realizing that its artificial displacements constitute
the sole function of the dream parody. For set what snare we will, a
dream cannot be taken alive. The chasing of dreams is like the chasing
of rainbows. One may no more behold his _real_ self in the mirror of
the dream than in any other reflecting surface. The image reproduced
may be never so lifelike but it is not life. As with birds on the wing,
so with our dreams; we cannot capture them except we destroy them. The
attempt to do so is to repeat without end our habitual offence against
the organic grammar of life constitutive of the double negative of all
unconsciousness. Again it is unconsciousness within unconsciousness,
personal preference within personal preference, unconsciousness
_unconscious_ that is the baffling complicity in our self-dissociation.

This self-involvement of the neurosis, this _unconsciousness of the
totality of self_ makes of our individual enfoldment a wellnigh
inscrutable situation. In such a situation the individual’s efforts
of self-help--the recourses of personal rather than of societal
outlooks--become comparable to the efforts of a man who would attempt
to lift himself by his own boot-straps. This it is that comprises the
dream within the dream of all individuation--of all separateness. Of
course, it quite naturally seems to us, in our now differentiated
mode, that the attainment of a position of relative inclusiveness is a
humanly impossible task. Yet, if we are to attain to a true recognition
of our _societal dissociation_, we may do so only through the
acceptance of the basic actuality of our common, organic confluence.
Such alone is the essential recourse of a fully awakened consciousness.

Whether we will or no, we are thus brought back again and again to
the essential fallacy of our day’s dreams as of our night’s--to the
illusion of personal causation or of individual sponsorship that is
at the heart of man’s dissociation, both neurotic and normal. In the
presumption of his self-determined hypothesis of good and bad, of hope
and fear, the individual is assuming unconsciously the supervision of
the universe, and the constant endeavour of his thoughts as of his
dreams is to keep secret the traces of his personal presumption through
the subtle projections of the disguised image. Some call it God, some
call it evolution, but no matter what the collective title under which
our private prerogative is symbolized, it is in reality but the cheat
that is the personal illusion of a central causality resident within
ourselves.

I know that in this subjective statement of the disharmony of
consciousness there is presented a trend that is wholly unacceptable
to the symbolic or absolute logician; but, on the other hand,
the objective statements of the absolute logician are with equal
validity unacceptable to the relativist. According to the objective
logic of the mental absolutist the fact of our very existence is
theoretically untenable. In the unconscious determinism of men’s
personal prerogative, the postulate, as is generally known, is that
the universe in which we have our being was either created by some
agency existing outside itself or it was self-creative. Of the two
alternatives either is impossible, but the vital fact remains that
here we are! The logical untenability of a position that limits itself
to these commonly accepted alternatives may some day offer sobering
consideration to our unconscious absolutism. For the present there is
grave need that our absolute or theoretical logic yield place to the
relative logic of a more organismic point of view. In the world of
physical phenomena prior to Einstein it was impossible for physicists
to proceed with further creative extensions because of the limitation
of their underlying conception. So in the sphere of human activities
around us, as long as we continue in our present objective fixity of
thought, it will not be possible for life to unfold because of the set
limitations of unessential attitudes of mind that block all essential
creative expression.




CHAPTER VII

THE BIOLOGICAL SUBSTRATE OF THE NEUROTIC CONFLICT IN ITS ORGANIC
SIGNIFICANCE


In studying the neurotic diathesis one recognizes the existence of two
marked reaction-types more or less clearly delineated one from another
in mood and _tempo_, though they equally sustain the same central
_motif_. The vicarious method of dream-analysis described in the last
chapter as having all the appearance of adequacy, when inherently it
is invalid, is especially characteristic of one of these two types
of personality. The two types may be distinguished by the contrast
between their specific reactions to the original repressive incident
occasioning the organism’s primary dissociation.

I am not in sympathy, however, with the _implication_ in the
discrimination of types demarcated as “introvert” and “extravert.”
These terms imply, as they are meant to imply, an essential difference
of type rather than a circumstantial difference of reaction. In general
the extravert is rather approvingly regarded in the light of a “jolly
good fellow,” as contrasted with the introvert whose disaffectivity,
on the contrary, tends to be regarded with an undisguised slant.
As if the jolly good-fellowship of the hysterical type, with all
its aggressiveness and ebullience, were not as truly a substitutive
alternative resultant upon repression as is the reaction of his more
silent, ingrown confrère of the opposite type! As if the affable,
effervescent type were not as truly “shut-out” as his psychological
vis-à-vis is “shut-in”! Psychiatry has a great deal to say about
the shut-in type of personality but it has nothing to say about the
shut-out type of personality. Yet of the two the latter is by no means
a less serious form of dissociation, and certainly it is by far the
more widespread in its results.

There are, then, two types of reaction to be discriminated. There is
the type of individual who upon the initial stimulus to defence has
recourse to a tactic of unconditional retreat. He simply withdraws
_in toto_, and his attitude toward his congeners is thenceforward
completely negative. He no longer sees nor is seen by them. They
are so far outside his ken that their existence is not for a moment
admitted by him. Excluded from the range of his actualities he does not
even concede them an hypothetical status. Such is the _autocentric_
individual. This personality is the subsequent precoid, if in his
withdrawal he does not even so much as pretend acknowledgment of
the external world; he is the later psychasthenic, or normal of the
socially detached type, if he adopts the more temperate policy of a
seeming _rapprochement_. In either case, enclosed within a system all
his own, he lives entirely apart from the world of actuality, ruling
alone (and of course supreme) over his self-determined cosmogony.

Then there is the type of personality whose course is the exact
opposite of that just described, the difference of reaction being due
to the modifying conditions, “constitutional” for aught I know, that
attend the repressive occasion. With this type of personality, due
to the fact that the arresting instance overtakes him, as it were,
in the open, retreat is automatically barred. He is surprised in
the act, discovered with the goods in his possession. Detection and
apprehension are here simultaneous. Unable to deny the actuality of the
situation, his instinctive recourse is in the direction of a desperate
effort to palliate the attending circumstances. Resort to an alibi
being out of the question, he seeks to exculpate himself by adopting
a policy of a more or less truckling servility. He would atone his
offence by propitiating his accusers and so winning a recommendation
of leniency. Such is the _allocentric_ type of personality. This type
may be seen either in the so-called normal individual of the socially
adaptive reaction or in the definitely efflorescent or hysterical
neurotic, according respectively as he succeeds in conniving in the
social pretence and unconsciousness about him and thus saves his
own neck, or as he fails in his effort at social compromise--the
process flatteringly known to-day as “sublimation.” In this event his
failure of adaptation is due to the stronger urge within him of the
factors that are allied with the underlying communism of his organic
consciousness but which in his mental dissociation he is unable to
co-ordinate with his innate experience.

Viewed biologically these two types represent, as I see them, a
functional over-emphasis _in the individual_ of the reactions
pertaining to one or the other of the two fundamental co-ordinated
systems underlying the biology of man’s confluent life and determining,
when in balanced relation to one another, the integral health of the
organism. I refer to the cerebro-spinal and the sympathetic nervous
systems. The opposite recourses of behaviour, manifested in the two
psychological types just cited, represent, I believe, the two extremes
of reaction resultant upon the disturbed balance between these two
systems coincident with the factor of repression.

In the preconscious form of life[40] preserved among the animals, there
has occurred no break between these two fundamental systems. In the
feline series, for example, one observes the same graceful, organic
undulations in the movements actuated by the voluntary muscles or in
the reactions presided over by the cerebro-spinal system, as occur
in the rhythmic and harmonious co-ordinations that characterize the
function of the internal viscera controlled by the sympathetic ganglia.
With man the picture is a very different one. Upon the introduction
of suggestion or repression and their concomitant interdiction to
his inherent feeling, there resulted an organic cleavage within his
personality. Coincident with this artificial summons to an adaptive
and ulterior response, the spheres of reaction corresponding to these
two systems within the organism of man were henceforth divided.
Affective responses within the organism’s subjective nuclear life, with
its physiological substrate in the vasomotor and visceral reactions
(sympathetic system), were no longer correlated with affective
responses which, having their substrate in the nuclei of the brain and
spinal cord (cerebro-spinal system), pertain to the objective, external
adaptations observable in the organism’s voluntary activities. Hence,
from this moment forward the co-ordination between the two systems
became automatically impaired, and there could no longer be the smooth,
uninterrupted confluence of function that originally united the two
systems into a single co-ordinated unit.

The disintegrating effect of this artificial cleavage between these
two reciprocal systems occurs only in the constituent that marks the
adaptive cerebral reactions or in the segment or terminal mediating
the relationships _socially_ of the individual elements _inter
se_. In the central or visceral system the organic unities remain
intact. Here in the depths of man’s organic being, actuated by his
involuntary, instinctive life, the disparity of separateness cannot
enter. Here is unbroken continuum. Here the organism is susceptible
to no interstitial flaw. In this central, involuntary system which is
organically common and confluent throughout the species, the extraneous
element of repression with its reaction in disparate, ulterior quests
is automatically excluded, for in its native inherency the organism
is one and indivisible. It is the peripheral portion of our organisms
with its specialization into the external sense-organs, through which
is mediated our recognition of objective difference or interval and
through which occurs, as has been said, our consequent inference of
intrinsic differentiation. In the peripheral system, therefore, the
fallacy of separateness due to this biological fission may be enforced
with seeming success. In a word, it is only in our social and external
relations that the fallacy of organic differentiation works havoc in
any positive or active sense.

In this generic schema is probably represented the physiological
substrate of the schism within the organism caused by the impact from
without of the trauma of repression, and there is represented as well
the basis of the resultant contrast of reaction-types in accordance as
the repression tends more strongly toward one or the other side of the
divided reaction.

Replacing essential continuity with mere contiguity, or the unity of
our organic life with the superficial gestures of an outer code, the
_normal_ of the hysterical type may rub surfaces, as it were, and play
desperately at the game of vicarious unity. We see this everywhere
exemplified among the devotees of normality in reactions that are
apparently confluent but that are, in reality, determined cerebrally or
peripherally in response to the division within the unitary organism
of man. Such are the expressions to be seen, for example, in our
religious hobnobbings, our spurious social covenants, our ingenious
political and economic affiliations, and in the superficial flatteries
and connivances common to normality generally. How definitely such
vicarious reactions are an infringement upon man’s organic life is
readily seen in the unfailing equalization that follows swiftly upon
them, exacting their inevitable toll in the ultimate retributive
penalties of national and industrial wars, of social and political
dissension and in the world-wide expression of disaffection that marks
the social periphery of our self-plumed “civilization.”

On the other hand the _neurotic_ of the hysterical type, by reason
of the greater sensitiveness of his organism, is held within the
grip of this organic conflict. It permits him neither to fawn nor to
defy whole-heartedly, but because of the irreconcilable urge of this
inner conflict it keeps him ever torn between its two extremes. As an
expression of the allocentric reaction he lives within a system that
is divided against itself, sensing throughout life, only intuitively,
the unassuageable pain of his division.

In direct contrast with this reaction the autocentric type lives within
a system that is completely dissociated from the common, congeneric
life. But, though the system is in itself uniform throughout, he
suffers no less the affliction of his life’s incompleted cycle
because of his organic separation from the socially reciprocal,
peripheral system. The allocentric seeks in vain to atone to
himself for his extradition from the co-ordinated organism in the
spurious compensations of a peripherally (socially) separative
system. The autocentric would annul the pain of his separation from
the co-ordinated organism in the futile appeasements of a central
(individual) system which, in its insulation, represents no less his
complete dissociation from the world of actuality. The one would repair
the organic breach within him through recourse to conciliations that
lie exclusively within the social sphere (peripheral dissociation).
The other would resort to reparations, which, being wholly enclosed
within the _ego_, embody exclusively the individual factor (central
dissociation). In brief, the allocentric sees himself as _picture_
in the world outside of him. The autocentric sees the world outside
of him as picture _within_ himself. If the conduct of the latter
personifies the smoke-screen, the conduct of the former is typical of
the red-herring!

Here again we witness the vacillations between the social consensus and
our personal resistance to its behests, between the opposed factors of
suggestion and of repression, of personal advantage and of personal
disadvantage, due to our unconscious alternatives of good and bad. In
the disorganization pertaining to these two reciprocally dissociated
spheres--the cerebral and the visceral--our unconsciousness consists,
in either case, in the individual’s inability to realize a unification
of personality comprised of the balanced inclusion of the two through
the co-ordination of the organic and the conscious spheres of his
experience.

It is my view that in the phenomena of repression or of sexuality
artificial symbols are substituted for the natural gestures represented
in the innate feelings of life and sex. In substituting the manifold
symbols of expression for the natural gestures of spontaneous feeling,
there is manifested a dissociation of the consciousness of man of which
the union of his nuclear and peripheral fields of feeling (affectivity)
is the biological basis. Just as the gesture is the motor expression of
its concomitant sensory reaction, so is the symbol the motor expression
of the sensory _repression_ concomitant to it. As the gesture is
the organic accompaniment of reality, the symbol is the vicarious
barrier against reality. We find the sponsorship for the symbol in
unconsciousness or in a mode that is personal, systematized, repressed,
while the gesture has its sponsorship in a mode of consciousness or in
a confluence of feeling that is impersonal, societal, organic.

If one may speak of ethnic modes, it may be said that in what is called
the period of Greek thought--with its preference for form to substance,
for “the good” conceived rather as beauty than as truth, for life felt
more in its outward line than in its inner meaning--there is ethnically
reflected the allocentric or peripheral type of reaction. A close
sympathy with all that pertains to this early period of Greek culture
is certainly characteristic of the strongly marked types of this
reaction.

On the other hand, the era of Christ and of the psychasthenic reaction
of Christianity, with its lugubrious reversal of the Greek _motif_,
is a mode one finds pre-eminently adapted to the autocentric type
of character, with its apotheosis of the symbols of love, of truth
and of the spirit. Said Christ: “The spirit is more than flesh,”
thus controverting the tendency of the Greek ideal, and an ascetic
Christianity has flocked to him. But in the eidolon of Greek as of
Christian there is offered again but the symbol. In the organic
incompleteness of each there is presented only the inadequacy of the
letter, of that which serves as a sign. In the first it is form,
colour, substance; in the second it is the word, the concept, the
spirit. To-day there are not wanting indications that there awaits
man a period that is confluent of the two in which these symbolic or
separative racial modes shall become absorbed in a unification of word
and of substance. This moment of man’s organic realization within
himself of the integrity of life in its totality will usher in a
sociological renascence when man’s life will embody a mode in which the
spirit _is_ flesh.[41]

The contrasting systems here denoted as allocentric and autocentric,
corresponding to the contrast between the cerebral, peripheral or
social mode of reaction on the one hand and the visceral, central
or nuclear reaction-type on the other, merely mark anew a very old
and commonly recognized division. Here in this more physiological
envisagement of it there is offered merely a different conceptual
basis. There is an analogous division in the experimental
psychologists’ discrimination between motor and sensory. Doubtless also
in the contrast more rhetorically defined as romantic and classical
there is contemplated the same division of types, not to mention
the contrasted reaction-types popularly known as temperamental and
phlegmatic.[42]

It is needful to remember that the allocentric type of individual
is, within the peripheral division of his cerebro-social system, as
truly self-centred as is the autocentric type within the central,
visceral division of his sympathetic system. The difference is that
the allocentric embodies dissociation in his seeming adaptation toward
the social dream that is his day, and the autocentric in his seeming
adaptation toward the individual dream that is his night. Every
psychiatrist is familiar with the facility with which the dementia
præcox patient may analyze his own dreams. But what avails his
facility? He is by very virtue of it not less but rather more shut in,
for his “analysis” is but the trick through which he subtly evades the
social demands existing outside his own centrally dissociated mode. At
all times he holds the stage of his self-determined drama, viewing the
spectacle of it not as onlooker but as producer. What he permits you
to see is but a play within a play, conceived and enacted within the
theatre of his own mind. And so in the autocentric type embodied in
the psychasthenic personality--the reaction of the type of normal or
neurotic that is related to the precoid in its extreme expression--one
may be led quite far from the touchstone of reality by reason of the
very simplicity and quite genuine correctness of his “analysis.” And
so no less with the allocentric type and the equally plausible decoys
of _his_ illusory system. What is needed is our realization that in
the projections of one as in the _intrajections_ of the other there
is equally embodied the identical purpose of self-withdrawal from the
common medium of reality.

Most significant of all is the need that the psychoanalyst realize,
on the one hand, the peripherally determined tendencies of his own
socially compensative reactions or of his own allocentric normality,
and, on the other, the centrally biased trends of his own insularly
compensative adjustments or of his own autocentric adaptation. Failing
to accept, through his own analysis, the possibility of the completely
theatrical or symbolic nature of the so-called actualities of his own
day as they tend to be expressed in the immediate moment at hand, he
may himself easily succumb to the fallacy of a too ready credence
(analyst’s wish-fulfilment) in judging the validity of a patient’s
presumable self-envisagement. This unconscious alternative which we
trace again and again throughout the varying manifestations of the
mind of man, whether in its single or in its collective expression,
whether in the immediate reaction of the individual or in the remoter
adaptations of the race mind, is equally the unconscious actuation
underlying the system of psychoanalysis.

It would seem to mark some strange miscarriage in our sociological
progress that a dualistic system, such as psychoanalysis, should have
arisen as an emanation of Jewish thought, when one considers the
essentially monotheistic tradition of the Hebrew consciousness. In this
sense the sociological reaction of the Hebrew mind manifested in the
dualistic principle of Freud, as exemplified in his basic theory of
psychic ambivalence, would seem to denote some inadvertence in racial
perception. Monotheism with its principle of a universal immanence
of good is clearly a sublimation of the unitary preconscious mode
(autocentric), just as the dualistic theism of the Gentiles, with its
basis in the alternatives of good and evil, is the sublimation of an
irreconcilable unconscious mode (allocentric). May it not be that
unconsciously psychoanalysis is a Semitic repudiation of the basal law
of Moses and of its preconscious principle of an underlying unity,
precisely as Christianity is an unconscious repudiation of the same
unitary precept as exemplified preconsciously in the teachings of
Christ? May it not be, too, that these unconscious alternatives now
actuating the dualistic systems of Jew and Gentile will ultimately
resolve themselves into an organic monism of accord which, in the
societal encompassment of each, will become equally understanding and
inclusive through the united consciousness of both?




CHAPTER VIII

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN SEXUALITY AND SEX IN RELATION TO UNIFICATION
AND ORGANIC MATING


In the impatience of the industrial laboratory to meet the public
need, it happens not infrequently that, through an omission of
adequate qualitative tests due to the unusual haste of production,
an inferior grade of material is distributed such as would not have
been produced under more temperate circumstances. The time has come to
acknowledge that through a like inadvertence many of the products of
psychoanalysis are seriously open to criticism upon the same grounds.
Owing to overhasty construction and to a lack of requisite tests of
their genuineness, an appreciable deficiency has occurred in the
quality of the material produced. Due to this occasion psychoanalysis
is answerable for engendering in the public mind certain conceptions
which are utterly without a basis in fact. Coupled with this want of
moderation, certain publicity experts have disseminated a wide range
of literature embodying a mass of disastrous misapprehension. In mere
zeal for a market they have circulated it broadcast amid all manner
of suggestible, because unconscious, individuals and communities.
Unconscious doctrines, however, cannot be promulgated except from
unconscious sources. When psychoanalysis has achieved a sufficiently
impersonal and far-reaching outlook to apply to itself in reality
the same tests which it is now applying to others in theory, it
will realize the need of recalling, as far as is possible, the many
conceptual products of its overhasty output and of offering instead a
more scientifically controlled and a more adequately tested summation
of views such as are suited to serve as an ultimate interpretation of
human consciousness.[43]

There is a characterological aspect of human consciousness which
psychoanalysis has yet to consider. By character I do not mean the
habituations of personal bigotry. I have in mind a characterology
that is racial and that furthers the conscious integrations of man
as expressive of his societal life as a whole. Thus far, instead of
regarding the personality of man as a societal aggregate assembled of
the elements comprising individual men, psychoanalysis has tended to
create artificial divisions within this organic unity. Unconsciously
influenced by a division based upon the bias of its own arbitrary
alternatives, psychoanalysis has assumed contrasts of behaviour which
completely lack the foundations of an organismic inclusiveness.

Perhaps the most unwarranted of such conceptual contrasts, because
most harmful and far-reaching in the confusion it entails, is the
artificial discrimination connoted under the terms homosexuality
and heterosexuality. From an organismic viewpoint the alternatives
presupposed in such a distinction are traceable alone to the
unconscious ambivalence within the psychoanalytic system itself. From
an inclusive position it will be seen that in the systematization
underlying the contrasting concepts homo- and heterosexuality, the
psychoanalyst himself has fallen a prey to the contrasting images of
hope and fear, “good” and “bad,” underlying the alternatives of his own
absolute system.

In a situation that is organically false, an organically false reaction
is the inevitable response. As long as sentimentality--the unconscious
projection of the flattering likeness of one’s own ego--dominates,
as now, all clinical procedure, the tendency to inversion or
image-substitution that underlies the psychoanalytic system itself will
necessarily render what is now the purely fanciful isolation of the
so-called homosexual complex inaccessible to consciousness.

It is the tacit assumption among psychoanalysts as among sexologists
generally that the condition described by Freud as unconscious
“homosexuality” deserves recognition as a true biological phenomenon,
and accordingly they tend to concede it place in the social scheme.
Since the analytic approach is not societal, the analyst necessarily
gives to the homosexual inversion a position that is positive and
static. Whether the case is regarded as “curable” or “incurable” it
is customarily treated as an objective disease-entity. Many instances
of so-called “analysis” that I have known have consisted in nothing
else than overcoming through suggestion (consensual assurance) a
patient’s social resistance to this type of adaptation, notwithstanding
that to this end there were pressed into clinical service the
external adjustments of active heterosexuality. This conception is as
unfortunate as it is unnecessary. The adaptation of the homosexual
disorientation within the societal consciousness is organically as
impossible as is the adaptation of the disorientations of paranoia in
the organically societal aggregate. “Normally” the adaptation of both
phases of inversion are a commonplace, but that it is so is but an
added commentary on normality and its collective unconsciousness.

That the natural expression of sex is the union between man and woman
is indisputable. The concomitance between the sex of man and the sex of
woman is self-evident. Being organic, this reproductive convergence of
the male and female of a species is a process that occurs spontaneously
and without intervention. No dissertation is required to establish
this view. There is, however, the need to set forth clearly a factor
entering into human behaviour that is not spontaneous and to render
conscious the conditions now obtaining unconsciously among us through
the artificial intervention of this extraneous factor. When we spoke
of the reactions of the child to the early influences of inducement
and prohibition (suggestion and repression) corresponding respectively
to the mental images of good and bad, we saw that “good” coincides
with the individual’s personal advantage as reflected in the social
approval about him, and that “bad” represents his personal disadvantage
as likewise reflected in his social surroundings. In the presumptive
absolute of our arbitrary images of good and bad, the system of
behaviour thus unconsciously begotten in us assumes sponsorship even of
the primary and organic instinct of mating. Not even this fundamental
impulse of our human behaviour is safe from the infringements of our
self-reflective alternatives of good and bad with their attendant
measures of individual advantage. Accordingly, the organic and inherent
impulse of mating is henceforward seen from the point of view of
personal self-interest. A common, societal instinct of reproduction
experiences thus the inversion of a secret, personal aim.

This secret element of personal advantage and acquisitiveness that has
come to mar the free and natural expression of man’s mating impulse
is fully attested in the covert self-consciousness that characterizes
his “in-love” attitude. In the alternative attitude of good and bad
that necessarily limits him to the issues of advantage or disadvantage
for himself, man no longer approaches the essentially unitary instinct
of love with unity in himself. Either there is the response in the
individual that is “good” in that it concedes the social exaction
(positive suggestion of self-advantage), or the response that is
“bad” in that it repudiates the social consensus (negative suggestion
of self-disadvantage, i.e., repression). In the first instance the
individual accepts the alternative of the socially approved adaptation
of heterosexuality, in the second the individual’s reaction issues in
the alternative of the socially repudiated adaptation of homosexuality.
In either alternative the factor of psychic inversion and self-interest
is equally decisive. In the first it is presented in the form that is
the individual’s response to the consensual suggestion, in the second
it is presented in the form that is his response to the consensual
repression. What is significant is the fact that, as each type of
response is an alternation on the basis of the social suggestion or the
social repression answering, in the first instance, to the desire of
personal gain or approval and, in the second, to the fear of personal
loss or disfavour, both types of response, in returning upon self and
self-interest for their satisfaction, are equally _ego-sexual_.

As is universally the case with reactions based on the unconscious
contrasts of good and bad, in the choice of either alternative there
are preserved the elements actuating both. In the heterosexual
alternative there is the unconscious presence of the homosexual
component, in the homosexual alternative there is the unconscious
presence of the heterosexual component. The reason is that the
underlying factor that equally determines each of these seemingly
opposed reactions is the deeper unconscious inversion of man’s
ego-sexuality with its inevitable alternatives of self-advantage based
upon our artificial differentiations of good and bad.

The conclusion is unavoidable that we shall have to reconstruct
entirely our conception of the interrelationship of man and woman
in respect to the instinct of sex. As has been said before, hetero-
and homosexuality are purely fictitious discriminations. Like the
distinctions presumably expressed by the conception extravert and
introvert, they embody no discrimination _in kind_ whatever, but are
terms for the alternative aspects of one and the same thing. As the
concept connoted by these terms may with advantage be replaced by the
concept connoted by the terms allocentric and autocentric, so the
concept expressed by the terms heterosexuality and homosexuality may
with propriety give way to a concept such as we may correspondingly
express by the terms _allosexual_ and _autosexual_--terms which do not
indicate a difference of content between two reactions but merely an
alternation of aspect in one and the same reaction. With a view, then,
to what I feel will afford a clearer and more encompassing outlook
upon the problems of our human adjustment, both individual and social,
I shall, wherever convenient, dispense with the term “homosexuality,”
because of the needlessly misleading stigma it imposes upon the
individual, and use instead of _homosexual_ the term _autosexual_;
correspondingly, instead of the term _heterosexual_, with its equally
misleading social implication of “right” comportment, the expression
_allosexual_ will be used, it being understood that by these contrasts
I mean the dual alternations of self-love due to man’s unconscious
repudiation of the organic instinct of sex in favour of the personal
inversions of sexuality.

Sexuality is the _effort_ of conjunction of peripheral and visceral
spheres, but because of the interposition of the personal or
self-reflexive element, with its necessarily inverse aim, there results
on the one hand (socially) the mere apposition of periphery with
periphery, entailing an inverse erotism or autosexuality in the form
of narcism (self-reflection), or unconscious homosexuality proper;
and on the other (centrally) the mere (psychic) enfolding of visceral
with visceral, entailing an inverse erotism in the form of autoerotism
or ego-sexuality proper. Sex, on the contrary, is the spontaneous,
effortless and non-personal conjugation of the organismic poles
comprising male and female. This distinction between sexuality and sex
explains the ulterior quality of a sophisticated and self-conscious
“in-love” state representing _contrast_, in replacement for the
organismic love-state representing _identification_. Hence sexuality is
but the temporary self-appeasement of a reciprocal adjustment, whereas
sex is the permanent self-realization of a mutual co-ordination.[44]

A consideration that cannot fail to be of interest to the psychoanalyst
is the obviously complementary relation of the two types, the
allocentric and the autocentric, in respect to one another, and its
undoubted significance as regards the instinct of mating among the more
conscious personalities such as we should expect to follow the unifying
process of analysis. The marked unconscious affinities observable
between the two types I take to be a fact of general recognition
among psychoanalysts if not among the laity itself. But unconscious
affinities, being infantile or adaptive in character, are obviously
attachments of an ego-sexual nature. It is an organic corollary,
however, which in its social implication is unconsciously blinked by
psychopathologists, that an individual who is infantile or unweaned
or ego-sexual is in his objective sexual interest also _de facto_
ego-sexual--ego-sexuality here being nothing else than the extension
of the ego-sexual or autoerotic mode into the sexual objective of
another individual. If, as would appear, normality is the expression of
the unweaned and unconscious mode of society generally, it is not to
be wondered at that the admission of this fact has been so generally
suppressed, since there follows logically the distasteful conclusion
that, unconsciously, normality or society in general, which includes us
all, is ego-sexually constellated.

Accustomed as we are to think so much more readily in objective than in
subjective terms, the conception of ego-sexuality as the determinant of
the relationship between persons of the opposite sex, or the conception
of our supposedly “normal” or “heterosexual” society as being in
essence ego-sexual, has not yet entered the analytic consciousness, nor
is it likely to do so without a violent storm of social protest and
“resistance.” But the typical expression of sexual union, as it exists
among “normals,” is redolent of this inverted bias. The folk-reaction
of the social mind represented in the custom of marriage, if clearly
confronted, reveals throughout the unmistakable signs of this
alternative. If we note carefully the countenance of this social
reaction, we cannot fail to observe that its instigation is based upon
the mutual desire to mollify, to “please.”

Hence, marriage is for the most part a process of mutual adjustment
of the ego-sexual claims upon one another of the two parties
involved. After all, the “oneness” of marriage is an achievement
due to the pooling of the private unconscious of the two parties to
the arrangement. It is the permanent coalition of the unconscious
of both, collectively, with a view to the temporary guarantees of
each, severally. For marriage is an arrangement in accordance with
the terms of which each party to the covenant secretly withdraws
from his organic place as a societal element, in exchange for his
fanciful sovereignty as a circumscribed domestic aggregate! That
is, in marriage two unconscious elements have merged into a single
unconscious entity. Through the self-reflection one achieves in his
unconscious mate, through the self-reduplication he achieves in his
unconsciously begotten offspring, one’s family is again but the
unconscious of the individual freshly reinforced through a subtle
recourse to symbolic replacement. It is the substitution of the single,
self-limited social group for the all-inclusive, organic consonance
of the societal aggregate. Thus the social cluster comprising the
family is but the _symbol_ of the societal unity comprising one’s own
confluent life. The transaction is, in reality, nothing else than the
unconscious reinstatement of the early childish mode of separateness,
fear and dependence, such as actuated the mental bias of one’s own
domestic traditions. In the marriage and homemaking of each of us
there is but the unconscious transmission of the marriage and home
of our parents.[45] For as the child is nurtured amid a codified
system of opinionativeness, this self-reflective (suggestive) habit
about him engenders a self-reflective habit within him. Having early
formed an image of himself in the social reflection with which he is
surrounded, he begins early to examine his own reactions from the
sector of this habitual self-reflection. It is in this reflection of
the self that consists the repercussion of consciousness constitutive
of self-consciousness or the manifestation we unconsciously personify
as _behaviour_--an off-hand term for a reaction which we have not yet
begun half adequately to analyze.

As self-consciousness is of its nature personal and adaptive, it
does not lend itself to analysis on the static basis of a merely
adaptive and personal premise. Its true analysis is the realization
on an inclusive basis of a genetic and relativistic principle of
consciousness. In the mere match-making of our pictorial affects, human
relationship has become throughout artificial. It is this private
impersonation of affects which we have substituted for the common
unity of our real affects. In this mutual comparison of reflected
impressions our relation to one another becomes a superficial and
meaningless balancing of one affect against another. This artificial
substitutive quality has entered even into the expression of man’s
mating and reproductive impulse, and it is blindly venting itself
to-day in the merely mutual attritions of our so-called sexual life.
But this suggestive, substitutive image-systematization of sexuality
is the direct antithesis to the unification and spontaneity of sex.
Where there is unity of spirit, the symbol of unity expressed in
bodily congress assumes a totally different significance. Sexuality is
the mere apposition of bodies in place of a unity of spirit. In this
apposition of the personal is the very abrogation of personality. It
is the mark of sexuality that it is autocratic and exclusive; it is
the mark of sex that it is relative and inclusive. This bidimension or
image-substitution of sexuality is the psychological mechanism of our
sexual resistances. For resistances, after all, are but the irksome
oppression of our habitually enforced adjacencies. For this reason
marriage is habituative, suggestive, inverted.

Wherever conditions require the isolation together of any two normal
individuals though of the same sex, over a protracted period, there
appear very unexpected phenomena in the mental reactions of the two
with respect to one another. These reactions may be noted not only
where their isolation is due to the accidents of circumstance, but also
where it is due to voluntary withdrawal from habitual associations
in the mutual interest of a common pursuit. The observation is
noteworthy that, in such instances, the dreams of each individual show
a persistently autosexual trend whose invariable object is the other,
while, on the other hand, the fancies of their days’ dreams disclose a
no less persistent criticism and repugnance on the part of each toward
the other. It is the more interesting that this identical ego-sexual
reaction (secret antagonism) is found also in two persons of unlike
sex under the mental conditions of isolation involved in the mutual
pursuance of self-interests represented in the bilateral attitude of
marriage.

It is not inevitable that marriage should be the expression of
inversion we make of it at present. Marriage is inverted or ego-centred
not because of an organic necessity but because, in its mistakenness of
form or its violation of the organic inherencies, marriage, like all
mere external forms, is not biological but symbolic. In the present
stage of society’s arrested growth marriage is not the outcome of a
mode of societal confluence but of a mode of personal preference.
It is the unconscious enforcement of a self-predicated want, not
the conscious acceptance of an organically determined need. When I
speak of marriage, I have not in mind the permanent union of man and
woman that is biological and true and that is the natural basis of
our human society. I refer to the _mental attitude_ toward marriage
that we have come to substitute unconsciously for marriage itself. In
place of the bipolar position of man and woman, we have substituted
the bidimensional attitude of male and female. Because of this mental
attitude of “marriage,” people whose lives might be mutually necessary
become, on the contrary, merely inevitable to one another. It is again
our paramount image of self with its resultant reflection in the
bidimensional picture. But whatever is pictorial is personal, whatever
is personal is factional, and wherever there lurks the unconscious
element of the factional or separative, union is organically
interdicted.

Glancing even superficially at the obvious aim toward the mutual
exchange of egoistic satisfactions and at the give-and-take of
superficial coquetries and accommodations generally characterizing
the marriage relationship, there is ample evidence of the completely
infantile, undeveloped, ego-sexual nature of the motives determining
such unions. If one considers the large number of women who are
supported by men in the capacity of sexual partners, and observes their
obsessive self-ornamentation, their voluptuous exaggerations of dress
and manner, their liberal use of perfume and cosmetics with which to
enhance their personal appeal, and considers correspondingly the large
sums of money contributed annually by their votaries in maintenance
of such sexual commodities, the ego-sexual character of such mutual
arrangements is not far to seek.

In contrast with this state of affairs in the sexual life of “normals,”
it has for some time interested me to observe the unconscious
autosexuality invariably presented by neurotic individuals. The
unconscious character of it, whether latent or actual, always manifests
itself in a privately repressed, unsatisfactory form or in a form
that invariably entails conflict. It has long seemed to me that this
repressed and tormenting expression of the tendency to the enfolded
satisfactions of autosexuality, or to the unconscious extension of
one’s ego-sexuality to others of one’s own sex, is but the aim of
the personality toward an organic unification deflected into the
symbolic form represented in _bodily_ identification or in objective
likeness.[46] It has further seemed to me that such a symbolically
distorted urge, if converted into its true meaning, would issue in
an organic identification representing a completer, more conscious
order of union. I am not unmindful that in the fixity of our own
symbolic substitutions our tendency is to make such organic conceptions
needlessly difficult of assimilation. In a paper read before a
psychoanalytic meeting several years ago[47] I gave expression to this
same view, and my meaning was so completely misconceived that I was
actually quoted subsequently as having said that I considered neurotic
autosexuality (I then suggested the use of the term homo-phyllism)
to embody a “higher expression of love” than that represented in
allosexuality. Such a statement could not be otherwise interpreted
than as an outspoken advocacy of homosexuality! It is, of course, not
to be denied that the union _typified_ in the allosexual relationship
is alone an adequate expression of sex-unity. But it is adequate only
as organic unity or conscious love, not as sexuality or self-love, the
basis on which at present it very generally rests.

Biologically, autosexuality cannot be other than essentially infantile
and regressive in character and as such it runs counter to the basic
aims of analysis. But emphasis should be placed upon our need of
recognizing to what a very large extent actual autosexuality exists
under the objective symbols of allosexuality. Marriage, I repeat, as
it largely obtains in the present stage of society, fairly teems with
this infantile mode of sexuality. As the dominant impulse between
“lovers” with their coy, infantile aim of secret self-satisfaction
amply attests, the relationship, under whatever guise of exterior
circumstance it may be concealed, is necessarily egoistic or autosexual.

I feel sure that sooner or later it will be recognized that
allosexuality and autosexuality are synonymous, that these seemingly
contrary adaptations are really but alternate aspects of one and
the same thing. Sooner or later it will be seen that, while the
neurosis entails in every instance an autosexual undercurrent, it
is an expression of autosexuality that is organically intolerable,
and that the social adaptation underlying normality is equally
the unconscious expression of a collectively assimilated ego- or
autosexuality. Thus our pseudo-normality is an unconsciously conceded
(socially assimilated) inversion to this infantile mode of sexuality in
substitution for the original organic instinct of sex. This is why it
has seemed to me that in the neurotic reaction, for all its distortion,
there is presented a progressive urge of evolution--that in the very
distortion of the neurotic personality there is the premonition of a
type of a clearer, more conscious social order. In his distorted effort
to assimilate to himself a vicarious, objective (bodily) likeness,
the neurotic expresses symbolically, unconsciously, an inherent urge
toward a subjective, organic identification. In this view normality
with its allosexual reaction is psychologically more autosexual than
the reaction we recognize as unconscious or neurotic autosexuality.
Although this repressed expression is symbolically the more infantile
and regressive of the two, yet, of the two, it is potentially far the
more competent to the truly complemental relationship whose fulfilment
is merely symbolized in the allosexual adaptation as it commonly exists
among us. What really underlies the conflict of the neurotic or the
unconsciously autosexual is his organic urge toward a completer oneness
of life. His autosexuality is but symbolic. It is a disposition the
essence of which is what I have elsewhere called “homophyllic”[48]
and the organic culmination of which can be realized only in the
unification of the complementary systems embodied in a corresponding
monophyllic union.

In the beginning of my analytic work I fully believed with other
psychoanalysts that there was a condition of neurotic or “unconscious
homosexuality” distinguishable from what I then believed to exist
conversely as “heterosexuality.” I was too theoretical, habituative,
academic, too limited in the freedom of unsystematized observation to
recognize that sexuality, as it now exists socially, is everywhere
of one cloth, that all sexuality being narcistic is “homosexuality,”
that it is of its nature an expression of the infantile desire of
self-supremacy, of self-seeking, of self-gratification, that, in a
word, sexuality is synonymous with autosexuality or ego-erotism. As
homosexuality is but the projection socially of what is ego-sexuality
individually, sexuality or ego-erotism is the very essence of
homosexuality or homo-erotism. But, like the rest of my confrères, it
was my habit to refer the question of health or disorder of adaptation
to the artificial distinction between heterosexuality and “unconscious
homosexuality” respectively. In other words, my criterion of health
and growth was formerly the merely unconscious conventionalization of
sex, the mere procuring for it, as it were, the external formality of
the social blessing. It is only in the last years that I have seen in
its fuller clarity that health is essentially unity and identity of
personality as contrasted with the introversions of an unconsciously
alternative adaptation. Only in the last years have I seen that as
life and sex are one, so are self-worship and sexuality one, and that
the real contrast as seen in the light of the health and growth of
the organism, whether individual or societal, is the contrast between
the organic instinct of sex on the one hand and the introversions of
sexuality on the other.[49]

It is the unerring test of unconscious autosexuality that the quest
that manifestly registers itself under this artificial form of
expression can find its answer only in a realization which, in its
true sex determination (love), is latently the precise reverse of this
expression. In the attitude of lust and autosexuality toward the male
there is presaged love or sex toward the woman; in the attitude of lust
or autosexuality toward the female is the earnest of love or sex toward
the man. On the contrary, it is the unfailing test of the delusionally
systematized autosexuality (ego-sexuality), which is social or
“normal,” that the quest thus recorded in its manifest content can
find its satisfaction only in the no less manifest “reliefs” of a
_seemingly_ opposite sexual determination (allosexuality). In the
self-lusts (autosexuality) of the male, his objective is the body of
the female with her autosexuality or self-lusts; in the self-lusts
(autosexuality) of the female, her objective is the body of the male
and his self-lusts or autosexuality. In the satisfactions of these
objective conquests lies the whole meaning of sexuality, as in the
inclusiveness of a subjective unification lies the meaning of love.

The type of union biologically natural and fitting is that between
man and woman as unified personalities. But in the present repressed,
vicarious, infantile state of the individual and society, such a union
is as yet in very large measure merely a type. To make of the union
of personalities something more than a type--to make of it an organic
reality--there is needed some such unification within each through
the personality of the other as would be realized in a relationship
representing the union of the two complementary systems, the peripheral
and central, the societal and individual. The separation of these
two systems we have seen to be the response to external repression
from without, and in the re-uniting of these artificially separated
complements there would be re-established the originally confluent
organism, individual and societal, such as alone embodies the free and
unified personality.

Union is not a thing of body in the contrasts of male and female with
their artificial dissociation from life. The female in her rôle of
costly _objet d’art_ and the male as collector of such wares do not
approach in this mere surface affinity a consummation even remotely
akin to any such organic reality. No man or woman ever understood the
other’s body who has not understood the other’s mind; no man or woman
ever understood the other’s mind, who has not understood the body of
the other. It is only in an organic identification such as is inclusive
of both that there is fulfilled the united understanding, in both,
of the mind and body of each. Union is of personality as realized in
man and woman through the fulfilment in each of their identification
with life in its totality, the one (male or female) embodying the
peripheral, societal, allocentric complement, the other (male or
female) the internal, central, autocentric complement, the two divided
personalities realizing in the welding of each with each the organic
unity of both.

In saying “male or female” I am advisedly avoiding assigning
specifically either sex element to either organic rôle. In general the
societal or peripheral rôle and the visceral or central rôle would
seem analogous to the respective rôles of male and female, in the
fact that the former is more fittingly adapted biologically to the
external demands of life as hunter and provider and the latter to the
more retired, enclosed conditions of life pertaining to the functions
of conservation and maternity. There is the further parallel that in
the female the reproductive organs are organs of receptivity, lying
deeper, more centrally within her organism, while those of the male
are more contiguous to the external skeletal tissues and are invasive
in function. Nevertheless, because of the frequent transposition
between the two sexes of the traits supposedly specific of each--a far
more frequent transposition than the conventional division between
the sexes affords opportunity to observe, the woman being often the
more aggressive, the man the more retired of the two--to assign
forehandedly one or the other complement to one or the other sex is
arbitrary and without warrant. This is true particularly in respect to
the distinction between the neurotic exaggerations of type described
as auto- and allocentric, in which the conventional psychosexual
differentiations are practically indeterminable.

These and kindred reflections lead me to feel that the term
“opposite” sex is subjectively an unfortunate misnomer. To the
neurotic especially, whose life has been crippled through repression
in response to external opposition, all “oppositeness” is felt as
a menace. Consider the inhibiting intimidations to the subjective
child, resulting from the implied oppositeness between teacher and
pupil, that characterizes the attitude of our prevailing pedagogical
systems. Consider to what extent our systems of education are really
barriers to education. In the very idea of oppositeness the child is
instinctively revolted. His organism shrinks from it as from a blow.
It is under such circumstances that, in his sense of the oppositeness
of the sexes, the individual’s unconscious recourse is to the sex that
is not opposite his own. Yet here too, as we have seen, he has only
turned to the objective symbol of unity, and the inherent opposition
remains. For the symbol of unity or that which stands instead of unity
is itself opposition. Thus in the neurotic’s unconscious recourse to
this symbolic or autosexual form of identification the opposition or
separation is only accented anew.

Organically, or from the point of view of personality, woman is not
opposite to man but each is the complement of the other. As in a
current of electricity the flow between its two termini is dependent
not upon their opposition but upon the functional confluence between
its positive and negative poles, each being incomplete in the absence
of the other, so is the relationship of sex between two organisms; it
is confluent and not opposite, it is of the nature of complement and
not of contrast. And so the need of the neurotic, as of the normal
individual, is such a completion of his personality in the organic
complement of his mate as is co-extensive with his unification with
life in its organic compass.

In the symbolic unification or unconscious autosexuality represented
in an objective likeness or bodily identification there is but
the short-circuiting of a true organic unification. Where it has
occurred in personalities of a high intellectual or social order,
the phenomenon has tended to be accounted for through recourse to
a conceptual accommodation that is more generous than scientific.
A plea has been advanced for the acceptance of the comrade-love of
such individuals on grounds of the high character of the expression
of their inverted tendency. To this end there has been invoked the
conception of an “intermediate sex.” But in this undoubtedly hospitable
envisagement there is to be seen the sentimentality that is as always
but inverted sentiment. The conception of an intermediate sex is
the creation of an intermediate imagination. An intermediate sex is
a biological solecism. It represents the attempt of a divided mind
to reconcile a divided state of feeling that is prior to it. It is
again the arbitrary assumption of opposition and the vicious circle
of separateness and unconsciousness. As for the high order of many
of its representatives, there is no high order of infantilism or
autosexuality. The existence of a high order, moral and intellectual,
of this type only imposes upon its representatives the greater societal
obligation to understand and encompass its meaning. Their need is to
relinquish the infantile distortion of life symbolized in this inverted
bias of their unconscious autosexuality, and concurrently to enter into
the organic realization of their innate consonance. It is only when
this organic inherency has become disturbed, whether neurotically or
normally, singly or societally, that there occurs the reflex effort
toward vicarious restitution, resulting either in the exaggerations
of self-assertiveness or in an over-emphasized self-derogation
representing respectively the spurious bravadoes of an alternative
maleness on the one hand and the artificial propitiations of an
alternative femaleness on the other.

As has been said, because of our objective, perceptual attitude toward
one another, our contacts, whether mediated through visual, auditory,
tactile or other stimuli, are necessarily superficial and attributive.
This superficial registry of stimuli includes also the sphere of our
sexological responses. Thus in civilized man the sexual reaction, in
both male and female, is restricted to the superficial sexual zones.
Because of man’s repression of this essential sphere of his feeling,
the natural flow of the sexual impulse is artificially intercepted.
Hence the genital stimulus in man is limited to the superficial
tactile organs. It does not radiate to the deeper visceral structures
constituting its nuclear terminus--in the male the rectal, prostatic
and crural zones, in the female the rectal, the deeper vaginal zones
and the cervix uteri (the homologue in the female of the prostate in
the male). It is because of this intercepted radiation of the natural
sexual response that there has arisen the necessity for the formulation
of an “anal complex”--a complex that is regarded by psychoanalysts as
existing quite sporadically in certain neurotic individuals and that is
by no means recognized as a condition common to the race of civilized
man! For naturally with the interception of the sexual impulse at its
nuclear pole, or with repression of the visceral sex zone, there can
only result in its stead a “complex” and along with it such artificial
sexual adaptations as have been described as intermediate. In addition
to this repression of our organic sex feeling there has occurred a
corresponding compensation in the sphere of the mental and social
life, which in the woman has led to the social adoption of the rôle
corresponding to the _mental image_ female and in the man to the
_mental image_ male.

Among the lower orders of animals the distinction between male and
female entails no organic opposition. In one and the same organism this
bipolar condition is undifferentiated and self-contained. On the other
hand, with the mental sophistication connoted under the distinction
man and woman we have come to assume the presence of an artificial
opposition between the male and female organism. With the male element
or organism we demand the mental and physical attributes we arbitrarily
posit as “man,” with the female element or organism we demand the
mental and physical attributes we arbitrarily posit as “woman.” Thus
we repudiate the polarity that is confluent of the two elements male
and female and exact of the organism we discriminate as man that it
repudiate the characteristics we discriminate as woman, and of the
organism we discriminate as woman that it repudiate the characteristics
we distinguish as man.

This arbitrary, unbiological dictum necessitates that a “man” shall
repress the female component within him notwithstanding that his
organism is compounded of it along with the male element. Conversely,
it makes obligatory upon the woman that she repress the male element
within her notwithstanding that it is a no less constituent factor than
the female element in composing the bipolar quality essential to the
unity of her organism.

With this artificial condition and its edict of enforced repression
there often occurs such a one-sided development within the organism
that the result is the exaggerated reaction we see in the bilateral
extremes we have described as good and bad, as saint and sinner. It is
interesting to observe, though, that upon analysis one discovers within
the repressed sphere of the sinner’s personality all the factors that
constitute the personality of the saint, and that within the repressed
sphere of the saint’s personality, there are disclosed all the elements
that constitute the personality of the sinner.

Such findings as we owe to our deeper penetration into individual
psychology make clearer the superficiality of our normal, social
distinctions. They afford us reason to believe that when psychiatry
has loosed itself of its superficial acceptations we shall find
that wherever the bipolar life of the organism, male or female, is
permitted to fulfil its natural expression there will be no longer the
repressed or unconscious instigation to such exaggerated distortions or
over-compensations as now issue as a result of the organic repression
of these artificially dual phases. We shall then recognize that the
“intermediate sex” is a fallacy due to discriminations that arise from
a disregard of the inclusive nature of sex. What is really apprehended
by the term intermediate sex is the _composite sex_ whereof the
unification of personality within every individual, normal as well as
neurotic, is the inherent embodiment. It is in this concomitance of the
social and nuclear systems that consists the organic co-ordination
of the individual element. Without it there is lacking the organic
correlation of the societal aggregate such as is the essential biology
of man.

The organismic postulate here proposed sets out from the conception of
a _principle of primary identification_ within the original psychic
organism as the biological basis of consciousness.[50] Upon this
principle rests the biological significance of the unity of personality
that comprises the consonance of life, individual and societal. The
essence of the neurotic diathesis, socially and singly, is merely the
reflection within the individual of these surface diversifications of
external suggestion or repression, as more and more they infringe upon
this original consonance of the organism. This gradual replacement
of our original unity and inherency by the external inducements
of the extraneous and alternative is the whole significance of
unconsciousness. This, in reality, is the meaning of the manifold
dissimilitudes of men as compared with the unified personality of man.

If, in the androgynous personalities represented in such autocentric
types as Buddha, Plato or Christ, there is manifested this unifying
urge of the inherent organism of man, so the allocentric personalities
of Socrates, of Napoleon and of Nietzsche are equally expressive of
this same composite urge. If this unifying urge of man’s common sex
incited the genius of an Hypatia in centuries past, it has directed
no less in our own times the creative impulse underlying the genius
of George Eliot or of Olive Schreiner. In the contemplation of such
genius we see presented the unity and concentration of personality that
is the real meaning of the artist as contrasted with the extraneous
dissipations and diversities of the average reaction-type. It is this
unity of personality that is the source of the artist’s creativeness
as it is the inspiration of his genius. This composite quality of
the sex life explains the gentler intuitions we often find in the
personality of a man. There is undoubtedly the feminine in man though
as yet he stands in fear of it. It does not wrangle or contend. It
does not calculate success. The feminine in man is the artist in man.
It is because of this that there can be in the societal unity of the
artist’s intuitive instinct no place for the illusion that is called
“the public.” To him “the public” is but the collective repudiation
of the common soul of man--a repudiation that corresponds to this
same disavowal within the private soul of each of us. Unmoved by its
clamorous demands, the artist feels within these manifestations of the
public mind the common soul that underlies it, and senses within it
the pain of denied needs identical with his own. This is the unfailing
intuition of the artist. It is because of this sense of the unity of
life that no artist was ever yet successful, that his triumph or his
failure are above all public concern.

And so by “the artist” I mean the quality of personality that is
enticed by no external advantage, that entertains no indirection, is
unmoved by the inverse compensations of egoism and the unconscious
wish. Such a quality is organically, societally self-contained and
subsists without object. It does not sue for favour nor seek to
please. In this confluence of the personality of the artist as of the
neurotic, in this creative concentration of man’s genius, whether
articulate or denied, is embodied the societal instinct that is the
composite life of the race. This organic integrity of personality that
is the composite life of man and that is organically inseparable from
the unifying urge embodied in the impulse of mating has its clearest
intimations in the affirmations of the artist as in the frustrations of
the neurotic. In the unifying urge represented in these two opposite
extremes of reaction--an urge which shall neither impose nor accept an
adjustment extraneous to the inherent personality--is expressed the
demand for a self-realization in a unification which, being organic,
is all-inclusive.[51]

Only in such a conjunction will man realize his original mode of
societal confluence. When such a conjunction will enable him truly
to realize in the instinct of mating the deepest need of his being,
union will no longer as now be _represented_ through juxtaposition in
the mere physical symbol of bodily interpenetration, but it will _be_
through unification the societal reality of an organic intussusception.




CHAPTER IX

ULTIMATE RESOLUTION OF THE SOCIETAL NEUROSIS IN ITS SOCIAL IMPLICATION


The first demand of our organic completion through a unification with
another is a unification within oneself. From a basis of a divided self
one can look out only dividedly. From a separative mode one can judge
only separatively. If the individual embodies a symbolic replacement
within himself, others about him appear to him necessarily also as
symbolic replacements, and the degree of his resentment toward his own
separateness is the measure of his resentment toward theirs. After all,
the only implacable enemy of man is his own unconsciousness, and the
reconcilement of himself to himself the severest test of his essential
personality. Its realization is born of a patience that is not virtue
but encompassment.

Man, in his unconsciousness, stands ever by himself and for himself.
In the separateness of his personal resistances toward the societal
organism as a whole, the individual has become marooned within his
own insular habituations. But this isolated attitude of mind is a
condition which, in our interpretation, is societally anomalous. Though
originally imposed, this condition now automatically imposes itself
upon the social personality. Thus far this organic disaffection of man
has sought alleviation in the social convivialities that are but the
syndicate of men’s collective unconscious. Men have sought to appease
their personal isolation through the accommodations of mere objective
agreement. They have substituted the symbols of social fraternization
for the actuality of man’s organic consonance. Within the unconscious
of man his secret disaffection has remained unaltered still.

So often this statement that every man is for himself alone has
brought the rejoinder: “But why may he not be? Surely such selfishness
is natural to man.” But is it? I do not think so. Of course I
have not in mind the individual’s effort of preservation in the
interests of his natural life and growth. I have in mind the private
differentiations due to man’s _mental attitude of self-distinction_.
In the conservation of interests incident to the individual’s instinct
of physical preservation, man’s native experience entails no secret
_self-conscious_ design. But it is the tell-tale of man’s mental
attitude of personal separatism that he is constantly under the
necessity to _pretend_ that he is not separative or for himself. This
universal pretence reveals a biologically specious condition of life
for which we feel a universal need of concealment. For whatsoever
attitude of mind is not openly compatible with the personality imposes
a division of the personality. A socially divided personality is a
socially insecure personality. Back of the social mind that pretends
it is not concerned exclusively for self lies a basis of social fear
and distrust. Pretence is division of personality, and division of
personality is fear. If the pretence and the division are social, the
fear is social. The effort of numbers or of the social consensus to
combine in support of their mutual fear is unavailing, for a consensus
begotten of fear is an organically spurious consensus. At the heart of
it lies a secret division. This is the travesty of normality with its
secret soviet of fear.

The analyst or the psychiatrist whose outlook is objective fails
to regard this consensual fallacy in its social as in its personal
implication. Being of the social unconscious he cannot contemplate
the social unconscious. Being himself divided he cannot realize his
own division. We all prefer the satisfaction of seeming together
socially to the reality of being together organically. We like the
seeming integrity of the social unconscious because it conceals
our own disaffection. It is only this seeming security of numerical
preponderance, however, that affords us comfortable protection
against the aberrations of the isolated, non-conformable or neurotic
personality. Nowhere is the autocracy of unconsciousness more blindly
cruel than in the mass impetus of our social consolidation. We are not
unaware of the resistance of the individual to the social consensus,
but we have yet to discover the resistance of the social consensus
to the individual. The psychopathologist has offered interesting
formulations regarding delusions of persecution, but none whatever
regarding delusions that persecute.

The group work that has been gradually developing among my students
and myself has consisted essentially in a reversal of this habitually
objective course of the psychiatrist. Instead of studying ideas of
reference objectively as expressed in the individual, we have studied
ideas of reference subjectively as they occur socially among ourselves.
Our experience as a group has led us inevitably to the conclusion that
the personal analysis is a self-contradictory process, that only as
the individual realizes through his societal experience the futility
of the personal or private basis is it biologically possible to be
truly in harmony with a healthy and constructive environment. If our
position has any value and significance it is because it has come to
us through the daily test of an actual living experience, and because
as a societal experience it cannot fail to extend itself societally to
others also.

Let it not be thought, however, that our efforts toward a social
analysis have proceeded upon a smooth and untroubled course. If
the individual has his “ups and downs” in the effort to unify his
consciousness on the basis of a personal analysis, he meets no less
with alternations of satisfaction and depression according as his
resistances surge or ebb in his efforts toward a social unification of
consciousness. If the individual analysis presents a situation that is
unconscious and bidimensional, a group analysis presents a condition
that is equally unconscious and bidimensional. In the bidimensional
reaction of the individual toward the personal analysis, he tends, as
we have seen, toward a permanent fixation upon the analyst which shows
itself alternately in the mental reaction of “love” or of “hate.” But
in either the personal or social situation he tends to hold tenaciously
to this new object of his infantile affect in the secret hope of
ultimately reconciling and amalgamating it with the love that underlies
still the original mother-image. Unhappily, it is the invariable
failure of the personal analysis that the patient carries his secret
purpose to a successful issue. For either he remains fastened between
the old and the new love-objects in a consolidated image-fixation upon
the analyst, or else he returns to the original love-image afforded by
the parent or to its surrogates, with or without the collateral aids of
sublimation.

In the actual experience of our group analysis the tendency was
essentially no different. But there was an additional recourse in the
group analysis that is precluded in the personal analysis. In the
personal analysis there is a bidimensional attitude toward the analyst
that alternates constantly between infantile docility and infantile
resentment, between sentimental approbation at one time and outraged
disillusionment at another. But this alternation always occurs, of
course, within one and the same individual. In the social analysis
the situation is expressed quite differently. It was my experience
that this diversity of reaction within the group led at first to the
formation of reaction-clusters within the group, so that one unit
became consistently docile toward the analyst and resentful among
themselves, while the other unit became hostile toward the analyst and
docile toward one another. Both alternations (resentment or docility)
were, of course, equally spurious within each group of reactions.

The practical outcome in each sub-group was very different however. In
the cluster that united against the analyst, a confederacy was formed
that presented all the features of unconsciousness we have seen to
characterize the collective reactions occurring everywhere throughout
the domain of our normal adaptation. The psychology of this reaction,
as we know, is the collective pooling of the unconscious of its members
severally, with a view to the mass support afforded each individual
within the unit separately. The result as it occurred in this cluster
was a temporary deadlock and a corresponding re-adoption of the normal
level of bidimensional standards, personal and social.

In the cluster in which the sense of resentment was limited to
inter-reactions among its own members, while as a unit all held an
attitude of friendliness toward the analyst, there was offered a form
of group-unconsciousness that at least lent itself to progressive
analysis and resolution. But here again there was discoverable the
secret pooling of unconscious motives of personal interest and
self-protection that in no way differentiated this group division from
the former, that did not separate the “faithful” from the “unfaithful,”
nor absolve the “docile” any more than the “resentful” from a secret
complicity in the collective reaction that is the mass neurosis of
normality.

It should be remembered that the plan of group analysis was adopted
not because I had _a priori_ found in it the logical solution of
the neurosis. Not by any means. Neither had I inductively reached
conclusions that led to any such logical determination. Not even
theoretically was there at hand anything of the nature of a _logical_
solution. A dissociation is not logical and its solution could
not be logical. The neurosis is not a matter of the intellect and
the process of its unravelling could not have been intellectually
predetermined. As thought and affect are processes that occupy
essentially different spheres, to _think out_ a solution for a disorder
of affect is self-contradictory. To attempt to do so is beyond the
range of organic possibility. All that I had in mind in our group
undertaking was _to obtain affective conditions shared in common that
might afford a basis for the observation of affective conditions
withheld separately_. It seemed to offer the opportunity to secure a
relative and societal background against which the individual would be
enabled to view in impersonal perspective his own hitherto absolute
and personal evaluations. Up to this time I had for years worked on
the group conception in the absence of any tangible background of
experimentation. There was now needed the practical substantiation
of this group conception in the actual assembling of “analyzed”
individuals into an organized social aggregate. While the programme
of group analysis entered upon by my students and myself came into an
intensive application with the beginning of the year 1923,[52] it was
actually the summer of that year that marked the active inception of
our experiment as an organized unit, our group having then its first
opportunity of a practical test in the daily contact of its members;
so that we were still at this time only feeling our way toward the
ultimate outcome of an analysis involving more than two or three
individuals.

In my view the really significant finding that has resulted from
our close mental association as a group has been the opportunity of
demonstrating through group experience the practical significance of
the very unexpected disclosure upon which I chanced some years ago in
my conception of the bidimensional image and its influence upon the
reactions of consciousness at large. It is this conception which has
proved to be the real foundation of our work. I am convinced that an
adjustment of consciousness, whether analytic or conventional, whether
of the laboratory or of the street, will ultimately demand that we
bring to book the very origins of our mental and social systems of
“thinking,” that we challenge our customary values of mental adaptation
at their very foundation. Our problem resolves itself into one that
shall challenge in every detail the fixed basis of an arbitrary and
unconscious position of absolutism as contrasted with the fluent
evaluations that alone pertain to a basis of conscious relativity.

Upon the basis of our prevailing personal criterion first inculcated
through the alternative precept of good and bad, the mind of every
individual existing under our present social system is disposed
toward a dualism of outlook that renders every affective judgment of
the individual irreconcilable and self-contradictory. For a basis
that rests upon a mental _standard_ or criterion of evaluations is
necessarily moralistic and divided. A moralistic command entails a
moralistic interdiction. Every affirmation contains _in itself_ a
negation that is equal and contrary. That is, every criterion _of its
nature_ entertains its opposite. Whatsoever I must be or think or feel,
I must at the same time also not be or think or feel. Whatsoever I
believe, to that precise degree I likewise disbelieve.[53]

This is not so simple. It is not by any means so simple as we tend to
make it. It does not merely mean, as we would like to think, that if
I love good people I do not love bad people. Not at all. That would
be obvious and a matter of fact. It would leave our absolutism quite
intact and our criteria quite unchallenged in their fallacy. It means
something far subtler than this. It means that if I love good people I
_do not_ love good people. It means that in the measure in which I love
an object, in that measure I hate that object. It means, in sum, that,
within a system of absolute measures, my concept “love” as my concept
“good” is throughout fanciful and artificial, that, in disturbing the
natural equilibrium of the organism, my mental criterion is resisted
by a counter-judgment, which, being fanciful and artificial, tends
in a precisely reverse direction at one and the same time. It means
that every mental image, arising on the basis of our present absolute
criterion, possesses unconsciously an ambivalent value. _Stating the
proposition in psycho-dynamic terms, every affective mental image is
counterbalanced by an opposite image having an attractive force that
possesses the quality of all bidimensional (or pendular) motion and
accordingly it acts with a momentum the direction of which is at every
moment precisely equal and reverse to its own impulse._

After many years in which I have been delving into the processes of
the unconscious and striving to unearth its intricate mechanisms,
I have come upon no phenomenon that has seemed to me of such basic
significance as this illusory mechanism of unconscious dualism and
conflict that underlies our absolute criteria of values, individual
and social. Through Freud we have learned that a psychic ambivalence
underlies the neurotic processes of the individual, but we have not yet
learned that an equal ambivalence underlies the processes of the social
unconscious. Furthermore, while Freud has shown that there is this
ambivalence of motive underlying the individual process represented
by the neurotic conflict, it remains to be seen that each term within
this ambivalent outlook is itself likewise ambivalent--that psychic
ambivalence necessarily presupposes at all times an essential condition
of ambivalence that repeatedly doubles upon itself. For, if we will
examine either term of our ambivalent proposition, we shall find that
it too is based on opposed valences. That is, on our present absolute
basis of evaluation, every term of our subjective judgment necessarily
divides and re-divides with its very inception. Not only does the
contrast between love and hate represent ambivalence, but love contains
in itself an ambivalent motive, and hate contains in itself a motive
that is equally ambivalent. And so, to whatever subjective determinant
we may turn, there is inevitably this inseparable element of contrast
due to our own subjectively bidimensional basis.

As regards the neurosis of the individual, we have learned through
Freud that an unconscious system of images, operating to inhibit
spontaneous thought and action, is the essential meaning of this
disorder. Of course, Freud attributes such disorders of development
to an associative inadequacy resident in the individual organism. But
in the study of the social unconscious upon the inclusive basis of
a relative method of approach, we shall recognize that an identical
system of images operates to hinder the spontaneous expression of the
social organism; that as there exists a neurosis of the individual that
is due to an unconscious system of personal images, so there exists a
neurosis of the social mind due to an equally unconscious system of
social images; and finally that the latter condition within the social
consciousness as a whole is the primary and essential disorder of
which the individual manifestation is but a subsequent and secondary
symptom.[54]

It is not possible to speak of the group basis of analysis that has
become the central feature of my own work without calling attention to
a bidimensional situation that has made itself felt within the ranks
of psychoanalysts themselves. Moreover, this situation has forced into
prominence a hitherto unrecognized impasse within our psychoanalytic
interpretations, precisely because of the inevitable conditions of an
individualistic basis of analysis. The outstanding theoretical feature
of Freud’s position toward his patients has always been a policy of
“hands off.” With the inception of psychoanalysis it has been the
signal position of Freud, and subsequently of us all, that the patient
shall be left free of all domination or direction or suggestion, that
in order that he come into a sense of adult responsibility toward his
social environment generally he must come into a responsibility toward
his own mental processes as they relate directly to the analyst. This
policy of non-interference is one which those of us who have attempted
to follow the psychoanalytic programme have adhered to with strict
conformity. But it is clear that the analyst becomes automatically the
all-engrossing criterion (transference) of the patient’s unconscious
and that unconsciously the analyst assumes toward his patient a
corresponding position of personal criterion. So that, however sincere
our intention, there has resulted what is perhaps the weakest point
in our psychoanalytic technique, a point that has warranted the most
severe criticism of our work, namely, that treatment by psychoanalysis
continues for a far too long and indefinite term.

To offset this embarrassment recourse is now had to a procedure whereby
the analysis is brought to a conclusion at a certain definitely
assigned period--a period to be determined by the analyst according
to the circumstances in each case. The change proposed, then, is
from a course of indefinite to a course of definite duration; from
a procedure that, at least theoretically, places upon the patient
the responsibility of terminating the analysis to a procedure that
definitely takes this responsibility from him and places it in the
hands of the analyst. But, in proposing that the analyst shall at
an assignable moment in the analysis peremptorily determine upon a
definite period at which the analysis shall cease, and in formally
pronouncing that from this moment on the patient shall be cured,
we are confronted again with the deadlock of the bidimensional and
alternative. In this recourse we are merely resorting again to the
legislation of suggestion and, unconsciously falling a victim to the
pictorial concept “cure,” we are in no sense meeting the issue. For
in the criterion of the suddenly achieved “cure” we are not less the
unconscious victims of an illusory and absolute criterion than we
were victims of a criterion that is illusory and absolute when we
presumed the position that the patient must at all hazards be left in a
position of freedom toward the analysis.[55] In my view, this proposal
of psychoanalysts themselves that we no longer assume a policy of
non-interference but that we offer instead the arbitrary suggestion of
spontaneous “cure,” there is sounded the death-knell of psychoanalysis
as administered on the basis of the personal analysis. This does not
mean, however, the death-knell of the basic position of psychoanalysis
as deducible from the principle first enunciated by Freud. On the
contrary, if we would enlarge the application of psychoanalysis to
include the wider scope of our societal personality, there would be
realized the necessary advance toward the full significance of Freud’s
essential principle.

It is admittedly a part of the purpose of the present thesis to show
that there do exist conditions which make treatment through the method
of psychoanalysis, as it is at present, needlessly long. But to reduce
the length of treatment calculated to adjust the distorted mind would
seem as unreasonable as to curtail the length of treatment intended to
adjust the distorted limb. As Freud remarked long ago, no one would
question the validity of the orthopaedist’s method because of the
length of time it requires. Why then all the outcry because of the
length of time often required by the psychoanalyst’s method? It is
my own feeling that if there are conditions which make the method of
psychoanalysis needlessly long, what is required is the analysis of
these conditions. I believe that under these circumstances the method
will automatically adjust itself. But to shorten a course of treatment
because it is long seems unintelligent to me. It seems merely shifting
from one unconscious condition to its equally unconscious alternative.

Let us examine more closely the real alternative here. The fact
is that by reason of the dualistic basis existing in the personal
analysis, the analyst necessarily invites the indefinite continuation
of the analysis on the part of the patient, no matter what he may
theoretically say or do to the contrary. For the analyst is himself
the victim of an unconscious criterion represented in his personal
standard of “cure.” That is, he entertains for the patient an image
of self-dependence obtainable alone through psychoanalysis. But
in this standard of “cure” he entertains a wish-motive that is
self-contradictory. For, in wishing to cure a patient through a
process of self-dependence, the analyst, because of the involvement of
his personal wish toward the patient, necessarily presents his cure
through processes that interfere with self-dependence. It is again
the bidimensional dilemma of the absolute or personal criterion, and
an absolute criterion necessarily involves a wish-motive of two terms
either of which unconsciously invites its opposite. In his personal
criterion the analyst would both release a patient with a view to
the patient’s self-dependence and at the same time retain a patient
in order to make sure that his self-dependence is complete. With one
gesture he would detain him while with the other he would set him free.
This is undoubtedly an awkward deadlock. This is the very contrary
of a cure that aims at self-dependence. For the analyst, whether in
detaining or dismissing a patient, is acting for him. But, on the
basis of the criterion of the personal image, there is inevitably this
alternative. It is unescapable.

This solicitous attitude of mind, I concede, has undoubtedly tended to
extend the course of the analysis to an indefinite duration. But does
the alternative--the arbitrary manifesto that a certain time limit
shall peremptorily conclude the analysis--really settle the issue? Does
it not rather sustain than remove the dilemma? Of course, a theoretical
assumption has been invoked that is calculated to warrant this
procedure upon psychological premises--the premises, namely, that the
analysis consists in the fanciful reproduction of the birth experience,
that the trauma in which the birth culminates physiologically must
be psychically reproduced through the trauma of sudden separation of
the personality of the patient from that of the analyst. But does
corroborating the illusory and symbolic dramatization occurring within
the neurotic mind assist such a patient in disabusing his mind of
the fallacy of the illusory and symbolic? In this alternative of a
predetermined period for a patient’s withdrawal from analysis are we
not merely having recourse to the more decisive position of the father
as contrasted with the more lenient and compromising attitude of the
mother-image? Further, in what we call the mother-father alternation
are we not again merely projecting the dualistic criterion that is our
own personal and contrasting basis of evaluation?

In my own work I have had an opportunity to realize convincingly the
completely illusory and arbitrary character of this mother-father
alternation. This has been shown in the fact that patients undergoing
analysis with me have turned to my assistant, Mr. Shields, in the
thought that they would find in him a less severe analyst than in
myself, while patients who were being analyzed by Mr. Shields have
turned to me in a similar hope. Needless to say, in either case, the
patients were equally disappointed in their quest. Yet this alternation
would have continued indefinitely had not a solution been found
elsewhere, namely, under conditions of a social analysis in which
a personal attachment is not permitted the conditions of lodgment
necessary for completing the personal illusion of permanence and
fixation.

I have come to the definite conclusion that in the individual analysis
the neurotic patient pulls the wool over the eyes of the analyst and
inevitably comes out the victor, because unconsciously the analyst is
inevitably on the patient’s side. Besides, to show sufficient interest
in an individual to sit with him in personal conference daily or three
times weekly (whatever the routine may be) is to indicate to the very
susceptible emotions of the neurotic patient that his presence is
personally desirable. The situation is only interpretable on the part
of the neurotic patient, with his unfulfilled personal emotions, as
the implication that those emotions are fully reciprocated personally
on the part of the analyst. For with whomsoever we enter into a
personal situation of mutual secrecy we are in a situation of mutual
complicity. In the secrecy and confidence of the individual analysis,
in which there is the close, private, specialized relationship of one
individual to another, there is the tacit disavowal in each of the
commonness of the socially prevalent quality of all unconsciousness.
As long as there is a private and personal system resident within the
analyst, he necessarily corroborates the private and personal system
resident within the patient in front of him. The fallacy of the private
system is the illusion of personal secrecy. Clinically, it is the
secrecy of unconsciousness that is the backbone of unconsciousness.
Though a patient divulge in minutest detail all the data entering into
his unconscious experience, he yet retains his unconsciousness if he
retains a sense of secrecy toward it.

In our group activity, as we have seen, there were several, who in
refusing to meet the organic demand for a social amalgamation of
their personality, were forced unconsciously to seek the protective
regression afforded either in family, in friends, or in some form of
defence-reaction that led to the isolated activities of mere social
or normal connivance. On the other hand, others, with no less motive
of personal defence-reaction, sought protection in the alternative
of family union which they contrived to secure among themselves, and
unconsciously assumed collectively that I, as the analyst, could be
arbitrarily delegated by them to the rôle of _pater-mater noster!_ As
I have said, there was thus formed once more an unconscious cluster,
a cluster, however, that was no less an unconscious form of social
encapsulation than the first.

Biologically it is the natural process that with the growth of their
strength offspring become less and less attached or dependent upon
the parent and that concomitantly there is more and more aptitude for
equal give-and-take activities or play with their fellows, at first
with brothers and sisters and later with those of their congeners with
whom chance affords association. Of course, though, if the parent has a
mental background that attaches the child artificially to him through
the image-suggestion of omnipotence, then, on the basis of our present
individual and social adaptation, the child cannot find in any of his
contacts a natural medium of association. Although the child may leave
his natural parent and associate objectively with his congeners, he
carries with him the image of the parent, and naturally he foists this
image upon all with whom he comes in contact. At the same time all who
come in contact with him equally foist upon him the image of _their_
omnipotent parent. Our position is that _as this image is not personal
but social it cannot be personally but only socially resolved_.

The point would seem to be that the child cannot look for companionship
in the mother or father as long as he holds the mother or father in
the light of an image or criterion. Neither can he come into simpler
relationships with his fellows on the basis of this criterion of the
mother-image without investing the personalities of his associates with
an equal image or criterion. The difficulty of the personal analysis
is the preservation of an image-situation the while one endeavours
theoretically to dispel the image. But in the natural give-and-take
of human beings in their work and play activities under conditions of
social analysis, there is afforded the reality of a social equalization
that renders untenable the secret and obsessive fixation with which we
merely _look on_ one another from the background of the bidimensional
picture.

The result of our group affiliation, to express it symbolically, has
been a family of “good” and “bad” children, of whom some desired to
run away from home while others were content to remain beside the
family hearth. Socially, the result was a bidimensional division or
alternative that exactly parallels the division or alternative within
the individual. But there is this significant difference between the
personal and the social analysis. In the individual the component that
is unwelcome may be permanently repressed, while in the alternatives
represented socially it is possible to stimulate these components into
repeated recognition through the constant clashing resultant upon
placing the opposed elements, represented by the alternate issues,
under conditions of socially irritating contrast or competition.
In the social analysis there is no letting sleeping dogs lie. Once
the unconscious of one alternative reaction has been set upon the
other, the fight is to the finish. There is not the private recess
of personal secrecy into which one may retreat. There is not the
recourse to self-partiality that allows a smoothing over of unpleasant
reminiscences and a successful substituting of more flattering
condolences.

According to our group or social conception of the neurosis it is
assumed that the causative element in the production of these disorders
is social or phyletic and that the correction of these disorders must
proceed upon a social or phyletic basis. Our position is that the
individual cannot be healthy whose consciousness is the outgrowth of
an unhealthy social mind about him. It, therefore, becomes the essence
of our group conception that the disorder of the individual presented
_manifestly_ in the individual’s “symptoms” may only be corrected
through the analysis of the social processes constituting _latently_
the individual’s collective medium.[56]

As we first learned from Freud and as has been corroborated through
researches in psychoanalysis made independently of Freud, the neurosis
is synonymous with the repression of the instinctive life of man, and
in the prevailing interpretation of psychoanalysis the remedy lies in
the successful adaptation of the personal satisfaction of sexuality
expressed both in direct physiological release and in the equivalents
of sublimation. It is our position that this interpretation is far
too narrow, that in interpreting the neurosis as due primarily to
disorders within the sphere of man’s reproductive instinct, there is
left out of account the disorders of instinct due to the obstruction
of man’s tribal or congeneric life and to the consequent interruption
of the creative expression of his personality as a societal unit.
Our feeling is that sexuality, as it now exists, is very generally
of an over-stimulated or obsessive character, owing to the undue
and greatly aggravated insistence that has been vicariously brought
to bear upon this sphere. In the absence of the natural outlets of
man’s societally instinctive expressions through the common avenues
of concerted work and play, the function natural to the physiological
process of reproduction has been overburdened and inflated out of all
proportion to its primary significance. While, as a consonant part of
the congeneric instinct of man, sex is an undoubtedly powerful urge, in
the self-interested and bidimensional bias of its autosexual, personal
quest, this manifestation has become but a symbolic exaggeration of the
natural instinct of sex. This exaggerated condition is due secondarily,
however, to a repression of the reproductive faculty of man as
naturally expressed in the creative interests of his common societal
activities. As our give-and-take expressions among our fellows develop
into activities that are reciprocally creative, in the same measure
our obsessive drive toward the satisfactions of sexuality, whether
repressed or indulged, will cease to dominate human personality in its
present completely unconscious and bidimensional image insistence.[57]




CHAPTER X

ULTIMATE RESOLUTION OF THE SOCIETAL NEUROSIS IN ITS PERSONAL IMPLICATION


I well recognize that in its matter this essay offers little that is
new. What I have sought to do is rather to speak of our human reactions
in the large from the basis of the altered consciousness of the handful
of men and women whose group experience, as gradually it has grown
and gathered strength and cohesion among us, has permitted the more
subjective or societal realization of these reactions. But though it
is true that there is little that is new in the matter of this essay,
yet, in so far as the collective differences existing among us as a
group have been allowed slowly to diffuse themselves gradually into the
solution of our common acceptance of one another, it seems to me that
in its mode at least our position offers an approach that brings us a
step closer to the increasingly urgent problem of our human adjustment.

After all, the intrinsic mode underlying our conception is the real
significance of our conception. To understand our position the
reader’s only recourse is to repudiate the bidimensional alternatives
of extrinsic moralities based upon precepts of a personalistic or
self-restricted behaviourism. For the position of this thesis will be
little understood in the light of the accustomed interpretations of
the conventional social mind. Because of the unconscious bias of its
own mental absolute it will appear to the social polity that, in the
altered attitude here outlined, the social polity is threatened at its
very foundations. In its tenacious hold upon habitual prepossessions
the organized consensus does not realize that these foundations are
already tottering. It will not see that in order to further the
replacement of the already disintegrating structures of our present
social system, a more widely envisioning concept of the organized
consciousness of man must needs be invoked. In some way, though, there
must first be brought home to each of us the realization that there
can be no true unity within the societal organism as long as we are a
prey to impressions that are but the give-and-take reflection of mental
attitudes existing mutually in one another. As long as we fail to
identify the tyranny of mental attitudes within the social unconscious
with the reflection of similar tyrannical mental attitudes within the
personalism and defection of each of us, man cannot rise to the reality
of an organized social consciousness. As long, for example, as we fail
to understand that when a mental attitude in others pleases or incenses
us, it is necessarily but the reflection of a corresponding mental
attitude in ourselves, we shall continue to praise or punish such
mental attitudes, together with the acts resulting from them, with the
mere retaliative measures of personal reward or redress. So that our
attitude will continue to be, as now, the mere pro-and-con reaction to
impressions determined by the unconscious self-reflection of our own
“good and bad.”

It is precisely this illusion of mental oppositeness that we need
to dispel. Harmony will follow automatically once we have accepted
in its societal significance the affective unity of life. With this
realization there will be no further need of the restraints of
an alternative principle of morality which, in its bidimensional
legislation, aims to establish merely a temporary balance between
essential opposites. With the elimination of the individual hope-fear
alternation the whole incitement to personal infringement will have
been removed. What inducement will I have to cheat a man if he is
myself? Or betray a woman if she is I? To what purpose will I seek
to enslave another to my whim (call it love, marriage or what you
will) if between us there is the acceptance of an organic compliance
that allows the realization in each of the common unity of both? Why
would I seek to outdo anyone in the invidious competitions of what is
called “success,” if I know clearly that success comprises only the
self-reflective distinctions existing within the unconscious of the
social mind in response to the spurious incentives of the personal
alternative as it exists within the unconscious of the individual mind?

Our prevailing personalistic basis is not applicable to an organismic
viewpoint, because a policy that is self-reflective in the unconscious
is self-contradictory in consciousness. Unity or consciousness of
personality is organically preclusive of whatever is personal or
unconscious in the personality. For every wish that is attained an
equal disappointment is incurred. For every satisfaction that is
secured a corresponding denial is imposed. To fulfil one’s wish
is to abjure one’s reality. Asking is its own postponement, as
striving is its own defeat. This inner homology between desire and
its non-attainment is alike the hope and the despair of atoning to
oneself unconsciously or personally for what is one’s need consciously
or societally. As with compulsion-replacements elsewhere, the real
occasion of prayer is one’s unanswerable attitude of mind in prayer.
In the self-compensation of man’s want as an individual organism, he
necessarily repudiates his inherent consonance as a societal organism.
Thus our personal dearth and our personal plenty are organically the
same. As the part embodied in one’s personal wish (unconsciousness)
is intrinsically opposed to the whole embodied in one’s societal
unity (consciousness), to desire is at the same time to fail of
attainment as well as to covet. This is the paradox of our personalism
and unconsciousness, as it is the impasse of the personal absolute
underlying it. In the personal opportunism of the unconscious wish we
would fancifully summon the processes of life to ourselves in place
of contributing our individual function as common participants in
the reality of these processes. Our contradiction, after all, is the
division within ourselves, and the real impasse as always is the
self-image embodied in the delusive alternative of good and bad.

I know, of course, that much that I have tried to set down in these
pages has been said many times before and by those more competent
of expression than I. Indeed, in its objective envisagement,
the recognition among us of differences, personal, national and
international, has become a commonplace. Even in the columns of our
daily news items, these conditions of societal defection are mentioned
time and again in the casual tone of the matter of course. Among
the current comments one reads, for example: “The task of saving
civilization seems rather hopeless when it doesn’t promise an immediate
and private profit”; “When a statesman says he despairs of the world
he means that he despairs of getting what he wants”; “All nations seem
agreed that chaos may result unless other nations forsake their evil
ways”; “Civilization is just a slow process of envisioning more rights
to fight for”; and so on without end.

But no amount of objective observation, however astute, will
avail in clearing personal outlooks. Too easily is one’s mere
observation, however right and seemingly true, the embodiment of
secret self-satisfaction and detachment. Personalistic observation,
far from resolving the affective illusion of the onlooker, serves
only to accentuate it. Dissociation within another individual that
is observed by us but that does not quicken us to a realization of
our own implication, automatically embeds us still deeper in the
fixity of our own unconscious personalism. There is need to withdraw
from our accustomed observations and to include within ourselves the
dissociation that seems to lie outside of us but that is, in fact,
the unconscious projection of our own dissociation. In this affective
illusion of the onlooker, we are ever hoping merely to convince others
of the disinterestedness of our interference with them. A disinterested
interference is biologically impossible. To wish to convince others is
to be unconvinced ourselves. True disinterestedness consists alone in
our own self-realization.

The familiar French saying, “Tout comprendre est tout pardonner” is,
like so much that is proverbial, _almost_ true. It has assembled the
right elements but in the wrong order. It gives to the letter dynamic
priority over the spirit.[58] It is hysterical replacement refurbished
in the condensation of the epigram. It is but the literature of the
neurosis. If we transpose the equation in such manner as to convert
intellectual values into their organic terms, the proposition
resolves itself into a form that is, I believe, much nearer the
answer to the problem of our human pathology: To forgive all is to
understand all. I have only this in mind in saying that the neurosis
is societal, that it is common. This is what I mean in saying that
differentiation is unconsciousness and that the factor of societal
repression or the societal factor of separatism is anterior to the
separatism of sexuality or to the factor of our individual repression.
As the societal and the individual are organically one in mode, the
unification of the individual is at least a step toward the unification
of our societal consciousness. This is all I have in mind in speaking
of consciousness as the encompassment of life. It is a mode of
consciousness that is inclusive and that reconciles within itself the
disparity that is social.

All this I had at first “in mind” only. It was, I confess, a theory
with me and, like all such substitutive replacements, the theory
held for me only an unconscious or symbolic significance. There was
lacking in myself the recognition that the theoretical is identical
with the symbolic. And so my position in stating that the theory
of analysis is the neurosis of the analyst has lacked its personal
acknowledgment within my own consciousness. Truly, unconsciousness
cannot envisage unconsciousness. Secret separateness cannot encompass
secret separateness. The division of each of us is the division within
himself. The real grudge is one’s own grudge. After all, there is only
one vice and that, paradoxically, is the virtue of being better than
other people. Yet so tenacious are we of this our solitary shortcoming,
that we will acknowledge all other “faults” rather than disclaim this
one. But the task of ourselves as the task of our patients is the
recognition of our own personalism and resentment. It is to forgive all
_within ourselves_, that we may understand all within others who are
societally no less ourselves. It is to realize that the whole intricate
problem of our “understanding” is but the retributive fabrication of
our own unforgiveness.

It is just here that the repressed and isolated individual resolutely
balks. Such a solution, he declares, offers nothing for him. He does
not discover in it an advantage for himself. Quite true. In his
unconscious sense, there is nothing for him. His self-seeking is itself
the very kernel of his delusion. It is only in the disparate bias of
his arbitrary individualism (I do not say individuality) that he can
apprehend anything so dissociative as an advantage for himself as a
separate individual. It is only as the wilful, defiant, separative
child that he is, that he would seek the treasure of life for himself,
that he comes demanding a governmental form embodying a system of
monarchical autocracy whereof he is to be the supreme ruler, when,
in truth, life is of its very essence an organic democracy and the
individual an element in its societal confluence. In the quandary of
his organic involution the neurotic, if one might so crudely express
it, is literally “hell-bent” on attaining heaven. He does not see,
for he will not see, that life and self are irreconcilable. On the
contrary, with every available device, with every recourse of subtlety
and with ever more enticing symbols, he seeks to decoy the common, free
gift of life into the circumscribed and artificial confines of his own
self-bias.

In this deflection of his mental outlook he is far from the basis from
which his experience originally set out--the organic basis in which
the secret of life is its commonness and in which the commonness and
the joy of it are one. As the analysis proceeds, synchronous with the
gradual acceptance on the part of the patient of his mistakenness and
of his growing responsibility toward this mistakenness through the
widening of his societal outlook, there comes his automatic awakening
to the realization of the inherent confluence of life in its utmost
fulfilment. It is a slow process this that demands our reversal from an
habitual attitude of disparity and separation to one of participation
and confluence, from self and unconsciousness to consciousness and
life, but it is the inevitable task of an analysis that bases its
procedure upon an organismic conception of consciousness in its
relative inclusiveness.

I am under no illusion as to the futility of reckoning upon any
far-reaching assent to such a thesis as this. I know well that a
thesis which confronts the securely entrenched ranks of the social
unconscious is, in general, predetermined to defeat. In this
unpromising outlook, however, I am not dismayed. Were I guided solely
by personal inclination I would endeavour at least to narrow the scope
of a challenge such as this. I would, for instance, absolve myself from
the obligation of recording so sweeping and unwelcome an indictment as
that which lays to the door of normality in the large the imputation
of autosexuality and infantilism. To many, such a statement will seem
extravagant, bizarre, unwarranted. So that, if I would propitiate my
readers through the presentation of a more acceptable thesis, I should
naturally wish, if I may not wholly withdraw this statement, at least
to palliate its implications.

But as this statement seems to me essentially true, as it is the very
crux of this thesis that unconsciousness is social and not individual,
that the collective unconscious is the anterior factor to which the
individual factor involving the neurosis is but the reflex response;
as the central issue upon which my entire position must stand or fall
is the conviction that the _responsibility for the neurosis rests
upon the societal consciousness in its ontogenetic phase within each
of us_; and above all, since my indictment of the social unconscious
is one from which I am no more exempted than others, to withhold such
a statement would be nothing other than the hesitation to affirm my
real conviction and so retain the servility and introversion of my own
social unconsciousness. This position is precisely the expression of
what I believe to be the essential embodiment of the neurosis, and my
wish to keep silent would be nothing else than my own unconscious wish
not to relinquish the neurosis in which I share as a social element
within it. Upon closer view, my unconscious fear becomes merely my wish
to save my own individuation and unconsciousness at the expense of the
participatory, societal confluence that alone constitutes consciousness.

This, as I think of it, is interesting, for upon reflection it grows
still clearer that my reluctance would be again the neurosis within
myself or the retention of the very separateness I am presumably
undertaking to observe. After all, my irresolution would amount to
my withholding not the statement but myself. It would represent my
preference (as always it is my preference unconsciously) to withhold
myself from my organic place as a confluent part in the societal
aggregate. Instead of being one, therefore, with every other element
comprising it, it would mean that I preferred to retain the illusion
of my own disparateness, phantastically hoping in my dissociative mode
thus to comprise in my individual self the self-possession that alone
pertains to the acceptance of one’s share in our common, societal
aggregate.

And so I have come to believe that, however unwelcome the imputation,
it is only the societal indictment as it applies to oneself personally
that affords the real opportunity of release from the neurosis of
society. It is the illusion of differentiation that is the essence
of the neurosis. It is the fallacy of our personal separateness that
is the meaning of our societal discord. Through our mutual analyses
and also in the contacts of our daily living as a subjectively
organized group, we have come to realize that this subtle attitude of
disaffection is extraneous to the essential life of man. Affective
conditions recognized as results outside of us are affective conditions
unrecognized as causes within us. Subjectively, societally, they are
the same. From a relative or organismic basis there is no difference.
Just as cosmically or in the objective universe there is no absolute
time and space, so organically or in the subjective universe there
is no absolute cause and effect. As objectively time and space are
“relative to moving systems,” so subjectively cause and effect are
relative to organic sequences. Accordingly, our need is to recognize
the implication of the unconscious not as directed against others
nor against oneself, but as including oneself equally with others in
constituting together in our common life a single, societal unit.

There will, I know, be much misunderstanding in regard to what has
been set down in these pages. If, by chance, the conventional artist
should read this thesis, he will tell you that he understands and that
he accepts it fully, on the ground that he finds its full realization
within his own intuitions. But the artist will be mistaken. Should
the conventional scientist read it, he will tell you that it is not
possible to find substantiation for such a thesis within the scope of
his authenticated formulations and that therefore he cannot understand
or accept it. But the scientist will also be mistaken. Both will be
quite right objectively, but this is, in itself, to miss the meaning of
a conception that is essentially subjective.[59] This thesis has been
felt and written from an intrinsically relative mode, and it is only
from an intrinsically relative mode that it can be felt and understood.
As yet the artist knows feeling only in the absolute form of the images
that exist within himself; as yet the scientist knows feeling only in
the absolute form of the images that exist outside himself. The one
lives within the dreams (fanciful formulations) arising within the
personal system that is individual; the other lives within the concepts
(theoretical formulations) transmitted to him from the personal
system that is social. Yet I do not doubt that among both artists and
scientists, as well as among many people who are technically neither
artist nor scientist, there will be those who will partake more or
less consciously of what is here more or less consciously partaken of.
In the form of its presentation it is inevitably restricted to the
objective symbol of the written word; nevertheless, in the subjective
encompassment of each that is its common inclusion of both, it may
equally reach and unite the basic personalities of poet and craftsman,
of male and female, of artist and scientist.

In this sense and in this spirit of a common involvement in the
unconscious of my fellows, I feel that to some, at least, my meaning
will seem clear and my motive not untoward. For there are those
who, like myself, are only “normal” under duress and who secretly
revolt against the compromising yoke of the social as well as of the
individual unconscious. It is for these that I have written. To speak
fearlessly and with freedom to the few, who are fearless and free
enough to understand, means far more to me and will, I believe, prove
ultimately far more fruitful in making clear the real meaning of our
human need than half-hearted statements muttered with bated breath and
trimmed to suit the fear-ridden prepossessions of the collective mind
as it tends in its blind autocracy to dominate the clearer vision of us
all.

The more I consider the factor of one’s personal hesitancy to entrust
himself unreservedly to the societal aggregate through unbosoming
his own unconscious wish to repress his share in its collective
dissociation, the more it is clear to me that in this very symptom of
one’s own--for such it is--lies the strongest corroboration of the
impersonal or societal interpretation of the neurosis. For, as I have
said, it is the acceptance of the oneness of each of us individually
within the encompassing societal organism as an aggregate that alone
points the way to our release from the fear or separateness that is the
neurosis of the societal organism.

To consider the instinct of the societal bond without mentioning its
influence in the development of the formulations that have resulted
from the conceptions of Freud, would be to waive acknowledgment of
the very determinants which have made possible the present societal
interpretation. Abstract truths are the personal relics of genius;
their vindication in the concrete text of experience is the heritage of
our common consciousness. If the significance of personality lies in
the organismic consciousness of man, the springs of all creative genius
are to be traced to this common source. This organic consanguinity is
the very essence of genius. Holding its incisive course against all
obstacle, this societal urge makes of genius the socially solitary
expression that it is. The source of genius is nuclear, original,
essential. Moving amid the surface crusts of “types” which in their
restriction of outer contact may only absorb or reflect the impressions
about them, genius eradiates from the common centre of our societal
organism sustained by an impulse that is cosmic. For this reason, it is
the unalterable sentence of genius that it break with every accustomed
adherence. It is its law that it raise itself out of habitual inertias
and see straight and clear, beyond all temporary immediacies, into the
unfurbished truth of things. In this wise, in face of the personal
criticism and resentment of the very world whose progress it was the
all-engrossing effort of his genius to further, Sigmund Freud saw and
reported what he saw, fearless, determined and alone. There is no more
isolated appointment than this to which genius is summoned. It is in
this appointment and in the societal implication of it, that lies
the real significance of Freud. Should we fail to realize this, we
would ourselves be overlooking the societal urge that is phyletically
inherent in Freud’s psychology.

In the course of our development the period of men’s substitutive
image-production was first interrupted through the return to reality
inaugurated by Darwin’s theory of evolution. What still remained over
in man’s mental life has been further threatened by Freud’s theory of
the evolutionary processes of the unconscious. When the evolutionary
theories of Darwin and Freud are carried to their ultimate social
conclusion, the result will be the entire repudiation of man’s
image-production and a re-uniting of his organic and conscious life
into a single constructive whole.

In an essentially psychological study of this kind in which the effort
has been made to trace the mechanisms of unconscious processes in their
social application, there is not place for discussing the practical
outcome, political, economic and industrial, that must follow through
the very altered position of man’s conscious outlook as a result of
a more inclusive interpretation of our societal background. It is
impossible to conjecture the influence upon man’s behaviour socially
and nationally that would result from a complete dispelling from his
mind of the images that now occupy the place of his organic reality.
How much the reaction that is ostensibly the most disastrous in our
social life--the reaction of war--is due to the obsession of the social
mind with mere images having no reality, it would only be extravagant
to attempt to surmise. But these are practical considerations that must
occupy us in subsequent discussions if the basis here outlined in its
fundamental biology shall be found of value amid the growing processes
of man’s thought.

There is a further statement I wish to make. In this statement I should
like to be understood as speaking in the fullest sincerity of which
I am capable, my feeling being uninfluenced either by sentimental
modesty or by any deprecatory wish to refer to extraneous agencies
the sponsorship for this record. This thesis in a very true sense is
not my thesis--it represents no intellectual achievement of mine.
On consideration it will readily be seen that of its very nature it
could not be my thesis. The outgrowth of automatic conditions stoutly
resisted by me, it is the product of environmental circumstances over
which I had no control. It was exacted under pain of repudiating
in actuality the theoretical interpretations for which my work has
stood. It is the outcome of inevitable concession to the ordeal of
facing in its grim detail the fabric of substitution and disparity
composing the structure of my own daily living. Convictions have been
wrung from me against my own personal will, against every tradition
about me and in spite of every effort of subtlety on my part to escape
their exactions. Through many months I have fought their acceptance
over every step of the way. As, little by little, a more relative and
societal conviction has been borne in upon me, it has proved that the
realization I have so long and so resolutely resisted has been the
actuality of my own separatism and unconsciousness, as contrasted
with the undifferentiated, organic life of which my personal work has
been but the theory. It is because this work in its actuality is the
expression of an urge common to life, sweeping aside in the strength of
its organic tide every claim to personal consideration, that there is
due the acknowledgment that it has come to expression unbeholden to me,
that its motive has been, as far as humanly possible, not personal but
societal.

The organic theory here offered has been advanced by me hitherto on
grounds of mere conceptual intuitions. Its present form embodies
in its spirit of an impersonal, affective participation, however
imperfectly fulfilled, the subjective record of an organic experience.
In its plea for a wider acceptance of the common fellowship of man’s
native consciousness, I well realize that it is only with the years
that we may hope to yield it fuller accord.

I shall be glad if this embodiment of whatever societal acceptance may
have found expression in these pages may bring a clearer meaning, a
quieter understanding to any whose need has been deep and unfulfilled.
For my own part, this expression is the response to what is the
deepest demand of my own life--the need for the organic unification of
personality that I feel resides alone in the common consciousness of
man.




INDEX


  Absolutism--
    in affects, 39, 227
    in present system of consciousness, 33, 43, 63, 104, 227
    in psychoanalysis, 67, 68, 73, 101
    in the Church, 66-68, 73
    _see also_ Personal absolute

  Adler, 113, 174

  Affects, 115, 121, 130, 178, 205, 227

  Affective life, 115, 125
    components, 57, 58, 62

  Allocentric and autocentric--
    complementary, 203, 213
    definition, 188
    reactions, 191-196, 218

  Allosexuality--
    and autosexuality, 207, 208, 211
    definition, 201, 202
    identical basis, 209
    _see also_ Sex

  Alternative--
    bidimensional, 80-85, 93, 96, 97, 226-228, 239
    in art and drama, 85-87, 96
    in psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychopathology, 97, 100-103,
        229-233
    individual expressions of, 88-91
    occurrence in group analysis, 223, 224, 236
    social expressions of, 85, 92-95, 99, 102, 207
    _see also_ “Good and bad”

  Ambivalence, 86, 94, 196, 228
    _see also_ Alternative

  “Anal complex,” 216

  Analysis--
    aim of, 26, 137, 164, 165, 166
    _see also_ Dream; Group analysis; Psychoanalysis

  Aquinas, 158

  Art, 87, 96, 183

  Artist, 96, 218, 219

  Autocentric--
    _see_ Allocentric

  Autosexuality, 206, 215, 244
    _see also_ Allosexuality


  Besant, Annie, 139

  Belief, 47, 143

  Bidimensional plane, 41, 42, 58, 60, 62, 104
    _see also_ Alternative; Relativity of consciousness

  Bleuler, 94

  Buddha, 218


  Calvin, 158

  Cerebro-spinal nervous system, 189-192, 194

  Childhood--
    consciousness of, 22, 23, 145
    imposition of social images upon, 52-55, 58, 59, 92, 93, 116, 123,
        132, 145, 213

  Christ, 218

  Christianity, 85, 193, 196

  Church--
    as social systematization, 65-75

  Claparède, 156

  Collective unconscious--
    _see_ Social unconscious

  Complexes, 47, 72

  Compulsion neurosis, 81

  Consciousness--
    absolutism of present system, 43, 44
    as unconsciousness, 24, 110, 111, 114, 115, 119, 143
    definition, 119
    individualistic compared with societal, 51, 62, 109, 144
    ontogenesis, 119-121
    phylogenesis, 118, 160, 162
    relativity of, 32-40, 48
    unification of, 122, 126, 169, 173, 212, 218, 242
    _see also_ Dissociation; Self-consciousness; Societal concept of
        consciousness


  Darwin, 249

  Dementia præcox, 124, 136, 137, 195, 203

  Depression, 91, 94

  Descartes, 124

  Differentiation, 129, 169, 178, 242
    delusion of, 120-122, 125, 131

  Dissociation--
    individual and social, 45-47, 76, 109, 110, 132, 144, 148-153, 155,
        176, 185, 241

  Division of personality, 81, 85, 95, 147, 222
    genesis of, 116-119
    physiological substrate, 189-191
    _see also_ Dissociation; Neurosis; Repression

  Doubt--
    attitude of Church toward, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71
    compared with resistance, 71-74

  Drama, 85-88, 182, 183

  Dream, 178-183, 185, 195
    analysis, 88, 176, 177, 184
    and personal absolute, 90, 111-113
    and wish, 89


  Eddington, A. S., 32

  Education, 92, 93, 214
    _see also_ Childhood

  Ego-sexuality, 201-203, 206-208
    _see also_ Sex

  Einstein, 32, 36, 37, 38, 186

  Eliot, George, 218

  Ellis, Havelock, 158

  Extravert, 187, 201


  Family, 204, 234, 235

  Feeling--
    as subjective experience, 20, 21, 115

  Freud, 1, 4, 5, 9, 14, 38, 47, 101, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113,
        126, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 174, 199, 204, 236, 248, 249

  Freudian analysis, 1-5, 38, 47, 138, 168, 172, 231

  Freud’s theory--
    of the neuroses, 12, 14, 37, 94, 108, 109, 126, 156, 157, 196,
        228, 229, 236, 237
    of resistance, 61, 154


  “Good and bad”--
    as image of personal advantage, 55, 59, 62, 81, 85, 90, 192, 200
    bidimensional alternative, 53, 58, 62, 65, 78, 81, 91, 102, 103,
        201, 227, 239
    pretence underlying, 54-56, 58, 92
    _see also_ Image

  Group analysis, 131, 223-226, 234-238, 246


  Heterosexuality--
    _see_ Allosexuality; Homosexuality; Sex

  Homophyllic, 208, 210

  Homosexuality, 94, 97, 199, 211
    and heterosexuality, 198, 200-202, 210
    and paranoia, 174, 175
    _see also_ Sex

  Hysteria, 63, 97, 143, 189, 191
    social, 16


  Ideas of reference, 136, 223

  Image, 40-42
    as substitution, 16
    basis of marriage, 207
    basis of sexuality, 14, 15
    bidimensional, 53, 57-59, 226-228
    contrasted with reality, 41, 79
    of male and female, 96, 216
    of parent, 55, 103, 173, 235
    _see also_ “Good and bad”; Mother-image; Social images

  Incest-Awe, 147, 148

  Individual--
    as systematization, 70, 76
    as separative element, 126, 150, 152, 153, 160, 243
    as societal element, 115, 117, 127, 130, 148, 156

  Infantilism, 215, 244

  Insanity, 23, 24, 91, 124, 137
    _see also_ Neurosis; Social neurosis

  Instinct, 60, 127
    common societal, 200
    organic instinct of sex, 202

  Introvert, 187, 201


  Jung, 113, 156, 204, 205


  Kropotkin, P., 159


  Libido, 156


  Mania, 91, 94

  Marriage, 93, 94, 204, 206-209

  Masturbation, 211

  Meyer, Adolf, xx

  Mood-alternation, 91, 94

  Mother-image, 141, 172, 234

  Mysticism, 125, 134, 139-142


  Napoleon, 218

  Narcism, 157, 202

  Nettleship, Richard Lewis, 106

  Neurosis, 15, 76, 77, 83, 102, 117
    and sexuality, 157, 173, 174, 209, 237
    marital, 93, 94
    source, 53, 125, 169, 173
    _see also_ Normality; Social neurosis

  Neurotic personality, 13-16, 24, 44, 168, 191, 214, 243, 244
    and organic consciousness, 11, 12, 23, 153, 209

  Newton, 35, 36
    Newtonian system, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38

  Nietzsche, 23, 130, 218, 247

  Normality--
    and personal absolute, 47, 63
    and sexuality, 173, 203, 209, 244
    as criterion, 11, 27, 30
    as neurotic manifestation, 12-16, 175, 176, 191
    mysticism in, 125, 134, 139-141
    unconsciousness of, 26, 27, 147, 179, 181, 203


  Objective observation, 18
    within subjective sphere, 19-21, 51, 121-124, 167, 176, 178

  Organismic--
    definition, 3
    _see also_ Societal concept of consciousness


  Paranoia--
    and homosexuality, 174, 175

  Paranoiac, 94, 97, 143, 199

  Personal absolute, 102, 103
    and war, 83
    as resistance, 61, 62, 76, 82, 84
    as right, 82, 83, 90, 92, 98, 112
    in psychoanalysis, 73, 101, 102
    underlying social system, 45-48, 63, 70, 72-76, 80-84, 240
    _see also_ Absolutism; Resistance; Will-to-self

  Personal equation, 4

  Plato, 218

  Precoid, 63, 97, 195

  Preconscious mode, 10, 119, 137, 189, 196

  Primary identification, 115, 116
    principle of, 218

  Psychasthenic, 94, 193, 195

  Psychiatrist, 107, 124, 136, 223

  Psychiatry, 123, 136, 137, 183, 187

  Psychoanalysis--
    alternative in, 103, 196, 198, 229-233
    as social systematization, 65, 67-76, 101
    as theory, 17-19, 21, 25
    duration of treatment, 230-233
    impasse in, 109, 172, 223, 224
    misconceptions, 2, 197
    personal absolute in, 3, 73, 101, 102
    position of, 9, 10, 229
    unconscious element in, 3, 143, 167, 234
    _see also_ Analysis; Group analysis

  Psychoanalyst--
    attitude toward patient, 24, 166-172, 181, 183, 195, 229, 230,
        232-234
    involvement in social unconscious, 110, 111, 183, 184, 222, 223
    qualifications of, 28, 29

  Psychology, 5, 33, 36, 38, 65, 97

  Psychopathology, 63, 100, 101, 123, 124, 223
    of war, 130

  Ptolemaic system, 38


  Relativity of consciousness, 32-40, 43, 45, 48, 51, 57-62, 104, 246

  Religion, 64, 96, 98, 99

  Repression--
    and bipolarity, 216, 217
    and sexuality, 156-159, 162, 163, 174, 193, 215, 242
    and suggestion, 55, 142, 189, 192, 200, 201, 218
    individual and social, 7, 13, 15, 30, 76, 77, 131, 154, 162, 163
    physiological substrate, 189-193

  Resistance--
    as personal absolute, 61, 62, 76, 82, 84, 230
    attitude of psychoanalysis toward, 69-76
    compared with doubt, 71-74
    individual and social, 43-45, 65, 75, 76, 152, 154, 155


  Schreiner, Olive, 218

  Self--
    and sexuality, 15, 173, 200, 201, 210, 211
    image of, 16, 58-61, 79, 82, 83, 141
    preservation and race-preservation, 127

  Self-consciousness, 116, 118-120, 125, 132, 147, 161, 162, 205

  Sex--
    and sexuality, 11, 156-159, 163, 193, 200-217, 237
    as organic unity, 11, 163, 199, 208-212, 220
    intermediate, 214, 215, 217
    oppositeness in, 211, 213, 214, 216

  Sexuality, 15
    as replacement, 10, 163
    _see also_ Repression; Sex

  Shields, Clarence, xix, 233

  Social images, 96, 102, 135-138, 161, 229
    and childhood, 51-55, 58, 59, 92, 93
    as distortion of reality, 87-90
    _see also_ Image; Mother-image

  Social neurosis, 101, 125, 130-133, 162, 245
    and images, 229
    individual implication, 84, 246

  Social unconscious, 117, 133, 162, 222, 223, 228, 245
    as basis of normality, 11-14, 26, 27, 44, 47, 176
    _see also_ Unconsciousness

  Societal concept of consciousness, 31, 45, 46, 127-131, 148, 149,
        160-163
    _see also_ Relativity of consciousness

  Socrates, 218

  Subjective sphere--
    _see_ Feeling; Objective observation

  Sublimation, 189

  Suggestion--
    _see_ Repression

  Sympathetic nervous system, 189-192, 194


  Transference, 167, 172, 230


  Unconsciousness, 5, 15, 111, 126, 135, 144, 173, 178, 183-185, 192,
        193, 204, 234
    as resistance, 34, 76
    underlying normality, 47, 125
    _see also_ Consciousness; Dissociation; Social unconscious


  War, 14, 16, 34, 35, 83, 129-132, 249

  Wilde, Oscar, 78

  Will-to-self, 13, 75, 90, 98, 129, 156

  Wish, 89, 111-113, 173, 180, 195, 232


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FOOTNOTES


[1] The word “organismic” refers to the feelings and reactions common
to the social body regarded as a coherent, integral organism. The term
organismic, as I use it in its social application, is identical with
the term organic in its individual application. The difference is that
the term organismic is employed in a more generic sense. But in general
the usages, organic and organismic, are interchangeable.

[2] “The Preconscious or the Nest Instinct,” a thesis presented in
outline at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, Boston, Mass., May 25, 1917.

[3] “Social Images versus Reality,” _The Journal of Abnormal Psychology
and Social Psychology_, Vol. XIX, No. 3, Oct.-Dec., 1924.

[4] “Our Social Evasion,” _Medical Journal and Record_, Vol. CXXIII,
No. 12, June 16, 1926.

[5] “Giebt es vielleicht--eine Frage für Irrenärzte--Neurosen der
Gesundheit?”--Nietzsche’s _Werke_. Erste Abt., Band I. _Die Geburt der
Tragödie._ Leipzig, 1903.

[6] An instance of this inversion of natural expression is seen in
the system of technique that is the obsession _par excellence_ of
singers. In the art of singing, as correspondingly in any art of life,
technique is applicable only to the theory of vocalization but not to
the actuality of spontaneous musical expression.

[7] I realize that a patient should have the protection of the medical
expert’s knowledge. This means that the analyst, if not himself
a physician, should be directly associated with the office of a
physician. We know, of course, that charlatanry exists no less within
the medical profession than elsewhere; yet while a medical degree is in
no sense a certificate of personal sincerity, it is a social surety of
professional responsibility. On the other hand, I have yet to hear the
suggestion offered that a physician who is not himself a psychoanalyst
should be closely associated with the office of a psychoanalyst. It
seems odd, as one thinks of it, that this provision should not have
been offered by those who have been conscientious enough to recognize
the reverse need. As a matter of fact, the number of instances in which
mental disorders are mistaken for somatic conditions is incomparably
greater than those in which there is failure to recognize the existence
of the somatic component. If it is important that the analyst should
be competent to trace the source of structural diseases, the internist
should be equally competent to trace the source of mental disharmonies.

[8] “To free our thought from the fetters of space and time is an
aspiration of the poet and the mystic, viewed somewhat coldly by
the scientist who has too good reason to fear the confusion of
loose ideas likely to ensue. If others have had a suspicion of the
end to be desired it has been left to Einstein to show the way to
rid ourselves of these ‘terrestrial adhesions to thought.’ And in
removing our fetters he leaves us, not (as might have been feared)
vague generalities for the ecstatic contemplation of the mystic,
but a precise scheme of world-structure to engage the mathematical
physicist.”--A. S. Eddington, F.R.S., “The Theory of Relativity and its
Influence on Scientific Thought,” _The Scientific Monthly_, Vol. XVI,
No. 1, Jan. 1923.

[9] It is, of course, not possible to trace through mathematical
intricacies a detailed analogy between the cosmic theory of relativity,
as it bears upon the objective data of an abstruse calculus, and the
organic theory of relativity, as it bears upon the subjective data of
the all-inclusive principle of psychology here regarded as the basis of
a universally comprehensive scheme of consciousness. The comparison has
significance for me merely in the aptness of its theoretical alignment
with a conception of consciousness which includes data extrinsic to our
habitual psychological system, i.e. the system intrinsic to ourselves
and commonly accepted as the totality of consciousness.

[10] Newton observed the universe from the point of view of his fixed
position upon the earth. Einstein observes the universe from the point
of view of all possible positions within the universe. Likewise our
present-day systems of psychology regard the conditions of life from
the position of observation that is one’s individual point of view
toward them. In the conception here advanced these conditions, on the
contrary, are regarded from points of view that are socially relative
to and inclusive of all possible positions of observation.

The reader will recall that the conceptions of the physicists first
led them to a theory of special relativity through their calculations
of uniform motion, while their deductions came only later to embrace
data pertaining to difform motion, or to motion that is not uniform,
as contained under the conception of general relativity. With regard
to the theory of relativity in the subjective sphere, it was upon
noting the habitual deflections from a predictable organic constant,
observable in the erratic reactions of the neurotic personality,
that the conception of relativity in the sphere of consciousness
first occurred to me. It was only subsequently that the relativity of
consciousness as applied to the uniform reactions characteristic of
the collective social mind came to shape itself into the organismic
conception of relativity here outlined as the underlying principle of
consciousness.

While representing in no sense a detailed correlation between them,
there is nevertheless a certain analogy, not only in the manner of
inception of the objective and subjective theories with respect to
the observation first of difform or abnormal deviation, and later
of discrepancies of normal or uniform reactions; but there is also
this further concomitance between the two aspects of the principle.
The Newtonian hypothesis takes account of motion or reaction in the
planetary system only in the large, while the theory of Einstein is
adequate in contemplating the motion of planets both in the large
and in the small. Conversely, our present Freudian theory of the
unconscious takes care of the reactions of the personality in the
small or in an individual or particular sense, while the theory of the
relativity of consciousness regards personality not only individually
or particularly (whether regarded singly or in its collective social
expression) but also societally or in the sense of consciousness in its
universal or organismic meaning.

[11] This psychobiological misconception is doubtless also aided
in large measure by the physiological conditions of our visual
organs of perception and by the bidimensional surface upon which
our impressions of objects are received. Because of the disposition
of the nerve terminals of the retina upon a flat or bidimensional
area, our visual perception of objects is limited to impressions of a
flat or bidimensional plane. If by means of binocular accommodation
objects present to us the appearance of “depth,” it is of course not
to direct visual perception that we owe our sense of perspective but
to stereoscopic inference, seconded by our stereognostic experience
of tridimensional solidity. Hence, what is actually “perceived” upon
looking at an object of three dimensions is a visual facet, as it
were, due to our own mentally flattened “cross-section” of the solid
object before us as determined by the particular aspect of it that
is momentarily presented to view. I think it cannot be doubted that
this mechanism of our visual perception is a contributing factor in
influencing our tendency to “see” mentally. One says “I see” when he
means “I understand.” There is the same implication in saying that one
“sees” the logic of such and such a statement. So, too, we speak of
a “mental point of view” or of “intellectual vision.” This illusory
character of our mental percepts probably owes its explanation also in
part to the fact that our visual sense is the sense that best permits a
distant and detached observation _of_ rather than a contact _with_ the
surrounding world.

[12] “Our Mass Neurosis,” _The Psychological Bulletin_, Vol. 23, No. 6,
June, 1926.

[13] “The Reabsorbed Affect and Its Elimination,” _British Journal of
Medical Psychology_, Vol. VI, Part 3.

[14] “Speaking of Resistances,” address before the Sixteenth Annual
Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, New York City, June
10, 1926. _Psyche_, No. 27, January, 1927.

[15] “The Heroic Rôle--An Historical Retrospect,” _Psyche_, No. 25,
July, 1926.

[16] Needless to say the distinction here made between “actual” and
“real” is used very specifically.

[17] “Insanity a Social Problem,” _The American Journal of Sociology_,
Vol. XXXII, No. I, Part I, July, 1926.

[18] I recall an incident that occurred several years ago in the office
of a prominent newspaper that well illustrates this point. A member of
the staff was called to the phone to receive the details of a drowning,
word of which had just been reported. One can picture the professional
zeal with which he turned to the phone, alert with the eagerness of
expectant acquisition. If a moment later he dropped the receiver
and drew back with a sudden cry of horror, his whole face gradually
altering to a look of dejection and pain, it was not because he had
been disappointed in the expectation of a thrilling item of news. Not
at all. The item was as tragic in its details as one could wish. The
disappointment lay only in the fact that, on inquiring the name of
the boy who had been drowned, he learned that it was his own son. It
was only this circumstance, then, that explained why his countenance
suddenly changed from satisfaction to pain. A matter of information
which was to have been sold to his readers as a delectable item of
news concerning the drowning of another man’s son became a poignant
sorrow when the self-same news related to his own son. And so, upon
examination, it may be seen that what really happened was an unexpected
shift of affect due to the sudden alternation of the personal motive
through the reversal of the bidimensional vantage.

[19] “Psychoanalytic Improvisations and the Personal Equation,” _The
Psychoanalytic Review_, Vol. XIII, No. 2, April, 1926.

[20] Consider the legend of the origin of the life of man as symbolized
through the intuitions of the folk unconscious recorded in the Book of
Genesis. For its discussion see “The Origin of the Incest-Awe,” _The
Psychoanalytic Review_, Vol. V, No. 3, July, 1918.

[21] The term “consciousness” is used by the writer in two different
senses, the one having to do with the mental sophistication of
individual awareness, the other with consciousness regarded as an
inclusive racial principle. The reader must rely upon the context for
the distinction between the restricted individualistic interpretation
on the one hand and the organismic interpretation on the other.

[22] This mistaken tendency of inference has so far laid hold upon us
as to mislead our perceptions even in respect to judgments concerning
data which lie altogether within the objective mode. To cite an
instance of homely type quite remote from the present argument:--when
we speak of two buckets of water, drawn from a common source, in
reality our concept is buckets of two waters. For the accident of their
separation in space and of the demarcation of the bulk of each by the
outline of its container leads the mind, habituated to the fallacy of
subjective inference, to posit a difference or a _twoness of essence_
where there is but a difference or twoness of outer circumstance or
accidental condition. Hence there results a concept not of two buckets
but of two waters, whereas the apparently two waters dipped from the
same source are essentially one.

[23] “The Need of an Analytic Psychiatry,” _The American Journal of
Psychiatry_, Vol. VI, No. 3, January, 1927.

[24] An example of the blindly impulsive character of this instinct
often recurs to me. I was standing with a lady on the shore of Lake
Zürich. A sudden storm arose and we could see plainly that two young
men in a sail-boat well out in the middle of the lake had lost complete
control of their craft. To the crowd that had gathered on the quays it
was evident from the way the sail was jibing from side to side that the
boat would overturn. A number of launches began hurrying toward it.
As the boat capsized, throwing the men into the lake, my companion,
suddenly tearing off her gloves, dashed toward the water. I managed to
seize her just as she reached the water’s edge. On my rallying her and
inquiring just what might be her plans with reference to two men a full
quarter of a mile out in the lake and closely surrounded by competent
rescue parties, she was unable to account for her impulsive reaction
beyond declaring that she “just couldn’t let them drown like that!”
Here was an individual with as goodly a share of unconscious egotism
as the rest of us, but in whom at the sight of danger to others the
self-instinct was completely subordinated to the organic behests of our
common societal instinct.

[25] “Character and the Neuroses,” _The Psychoanalytic Review_, Vol. I,
No. 2, February, 1914.

[26] We overlook the fact that it is not the content of a belief but
rather the mere condition of believing that determines its errancy or
truth. The word _belief_, as has been said, is a derivative of the
Anglo-Saxon _leof_, meaning _preference_, but we do not recognize that
what one “believes” is merely what one _wants to think_. There are
undoubtedly as many devout believers among the devotees of Science
as of Religion, and upon inquiry we should probably find that the
pet _beliefs_ of the scientist rest upon as unreasoning an attitude
of mind as those of the religionist. The point is that whatever is
thus believed in response to personal preference is arbitrary and
doctrinaire, be it evolution, relativity, or God.

[27] It is really the element of secret emotionalism that constitutes
mysticism. It is again a phase of the private alternative whereby
we get what we want. What is called “intellectual mysticism” is but
a secondary rationalization of this emotional element. But there is
need of discrimination. While it is true that conceptions arising
from intuitional inference may readily be begotten of emotionalism,
yet the same inferences when based upon biological analogy cease to
be mystical. Nietzsche’s “primordial unity,” because biologically
inferred, seems to me a quite unemotional and inclusive conception. In
the biological consistency that unites the most highly differentiated
species with the lowest single unicellular organism, the mind
straightway finds substantiation for Nietzsche’s conception. Whereas
the “metaphysical unity” of the religionists is, on the contrary,
a wholly mystical conception. Through this postulate the mind is
immediately involved in such vagaries as one connects with the doctrine
of transubstantiation or with the flights of Annie Besant and her
astral bodies!

But one can perhaps still more aptly illustrate the distinction
in question by considering the totally opposed meanings--the one
intellectual, the other emotional--contained in the word “vibrations”
according as it is used by the scientist in regard to mathematically
mensurable physical wave-lengths or as it is employed by the
“hypersensitive personality” to describe certain sensations presumably
recorded somewhere in the region of the epigastrium in response to
subtle but invisible “psychic communications.” In defining the term
mystical one must not fail to include the attitude of mind that leads
one scientist, who has failed to understand the investigations of
another, to refer to those investigations as mystical. I am inclined
to feel somewhat strongly on this point because of the fact that my
conception of the primary biological unity of the organism and its
influence upon the subsequent development of the personality has
tended to be regarded quite arbitrarily in the light of a mystical
interpretation. (See note 1, page 10.)

[28] There is a story reminiscent of juvenile days in my own home that
is to the point. An older brother, then between four and five years of
age, was being given his bath in the nursery as was customary in those
days. Hanging above the mantel was a picture of the Sistine Madonna.
The youngster being freed of his clothing ran skipping about the room.
His governess happened to be present, and being duly horrified or,
what is more probable as I remember her, acting in response to a sense
of duty, she gently chid him for his lack of modesty, saying “Jesus
doesn’t love little boys who go about that way.” The child looked up
at the picture of the nude infant with doubtless a more discerning
sympathy with Jesus’ views than grown-ups are wont to attribute to the
wisdom of childhood, and looking his would-be instructress quietly in
the eyes he replied incontrovertibly: “He does it hisse’f!”

If the story of my brother’s life should ever be fully told, as some
day I hope it may, it will help us realize the unerring fatality of an
early enforced system of repression and its logical effect upon the
individual’s subsequent life as upon its close.

[29] The biological (organic) continuity between the societal
or psychological and the functional or physiological spheres is
interesting in view of their obvious homologies as shown in the
marked suggestive influences which we see passing over from the
psychological sphere and affecting the processes pertaining to the
functional or physiological sphere and doubtless operating no less in
the reverse direction. One wonders without undue presumption how many
so-called “organic” diseases are not primarily functional and hence
functionally modifiable through the integral, societal agency of an
organic analysis, provided, of course, that the separative process
has not already crystallized into the static condition of structural
alteration. At least it is clear that many so-called physical
derangements need to be frankly regarded in the light of sheer somatic
hysterias. See “The Psychological Analysis of So-called Neurasthenic
and Allied States,” _The Journal of Abnormal Psychology_, Vol. VIII,
1913-14, page 246, note 1.

An analogous condition is demonstrable in the physical universe in the
fact that the phenomena of gravitation (such as planetary motion) and
the phenomena of electricity (including the motion of light) have been
proved to be so intimately related to one another as to be regarded now
by the physicists “as parts of one vast system embracing all Nature.”

[30] The Southern negro has a definition of libido that is biologically
truer than that of either Freud, Jung or Claparède. He refers to
inadequacy of the sexual life as a lack of “ambition.”

[31] It should be recalled that in the view of the present thesis
sexuality as it exists socially among us is, in essence, narcistic
throughout and that hence sexuality, including so-called _normal_
sexuality, is, in my conception, a repression, and must be definitely
discriminated from the spontaneous and biological expression embodied
in the native instinct of sex. (See p. 10.)

[32] One may find the objective evidence of this statement amply set
forth in P. Kropotkin’s _Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution_. Here
Kropotkin traces in a very conclusive way the presence of the societal
instinct in the lower animals and in primitive man. Kropotkin errs,
however, when he reaches the levels of development expressed in the
social organizations of man. For he fails to discriminate between the
instinct of societal solidarity that is the natural cohesion of a
species and the quite premeditated and ulterior expressions of social
accord represented in the mutual self-interests of man’s collective
adaptations.

[33] “An Ethnic Aspect of Consciousness,” _The Sociological Review_,
Vol. XIX, No. 1, January, 1927.

[34] If, in the flash of so brief an interval of time (speaking
ethnologically) as fifty years or so, a plan were effected involving
the complete segregation from one another of all the individuals
comprising the societal organism of the species, the result,
notwithstanding the many millions of years required for the gradual
evolution of the race up to the present time, would be its complete
extermination! Such a consideration allows us to realize, at least
objectively, how closely interwoven are the elements comprising our
societal organism and how dependent is the integrity of the whole upon
the organic participation of its parts.

[35] A striking instance of psychoanalytic unconsciousness may be
seen in the analyst’s quite naïve attitude toward his own unconscious
need for such infantile pacifiers as he finds in the obsessive use of
tobacco. That such diversions are no more adult than the use of the
rubber ring or nipple of his infancy he does not for a moment suspect,
the concomitance of such practices with the oral eroticism of his
childhood having only a _theoretical_ significance for him. The truth
is, the psychoanalyst _wants to smoke_. Of course, it is not consistent
with his teaching and if he is to have his way in the matter some
process must be devised that will make it consistent. And so in his
authoritarian suzerainty he forthwith decrees that the patient who
objects to a smoke-filled room is a prey to unseemly resistances, and
that his or her attitude of mind, not the analyst’s, must be promptly
looked into with a view to summary treatment.

[36] Let me say at once that this nomadic young lady did me the
honour to remark that she sensed immediately upon meeting me that
_my_ attitude was entirely different from that of other analysts. Of
this she made haste to assure me at the outset. In thinking of it, a
wince gives place to a smile as I recall the trustful complacency with
which I benignly accepted as a statement of fact the cunning decoys of
this seraphically unconscious individual, her flattering reassurances
seeming to me at the time clearly to indicate the very rare perceptions
of this unusually discerning young person! The aftermath as it has come
to pass in the brief succeeding years enables me unhesitatingly to aver
that my severely reproved colleagues were at least not more unconscious
than I.

[37] See note 1, page 15.

[38] See note 1, page 56.

[39] See note 1, page 10.

[40] See note 1, page 10.

[41] Perhaps this distinction of type has its societal counterpart
also in the opposite psychological reactions embodied in the esoteric
tendencies of Catholicism with its markedly autocentric organization,
as compared with Protestantism’s more allocentric trends. The
difference between the two types of reaction is also seen in the broad
geographical contrast that separates the consciousness of Asia from
that of Europe.

[42] See discussion of opposed reaction-types independently determined
by M. Geiger, “Neue Complicationsversuche,” _Philos. Studien_,
XVIII, 1903, pp. 347-436 and also by myself, _The Determination of
the Position of a Momentary Impression in the Temporal Course of a
Moving Visual Impression_, The Johns Hopkins Studies in Philosophy and
Psychology, No. 3, The Psychological Review, Psychological Monographs,
Vol. XI, No. 4, September, 1909.

[43] “Psychiatry as an Objective Science,” _British Journal of Medical
Psychology_, Vol. V, Part 4.

[44] Narcism (homo-erotism) is a reversion of interest representing
a sexual reaction to the pictorial affect or to the personal image.
Autoerotism (ego-erotism) represents an arrest of the individual’s
sexuality due to its impact with the personal image or with the social
self-reflection about him. Narcism embodies the reflection of the
individual’s erotism in its social phase. Autoerotism is the absorption
of the individual’s erotism in its personal phase. Autoerotism is
thus central and represents the retroversion or interception by the
organism of its efferent interests. This occurs in the individual
inversion expressed in the sensory images of dementia præcox. Narcism
is peripheral and is expressed in the social inversion pertaining
equally to the motor images of homosexuality as to the sensory images
of paranoia.

[45] While a student of Jung’s in the early days of psychoanalysis,
at the time when Jung was the very organ of Freud’s genius, the clear
emanation of his spirit, I remarked to him one day that I had come to
the conclusion that the neurotic individual inevitably married his
mother. Jung’s reply, alert as a flash, was characteristic of his
brilliant, inclusive scope of vision. “I have come to the conclusion,”
he said, “that _every_ individual inevitably marries his mother.”

[46] The word _like_ is from Anglo-Saxon _gelic_, compounded of _ge_,
meaning together, and _lic_, meaning body.

[47] “Convention in Psychoanalysis and Its Interpretative Inhibitions,”
a paper read at the Eighth Annual Meeting of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, Atlantic City, May 10, 1918.

[48] See note 2, page 208.

[49] In a recent meeting of psychopathologists a paper was presented
which described the results of a questionnaire that had been
distributed among the students of one of our prominent American
universities, the object of which was to learn the nature of the sexual
life of the college students. The figures compiled from the answers
submitted showed in the author’s view a surprisingly high percentage
of masturbation and homosexuality. But what is of interest is the fact
that in the interpretation of the author of the paper, as well as in
that of every member who participated in the discussion, the concept
of masturbation was restricted solely to personal practices on the
part of the single individual, while the concept of homosexuality
was confined entirely to the manifestation of sexual interests or
activities occurring between persons of the same sex! Apparently it
was not suspected that these manifest expressions of autoerotism or
homosexuality are the least widespread or significant forms of its
occurrence, that the really important and far-reaching expression of
these disorders of instinct occurs in the latent form represented in
the symbolic substitutions of heterosexuality as commonly practised,
for example, in houses of prostitution. Yet these latter expressions
were avowedly regarded as real expressions of heterosexuality and,
accordingly, its devotees were naïvely interpreted as presenting a
psychological adaptation which showed a frank contrast to that of
their “homosexual” confrères! It is hopeless to expect any scientific
understanding of anomalies of reaction that pertain to our subjective
life as long as scientists themselves persist in confusing the
objective appearances under which these anomalies are disguised for the
subjective actuality of these anomalies themselves.

[50] “The Genesis and Meaning of ‘Homosexuality’”--a development of
_the principle of identification or the primary subjective phase of
consciousness_. See _The Psychoanalytic Review_, Vol. IV, No. 3, July,
1917.

[51] It is not by accident but by some inner, intuitive design that
man has adopted the symbol he employs as the sign of infinity. In
the mark of the mathematicians--consisting of two circles that are
one, one circle that is two, wherein is neither beginning nor end--is
expressed the character of the infinite and all-inclusive in a form of
conjunction so complete as not to be susceptible of possible increment.

[52] The reader is reminded that this book was outlined in 1923. From
that time to the time of publication (1927), the group analysis,
proceeding along the lines indicated in this chapter, has further
substantiated the thesis here stated.

[53] See note 1, page 53.

[54] See note 1, page 15.

[55] We are warned, of course, that this new shift of technique will
arouse in us unprecedented resistances. But let us be wary lest we
capitulate too easily to this ready-to-hand ogre of “resistances”; for
by the same token we have been warned throughout these analytic years
that we must expect unprecedented resistances to the former dictum of
psychoanalysis--a dictum which imposed without parley or mitigation a
rigid analytic policy of non-interference. Our inconsistency is but
another instance of the automatic illogic of the alternative, of the
inevitable compulsion of the personal criterion.

[56] “The Group Method of Analysis,” _The Psychoanalytic Review_, Vol.
XIV, 1927, “The Laboratory Method in Psychoanalysis,” _The American
Journal of Psychiatry_, Vol. V, No. 3, January, 1926.

[57] It should be clearly explained that _group analysis is not my
analysis of the group but that it is the group’s analysis of me or
of any other individual_. In our laboratory usage, “group” does not
mean a collection of individuals. It means a phyletic principle of
observation. This phyletic principle of observation as applied to the
individual and to the aggregate is the whole significance of group
analysis.

[58] I hold that the word “spirit” employed in its biological
connotation belongs to the legitimate equipment of the laboratory.
Because the religionists have carried it off and perverted it to
sentimental uses, I shall not surrender the claim of the scientist upon
it. And so by “spirit” I do not wish to indicate anything akin to the
ghostly itinerants reputed to stalk o’ nights, nor to that beneficent
impulse that moves people to cheer the afternoon of life by “doing
good” when the infelicities of age or infirmity have dulled the edge of
less salutary proclivities. Neither have I in mind any philosophical
concept whatever, nor least of all a conception savouring of a
religious purport, all of which seem to me equally apparitional. I mean
merely man’s innate, unprompted or unchecked feeling as expressive of
his organic life. That which in man responds to natural beauty, actual
or inferred, is of the sphere of the spirit as I use the term.

[59] “There are ages, when the rational and the intuitive man stand
side by side, the one full of fear of the intuition, the other full of
scorn for the abstraction; the latter just as irrational as the former
is inartistic.” Nietzsche, _Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays_.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78616 ***