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International Library of Psychology
Philosophy and Scientific Method

The
Social Basis of Consciousness

International Library of Psychology
Philosophy and Scientific Method

GENERAL EDITOR . C. K. OGDEN, M.A. (Magdalen College, Cambridge')
PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES . . . . by G. E. MOORE, LittD.

THE MISUSE OF MIND by KARIN STEPHEN

CONFLICT AND DREAM . . . by W. H. R. RIVERS, F.R.S.

PSYCHOLOGY AND POLITICS . . by W. H. R. RIVERS, F.R.S.

MEDICINE, MAGIC AND RELIGION . by W. H. R. RIVERS, F.R.S.
PSYCHOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY . by W. H. R. RIVERS. F.R.S.

TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS . . by L. WITTGENSTEIN

THE MEASUREMENT OF EMOTION . . by W. WHATELY SMITM
PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES . . . . by C. G. JUNG, M.D. , LL. D.

SCIENTIFIC METHOD by A. D. RITCHIE

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT by C. D. BROAD, Litt D.

MIND AND ITS PLACE IN NATURE . . by C. D. BROAD, Litt. D.
THE MEANING OF MEANING. by C K. OGDEN and I. A. RICHARDS
CHARACTER AND THE UNCONSCIOUS . by J. H. VAN DER HOOP

INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY . by ALFRED ADLER

CHANCE, LOVE AND LOGIC by C. S. PEIRCE

SPECULATIONS (Preface by Jacob Epstein) . . by T E. HULME
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REASONING . . by EUGENIO RIGNANO

BIOLOGICAL MEMORY by EUGENIO RIGNANO

THE PHILOSOPHY OF Music . . . . by W. POLE, F R S.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ' As IF ' . . . . by H. VAIHINGER
THE NATURE OF LAUGHTER . . . . by]. C. GREGORY
THE NATURE OF INTELLIGENCE . . . . by L. L. THURSTONE
TELEPATHY AND CLAIRVOYANCE .... by R. TISCHNER

THE GROWTH OF THE MIND . . . . by K. KOFFKA

THE MENTALITY OF APES by W. KOHLER

PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS MYSTICISM . . . by J. H. LEUBA
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A MUSICAL PRODIGY . by G. REVESZ

PRINCIPLES OF LITERARY CRITICISM . . by I. A. RICHARDS

METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS OF SCIENCE by E. A. BURTT, Ph D.
COLOUR-BLINDNESS . . . . . by M. COLLINS, Ph.D.
PHYSIQUE AND CHARACTER by ERNST KRETSCHMER

PSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTION . . . by J. T. MACCURDY, M.D.
PROBLEMS OF PERSONALITY: . . in honour of MORTON PRINCE

PSYCHE by E ROHDE

PSYCHOLOGY OF TIME by M. STURT

THE HISTORY OF MATERIALISM by F. A. LANGE

EMOTION AND INSANITY . . . . by S. THALBITZER

PERSONALITY by R. G. GORDON, M.D.

EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY by CHARLES Fox

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT OF THE CHILD . . . by ]. PIAGET
COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY . . . by P. MASSON-OURSEL

CRIME AND CUSTOM IN SAVAGE SOCIETY by B. MALINOWSKI, D.Sc.

THEORETICAL BIOLOGY by J. VON UEXKOLL

THOUGHT AND THE BRAIN by H. PI&RON.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CHARACTER . . . by A. A. ROBACK
SOCIAL LIFE IN THE ANIMAL WORLD ... by F. ALVERDES
THE ANALYSIS OF MATTER . . by BERTRAND RUSSELL, F.R.S.
THE EFFECTS OF Music .... edited by MAX SCHOEN
SOCIAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS by TRIGANT BURROW, M D.,Ph D.

IN PREPARATION

SEX AND REPRESSION IN SAVAGE SOCIETY . by B. MALINOWSKI, r> c.

RELIGIOUS CONVERSION by S. DE SANCTIS

POLITICAL PLURALISM by KUNG-CHUAN HSIAO

DIALECTIC by M. J. ADLER

POSSIBILITY ... . by SCOTT BUCHANAN

NEUROTIC PERSONALITY . . . . by R. G. GORDON, M.D.
PROBLEMS IN PSYCHOPATHOLOGY . by T. W. MITCHELL, M.D,

THE LAWS OF FEELING by F. PAULHAN

STATISTICAL METHOD IN ECONOMICS . by P. SARGANT FLORENCE
COLOUR-HARMONY ....... by JAMES WOOD

THE INTEGRATIVE ACTION OF THE MlND . . by E. MILLER

INSECT SOCIETIES by W. M. WHEELER, Ph.D.

PSYCHOLOGY OF INSECTS by J. G. MYERS

PLATO'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE . . . by F. M. CORNFORD
THEORY OF MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS . by F. G. CROOKSHANK, M.D.

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.

LONDON

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD.

NEW YORK: HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY, INC.

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 Keview. Acknowledg-
ment is made to the Editors for permission to include
these papers in the present volume.

FRINTFD IN l.KFAT BRITAIN BY
THB EDINBURGH 1'RKSS, Q AND H YOUNu MRKET, EDINBURGH

/ am that which began ',

Out of me the years roll ;
Out of me God and man ;
/ am equal and whole ;

God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily ;
/ am the soul.

" Hertha. " SWINBURNE.

CONTENTS

PACK

PREFACE xv

INTRODUCTION I

Significance of Freud's basic conception Misconceptions
in psychoanalysis due to present personalistic basis Psycho-
analysis entails the element of personal differentiation and
sponsorship presented in other therapeutic systems Need for
abrogation of personal equation Societal concept an out-
growth 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 un-
conscious 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 methodsThe
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 domin-
ates our presumably conscious world Analysis of our

viii CONTENTS

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 bidimen-
sional 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 tri-
dimensional (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
tndimensional 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 under-
lying 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-mclusiveness of others is meaning
of unconsciousness, individual and social Present social
adaptation is merely collective response, not societal exten-
sion 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.

CONTENTS ix

CHAPTER V 78

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF UNCONSCIOUS-
NESS FROM A VIEWPOINT OF RELATIVITY

The established system demands conformity to its pre-
scribed 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 dis-
sociated personality lies only in surrender socially of bi-
dimensional or pictorial illusion in favour of tridimensional
actuality.

PART II

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

CHAPTER I 107

ANALYSIS OF. FREUD'S DYNAMIC AND INDIVID-
UALISTIC 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 conscious-
ness.

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 pro-
hibition of the parent there is the issue of personal gain or
loss (suggestion and repression) Appearance of self-conscious-
ness and self-interest forces interruption of the organism's

CONTENTS

societal life and a separation from its basic continuum Main-
tenance 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 Un-
conscious 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, cur-
rently 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 per-
sonality.

CHAPTER V ........ 165

ORGANIC ANALYSIS OF REPRESSION AND OF
THE FACTOR OF RESISTANCE FROM THE INDI-
VIDUAL VIEWPOINT

Transference is an unconscious condition which involves as
much the analyst as the analysand Resistance and re-
pression are the factors in this mutual situation Under

CONTENTS xi

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 psycho-
analysis 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.

:HAPTER 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 ot 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 vicari-
ously 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 allocentnc who makes effort at social compromise
or adaptation (" sublimation ") Both reactions equally self-
centered : autocentric (precoid, psychasthenic) showing adap-
tation 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 re-
sponse Period of Greek thought essentially allocentric ;
Christianity essentially autocentric.

xii CONTENTS

CHAPTER VIII 197

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN SEXUALITY AND
SEX IN RELATION TO UNIFICATION AND OR-
GANIC 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 " homo-
sexuality " and " heterosexuahty " 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 opportun-
ity 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.

CONTENTS xiii

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 uncon-
scious The social basis of consciousness, however in-
adequately 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 con-
clusions 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 under-
stood 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

xvi PREFACE

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 sugges-
tion in the present instance was chiefly one of amuse-
ment, 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

PREFACE xvii

wholly new vistas of experience. In the light of its dis-
covery 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 authori-
tarian 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 hence-
forth 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

xvui PREFACE

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 r61e of the patient and
the patient in the analytic r61e, 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 re-
sponsible 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 recog-
nition 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/ 1

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 realiza-
tion. But if I am loath to shift to others the responsi-
bility for my own venturesomeness, I need not forgo the
pleasure of acknowledging as I do with whole-hearted-
ness 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 psycho-
logy 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 com-
prehension 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 con-

A

2 INTRODUCTION

sciousness of man. This concept is not one that is inter-
pretable upon our accustomed individualistic basis. As
its envisagement is societal, its realization must neces-
sarily be societal also.

To-day it is not possible to contemplate the signi-
ficance 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 person-
alistically 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 authen-
ticated 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 psycho-
logy of man, it will be necessary first to establish a position

INTRODUCTION 3

that is based upon an organismic l or societal viewpoint
as contrasted with a position based upon a viewpoint that
is systematized and personal. Many years of psycho-
analytic practice have led me to the conviction that the
basis of Freud's psychology is inadequate to render com-
pletely 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 interpreta-
tions 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 per-
sonalistic 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 differ-
entiation 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 con-
comitant 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 under-
taken the investigations of which this study is in part
the outcome.

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.

4 INTRODUCTION

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 associa-
tion of conscious personalities will be unified also. The
reason why there are to-day as many systems of psycho-
analysis 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 out-
growth of that teaching. If in our widened outlook we
have outgrown the personal interpretations of psycho-
analysis, 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

INTRODUCTION 5

Freud's theory of the unconscious, our position embodies
the wider inclusion of it in what I feel is its more compre-
hensive 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 conscious-
ness 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 un-
conscious and which in our personalistic outlook we have
not yet begun to grasp. Ourselves unwitting partici-
pants 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

6 INTRODUCTION

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 pre-
possessions. As we stand amid the debris of past con-
ceptions 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 inter-
pretations 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

io PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

psychoanalysis is, in its essential significance, now gener-
ally 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 interpreta-
tion 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 mani-
fested 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 x 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

1 " The Preconscious or the Nest Instinct," a thesis presented in out-
line at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, Boston, Mass., May 25, 1917.

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND LIFE n

kept asunder through the interposition of the un-
conscious.

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 un-
related 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 satis-
faction 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 con-
scious 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 sub-
stitutions 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 pre-
sented 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

12 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 un-
conscious.

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 uncon-
scious. 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 mani-
festation 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

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND LIFE 13

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 conscious-
ness, 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 posses-
sivism 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 sub-
stitutive 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

14 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 mani-
fested throughout the social organism. Could there be
anywhere imagined an unconscious reaction more waste-
ful and destructive or one of wider scope or severer inten-
sity 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 sub-
stitution 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

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND LIFE 15

the organism's unconscious reversion upon its own
image*

Sexuality, then, is but a larger word for self. Sexuality
is the effort to limit life to the ends of personal aggrandize-
ment. It is the greed of the self-limited personality to
compass the whole, as contrasted with the societal per-
sonality 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 mani-
fested 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 uncon-
scious 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-

1 " Social Images versus Reality," The Journal of Abnormal Psy-
chology and Social Psychology, Vol. XIX, No. 3, Oct.-Dec., 1924.

16 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

acquisitiveness or sexuality and its organic incompati-
bility 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 pre-
valent 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 count-
less 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

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND LIFE 17

to be embodied in the formulated system of psycho-
analysis.

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 psycho-
analysis 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 thera-
peutic 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 communica-
tion 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. 1

1 " Our Social Evasion," Medical Journal and Record, Vol. CXXIII,
No. 12, June 16, 1926.

B

i8 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 psycho-
analysts 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 com-
mentary 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 per-
sonality 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, some-
thing felt. Life is not theoretical ; it is actual. It is

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND LIFE 19

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 understand-
ingly with the nature of the subjective as contrasted with
the objective sphere of life. We are, in fact, quite naive
in our attitude toward the whole subjective field, pre-
ferring to adopt toward it either a mood of beatific
reverence and mysticism, in which we conjure un-
warranted images of " psychic phenomena " that are
allied with man's pseudo-religious vagaries, or we adopt
a pseudo-scientific attitude which repudiates as non-
existent 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 know-
ledge 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

20 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 know-
ledge concerning and my facts, however widely accumu-
lated, 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 per-
fectly 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 know-
ledge 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

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND LIFE 21

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
undefstand that our knowledge about our feelings is but
attributive, that it brings us no nearer the feelings them-
selves ; 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 conscious-
ness 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

22 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 Under-
stood.

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 punctilious-
ness 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 suscepti-
bility 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.

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND LIFE 23

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 sophis-
ticated 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 ex-
pressed 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 unconscious-
ness and indirection within themselves, and that essen-
tially 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 ? " l 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 inter-
ested 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

1 " Giebt es vielleicht eine Frage fiir Irrenarzte Neurosen der
Gesundheit ? "Nietzsche's Werke, Erste Abt., Band I. Die Geburt
der Tragddie. Leipzig, 1903.

24 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 uncon-
sciousness.
In accordance with such a mode of consciousness each

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND LIFE 25

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 con-
cerned 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 con-
vinced that the so-called technique of psychoanalysis is
but another hobgoblin wherewith the unconscious ten-
dency 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 moie 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 con-
scious 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 experi-
ence. It is a joy or a sorrow, a disappointment or an

26 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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. 1

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 accept-
ance 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 dis-
tortions 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 con-
federacy of unconsciousness popularly endorsed as
normality.

The prime requisite for clear, free, untrammelled work
in the analysis of human personality is the unqualified

1 An instance of this inversion of natural expression is seen in the
system of technique that is the obsession par excellency of singers. In
the art of singing, as correspondingly in any art of Jife, technique is
applicable only to the theory of vocalization but not to the actuality
of spontaneous musical expression.

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND LIFE 27

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 psycho-
therapist 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 free-
dom 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 analy-
tically, 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 -limita-
tion ; as long as there is self -limitation, we are necessarily
setting a limitation to the possibility of growth and con-
sciousness in others. Only through rejecting such pro-
tection may we come to accept the testimony of the
unconscious within ourselves. Otherwise, we ourselves
become the inhibitors rather than the liberators of con-
sciousness ; 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 con-
sciousness 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.

28 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 f6r 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 psycho-
analyst. 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 understand-
ing'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 psycho-
analyst are wholly beside the point. 1 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

1 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 com-
ponent. 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.

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND LIFE 29

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 mean-
ing. 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 academic-
ally 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 import-
ance 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 under-
stood. 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 com-
munication is life, that it is the very meaning of conscious-
ness, 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 under-
stand is to be understood. Needless to say these are

30 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 communica-
tion 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 under-
standing and of growth within ourselves. Clearly, we
ourselves must realize the completely vicarious and
repressed element underlying the expression of uncon-
sciousness 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 communica-
tion. 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 con-
ditions of life as they unfold themselves in the develop-
ment of his own personality as well as in that of others.

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND LIFE 31

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 systema-
tization 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 con-
ception 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. 1

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

1 " 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. I, Jan. 1923.

38

ETHNIC ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS 33

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 astro-
nomical 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 out-
side 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. 1

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

1 It is, of course, not possible to trace through mathematical in-
tricacies 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.

C

34 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 predomi-
nantly 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 resist-

ETHNIC ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS 35

ance 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, pre-
paring 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 encom-
passment of objective mathematics. As in the intrinsic
principle of absolutism comprising the Newtonian system
of gravitation, so in the self-determined principle of

36 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 con-
sidered there is to be traced, however inconclusively,
a philosophical parallelism that is significant. 1 My feel-

1 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

ETHNIC ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS 37

ing 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

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 dis-
crepancies 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 contem-
plating the motion of planets both in the large and in the small. Con-
versely, our present Freudian theory of the unconscious takes care of
the reactions of the personality in the small or in an individual or par-
ticular 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.

38 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 under-
stood 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, sub-
sumed under the postulate of relativity, will be understood
only as we discard entirely the absolute conception repre-
sented 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

ETHNIC ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS 39

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 sub-
jective 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 per-
taining 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 uncon-
sciousness.

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 con-
sciousness 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 observa-

40 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

tions 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. Thai 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-deter-
mined centre. Whatever the point of view, it is invariably
" the point of view " of the observer. So that in consti-
tuting ourselves perceptual foci from which, according to
our self-appointed terms, we look out as from a back-
ground 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 deter-
mined 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

ETHNIC ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS 41

artificial systematization that is our own detached observa-
tion 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 experi-
ence. 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 bidi-
mensional " 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. 1

Such is the probable ethnological account of this mis-

1 This psychobiological misconception is doubtless also aided in large
measure by the physiological conditions of our visual organs of per-
ception and by the bidimensional surface upon which our impressions
of objects are received. Because of the disposition of the nerve terminals

42 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

construction of actuality that underlies our mental world.
The significance of such a pictorial and artificially fore-
shortened 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 observa-
tion is imbued with a bidimensional or superficial bias,
then our reason is also influenced by this same bidimen-
sionally imbued bias. If our observation is not subjec-
tively 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 con-
stitutes our mental systematization. In this perceptual
relationship to life, due to our detached basis of inter-
pretation of it upon grounds of the apparent aspect

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.

ETHNIC ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS 43

rather than of its solid actuality, consists the arbitrary
absolutism of our present system of consciousness. Due
to this organic misconception of consciousness, we habitu-
ally prefer the picturesque semblance of the aspect to the
pragmatic inclusiveness of the actual. This is why we
tend tb 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 homo-
geneous substrate of man's consciousness in its totality
that is implied in the principle of the relativity of con-
sciousness.

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 conscious-

44 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

ness 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 com-
prising our personal basis only in relation to the objective
world or to the world of things ; we have not yet con-
sidered 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 conscious-
ness of man, due to his bidimensional and unreal apper-
ception of his fellows, and to his consequently false infer-
ences 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 indi-
vidual 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

ETHNIC ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS 45

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 con-
straine'd 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, com-
pletely 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 interpreta-
tion 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 con-
comitant of this habitually reflective attitude toward
life there is mental dissociation rather than an assimilative
participation such as may only be realized in the inclusive-
ness of consciousness as an organic whole. Only an
organic coalescence in our common affectivity, as con-
trasted with our present attitude of detached, bidi-
mensional 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 essen-
tially 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

46 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 experi-
ence 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 con-
structions of life leave off that our constructive concep-
tions 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 systematiza-
tion. Upon this basis, what we call our opinions are,

ETHNIC ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS 47

after all, not our opinions, and our so-called beliefs are not
beliefs at all. For all our formulations and systematiza-
tions with respect to human consciousness are but ration-
alizations serving as convenient foils for the blind asser-
tion 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 estab-
lished 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 com-
plexes 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

48 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 con-
sciousness 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 col-
lective, are but relative, we fail to reckon with a signi-
ficant 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. Con-
comitantly, 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 com-
prising 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 tridi-
mensional actuality, from contemplation of aspect to

ETHNIC ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS 49

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 psycho-
logical 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 con-
currence 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 dimen-
sions. Likewise, it would seem that, in the concomitant
sphere of consciousness, an absolute basis of determina-
tion 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 restate-
ment of values in terms of a more comprehensive con-
ception.

In such an outlook the requisite readjustment is of so
wide a scope that I do not find it easy to contemplate,

OUR INDIVIDUAL UNCONSCIOUS 51

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 under-
stood, 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 sub-
jective 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 way-
faring. 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

52 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

taught the handy designations for the objects surround-
ing 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 con-
sciousness, 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 dis-
closed for the fundamental reduction of personal assess-
ments. 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 conscious-
ness 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 un-

OUR INDIVIDUAL UNCONSCIOUS 53

prepossessing 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. 1

Because of some element implicit in the behaviour
determining the " right " or " wrong " adaptation of the
individuals surrounding the child in the foimative 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 mis-
adventure. Of the inhibiting influence itself, therefore,
I am not speaking. What I have in mind is something

1 " Our Mass Neurosis," The Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 23, No. 6.
June, 1926.

54 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 con-
venience. Accordingly, the parent or guardian lays
down the proposition that a good little boy doesn't
destroy costly bric-k-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 incon-
venience or chagrin to the parent. But so sincere a
statement on the part of the parent might alienate the

OUR INDIVIDUAL UNCONSCIOUS 55

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 mysteri-
ously 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 accom-
panied 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 explana-

56 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

tion the sweeping denominator " self -consciousness. 1 '
Such an account is historic or psychological ; it is not
organic or biological. It is, I believe, only as we un-
earth the mental reaption 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. 1

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 sub-
versive 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,

1 " The Reabsorbed Affect and Its Elimination," B^sh Journal of
Medical Psychology, Vol. VI, Part 3.

OUR INDIVIDUAL UNCONSCIOUS 57

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 con-
sciousness, it may be seen that there are three deter-
minants 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 inter-
relationships 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 com-
ponents. There is first the dimension consisting of one-
self ; 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 repre-
senting 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 tridi-
mensional in its actuality as our cognitive or objective
world, statically considered, is tridimensional in its
actuality. Nevertheless, as was pointed out in the pre-
ceding chapter, our cognitive apprehension of the world
of objects about us invariably presents an outline corre-
sponding 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 invari-
ably 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

58 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

tridimensional actuality that truly comprises our affective
world. On the contrary, owing to the rebuff to spon-
taneous 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 tis, 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 deter-
minants 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

OUR INDIVIDUAL UNCONSCIOUS 59

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 one-
self 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 arti-
ficial image of life rather than life in the functional in-
clusiveness 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

6o PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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, con-
sists 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 unconscious-
ness. It is our non-inclusiveness of others that is the
systematization of each. It is this perceptual interpreta-
tion 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

OUR INDIVIDUAL UNCONSCIOUS 61

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 cosmo-
gony that is one's self-reflection of it, there is uncon-
sciously 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 absolu-
tism of its own premise, it fails to account for data
extrinsic to the static absolutism it embodies. Corre-
spondingly, 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

62 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 staild as a
universal principle whereby we may evaluate the pheno-
mena 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 un-
consciously 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 con-
tributing element. The consciousness of the isolated
individual cannot encompass consciousness in its societal
inclusiveness. Only consciousness in its societal in-
clusiveness 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 accord-
ance 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 abstrac-
tion. Our consensual normality is but the systematized
abstraction embodying the absolute of its own uncon-
scious 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

64 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

safeguarded his preservation for the moment through
recourse to " cure,' 1 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 apprehen-
siveness 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 philo-
sophy of religion on the other, in the current social
phenomenon of our widely flourishing " sciences of mental
healing " with their unescapable unconsciousness in meta-
physical 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 SOCIAL SYSTEM 65

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 repre-
sents at one and the same time both traditionally the
longest established and politically the most compact
organization of the many religious sects existing through-
out our Western civilization. The system of psycho-
analysis, representing as it does the most modern con-
ception 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 psycho-
logy 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 bidi-
mensional impasse comprised of our personal self -reflection.

Throughout the unconscious period of man's bidi-
mensional 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

E

66 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 dis-
interested 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 con-
clusion 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-deter-
mined 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 unquestion-
able 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

THE SOCIAL SYSTEM 67

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 under-
lying 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 considera-
tion. Surely in any other attitude the name of psycho-

68 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

analyst 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 system-
atization 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 un-
conscious 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 occur-
ring 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 over-
coming the intractable tendencies which, in the deter-
mination 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

THE SOCIAL SYSTEM 69

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 inevit-
able ultimatum of " inferior type of personality " and his
coincident elimination from the pale.

It is, of course, clear that the actuality of the pheno-
menon 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 specifica-
tion of the Church when it posits a doubt as the under-
lying 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 factoi 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 per-
sonality 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

70 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 systematiza-
tion 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 systematiza-
tion 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 ? *

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 applica-
tion 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.

1 " 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.

THE SOCIAL SYSTEM 71

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 reproduc-
tion.

Assuming the broader outlook of this more encom-
passing 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 socio-
logical 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

72 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

phenomenon of resistance on the one side and of the
social phenomenon of organized systematization repre-
senting 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 involve-
ment, 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 dis-
similar 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 resist-
ance 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

THE SOCIAL SYSTEM 73

our impersonal relativity comprising the generic individu-
ality of mankind. 1

But the social mind has in the last few centuries under-
gone 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 indi-
vidual's defection to-day as compared with his defection
of yesterday. In the implication of the rights of indi-
vidual freedom of thought implied in the defection of
doubt, the predominant factor was the individual's
acknowledgment of his personal remissness, of his un-
seemly 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 pro-
claims 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

1 " The Heroic Role An Historical Retrospect," Psyche, No. 25
July, 1926.

74 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 weak-
ness, 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 domina-
tion 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 psycho-
analysis when it pronounces the resistance of the indi-
vidual 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

THE SOCIAL SYSTEM 75

absolutism in the individual is necessarily but the reflec-
tion of a prior social systematization to which the indi-
vidual's adaptation is but a secondary response.

Clearly it is not possible for the socially systematized
consensus embodied in Church, State or psycho thera-
peutic' system to afford the requisite condition of release
from a resistance thus constituted, when its own systema-
tization 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-systema-
tization, 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. Need-
less 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 con-
ception whereof this essay offers the organismic inter-
pretation.

It is, however, only in the measure in which this less

76 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

personal mode of approach becomes actual for me that
my work with others grows in significance and in con-
structiveness 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 substi-
tution 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 prero-
gative embodied in a resistance has its expression in the
single individual or in the collection of individuals com-
prising 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 SOCIAL SYSTEM 77

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 uncon-
sciousness, 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 UNCONSCIOUS-
NESS 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 un-
doubtedly 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. Auto-
matic 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 con-
sciousness in its organismic significance.

In the light of this ulterior motive of good or bad of

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 79

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 " our-
selves " 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 pre-
perceptions. We do not verify feeling through senses that
are native to us, we imitate feeling by means of impres-
sions 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

8o PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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. 1

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 dis-
parity 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-inclusive-
ness 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

1 Needless to say the distinction here made between " actual " and
" real " is used very specifically.

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 81

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 com-
ponents 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,

82 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 dis-
tortion 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 uncon-

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 83

scious everywhere about us. Here we find the psycho-
logical 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 bidi-
mensional 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 per-
sonal 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 ques-
tion 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 com-
petition, 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

84 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 " Tightness " is not
the natural result of our logic but our logic is the enforced
result of our " Tightness." 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 signi-
ficant commentary upon our so-called adult social con-
sciousness. 1

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 implica-
tions 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 depend-
ing upon our getting and not getting what we want.

The element of failure in Christianity is the element of

1 " Insanity a Social Problem," The American Journal of Sociology t
Vol. XXXII, No. I, Part I, July, 1926.

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 85

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
familialr 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 under-
lying 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 every-
where 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

86 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 con-
clusion 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 prece-
dent 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 conceal-
ment of his equally secret self-interest in her it is as
intolerable to him to have the secret of his illusion dis-
turbed 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 bilater-

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 87

ally 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 experi-
ence 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 surround-
ings which one's life may by participation fill and render
beautiful. For art as image is the porfrayal 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 no-
where a happier vehicle than in the mechanical bidi-
mension 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

88 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 naive sequences
standing for plot as represented in the bidimerision 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 dis-
torted. 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 neces-
sarily pictorial and unreal. So that in our presumable

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 89

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 partici-
pation 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 com-
prising 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 re-
action 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

90 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

(inverse cognition and inverse affect) are the very tissue
of our personalistic consciousness, we may begin to under-
stand 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 alter-
nations 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

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 91

unhappy one. This accounts for our artificial dependence
upon the social give-and-take with which we hedge our-
selves 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 charac-
teristic 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 intrinsi-
cally 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 etymo-
logical 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 unescap-
able 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

92 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 embody-
ing 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 r61e 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 imputa-
tion the ultra-liberal, the prohibitionists are by imputa-
tion 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 arti-
ficial. 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

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 93

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. Appar-
ently it is not realized that this element of the preparatory
or ulterior is the criterion also of the teachers, being like-
wise 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 educa-
tional 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 aesthetic, 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 spon-
taneous 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-k-vis unconscious self -reflection is at flood-
tide. This is why, in the opposite extensions of the
conjugal conflict, there are presented concomitantly in

94 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 psychas-
thenic and hysterical extremes, as well as the contrasts of
homosexuality and paranoia. Where such reciprocal
conditions exist, the opposite r6les 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 extra-
vagances of self-adornment worn by a narcistically in-
verted wife, the satisfactions of an unconscious exhibi-
tionism. 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 nor-
mally as well as neurotically, socially as well as individu-
ally. 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 antag-
onistic only in the degree in which they correspond or
fail to correspond with our personally preconceived

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 95

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 con-
veying 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. 1 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 mis-
fortune we feel, by contrast, or in a comparative count so
much more fortunate than he. It is again but the pro-

1 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 dis-
appointed 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 dis-
appointment 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 un-
expected shift of affect due to the sudden alternation of the personal
motive through the reversal of the bidimensional vantage.

96 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

jection 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 alterna-
tion 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 bidi-
mensional 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 rela-

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 97

tivity ; 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 proteges 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,

9 8 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

while the behaviourists as ardently doubt whether intro-
spective 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 un-
doubted authenticity of sources confirmatory of the

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 99

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 incon-
trovertible " proof " leaves likewise no room for doubt.
In both instances, however, the proofs of each are accept-
able 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 intel-
lectualizations. 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 pre-
possessions, 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 conscious-
ness there has arisen the widely inclusive and impersonal
field of preventive medicine with its essential preoccupa-
tion 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

ioo PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 indi-
vidual. In Panama, for example, where, through a far-
reaching programme of civic hygiene, the malaria-breed-
ing 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 straight-
way menace the illusion of his personal prerogative and
rob him of what is now for him the basis of all his experi-
ence and the sum of his personality. He does not see
that his " experience," by reason of its inverted absolu-
tism, 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

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 101

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 suc-
ceeded 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 bidi-
mensional absolute which has its existence in the indi-
vidual 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 psycho-
analysis, 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 repre-
sented in the social anomaly of the neurosis. Being our-
selves unconsciously involved in the social neurosis about
us, we have been urged forward through an unconscious

102 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

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 inter-
related elements in our common social consciousness.

With each of us, the real motive has been the uncon-
scious 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/ 1 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 inevit-
able " 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
" Tightness " 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

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 103

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 unspon-
sored 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 be-
neath 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 indi-
vidual, 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, sub-
limative, or en rdgle.

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 bidi-
mensional or pictorially constellated scheme of conscious-
ness, namely, a policy in which the reaction of the indi-
vidual can only be in the direction of the reverse or

104 PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

opposite extension. Hence, however personally displeas-
ing to us, there is the need that we who are psychoanalysts
somehow recognize that we, also, are unconsciously sub-
ordinated 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 domina-
tion 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 bidi-
mensional 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 per-
sonality, single and social, neurotic and normal, a readjust-
ment 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 une-
quivocal 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 INDI-
VIDUALISTIC 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 com-
prising 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 psychopatho-
logist is constantly engaged in efforts to restore the dis-
torted 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 pre-
occupied 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

io8 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 psycho-
pathologist 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 par-
alysis, 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. View-
ing 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 pre-
siding 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 trans-
position 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

FREUD'S CONCEPTION OF NEUROSES 109

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 con-
sciousness. I believe that the many inconsistencies and
half-baked deductions of psychoanalysis, with the con-
sequent deadlock to a truly comprehensive interpreta-
tion 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 bio-
logically tenable only from the point of view of an in-
clusive 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 out-
growth of personal inclination and tradition uncon-
sciously 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 trans-
position 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-govern-
ing 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

no PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 com-
pletely unnoticed, due to our own unconscious embroil-
ment within the limitations of our circumscribed indi-
vidual 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

FREUD'S CONCEPTION OF NEUROSES in

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 pre-
ference (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. Uncon-
sciousness cannot compass unconsciousness. The wish
cannot assail the wish. In our present mode of personal-
ism 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 conven-
tional 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

H2 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 nai'vet6, and, with a
complacency that is no less naive, 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 " lightness." 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 obfus-
cating 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. 1

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 bitter-
ness when others would gainsay us. It is so with us all.

1 " Psychoanalytic Improvisations and the Personal Equation,"
The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. XIII, No. 2, April, 1926.

FREUD'S CONCEPTION OF NEUROSES 113

It is the morbid compulsion of self-vindication that
underlies all " lightness." 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
" Tightness " of each is the wish of each and the wish is
father to the dream !

H

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 founda-
tion. 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 obliga-
tions 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, un-

ORGANIC BASIS OF INTERPRETATION 115

sophisticated 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 unconscious-
ness is our habitual mode and so allow it to cease auto-
matically 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, undifferen-
tiated, 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

n6 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 exploita-
tion 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. 1 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 con-
fluence 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 pro-
gramme 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 adjust-
ment to the ends of self-interest is demanded. Every-
thing 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.

1 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.

ORGANIC BASIS OF INTERPRETATION 117

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 per-
sonality, 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 repre-
sented alone in the preservation throughout the growth
of the individual element of its primary organic con-
fluence.

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 organ-
ization 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 conclusive-
ness of a merely dynamic or individualistic interpretation.
Our approach must needs be genetic in its scope. We

n8 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 thought-
ful 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 wonder-
ment 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

ORGANIC BASIS OF INTERPRETATION 119

turn where he would, the organic hiatus had now been
made and its inexorable breach yawned wide and in-
evitable before him. Unable as yet to endure the con-
templation 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 develop-
ment, comprised of these two contending issues and
entailing the irreconcilable conflict of which each indi-
vidual's experience is a recapitulation, that is the phylo-
geny 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 ontogenctically, the development of
consciousness, contrary to accepted tenets, has by no
means proceeded upon a fluent and harmonious course. 1
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

1 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 dis-
tinction between the restricted individualistic interpretation on the one
hand and the organismic interpretation on the other.

120 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 develop-
mental 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

ORGANIC BASIS OF INTERPRETATION 121

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 discon-
tinuity, man fell a victim to a trick of his own conscious-
ness, and, from implications of disparity in the sphere of
his peripheral contacts, he erroneously inferred differen-
tiations 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 employ-
ment 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 col-
lective mind, as it is the biological basis of the displace-
ments 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 objec-
tive judgment rests upon a complete subjective mis-

122 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

conception. 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 under-
standing, 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 etymo-
logical evidences betray the organic intolerance of differ-
entiation within the sphere of the subjective life. How-
ever 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 demar-

ORGANIC BASIS OF INTERPRETATION 123

cations there is the persistent assertion of an underlying
principle of unification and continuity. In our own
customary dissociated feeling we lose sight of this com-
pletely, 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 them-
selves inflicting punishment upon the object in question. 1

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. 2 Indeed, this
misconception is responsible for many of the inadver-
tencies 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

1 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.

2 " The Need of an Analytic Psychiatry," The American Journal of
Psychiatry, Vol. VI, No. 3, January, 1927.

124 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

psychiatrist is asked what is dementia praecox, 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 praecox. 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 dis-
orders, the psychiatrist does not recognize that a sub-
jective 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 ration-
alization a symbolic picture presented in lieu of the
corresponding affect denied. It is this type of " reason-
ing " that is responsible for the tendency one sees every-
where within philosophical circles to make dark the
things that are clear. Descartes' dictum, " I think, there-
fore I am/' is the keynote to this cognitive fallacy.
The tendency, as I said, even of us who are psycho-

ORGANIC BASIS OF INTERPRETATION 125

pathologists 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 under-
lying fallacy of reference that is habitual to unconscious-
ness 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 replace-
ment 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 col-
lective 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 founda-
tion of the social as of the individual neurosis.

The situation with us is indeed a serious one. Except

126 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 contempla-
tion 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 blind-
ness of the retroactive self-defence to which his erron-
eously 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 pre-
ferential 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 inten-
tionally 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. Discon-
tinuity 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 dis-
sociated 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.

ORGANIC BASIS OF INTERPRETATION 127

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 com-
prising 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-pre-
servation 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-main-
tenance to a degree that renders individual life insigni-
ficant 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. 1 Nor is it confined to these more

1 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 Zurich.
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

128 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 sym-
pathetic 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 dis-
crimination 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

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.

ORGANIC BASIS OF INTERPRETATION 129

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, individ-
ualistic 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 con-
tinuity 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
un 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

I

130 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 under-
lies and actuates it. We do not realize that the settle-
ment of war is properly the concern not of politics but of
psychiatry. Here, as elsewhere, we shrink from un-
earthing 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 fa9ade
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 uncon-
scious 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

ORGANIC BASIS OF INTERPRETATION 131

deeply rooted in the psychopathology of man's societal
disunity. While not questioning the outstanding objec-
tive 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.

132 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 dis-
affection, 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

ORGANIC BASIS OF INTERPRETATION 133

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 com-
pensatory 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 undepend-
able. 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 under-
lying its cherished superstitions and " beliefs/' and
explains the whole meaning of the man-made immanence
represented in the vicariously projected image of invincible

184

SIGNIFICANCE OF UNCONSCIOUS 135

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 substi-
tution 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 " dis-
belief." 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 sub-
stituted 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 study-
ing the phylogenetic account of our inherent mental
descent in the spirit of objective disinterestedness. For,

136 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 dis-
guised under our personal interpretation of God. Restor-
ing 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 aberra-
tion 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 Praecox. 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 Praecox/' the disease, is but the
symbolic projection of dementia praecox, the actuality,
ever resident in our generic unconsciousness. As it is
the primary state of the infant psyche, its rudiment is

SIGNIFICANCE OF UNCONSCIOUS 137

preserved in the unconscious of us all. 1 The under-
standing 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 per-
petuate this regressive trend under its present symbolic
guise. Theoretical substitution is the big-stick of nor-
mality 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 praecox 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 praecox, 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 praecox but psychiatry. When the
psychiatrist will have come to understand dementia
praecox or the preconscious within himself, this objective
figment of his own disordered consciousness will spon-
taneously 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

1 " Character and the Neuroses," The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. I,
No. 2, February, 1914.

138 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 un-
conscious self-worship shifted from the broken image of
" God " to a merely re varnished 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 fabrica-
tions of our collective unconscious. 1 But in the image

1 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,

SIGNIFICANCE OF UNCONSCIOUS 139

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 dis-
sociatively. In its repudiation of reality it resorts per-
force 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. 1 The objects of

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.

1 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 sub-
stantiation for Nietzsche's conception. Whereas the " metaphysical
unity " of the religionists is, on the contrary, a wholly mystical con-
ception. 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 intel-
lectual, 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 " hyper-
sensitive 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,

140 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 super-
lative 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 mil-
lennium. 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

to refer to those investigations as mystical. I am inclined to feel some-
what 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 i,
page 10.)

SIGNIFICANCE OF UNCONSCIOUS 141

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. 11 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, transcen-
dental 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 respec-
tively 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 habitations 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 "

142 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 con-
sensual mind. So that, whether the impetus be the
factor of suggestion or of repression, whether it be offered
in the positive inducements to " good lf 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 in-
fluence 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 separa-
tive in its effect. For its self-reflective tendency neces-
sarily induces in us the inversion of self-worship. Again
it is the discontinuity of the dissociative self in the separa-
tism 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 assump-
tions 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

SIGNIFICANCE OF UNCONSCIOUS 143

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 uncon-
sciousness, 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 pre-
occupation 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 con-
fluence 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

144 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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, undifferen-
tiated 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

SIGNIFICANCE OF UNCONSCIOUS 145

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 conscious-
ness 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 spon-
taneous 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

K

146 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 know-
ledge 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 lias 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 state-
ment 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. 1

1 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 attri-
bute 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.

SIGNIFICANCE OF UNCONSCIOUS 147

If we have become aware of ourselves and of our un-
protectedness, 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 feel-
ings 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. Psychic-
ally 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 un-
welcome 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 -con-
sciousness 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

148 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 com-
pass 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 dis-
sociation 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 physio-

SIGNIFICANCE OF UNCONSCIOUS 149

logical 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. 1

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 pro-
duced the condition of disharmony or disease represented
by a state of inflammation, there inevitably occurs some
partition, some breach in or interruption of their con-
certed 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 sub-
jectively 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

1 The biological (organic) continuity between the societal or psycho-
logical 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 i.

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."

150 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 inflam-
mation 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 com-
prising the societal aggregate whereof he, as an individual,
is the contributive clement 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 cir-
cumscribed area of inflammation.

It is essential to bear in mind that the organic pathology
of this biological lesion or separation that is the indi-
vidual'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 in-
herently the whole, his conflict is one that is concomitantly
individual and societal, for the individual and the societal
factors are organically inseparable.

SIGNIFICANCE OF UNCONSCIOUS 151

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 develop-
ment of the individual but also the corresponding charac-
ters 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 indi-
vidual 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 expres-
sion 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 dissocia-
tion 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 indi-
vidual 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

152 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 threaten-
ing 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 uncon-
sciously 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 uncon-
sciousness 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 separate-
ness and prolong to a fatal issue the destructive process in
the individual.

It is characteristic of separateness that it fights desper-
ately 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

SIGNIFICANCE OF UNCONSCIOUS 153

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 un-
consciousness, in the second he is the integration that is
his own confluence and consciousness. It is this con-
structive aspect of the neuroses of which we have not
yet taken account and of which we may take due cog-
nizance only upon the basis of a wider, organismic inter-
pretation 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 indi-
vidual organism to obstruct the function of the societal
organism as a whole, that is the significance of an organ-
ismic 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 con-
fronted in the very inception of his work was the element
of repression and its concomitant reflection in the objec-
tive 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 individual-
ity, 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

FACTOR OF RESISTANCE SOCIAL 155

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 responsi-
bility 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 formula-
tion of life can function as life. It is only life itself in its
organic confluence that may abrogate the scparateness
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 separa-
tively, 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 recon-
cilement must take place also within the individual.

156 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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. Natur-
ally, 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 dis-
sociative mode. Precluding within himself a participa-
tion 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 uncon-
scious 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 l in the view of the present inter-
pretation) 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

1 The Southern negro has a definition of libido that is biologically truer
than that of either Freud, Jung or Claparede. He refers to inadequacy
of the sexual life as a lack of " ambition."

FACTOR OF RESISTANCE SOCIAL 157

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 organic-
ally confluent and unitary. 1

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

1 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.)

158 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 (un-
consciousness), repression with its actuation in the alter-
native 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 rationaliza-
tions 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

FACTOR OF RESISTANCE SOCIAL 159

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 regula-
tion a system either of sexology or of theology. Con-
comitantly, 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 ! l

Approaching the problem of the neurosis anew from
the vantage coign of a more inclusive, integral back-
ground, 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 conscious-
ness, as an entity distinct from that of the separative
individual unit with its basis in our dissociated uncon-
scious. 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

1 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.

160 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 un-
differentiated mental tissue of our common species,
knitting its contributing elements into a unitary, homo-
geneous organism. 1 We need to form a clearer image of
the uniform, co-ordinated one-mindedness of this primor-
dial, " 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 con-
sider 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. 2

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 psycho-
biological 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 subse-
quently entailed man's earliest reckonings with the

1 " An Ethnic Aspect of Consciousness," The Sociological Review t
Vol. XIX, No. i, January, 1927.

a If, in the flash of so brief an interval of time (speaking ethno-
logically) 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.

FACTOR OF RESISTANCE SOCIAL 161

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 imman-
ence 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 pro-
ject 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 realiza-
tion 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.

L

162 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 con-
solidated 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/ 1 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 pro-
hibition operating upon the discrete element or individual
as a response to popular covenant, and the societal pro-
hibition that operates within the confluent aggregate and
is coincident with our organic separation from man's

FACTOR OF RESISTANCE SOCIAL 163

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 sub-
jective 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,

164 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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,

165

166 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 con-
sciousness 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 involve-
ment 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 im-
placable 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,

FACTOR OF RESISTANCE INDIVIDUAL 167

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 trans-
ference " ! 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, any-
thing ! 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.

168 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

In a list of precepts for psychoanalysts (" precepts "
for the elimination of repressions scarcely requires
comment !) there is offered this naive 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/ 1 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. 1 But " who
decries the loved decries the lover." In the true sense
in the sense of our organic life there is no other fellow.

1 A striking instance of psychoanalytic unconsciousness may be seen
in the analyst's quite naive 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 psycho-
analyst 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.

FACTOR OF RESISTANCE INDIVIDUAL 169

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 conse-
quence, 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

170 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 con-
sciousness 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 inter-
views 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 un-
consciously displeased at his withholding it. In other
words, the attitude of the analyst is not uninfluenced by
personal or egoistic predilection. 1 Here, then, is straight-

1 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

FACTOR OF RESISTANCE INDIVIDUAL 171

way 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 uncon-
sciousness. 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 uncon-
sciously 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 un-
consciousness within ourselves makes it easier for us to

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 I 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.

172 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

condone the personalism or unconsciousness in another,
rather than understand it. Because of the greater
significance to us of our own personal grievance as com-
pared 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 dis-
sociated attitude of analyst toward analysand, that there
stands the inevitable impasse to the personal or in-
dividualistic analysis of Freud. Here is the futile revolu-
tion 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

FACTOR OF RESISTANCE INDIVIDUAL 173

the artificial image of the parent 1 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 conscious-
ness and the sole meaning of " unconsciousness/ 1

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 diver-
sifications 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 uncon-
scious 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 individual-
istic 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 synony-
mous 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
1 See note i, page 15.

174 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 psycho-
logical 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 defense 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 psycho-
analysis 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

FACTOR OF RESISTANCE INDIVIDUAL 175

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 second-
ary 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 psycho-
biology 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 naive 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

176 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

exists in its securest, most widespread and most aggressive
form, that is, in the socially systematized delusion com-
prising 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 unaware-
ness ? 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 con-
trasting factors of a subject looking upon and an object
looked upon. If normality is mere collective unconscious-
ness and therefore itself an artificially induced neurosis
if it is a condition of unconsciousness produced through
the influence of external suggestion and therefore re-
presents 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/ 1

CHAPTER VI

THE DREAM AND ITS ANALYSIS IN AN ORGAN-
ISMIC INTERPRETATION OF THE NEUROSES

THE dream of the individual together with the individual-
istic 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

177 M

178 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 separa-
tive. 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 conserva-
tion 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 con-
stitutive 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. 1

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
1 See note i, page 56.

THE DREAM AND ITS ANALYSIS 179

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 indivi-
dualistic, " 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/ 1 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 accen-
tuating 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 con-
ciliatory process at work. 1 After all, diplomacy and lying

1 See note i, page 10,

i8o PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 parti-
cipation, 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 corre-
sponding 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 harmoni-
ous imagery the quiet process of the day's constructive-
ness. 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,

THE DREAM AND ITS ANALYSIS 181

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 formula-
tion. 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 intel-
lectualism 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 sub-
stitution 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

182 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 under-
lying motive in the light of conscious perspectives, to
unravel its meaning through carefully retracing dis-

THE DREAM AND ITS ANALYSIS 183

coverable 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 unconscious-
ness are separable from the present confusion that exists
between the objective and the subjective spheres of con-
sciousness. Because of this confusion, in our dissociation
we take pleasure in participating in the dramatic re-
presentation 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 sur-
rounded 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-

184 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

conscious formulation of the occasion of his confusion, we
deem ourselves less unconscious than he.

As it is the especial metier 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
manoeuvre 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 stand-
point 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

THE DREAM AND ITS ANALYSIS 185

unconsciousness, personal preference within personal
preference, unconsciousness unconscious that is the
baffling complicity in our self -dissociation.

This self-involvement of the neurosis, this unconscious-
ness 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 pre-
sumption of his self-determined hypothesis of good and
bad, of hope and fear, the individual is assuming uncon-
sciously 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 dis-
harmony of consciousness there is presented a trend that
is wholly unacceptable to the symbolic or absolute

186 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

logician ; but, on the other hand, the objective statements
of the absolute logician are with equal validity unaccept-
able 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 confrere of the opposite type ! As if the
affable, effervescent type were not as truly " shut-out "
as his psychological vis-k-vis is " shut-in " 1 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

187

i88 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 uncon-
ditional 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 hypo-
thetical status. Such is the autocentric individual. This
personality is the subsequent precoid, if in his with-
drawal he does not even so much as pretend acknowledg-
ment 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 cos-
mogony.

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, " con-
stitutional " 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 in-
stinctive 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

THE BIOLOGICAL SUBSTRATE 189

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 com-
munism 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 x 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

1 See note i, page 10,

igo PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 vaso-
motor 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 auto-
matically impaired, and there could no longer be the
smooth, uninterrupted confluence of function that origi-
nally 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.

THE BIOLOGICAL SUBSTRATE 191

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 ex-
pressions to be seen, for example, in our religious hob-
nobbings, 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 infringe-
ment 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

192 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 1

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.

THE BIOLOGICAL SUBSTRATE 193

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 re-
action, 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 con-
fluence 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 " con-
ceived 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 psych-
asthenic 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,

N

194 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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. 1

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 rhetoric-
ally 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. 2

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

1 Perhaps this distinction of type has its societal counterpart also
in the opposite psychological reactions embodied in the esoteric ten-
dencies 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.

a 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.

THE BIOLOGICAL SUBSTRATE 195

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 praecox 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 per-
sonality 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 psycho-
analyst realize, on the one hand, the peripherally deter-
mined 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

196 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 psycho-
analysis.

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 ex-
emplified in his basic theory of psychic ambivalence,
would seem to denote some inadvertence in racial percep-
tion. 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 uncon-
sciously 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 un-
conscious 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. Un-
conscious 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

198 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

tested summation of views such as are suited to serve as
an ultimate interpretation of human consciousness. 1

There is a characterological aspect of human conscious-
ness 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 con-
noted under the terms homosexuality and hetero-
sexuality. From an organismic viewpoint the alter-
natives presupposed in such a distinction are traceable
alone to the unconscious ambivalence within the psycho-
analytic system itself. From an inclusive position it will
be seen that in the systematization underlying the con-
trasting concepts homo- and heterosexuality, the psycho-
analyst 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 flatter-
ing 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

1 " Psychiatry as an Objective Science," British Journal of Medical
Psychology, Vol. V, Part 4.

SEXUALITY AND SEX 199

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 accord-
ingly 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 (con-
sensual 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 con-
sciousness is organically as impossible as is the adapta-
tion 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

200 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 arbi-
trary 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 acquis-
itiveness 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 homo-
sexuality. 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

SEXUALITY AND SEX 201

to the consensual suggestion, in the second it is presented
in the form that is his response to the consensual re-
pression. 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 interrelation-
ship 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 what-
ever, 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 homo-
sexuality 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,

202 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

then, to what I feel will afford a clearer and more en-
compassing 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 autoscxuality 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. 1

1 Narcism (homo -erotism) is a reversion of interest representing a
sexual reaction to the pictorial affect or to the personal image. Auto-
erotism (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

SEXUALITY AND SEX 203

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 attach-
ments 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 ex-
pression 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-scxually 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-
efferent interests. This occurs in the individual inversion expressed
in the sensory images of dementia praecox. 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.

204 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

reaction of the social mind represented in the custom of
marriage, if clearly confronted, reveals throughout the
umistakable 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 home-
making of each of us there is but the unconscious trans-
mission of the marriage and home of our parents. 1 For

1 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

SEXUALITY AND SEX 205

as the child is nurtured amid a codified system of opinion-
ativeness, 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 sub-
stituted 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 attri-
tions 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 ex-
pressed 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

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."

206 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 circum-
stance, 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 ol
society's arrested growth marriage is not the outcome oi
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

SEXUALITY AND SEX 207

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 un-
consciously 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 para-
mount 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 accommoda-
tions generally characterizing the marriage relationship,
there is ample evidence of the completely infantile, un-
developed, 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 correspond-
ingly 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

208 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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. 1
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 psycho-
analytic meeting several years ago 2 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

1 The word like is from Anglo-Saxon gehc, compounded of ge, meaning
together, and he, meaning body.

* " Convention in Psychoanalysis and Its Interpretative Inhibitions/*
a paper read at the Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Psycho-
analytic Association, Atlantic City, May 10, 1918.

SEXUALITY AND SEX 209

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 circum-
stance 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 un-
consciously 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 in-
herent 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.

O

2io PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

His autosexuality is but symbolic. It is a disposition
the essence of which is what I have elsewhere called
" homophyllic "* and the organic culmination of which
can be realized only in the unification of the comple-
mentary systems embodied in a corresponding mono-
phyllic 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 " hetero-
sexuality." I was too theoretical, habituative, academic,
too limited in the freedom of unsystcmatized 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 confreres, it was my habit to refer the question of
health or disorder of adaptation to the artificial distinc-
tion between heterosexuality and " unconscious homo-
sexuality " 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

1 See note 2, page 208.

SEXUALITY AND SEX 211

instinct of sex on the one hand and the introversions of
sexuality on the other. 1

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 dclusionally systematized auto-
sexuality (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 (allo-
sexuality). In the self -lusts (autosexuality) of the male,

1 In a recent meeting of psychopathologists a paper was presented
which described the results of a questionnaire that had been dis-
tributed 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 icstncted 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 sub-
stitutions of heterosexuahty as commonly practised, for example, in
houses of prostitution. Yet these latter expressions were avowedly
regarded as real expressions of heterosexuahty and, accordingly, its
devotees were naively interpreted as presenting a psychological adapta-
tion which showed a frank contrast to that of their " homosexual "
confreres ! 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.

212 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

his objective is the body of the female with her auto-
sexuality 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 per-
sonalities 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 re-
pression from without, and in the re-uniting of these artifi-
cially 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 r61e 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 under-
stood 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 person-
ality 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,

SEXUALITY AND SEX 213

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
r61e. In general the societal or peripheral r6le and the
visceral or central r61e would seem analogous to the
respective r61es 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 re-
productive 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 psycho-
sexual 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

214 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 auto-
sexuality represented in an objective likeness or bodily
identification there is but the short-circuiting of a true
organic unification. Where it has occurred in person-
alities 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

SEXUALITY AND SEX 215

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 auto-
sexuality, 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 sexo-
logical 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

216 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 r6le 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/ 1 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.

SEXUALITY AND SEX 217

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 develop-
ment within the organism that the result is the ex-
aggerated 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 person-
ality 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

218 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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. 1 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 diver-
sifications 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

1 " The Genesis and Meaning of ' Homosexuality ' " a development
of the principle of identification or the primary subjective phase of con-
sciousness. See The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. IV, No. 3, July, 1917.

SEXUALITY AND SEX 219

of his genius. This composite quality of the sex life
explains the gentler intuitions we often find in the per-
sonality 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 per-
sonality 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 docs 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 com-
posite 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 tfie 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-

220 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

realization in a unification which, being organic, is all-
inclusive. 1

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 intussuscep-
tion.

1 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.

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 unconscious-
ness, 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 encompass-
ment.

Man, in his unconsciousness, stands ever by himself and
for himself. In the separateness of his personal resist-
ances toward the societal organism as a whole, the in-
dividual 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 person-
ality. 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

222 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 con-
dition of life for which we feel a universal need of con-
cealment. 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 per-
sonality, 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 con-
sensus begotten of fear is an organically spurious con-
sensus. 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 un-
conscious 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

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS SOCIAL 223

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. No-
where 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 formula-
tions regarding delusions of persecution, but none what-
ever 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

224 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 ulti-
mately 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 re-
sentment, 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

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS SOCIAL 225

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 re-
solution. 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

P

226 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 back-
ground 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 con-
ception 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,* 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 un-
expected 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 adjust-
ment 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

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

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS SOCIAL 227

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. 1

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
1 See note i, page 53.

228 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 ac-
cordingly 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 un-
conscious. 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 am-
bivalent 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, btft love contains in itself an
ambivalent motive, and hate contains in itself a motive
that is equally ambivalent. And so, to whatever sub-
jective determinant we may turn, there is inevitably this
inseparable element of contrast due to our own sub-
jectively bidimensional basis.

As regards the neurosis of the individual, we have
learned through Freud that an unconscious system of

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS SOCIAL 229

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 con-
sciousness as a whole is the primary and essential disorder
of which the individual manifestation is but a subsequent
and secondary symptom. 1

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 psycho-
analysts 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 environ-
ment generally he must come into a responsibility to-
ward 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 psycho-
analytic programme have adhered to with strict conformity.
But it is clear that the analyst becomes automatically the

1 See note i, page 15.

230 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 in-
definite term.

To offset this embarrassment recourse is now had
to a procedure whereby the analysis is brought to a con-
clusion at a certain definitely assigned period a period
to be determined by the analyst according to the circum-
stances 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. 1 In my view, this proposal

1 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

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS SOCIAL 231

of psychoanalysts themselves that we no longer assume
a policy of non-interference but that we offer instead
the arbitrary suggestion of spontaneous " cure/ 1 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 psycho-
analysis 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

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.

232 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

indefinite continuation of the analysis on the part of the
patient, no matter what he m^y 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 de-
tain 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 un-
doubtedly 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 per-
emptorily 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 psycho-
logical premises the premises, namely, that the analysis
consists in the fanciful reproduction of the birth ex-
perience, that the trauma in which the birth culminates

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS SOCIAL 233

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.

234 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 whomso-
ever 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. Clinic-
ally, it is the secrecy of unconsciousness that is the back-
bone 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 pro-
tection in the alternative of family union which they
contrived to secure among themselves, and uncon-
sciously assumed collectively that I, as the analyst, could
be arbitrarily delegated by them to the role of pater-
mater nosier ! 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

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS SOCIAL 235

attached or dependent upon the parent and that con-
comitantly there is mora 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 per-
sonal 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 equaliza-
tion 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 symbolic-
ally, 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

236 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

alternative that exactly parallels the division or alterna-
tive 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 com-
ponents 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 in-
dividual 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. 1

As we first learned from Freud and as has been cor-
roborated 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 satis-

1 " 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.

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS SOCIAL 237

faction 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 repro-
duction has been overburdened and inflated out of all
proportion to its primary significance. While, as a con-
sonant 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 re-
productive 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. 1

1 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 in-
dividuals. 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.

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 re-
actions. 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 be-
haviourism. 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 uncon-
scious 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

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS PERSONAL 239

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 legisla-
tion, 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

240 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 com-
prises 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 uncon-
sciously 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

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS-PERSONAL 241

division within ourselves, and the real impasse as always
is the self-image embodied 3 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 per-
sonalism. There is need to withdraw from our accustomed
observations and to include within ourselves the dis-
sociation 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

Q

242 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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. 1
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 pro-
position 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 differentia-
tion 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 indi-
vidual 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 con-
fess, a theory with me and, like all such substitutive re-

1 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.

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS PERSONAL 243

placements, the theory held for me only an unconscious
or symbolic significance. There was lacking in myself the
jrecognition 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 re-
cognition 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 " un-
derstanding " 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

244 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

" 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 mistaken-
ness and of his growing responsibility toward this mis-
takenness 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 unconscious-
ness 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 sweep-
ing and unwelcome an indictment as that which lays to
the door of normality in the large the imputation of auto-
sexuality 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

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS PERSONAL 245

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 on-
togenetic 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 state-
ment would be nothing other than the hesitation to affirm
my real conviction and so retain the servility and intro-
version 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 uncon-
scious 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 with-
holding not the statement but myself. It would represent
my preference (as always it is my preference uncon-
sciously) 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

246 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 op-
portunity 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

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS PERSONAL 247

that is essentially subjective. 1 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 formula-
tions) 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 technic-
ally 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 pre-
sentation 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 involve-
ment 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

1 " 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.

248 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 formu-
lations that have resulted from the conceptions of Freud,
would be to waive acknowledgment of the very determin-
ants 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 con-
sciousness of man, the springs of all creative genius are to
be traced to this common source. This organic con-
sanguinity 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 re-
striction 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 un-
alterable 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

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS PERSONAL 249

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 sub-
stitutive 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

250 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

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 achieve-
ment 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 re-
solutely 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 un-
beholden 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.

RESOLUTION OF NEUROSIS PERSONAL 251

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 unifica-
tion 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, 9 6 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 confplex," 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, n6, 123,
132, 145, 213
Christ, 218

Christianity, 85, 193, 196
Church

as social systematization, 65-75
Clapardde, 156
Collective unconscious

see Social unconscious
Complexes, 47, 72
Compulsion neurosis, 81
Consciousness

absolutism of present system, 43,

44

as unconsciousness, 24, no, in,
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-con-
sciousness ; Societal concept
of consciousness

Darwin, 249

Dementia praecox, 124, 136, 137,

195, 203

Depression, 91, 94
Descartes, 124

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

254

INDEX

Dissociation

individual and social, 45-47, 76,
109, no, 132, 144, 148-153,
*55 r 76, 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, i, 4, 5, 9, 14, 38, 47, 101, 108,

109, no, in, 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, 1191

social, 1 6

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, -2 34

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

INDEX

255

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

38

Nietzsche, 23, 139, 218, 247
Normality

and personal absolute, 47, 63
and sexuality, 173, 203, 209, 244
as criterion, n, 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, l6 7 X 7 6 * J 7 8
Organismic
definition, 3

see also Societal concept of con-
sciousness

Paranoia
and homosexuality, 174, 175

Paranoiac, 94, 97, 143, 199

Personal absolute, 102, 103
and war, 83

as resistance, 6r, 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

Psychas theme, 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,
no, in, 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, 5L 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* J 62, 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. ?6, 152, 154. !55

Schreiner, Olive, 218
Self

and sexuality, 15, 173, 200, 201,

210, 211

image of, 16, 58-61, 79, 82, 83, 141
preservation and race-preserva-
tion, 127
Self -consciousness, 116, 118-120,

125, 132, 147, 161, 162,205
Sex

and sexuality, n, 156-159, 163,

193, 200-217, 237
as organic unity, n, 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

256

INDEX

Social neurosis, 101, 125, 130-133, Suggestion

162, 245 see Repression

and images, 229 Sympathetic nervous system, 189-

individual implication, 84, 246 192, 194
Social unconscious, 117, 133, 162,

222, 223, 228, 245 Transference, 167, 172, 230
as basis of normality, 11-14, 26,

27, 44, 47, 176 Unconsciousness, 5, 15, in, 126,

see also Unconsciousness 135, 144, 173, 178, 183-185,

Societal concept of consciousness, 31, 192, 193, 204, 234

45, 46, 127-131, 148, 149, 160- as resistance, 34, 76

163 underlying normality, 47, 125

see also Relativity of conscious- see also Consciousness ; Dissocia-

ness tion ; Social unconscious
Socrates, 218

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

see Feeling ; Objective observa- Wilde, Oscar, 78

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

Sublimation, 189 Wish, 89, 111-113, *73 J 8o, 195, 235

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The

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PSYCHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY
AND SCIENTIFIC METHOD

<///*</ ^7
C. K. OGDEN, M.A.

Magdalene College, Cambridge

The International Library, of which nearly one hundred volumes
will be ready before the end of 1931, is both in quality and quantity
a unique achievement in this department of publishing. Its purpose
is to give expression, in a convenient form and at a moderate price,
to the remarkable developments which have recently occurred in
Psychology and its allied sciences. The older philosophers were
preoccupied by metaphysical interests which for the most part have
ceased to attract the younger investigators, and their forbidding
terminology too often acted as a deterrent for the general reader.
The attempt to deal in clear language with current tendencies
whether in England and America or on the Continent has met with
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Published by
KEG AN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., Ltd.

BROADWAY HOUSE: 68-74 CARTER LANE, LONDON, E.C.
1931

CLASSIFIED INDEX

A. PSYCHOLOGY

1.

GENERAL AND DESCRIPTIVE

Page

The Mind and its Place in Nature .

C. D. Broad, Litt.D.

8

The Psychology of Reasoning .
Thought and the Brain .

Professor E. Rignane
Professor Henri Pieron

5

10

Principles of Experimental Psychology

Professor Henri Pieron

14

Integrative Psychology

Wflham M. Marston

17

*The Mind and its Body

Charles Fox

18

The Nature of Intelligence

Professor L. L. Thurstone

6

The Nature of Laughter

J. C. Gregory

6

The Psychology of Time
Telepathy and Clairvoyance
The Psychology of Philosophers

Mary Sturt
Rudolf Tischner
Alexander Herzberg

7
6
13

Invention and the Unconscious

J. ^f. Montmasson

18

II.

EMOTION

Emotions of Normal People

William M. Marston

13

The Psychology of Emotion
Emotion and Insanity

J. T. MacCurdy, M.D.
8. Thalbitzer

8
9

The Measurement of Emotion .

W. Whately Smith

4

Pleasure and Instinct

A 1L B.Allen

15

The Laws of Feeling

F. Paulhan

10

The Concentric Method

M Laignel-Lavastine

15

til.

PERSONALITY

Personality

R. G. Gordon, M.D.

9

The Neurotic Personality

R. G. Gordon, M.D.

11

Physique and Character .

E. Kretschmer

8

The Psychology of Men of Genius

K. Kretschmer

17

The Psychology of Character .

A. A. Robaek

10

Problems of Personality .

(Edited by) A. A. Robaek

8

IV.

ANALYSIS

Conflict and Dream

W. R. R. Rivers, F.R.S.

4

Individual Psychology
Psychological Types ....

Alfred Adler
C. G. Jung

6
5

Contributions to Analytical Psychology

C. G. Jung

13

The Social Basis of Consciousness

. Trigant Burrow, M.D.

10

The Trauma of Birth

Otto Rank

14

*The Development of the Sexual Impulses
Character and the Unconscious

R. E. Money Kyrle
J. H. van der Iloop

18
5

Problems in Psychopathology .

. T. W. Mitchell, M.D.

11

V.

SOUND AND COLOUR

The Philosophy of Music .

. William Pole, F.R.S.

6

The Psychology of a Musical Prodigy

G. Revesz

7

The Effects of Music

. (Edited by) Max Schoen

11

Colour Blindness ....

Mary Collins, Ph.D.

8

Colour and Colour Theories

Christine Ladd-Franklin

13

VI.

LANGUAGE AND SYMBOLISM

Language and Thought of the Child .

Professor Jean Piaget

9

The Symbolic Process

John F. Markey

12

The Meaning of Meaning . C. K.

Ogden and /. A. Richards

5

Principles of Literary Criticism

I. A. Richards

7

Creative Imagination

Professor June E. Downey

13

Dialectic

Mortimer J. Adler

12

Human Speech ....

Sir Richard Paget

14

* Ready shortly-

CLASSIFIED INDEX (continued}

VII.

CHILD PSYCHOLOGY, EDUCATION, ETC.

Page

The Growth of the Mind . . . Professor K. Koffka

7

Judgment and Reasoning in the Child . Professor Jean Piaget

11

The Child's Conception of the World . Professor Jean Piaget

13

The Child's Conception of .Causality . Professor Jean Piaget

15

The Growth of Reason F. Larimer

14

Educational Psychology ..... Charles Fox

9

The Art of Interrogation . . . . E. R. Hamilton

14

The Mental Development of the Child . Professor Karl Buhler

15

*The Psychology of Chi Idi en's Drawings . . . Ilelga Eng

18

Eidetic Imagery . Professor E. R Jaensch

15

The Psychology of Intelligence and Will . . 11. 0. Wyatt

17

VIII.

ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY, BIOLOGY, ETC.

The Mentality of Apes .... Professor W. Kohler

7

*The Social Life of Apes and Monkeys . S\ Zuckertnan

18

Social Life in the Animal World " . . Professor F. Alverdes

10

The Social Insects .... Professor W. Morton Wheeler

12

How Animals Find Their Way About . Professor E. Rabaud

12

Theoretical Biology J. von Uexkull

10

Biological Principles ..... J. H. Woodger

14

Biological Memory .... Professor E. Rignano

9

IX.

ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, RELIGION, ETC.

Psychology and Ethnology . . W. E. R. Rivers, F.R.S.
Medicine, Magic and Religion W. E. R. Rivers, F.R.S.

10
4

Psychology and Politics . . . W. H. R. Rivers, F.R.S.

4

*The Theory of Legislation . . Jeremy Kentham,

18

Political Pluralism A'. C. Hsiao

11

History of Chinese Political Thought . . Liang Chi-Chao
Crime and Custom in Savage Society Professor B. Malinowski

15
9

Sex arid Repression in Savage Society Professor B. Malinowski

10

The Primitive Mind . C. R. Aldrich

17

The Psychology of Religious Mysticism Professor J. H. Leuba

7

Religious Conversion . . . Professor Sante de Sanctis

11

B. PHILOSOPHY

Philosophical Studies .... Professor G. E. Moore

4

The Philosophy of * As If ' . . . Hans Vaihinger

6

The Misuse of Mind . . . Karm Stephen

4

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . Ludwig Wittgenstein

4

The Analysis of Matter . . Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.

11

Five Types of Ethical Theory . . CD Broad, Litt.D

15

Chance, Love and Logic . . . . C. 8. Peirce

K.

Speculations T. E. Uuhne

6

Aletaphysical Foundations of Modem Science Professor E. A. Burtt

7

Possibility ...... Scott Buchanan

12

The Nature of Life Professor E. Rignano

15

Foundations of Geometry and Induction . . Jean Nicod

15

The Foundations of Mathematics ... F. P. Ramsey

17

C. SCIENTIFIC METHOD

I.

METHODOLOGY

Scientific Thought C. D. Broad, Litt.D.

5

Scientific Method A. D. Ritchie

5

The Technique of Controversy . . . Boris B. Bogoslovsky

12

The Statistical Method in Economics Professor P. S. Florence

14

II.

HISTORY, ETC.

Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology Gardner Murphy

13

Comparative Philosophy ... P. Masson-Onrsel

9

The History of Materialism . . . . F. A. Lange

8

The Philosophy of the Unconscious . E. von Hartmann

17

Psyche Ervrin Rohde

8

Plato's Theory of Ethics . . . Professor R. C. Lodge

12

*0utlines of the History of Greek Philosophy . . E. letter

IT

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* This is an excellent book and its re-issue should be welcomed by all who
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Individual Psychology. By Alfred Adler. Second edition,
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Speculations : Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art.
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The Nature of Intelligence. By L. L. Thurstone, Professor
of Psychology in the University of Chicago. los. 6d. net.

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Telepathy and Clairvoyance. By Rudolf Tischner. Preface
by E. J. Dingwall. With 20 illustrations, IDS. 6d. net.

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INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF PSYCHOLOGY 7

The Growth of the Mind : an Introduction to Child Psychology.
By K. Koffka, Professor rji the University of Giessen. Fifth
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,' t His book is extremely interesting, and it is to be hoped that it will be
widely read.' Times Literary Supplement. Leonard Woolf, reviewing this
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of psychology ought to read it [The Apes], and he should supplement it by
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The Mentality of Apes. By Professor W. Koehler, of Berlin
University. Second edition, with 28 illustrations, los. 6d. net.

' May fairly be said to mark a turning-point in the history of psychology.
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The Psychology of Religious Mysticism. By Professor James
H. Leuba. Second edition, 155. net.

1 Based upon solid research.' Times Literary Supplement ' The book is
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The Psychology of a Musical Prodigy. By G. Revesz, Director
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' For the first time we have a scientific report on the development of a
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Principles of Literary Criticism. By I. A . Richards, Fellow of
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The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. By

Professor Edwin A. Burtt. 145. net.

' This book deals with a profoundly interesting subject. The critical portion
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The Psychology of Time. By Mary Sturt, M.A . 75. 6d. net.

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Physique and Character. By E. Kretschmer. With 31 plates,
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' His contributions to psychiatry are practically unknown in this country,
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The Psychology of Emotion : Morbid and Normal. By

John T. MacCurdy, M.D. 255. net.

' There are two reasons in particular for welcoming this book. First, it is
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Problems of Personality ' Essays in honour of Morton Prince.
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Colour-Blindness. By Mary Collins, M.A., Ph.D. Introduc-
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1 Her book is worthy of high praise as a painstaking, honest, well-written
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The History of Materialism. By F. A . Lange. New edition in
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vinced ' From the Introduction.

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Educational Psychology. By Charles Fox, Lecturer on
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Biological Memory. By Eugenia Rignano, Professor of

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Crime and Custom in Savage Society. By B. Malinowski,
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With 6 plates, 5s. net.

' A book of great interest to any intelligent reader.' Sunday Times.
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io INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology and Ethnology. By W. H. R. Rivers, M.D., Litt.D.,
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' This notice in no way exhausts the treasures that are to be found in this
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Theoretical Biology. By /. von Uexkull. i8s. net.

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Thought and the Brain. By Henri Piwn, Professor at the
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Sex and Repression in Savage Society. By B. Malinowski,
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Social Life in the Animal World. By F. Alverdes, Professor-
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The Psychology of Character. By. A. A. Roback, Ph.D.
Second edition, 2is. net.

4 He gives a most complete and admirable historical survey of the study of
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The Social Basis of Consciousness. By Trigant Burrow,
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The Effects of Music. Edited by Max Schoen. 155. net.

' The results of such studies as Ijiis confirm the observations of experience,
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The Analysis of Matter. By Bertrand Russell, F.R.S. 2is.
net.

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and interpretation of the doctrine of relativity and of the quantum theory,
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rest of the book.' Manchester Guardian. ' His present brilliant book is
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the best that Mr. Russell has given us.' Times Literary Supplement.

Political Pluralism : a Study in Modern Political Theory. By
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of view.' Yorkshire Post. ' This is a very interesting book.' Mind.

The Neurotic Personality. By R. G. Gordon, M.D., D.Sc.,
F.R.C.P.Ed. los. 6d. net.

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the psychoneuroses.' Nature.

Problems in Psychopathology. By T. W. Mitchell, M.D.
95. net.

' A masterly and reasoned summary of Freud's contribution to psychology.
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Religious Conversion. By Sante de Sanctis, Professor of
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Daily News.

Judgment and Reasoning in the Child. By Jean Piaget,
Professor at the University of Geneva. IDS. 6d. net.

' His new book is further evidence of his cautious and interesting work.
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minute investigation of the mental processes of early childhood. Dr. Piaget
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some original contributions to logic.' Times Literary Supplement.

12 INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF PSYCHOLOGY

Dialectic. By Mortimer J. Adler, Lecturer in Psychology,
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Possibility. By Scott Buchanan. los. 6d. net.

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The Technique of Controversy. By Boris B. Bogoslovsky.
i2s. 6d. net.

' We can only say that, in comparison with the orthodox treatise on logic,
this book makes really profitable and even fascinating reading It 13
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important series to which it belongs.' Journal of Education.

The Symbolic Process, and its Integration in Children. By

John F. Markey, Ph.D. los. 6d. net.

' He has collected an interesting series of statistics on such points as the
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The Social Insects : their Origin and Evolution. By William
Morton Wheeler, Professor of Entomology at Harvard University.
With 48 plates, 2is. net.

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How Animals Find Their Way About, By E. Rabaud, Pro-
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Plato's Theory of Ethics : a Study of the Moral Criterion and
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INTEKNATIONAL LIBRARY OF PSYCHOLOGY 13

MMn^MMMM^MMn^MMWMMM^MHMMnMMaMMMHMmMMMMMMMMM^MaBBMMMMMBBMMMMMMB

Contributions to Analytical Psychology. By C. G. Jung.
Dr. Med. , Zurich, author of ' Psychological Types '. Translated
by H. G. and Gary F. Baynes. i8s. net.

Taken as a whole, the book is extremely important and will further
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psycho-analytical movement has produced.' Times Literary Supplement

An Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology. By

Gardner Murphy, Ph.D. Third Edition, 2 is. net.

' That Dr. Murphy should have been able to handle this mass of material
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Emotions of Normal People. By William Moulton Marston,
Lecturer in Psychology in Columbia University. i8s. net.

' He is an American psychologist and neurologist whose work is quite un-
known in this country. He has written an important and daring book, a
very stimulating book He has thrown down challenges which many may
consider outrageous.' Saturday Review

The Child's Conception of the World. By Jean Piaget,
Professor at the University at Geneva. 125. 6d. net.

' The child-mind has been largely an untapped region. Professor Piaget
has made a serious and effective drive into this area, and has succeeded in
marking in a considerable outline of the actual facts They are of interest
to all who want to understand children We know of no other source from
which the same insight can be obtained ' Manchester Guardian.

Colour and Colour Theories. By Christine Ladd-Franklin.
With 9 coloured plates, 125. 6d. net.

' This is a collection of the various papers in which Mrs Ladd-Franklin has
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make a consistent story out of this tangle of mysterious phenomena. Her
theory is one of the most ingenious and comprehensive that has been put
forward ' Times Literary Supplement

The Psychology of Philosophers. By Alexander Herzberg,
PhJ). t los. 6d. net.

' It has been left for him to expound the points in which the psychology
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Supplement

Creative Imagination : Studies in the Psychology of Literature.
By June E. Downey, Professor of Psychology in the University
of Wyoming. los. 6d. net.

' This is an altogether delightful book Her psychology is not of the
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14 INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF PSYCHOLOGY

<
The Art of Interrogation. By E. R. Hamilton, M.A., B.Sc.,

Lecturer in Education, University College of North Wales.

Introduction by Professor C. Spearman, F.R.S. 75. 6d. net.

' His practical advice is of the utmost possible value, and his book is to,
be recommended not only to teachers but to all parents who take any
interest in the education of their children. It sets out first principles with
lucidity and fairness, and is stimulating.' Saturday Review.

The Growth of Reason : a Study of Verbal Activity. By
Frank Lorimer, Lecturer in Social Theory, Wellesley College,
los. 6d. net.

' A valuable book in which the relation of social to organic factors in thought
development is traced, the argument being that while animals may live
well by instinct, and primitive communities by culture patterns, civiliza-
tion can live well only by symbols and logic.' Lancet.

The Trauma of Birth. By Otto Rank. los. 6d. net.

' His thesis asserts that the neurotic patient is still shrinking from the pain

of his own birth. This motive of the birth trauma Dr. Rank follows in many

aspects, psychological, medical, and cultural He sees it as the root of

religion, art, and philosophy There can be no doubt of the illumination

which Dr. Rank's thesis can cast on the neurotic psyche.' Times Literary

Supplement.

Biological Principles. By J. H. Woodger, B.Sc., Reader in

Biology in the University of London. 2 is. net.
' The task Mr. Woodger has undertaken must have been very difficult and
laborious, but he may be congratulated on the result.' Manchester Guardian.
' No biologist who really wishes to face fundamental problems should omit
to read it.' Nature.

Principles of Experimental Psychology. By H. Pieron,

Professor at the College de France. los. 6d. net.
' Treating psychology as the science of reactions, Professor PieVon ranges
over the whole field in a masterly r6sum^. We do not know of any general
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Time* Literary Supplement.

The Statistical Method in Economics and Political Science.

By P. Sargant Florence, M.A., Ph.D., Professor of Commerce

in the University of Birmingham. 255. net.

1 It sums up the work of all the best authorities, but most of it is the author's
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method.' Nature.

Human Speech. By Sir Richard Paget, Bt., F.Inst.P. With

numerous illustrations. 255. net.

' There is a unique fascination about a really original piece of research The
process of detecting one of Nature's secrets constitutes an adventure of the
mind almost as thrilling to read as to experience. It is such an adventure
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is a gesture of the mouth, and more especially of the tongue. We feel that
we can hardly praise it too highly ' Times Literary Supplement.

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^
The Foundations of Geometry and Induction. By Jean

Nicod. Introduction by Bertrand Russell, F.R.S. i6s. net.

Anyone on first reading these fwo essays might be tempted to underrate

them, but further study would show him his mistake, and convince him that

the death of their author at the age of thirty has been a most serious loss

to modern philosophy.' Journal of Philosophical Studies.

Pleasure and Instinct : a Study in the Psychology of Human
Action. By A. H. B, Allen. I2s. 6d. net.

An eminently clear and readable monograph on the much -discussed
problem of the nature of pleasure and unpleasure. Since this work
amplifies some of the most important aspects of general psychology, the
student will find it useful to read in conjunction with his text-book.'
British Medical Journal

History of Chinese Political Thought, during the early Tsin
Period. By Liang Chi-Chao. With 2 portraits, IDS. 6d. net.

For all his wide knowledge of non-Chinese political systems and the breadth
of his own opinions, he remained at heart a Confucianiht Amidst the
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exposition of the political foundations of the oldest civilization in the world
comes like the deep note of some ancient temple bell.' Times Literary
Supplement.

Five Types of Ethical Theory. By C. D. Broad, Litt.D.,

Lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. i6s. net.
' A book on ethics by Dr. Broad is bound to be welcome to all lovers of clear
thought. There is no branch of philosophical study which stands more in
need of the special gifts which mark all his writings, great analytical acumen,
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irrelevant prejudices ' Mind.

The Nature of Life. By Eugenio Rignano, Professor of
Philosophy in the University of Milan, ys. 6d. net.

' In this learned and arresting study he has elaborated the arguments of
those biologists who have seen in the activities of the simplest organisms
purposive movements inspired by trial and error and foreshadowing the
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of life which distinguishes it from all the inorganic processes.' New
Statesman.

The Mental Development of the Child. By Karl BiMer,

Professor in the University of Vienna. 8s. 6d. net.
' He summarizes in a masterly way all that we have really learned so far
about the" mental development of the child. Few psychologists show a
judgment so cool and so free from the bias of preconceived theories. He
takes us with penetrating comments through the silly age, the chimpanzee
age, the age of the grabber, the toddler, the babbler.' Times Literary
Supplement.

The Child's Conception of Physical Causality. By Jean
Piaget, Professor at the University of Geneva. 125. 6d. net.

' Develops further his valuable work. Here he endeavours to arrive at
some idea of the child's notions of the reasons behind movement, and hence
to consider its primitive system of physics. His results are likely to prove
useful in the study of the psychological history of the human race, and in
the understanding of primitive peoples, as well as that of the child. His
method is admirable.' Saturday Review.

16 INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF PSYCHOLOGY

Eidetic Imagery, and the Typological Method. By E. R.
Jaensch, Professor in the University of Marburg. 75. 6d. net.

' While the work of Professor Jaensch is well-known to psychologists and
educationalists, it is too little known to physicians. An excellent translation
recently published leaves no excuse for ignorance of a subject as important,
as it is interesting. . . . The author epitomizes much of the recent
work on these fascinating topics and gives us a glimpse of a subject which
promises a fruitful field of research in the realm between general medicine
and psychopathology.' Lancet

The Laws of Feeling. By F. Paulhan. Translated by C. K.
Ogden. i os. 6d. net.

It is strange that so important a contribution to our knowledge of feeling
and emotion should have buffered neglect. The mam thesis that the author
advances is that all feeling, even pleasure and pain, and all emotion are due
to the arrest of tendencies. He goes far beyond elementary affective
phenomena, and the laws he formulates are such that they take into their
ken the mobt complicated tendencies ' Saturday Review

The Psychology of Intelligence and Will. By H. G. Wyatt.
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i8 INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF PSYCHOLOGY

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INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF PSYCHOLOGY 19

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VOLUMES 'IN PREPARATION

(Not included in the Classified Index)

Ethical Relativity .... Edward Westermarck

The Spirit of Language in Civilization . . K. Vossler

The Gestalt Theory .... Bruno Petermann

Mencius on the Mind . . . . . /. A. Richards

On Fictions . ... Jeremy Bentham

The Dynamics of Education .... Hilda Taba
The Child's Conception of Morality . . Jean Piaget

Psychological Optics . . . . . D. Me. L. Purdy

The Nature of Mathematics .... Max Black

The Theory of Hearing . H. Hartridge, D.Sc.

Learning and the Living System . George Humphrey

Emotional Expression in Birds . . F. B. Kirkman

The Mind as an Organism .... E. Miller

Animal Behaviour .... H. Munro Fox

The Psychology of Insects . . . . J. G. Myers

Colour-Harmony . . C. K. Ogden and James Wood

Gestalt K. Koffka

Theory of Medical Diagnosis F. G. Crookshank, M.D., F.R.C.P.
Language as Symbol and as Expression . . E. Saptr

Psychology of Kinship . . . . B. Malinowski, D.Sc.

Social Biology ...... M. Ginsberg, D.Lit.

The Philosophy of Law .... A.L.Goodhart

The Psychology of Mathematics . . E. R. Hamilton

Mathematics for Philosophers . . . G. H. Hardy, F.R.S.
The Psychology of Myths G. Elliot Smith, F.R.S.

The Psychology of Music . . . Edward J. Dent

Psychology of Primitive Peoples . . B. Malinowski, D.Sc.

Development of Chinese Thought . . . Hu Shih

HEADLEY BROTHERS, IOQ KINOSWAY, LONDON, W.C.2 , AND ASHFORD, KtNT.