LIBRARY THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA PRESENTED BY DANIEL FITZMAURICE MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT A Popular Exposition of Psychoanalysis BY WILFRID LAY, PH.D. For there is nothing hid which shall not be manifested. Mark iv: 22 NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1917 LIBRARY OF CALIFOBNI, SANTA BA&BARA CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. INTRODUCTION ....... i II. THE UNKNOWN ELEMENT IN ACTION 14 III. JTHE -CEDIPUS MYTH ...... 18 IV. THE FORE-CONSCIOUS ..... 38 V. THE UNCONSCIOUS. (DESCRIPTIVE) . 4 3 A. Complete Retentiveness ..... 45 ..... 50 C. Independent Vitality ..... 65 D. Symbolism ........ 67 E. The Censor ....... 71 F. Sublimation ....... 80 G. Introversion ..... 82 H. Pleasure-Pain versus Reality ... 85 I. Regression ........ 88 J. Universality of Manifestation ... 90 VI. THE UNCONSCIOUS (DYNAMIC) . . 93 A. Craving or Reality? ..... 93 B. Where Do Thoughts Come From? . - 98 C. Resistances . . ...... 107 D. Conflicts ........ no . ^Cptflplexes ........ H2 F. Phobias ...... . 118 G. Our Mental Attitude . . . . . 121 vi CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE VII. THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE .... 127 VIII. DREAMS 144 IX. TWO KINDS OF THINKING .... 176 X. EVERYDAY LIFE 200 XI. PSYCHOTHERAPY 220 A. The Moral Struggle 220 B. Reasoning by Analogy 233 C. Psychic Gravitation 244 D. The Transference 260 XII. EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS . . .265 A. The Object of Mental Activity . . 266 B. The Father-Image 273 C. The Superiority Feeling 280 D. "He Irritates Me" 284 E. Memory Work 293 F. Abstract Thinking 301 G. Hate, Anger and Love 304 XIII. CONCLUSION 314 INDEX 317 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION IN the Greek mythology the Titans are the chil- dren of Earth and Heaven and, because they warred with the gods, were cast into the gulf of Tartarus, where they lie prostrate, but occa- sionally, becoming restive, shake their bonds and in so doing cause the earth to tremble. In each one of us there lives a Titan. As the Titans represented the crude forces of nature that were later brought into subjection by the gods who introduced a reign of order, so the Titan that is in each one of us represents the primal impulses of animal life which have through the ages been brought into some semblance of order by the force of society. But just as the Titans in the old mythology made themselves felt in disturb- ances of the equilibrium of the world, so some- times do the Titans * residing in us all break * Freud, in his Interpretation of Dreams, p. 435, says: "These ever-moving and so to speak immortal wishes of our Unconscious, 2 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT loose and do much damage in our daily life. And as the Titans were chained in the deep pit, and could never show their faces to the light of day, so these primordial vital forces are generally controlled by the restraints of organised society, and are as little in evidence to most people as if they too were chained at the bottom of a pit. Their writhings, however, are not without effect on our daily thoughts and on our bodily func- tions, as will be seen in the chapters that follow. That part of our mental life of which as a gen- eral rule we know nothing, but which exerts a great influence upon our actions, is known to the newer psychology as the Unconscious, and in this book I frequently refer to it as the unknown Titan. It is well to be informed of this archaic being which constitutes so great a part of our ego, for if rightly understood it will enable us to develop all the power that we have, up to the limit of our possibility, while, on the other hand, an ignorance of its very existence and of its effect on human conduct has been the cause of much misunderstanding and sorrow. It is the hope of the present writer that some, at least, of the unhappiness of this life we lead may be seen which reminds us of the Titans of the myth, on whom since the earliest times has pressed heavily the weight of the mountains which were hurled upon them by the victorious gods and which even now tremble at the occasional quivering of their limbs." INTRODUCTION 3 to be as unnecessary as it really is, when a deeper insight is gained into the real causes of much that we now misunderstand. The title-page of Bulfinch's Age of Fable is embellished with the following stanza of Barry Cornwall : O ye delicious fables! where the wave And woods were peopled, and the air, with things So lonely! why, ah! why has science grave Scattered afar your sweet imaginings? It is a feature of the new science of psycho- analysis, touched upon in the following pages from time to time, that it has given a fresh interest and value to these sweet imaginings of mythology, and instead of banishing them afar, has brought them to our very doors nay, into our very hearts in a new and original way. Science, while perhaps not yet entitled to be called gay, is not, in the results of psychoanalytic research, any longer to be truly called grave, for it has through its workers, Freud and others, opened up a prospect which is full of promise for the re- moval of much that has been grotesque, not to say gruesome, in our social life. The foundations of a new psychology of cer- tain aspects of a limited number of mental aber- 4 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT rations were laid down in Vienna about 1890 by a physician specialising in nervous diseases, Dr. Sigmund Freud. He disclaims having made a complete system, either of philosophy or of psy- chology, but the principles which he stated have found so wide an application that the Freudian psychology, the details of which have been and are being worked out by numerous psychologists and physicians both in Europe and in this coun- try, seems likely not only to become a complete philosophy of life, but, in its practical results, to be more valuable than all previous philosophies, idealised as they have been out of one man's thoughts or elaborated from the conversations of many men. For its application is primarily per- sonal and individual, however general its laws may be, and its aim in the hands of its founder has been the consistent one of alleviating human suffering, both mental and physical; and we all know how very real mental suffering may some- times be. It seems unique, and yet, in view of the prag- matic trend of philosophy during the last decades, quite in accordance with the spirit of modern civilisation, that a philosophy, including a psy- chology, sciences which, in the past, have been associated with anything but practical ends, should be devoted principally to the alleviation of human physical ills. The age that has seen INTRODUCTION 5 the telephone, and wireless telegraphy, and aero- nautics developed to a practical point of useful- ness has now turned its attention toward making what always before seemed in the clouds appear to be amenable to human control and for human practical purposes or curing physical ills. Thus has Freud become the first aeronaut in the empy- rean of the human mind, and has reconnoitred and brought back to us exact information con- cerning matters of which otherwise we should have known nothing. It seems marvellous that we can at last fly in the air, and that we have used our airships for destruction in warfare. It also seems quite as marvellous that we have learned how to enlist the curative power of nature by an appeal to the emotions through the intellect. For an increas- ingly large number of human ills we now go to specialists and physicians who never write a pre- scription for any drug for us, never give us a diet list or prescribe- exercise or rest. We tell them our bodily ills and they talk to us. There is no manipulation, there are no hypnotic passes, but there is the most patient and detailed study of our mental attitudes toward our ills, there is the most painstaking inquiry into everything we have ever thought about them. This mental specialist takes a sort of spiritual inventory of our beliefs, suppositions, misbeliefs, supersti- 6 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT tions and queer ideas about our own mental and bodily physiology. We all have strange miscon- ceptions about nutrition, growth, reproduction! This new variety of specialist listens for days at a time and finally tells us some few truths which act dynamically on our mental powers, and we begin to see things about life which we never dreamed of before or did not know we dreamed of. We begin to put in order the disordered thoughts which we have been thinking for years, from our earliest infancy indeed, and to associate these thoughts as they should be associated in order to make us as much use to society as we could possibly be. Then the health we may have lost, whatever disorders of a physical nature we may have had, caused by the disorderliness of our mental operations, commences to come back to us. In comparing Freud to a psychical aviator, I might liken the medium in which he has navigated so surprisingly to the world of dreams. Perhaps nothing, to the so-called practical person, looks so impractical as this very world of dreams, but nothing would a few years ago have been thought more ridiculously impossible than that we should be able to fly twenty miles in less than thirty minutes to take lunch with a friend in a neigh- bouring city. Remarkable advances have been made recently in the use in large manufactures of INTRODUCTION 7 quantities of by-products which were formerly thrown into the streams that furnished the power for the machinery. We can say that advances quite as remarkable have been made in the use found for what once were regarded as by-products of the mind. Certainly the dream was regarded, particularly in the earlier days of science, as no better than a by-product of the mind. Just as the factory had to make a salable material out of its waste matter, in order to make up for the money formerly paid for carting away what had accumulated in the river, so the modern psy- chologist has, as it were, been forced to make something serviceable out of the dream. And he has done so in an extraordinary manner, the full narrative of which will some day be the most striking chapter in the history of science. The name given by Freud himself to the science is psychoanalysis, spelled also psychanaly- sis, or the analysis of the psyche. The psyche is not merely the mind regarded as a product, a stationary or crystallised object which can be cut and dried and labelled. The mind and soul and character and body as a connected, organic whole, and its functions (or what it does and how it changes), are the subject of psychoanalysis more than how its results or finite outward mani-j festations can be classified. Psychoanalysis natu- rally suggests psychosynthesis as a more construe- 8 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT tive procedure, and that is, indeed, the ultimate aim of psychoanalysis; not merely to take apart but to put together again, following a plan which is along the lines of the greatest usefulness to society. I should have been more exact, however, in the simile drawn above if I had said that the atmos- phere in which the latest psychological aviators have sailed so successfully is the Unconscious. For that part of the mind which before the science of psychoanalysis we knew almost noth- ing about, and which is unknowable except by means of this new instrument of precision, psychoanalysis, has been termed the Uncon- scious. The Unconscious is not to be regarded as the unknowing part of the mind but only as the unknown part. From one point of view there is no such thing as the unknowing part of the mind, because the mind is essentially that part of the personality that is knowing; knowing with greater or less intensity, and knowing now one and now another object, but always knowing something, from the first day of life until the last. But the Unconscious may be described as the generally unknown realms of the ego, into the seemingly bottomless abyss of which the sensations and perceptions of the individual are constantly sink- ing, and from which, no matter how hard we try, INTRODUCTION 9 we cannot, without the help which analytic psychology offers us, recover anything except a very limited amount of visual, verbal or other memories. In this book an attempt is made to show the Unconscious operating in every act of our lives, not merely in the actions ordinarily known as unconscious or automatic, but in that part of our activity to which we attribute the most vivid con- sciousness. For in a certain sense we are most helped or hindered by the unconscious part of ourselves when we think we are most keenly alive. Our Unconscious pervades our conduct in the most minute details, just as the air we breathe is forced by our blood through our tissues, and it might almost be said that it is as important, and as great in extent, when compared with the conscious present, as the air, so small a part of which we breathe, is great in extent in propor- tion to the minute particles of it that we take into our lungs. In the spacious atmosphere of the Unconscious our dreams, both those of our sleep and those of our waking state, are but one form out of the multitude of varieties of the manifestations of the Unconscious. The present scope of psycho- analysis has extended far beyond the purely therapeutic one originally outlined by the founder. The psychoanalytic interpretation of human con- io MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT duct has been shown by many recent writers to be applicable to mythology, to sociology and to education, to mention only three out of the numerous spheres of human thought in which it illuminates what has before been dark. Much indignation has been expressed by some of Freud's critics because he has treated sexual matters in such an outspoken way. He has dis- cussed all matters that are generally considered sexual in a manner that these critics consider needlessly full and explicit, but he has done more, in that he has included a number of subjects as sexual which the ordinary person did not know were sexual; in order words, he is blamed for finding sexual reasons for a large proportion of human acts, a procedure which arouses the antagonism of many persons whose actions are of such a nature as to be very intimately touched by any reference to things purely sexual. But the fact remains, after all the emotions are removed from the discussion, that if certain kinds of behaviour have sexual causes, and we do not know it, we are being helped and not hindered by having the real nature of that behaviour pointed out to us. For example, if it has been repeatedly shown by analyses of many persons that a young unmarried woman's dream of a burglar entering her room is in most cases based on a crassly sexual desire of her Unconscious, it INTRODUCTION n will certainly profit the young lady to be told not only that it represents a craving on the part of her Unconscious for the very thing that the dream pictures, and that the number of persons who know this fact is increasing every day, but also that it is not an uncommon dream of virgins and that it is absolutely no derogation to her character. But this is what Freud has done. He has told the ignorant and the innocent alike, with scientific impartiality, that they are ignorant of what goes on in their Unconscious and why they are ignorant and the results of their ignorance. It is of course not pleasant to learn of any defect in our knowledge, particularly that part of our knowledge which concerns the most personal rela- tions of our ego, and Freud and his followers have been reviled for their truth, even by those who are supposed to be in possession of the calmness and coolness coming from scientific work, with a vehemence which is born only of a strong need for defence. But the Freudians have shown that if we feel strongly that a cer- tain tenet needs vigorous defence we are admit- ting to ourselves that it is weak and cannot defend itself. Few persons think it necessary to defend what is accepted by many. No one would think of advocating the continuance of breathing, for instance. But if a seer of truths finds his fellows universally indulging in a habit which 12 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT is both foolish and dangerous, foolish because conditioned by ignorance and dangerous because sapping the vital forces of almost all individuals, more insidious and more unknown than infantile paralysis, but infinitely more widespread, he will be opposed by the united strength of those who hear him, gradually tolerated by those who will listen to him and followed by those who under- stand him. In order not to offend persons who would close their ears if the sexual were mentioned in too plain terms, I have chosen to avoid as far as possible emphasising the " medical " or " ana- tomical " features of the topics treated, leaving the reader to infer that when among other expres- sions I may have occasion to mention " hunger " I may be referring to the physical sexual crav- ing, and to make analogous inferences in other spheres. I have also used the word craving throughout in place of the Freudian word libido, which has for the American ear a connotation somewhat different from the European. Readers desiring to follow the subject of the Unconscious still farther are referred to the fol- lowing books in English: i Adler: The Neurotic Constitution. Brill : Psychoanalysis. Morbid Dreads. INTRODUCTION 13 Coriat: Abnormal Psychology. The Meaning of Dreams. Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams.. (Containing an extensive bibliography) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Leonardo da Find. Wit and Its Relation to the Uncon- scious. Hitschmann : Freud's Theories of the Neuroses. Holt: The Freudian Wish. Jones: Papers on Psychoanalysis. Jung: Psychology of the Unconscious. Analytical Psychology. Pfister : The Psychoanalytic Method. Prince : The Unconscious. White: Mechanisms of Character Formation. One periodical in this country deals exclusively with psychoanalytic subjects: The Psychoanalytic Review, a quarterly edited by Smith Ely Jelliffe, M.D., and William A. White, M.D. CHAPTER II THE UNKNOWN ELEMENT IN ACTION A CLASSICAL illustration of the power of the hypnotiser over his subject is the following: The hypnotiser tells the hypnotised person that when he awakes he will take a chair from the floor and put it on the table. He also tells him at another time that when he is. awake, and at a certain hour, he will wipe his face with his handkerchief. What is most interesting to us here is, however, the answers that he gives to questions about why he did these things. He always has a plausible reason. He says that he found the chair in the way and wished to put it out of the way. Also he says that he found that his face was perspir- ing and that was why he wiped it with his hand- kerchief. The hypnotiser and the spectators in this little comedy are in the position of the gods, for they know the real cause of these actions and the deluded subject does not. He really thinks that the causes were as he stated, but we know whence came the idea which he carried out. In the world of everyday life we are all of us in much the same situation as the hypnotised sub- 14 UNKNOWN ELEMENT IN ACTION 15 ject. It will be seen later that the hypnotiser in our everyday life is a part of our own selves, a very important and a very extensive part of our personalities. In a sense we are all hypnotising ourselves all the time. A section of our ego is the subject, a very small section indeed, and all the rest of our personality is the hypnotiser. In short, we are unaware of the real causes of why we act as we do in a great proportion of our daily life. We are directed to do this and that by the resultant states of mind which have ac- cumulated in the all-retentive storehouses of our subliminal memory and which we may truthfully say we have forgotten, though they are in our memory. They have been subject to retention, but are impossible of recall. The hypnotic state, in the illustration cited above, is a sort of rapid process of forgetting. The idea of putting the chair on the table was in the mind of the sub- ject all the time, so we may say that he remem- bered it. But it had passed out of his conscious- ness, and so we may say that he had forgotten it. Now, the case is about the same with all of us, except that instead of our rapidly forgetting some recent thing, we have gradually forgotten, in the same sense of having stored it away where it could not be called up at will, almost every- thing that we ever experienced. Thus we see that there is a discrepancy between our present 1 6 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT thoughts and our present actions, which makes our actions so often seem, even to ourselves, so very inconsistent. Too much emphasis cannot be placed on the fact that the real causes of what we do in our acts from hour to hour are hidden from us and that the majority of assigned reasons are mere pretexts, the real motives being in the Uncon- scious, and therefore absolutely inaccessible to us. It is only after a thorough analysis at the hands of a trained analyst .that anyone can gain an insight into the mechanisms that motivate not only our extraordinary but our ordinary acts. Our preferences for or avoidance of specific foods, occupations, pastimes and persons are as a rule never analysed by any except the specialist in psychoanalysis. Our motives remain in the Unconscious because they are asocial, that is, destructive of the organisation of society, and continue to be hidden from us before, during and after the performance of the act. " Forgive them, for they know not what they do " is quite as applicable to the everyday acts of everyday people as to the acts of those who crucified Christ. Jones, in his treatment of the subject of ration- alisation, which is the name he applies to the tendency of all of us to assign a conscious reason to the acts which are motivated by the wishes of the Unconscious, instances the choice of a UNKNOWN ELEMENT IN ACTION 17 religious or political creed as a case where the real and the apparent motives are quite likely to be different. In the chapter on the unconscious factor in everyday life will be found examples of actions which seem unaccountable, and indeed are unaccountable except on the grounds of their having been motivated by the unconscious wish. CHAPTER III THE OEDIPUS MYTH IF we think about what we have done we are rarely satisfied with it. We are much more likely to be satisfied with or to approve what we are go- ing to do. There is so frequently an indefinable dissatisfaction with what we have accomplished, a dissatisfaction which comes from a sense of not being able to know why we did all or at any rate a part of what we did. Why did we leave unmen- tioned, in a conversation with a friend, exactly the facts that we consciously most wished to mention? Why did we forget this person's name, or that person's existence? Why in general is our action so incomplete, compared with what we could have wished? What factor is it in our lives that has exercised control over us at a critical time, at a time when we had to act rapidly and almost without thinking? If we ourselves had known and had been able to get control over this part of ourselves which was the determining fac- tor in our action now under review, we should now be so much better satisfied with our actions. To all thinking persons it is evident that only a iS THE OEDIPUS MYTH 19 part of our actions from hour to hour are abso- lutely within our control. For instance, what we say. In a heated argument we all say things we do not feel altogether like backing up when we have cooled off a bit. In times of great excitement, in keenly vivid living, we all recognise that we are impelled by a power over which we do not have complete control. We are borne along by a force which we do not possess at the other times when we are not acting or thinking so keenly. In times of great stimulation we get an intense pleasure from the employment of large amounts of our strength, mental or physical, amounts of power that sometimes surprise us, for we did not know we had it, and which give us the feeling that we are drawing upon a source of power that at other times does not belong to us. There is even a doubt in our minds sometimes that the power we exercise in these exalted times is in reality not our own power, but belongs to some other than us. We do not know how we did it. It seemed that for a short time, at least, we had supernatural powers. Indeed, many have attributed, with characteristic human lack of logic, this particu- lar access of power to deity or to divine aid, as if implying that our ordinary everyday powers were not the manifestation of divine activity. 20 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT At such times, then, which occur now and then during a life, we realise that we are ourselves raised to the wth power. The strength we put forth is primordial, primal, archaic. We are in perfect alignment with ourselves, every fibre of our physical being and every thought of our men- tal being seem to be in perfect order and func- tioning in completely organised coordination. We call upon the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, and they are with us and we have the strength of our fathers and of our ancestors to the wth generation. We all, too, know the other extreme, when we are doing our worst, when everything goes wrong, and the right hand is the enemy of the left, and we are at variance with ourselves, the struggle is within and not without. But I will not amplify here. Modern mental science has made the dis- covery, dimly foreshadowed though it may have been for centuries, that the combined mental and physical organism is in a large degree under the control of the Unconscious ; my conscious acts are controlled by my unconscious life, your waking be- haviour by the unknown Titan slumbering within you, every man's visible activities by the archaic past which in him still lives in the present. And it is predominantly archaic or primordial in strength and in trend, and in its universality. No one, no matter how refined, cultured, civilised, THE CEDIPUS MYTH 21 escapes it. All children are admittedly primitive in their nature. Their primitive nature is rec- ognised in the newer systems of education which provide a curriculum running parallel with the supposed outgrowing of the primitive traits. It is given first the occupations and the amusements of the earliest prehistoric man, and the steps of advancing civilisation are followed in these sys- tems as if the child rehearsed in his own life the life of the race, and the savage was finally given up and replaced by the civilised man in him. Let me state here the latest findings of the newer psychology in this connection. The savage in the child, the archaic in man, still lives in him, but in that part of him which is called the Unconscious. It has not been replaced or supplanted, but has been overlaid or veneered with a partial civilisa- tion in some persons, and in a few has been secured for the service of society through a process of self-control, and has been almost trans- formed by a process of sublimation. In the majority of people, however, this veneer is only skin deep, and in all the actions of the less thoughtful and more instinctive, more impulsive men and women the archaic Unconscious may still be seen driving them to their general be- haviour and influencing them in their specific actions, according as their acts are more or less under the governance of the usages of conven- 22 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT tional society or are, as so many of our actions still are, a matter of our own private personal life and do not appear in public, are not super- vised or censored, so to speak, by public opinion. In these private realms we do as we like, which is as the archaic Titan within us likes, provided only that we do not appear to do anything detri- mental to, or that seems detrimental to, our neighbours. It is there, in this private personal nature of ours, that we have most recourse to the manners and customs of our remote ancestors. In public, in the most cultured communities, our behaviour is such as to be of the greatest general service and widest validity for the home, the state and the nation. In our private lives, which a flattering self-complacency is pleased to call our individualities, we show those peculiarities, sup- posed to distinguish us from our neighbours, but which really do not, because they are the most determined by the archaisms of the Unconscious. There is a curious contradiction here. By all that is holy we respect individuality as if in indi- viduality or in being different * from our neigh- bour we possessed the only means of preserving ourselves intact as individuals. The greatest dif- ference, which by a certain form of reasoning assures the greatest individuality, is to be gained *The most appropriate place to be absolutely different from other people is the insane asylum. THE CEDIPUS MYTH 23 by doing that which is farthest removed from the conventional behaviour of society. This we cannot do in the sight of society. So we indulge our greatest eccentricity in private, having our peculiar habits of the most intimate personal nature, our pet superstitions which we keep to ourselves, our little formulae of eating, drinking, washing, dressing, writing, reading, working, playing. These we regard as the essential parts of our personality, essential because they differ- entiate us, as we think, from our fellows. But they do not separate us from the rest of humanity in that sense, for it is just here, in those regions of our personality in which we think that we are most free to indulge our own idiosyncrasies, and be ourselves and not anyone else, that we draw upon the universal humanity within us, the part that is common to us all, the part in which we differ from our neighbours less than in any other part. When apart, as it were, from society, and when freed for the time from the restraints imposed by our social relations, we are most under the control of that portion of our nature which has not yet been directed or mastered by society for the advancement of social organisa- tion. When we escape temporarily from the supervision of our social position, if our position in the social fabric may be said to supervise us, we tend to return to the condition that we were 24 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT in before social relations had begun to form restrictions on our behaviour. That is but saying that when the human finds himself in certain situations, he ceases to be a man and becomes a beast. Any panic demon- strates this. It also shows the infinite gradations of this civilisation as appearing in different per- sons. In a panic of almost any kind there will be those who keep their heads, whether because they have been experienced in this particular kind of emergency, such as firemen at a fire, or because they have in their relations with their fellow-men absorbed more humanity, more civilisation, which is the ability to be a citizen or to do work in cooperation with other people. Those in a panic who do not keep their heads but act instinctively, who rush madly for exits, and trample over others weaker than they, or who jump into life- boats, crowding out women and children, are for the time at least dominated by their Unconscious. That in great excitement we are unconscious of what, or of a good part of what, we do needs no proof. The unreliability of so much testimony of witnesses, even when under oath, especially when they are testifying about something done under great excitement, shows not only do we not fully know, at those times, what we do, but also that we do not know what we see. Losing one's head, losing one's control is like a vessel losing THE GEDIPUS MYTH 25 its rudder or its helmsman, and drifting along just as the powers of nature draw it and quite irrespective of human direction or human aims, human ideas. Now, these powers of nature in the human individual are the powers of the Un- conscious, that ninety-nine per cent, of our psyche over which the most of us have secured no con- trol, and it is they who, when they are undirected, do so much damage to our entire personality, both the unconscious part of it and the conscious part. From these considerations the primordial, the archaic character of the Unconscious clearly emerges. The facts I have stated in the briefest possible form because they are so well known. But the application of them made by the newer psychology is the least evident to most persons and will require the most detailed treatment. We may state, as a preliminary, that every act of every man, woman and child is either social or asocial, that whatever we do we are either revealing through some trivial act the primordial power that resides within us, or we are doing something positively constructive or destructive of the community in which we live; that is, none of our acts is without its effect, on ourselves and on our neighbours. If we are merely revealing or giving evidence of, or manifesting to those who have the eyes to see, the fundamental powers that 26 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT are ours (if we but learn to control them), we are doing a constructive work just in so far as the powers are perceived by other persons. We are, in that respect, dependent for our results upon the persons who know more than we do. Some see the enormous power of the human individual and they are stimulated by the sight, but it is only because they have been taught to see its manifestations in all the behaviour of their fellows. Now, the social acts are the acts that are determined by the directed thinking, and the asocial acts are those determined or caused or controlled by the undirected thinking, which is the Unconscious. But the social acts are a matter of evolution. What has been social for the last century was not social for the century before that, or as in the study of things human we are dealing with vast periods of time, we may have to say that what was of service to society a thousand years ago is not serviceable to society today. What was constructive a thousand years ago is constructive no longer but destructive of the social organism. For example, marriage did not exist in those archaic times. Sexual promiscuity was the rule. It could not have even been known what were the exact relations of persons within a tribe to one another. Fathers mating with their own daughters, mothers with their own sons, brothers THE CEDIPUS MYTH 27 with sisters, were as inevitable as the analogous relations among barnyard fowls. But some mys- terious force is always at work among even the lowest type of tribal development, which tells the uncivilised that the mating of too close blood rela- tions is disadvantageous from a purely physical point of view, and a taboo arises, none of them knows how or why, during the course of the cen- turies, as they progress in the arts and learn to go abroad and meet and observe their neighbour- ing tribes; and the too close relationship in mat- ing is called by a name that is invented to express the conclusion thus reached by the tribe, that the promiscuity of sexual relations as affecting cer- tain blood relatives is undesirable, unsuitable, damaged, spotted. Now the word in one ancient language for this idea of polluted is INCESTUS. It was properly applied to a great many situa- tions in human life that might be described by the words " unclean, defiled, sinful, criminal." In the evolution of marriage, however, it has been restricted in its meaning, and specialised so that it now stands for a definite relation between relatives that the law, political or spiritual, considers too close. The father-daughter and mother-son mating and the brother-sister mating seem to have been the ones earliest taken excep- tion to, and the other degrees of nearness of blood relationship come in for restrictions in different 28 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT countries at different times, and even at the same time, as is evident from the convention obtain- ing so long in the British Isles that prevented a man from legally marrying his deceased wife's sister. Now, the mating of father and daughter or the mating of mother and son has for a couple of thousand years at least been a matter for so great horror that an early Greek myth deals with the terrible fate that came to the man who even without knowing it married his mother. I refer to the story of GEdipus. For the purpose of refreshing the reader's memory and for present- ing the myth in only its essential form, which will exclude irrelevant details, I will reproduce it here, as follows : " After passing through the hands of the dram- atists the story assumed the following form: " Laius, son of Labdacus, King of Thebes, was warned by Apollo's oracle at Delphi that he was to die at the hands of his son. In spite of this warning Laius became by his wife Jocasta the father of a boy. When the child was born he fastened its ankles with a pin (whence the name 4 swell foot ') and gave it to a faithful herdsman to expose on Mount Cithaeron. Ignorant of the oracle, the man in pity gave the child to the shep- herd of Polybus, King of Corinth, and that ruler, THE CEDIPUS MYTH 29 who was childless, reared him as his own son. The young man, OEdipus, never doubted his Corinthian origin till the taunt of a drunken com- panion roused his suspicions, and, unable to ob- tain satisfaction from his supposed parents, he sought the oracle at Delphi, which did not answer his question, but warned him that he was doomed to slay his father and wed his mother. Horrified, CEdipus fled from Corinth, and shortly after, at a narrow place in the road, met Laius with his servants. They endeavoured to force him from the road, and in the quarrel he slew them all, as he supposed. Pursuing his journey, he found Thebes harassed by the Sphinx, who propounded a riddle to every passer-by and devoured all who failed to solve it. Creon, the brother of Jocasta, who had become king on the death of Laius, had offered the hand of his sister and the kingdom to him who, by solving the rid- dle, should free the city from the monster. CEdipus answered the riddle and thus slew the Sphinx. He then married Jocasta, his mother, and became king of Thebes. At first he pros- pered greatly and four children were born to him, two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, and two daugh- ters, Antigone and Ismene. At length a terrible pestilence visited Thebes, and the oracle declared that the murderer of Laius must be expelled from the country. QEdipus began the search, and 30 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT by degrees the truth became known. Jocasta hanged herself and QEdipus put out his eyes." International Encyclopedia. The pity and terror which Aristotle says purge our souls as we see on the stage the representa- tion of the myth, is caused, according to Freud, by the fact that in our Unconscious we feel that except for fate we might have suffered the same miseries as CEdipus, because every man has in his Unconscious a craving that has not been modern- ised, a craving that does not make even so fine a distinction between women, as that, for instance, between his mother and a woman his own age or younger. The CEdipus myth has been used in psycho- analysis as a measure by which to test the rela- tive development of the individual psyche. By means of the interpretation of a given person's dreams it is possible to tell how far his Uncon- scious has progressed along the line of evolution from the place where it desires the possession of the mother above all else in the world. It is shown by this method that the psyche of a great many persons afflicted with certain sorts of nerv- ous disorders has been subject to a fixation (as it is called) upon the mother. This applies, in strict literalness, of course only to men. But the corresponding unconscious mental state occurring THE CEDIPUS MYTH 31 in women is quite as common if not commoner, and is sometimes known by the name of the Electra complex. A complex, as will be seen later, is a group of unconscious ideas, or rather a group of ideas in the Unconscious, which, hav- ing been subjected to repression, continues to have an independent existence and growth. The Electra complex is for women quite analogous to the CEdipus complex in men, so much so, in fact, that the name QEdipus complex is indiffer- ently used for both, the relations to be changed being understood. Thus, as the primary affec- tion on the part of the boy is for his mother and his earliest wish is to supplant the father in the affection of his mother, so the primary affec- tion of the little girl is for her father and she wishes above all things to supplant her mother in the regard of her father. These natural expressions of preference on the part of little boys and girls are quite familiar to all observant persons. The natural fondness for the parent of the other sex is even encouraged by some fathers and mothers. But we are in the study of the Unconscious not so much concerned with these conscious expressions of preference. The CEdipus myth, when used as a measure of the state of development of the psyche, refers only to the conditions of the Unconscious itself which are only faintly indicated in the conscious life, condi- 32 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT tions which are impossible to test accurately with- out the instrument of precision supplied us by the dreams of the individual in question. So that when it is said that such and such a person shows an unconscious fixation of the CEdipus type, it does not mean that we have a right to be horri- fied as we should be at hearing that the child has an incest-wish, as it has been termed, for the parent of the opposite sex, but merely that there exists, in the Unconscious of the individual in question, a condition which corresponds to the archaic social conditions before society had stamped the mating of son and mother or father and daughter as incest. It should here be stated, however, that this CEdipus complex, while, as above remarked, it is only dimly indicated in the conscious life, has, nevertheless, far-reaching effects upon the behaviour and activities of the individual. The bearing of this fact upon the life of the individual man of today is most important. It is to be taken, however, in connection with another fact, namely, that the Unconscious, being so archaic, and so artless and so infantile, has the childlike characteristic of appearing in the infancy of the individual. Very young children, even infants, show this craving for the attention of the opposite sex. It is a necessity to the very existence of the infant to be extremely fond of 33 one woman. The forming of a strong attach- ment for the mother or the person who, in the absence of the mother, performs her duties is paralleled in a great many men by a fondness for the home where, after their own marriage, they get a revival of the services which their mothers used to render them. In the quiet and peace of the home the husband once more returns mentally to the situation where he is the recipient of nourishment and comfort from the same woman who has been the maker of his own body. It is no wonder if there is some rivalry between wife and mother-in-law, or between wife and mother, even though the mother is not physically present. The mother of the man stands in the same relation to the wife that a former wife would. In other words, it is never possible for a man to say to the woman he first wants to marry that he has never loved any other woman. Of course he can say it, but it will not be true. He has loved, and with an ardour that only a purely unrestrained infantile craving can create, a woman that must always be the rival of the wife unless this relation which we are now discussing has been satisfactorily settled either in or out of consciousness. If it is possible for a woman to be happy as the second wife of a man, it must be for the same reason as for a woman to be happy as the first wife of a man that is, 34 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT so far as it depends on the actions of the man. Because it will now be evident to the reader that there is a certain line of conduct conceivable in a husband that is more appropriate toward a mother than toward a wife, just as there is an appropriate motherly attitude in a mother toward her children which is singularly in- appropriate in a wife toward her husband. In other words, no matter what the moralisers in the evening papers say about the wisdom of the wife " mothering " her husband, it is a kind of action that is likely to cause the greatest unhap- piness for the reason that if a man wants a wife in the most modern sense and according to the most modern ideals, he wants her not merely as his cook and the mother and nurse of his chil- dren, not merely as his housekeeper, not merely as an auxiliary tailor with the special duties of sewing on buttons and mending holes, not merely as the performer of a vast number of duties almost anyone would be unable to recount, but as a spiritual and intellectual comrade of a kind different from the male companions he has in business and in the other relations of life. And no matter how much a man may respect and desire his mother, and all the comforts of home with which she supplied him, it is folly of the most arrant kind for a husband to look to his wife for things that are peculiarly maternal, THE CEDIPUS MYTH 35 unless he wishes to place himself on the same level with his own children. Many men do. There are not a few who call their wives " Mother," or even " Mama." Possibly they think they do it solely to amuse or set an example to their children. We know, on the other hand, that the unconscious cause of this word's being used is that the psyche, just as water falls to its own level, tends to return to the situations of its least activity that is, to the state just after or even before it was born, and is always pulling all of us, who do not overcome this tendency, in the direction of peace, of home, of mother, of rest, of inactivity, of Nirvana. Anything what- ever that suggests or is mentally associated with this tendency is seized upon by the Unconscious with unerring inevitability. This trait and a thou- sand others proclaim, to those who can under- stand the language, the attitude of the man not only in his business but in his home, and in his most intimate relations with his family and with himself. In short, every man has been and is by nature passionately in love with his mother, a love which is a consuming love and which because of its ecstatic quality is to colour for him his appercep- tion of every woman whom he sees subsequently, and in particular the woman whom he chooses for his life mate. As his mother was his first 36 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT mate, he cannot look upon and judge a single other woman save by reference to and in com- parison with the woman who has been his ideal from the time he was able to distinguish one per- son from another. Every look, expression, tone of voice, touch and even odour (unconsciously, to be sure) is perceived by him through the medium of his memories of his mother or her surrogate (the nearest female person to him in his childhood, if by any chance his mother did not happen to be such). The greatest mystery in the world to some of us is what constitutes the attraction some people have for others. How this man of our acquaint- ance could ever have fallen in love with the woman he did passes our understanding. Some of us, too, have sometimes wondered how we ever could have been so fascinated by our own spouses, whether we be men or women, as to think that we should never tire of them. The folly of this or that attachment among our acquaintance is so clearly manifest to us, not merely the young lovers in the ardour of youth, whom we naturally expect to be hasty in their judgment, but even those whose passions have cooled off. But when looked at from the point of view that our knowledge of the Unconscious gives us, the causes of the preference are quite transparent. The psychoanalyst is able, through THE CEDIPUS MYTH 37 interpretation of dreams and of other manifesta- tions of the Unconscious, to discover just what is the trouble in the most intimate of human rela- tions and to direct a course of action which will ameliorate or cure these troubles, some of which are attended not merely with mental but many with serious physical ills. CHAPTER IV THE FORE-CONSCIOUS No attempt is made by the newer psychology to give an exact definition of the Unconscious. But as in the case of many terms which are hard if not impossible to define, an approximation is made by specifying what these terms do not include. Now, in studying mental operations it is seen that there is a mass of mental material that, while not in consciousness at the time, may at will be summoned to appear before conscious- ness; in other words, there are facts, memories, mental images which we can recall whenever we desire to do so, and there are other facts, proper names being an excellent example, which, although they may not in every case be recalled when we want them, and even evince a perversity in sometimes not coming when they are called, occur spontaneously as it appears, and at times when we may be thinking of something very remote from any logical connection with them. I say advisedly very remote, for the reason that it will appear later that these ideas which seem to enter of their own accord are quite as closely connected 38 THE FORE-CONSCIOUS 39 with the topics which are occupying our attention at the time as the others. The connection is not so much logical as it is psychological. Another illustration of the type of mental material which may be called up at will is the multiplication table. Others are the telephone numbers or addresses of more or less numerous friends or the brands and prices of several com- modities. We have them in mind that is, in con- sciousness whenever we want them and almost without fail, and dismiss them, and call up others. Of course there are times when, on account of our being disconcerted, we may not be able to remember these facts t at exactly the minute we desire to use them. But things like these are in and out of the mind day after day, with quite a reasonable degree of certainty, in much the same way as we can call up any one of a million or so of people on the telephone. Now, the name applied to those ideas, facts, images and other mental states which we have the power to call up at will, or that part of the mind where they are stored, is the Fore-conscious. It contains those thoughts and ideas which are available for ready reproduction, and which occupy our minds most clearly when we are not actively looking, hearing, tasting, touching, etc. These ideas of the fore-conscious are the only purely mental material, aside from real sensa- 40 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT tions and perceptions, available for the most of us when we wish to do any voluntary thinking. The Unconscious, on the other hand, is that region of the mind where are deposited, and have been deposited since our birth (and some students of the mind think even before), all our experiences, not only those of last summer, for instance, every sight or sound that we perceived and every feeling that we had, but everything that has ever happened to us. Think of all the places our parents took us to before the time of the earliest memory we can rake up out of our earliest childhood! We cannot possibly recall them all, although they occurred at the most impressionable age, before we were five years old. There has been a gradual process of forgetting taking place, which in our present terminology we may describe by saying that these experiences have for a short time been in the fore-conscious, but have one by one dropped out of it. To con- tinue the telephone metaphor, we may say that connection has been cut off from those incidents, which are now comparable to the billions of humans who live their entire lives out of reach of any telephone lines whatever. They could be reached only by putting up poles and wires or by other expensive construction. For these ideas of the forerconscious we need no inferential proof. By means of them we THE FORE-CONSCIOUS 41 revive into conscious and experience again, in our own personalities, things that have occurred days, weeks, months, years ago. I have said that we can recall them at will, and also that they return spontaneously. Some are aroused in one of these ways, and some in the other. At any rate, that is the general opinion. How accurate this general opinion is may be inferred later when we come to discuss the origin of particular thoughts. But no one will deny that the ideas of the fore-conscious are what has been called immediate experience. In this respect they are as certain facts as are all our sensations and per- ceptions, of which indeed they have been called the copies. Kaplan * says : " We are forced to recognise the Unconscious, * if we let conscious psychic phenomena pass not merely as an empty succes- sion of experiences, but wish to bring them into intimate relations in the same way that we con- nect the hourly increasing strokes of the hour on the clock intimately through the knowledge that they are the regular effects of a mechanism built and operating according to certain laws and at most only withdrawn from our perception.' We divide unconscious mental processes into two classes, those that are ' forgotten ' on account of their being * uninteresting,' and those that are * Grundziige der Psychoanalyse, p. 8x. 42 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT * repressed ' on account of their ' painful ' or even * shocking ' nature. The psychic processes of the first class, containing all as yet unsettled thoughts or those not yet brought to a conclu- sion, are really ' unconscious,' but they may easily become ' conscious,' they are ' available for con- sciousness.' Those of the second class are in the highest degree unconscious, they may be called ' unavailable for consciousness.' For this reason Freud divides the unconscious into the ' fore- conscious ' and the absolutely ' unconscious.' The concept ' unavailable for consciousness ' is evi- dently a relative one, and denotes only the man- ner in which anything is experienced; the task of psychoanalysis, however, is to bring to conscious- ness the processes that are unavailable for con- sciousness. " The unconscious is not to be compared with the unreal or non-existent. From the above dis- cussion it is easy to understand this about the ' fore-conscious,' that is, the act of forgetting in the ordinary sense, and about the thoughts not carried to a conclusion. The same is true of the ' unconscious ' in the special sense of Freud. There are conditions where the complexes un- available for consciousness press forward into consciousness, but their belonging to the ego is disguised." CHAPTER V THE UNCONSCIOUS. (DESCRIPTIVE) ON the other hand, the thoughts, ideas and wishes of the Unconscious are never directly called up voluntarily. They are neither subject to our volition nor do they make their appear- ance spontaneously. They are and remain for- ever inaccessible to ordinary consciousness. Their existence even is a matter of inference. They are described as being that portion of our mental states of which we may not have direct or im- mediate experience, but whose existence we may deduce from other facts. From certain mental diseases, from dreams, from mistakes in reading, speaking and writing, and from actions of the type which is called " symptomatic," we infer the existence of certain unconscious ideas and wishes, which we never directly experience as such, but whose effects upon our behaviour and even our specific acts are clearly demonstrable. Just as the astronomers in the days of low-powered telescopes deduced the existence of the planet Neptune from the motions of the other planets, motions which could be accounted for on no 43 44 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT other basis save the existence of a planet which they could not see, but which later astronomers have seen with telescopes of higher power, so psychoanalysis, relying only on the low-powered instrument of conscious thought, deduces the existence of certain features of the uncon- scious part of the psyche, features which are well known to it by their effects upon conscious thoughts and acts, but of which consciousness itself can have no direct and immediate experi- ence. And just as astronomy with its telescopes, and with its spectroscopes, has been able to give us exact information about a goodly proportion of the illimitable universe invisible to the naked eye, information the reliability of which no one doubts, so psychoanalysis, with instruments of precision, albeit purely mental and not material ones, has already, in the brief quarter of a cen- tury of its work as a science, given us informa- tion of the most stupendous and yet perfectly practical character about a portion of our souls of which we had before been in complete igno- rance, a vast illimitable realm which in extent may well be compared to the stellar universe in pro- portion to the circumscribed confines of our con- scious life. And the simile may be carried out in another direction, too. Just as we are im- pressed with a feeling of awe, as we look into COMPLETE RETENTIVENESS 45 the depths of the heavens on a moonless, starry night, so do we experience a feeling of awe, and a sensation of being confronted with something of enormousness and immeasurable import when through the study of the newer psychology we face the infinite deeps of the human soul. A. Complete Retentiveness In much the same way as on a starry night our vision is filled with the countless numbers of the stars, and we think that, if our sight was keen enough, we should be able to see still others, and that possibly if keen-sighted enough we should see no black sky, nothing but stars, so we are impressed with the fact that the Unconscious is absolutely retentive of every experience that the individual has ever had. After study of the Unconscious in its various manifestations in everyday life and in dreams, we find that it is an ever retentive storehouse, in which is preserved everything that has entered the mind through all the avenues of sensation, both external and internal, that most of what we experienced has been forgotten, but, though for- gotten, is still operative in our minds, ever striv- ing to return to consciousness. We find that there is a restraining force which prevents most of our thoughts and feelings from reentering 46 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT consciousness in their own true form, but that if sufficiently disguised they may elude that restrain- ing force, the censor,* and appear in other forms. We discover that the enormous vital power of the psyche, so large a proportion of which is unknown to us, is capable of an extraordinary degree of development which has been called its sublimation,! and that failing to find that sublima- tion in activities connected with life outside of us, the life craving turns inward toward the physiological processes of nutrition, reproduction, etc., and becomes the cause of the disordered functioning of the bodily mechanism. We are convinced of the fact that the constant vital crav- ing is manifested, too, in every act of our daily lives. These considerations will occupy us in the pages immediately following. No matter how trivial, every sensation and every perception of the individual psyche is stored in its original shape in the Unconscious. The appearance of everything we ever saw, the sound of everything we ever heard, the feeling of every- thing we ever touched, all these are registered, some say in the billion or so cells in the brain, like negatives on a photographic film. They almost always remain undeveloped, preserving their unconscious state forever. But they are sometimes developed " as the photographer's * See page 71. t See page 80. COMPLETE RETENTIVENESS 47 fluid develops the picture sleeping in the collodion film. The oftenest quoted of these cases is Coleridge's : " ' In a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a young woman, who could neither read nor write, was seized with a fever, and was said by the priests to be possessed of a devil, because she was heard talking Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Whole sheets of her ravings were written out, and found to consist of sentences intelligible in themselves, but having slight connection with each other. Of her Hebrew sayings only a few could be traced to the Bible, and most seemed to be in the Rabbinical dialect. All trick was out of the ques- tion ; the woman was a simple creature ; there was no doubt as to the fever ... At last the mys- tery was unveiled by a physician, who determined to trace back the girl's history, and who, after much trouble, discovered that at the age of nine she had been charitably taken by an old Protes- tant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, in whose house she lived till his death. On further inquiry it appeared to have been the old man's custom for years to walk up and down a passage of his house into which the kitchen opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice out of his books. The books were ransacked, and among them were found several of the Greek and Latin Fathers, together with a collection of Rabbinical 48 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT writings. In these works so many of the passages taken down at the young woman's bedside were identified that there could be no reasonable doubt as to their source ' ' (James: Psychology, I, 681). Sporadic cases like this show clearly the pos- sibility of utter completeness of retention by the mind of almost every incident, no matter how apparently trivial and unimportant to the person retaining the memory. The fact that needs ex- planation, supposing that we are all equally reten- tive, is how it happens that some of our memories are selected for recall while others are by some influence rendered incapable of recall. Freud and his school have contributed an original answer to this question, an answer that will be indicated in the following pages. What strikes the thoughtful person at the outset of his study of the newer psychology is the recurrence of the phrases " unconscious thoughts," " unconscious wishes " and similar expressions. If he happens to be acquainted with the general position of philosophy up to the advent of the science of psychoanalysis, he will at once inquire how it is possible that there should be unconscious mental states of any sort. The definition of mind generally accepted up to the time of analytic psychology has made mind coex- tensive with consciousness. So that the term un- COMPLETE RETENTIVENESS 49 conscious mental process will seem to him a contradiction. But the psychoanalysts have amply demonstrated that unconscious thinking not only takes place, but that it goes on all the time, whether we are awake or asleep. Freud (Traumdeutung, p. 450) says: " It is a striking peculiarity of unconscious processes that they remain indestructible. In the Unconscious there is no ending, there is no past, there is no forgetting. We are most strongly impressed with this when investigating the neuroses, especially hysteria. The insult that occurred thirty years ago, once it has won its way to the unconscious sources of the affects, works the entire thirty years like a new one. As often as its memory is touched it revives and is shown to be possessed of an excitability which at one stroke produces motor disturbance. Exactly here is where psy- chotherapy comes in. It is its task to produce for the unconscious processes a discharge and a forgetting. Therefore what we are inclined to consider self-explanatory and account for as a pri- mary influence of time upon the mental memory residues, namely the paling of memories and the weakness of affects of impressions no longer fresh, are really secondary transformations which are brought about by laborious effort. It is the fore-conscious which performs this work, and psychotherapy can take no other course than sub- 50 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT jecting the Unconscious to the control of the fore- conscious." B. Repression The real causes of our behaviour are hidden from us, as is shown by the fact that the things we thought we had forgotten are not completely destroyed. And the reason they seem to be for- gotten is that they no longer occur to us. They no longer occur to us because they have been re- pressed, and carry with them into the Unconscious, as they are repressed, other things which are men- tally associated with them. This repression is so nearly perfect that it may be said that most of our experiences have sunk into oblivion. Ordinarily, or as we might say normally, they cannot be awak- ened when once they have lapsed into the Uncon- scious. And there is a very good reason for this, namely, that the power that has done the re- pressing is still at work continuing the repression, and making it more and more permanent as time goes on. In order to account for the state of anything, we are obliged to frame a theory of the manner in which that thing came into existence. Our modern attitude toward nature is not as it once was. Modern science is not satisfied with barren labelling and ticketing and dividing into classes according to the presence or absence of a certain REPRESSION 51 quality. The most modern trend of scientific thought is to make a theory and then make it work, if possible. If it does not, we give it up, and try another. The path of the progress of science is paved with abandoned theories. It is quite possible that many of the present theories will be given up for better ones. The Unconscious is a theory proposed for the explanation of a great many phenomena of mental life, and an- other is that concerning the prime mover of human action. This prime mover of human ac- tion is called by Bergson the elan vital, by Jung horme, by Freud libido. The name which I have used in this book is the Craving, proposed by Putnam as the best English equivalent of the word libido. It is the power which many have called love. Each name has its defects, and I have only chosen the one which seemed to me to have the fewest. These two theories first, that a large part of our mental life is unconscious (unknown or un- knowable), and second, that a creative force, by whatever name it may be called, is constantly im- pelling all animate life have been used together in working out the science of psychoanalysis. The prime mover of the human soul, then, is its continual Craving for Life, for Love and for Action. Its craving for Life is easily understood, for without it the individual would seek annihila- 52 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT tion with as much eagerness as the ordinary person seeks to continue his life. Our conscious life is generally little troubled by definite thoughts of our processes of maintaining our physical or- ganism. We all want our three or four meals a day and are more or less impossible if we do not get what we want to eat where and when we want it, and in sufficient quantities to make us feel geni- ally satisfied. Few of us that are not troubled with dyspepsia ever give our food another thought after we have eaten it, and that is quite as it should be. Some of us do not know where our stomachs or our hearts or livers are, and in truth it is really no business of ours to be thinking of such things. For all these processes, the finished product of seons of evolution, are the business of that part of the Unconscious which has been called the biochemical level. Of course we all have been acquainted at some time or other with people (some men, but more women) who, to use an old-fashioned expression, " enjoy poor health." These people do, possibly through no fault of their own, get to thinking after a slight illness about what is the cause of it and how their various digestive organs work, and so on. " So on " comprises the fact that such people frame gro- tesque theories as to the physiological processes that have been temporarily thrown out of gear, theories which the newer psychologists, the medi- REPRESSION 53 cal school, have called not without a dry humour " phantasies." If the Unconscious were satisfied to stay at the biochemical level mentioned above we probably should not ever have discovered its existence, and the child's questions about where we are when we are asleep or where our thoughts are when we are not thinking them would either have been un- answered or would continue to be answered in the historically evasive way. But the Unconscious, craving not only to live but to love and to act, has pervaded our every thought and action, and con- trols us, a mysterious unseen power that has escaped detection until this twentieth century. It has been faintly guessed at even from the time of the earliest Greek philosophers, but now the psychoanalysts have begun to examine it in the laboratory and apply the methods of modern science to it. Why, then, can we not recall the greater part of our past experiences? Because they are re- pressed. Why, then, are they repressed? Be- cause of the controlling power of the Uncon- scious, which permits only a dim glimmer of light to filter through the curtain of the past. It will naturally occur to the reader that all this seems to imply a purpose on the part of the Unconscious. An indefinite desire it is, but not a purpose. We are forced to infer that the Unconscious, called by 54 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT us the Titan, thinks in its elemental way, and in archaic modes, and is satisfied with broad and primal gratifications. We have seen this in re- gard to the nutritive functions, as indicated above. The mode of thought governing this Titan which plays so important a part in the affairs of men may be described somewhat as follows: It gets great satisfaction from a feeling of superior- ity, of greater strength or power, when comparing itself with other individuals. In fact, it seems al- ways to be comparing itself in point of power with some other fellow-being, mostly human, of its en- vironment. If, then, it succeeds in demonstrating to itself its superiority in any given situation, all well and good. It tries to make this situation per- manent. But if, on the other hand, it finds itself in a situation where it is at a disadvantage, it does two things, frequently both at the same time. It ignores as far as possible, and it would amaze the reader to learn how far that is sometimes, all the circumstances surrounding such a demonstra- tion of inferiority, abolishing the situation to- gether with myriads of associations connected with it. It is much as if a sculptor, seeing that his statue was inferior to some other artist's, or even think- ing erroneously that it was inferior, should de- stroy it, together with the studio in which it was modelled and all the materials and modelling tools. The other thing that the Unconscious Ti- REPRESSION 55 tan does in such a situation is to seek immedi- ate satisfaction for his disappointment in some activity generally much lower in the moral scale. The sculptor demolishes his statue, burns up his studio, and gets beastly drunk himself. As a mat- ter of fact, every drink of alcoholic liquor that is drunk in the world, or has ever been drunk, has been imbibed for exactly that reason. The same remark applies to all the drugs of stimulating or narcotic character, particularly when their use has become a habit. A stimulating drink is taken admittedly for the purpose of driving away dull care, of forgetting unhappiness, of increasing the sense of power. It does increase the sense of power, but it very soon decreases the power itself. In increasing the sense of power, which is purely subjective, it thus makes a direct appeal to the imagination, and solely to the imagination, of the drinker. In making an appeal to the imagination it drives the drinker to the baleful resource of gaining his satisfactions from himself and not from his effective work upon the world of reality outside of himself. This, as will be seen later, is driving the drinker back to his own infancy, when he had no cares and when all his wants were sup- plied to him from his mother. In this sense all drinking of stimulating liquors is a projecting of oneself back to the days of his first drink at his mother's breast, or its successor or substitute, the 56 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT rubber-nippled bottle. The drinker is still, as he was when a baby in years only, fond of his bottle. Now, the feeling of inferiority, which is the source of the most painful mental states that we experience, is a matter of comparison, of judg- ment; and the Titan within us judges very roughly. It is pathetic to learn of the low esti- mate that some very good workmen place upon their productions. But the fact that concerns us here is that the action or performance, whether it was really good or bad, acquires the quality of being too terrible to be borne, and, as it is too terrible to be borne, the mind refuses to think of it and begins actively to abolish it and the memory of it. It is perfectly patent that we do not like places where we have suffered defeats of various kinds, and we naturally return to localities where we have had a good time. In the one place every sight recalls the defeat, and the unpleasant feel- ings originally aroused by it are revived, and in the other place we are reminded of the pleasures and gratifications we have had there. In short, what determines the repression, or the banishing of memories and thoughts associ- ated with them, is the sense of intolerability that is awakened. It is quite surprising to learn what things are regarded as intolerable by some per- sons, not merely those who are mentally abnormal but those who are in every other respect absolutely REPRESSION 57 wholesome humans. For the drinker the intoler- able thing is that he may have to go without that feeling which the drink produces in him. The fact, too, that the intolerable thing to the drinker is the absence of a certain subjective feeling, de- rived from a process of doing a species of violence to himself, places his act at once in the class of solitary vices, no matter how many of his fellow- infants he may be practising it with. A room full of opium smokers is another instance of this same retirement into the subjective world, apart from their fellows, no matter how gregarious they might look to a casual observer. The Unconscious, then, represses what seems intolerable to it, the standard of tolerability being very different in different individuals. Moreover, it constantly resorts to any means whatever by which it may gain a feeling of superiority, and in this its methods are bizarre and grotesque, not to say weird. They have a continual tendency to be or to become petty. In a crowded city street it is a custom of the drivers, mostly of business wagons, if they see a man walking across the street in front of them, to whip up their horses and try, not to run over him, but to make him jump out of the way. In so doing they produce an immediate visible effect on a person whom they could not command with words. Another in- stance of the same satisfaction derived by a sim- 5 8 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT ilar petty act was confessed to me by an educator who had recently bought a Ford car. His diffi- culties in managing to learn to drive it were more than offset, apparently, and any sense of inferior- ity was fully compensated for, by the immense joy he derived from seeing men, women and children jump and start back when he sounded his horn! Of course it may be said that he was conscious that he enjoyed the sensation of seeing the people jump at the sound of his horn, but he surely would not have mentioned it with such glee, if he had re- flected that he was taking a petty satisfaction from the power with which the possession of the horn furnished him, as a compensation for awkward- ness in the management of his new automobile. And this is an educator, a man not only in the full possession of all his faculties, but a cultivated gentleman of power and refinement. Do we wonder that ignorant drivers of horses like to show their power? Another instance. Did you ever hand any- thing to a person at that person's request and have him or her accidentally (?) and quite in- nocently look away at just the minute you were handing it to her or him? A gentle reminder that you are still proffering it produces a sudden start in that person, and an apology, more or less feeble. But reflect on the situation. What does it mean to the Unconscious of the offending per- REPRESSION 59 son? It means that It, the Titan belonging to that sort of irritating person, or perhaps to whom that person belongs, is taking a satisfaction from the fact that as long as you stand holding the ob- ject you are Its servant; and you will notice that very perverse people will prolong such a situ- ation just as far as they can. I purposely take examples of petty actions, because they are gen- erally so unconscious. There are a great number of conscious perversities in people coming from downright meanness of character that I do not need to describe, such as continued refusal to give you a thing you ask for and have a right to, and many other actions. The conversational bore is one who takes his satisfaction, which means exerting a kind of power, which again means cre- ating and maintaining a situation in which he in a certain sense becomes your superior, in using his word-making apparatus simply and solely for the purpose of commanding your attention. One of the sources from which the infantile Un- conscious draws its sense of power, which it needs must draw in order to get the satisfaction derivable from the removal of the sense of infe- riority, is from simple negativism. It is pointed out in another place that the mere negation of a prop- osition is of no psychological value whatever. A mere verbal contradiction is psychologically equiv- alent only to a complete repetition of the idea 60 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT adding a negative sign to it. It really does not change the proposition at all. It accepts the statement in to to without variation. The nega- tive is no variation on any theme. Similarly with negativistic acts. If, told to do something, a child does exactly the opposite, it is more than half accepting the suggestion. A more complete re- jection of the suggestion would be to do some- thing of an entirely different nature. The most complete rejection of any verbal suggestion is totally ignoring it and talking about something else, illustrated by the boy who was scolded by his teacher, and remarked in a perfectly unruffled tone that he had observed that the teacher's upper jaw did not move while she was speaking. Thus complete diversion is seen to be the only form of psychological negation possible. This is prac- tised by skilful handlers of their fellow-men, who, realising, though perhaps only unconsciously, that a contradiction is only a following of the sug- gestion of the other person but with a negative sign, so to speak, succeed in pleasantly instilling their own ideas into the minds of others, at the same time persuading them to believe that they are desirable. All these modes of behaviour on the part of civ- ilised and more or less educated persons show the working of their Unconscious even in their small- est acts. Some of them know, possibly, that they REPRESSION 61 are examples of bad habits or impoliteness, but they are mostly unable to change, because the un- conscious satisfaction that they derive puts them in a good humour with themselves, and the effort to accomplish the contrary produces a strange un- easiness in them which they do not understand because they do not know of the implications which I have outlined above. Complete retention, therefore, of all experi- ences, and equally complete repression of all ex- periences that are not needed for the performance of our everyday duties, are what characterise the Unconscious on the passive side. A blind desire which consciousness is perpetually directing to- ward higher aims and which the Unconscious is ever tending to drag down to the archaic level is the salient quality of the Titan on the active side. When I spoke above of experiences that are not needed for the performance of our everyday duties, I referred to the essentially perfunctory way in which so many of us get through our daily work. From one point of view it appears that if we could keep in the fore-conscious, within easy call, a goodly number of our fortunate experiences for inspiration and illumination we should be so heartened by them that every act throughout the day would be a triumph of joy. It would seem as if the rule ought to work both ways.- If the Uncon- scious succeeds in banishing past events and the 62 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT emotions connected with them, why should it not invite and entertain the pleasant memories, to cheer us on our way? To a certain extent it does this, to be sure. Here we come upon the third main point that we have continually to bear in mind as a character- istic of the Unconscious. It has been shown that the repressions consist of repressed ideas, scenes, sounds and what not, and repressed emotions. From the time of Achilles sulking in his tent on account of losing Chryseis as his part of the booty, down to the time of Mr. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, who went out into the woodhouse and swore at the wood, which mightily relieved his feelings, men and particularly women have either vented their wrath, which has been good for their health if not for that of others, or have swallowed their feelings, a procedure that has never done them any good, but has perhaps spared their friends and relatives. Now, the repression of the emotions is the ultimate cause of the repression that is, the forgetting of the ideas. The venting of the wrath symbolises the getting rid of almost any kind of deleterious material from the system. The happiest individuals on the whole are those who can work off all their uneasinesses, not to say their diseases, by appropriate actions. But the re- quirements of modern civilised society are such that we frequently have to repress the frank ex- REPRESSION 63 pression of our emotions. The history of the repressed emotion is what now concerns us. For it has been discovered by the newer psychology that these repressed emotions are merely driven back, down into the Unconscious. They do not abate a jot or tittle of their intensity, buferather keep on growing. In extreme cases, instead of re- maining a branch as it were of our own person- ality, our " queer streak," they form independent individualities of themselves, so that we have, in our supposedly one Ego, two or more person- alities. This is what I might call the distracted Soul. We are all more or less distracted. The line be- tween what is called sanity and what is called insanity is, as everyone well knows, almost, if not quite, impossible to draw. We are distracted in a mild degree, of course, if we try to play the piano and talk at the same time, unless we are pretty good players, or if at a social gathering we try to listen to two conversations at the same time. These are, however, but intellectual distractions. The emotional one is what comes from a sorrow or a disappointment buried in the Unconscious. For in the Unconscious it is alive and not an- nihilated, and what is worse it is in your Uncon- scious and no one's else and playing havoc with your mind and soul and with that of no one else but yourself. The sights and sounds that we have 64 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT seen and heard would of themselves do no mis- chief if it were not for the emotions that they are so closely bound up with. It is somewhat as if we found a waste-basket on fire, and instead of putting out the fire we carefully put it up attic or down cellar and shut the door and locked it, per- haps threw away the key ! But that is what we do when we repress emotions. It damages our house if it does not burn it down. Possibly the fire department or the doctor is called in, as the case may be, and saves some part of our physical or mental edifice. But we were only an ignorant serv- ant and knew no better. So it appears that we have to conceive of for- getting in a new way. We naturally speak of for- getting some things as if by so doing we could put them out of existence. We think that by keeping an unpleasant experience or an unfortunate one out of mind we can make it as if it had never been. On the other hand, I have said above that many of the experiences of the past are banished to the Unconscious in such a way that it is impossible to reawaken them. And there seems to be a sort of contradiction in these two statements. But the ex- periences that are banished to the Unconscious are forgotten by our conscious mind. They have been pushed down from the fore-conscious into the Un- conscious, and they are " forgotten " by the former but not by the latter, which is unable to INDEPENDENT VITALITY 65 " forget," in that sense, anything at all. So when we say that we have forgotten or buried a memory of a sorrow or a disappointment, we can really mean only that we have exiled it from the fore- conscious, whence it would have an easy access at all times to our conscious life, and might em- barrass us by inopportune emergence at awkward times, to the Unconscious, whence it never emerges at all, at least in its original shape. C. Independent Vitality The real causes of our conduct are concealed from us, continually, because the mental states, repressed into the Unconscious by virtue of the un- pleasant feelings originally associated with them, in other words, the unpleasant or painful feeling tone which the experiences had at the time, are undergoing a continuous development below the level of consciousness. For while the experience is " forgotten," is banished to the dark realm of the Unconscious, it has, as we have seen, lost none of its independent vitality, but it continues to de- velop, and what is still more important for us, it keeps on influencing us, indirectly, to be sure, and in dark and hitherto mysterious ways. The prin- ciple of the conservation of matter in the science of physics declares that no atom is ever destroyed. Shapes that we have seen are seen no more, and 66 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT the molecules of matter that formed the substance of what we saw have been broken up and have taken other shapes, but the atoms composing them have only been differently arranged in space and have lost none of their substance or proper activ- ity. We may posit a similar conservation prin- ciple in psychic life. The experience is as it were destroyed, forgotten, banished from recollection. It is as if burned up and transformed into gases and ashes. But if it can no longer enter our minds in its original form, it nevertheless can and does affect our lives and actions in another form. In some shape it is perfectly and completely con- served. It can and does enter our lives under various disguises. The real causes for the particular acts of our everyday lives are hidden from us, because they are not available for presentation to consciousness in their crassly archaic forms. The manners and customs of some of our ancestors not so very re- mote would shock our present-day sense of pro- priety. From the extremely archaic impulses which daily emanate from the Unconscious ourt gaze is necessarily averted. Yet in order to enter! the light of consciousness their nature has to be apparently changed. They are ceaselessly strug- gling to enter consciousness because of their super- abundant vitality. Similiarly the occurrences in our own lives which are so painful or unpleasant SYMBOLISM 67 that our consciousness shrinks from them at the time we first experience them are still retained in the Unconscious and are continuously striving for an outlet into the consciousness. They do not succeed in doing so until they have been trans- muted into a form in which our conscious sensi- tiveness no longer recoils from them. D. Symbolism The disguises under which the Unconscious presents to our conscious lives the experiences that have been repressed on account of their pain- ful qualities have been studied by psychoanalysis under the name of symbols. A symbol in the ordi- nary sense is merely an emblem like the national flag, or a trademark, which represents in the one case some sentiment such as patriotism, and on the other hand a certain standard of excellence in making of a kind of goods. But a symbol in the newer sense is an idea which takes the place of the ideas that have become too painful to be borne by the conscious life, and so to speak represents in consciousness the idea that is buried in the Uncon- scious. It is a sort of euphemism, or speaking of an unpleasant fact by means of a word generally having pleasant associations. In the newer sense, too, the symptom of a disease is sometimes also a symbol, as for instance when the fear of crossing 68 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT open places is seen to be the symptom of the mental disease called hysteria, and symbolises a fear of quite a different sort which is in the Un- conscious, and never appears above the threshold because too terrible to be faced consciously. It is thought by some of those doing research in psychoanalysis that the symbol in this sense is always the substitute in consciousness for a thought or group of thoughts or feelings which are unable to enter consciousness themselves, but which find a vicarious admittance into our waking life through the symbols. If, then, it is found that a large proportion of our thoughts and actions not to say physical conditions, are sym- bols or substitutes for something of which we are totally ignorant, then certainly it will be evident that the more we can learn about their real mean- ing (which is the things that they only stand for and themselves are not), the better we shall un- derstand human conduct in general. Pfister tells of a girl who was troubled with chronic constipation. Her duties about the house became excessively unpleasant to her. The psycho- analysis to which Pfister, her pastor and teacher, subjected her revealed the fact that what she hated worse about her housework were activities con- nected with cleaning and dusting. She could not tell why this was so, but when it was suggested to her that her dislike of cleaning and dusting the SYMBOLISM 69 house was but an outward symbol of the same wish which made her constipated, and that the cleaning of the house symbolised the cleaning of her own intestinal tract, she took hold of the proposition with a will, and all her difficulties came to an end. Her wish not to be clean in one respect is analo- gous to the wish not to be clean in another. She knows both circumstances, but is not aware of the connection between them. But when told by the analyser that the constipation was not an isolated affair, but was in direct causal connection with her unwillingness to do cleaning work in other direc- tions, the whole thing took on a new appearance and she saw the domestic laziness as a symbol of another form of disinclination. If an experience which has been a terrible shock to any one of us, and the feelings and emotions associated with it have not at the time of the ex- perience been allowed for some reason to find their natural outlet in action or in a recourse to human sympathy and understanding, if such an experience is repressed, there results a condition much like a boiler generating steam, but with no work being done, no outlet except the safety valve. The fire of our animal vitality goes right on gener- ating more and more steam. The energy issues from the safety valve in amorphous clouds, in- stead of the formal and definite reciprocation of the piston and the smooth and regular turning of yo MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT the wheels. The symbols are the safety valve's outrush of steam. To carry the simile one step farther, we may say that the human machine, here compared to a steam boiler, has (or itself forms) many safety valves, each one of them a different group of symbols, if, and only if, the engine which it is designed by its maker to set in motion be either cut off or be too small to use up all the energy generated in the boiler. As an example of steam power cut off from its engine, take the case of a business man who retires and does not find employment for his faculties, or the lover who has lost his mistress. Each must find another absorbing interest or perish, at least mentally. Of course there are physiques that go on for years as merely physical organisms, without per- ceptible mentality more than is enough to keep them eating, dressing and undressing. This is, to be sure, but a very broad statement about symbols, and is necessarily extremely in- definite. To go into details here, for instance, as to the reason why I signifies male, 2 female, why red is sometimes masculine while at other times blue is the masculine colour, would require too much space in the present treatment of the subject. Here, however, it should be remembered chiefly that any idea, thing or action may become, as in fact all things have become, for all of us, a con- THE CENSOR 71 scious symbol (or, a symbol in consciousness) for another idea or emotion or group of ideas or emo- tions which have been repressed into our Uncon- scious because they are themselves regarded by us as too terrible to be faced consciously. This is the cause of so many pleasant, not to say comical, euphemisms for the idea of death, such as " kick- ing the bucket," " turned up his toes to the daisies," etc., and it is the cause of our dreams being so apparently nonsensical. E. The Censor The real causes of our daily behaviour are con- cealed from us. If, as Kaplan says, we regard the Unconscious and the Conscious as separate locali- ties, there is a boundary between them across which the wishes of the Unconscious have to pass before attaining the light of conscious life. At this boundary line there is situated an inhibitive power preventing these unconscious wishes from passing unless they are masked by the symbolisms referred to in the preceding section. Under the influence of the human society in which we live we do many things and we avoid doing many other things. It is shown by psycho- analysis that the combined effect of the interests of all the people with whom we live in relations of greater or less amity is represented, so to speak, 72 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT by a deterrent force residing in our ego and pre- venting us from stepping outside of the bounds of propriety. This deterrent force was compared by Freud to a censor. Just as a censor of some government (in our present metaphor, the con- scious) goes over the letters and communications of other kinds that come from some other nation or from all other nations (here the Unconscious), and excises certain parts of the printed or written matter, in the same way the so-called psychic (or endopsychic) censor reviews the ideas which are constantly being sent up from the underworld of the Unconscious, and prevents them from entering consciousness except in a form that is unrecog- nisable by the conscious part of our ego namely, in the form of symptoms and other symbols. The Unconscious thus keeps on delivering its messages to us, messages which are mostly to the effect that it wishes to live, love and act in archaic modes, according to which it has evolved through the ages. But these modes are in conflict with the progress of human society, and the result is that the hundreds of thousands of years of ancestry behind us have to be in a sense curbed and re- strained or the manners and morals which may have been the best in prehistoric times will, and constantly do attempt to, assert themselves in the actions of persons living today. Right here it is interesting to note that the newest theory of in- THE CENSOR 73 sanity is that insanity is the regression of the mind back to prehistoric modes of thought. There is no doubt that if a paleolithic man could be revived and paraded on Broadway, Broadway would think him, and would be obliged to think him, completely insane. He could not talk " United States," and just think what he would do! So that it seems quite reasonable to suppose that people of today who lose their minds, as it is called, do nothing else than revert to a mental state that was useful in archaic ages, but which society of the present day is obliged to shut up to keep from injuring themselves and other people. And here we see why the line between sanity and insanity is so hard to draw, because some of us revert only a few years or a few centuries, while others go back farther, and we see in this way that the only criterion of sanity is usefulness to society, the person being most insane who is least avail- able for the work demanded of him by society, and least " out of his head " who can carry on some work that his position in economic society requires of him. This is only another way of saying that the actions of such a person are more or less uncensored. Why is a person called eccen- tric or " queer " ? Because he cannot do something that all the others do, or if he does it, performs his duty in an unusual and less serviceable man- ner. This is the most uncomfortable aspect of 74 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT this view of the Unconscious, as the uncivilised, not to say violent and crazy, Titan that each and every one of us carries around all the time. Watch him carefully! He it is that breaks loose when savages " run amuck " and him we unchain when we melt his bonds with liquor! Him we satisfy when we do so many things that our conscious life in soberer moments disapproves of or finds il- logical, as we look back on our former acts and wonder how it was possible that we ever could have done this or that thing, made this or that blunder. On this side of our nature I do not, however, wish to leave the reader gazing. It is enough to lift for a brief moment the veil which time has drawn over the past that lives in the present. If psychoanalysis had been able to do no more than this, its results would not have justified the years that have been spent in its manifold researches. There is one compensation for all the repulsive- ness which a glance at the depths of the Uncon- scious reveals. As one writer puts it : " Where the brightest light is, there are the darkest shad- ows." Let us remember that we have the light! The light does not cast the shadows ; they are cast by the objects that we wanted to see when we made the light. The compensation for the terror which first strikes our hearts when we see in the / past of our race the dark outlines, those forms THE CENSOR 75 " that tare each other in their slime," the ves- tigial remains of which are still active in the thoughts and actions of our daily life, is the in- dubitable fact that for the soul that realises these conditions there is in life nothing too terrible to be borne. This is the least of the compensations, being merely negative, but there are others far greater and more positive. To restate the results, so far, of our consider- ation of the manifestations of the Unconscious in our daily life: We find the Unconscious to be completely retentive of all past experiences, par- ticularly of the emotions, completely repressive of all except a meagre few which are necessities for our existence and for what happiness we may be able to get out of life, and we find that the repressed elements are possessed of a vigorous vitality, and that they are controlled or curbed to a certain extent by an inhibitory power that has been called the psychic censor. This represents in us the restraining force of society upon us, and acts as a sort of agency for society somewhat as a diplomatic agent represents a foreign country, but with the added qualification that this censor does not merely excise from the demands sent up from the forces below; but, because the demands are so strong and so insistent and so rudimentary, transforms the demands for life, love and action in such a way that they are unrecognisable. It is 76 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT only when we recognise that the instinct to do cer- tain things to chew gum, for instance, is merely a disguised demand on the part of the Uncon- scious that we keep constantly munching at some- thing, in the case of the gum (or sucking some- thing, such as a pipe or a cigar or a piece of candy) it is only when we recognise what is at the bottom of these impulses that we see what their true value is, and in the cases just mentioned the regression of the desire to a level of mere nutritive function. We should be glad for this censor to abide with us and especially happy to have him as well developed as possible in other people, because he is in a certain sense what keeps others from making life intolerable to us. And there is a way in which we can help him both in ourselves and in others. But before I come to that point I shall have to call attention to the enormous power of the Un- conscious. If it is the accumulated desire in each one of us, of aeons of evolution, the present form, in each individual, of that vital force which has kept itself immortal through thousands of gener- ations of men behind us, and millions of genera- tions of animals behind them, it need not be any- thing but a source of power to us, power that we can draw on, if we rightly understand it, just as we turn on power from a steam pipe or an electric wire. It need not be destructive, indeed is not THE CENSOR 77 destructive except in the most distracted souls, but on the contrary ought in each one of us, when we have learned to manage it rightly, to be as much and as completely at our command as is the power in an automobile. As in the automobile, there are a few simple things that we have to learn and the rest is furnished by the maker of the car, and we do ill to tamper with it. The experience of hav- ing a fifty-horsepower auto placed at one's com- mand (if it is to be driven by oneself) is a situa- tion into which there are many persons, both men and women, who are very loth to enter. And sim- ilarly there are many persons who for various causes would not be willing to have the fifty-thou- sand-generation-power which resides in them de- veloped. There are various reasons for this, which will be discussed later. We are concerned now chiefly with the proposi- tion that the will to live, love and act, conditioned as it is by the power which has gone on living and loving and acting for countless generations, is the only source of all human strength. A number of religious sects have sprung up and have called it the manifestation of Deity or Deity itself. The only point in that connection concerning us here is that to all intents and purposes, and as far as human flesh is able to endure the strain, this power which is largely in the hands of the Unconscious in most men and women is illimitable. Illustrations 78 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT of human endurance, perseverance, ambition and accomplishment are unnecessary to mention now, as they would but draw the attention away from the present path. But it is quite evident that the persons who have distinguished themselves in his- tory for their performances of various kinds have not all been people of extraordinary physical strength. They have, on the other hand, some- times been handicapped try physical afflictions, in spite of which they performed their stirring deeds. They have, however, all been people in whom the power to live, to love and to act was united upon one object at a time. The power which they had and exercised was not dissipated by conflicting ele- ments within themselves. They devoted all their energies to a single aim for long periods, and were capable of long and sustained effort. This is pos- sible only if the Unconscious is, as it were, har- nessed to the same plough as the conscious life. The amount of work, physical or otherwise, that man, woman or child can do is known to be meas- ured by what has been called their interest. Now, when interest flags and the work is done in a half- hearted way, it means simply and solely that the Unconscious, which is in a certain sense infantile because it is archaic, childish because representing in the present the childhood of the race, begins to weary of the activity which it is being put through, and sends wily wireless messages from the depths, THE CENSOR 79 fabricating all sorts of reasons some, if not all of them, very plausible for our ceasing the activ- ity in question and doing something else. This something else is almost always eating or drink- ing or taking some purely physical satisfaction of a low order when compared with the kind of activ- ity by which the world would most be benefited. This concentration of the powers of one indi- vidual unitedly upon one aim is a proof that the souls of some people are united; and the different degrees of unitedness in different individuals show that progress can be made in the line of uniting ourselves to ourselves. It should not be thought that differences in native endowment are sufficient to account for the enormous differences in ac- complishment, and a country like the United States amply demonstrates that different de- grees of accomplishment in social service are not limited in opportunity. The differences in the practical results of human endeavour are condi- tioned solely by the human endeavour itself, and that in turn by the ability of the individual to per- form his work without interruption or obstacles thrown in his way by his Unconscious. The true alignment of the personality can be accomplished by the individual only by turning the tables, as it were, on the Unconscious. If the Unconscious is, as I have attempted to show, a power plant and now engaged in making a multitude of gim- 80 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT cracks to be sold on sidewalks by peddlers, it must be converted into a factory for the specialised pro- duction of some one useful commodity. In human literalness, corresponding to this mechanical meta- phor, we are to give up as many as possible of the distractions, which by a study of the Unconscious we shall see in their true light as archaic, and therefore instances of arrested development, ar- rested as it were in the childhood of the race, and substitute for them actions that are more in line with the team work called for by the requirements of modern progressive society. This necessitates our getting the Unconscious to take a higher aim for a lower, almost to cheat it, so to speak, into believing that it is eating when it is working. * F. Sublimation The real causes of our daily behaviour having been revealed to us by psychoanalysis, we are in duty bound to reckon with them. When their symbolisms are understood by consciousness, a definite line of action has to be pursued in order to array the unlimited power of those unconscious wishes on the side of modern progressive social action. This process of enlisting the Unconscious in the work that is available for social purposes is called Sublimation because it sublimes (an old word in alchemy) or sublimates the crude desires SUBLIMATION 81 of the Unconscious. Just as the alchemists in the early days of science thought that they could trans- mute the baser metals into gold, so the philoso- phers have found that we can change the direction and object of the baser desires into higher ones having in them more gold that is, more value for the modern development of society. That the old Titan, Unconscious, can be coz- ened or cajoled into taking other substitutes for the nutritional aims that he is always growling for is seen when we reflect on the many amusements and distractions that humans are always seeking. Not one per cent, of them really know why they are playing golf or tennis or swimming or danc- ing. If they did, some of them would be surprised indeed. To give an example of the way " A sub- stitute shines brightly as a king Until a king be by," let me mention the extraordinary value placed by the lover upon the possession of his mistress' glove or handkerchief, or a rose that she has worn, which he cherishes up to the point of fetichism, and all to satisfy and for a time, at any rate, it does satisfy the old Titan within him, as a repre- sentative of the adored one, retaining a vividness and a magnetism for him which make him some- times the laughing-stock of those not in his excited condition. There is, then, a real satisfaction, conscious and unconscious, in the possession of the token 82 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT above mentioned. I do not mean to imply for a moment that it will or should continue to be a sat- isfaction of the right kind, but it makes life endur- able for a while. Then there is the sublimation which is necessary for the lover who, through the death or unfaith- fulness of the inamorata, is obliged to give up all hope of ever completely possessing her. We know that it can be done. " Men have died, and worms have eaten them, but not for love." The intense desire, directed by chance toward one of the opposite sex, may still be utilised as an enor- mous power for the attainment of an end which eventually will give as great a spiritual satisfaction as would have been given by the attainment of the end first proposed. In other words, it has been proved over and over that humans can get inter- ested in anything, especially anything human, the only requisite being the same as that for the love of men for women and women for men; that is, a complete devotion to and absorption in the work that they are doing, to the utter forgetfulness of self. G. Introversion An ignorance of the real causes of our acts from hour to hour may result in our not being able to see our opportunities in the line of social co- operation. We may turn more and more away INTROVERSION 83 from relations with the outer world, and more and more become preoccupied with what we conceive as our own interests. We may seek our satisfac- tions from within or from without. By virtue of the principle of ambivalence, to be discussed in a later chapter, the Unconscious is susceptible of development in these two opposite directions. It may develop in such a way as to appear to be essentially selfish, or, to use a homely expression, ingrowing. It may frequently tend to turn in upon itself, to feed upon itself and to con- sume itself. At the same time, however, we are to remember that, as a source of almost unlimited power, it still has the ability, if not obstructed by one or another factor of the environment, of de- veloping outward and effecting the greater part of its work upon the outer world. The cause of the introversion, as it is called, or the tendency to turn in upon itself, is the fact that for a very important period of our lives that is, our infancy we absorb more influences from both outer and inner world than at any other time. In this most im- pressionable time of our lives, when we learn more than we do at any other time, we are almost unable to avoid getting the greater, by far the greater, part of our satisfactions from our own persons. The nursing infant hardly distinguishes any world outside of itself; and that, as we know, is composed largely of absorbing liquid nourishment, playing 84 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT with its toes and other parts of its body, and filling the air with its own inarticulate but vociferous pro- testations. Satisfaction from effecting changes upon external reality, silently and with its hands, it, of course, knows nothing about. And yet, when we look at the ordinary actions of many of our acquaintances of maturer years, how much better do they do than the infant? The nourishment is changed, with the advent of teeth, from entirely liquid to partly solid, the playing with its toes goes on, figuratively, as a great part of human activity is really not much more useful than that for the ad- vancement, material and spiritual, of society; and as for the filling of the air with inarticulate but vo- ciferous protestations, what is the major portion of ordinary adult (so-called) conversation, small talk, but a voicing of one's own opinions, without any more regard than the infant as to whether those opinions are interesting to, not to say effect any change in, the world of reality outside of them? Most conversation, when between two persons, consists in one person talking to himself in the hearing of the other person and vice versa. When among three or more persons it is the same thing, only multiplied. A voices his own opinions or gives utterance to a train of thought that gen- erally has no reference to B, and if B gets a chance, which he may when A's verification is PLEASURE-PAIN VS. REALITY 85 exhausted, he goes ahead and does the same thing. Rarely does either of them take any interest in the shade of difference of personality between him- self and the other. Only those who are intuitively able to take some small steps in the study of the Unconscious succeed in really conversing, which, according to derivation, should mean a convert- ing of the thoughts of the one into a form compre- hensible to the other and vice versa. But rarely are the one person's thoughts entertained by the other for any purpose whatever except pure nega- tion, contradiction being the easiest treatment of any presented theme, consisting, as it does, of a merely parrot-like repetition of ideas, but with the parrot-like or inhuman quality of the negative. Elsewhere, page 60, I refer to the essential iden- tity of any idea and its negative. It may, indeed, be said that an idea has no negative, except pos- sibly that the negative of an idea is but a mental blank, nothing at all. H. Pleasure-Pain versus Reality Considerable illumination comes to us if we regard the causes of our individual actions as de- termined on the one hand by a wish for or a disin- clination from the pleasure or pain connected with such actions, or, on the other hand, by a wish to produce an effect on the outside world by these actions. 86 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT In these considerations of reality and the atti- tude toward reality which is required by the fully developed adult psyche, it is necessary to bear in mind that the natural tendency of the psyche up to the time of real adulthood is to regard the value of all things and experiences in accordance with the degree of pleasure or pain which they produce in the psyche, and as pleasure and pain are pro- duced only in the psyche, or in other words are absolutely subjective and are not qualities inher- ent in real things belonging to the outer world, we have here a standard by which to test all ex- periences. This is called the principle of pleasure- pain versus reality. If an effort is made which has for its aim the production of pleasure alone or the avoidance of pain only, it is instigated merely from the archaic Unconscious level. If it has an ele- ment in it of doing better work by means of doing it under pleasurable rather than painful circum- stances, it is to be approved only from the point of view of the work actually done and is so far re- moved from simple infantility. If the work is such that it is completed irrespective of the pleas- ure or pain it may entail, but only with a view to its productiveness from the social standpoint, then it is completely removed from infantility and is directed according to the principle of reality. The mark of the completely socialised human PLEASURE-PAIN VS. REALITY 87 adult is a separation from self, or from the effort- less consuming of self, and an effective or outwork- ing activity upon things recognised as not self, viz., the world of reality. The world of reality consists of those things which we cannot always control, but with which we are continually experi- menting, to see if we can control them. If we can control them, we expand our Self by the measure of everything over which we exercise control. If we build a house or organise a club, or cover a window with mosquito netting or even hammer in a single tack where it ought to be, and was not, we a,re by so much expanding our Self. The ex- pending of effort is the expanding of Ego. If, on the other hand, we sit down and imagine what we should like to do, and know at the same time that we never shall do it, we are in the condition of the infant playing with itself. It has no control over the world ; it gets all its joy out of itself. But the individual who recognises the difference be- tween himself and the outer world (and very few realise the import of that difference), and recog- nises that his own growth and expansion depend on his manipulation, not of himself, but of that outside world, will, with an ever increasing inter- est, try and prove and try again in an effort to see how much of his environment he can shape to his ideas. For those of us who are in the powerful grip of the Unconscious the difference between ourselves and the outside world of reality is diffi- cult or impossible to realise, for the reason that It constantly plays upon us a trick which only a few have been able to beat It at. This trick con- sists in causing us, by virtue of the strong colour of Self that we are invested with, to think that what we see is what we want to see. This propensity is called by It the genial quality of seeing the best in things, of making the best out of things a phrase that, like reality in the hands of the Un- conscious, is subject to. much twisting. If things go dead wrong, of course, as the motto says, we ought to smile; but it means a lot more. Some people take it to mean that we should be satis- fied with what has been allotted to us by Fate, accept without a struggle what she has given us and smile, probably at her, to see if we cannot in- duce her to give more. Other people take it to mean that we should spare them the pain which our outcry might occasion them. I. Regression The metaphor of Fate, just now used with the feminine pronoun, suggests a corollary of the in- fantility of the Unconscious. I have mentioned its childish or archaic character, childish because it seeks its satisfactions out of (from) itself as an in- fant does, being powerless to move the external REGRESSION 89 world or any part of it, and archaic because it has been so and done so for many hundreds of thou- sands of years. This characteristic of the Uncon- scious which is shown in its tendency to go backward to stages of development which were the highest point reached ages ago in the evolution of the human mind is called Regression. Re- gression is toward an infantile state, and the im- plication inherent in this term is its relative term, mother. The Unconscious behaves as if it wanted to be a child and to return to, and get things out of (from), its mother. Thus the man submits to Fate or to Fortune, as a child submits to its mother, and he looks to Fortune for favours as the infant looks to its mother for sustenance. This is the attitude of all gamblers, of spec- ulators of all kinds, and other people who, like Mr. Micawber, are looking for things to " turn up." This attitude to the world, similar to the attitude of the child toward its mother, is a widespread characteristic of men and women. In other words, the infantile Uncon- scious, constituting by far the greater part of our total self, and controlling by far the greater part of our actions, makes us behave in a multitude of relations with the world not even like grown-up children, but like children not grown up, and to act toward the world as a child does toward its 90 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT mother, receiving favours with great expectations and small thanks, and attempting to reject rebuffs with loud waitings more like the vociferated prot- estations previously mentioned. All this the Unconscious makes us do without realising it our- selves. Of the figure we are cutting we are our- selves unconscious. And we are unconscious of it for the same reason that the clown in Hamlet gave for Hamlet's madness not being seen in him in England: " There they are all as mad as he." J. Universality of Manifestation The physical sciences teach us that no motion of any material body is without a cause, that the effect is always measurably equal to the cause, that no atom is ever destroyed and that no energy is ever lost. Analytical psychology is differentiated from other mental science in making the same statement about psychical phenomena, namely, that all motions of our bodies are invariably the effects of physical causes within or without our bodies, that these causes within our bodies are conditions either physical or mental, and furthermore that all mental manifestations whatever are quite as much subject to the law of causation as are the purely physical phenomena. The billiard ball was set in motion by my cue, the cue by my arm, my arm by my mind. All, including the mental action of aim- UNIVERSALITY 91 ing at the other ball and willing the motion of my arm, are equally determined by the same law of causation. Not only that, but every association of ideas that could possibly occur to me is the in- evitable result of causes that have been operative always. It needs but a slight exercise of the im- agination to conceive that if a person were able to trace back the causes of every act of our life, he could tell exactly why we had done any action. This would fill with meaning every expression of countenance of every face he saw, and enable him to know by anyone's actions exactly what he was thinking. The slightest movement of a finger would be to him indicative of the whole character, for it is evident that having a certain mental or moral character a man cannot help revealing it by every motion of his body. Freud says that mortals can hide no secret, and that whoever is silent with the lips tattles with the finger tips, betrayal oozing out of every pore. Thus have we forever continued to express our intimate thoughts in everything we do, and have as continually refrained from reading each other's natures thus exposed. And the strangeness, the ridiculousness of the whole proceeding still con- tinues. All but the smallest fraction of us abso- lutely unconscious (that is, unknown to ourselves) , and yet to anyone else perfectly legible in every- thing we do legible but forever unread, un- 92 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT thought about and not acted on ! But now at last in the analytic form of psychology we have not only the gift to " see oursels as ithers see us," but to see ourselves as no one of us has ever before seen another. If we were suddenly given an insight into the motives governing the actions of the people around us, it would at once give us a clear under- standing of what their words really meant. If, on the other hand, some device could be invented which would translate every utterance of our fellows into truth, regardless of what degree of prevarication was intended, we should have but a perfected variety of the present analytic psy- chology. CHAPTER VI THE UNCONSCIOUS (DYNAMIC) THE previous chapter has been largely devoted to a description of certain phases of the Unconscious. We have now to examine some of its workings as dynamic, and to emphasise the continual trickery which it practises upon us, as well as the way in which it sometimes helps us to do our work better, as we learn more and more to sublimate the con- tinuous and never completely satisfied craving. And first of all we should realise that the craving changes the appearance of reality. A. Craving or Reality? We can conceive of a person with an imagina- tion so strong as to change the greater part of external reality from what it is to what he im- agines it is. A child playing with a few sticks and stones makes of them, in his imagination, boats and docks or people and houses. Similarly the insane person thinks one or another of his com- panions to be his mother, his wife, his enemy or anyone else. The insane are children, and chil- 93 94 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT dren are expected to be at least a little foolish. The difference is only in what society has a right to expect of them. When we are more civilised I think that perhaps more will be expected of chil- dren in the way of productive work than is now except in agricultural districts. In schools, even, they are sometimes required to make things that really add to the wealth of the nation in a small way. Like the child playing with sticks and stones and water, and taking out of himself the difference between the reality and his desires, a great many adults are accomplishing a little and are getting their satisfaction out of their own imagining that their accomplishments are greater than they really are. It is easier to imagine that a piece of work is satisfactory to ourselves and to other people than it is to do it again and again until we have proved by every means in our power that we could not do it better. Since childhood we have prac- tised ourselves, not in performance, but in pulling the wool over our own desires. The contrast be- tween the world of our wishes and the world of reality is ever before our eyes. Where we do not see it is just where we have accustomed ourselves to be satisfied with the less, rather than with the greater accomplishment. The infantility of our present civilisation, much as it may have invented and built and produced, constantly forms a bar- CRAVING OR REALITY? 95 rier against further progress. If we devote our days and our nights to toil, our acquaintances call us unsocial, and unsocial we are, to be sure, in a certain narrow sense. If sociability is demanded of us, consisting in a playing of games, and eating of feasts, and in driving of motor-cars and boast- ing how fast and how far we have driven them, then sociability is no virtue. Here again our Un- conscious is deceiving us. The contrast between our wishes and our reality is again obscured in the same way as it is in the case of the children with their sticks and stones. We do not see the dis- crepancy between what we have and what we wish. With a childish complacency we take what we have for what we desire, because our desires are so strong that they would make it seem that we simply could not stand disappointment, and the only way not to be disappointed in the majority of the sit- uations in which we find ourselves is to wrench the truth to fit our desires. Most of us actually accomplish this terrific twist of the lenses through which we see life, and fancy that we cause a thing to be so merely by believing it to be so. This is on the supposition of the intolerability of the idea of being disappointed in any of our desires, a sup- position that gains support from all the intimate study of the human soul made in more recent times. And the significant point about the intol- erability of an idea is the fact that this quality of it 96 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT is exactly what causes the idea to be repressed and to be forced to maintain an existence of its own apart from our conscious lives, and yet, as will be shown later, to be closely connected with our conscious lives and to appear in them daily, hourly, but in forms that we do not recognise and can recognise only with the aid of psychoanalysis. If only we were all strong enough to stand any dis- appointment, any rebuff, we never should have any troubles either physical or mental. There's the rub ! The truth is that we are all stronger, men- tally and physically, than we think we are, and here again our Unconscious is deceiving us.* We have all heard that it is not overwork that kills, but worry. But worry is only the fear that we are going to break down. " Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant only taste of death but once." Children do not so soon get tired of play, because in play they and their Unconscious are united, there are no com- plexes or conflicts (of the mental variety), and so no obstructions in their activities. They " get tired " when it comes to some lessons, and for the reason that in them they are not united with them- selves. The trick above referred to, that the Uncon- scious plays upon us all more or less, is that of *"The Unconscious has an extremely subtle skill in shaping humans according to its desires." Pfister, /. c. t p. 98. CRAVING OR REALITY? 97 making us think that our desires are being realised, when they are only partly realised or not at all. It is somewhat as if one wished that all the earth were blue like the sky, and put on a pair of blue glasses in order to change it into blue. To make this concept more vivid I need only refer to a form of insanity in which the afflicted person im- agines that he is Napoleon or Jehovah, or to any other form of megalomania, and to repeat what I have said on page 73, about the line of demar- kation between sanity and insanity. To the extent that we are all controlled by the Unconscious, we are all of us megalo- or any other kind of maniacs in greater or less degree, for the simple and sole reason that we allow our desires to colour our per- ceptions. It has long been recognised by psychol- ogists that our former sensations affected our later perceptions, but the important part played by our wishes was almost entirely overlooked. We are what we are because of our wishes. Had our wish to be other than we are been a stronger one we should have been other. A Rip Van Winkle is a drink-wrecked wretch because he has gratified the imbibing wish from his infancy, and really pre- ferred, like Omar Khayyam, to take the cash and let the credit go. The same may be asserted of all men, successful and unsuccessful alike. They wish to be what they are, the unsuccessful at the same time wishing to bemoan their fate with 98 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT vociferous protestations. They are not obliged to. But they get positive pleasure at the infant- wailing level, a pleasure quite analogous to the boasting of the successful man. B. Where Do Thoughts Come From? Nowhere do we realise more keenly that the real motives of our everyday acts are hidden from us than in the inquiry as to the origin of the im- pulse to do any given thing. Even in the matter of sense perception we frequently notice after- ward that we have not seen what was before our eyes, and have seen what was not there. A simple and concrete example of this is the infrequency of our seeing misprints. An inverted letter in a word is seldom noticed, an omitted letter is supplied by the mind, a superfluous letter is ignored. We see only what is in our minds, was the old form of expression, but a newer one and a better would be to say that we see, hear and feel only what is in our hearts, that is, in our desires. A most con- vincing method of showing that is to point out that the mere occurrence of an idea to a person is a proof that that idea and no other was the idea wished for by the Unconscious. For instance, I am handed a letter by the postman, and see on it the handwriting of someone who owes me some money. My first thought is that he may be send- WHENCE COME THOUGHTS? 99 ing me a check to cover his indebtedness. I may express that thought in the cynical form of there being no such luck as that this fellow should pay his debts so soon. But be advised that no wish is itself negative in its matter. It may be couched in a negative form, suggested by the desire of the Titan to be powerful in the way of deep knowl- edge of the world. But the wish for the money is there in its positive shape, just the same, whether it is expressed affirmatively or negatively. I tear open the envelope and I read that the 1 wretch is going to be married to a girl whom I know quite well and think very highly of. There was no chance that this idea should ever have come into my mind ! It is almost impossible to tell, of any experience, how much and what is contributed to the total im- pression by the outside world and what by the in- ner world of thought. In a street accident where a horse knocks down and runs over a man, one observer is horrified to see the horse step right on the man's chest and thinks that the weight that a horse puts on his right forefoot is enough to crush the man's chest and perhaps kill him instantly. It appears that a large proportion of the horror of that occasion was contributed by the horrified observer, as the man in question to the surprise of the onlooker, not to say to his disappointment, immediately jumped up and walked off. The wit- ioo MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT ness never knew whether the horse had really stepped on the man or not. The witness was quite sure, however, of his own unpleasant sensations. Now, must it be said that the witness desired to see injury done to the man? If what I have said about our seeing what is in our hearts is true we must say that. Not that the witness had any grudge against the man, either, for he was a total stranger. But why in a city does a crowd imme- diately collect around any accident? Do all the people that run to see what is at the centre of a street crowd think that they can be of service? We are obliged to acknowledge that there is a desire for excitement in all of us, which is satis- fied by the sight of any unusual occurrence, even if it be a disaster. Psychoanalysis, as will be shown later, believes that all excitement is sexual in its nature, fundamentally. Another instance. Suppose that Willie wants to go fishing down the bay in a rowboat with a couple of other boys about his age. What is Mother's first idea? "Oh, I'm afraid that he might get drowned! " What put that idea into her head? The Unconscious. What would It lose if Willie got drowned? Nothing; It would go on wishing for more excitement; It would reap the intense feelings of a nine-days' talk. It sent up that idea into Mother's head from the depths where It has been squirming for aeons. But the WHENCE COME THOUGHTS? 101 thought was most natural. Boys do get into such trouble. One reads of it in the papers every day. Yes, to be sure, madam, but the proportion of boys that are drowned is very small indeed com- pared with the number who go fishing. There is also another practical point of view in this con- nection, f Everything that Willie does apart from his mother makes him independent of her, and brings nearer a separation which can do only good to him, but which most mothers think is undesir- able for themselves. The plain fact, which the mother's Unconscious blinds her to, is that her own importance, her own size in Willie's world, so to speak, is greatly enlarged by any mishap that can occur to him. ylf he only gets a fish- hook in his foot, he ana she both go backwards, maybe several years, to the time when he was wholly dependent on her for life and sustenance, and they both regress, as the expression is, to the mother-infant condition, for the time being. Such temporary regressions are common enough in everyone's life. But the point is that mothers ought not to worry. Perhaps they would worry less if they knew that all worry is fear and that all fear is desire, even though it be expressed in a negative form. But we must return to the tricks of the Unconscious, and in particular to the extremely common trick it has of supplying us with our ideas, especially fears, or other apprehensions. UNP> (FOB] .0 A MT A It A Titt ARA io2 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT I once knew a man who was left a fortune by an uncle. It was left in trust, the income of it to be used by the widow until her death. At that time her expectation of life was twelve years, but the wish for the money made the expectant inheri- tor turn, every morning from that time on for sev- eral years, to the column of the newspaper that contained the death notices, and look for the name of his uncle's widow. I am wondering how many hours of his life he has wasted in that ig- noble search. He might have done quite a bit for science in that time, or earned some of the money that he is still waiting for. But he, like so many others, was at those times, as well as at most other times, in the grip of his Unconscious, which di- verted him, as it daily diverts the majority of us, from the path of greatest ultimate satisfaction to us to a regressive path on which we amble, led on placidly by blind desire, without the least thought of whether it is the best or the worst desire. All these are tricks of the Unconscious to lull us backward to the condition of the prenatal sleep. It seems that only a few of us have the natural faculty of rousing ourselves to continuous useful activity without inspiration or instigation from outside. But it is at least interesting to know that if the Unconscious is reached and affected from without, the awakening may take place. In Chapter X we shall mention some of the WHENCE COME THOUGHTS? 103 manifestations of the Unconscious in everyday life, but here, while on the topic of the continual trick- ery of the Unconscious by which it influences our actions, I must say one word more about how hard it is to detect oneself in time in the very act of re- laxing control over the Unconscious. As we pro- ceed with our daily occupations, our attention is for the moment deflected from the thing we hap- pen to be doing toward something else not in the same line of thought and not leading to the same goal. Is this a social or an asocial deflection of attention? That depends almost always on whether the source of the interruption is external or internal. If we are working at some task and a caller comes in, or some question has to be de- cided, which has come up unexpectedly at that time, it is of course possible that we should be act- ing in an asocial manner if we went on with our work, and did not first respond to the call, but if on the other hand a thought occurred to us and we did not make a memorandum of it as briefly as possible and immediately go on with our work, we should not be acting in a way that would lead to the best results from the point of view of the social organisation, which requires us to make the best possible use of every minute of our time. The head of a big business, and the heads of many departments of business more or less great, care- fully shield themselves, by means of secretaries, io 4 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT telephone operators and pages, from anything that will unnecessarily divert their attention from the work in hand. So should our craving be kept shielded from deflection, for in the deflection of the organic craving it is not the whole that is changed but only a small part of it. If the di- rection of the entire craving were changed, we should still have a united psyche, but with its cur- rent all flowing in a direction which might not be the best one for the co-workers in the evolution of society. For instance, it probably takes all of the combined craving of an individual psyche to coun- teract the restrictive suggestions of society to so great an extent as to allow the man to commit a murder of the first degree. This psyche, however, has for the time being had its craving all united toward one goal. To take an illustration less sensational : A man was going to pay a bill at a store next door to a drug store. As he was about to pass the drug store a large automobile glided up to it and a beautiful young woman stepped out and walked into the drug store. It is not hard to conceive of what the man was thinking when, in a moment of forgetfulness, he went into the drug store and offered to the cashier his check in payment of the bill that he had incurred at the next store (which sold paints and oils) . His Unconscious, following the archaic trends of its infantile constitution, WHENCE COME THOUGHTS? 105 craved to look at the beauty who had come out of the automobile, and so far overcame the conscious purpose of the man that it made him follow the young woman, but without the slightest show of impoliteness. For a brief time it simply abolished all thought of the errand which he was on and de- flected his actual path from one store and made him go into another. He did not regain his full consciousness until he stood before the cashier and realised that it was not there that he owed the money. Thus does the Unconscious take hold and steer us sometimes into situations that we find somewhat embarrassing. This incident shows us the Unconscious in complete control of a man's actions for a brief time and the rapid awakening, as it might be called, to his conscious purpose. How the Unconscious controls the nature of the ideas that seem to occur to us when we suddenly and without apparent reason merely happen to think of something, may be illustrated by the fol- lowing examples. It is a familiar experience to all of us to find ourselves thinking of something, to wonder how we happened to be thinking of that particular thing, and then to be able to trace back the associations of ideas through several steps un- til we are satisfied that we have found the orig- inal thought that started the whole train of ideas, the noteworthy feature of which strikes us as being the remoteness of the last idea from the first. io6 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT We rarely or never try to think where the orig- inal idea came from. We always find, however, if we take the trouble to devote some thought to the matter, that the original idea is the expression of a desire on our part. In other words, the first idea, apparently not associated with anything at all that we may have been thinking of at the time, has been supplied by the Unconscious. It is a remark- able fact, too, that not only the first idea in the series, but also all the others, which seem so nat- urally associated with each other, have been sup- plied in the same way. When we think right along naturally without any restraint, or repres- sion, as we now call it, and the ideas flow in easily without any obstructions, we may safely say that the smoother the flow of thoughts the more sub- ject they are to the dictation of the Unconscious. Every idea is associated according to Its logic, with the wishes which It is formulating for Itself at the time. We may think we can control our thought, but it is quite manifest that if two people start with, for instance, the thought " hotel " the next thought may be " dance " for one of them and " hops " for the other, and the next may take them still farther apart, as from " dance " the lady might get " Fred," while from " hops " the gentle- man might next turn his thought (or his Uncon- scious might, for him) to beer. At any rate, the experience is common enough and it shows with- RESISTANCES 107 out doubt that our ideas, apparently flowing as they will, and quite accidentally, are yet subject to the control of the Unconscious, and its selective action is plainly shown in cases like this one. In contrast to the free flowing of ideas as in the examples cited, we sometimes experience a stop- page in our flow of thoughts, the most familiar ex- ample of which is from embarrassment of one kind or another, as, for instance, when an inexperienced speaker is forced by circumstances to address an assembly, or even when an experienced speaker suddenly comes upon some part of his topic on which he is less prepared. We hear him hesitate for the right word, can see before our eyes, in fact, his Unconscious struggling with him and him with It until a compromise is reached. Sometimes the compromise is quite comical, too, as when the min- ister said he had in his heart a " half warmed fish," meaning to say a " half formed wish." This compromise is, however, a more mechanical type which will be discussed later when we come to speak of slips of the tongue and of the pen. C. Resistances These stoppages perceived by us all, in our- selves as well as in others, are concrete examples of the repression mentioned in the first part of this chapter. What we should have liked to say or do in the situation mentioned was for that time, at io8 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT any rate, completely repressed. The Unconscious does not wish to utter the word or do the thing that would have been, according to our later view, most appropriate, because the word or thing is connected in the past with some unpleasant occur- rence which It does not wish to have brought into consciousness. This resistance or " balking " of thought, as we might call it, has been used in what is called the " association test " on criminals to make them unwittingly give evidence against themselves. If, for instance, a man suspected of murder is told to say what thought comes to him when " eating " is mentioned, and a hundred or so other commonplaces, among which is inserted some word such as " knife " or " pistol " or " poison," and the time he takes in replying to each of these suggestions is carefully recorded to the fifth of a second, there is hardly a criminal so brazen and so self-confident who will not hesitate for at least a fifth of a second when he hears a word associated with his crime. So that if a num- ber of hundred-word tests be administered to the same man, on different occasions, he will inevitably let out something at least that may be used as a clue to discover the circumstances of the crime. His Unconscious, not being in his power but he in Its power, he cannot avoid giving expression to It. This illustrates another characteristic of the Unconscious which is akin to its childishness, RESISTANCES 109 namely, its artlessness. Being untrained and uned- ucated through the centuries, it is always blurting out everything in a language not read except in psychological laboratory, criminal investigation and insane asylum, whereas it would add mate- rially to the understanding of men concerning their fellow-men and make us all more charitable to- ward each other if we all recognised what an enormous part in our lives this Unconscious plays, and that the persons who appear to be trying to injure us are not so much our enemies as their own. They are their own enemies in just the same way that each of us is his own enemy because we have not learned to master our Unconscious and make it serve society, which would be the best way for us to serve ourselves. Its artlessness is of a piece with ignorance of all kinds which we try in civilised countries to abolish in conscious ways by means of the different forms of what we call " education." It might be well to say here, how- ever, that " education " has as yet taken little account of the Unconscious, and that most if not all of the faults of the pfesent system of instruc- tion in schools and colleges are attributable to that lack of wisdom. For " Know thyself I " we cannot each and every one do, until we know more of ourselves than is comprised in that small percent- age of our nature which has been termed above the " fore-conscious." no MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT D. Conflicts The resistances, seen in the very act of thinking, indicate that a conflict has taken place between one tendency in the psyche, usually in the Unconscious, and another tendency which is generally the cen- sor. These conflicts, as revealed so constantly by the resistances, cause a continual irregularity in the running of the mental machine. They are thus manifested not merely in the mental blank which occurs to the person under psychoanalytic inves- tigation, who says that he cannot think of anything at all. They are shown not merely in the retard- ations of ideas in the association tests. They are in evidence hourly in the lives of most people, in actions which seem to be interrupted by external circumstances, but really are not. If I begin to write a letter to a person and come to a point when I cannot think of anything to say, I recognise at once the result of some unconscious conflict. If, during the writing of the letter, I happen to think of something that I had intended to do but had forgotten, I see an indication of another conflict. If I finish, seal and stamp the letter, put on my hat and go out, leaving the lettergpn the desk, and so do not post it, still another conflict is shown. All these take place below the level of consciousness, and only the net result is manifest. There has been a battle of ideas, and only the victor emerges. CONFLICTS in Why I could not go on with the letter, why I for- got the other action whose place the letter-writing takes, why I forgot to post the letter, can be known only after an analysis of the actions. In short, much of the lack of consecutiveness of our daily actions is the result of the appar- ently fortuitous, though really determined, nature of the ideas which occur to us and motivate our acts. We think of things we should like to do, and which would be very advantageous for us, and then distractions intervene and prevent us from striving toward those ideals. The point is that, except for the conflicts which have taken place, and of which we have been totally unconscious, we should not have become aware of those distrac- tions. A person thoroughly absorbed in his work will not hear or see what otherwise would distract him. Many a man has been thrown off the track he was travelling on in his day's work by the oc- currence of some essentially trivial thing, noticed by him only because of the conflict between that thing and his ideal, a conflict that had taken place in the Unconscious, and the winner in which had therefore the power to make the essentially trivial occurrence strong enough to enter his con- sciousness and attract his attention. Broadly speaking, we may say that the con- flict may be external or internal. The external is between the psyche and the world without. In H2 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT this, if the psyche is united with itself, the satisfac- tion comes from the action of struggling itself, as when we, forgetting ourselves, effect what change we can upon our external environment. The inter- nal conflict is between the tendency to look for pleasure or for absence of pain as a result of the struggle. The struggle is then practically in the emotions, that is, in our very selves, and is not concerned with the world of external reality. Most of us know we are not doing our best every moment of every day, and now we know that the cause of it is the conflicts that have taken place without our knowledge. It is interesting, therefore, to learn of the antagonistic forces that struggle with each other in the Unconscious, and to inquire what gives them their power to carry on those contests. The resistances and the conflicts are due to the presence in the Unconscious of the different complexes. In the chapter on Therapy the share of these complexes in the production of morbid symptoms is further discussed. E. Complexes Complex is the name given by psychoanalysis to an idea or a group of ideas with which is associ- ated a tone of unpleasant feeling which keeps or tends to keep the complex out of consciousness. We all have complexes. The difference between COMPLEXES 113 the complex and the ordinary forgotten occur- rence is that the latter has no feeling tone con- nected with it when it occurs and therefore does not have the energy, so to speak, to form a con- nection with other registered experiences, or life to go on developing by the assimilation of other experiences. Thus every experience which arouses at the same time a pleasant emotion is welcomed again and again into consciousness. We like to recall what has pleased us.* On the other hand, we know that we do not try to recall un- pleasant events. That a recent unpleasant event tends for a time to keep recurring to our minds is an example of what might be called an emo- tional after-image, and gives us the opportunity of working off the unpleasant event spiritually by con- sciously arranging it in our minds and finally dis- posing of it. It is only the unpleasant events which, crowded out of consciousness by our fear to face them as adult humans should, carry with them into the Unconscious the emotions which are the life of ideas and allow that life, like the sickly growth of pale plants in a cellar, to develop un- cared for by the consciousness. It is natural that we should remember the pleasant and forget the painful. But the pleasant occurrences, being fre- * Exception ally, also, we like to brood over our wrongs, if we are so constituted, a trait which is mentioned under the head of Masochism in Chapter VII. ii 4 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT quently evoked and talked over with our friends, are brought into alignment with our daily con- scious lives. They give us strength for our pres- ent, and inspiration for our future, tasks. They do not become associated in a lump, in some corner of our minds, but are connected with all our waking experiences. A bit of travel is something that we can share with all our friends, telling them things they want to know. A pleasant adventure makes us friends with everybody. How much more sociable are strangers when on a holiday in the mountains or at the seashore ! The travel or adventure is unfolded or explicated, so to speak, and acquires relations with all of our men- tal life and so does not become coagulated or tangled up in one bunch. A complex, on the other hand, being repressed into the Unconscious on account of the painful feeling connected with it, at once begins in the Un- conscious to associate with itself a number of other ideas, all of which take on the unpleasant quality. These ideas, therefore, are prevented by this ac- quired unpleasantness from coming into conscious- ness. The person in whose mind these complexes are forming will not, without an effort, be able to remember these ideas when he wants them. The complexes will detach from the fore-conscious, where are stored the ideas which are subject to voluntary recall, one person's name, another per- COMPLEXES 115 son's address, another's occupation, and drag them down toward the Unconscious, where they will nevermore be subject to his will. It is thus seen that, when looked at from the under side, as it were, from the point of view of the Unconscious, there must be complexes forming down there from the time of our earliest infancy. The complexes continue to develop and attach more and more ideas to themselves until finally our minds, even those of us who are completely normal, are made up of an overwhelming majority of forgotten or repressed matter, all of it available for the pur- pose of feeding the complexes, and none of it of any use to ourselves. Only the fullest human lives can prevent this formation of a sodden mass of complexes in the Unconscious of every one of us. The experiences of a thoroughly unsuccessful and disappointed life keep on making for oblivion, drawing one event after another back into the unconscious part of our psyche. The most active and successful men and women therefore will, other things being equal, have the fullest mem- ories, will be able to converse most entertainingly, for they will have the fewest complexes as inhibi- tions on their mental life, whether that mental life be expressed in words or in actions. Any situation that reveals the working of the complex is called a complex indicator. (That is: an indicator of a complex, not an indicator which u6 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT is complex in its nature.) In the tragedy of Hamlet that part of the play within the play where the murder takes place produces the effect upon Claudius of making him leave the room in confusion. His confusion indicated his complex, which was caked about his own guilt, and was his complex indicator. In the association experi- ments, where a number of words are given to the subject and he is told to utter the first word that occurs to him, the hesitation he shows in associat- ing with some of the words is his complex indicator and the word that caused that hesitation is invari- ably found to be connected with some complex. It has called up some unpleasant memory which he wishes to forget, or is unwilling to publish; and his hesitation is caused by his trying not to say the word which spontaneously comes to his mind, for fear it will betray him, but to think of and say another. Any hesitation, therefore, is likely to be a complex indicator, except in the case of people who intuitively know this, and such people often betray their complexes by an unexpected or inap- propriate fluency or glibness. It sometimes happens that there is in a given in- dividual only one obvious complex. We all know people who are a " little bit off " in one respect but are conventional in their actions in every other. The eccentricities of genius as well as of ordinary persons are examples. George Francis Train COMPLEXES 117 would not speak to an adult for years and sat on a bench in Madison Square talking to chil- dren and continually ate peanuts. Other persons' peculiarities, such as an inability to touch cer- tain substances, velvet, silk, cotton, etc., or a diet consisting of rock salt, molasses and butter- nuts, or a refusal to eat anything with raisins in it, or a belief that some special kind of food is impos- sible, like strawberries or cucumbers, all of these are eventually traceable to complexes. It is well to remember that the complex is always based on unconscious thoughts and that the reasons given by the persons are not ever the real causes of these eccentricities. Most of them are con- nected with intimate attitudes toward the ideas not merely of nutrition but of reproduction. The man who could not eat food containing raisins explained his dislike of them by saying that he judged all tastes (so-called) by the feeling of the food in his mouth, that raisins felt like insects, and that he really liked soft and tender foods, in spite of the fact that he had a good set of teeth. The upshot of it all was that he showed an uncon- scious tendency in the direction of breast milk, in other words was, while a man in stature and years, only an infant in this characteristic, which, indeed, as the analysis progressed, was found to be par- alleled by infantile traits in other spheres of life. Thus he made a demand upon his wife for an ex- .ii 8 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT pression of tenderness of a kind that should have been expected only from his mother. He showed, too, an attitude toward the world which evinced in him an expectation that it would give him things, not that he should force things from it or even win them by his own efforts. This was side by side with traits that enabled him to do acceptably the tasks imposed upon him by his business, and to be taken by his acquaintances for a man in most other respects. F. Phobias A phobia (Greek word for fear) is a recurrent or dominating fear of some object or situation. All humans are continuously influenced by fears greater or less, the only distinction between the ordinary fear and that fear which is called a phobia being its strength and the effects which it has on the life of the individual. Most of our fears are so well hidden that they do not appar- ently affect our conduct, but when a fear is so great and its effects so numerous and so potent as to make our social effectiveness much less, then it be- comes a phobia. If, for instance, a fear of any situation or thing is so powerful as to prevent a person from fulfilling any of his duties toward society, such as getting married, then it should cer- tainly be regarded as a phobia and the person exhibiting it should be analysed. Phobias are of PHOBIAS [119 course as numerous as are things or situations, but the more familiar types of them have been classed as follows : a fear of closed places, which is known as claustrophobia ; a fear of open places, which is known as agoraphobia; the fear of being alone, fear of dirt or germs, fear of the number 13, etc. For illustration we may take a case of the last named fear from Pfister. " A bachelor forty- seven years old carried on a war from his twelfth year with the number 13. His sufferings forced him to leave school and spoiled his whole life for him. He was constrained to pay attention to the number constantly. Thirteen minutes before and after each hour was a moment of anxiety for him, as well as every position of the hands of the clock which added up to 13, e.g. 8 : 23. Other situations which produced the anxiety were, to mention only a few out of hundreds: If it struck eleven when two persons were in the room, or if five persons were at table at eight o'clock. He could not stay away from home thirteen hours. The whole of March (3d month), 1910, was an unlucky month, in which he did not dare to undertake anything im- portant, as well as February, 1911, etc. The hours from five to eight were sinister because five, six, seven and eight add up to 26, which is twice 13. Every thirteenth line of a letter, every set of numbers which summed up 13 brought misery. He had to shun not only every house numbered 120 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT 13, but all the residents of such a house. . . . The most remarkable was the inability to go to bed at ten o'clock because he always said three prayers." The phobias just mentioned are all so-called " abnormal " cases, that is, they have gone so far to interfere with the regular, orderly and smooth working of the daily life of the persons exhibiting them. Now, every preference of a negative char- acter that is, every disinclination to do anything that has received the sanction of society is a state of mind existing in an otherwise " normal " person and corresponding to or representing in the normal person the phobia of the abnormal one. When you are in Rome, do as the Romans do, is an adage that calls for the complete harmonising of the individual with his environment. There ought really to be nothing in our lives that we should not be eager to do, just as our fellows do it, if not even a little better, or more enthusiastically. To live among people and continually to refuse to do the things that the people all around us are doing is a restriction upon ourselves that has been placed upon us by the independent activity of our complexes, developing as they do in the depths of our Unconscious, and differs only in degree from the well developed and organised phobias that have been mentioned above. Disinclinations are little phobias; acceptance and acquiescence are OUR MENTAL ATTITUDE 121 normal healthy states of mind. Rejections and refusals and declinings are unhealthy, abnormal states of mind, for they imply a lack of power to cope with the situations rejected or dodged, and an unconscious belief on the part of the declining person that his constitution, mental or physical, is not strong enough to stand the strain. ; * Thus the neurotic battles with spectres, and the normal, too, are in the power of unreal forces, which lead him now to injury and now to good fortune. The liberation from Maya, Illusion, is indeed an essential part of the problem of salva- tion, but not in the way that Buddhism teaches. The emancipation from that which is not actual, but which stands in the way of our living our best, is necessary for the highest possible unfolding of the noblest spiritual powers. But the liberation lies only in this new unfolding of the craving. Most normals, too, suffer from obstructions which rob them of a considerable part of their ability to act " (PFISTER, Die Psychanalytische Methode, p. 128). G. Our Mental Attitude One of the first problems of the person who is confronted with the existence within himself of a Titanic force such as the craving of the Uncon- scious, is how to regard that Unconscious within him. Are we to regard it as a hostile force within 122 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT the camp, and try to annihilate it? No, for it is not hostile to us but only to certain of our limita- tions imposed upon us by our necessity of living as members of an organic whole, society. Are we to be ashamed at the discovery or enlightenment con- cerning the true nature of that which is so great a part of us, and so great and invisible a factor in all that we say or do ? No, for we are not alone in that particular. All of our fellows are as clearly dominated by the Unconscious as we. Shame should arise only from a knowledge of inferi- ority of our acts from a moral point of view. And our feeling upon learning that this archaic Titan is still alive within us should be that we are thank- ful for having been warned in time to avoid mak- ing at least some of the mistakes that we should have made if we had remained ignorant. Are we to be so horrified at the revelation of the patricidal and incestuous monster that we harbour in our breasts, that we feel discouraged and un- able to cope with him ? No, for we know that its primal craving, which for a moment strikes us as so savage and brutal, so elemental and over- powering, needs only to be harnessed, like Ni- agara, to become docile and productive. And just as the waters of Niagara have been employed to generate electricity for light and power, now in small part but possibly later in its entirety, so the primal forces of every person living and doing his OUR MENTAL ATTITUDE 123 work in a civilised community are now partly available for the purposes most advantageous to society, and plans can be made immediately to yoke up the whole of each individual's power for social and withdraw it from asocial aims. All the activities of men, ploughing, reaping, buying, sell- ing, reading and writing and studying, belong to the type of action controlled by what is called di- rected thinking. I said above " partly available for society." It seems that as yet all the directed activities of men are but a sort of safety valve to prevent the social machine from being blown up by its superabundant steam. It is clear that if all the energy of the human race, now so largely dissi- pated in undirected thinking and its resultant activities, could be directed toward social aims, the numerous ills of humanity, so many of which are unnecessary, would be reduced to a mini- mum of necessary ills of which there are quite enough. So if one is told by the psychoanalyst that his dreams reveal an infantility, or a strong mother- complex or father-complex, he may be assured that the dreams of most persons do likewise. Only the new information requires a new reaction. We are to respond to the new environment of the Unconscious that we find ourselves in, by a new activity directed along the lines indicated by the analysis. The first characteristic of the type of i2 4 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT directed thinking is that it fatigues us, and that the undirected thinking or phantasying does not. Therefore that is to be one criterion by which we may judge the results of our new activities. They must produce in us a healthy and unworried, un- troubled fatigue. There is a great satisfaction comparable to the keenest physical satisfaction given to mortals, in the complete exhaustion of one's powers daily in the pursuit of the most pro- ductive ends. This fatigue differs entirely from the fatigue of nervous persons in whom there is a psychical conflict ever present. Such people are fatigued when they begin a piece of work, by rea- son of the conflict in their ego caused by the fact that they are not united with themselves, so to speak, and that every motion that they make is opposed by forces within themselves which pull against them in whatever they are doing, and make each separate effort twice as hard as it would be if there were within them no such opposition to everything they do. It is as if they were carry- ing a pound of some commodity in a case that weighed ten pounds, or as if we gave to a day- labourer a shovel weighing fifty pounds with which to dig up shovelfuls of earth weighing thirty pounds. The test of the right kind of fa- tigue is its coming at the end of a day full of toil in which we can forget ourselves, and be igno- rant of the fact that we are tired until after we OUR MENTAL ATTITUDE 125 stop and look at the clock and find that it is time to go to bed. This is a strong contrast to the way many peo- ple work. They keep looking at the clock and yawn, and the unexpired time of their necessary hours of labour acts as a drag upon their further effort. So, then, the test of the productiveness of a day's work is to a certain extent a subjective one. No day is well spent if it contains any psychical conflicts that interfere with the united functioning of the entire psyche in an effort which brings at the end, and only at the end, of the day a feeling of thorough and satisfactory fatigue, a fatigue that is felt more or less as a surprise, and which prepares the mind for a complete relaxation in sleep. That is not to say that it must be a dreamless sleep. It is an undoubted fact that there are dreams for every individual every night. He does not always remember them, and for the person that is using up all his energies every day with a resultant satisfactory fatigue, it is quite un- necessary to pay any attention to dreams. But if there are constant dreams or frequent dreams of an unpleasant nature, then their being remembered is a sure indication that the person is not using up all his energy every day as he should, either be- cause there is insufficient activity or because there is too much conflict in his ego during the per- formance of his appointed task. 126 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT The almost universally unknown causes of our fatigues or our insomnias or our dreams, and, as will be seen later, of many of our illnesses, are the unconscious wishes which, unacceptable though they may be to consciousness in their archaic form, manage, by disguising themselves as symbols of various kinds, to slip by the censor and appear incognito in a disguise assumed for the purpose of effecting their work, which as may be easily seen is at variance with the trend of social evolu- tion. In order, therefore, to gain a still deeper in- sight into the causes why the real motives of our behaviour from day to day are so neatly hidden from us under such perfect disguises, it will be necessary to trace very briefly the course of de- velopment through which, as psychoanalysis has discovered, the individual psyche passes. This development, as thus outlined, is quite different in many respects from that hitherto accepted as the manner of unfolding of the particular psyche, certain qualities being assigned to it by the newer psychology, even in the infancy of the psyche, which were not formerly supposed to belong to that stage of development. CHAPTER VII THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE UPON the newborn babe streams in from the out- side world a multitude of impressions which are reacted to according to the few primal desires with which it is supplied. The desires or cravings first in importance are those of respiration and nutrition. The infant has first to breathe and then to take food. The contrast in feeling between the stream of impressions assailing it from without and the prenatal Nirvana in which it has existed is so strong that its main desires are to renew the feeling of the warmth and calm with which it was surrounded before its birth, and the first means of accomplishing that gratification is by taking nour- ishment. Then begins a struggle between activity and passivity, which continues through life, a struggle between motion and inertia, between effort and relaxation; it might almost be said between life which incites the babe to outward activities, and death which seeks to drag it down to an insensate condition. Then begins the strug- gle between reality and pain-pleasure, though the struggle does not become conscious until adult- 127 128 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT hood is attained, which in some people is never, though they live to be a hundred. The craving for satisfaction grows along a few simple lines, chiefly the nutritional and the sexual. Many symbolisms in folklore indicate the close relationship of the sexual and the nutritional crav- ings, one of which is the phantasy common to children and savages that impregnation is caused by certain foods. The shock which Freud has given to the complacent world of modern con- ventionality is due to his maintaining that the infant, even from the earliest months, shows un- mistakable signs of sexual feeling. This is quite contrary to the general supposition that the dawn of sexuality is at the time commonly called puberty. Freud recognises in the infant several different areas or zones of the body where feelings are located which are sexual in quality. These areas are called by him erogenous (love-creating) zones. The lip zone and the anal zone and certain zones on the skin are said to be the sources of sexual feeling in the years of infancy, as are the muscles of all parts of the body. True adult sexuality is attained when the cravings originating in these diverse zones leave them and are centred in the genital zone, thereby effecting what is called the primacy of the genital zone. According to the Freudian scheme the child THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE 129 spends its first four or five years in gaining its chief satisfaction in life from the stimulation of these few zones of sexuality. It gets very little satisfaction from the outside world, but most of it comes from squeezing as much pleasure as it can from the various methods of stimulating these erogenous zones. The earliest is the lip zone, and the preva- lence of thumb-sucking among children becomes the classical illustration of the infantile sexual ex- citement. The later or adult form of sexual excitement and gratification is regarded by the Freudians as composed of the sum of the excita- tions of the other zones transferred to the genital zone. We thus have a number of sexual feelings which are, in the infant, diffused over different parts of the body, collected in the adult into one part of the body, and so depriving the other parts of the capacity of causing sexual pleasure. The objection to this theory is merely the logical one that he has taken it for granted that the sum of a number of elements is in quality the same as, but in intensity stronger than, any one of its com- ponents. Psychologically, however, it appears clear that the infant's sexuality is one that is sepa- rated into fragments, located in various places and later to be assembled. The repugnance against seeing anything of the quality or intensity of adult sexual feeling at-' tributed to children under five years of age is so 130 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT strong in most people that they have accused the Freudians of reading sex into everything. The reply to this accusation is that it is true that all excitement is primarily sexual, but that the word sexual is to be understood in a very broad sense, and that, viewed from the purely scientific stand- point, and freed as it should be from all ideas of prurience or prudery, there is no reproach in re- garding what is admitted as the prime mover of human life and activity as an essential character- istic of all ages of human life, even of infancy. The corollaries of thus attributing sexuality in a broad sense to the earliest years of childhood are, as will be seen later, so important and so striking in their application that the reader will do well to restrain if possible his indignation against what he may deem to be a wrong view of the innocence of child- hood, by reflecting that, in ascribing sexual feel- ings to that age, the Freudians do not for one moment intend that the innocence and purity of the child shall be doubted. Developing as it does along various erogenous lines which converge later upon the central point of the genital zones, the psyche passes from the stage where it gets all its satisfactions now from one and now from another erogenous zone, and thus entirely from its own body, to a stage where it begins to differentiate its body from the outside world with respect to the satisfaction-giving qual- THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE 131 ity now of one and now of the other. The entire skin is recognised as one of the erogenous zones. The child up to five years of age is without shame and enjoys showing his naked body and feeling the air and other objects on all parts of it. This tendency is called " exhibitionism," and the coun- terpart of it is the tendency to " peep " which is noticed in him by adults generally only when it is directed to things which they think he ought not to look at. The child loves " to see and eke for to be seye." A period in the development of the individual psyche is passed through called the narcissistic period, from the Greek myth of Narcissus, who was infatuated with the view of himself which he got in a pool. In this period the child regards all things in their relation to itself and not as related each with some other thing or with all other things. Up to this point the principle of pleasure- pain has been the dominating one. Corresponding to this pleasure-pain principle which posits that the wishes of the child are fulfilled or not in the pleasure or pain in its own body, we have as another characteristic of the infantile psyche a pleasure in inflicting pain upon others, a form of cruelty, which is referred to in psychoanalytic lit- erature as Sadism (from Count de Sade, whose novels exploit cruelty of man to woman). There is also a negative form of this called Masochism i 3 2 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT (from L. von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian novel- ist, who depicts this form of cruelty practised upon self), which originates in the tendency of the infantile psyche to push pleasure so hard that it becomes pain, and then to acquire a fascination for pain inflicted upon itself. This pair of opposites is explained partly by the principle of ambivalence, which sums up our ex- perience that whatever quality of sensation is uppermost in the mind naturally suggests its oppo- site. Thus pain suggests pleasure as its relief; pleasure suggests pain as its possible termination. White is more closely associated with black than with any other colour, good with bad, love with hate. A parallel is drawn between the intellectual and the emotional ambivalence, and a physical ambivalence is shown in the fact that any position of the body, except absolutely relaxed lying down, is maintained only by the constant working of two sets of muscles, one pulling against the other. Fur- thermore, sensation itself is continued only by a change very similar to a change from a quality to its opposite, in that without contrast sensation is not possible to maintain. An unchanging blue soon ceases to be perceived as any colour, a mono- tone loses its auditory quality, the same smell if continued indefinitely is soon not perceived at all. The sensation must constantly be changed from what it is to what it is not. Thus ambivalence is JHE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE 133 seen to be the very foundation of external per- ception. From this time on it is possible that a sense of reality may be consciously awakened in the child. That is, it may begin to be aware that all the effects of action may not be the pleasure or pain it feels itself. It may begin to know that physical effects may be produced by itself upon the outside world, effects that are not equally matched with states of pleasure or pain in its own body. The squeezing of pleasure out of the sensations of the child's own body in the different erogenous zones leads not only to universal self-abuse of the physical kind in infancy, but, at a later date, to very many forms of mental activity indulged in for the ecstatic quality of the pleasure derived from them. When these are recognised as a form of mental self-abuse, they are frequently discontinued, and all other acts are scrutinised for elements sym- bolising this kind of introversion. Part of the rage for reading books shown by some young per- sons is a form of mental self-abuse in that it is centripetal, seeking pleasure not from the outside world, but in the inner life, a solitary vice which leads to other forms of introversion. While it is of perfectly natural origin, and no human but goes through a period of it, the normal individual inevitably develops away from it and turns his activities outward from his own body and mind. 134 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT The child will then begin to take an interest in the actions of other persons, and a stage is passed through which may be called the hero-worship stage. This is the age before the craving has become fixed on the opposite sex, and is the period of ardent friendships, boy with boy and girl with girl. This state of the psyche has been called the homosexual stage, and after a time it gives place to the heterosexual stage, in which each human normally picks out his or her life mate from the other sex. The homosexual stage in the development of the individual psyche is based on the fact of the indeterminateness of sex at one stage in the physical development of the individual. There is a period in the growth of the embryo when it is neither male nor female but may later become either the one or the other. Furthermore, there is no individual who does not have in an unde- veloped state some physical features which are, when fully developed in the other sex, accounted as essential characteristics of that other sex, e.g. the breasts in males and the hair on the face of human females. Parallel with his physical bi- sexuality runs a psychical bisexuality in all humans. In the infantile psyche the sexes are much less differentiated than in the adult. Little girls are mentally in every way much more like little boys than women are like men. In the homosexual THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE 135 stage the masculine element in young girls seeks out the feminine element in other children, boys or girls. Young girls have not, of course, enough masculinity to desire the companionship of women nor yet enough true femininity to desire the un- couth roughness of boys. The progress of the psyche in attaining true adult masculinity or femininity may be arrested at any step. Women with masculine traits, mental or physical, are common, as well as men with feminine traits. This accounts for much of the strong affection of some women, particularly if it is the only strong affection in either woman's life, and is the cause of much of the devoted comrade- ship of men. A highly masculine man is likely to have as intimates men with less masculinity than he. He spiritually plays man to their woman. The over-masculine woman in her intimacy with another woman may be spiritually playing man to the other woman, who in turn may be ultra- feminine and want masculine traits in a friend, but not too masculine, as a real man would be. The extreme importance of this genetic view of the psyche will be appreciated only when we realise that the psychical development of any human being may be arrested at any one of these stages. It not only may be arrested, but it very frequently is arrested, or it is uneven, some parts of it being more advanced than others even in i 3 6 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT the same person, with corresponding mental pecu- liarities which are noted but not understood by the person or his friends. In fact, Freud has gone so far as to say that there is not a single peculiarity that any individual can show that is not at bot- tom a sexual peculiarity, derived from the retarda- tion or complete arrest of some part of this sexual development, in the broad sense, as briefly out- lined above. With this is closely connected the CEdipus situation which has been given a short exposition in a preceding chapter. The natural way for the evolution of the relations of the in- dividual to those persons who stand nearest to him or her, father, mother, brother and sister, is that he or she should before finding a life mate be thoroughly separated in feeling from the other members of the family, and not be swayed in the choice of a mate by any unconsciously perceived similarity between the loved object and the mother, in the case of the man, or the father, in the case of the woman. But psychoanalysis has shown that this unconscious element in the choice has been very common and is the real cause of a great deal of the unhappiness of married life. This is indeed the literal application in everyday life of the CEdipus myth. It is frequently the cause of that mystery love " at first sight." The man who falls in love at first sight with a woman is doing so in nine cases out of ten because there THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHE 137 is a similarity in appearance, voice, complexion, nose, hair, ears, eyes or what not, with his first love, namely, his mother. That is a statement which will be met with contradiction, vehement in proportion to the truth of the statement in the individual case. The greatest need for a denial is found by those who fear the truth of a state- ment. It would require far too much space to give in detail the various combinations of arrested and retarded development in the sexual development of the psyche only hinted at above. We all know, however, what different features of personality are valued by men in their estimation of women, and vice versa what different characteristics in men are looked for by women. In general it may be said that when a girl chooses for her husband a man much older than herself, she is taking him at least partly because he is in some respects, age included, like her father. All the other character- istics of older men enter unconsciously into the choice, too. The result cannot possibly be as happy as if these elements were not predominating in the selection. Or if a man marries a woman older than himself, it is ten to one that he is unconsciously playing a metaphorical CEdipus to her Jocasta, and that if he does not tear out his own eyes, as CEdipus did, he may do so figura- tively, just as did the man who became blind 138 MAN'S UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICT because of unconscious hate of his wife.* (See p. 222.) An extraordinary case of the CEdipus com- plex, or abnormal unconscious fixation on the mother, in the case of the man, is described in D. H. Lawrence's novel, S