CHAPTER III. A New Technique of Thinking[6]

A NEW TECHNIQUE OF THINKING

The prevailing theory is that men who make important decisions in politics can be trained to use their minds wisely by disciplinary training in the practices of logical thought. Legal training is supposed to mold the mind to ways of dealing with the world which subordinate whim to principle. Formal instruction in the social sciences is intended to equip the mind for the detached consideration of social consequences, and everyone agrees that this implies a large measure of self-awareness for the sake of reducing the play of prejudice.

The nature of logical thought has been carefully examined by an array of able writers. Their conclusions may be provisionally reported by saying that logic is a guided form of mental operation. It is not something marked off from impulse, but a progressive elaboration and differentiation of impulse. It proceeds by the affirmation of a starting-point, which is in fact a vague indication of the goal to be reached, and develops by the criticism of the material which appears in consciousness according to its relevance to the end in view. If the judge begins by wanting to settle a controversy consistently with precedents, he has indicated in advance the shadowy outline of the desired termination of his efforts. If an administrator wants to reduce complaints against his handling of the postal service, he starts with a different mental set from the judge, but, like the mental set of the latter, his first act is to bring into view the state of affairs which he hopes to find when he quits thinking. He is accustomed to guide the operations of his mind by this preliminary characterization of the terminus sought. No thinker can haul into the center of attention the material which indicates how the terminal situation is to be attained. The thinker must wait attentively for whatever appears. If he wants to deal with such a simple practical matter as getting to the railway station, and his mind continues to fill with images of the one he left behind him, his accustomed means of asserting control is to reiterate the practical end and to hope that he can “keep his mind on” taxicabs or autobusses. Alternating with periods of reiteration and expectancy and illumination are episodes of “No” and “Yes,” which evidence the existence of guided thought.

It would be misleading to stop with this formal description of the characteristics of logical thinking. Logical thinking is not a hocus-pocus to be applied here and there and everywhere. The previewing of events presupposes familiarity with the sorts of events to which the previewing relates. It usually involves analysis of the contingent future in the light of analogies with the past, which is simply a means of refining general familiarity through systematic methods of inspecting reality. General knowledge of lending and borrowing must be supplemented, for many purposes, by detailed examination of the quantitative dimensions of various routines. The precise nature of the relationship between changes in the rediscount rate and the price of call money requires analysis far beyond impressionistic familiarity.

There need be no illusion that the specification of the terminal situation provides an immovable constant for thought. We can imply, as we have implied, that logical thinking begins by sketching a figure on the canvass and leaves the details to be filled in during the course of the thinking. But the starting-point is often subject to many shifts, and the initial sketch is more or less subject to remaking. The judge who starts in pursuit of consistency-with-precedent characteristically must add conformity-to-principles-of-policy. A plurality of ends is always involved, and usually appears.

Everybody knows that the pluralism of ends goes far beyond “official” ends. A sophisticated and discerning judge may discover an embarrassing conflict in the controlling precedents, and cast about for other social purposes than conformity-to-precedent to guide him. He may scrutinize the principal economic, cultural, and political changes in the society in which he operates, and discern the appearance of a new set of rising dominant values, and decide to diminish the cost of social change by seeking to facilitate their introduction. If this hypothetical judge believes that he should not consciously enact his private prejudices into law, and if the social values are so confused that uncertainty rules, the judge is well advised to flip a coin (in chambers) and govern his decision accordingly. If the judge finds himself favorably disposed toward any alternative to begin with, he will take himself as an object of investigation to determine the extent and origin of his prejudice. His logic thus involves the use of self-scrutiny for the exposure of private values which load the dice for or against a particular point of view. Besides the values which are “public,” there are complicating values which are the residue of one’s “private” history.

All these points are stressed in greater or less degree in the current writing on the use of the mind. The avowed purpose of our professional schools is to increase the amount of logical reflection in the world, and the set complaint is that people somehow or another manage to think very clumsily. In spite of our best efforts to disseminate logicality, people are always “letting their prejudices run away with them,” even when they have a baggage of good intentions.

The stock alibi for the failure of the schools to improve the character of thinking among those who hold positions of power is that the human mind offers a perverse opacity to the rays of reason. Somehow or other our training doesn’t take; but this is attributed not to the deficiencies of logic but to the resistances to it. All this is reminiscent of the reply of the Christian to the taunt that Christianity has failed. He says that Christianity isn’t to blame, but the lack of it. The logicians say that the cure of bad logic is more and better logic. If the human mind refuses to be educated, that’s just too bad.

Our thesis is that our faith in logic is misplaced. Exclusive emphasis upon logic (even where logic is adroitly used) incapacitates rather than fits the mind to function as a fit instrument of reality adjustment.

The supposition that emotional aberrations are to be conquered by heroic doses of logical thinking is a mistake. The absence of effective logic is a symptom of a disease which logic cannot itself cure. We have been misled by supposing that the mind can rely upon a single technique of operation when this isolated technique has serious limitations.

A totally different technique of thinking is needed to get on with the task of ridding the mind of the distorting results of unseen compulsions. Since our schools have found no place for the cultivation of this additional technique of thinking, our judges and administrators and policy-makers are turned loose on the world armed with faith in logic and incapable of making their minds safe for logic. Logical thinking is but one of the special methods of using the mind, and cannot itself achieve an adequate inspection of reality because it is unable to achieve self-knowledge without the aid of other forms of thinking.

The technique of free-fantasy offers many points of contrast with logical thinking. It is unguided rather than guided association. From a given starting-point, no effort is bent toward the exclusion of the trivial, the trite, the embarrassing, the filthy, the nonsensical. The mind is permitted to run hither and yon. It is hospitable to everything which germinates in the mind, and is subject only to the effort to steer clear of the molds of logical thinking. There is no specific definition of an objective, and no intermittent intervention in the flow of material to register its pertinence or impertinence to this rather specific objective.

Free-fantasy is not to be confused with free word associations which begin with simple stimulus words and end when the first few words which pop into the mind are put down. Free-fantasy is not a momentary relaxation of selective criticism, but prolonged emancipation from logical fetters.

Free-fantasy differs from the ordinary daydream, the night dream, and the visions which arise in sleeping or waking by the circumstance that it is embarked upon with the vague, generalized purpose of rendering available new subject matter for logical thought. The frequent interventions which characterize logical procedures are suspended, the better to serve the ultimate purposes of reality adjustment. Daydreaming which is not used for this general purpose does not represent a technique for using the mind.

The ultimate paradox of logical thinking is that it is self-destroying when it is too sedulously cultivated. It asserts its own prerogatives by clamping down certain restrictive frames of reference upon the activity of the mind, and presently ends in impoverishing the activity which it purports to guide into creative channels. It becomes intolerant of the immediate, unanalyzed, primitive abundance of the mind, and by so doing destroys its own source.

More seriously, too, for the mind which is engaged with social life, logical procedures exclude from the mind the most important data about the self. Directed thinking, whether about the self or something else as an object, is impatient of the seemingly trivial, and this impatience with the seemingly trivial is the rationally acceptable guise in which the impulse to avoid rigorous self-scrutiny gets itself accepted. The mind which is freely fantasying produces distasteful evidence of the facts about the self which the socialized self wants to avoid. This is why free-fantasy is not learned by rote, but achieved through trying experiences, usually under prolonged supervision.

There are wide individual differences in acquiring the technique of free-fantasy. Logical controls are often so gradually released that progress is almost imperceptible for several weeks of daily contact with a psychoanalytic interviewer. Frequently, of course, the logical controls fall away quite rapidly, and the exposure of the underlying preoccupations proceeds apace. Freud developed the technique, and drills his subjects, largely in relation to their dreams, but this is in no sense its exclusive application. The purpose of the psychoanalytic interview is not served if the patient is merely relieved of a few annoying symptoms; its purpose is to equip him with a means of handling his mind which will enable him to go it alone. In developing the free-fantasy procedure, Freud added a powerful tool to the repertory of those who would use their mind with some hope of disentangling themselves from the compulsive domination of many vestigial remains of their “private” histories.

It is quite possible to train people to use the free-fantasy method with considerable success and to outfit them with a device which they can use in the ordinary problems of professional and private life. The instances which I shall presently adduce are from the fantasies which were produced by a judge in the course of a series of interviews which he undertook after his curiosity about the method had been aroused by the therapeutic treatment of a member of his family. Any specific allusions are disguised.

One day the judge commented at the beginning of the interview that a certain attorney irritated him in some unexplained way. He found himself acutely conscious of his own prejudice against the man, and in trying to deal fairly with him often leaned over backward and showed him an embarrassing favoritism in sustaining his objections. There was always a struggle to hold the balance even. This seemed to indicate the conspicuous operation of some unrecognized set of motives in relation to this particular individual. The judge, who was already partly skilled in the use of free-fantasy, began to report whatever came into his mind at the mention of the attorney, without regard to logic or scruple. “Cigar smoke ... black cigar ... vile and pungent and stuffy ... corridor ... courtroom ...,” and so on and on. The word “corridor” reappeared several times in the course of his associations, and the interviewer initiated a new chain by using the word as a stimulus. After some time, there came up a vivid memory of an incident in the corridor of the law school where the judge had studied. A fellow-student, who was a man with a great reputation as a promising mind, dropped cigar ashes by accident on the judge’s overcoat. The judge remembered his angry impulse to “sock” the offender, an impulse which he instantly subdued, and that he accepted the apology, which seemed to end the incident. Associations were continued to find why the brilliant rival had so incensed the judge, and the trail led back to certain incidents and reveries in early adolescence, but this material is not relevant here. The connection of his hostility toward his former rival with the attorney before him was due to one of the attorney’s mannerisms, which recalled the way the student had flecked ashes off the end of his cigar. When this tie was exposed, the compulsive animosity and the overcompensatory reactions disappeared from the attitude of the judge in relation to the attorney.

Another illustrative detail may be taken almost at random from the record. On one occasion the judge began to enumerate the three principal alternatives which lay before him in deciding a pending case. He remembered two of them but hesitated several seconds before the third came into his mind. This led him to remember that he had often casually noticed that this third possibility seemed to elude him, although on reflection he felt that it deserved as much attention as the other two. He began spontaneously to relax and report everything that crossed his mind, and produced a long string of catch phrases from law and politics like “freedom of contract,” “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” “freedom of speech and assembly.” He presently noted that a picture was forming of one of his old law-school classrooms. He felt that someone was just about to speak to him, and had to resist the temptation to turn around. Then there came across his mind a long series of incidents in which one of his law professors was the principal figure. This teacher was reputed to possess a mastermind and a caustic tongue; and the judge, though he had always wanted to make a great impression on him, had met with no particular success. The professor had a habit of using his most ironic tone of voice when he spoke of “this freedom of contract.” Now it happened that the attorney who was arguing for alternative No. 3 before the court pronounced the word “freedom” with unction. This aroused in the judge’s mind the ironic tone of the old professor’s voice, and this in turn brought back the rather humiliating failure he had been in his efforts to impress the professor. He now exhibited a tendency to repress everything connected with the episode, including the attorney’s argument.

The world about us is much richer in meanings than we consciously see. These meanings are continually cutting across our ostensible criteria of judgment, and compulsively distorting the operations of the mind whose quest for an objective view of reality is consciously quite sincere. Good intentions are not enough to widen the sphere of self-mastery. There must be a special technique for the sake of exposing the hidden meanings which operate to bind and cripple the processes of logical thought. With practice one may wield the tool of free-fantasy with such ruthless honesty that relevant material comes very quickly to the focus of attention which we call “waking consciousness.”

It would be possible to fill many volumes with illustrations of the hitherto unseen meanings which have been discovered by men and women who have learned to use the free-fantasy technique. They have often been able to find how and why their emotions tended to be aroused favorably or unfavorably toward individuals of their own or the opposite sex who exhibited certain traits, and to understand why they tended to choose certain secretaries, to sponsor certain protégés, and to be impressed by certain witnesses and attorneys. They have been able to inspect the phraseology of law, politics, and culture, and to extricate themselves from many of the logically irrelevant private meanings which they read into it.

Freud developed the technique of free-fantasy well over a quarter of a century ago, but it is still beyond the pale of the schools. Our professional and graduate schools make no effort to readjust their methods to fit the minds of future men of authority for self-knowledge. The sententious admonitions to “know thyself” are no adequate substitute for special discipline in the ways of self-understanding.

We have tried to cure the failures of logical training by homeopathic doses of sermonizing, rather than by the discipline of supplementary techniques of using the mind. The mind is a fit instrument of reality testing when both blades are sharpened--those of logic and free-fantasy. Until this fundamental proposition is adequately comprehended, the professional training of our judges, administrators, and theorists will continue to furnish discipline in self-deception rather than self-analysis.