CHAPTER V.. The Ego and Its Emotional Manifestations.

THE EGO AND ITS EMOTIONAL MANIFESTATIONS.

Reducible to one primary fact: the feeling of strength or weakness—Positive form: type, pride. Its physiological and psychological characteristics. Its relation to joy and anger. Its evolution—Negative form: humility. Its semi-social character—Pathology, positive form: monomania of power, megalomania—Extreme negative form: suicidal tendency—Psychological problem of this practical negation of the fundamental instinct.

The English designate by the term of self-feeling, and the Germans by that of Selbstgefühl, a group of sentiments directly derived from the ego. I scarcely know what to call them: “personal” would be too vague a term, “egoistic” too ambiguous (“egotistic” would be better). To identify them with pride and its opposite would be to restrict them too far, for they have other forms. We might, for want of a better, include them under the term amour-propre (in its etymological meaning, amor proprius), i.e., satisfaction or dissatisfaction with one’s self, with its different varieties.

Whatever name we may give them, these emotional forms are reducible to one primary fact of which they are the embodiment in consciousness—viz., the feeling (well-founded, or not) of personal strength or weakness, with the tendency to action or arrest of action which is its motor manifestation. We can also, but in a less direct manner, connect them with the instinct of conservation, and say, with Höffding, that they result from that instinct “arrived at the full consciousness of itself and incarnated in the idea of the Ego.”

This group has its peculiar characteristics. It is almost, if not quite, exclusively human, while the emotions hitherto studied have been as much animal as human. It is late in making its appearance (about the end of the third year), and is the last in chronological order, except the sex-instinct. This is because it soon assumes a reflective character, and because it implies that the ego is constituted and that the individual is conscious of himself as such.

The self-feeling has two forms, one positive, the other negative, of which pride and humility may respectively be taken as the types.

Under its positive form, it has a well-known physiological expression, which consists of a series of movements tending to two ends—(1) Increase in size: the respiration is deep, the thorax greatly dilated, the gestures eccentric, and, as it were, aggressive, whence the popular expressions “puffed up” or “swollen” with pride. (2) Increase in height: the body and head are held more erect, the gait is assured, the mouth firmly closed, the teeth clenched; in megalomaniacs, who present, so to speak, the caricature of pride, these traits are still further emphasised. Some writers note, besides, as a specific character, the action of the musculus superbus, which everts the lower lip.

Footnote 151:

See Darwin (chap. xi.) and Mantegazza (chap. xiv.).

Psychologically, the feeling of strength is sui generis and irreducible. It is related on one side to joy, being the sthenic emotion par excellence, on the other to anger, because the feeling of superiority soon leads to contempt, insolence, brutality, and the exercise of strength under its aggressive form. Let us remember that we have, on a previous occasion, connected with this feeling the pleasure which frequently accompanies satisfied anger. As it depends, more than any other primary emotion, on reflection, its development is determined by intellectual conditions.

Is there any equivalent to it among animals? Certain facts allow us to suppose that there is. The courteous contests of pretended battle, the song, the dances by which the males attempt to captivate the females, the triumph of some and the defeat of others, must produce some states analogous to pride and humiliation. The arrogant attitudes of the cock and the turkey-cock, the ostentatious display of the peacock, are taken as symbols of naïf pride; and if the expression of an emotion is that emotion objectivised, we can easily suppose that it exists in some manner. In children, the personal feeling is at first connected with the exercise of physical strength expended in struggling with each other and in games; later on, with personal appearance, clothes and ornaments, especially in girls. In consequence of an increasing irradiation, the self-feeling envelops everything entering into its sphere of action which may help to swell its importance—house, furniture, relations. Later on comes the consciousness of intellectual force, and the advantages procured by it—fame, power, riches, etc.

As derivative, or different aspects of egotistic emotion, under its positive form, we find pride, vanity, contempt, love of glory, ambition, emulation, courage, daring, boldness, etc. The special study of each of these feelings belongs rather to the moralist than the psychologist.

Footnote 152:

Consult James, Psychology, ii. 305, 329; Bain, Emotions, chap. x., xi.; J. Sully, Psychology, ii. 97 et seq.

Under its negative form, personal emotion cannot detain us long, as it would only be a repetition of what we have previously studied under the converse aspect. It has for its basis a feeling of weakness and impotence. It shows itself by diminution or arrest of movement; its gestures are concentric, and it consists in belittling instead of aggrandising, of lowering instead of raising. It is related on one side to sadness, and on the other to fear; in short, it is the complete antithesis to the positive form.

From this source flow, with different adaptations, humility, timidity, modesty, resignation, patience, meanness, cowardice, want of self-confidence, etc. Most of these manifestations are not simple, but result from the combined action of several causes, as we shall see later on.

II.

The positive or negative feeling of personal strength is a normal and healthy emotion when it remains within the limits of adaptation; for it has an individual and even social utility.

For the individual, it is the instinct of conservation become reflective, and by the consciousness of his strength or weakness, it permits him to measure his pretensions by his degree of power.

Socially, it makes us in a certain measure dependent on others. Although strictly egoistic in its origin, self-feeling cannot develop unless it becomes ego-altruistic, or semi-social. According to Bain, self-esteem is a reflective sentiment which consists in judging ourselves as we judge others. This opinion has been criticised and scarcely seems tenable, in so far, at least, as it takes away from amour propre its instinctive and self-generated character and considers it as a return action. However, it is certain that the desire of approbation and the fear of blame are the external elements which count in the constitution and consolidation of the feeling of self-complacency; praise gives it extension, criticism impairs and mutilates it. This does not imply any great amount of reflection or culture. The child is extremely sensitive to the judgment of his equals. Primitive man is imprisoned in a network of custom, tradition, and prejudice which he cannot break without incurring excommunication; and those people are very rare who content themselves with their own approbation only.

But from a semi-social feeling, the love of ourselves can easily become an anti-social feeling. There is no emotion which passes so simply and definitely from the normal form to passion, and from passion to madness. At the bottom of the tendency of the ego to affirm itself there is a potentiality of limitless expansion and indefinite radiation. A man whose self-feeling is vigorous resembles those species of animals and vegetables which—prolific and of tenacious vitality—would, if left to themselves, cover the whole surface of the globe; his expansion is only kept in check by that of others.

Our path towards the pathology of the subject is already marked out. We have, first, the semi-morbid forms which have been called the monomania of power. Place a man in conditions where this tendency to unlimited expansion meets with no obstacle, and it will go to any extreme. This is the case with absolute power. No doubt this unique and, so to speak, superhuman position is not of itself sufficient. The madness of power (folie du pouvoir) is the resultant of two factors: first, the character, i.e., the violence of the egoistic appetites, which, continually satisfied, continually increase; while the will, the antagonistic, inhibitive force, keeps on diminishing; and next, external circumstances—the absence of all restraint, of any equal power which might overawe by threats. A religious sanction, or the fear of a political catastrophe, has restrained more than one, and limited that unbridled tendency which is only the ego’s feeling of its own power carried to the acute stage. It is needless to give examples from history, for they are known to every one.

Footnote 153:

For details on this point the reader should consult Ireland, The Blot on the Brain, p. 88 (where he will find a study of the Cæsars, the Hindoo Sultans, Ivan the Terrible, etc.), and Jacoby, Études sur la sélection et l’hérédité.

Self-feeling, under its positive form, has its ultimate incarnation in a well-known pathological manifestation—the delusion of greatness, or megalomania. Perhaps, indeed, in this case, the exaggeration produced by disease shows itself most clearly and without altering the original.

Megalomania is met with in general paralysis of the insane as a transitory phase; but especially in systematised chronic delusions (paranoia). We may pass over the period of incubation, which is often melancholic; thus, in a case of persecution-delusions, the patient is at first tormented by vague suspicions; he accuses no one in particular, he has as yet no accredited enemies; but one day he discovers them, and nothing will ever divert his thoughts from them again. Then, in some cases, the disease passing through another evolutionary stage, he arrives, by logical deduction, at the conclusion that it is his great merit, his high position, which are exciting jealousy. Thenceforth megalomania is fully developed; the subject thinks himself a millionaire, an unrecognised genius, a great inventor, a king, the pope, or even the Deity.

There is nothing more characteristic than such a description as the following, which has often been drawn up, and is yet another proof that emotion, its expressive and its physiological bases, are but parts of the same phenomenon. “He walks with head erect, with assurance; his speech is laconic and imperious, he seeks solitude, and is full of contempt for the society which surrounds him. His style of dress is in accordance with the tendency of his aberration. Like the maniac, he is restlessly active; but, in him, no movement is fortuitous or without a motive; his will is always active, his actions have a definite aim; if he shows violence, it is in order to ensure the execution of his commands, to show that he has strength sufficient to annihilate everything; it is not a destructive spirit which animates him, but the necessity for showing his power. The functions of the assimilative life have undergone no alteration; they take place, as a rule, with perfect regularity. It seems as if the expansive form of their feelings, their contentment with themselves, the extreme and unbroken satisfaction surrounding their life, imparted to the organic vital apparatus a surplus of activity, resulting, in a manner, in an excess of health.” Frequent cases of longevity among megalomaniacs have been noted. Finally, the following observation has its value, on account of the change—at once organic and psychic—there recorded:—"We have watched a patient who, after having suffered from melancholia for several years, suddenly became megalomaniac. His constitution had undergone great alterations, and his health was much weakened, so that he became a chronic melancholic; but so soon as his mental affection took on the character of megalomania he was not long in acquiring new vigour."

Footnote 154:

Dagonet, Traité des maladies mentales, pp. 360 et seq.

We might add that the tendency of men is rather to pride, of women to vanity, which favours the views of those who maintain that madness is often only the exaggeration of the habitual character: it is sufficient to have shown that the feeling (though illusory) of personal strength in an extreme degree is only the normal state amplified, but not changed.

III.

It may seem strange to close this chapter by some remarks on a phenomenon which, both by its internal and external characteristics, belongs to the class of irresistible tendencies—the fatal impulse to suicide. Its affinity with homicidal obsession is undeniable, as is proved by the persons who are tormented, in turn, by the craving to kill others and to kill themselves. However, if self-love, in its positive form, reaches its culminating point in megalomania, it seems to me quite legitimate to maintain that self-feeling, under its negative form, attains its supreme negation in suicide.

Without insisting on a merely accessory point, it is certain that suicide, as a manifestation of emotional life, brings us face to face with a psychological problem as yet insufficiently noticed. If there is an incontestable fact—one which, even among the ancients, was familiar to triteness—it is that in every animal the fundamental, ineradicable instinct is that of self-preservation, of existing, and persisting in existence. Now, suicide, whether voluntary or unreflecting, deliberate or impulsive, is the negation of the fundamental tendency, not a theoretic or partial negation, or one in word only, but in deed and absolute. And the sacrifice of life is not subordinated to some other end which acts by superior attraction, such as devotion to a belief, to friends, to humanity, to one’s country, it is a suppression pure and simple, a liberation desired in and for itself.

The ethnological, moral, and social study of suicide does not form part of our subject, having already been fully worked out. Our aim is merely the psychological problem, which we must now define with more precision.

Footnote 155:

Among the very copious existing literature on suicide I must mention Morselli’s monograph, Il Suicidio, in which the various causes—cosmic, ethnic, social, biological, and psychological—are studied in great detail. His principal theoretical conclusions are—(1) Among all civilised nations suicide increases more rapidly than the geometrical ratio of the population and the general mortality; (2) suicides are in inverse proportion to homicides at any given time or in any given country. This last “law” has been strongly contested by Tarde and others.

The act of suicide results from two very different mental states, that of reflection and that of impulsion.

In deliberate, reflective, voluntary suicide there is a struggle between two factors: the instinct of conservation and the insupportable state caused by pain (incurable disease, ruin, misery, grief, frustrated ambition, dishonour). Reflection decides, and as pain is always a beginning of destruction, it prefers a total and rapid destruction to a partial and slow one. The act is rational, since it tends towards the lesser evil, or at least what is judged to be such.

Impulsive suicide is harder to explain. A man throws himself suddenly out of a window, poisons himself, cuts his throat. In some cases death has been premeditated, but always appears as a compelling, inevitable force, inexorably claiming its victim; the epithet “irresistible” says everything. To the outside spectator the act appears motiveless, without reason, without cause. It is all the more surprising that the struggle, in this case, is no longer between instinct and reflection, but between two instincts, the conservative and the destructive, of which the one which usually is the strongest succumbs, and the individual turns against himself the destructive tendency originally destined to act on others.

Yet the psychology of deliberate suicide gives us the key to that of the impulsive variety. What in the first case results from conscious, clear, reasoned motives, results in the second from blind, obscure, unconscious states: it is an act of organic life, and its cause is found in cœnæsthesia. Impulsive suicide is the expression of the destructive process, slow, permanent, dimly felt, going on in the depths of the organism. Any one who presses in rage on an aching tooth, who rolls on the ground, strikes his head against the wall, or mutilates himself, is attempting an instinctive though absurd reaction in order to get rid of his pain. These are modified forms, it is true, but they will serve to show that the man who yields to an overmastering impulse to strangle or drown himself seeks a deliverance of the same kind.

Leaving degeneration (which is perpetually being dragged into this question) out of account, observation shows us that the difference between the two forms of suicide is reduced to that between psychic and purely organic causes. Impulsive suicide flourishes best on the soil of melancholia and hypochondria—i.e., in states which involve deep dejection and a disorganisation of vital action. We may also notice the part played (as was long ago pointed out) by heredity, the descendants of suicidal ancestors often killing themselves at the same age and in the same manner as the latter; now, psychological heredity is based on organic. Finally, the automatic character of these impulses approximates them to the class of reflex actions, attempts at suicide being repeated in the same form during a recurrence of the same circumstances—e.g., somnambulism, intoxication, the menstrual period. All these characteristics assign to irresistible suicide an organic origin, which is equivalent to saying that its ultimate cause lies in temperament. The conservative instinct exists in all men, but it may exist in any degree. In some there is an innate joy of life capable of resisting all disasters; in others, a constitutional melancholy, or (which comes to the same thing) the conservative instinct is very weak and yields to the least shock. Impulsive suicide represents self-feeling at its last stage of regression, or, in other words, at its negative extreme.

Footnote 156:

For further details see my Hérédité psychologique, Part I., chap. viii.