Chapter X 238

ULTIMATE RESOLUTION OF THE SOCIETAL NEUROSIS IN ITS PERSONAL IMPLICATION

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

Index 253

PREFACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRIGANT BURROW.

The Tuscany, Baltimore, Maryland.

THE SOCIAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

INTRODUCTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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