PART I. The Philosophy of the Neuroses

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEUROSES

CHAPTER I

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THEORY AND IN LIFE

Now that the excitement following the inundation of psychoanalysis has died down and the clinical territories most affected have been once more built up and restocked, it is interesting to witness the changes wrought in different quarters as a result of the general havoc to habitual prepossessions. As we stand amid the debris of past conceptions there is no question but that the sudden descent upon us of Freud’s postulates has destroyed many old landmarks that shall not be restored and that it has brought in a wealth of new material that has altered no little the configuration of the old.

As I happen to have been of those who were carried in upon the current of the general onsweep of new interpretations ushered in by Freud, my experience forms the record of a reaction to that movement that is internal because it is from the vantage-ground of a participant in it. Many of these interpretations are of epoch-making significance in their approach to mental disharmonies, but many, being immature and unsound, only obstruct the passage that psychoanalysis has contributed so splendidly to open. And so my position may be of interest to others who, like myself, have earnestly tried to bring order and a permanent coherence out of the large mass of conceptions that cluster about Freud’s dynamic idea.

The theory of psychoanalysis rests on the conception that nervous disorders are the substitutive manifestation of a repressed sexual life; its basic position is that this substitutive factor is responsible for neurotic processes and that it is the sexual impulse for which recourse is sought in the process of substitution. This position of psychoanalysis is, in its essential significance, now generally accepted--the position, namely, which affirms the factor of replacement as the essential account of nervous manifestations and assumes the urge of the sexual instinct as the element replaced.

While, with other psychoanalysts, I am in full accord with this thesis, my finding in regard to the relation of these two propositions to one another is so entirely at variance with the prevailing psychoanalytic view, and alters so fundamentally for me the ultimate interpretation of psychoanalysis in its bearing upon the problems of consciousness, that I shall make clearer the ideas expressed in this work if, at the outset, I may state briefly in what manner my interpretation of this relation differs from the accepted conception.

The difference lies in the fact that I do not regard this replacement as primarily a replacement for sexuality as we now know it. On the contrary, sexuality, as manifested to-day amid the sophistications of civilization, is itself a replacement for the organic unity of personality arising naturally from the harmony of function that pertains biologically to the primary infant psyche. This original mode I have referred to in a previous work as the preconscious, and this preconscious mode I regard as the matrix of the mental life. The spontaneous process of the organism’s unhindered growth through the gradual development of experience or awareness from this unitary mode as a basis is, in my interpretation, the meaning of consciousness. The whole meaning of sexuality on the other hand is substitution, compensation, repression. In a word, sexuality, as it has come to exist socially to-day, is identical with the unconscious, while a unification of personality is alone to be found through eliminating the recourses of substitution and sexuality and thus reuniting the elements of the conscious and organic modes now kept asunder through the interposition of the unconscious.

Hence the modern substitutions existing under the name of sexuality, whether repressed or indulged, are but a symptom of this denial of man’s organic affective life. Sexuality, as it now exists, is not only utterly unrelated to sex but it is intrinsically exclusive of sex. Sex is life. It is life in its deepest significance. Sex is the spontaneous expression of a natural hunger. In the instinct of sex there is felt a yearning from the depths of man’s organism for mating and reproduction, while sexuality is the personal coveting of momentary satisfaction in mere superficial sensation. By sexuality, then, I mean something very different from sex. I mean the restless, obsessive, over-stimulated quest for temporary self-gratification that everywhere masquerades as sex and is everywhere substituted for the strong, simple, quiet flow of feeling that unites the organic and the conscious life in a single stream and is the expression of personality in its native inherency.

With this altered conception other modifications have followed which necessarily entail a distinct departure from certain accepted psychoanalytic formulations. The organic denial and the restless compensations and substitutions comprising the unconscious are, in essence, the psychology of the mental reaction-average known as normality. The popular analytic view places a premium upon this manifestation of the collective unconscious and assigns the criterion of normality as the desired goal of adaptation for the neurotically repressed personality.

I cannot accept this view. For an analysis of the social unconscious shows that the collective reaction embodied in the adaptations commonly accepted as normal betrays a tendency to repression and replacement that is no less an indication of disease-process than is the reaction presented in the individual neurosis. Indeed, from the point of view of constructive consciousness and health, our so-called normality is, of the two, the less progressive type of reaction. In truth, normality, in evading the issues of the unconscious, envisages less the processes of growth and a larger consciousness than the neurotic type of reaction, which, however blind its motivation, at least comes to grips with the actualities of the unconscious.

It is the hall-mark of normality that, suspecting nothing, it takes itself completely for granted. In the spirit of true conformity, it accepts its expressions of the vicarious at their face value and assumes the burden of its self-inflicted compensations with entire complacency. The neurotic, on the other hand, at least senses the inherent discrepancy in his life. He at least demurs in so far as to withhold assent from the mass-compromise embodied in the substitutions and connivances of the social unconscious. In a word, it is the distinction of the neurotic personality that he is at least consciously and confessedly “nervous.”

This, as far as I can see, is the chief distinction between the condition represented in normal adaptations and that represented in the neurosis. The distinction lies merely in the greater weight of numbers. Normality, in its numerical strength, concedes acceptance to the average-reaction and so yields it right of way. In normality the unconscious carries the day, while in the neurosis it is pushed to the wall. The distinction psychologically lies in the successful compromise of the one as contrasted with the enforced doubt and self-questioning of the other. On the one hand there is the compact security of the social polity; on the other, there is the more sensitive isolation and uncertainty of the individual unit.

From the point of view of life, therefore, many of our normal reactions are psychologically as truly a manifestation of the distorted and substitutive as are those more isolated manifestations we commonly stigmatize as neurotic disharmonies. I cannot see but that the element of the repressed and substitutive on which is based Freud’s theory of the neuroses is an element that underlies the expression of consciousness in all phases of its manifestation and that hence underlies also the phase represented in normality. In brief, normality too is nervous. Normality too, since it is actuated no less from motives of the ulterior and vicarious, even though it supposedly represents the criterion of adult consciousness, is no less an expression of the distorted and symbolic. This distortion is to be seen upon every hand in the restless greed and obsessive self-seeking that underlie the national, industrial, political, social and religious possessivism and competition which are the typical psychology of the normal mind, notwithstanding its plausible exterior of human progress and universal goodwill. Universality and goodwill are not there. These are but the manifest symptoms embodied by the social personality after it has undergone the distortion represented in the substitutive reactions characteristic of the social neurosis, that is, after it has been subjected to the mechanism of diplomatic repression and modification. What is there, in reality, is the will-to-self and the particular aim which best serves the narcistic advantages of the individuals comprising the social unit in question. The mechanism is identical with that which underlies the individual neurosis, namely, the covert aim toward the satisfactions of self which constitute unconsciousness.

Normality too, then, is neurotic. Normality too has its repressions and its substitutions, its secret symbols and equivocations. The difference is that as normality possesses the warrant of the institutionalized and current, it enjoys the protection of the consensus. And just as the neurotic fails to comprehend the meaning of this vicarious manifestation in its individual expression within himself and is a prey to the inscrutable symptoms in which his organism finds its compensations, so we, who are accounted normal, as little suspect the meaning of this same symptomatology existing in its social expression within ourselves. The neurotic resolutely defends his unconscious duplicity behind an ingenious charade of unconscious symbolism, and we no less resolutely defend ours through recourse to an identical device. But if we will look beyond the narrower confine of the clinic and face squarely the logical issue of Freud’s thesis, we cannot avoid the conclusion that it is an indictment of man’s consciousness in its entirety. Hence normality too must make answer for its complicity in the unconscious ruse of substitution and evasion which we observe in its more intense reaction as the introversions of personality presented in the obviously arrested expression we call neurotic.

If anyone is disposed to question this view, let him consider but one symptomatic reaction recently manifested throughout the social organism. Could there be anywhere imagined an unconscious reaction more wasteful and destructive or one of wider scope or severer intensity than the symptom-reaction represented by the war that has recently convulsed the world? Or consider the equally unconscious expression presented in the tendency to religious emotionalism that has followed in the wake of this world-war, with the corresponding effort towards compensation and self-propitiation through recourse to the sentimental and spiritualistic. Yet all the while the existence and the significance of the unconscious motives that are latent in the two extremes of emotional reaction underlying these manifest expressions have not yet begun to be suspected and reckoned with on any clear, conscious, analytic basis.

What, then, is the meaning of this tendency to substitution as shown in the reaction of the social as well as of the individual organism? If sexuality is the element substituted for, what is the psychology of this factor called sexuality? What is its meaning? In analyzing the unconscious of the neurotic personality it has become gradually clearer to me that the factor underlying and actuating the conflict Freud describes as repressed sexuality is nothing else than the personal desire of ascendancy or the lust of acquisition concomitant with the organism’s unconscious reversion upon its own image.

Sexuality, then, is but a larger word for self. Sexuality is the effort to limit life to the ends of personal aggrandizement. It is the greed of the self-limited personality to compass the whole, as contrasted with the societal personality that is encompassed by the whole. But, since the unconscious is the same under all forms, self or sexuality, with its pride of possession, its lust of gain, is no less the unconscious element underlying the psychology of the normal reaction-average. And precisely as in the individual reaction these unconscious wishes are manifested only in the disguised symbols and substitutive equivalents portrayed in neurotic symptoms, so too in the social organism these egocentric interests antagonistic to consciousness and growth venture to express themselves only in the corresponding substitutions of the mass unconscious.

Thus the unconscious represented in the social reaction we call normality is no whit different from the unconscious represented in the individual reaction observable as the neurosis. We are habitually deceived by the give-and-take policy of normal adaptation with its secret covenant of good manners and outward forms. But the apparent difference between the social and the individual neurosis consists merely in the fact that the poignancy of the conflict underlying the symptomatology of the social personality is largely mitigated and condoned by reason of the wider numerical distribution of the social organism and the consequent freer dissemination of the elements involved.

But, though of wider distribution, there underlies the expressions of normality no less of conflict and repression than exists in the acuter expression seen in the individual neurosis. In the personality of the more sensitive or feeling type we think of as neurotic, this tendency to self-acquisitiveness or sexuality and its organic incompatibility with the physiological inherency of life become, as it were, stalled and impacted within him; while in the social organism the discrepancy of personality, occasioned by its sexuality or pride of ascendancy, apparently entails no such organic blocking as that occurring in the individual. But the pain and impaction are present nevertheless, and are betrayed no less in the recourse to the substitutive and symbolic manifestations, characteristic of our prevalent social hysterias, not to mention the more violent disorders that crash upon the world in the reactions of political and industrial dissension and in the fiercer paroxysms of war.

Such is the meaning of our so-called normality. To a degree that is quite unsuspected by us its psychology is unconsciousness, and the psychology of unconsciousness is the psychology of the self-image secretly worshipped under the habitual guises of symbolism and replacement. It is time we should recognize that this recourse to the vicarious image is the psychology of many of the reactions of the normal as well as of the neurotic, that in ourselves, no less than in the neurotic, there is the putting forward of that which stands for--the exploitation, under countless different aspects, of that which may be adroitly put instead of rather than the simple acceptance of that which is.

Part of the purpose of the present study, however, is to try to bring into clearer light a substitutive reaction that is much nearer home. As psychoanalysts we need to take into account a distortive process that has a much closer bearing upon ourselves and our responsibility toward the problems of our common social consciousness. For, of all the forms of substitution to which normality has recourse, the form that seems to me of deepest significance for us and that presents the most vital need of analysis and understanding within ourselves, is the vicarious expression growing out of the tendency to an extrinsic approach to the problems of consciousness that has come to be embodied in the formulated system of psychoanalysis.

In the whole symptomatology of normality with its social expression of the vicarious there is no symptom-complex that is of greater significance than that embodied in the attempt to apply to the reality of human life the system of human life offered in psychoanalysis as it is to-day interpreted and applied. For a system of psychoanalysis is itself but a substitution for life, a theory of life in place of life itself. The theory of psychoanalysis sets out with a premise; life does not. Psychoanalysis offers a solution; life is its own solution.

It is not theory as theory at which I demur; it is theory as application to the needs of human growth. From the point of view of the theory of psychoanalysis this therapeutic recourse in the treatment of nervous disorders seems to me completely adequate and true; but from the point of view of life I have come to regard the application of the system or theory of psychoanalysis to the problems of individual needs as an utterly futile procedure. I have come to feel that what is here of value in the text-book is utterly worthless in our daily relation to human personality.

I would not, of course, be understood as repudiating theory as such. Seen clearly as the extrinsic expression it is, theory undoubtedly has its place, but its place is not in the earnest relationship of one human being to another such as obtains in the confidence and communication offered in the actuality of psychoanalysis. It has not yet been recognized, however, that we who are psychoanalysts are ourselves theorists, that we also are very largely misled by an unconscious that is social, that we too are neurotic, in so far as every expression but that of life in its native simplicity is neurotic. Our disharmony, however, is a phase of that widely diffused neurosis that exists under the prevailing social consensus represented in the normal adaptation.

And so, as I now see it, there is no more subtle form of substitution or one that is more successful in its capacity to evade the censor of consciousness and obtain the stamp of genuineness than the symptom represented in the theory of the reactions of human beings as a replacement for the reality of these reactions in life itself. Personal experience compels me to concede that it is such a symptom that is comprised in the theory of psychoanalysis as it is widely operative in the consultation rooms of psychoanalysts to-day.

We have assumed that, in envisaging the unconscious, psychoanalysis presupposes a more inclusive position than is generally characteristic of the theoretical or systematized clinician. But it is a far-reaching commentary upon the analyst’s capacity of discrimination that he still presumes to analyze another on the basis of a system or theory, as though a neurosis which is an essentially subjective condition were of the nature of an objective bodily lesion. A dissociation within the personality may find its analogy in a bodily lesion but never its understanding. In the field of objective phenomena, theory is entirely commensurate with its application. After all, the theory of a mechanism is but the description of the principle of its operation. In the objective world such an objective description presents no discrepancy. It is the application of the objective method to an objective principle. The theory of the hydraulic press is perfectly consistent with its application. Between theory and application there is here complete conjunction. No disparate element intervenes to mar the transition from the descriptive to the practical.

So too with the theory of psychoanalysis as long as it pertains to the objective viewpoint of the text-book. But in the subjective sphere a totally different situation is presented. In dealing with life in its actuality, we are not dealing with the descriptive and objective. Human life is subjective. It is something experienced, something felt. Life is not theoretical; it is actual. It is not descriptive; it is dynamic. Human life is; it is not a theory of what is. Life, as it is felt, is our ultimate subjective actuality. Subjectivity or intrinsic feeling is the very basis of life. As such, feeling is life’s reality and no theory of feeling is an adequate substitute for this reality. And so the objective theory of psychoanalysis or the objective theory of the motives of human life is wholly inapplicable to the subjective experience or to the actuality of human life as it is felt in individual personality.

We have not begun to reckon in the least understandingly with the nature of the subjective as contrasted with the objective sphere of life. We are, in fact, quite naïve in our attitude toward the whole subjective field, preferring to adopt toward it either a mood of beatific reverence and mysticism, in which we conjure unwarranted images of “psychic phenomena” that are allied with man’s pseudo-religious vagaries, or we adopt a pseudo-scientific attitude which repudiates as nonexistent or regards as unworthy of serious thought any phenomena that do not lend themselves to objective observation. Neither position seems to me tenable. We may dismiss at once the attitude of the occultists, for mysticism entertains no argument. But there is the need to consider very seriously the subjective field of scientific reasoning and to keep clearly before us the distinctive and impassable interval between the subjective and objective domains of scientific inquiry.

It is most true that objective observation is the sole method whereby we may obtain knowledge concerning the phenomenal world. This is true whether the knowledge concern substances themselves or the manner of their interaction. But we forget that knowledge thus gained is always knowledge concerning. If I consider any object--a book, a flower, or a stone--all that my knowledge will ever yield me is restricted to the attributes that pertain to the substance in hand. I observe that the stone is smooth, hard, ovoid. Submitting it to certain physical and chemical tests I learn still further about its qualities, and so, little by little, bring myself into ever closer touch with the object in question. But always my data furnish only closer touch with. The essential matter informing the substance we recognize as stone remains as inaccessible at the conclusion of an ultimate analysis as in the beginning. It is still knowledge concerning and my facts, however widely accumulated, are but attributive. Thus the essential nature of the objects about us is not to be approached by a method that is unessential or attributive.

The same circumstance confronts us in dealing with the phenomenal world of our own experience. Here too we proceed upon the method of objective inquiry--a perfectly legitimate field of “observation.” We posit and collate all manner of phenomena and note no end of “reactions.” But always we are restricted to a knowledge concerning, to data in regard to. In brief, we remain apart from--are ever outside of the reaction observed. Not that we may hold the attitude of the philosophers and assume the “existence” of a “metaphysical essence” that is inaccessible to us. We need rather to recognize that the alleged essence is merely that organic condition of matter with which our conscious processes are not organically continuous. There are, however, organic conditions or processes with which our consciousness is continuous--namely, the organic processes occurring within our own bodies and registering themselves within us as feeling. It is this continuity registered within us as feeling that is an essentially subjective state of mind and that must not be confused with the objective state of mind that merely registers impressions of the observable action or outer condition of such feeling processes. This subjective continuity is organic and inherent. True, it is possible through a shunting of interest or attention (repression or misplaced affect) to divert the course of our organic processes from their natural perception in consciousness. But this artificial situation through which we divert organic process from conscious participation and acknowledgment is the condition of unconsciousness.

My whole contention is precisely this: we are constantly attempting to deal objectively or attributively with experiences that are subjective and essential. We fail to understand that our knowledge about our feelings is but attributive, that it brings us no nearer the feelings themselves; that our feelings are essential, physiological and that we may no more know our essential feelings through observation of their attributes than we may reach the essence of any object about us through a knowledge of its attributes.

The basis of this essay is precisely the recognition of this impossible breach between the condition of consciousness produced through a knowledge about feeling and the condition of consciousness that is the feeling itself, between the state of mind that is commentative and the state of mind that is functioning. The former is objective, the latter is subjective. The failure of our psychological methods to recognize this intrinsic distinction is to my mind the failure of our entire approach to the problems of mental and social disharmony. It is this unwitting substitution of the theory of human feelings for the unannotated experience of the feelings themselves as recorded in our interactive functioning as human beings that is the impossibility of our present “method” of psychoanalysis.

This position is for me an all-important one. Upon the acceptance or rejection of it, I believe, depends the growth or the decline of psychoanalysis as an agency of release for the intrinsic needs of the neurotic personality. To-day, under the impetus of psychoanalysis in its theoretical or vicarious form, we are carrying theory to the point of absurdity. There is now, for example, the psychoanalytic theory of the nursery. Anxious young mothers are running about looking for texts which will serve them as guides in the love of their children. They are diligently searching upon every hand for the latest approved theory of maternal love. And in response to the demand the popular literature is supplying them with full details. But there are no librettos of the nursery. Baedekers to motherhood are not to be had. The motherhood that is true is a subjective relationship, and it is only subjectively that it can be felt and understood.

I shall not forget the experience told me by a patient whose mother, actuated by the theory of motherhood in its highest “scientific” interpretation, undertook to enlighten her upon the significance of sex. The incident left the most painful impression upon her. The mother, having gathered courage for the performance of her maternal duty, delivered her errand with a punctiliousness which from the point of view of technique was irreproachable. She spoke out of the strictest regard for the theory of motherhood. But unfortunately her theory left out of account an item that needs to be reckoned with, namely, the native simplicity of the consciousness of childhood. The woman spoke out of the theory of a truth, but her child listened with the organic susceptibility of truth itself. The mother had not accepted within herself the actual significance of life, and so, in accordance with the formality of a theory, was vicariously imposing its acceptance upon her child. But childish perception pierces the veil of pedagogic finesse. The rigid demeanour of her instructor readily disclosed the discrepancy between the verbal recital and the utter lack of conscious acceptance within herself. For the child, now a middle-aged woman, the moment was an unforgettable one. She had witnessed in her mother an outrage to organic truth, and the shock of that experience caused a psychic disunity between mother and child from which there resulted an introversion of personality that covered half a lifetime. And so, while the theory of the nursery is from the point of view of theory wholly irreproachable, it is from the point of view of the nursery wholly absurd.

A lesson which parents have yet to learn is that the child is closer to the heart of things than the grown-up--that the consciousness of childhood stands in a far more truthful relationship to the actuality of life, as it is, than the consciousness of the conventionalized and sophisticated adult. For years it has been my feeling that beneath the conflict of the neurotic personality there is reiterated an urge toward the expression of this primal inherency of consciousness. To-day, it is more than ever my view that in the neurotic reaction there is expressed an inherent plea for the native simplicity and truth of this organic consciousness. It becomes more and more clear to me that the pain of these personalities is due solely to the organic discrepancy of an unconsciousness and indirection within themselves, and that essentially their urge is to bring themselves again into harmony with the law of their personality by reuniting the needs of their consciousness with the needs of their organic life.

As Nietzsche says: “May there not be--a question for alienists--neuroses of health?” This question for alienists is indeed a vital one but it is one which, as far as I am aware, has not as yet even dimly occurred to us. There is nowhere, it may be noted, a clearer argument for Nietzsche’s hypothesis than Nietzsche’s own neurosis. Unfortunately, however, alienists are still as little interested in the positive processes that bespeak the organism’s conscious health, as physicians in general are interested in the positive processes that insure the organism’s physical health. But, as long as the collective social mind remains the collective unconscious mind, it is not to be expected that we shall approach the unconscious of the individual, in either its psychic or in its somatic aspect, from the basis of an inclusive consciousness and health. The question is often asked whether insanity will ever become curable. The answer can only be that the insanity of the individual cannot be curable as long as there exists the insanity of the social mind about him. It is not humanly possible for the psychiatrist to remedy conditions of mental disorganization as long as he himself is part of a disorganized social mind.

If the psychoanalyst, in applying to the lives of his patients a theory of life, is himself unconsciously resorting to the self-protection of the substitutive and symbolic; if the blocked personality of our patients meets with a blocking in ourselves, with a compromise, a theory, a something which stands as a sign for rather than that which is--a situation which offers a compromise mechanism identical with that for which they have sought aid from us--then clearly the way is not yet open for the release of the conflict within these personalities. For a patient may be untrammelled only in so far as the analyst is himself untrammelled.

In taking this attitude I do not make any personal claim for myself. This position is not one to which I have come through the success of my work but rather through its failure. For in the measure in which I have adhered to the dictates of a preconceived normality, in just that measure has my work defeated itself. Though I have for some time theoretically disavowed the mental status represented in the normal reaction, I have tended unconsciously all the while to ally myself with this standardized brand of unconsciousness and thus, in my own work, have inclined to hold to a theory of life rather than to its actuality. Not, then, with the neurotic alone, but with us all, it would seem that consciousness is mainly employed in efforts of self-protection and evasion. Truly, consciousness makes cowards of us all. But this is not consciousness in the sense of life and growth; it is consciousness in the sense of retention and self. It is not a free consciousness; it is consciousness with a reservation. It is not true consciousness; it is unconsciousness.

In accordance with such a mode of consciousness each of us is elbowing for a place for himself. Each is seeking more territory for his own expansion. Each of us is an unconscious overlord striving to secure the supremacy of his own “personality.” Universal and normal as this reaction is, its tendency is obsessive and ill. I do not believe that life is aggressive and that growth is concerned for itself. Personality is impersonality. What is needed is the quiet acceptance of life in its actuality. In this and this alone lies the opportunity for freedom and growth.

We hear much to-day of the technique of psychoanalysis. In truth there is no such thing. It is just another defence mechanism, just another resistance to the actualities of life. As in all instances of therapeutic specialization, the technique of psychoanalysis has become a fetish with us. It has become a veritable complex, a disorder from which I find patients actually suffering. The situation is quite ridiculous. The more I think of it, the more I am convinced that the so-called technique of psychoanalysis is but another hobgoblin wherewith the unconscious tendency of professionalism with its egoistic striving for preferment contrives to preserve its own separateness and distinction. I confess that, in my own unconsciousness, I have more than once laid stress upon the importance of the analytic technique. But let us not be misled by what is called the technique of psychoanalysis. It is but another subterfuge for the reality of life. A technique of psychoanalysis is no more possible than a technique of love or of friendship or of motherhood. There is a technique and a very difficult technique of the theory of psychoanalysis. But that is quite a different thing. Psychoanalysis itself or, as its name implies, the loosening or freeing of consciousness is nothing else than the conscious acceptance of life. As such, it is the exact contrary of the objective and technical. Life is not a technique. It does not express itself in terms of technique. Technique is an objective instrument. Life is a subjective experience. It is a joy or a sorrow, a disappointment or an aspiration, and it can no more be handled from the point of view of technique than it can be handled with the scalpel of the anatomist.

From these and similar reflections I have come to regard the formality of applying a system of psychoanalysis to the life of an individual as an actual hindrance rather than as an aid to the true expression of his personality. It is but an added repression, blocking the very way it attempts to open. For to meet the unconscious of a patient with unconsciousness within oneself, is only to answer symbolic substitution and indirection with the same substitution and indirection in an altered, more subtle, socially plausible form.

The whole meaning, therefore, of an analysis that is actual and not theoretical is the realization and acceptance on the part of the analyst of the utmost unconscious symbolization and distortion within himself. The analysis of a patient is the analysis of oneself. It cannot be otherwise. And when I say analysis, I do not mean an analysis that is a mere unconscious concession to normality--a giving vent to the egoistic erotism of the individual by diffusing it among the widely distributed elements of the social personality in the manifold distortions of sexuality. I mean an analysis of personality in its widest expression--an analysis through which the individual comes into the conscious acceptance not only of the repression or distortion that is personal and that is comprised within the individual introversion we know as the neurosis, but of the distortion or substitution of personality that is social and that constitutes the confederacy of unconsciousness popularly endorsed as normality.

The prime requisite for clear, free, untrammelled work in the analysis of human personality is the unqualified rejection of the unconscious compromise embodied in the social reaction of normality. The analyst who is not himself capitulating to the concession of the social unconscious will repudiate the attitude of the psychotherapist whose criterion is the restoration of his patient to a condition of normality, and will take his stand against any recourse that is based upon a programme of compromise and habituation. He will see that normality is merely unconsciousness on a co-operative basis and he will not be deceived by its insidious offers. It is only through such an attitude of complete freedom within oneself that it is possible to offer the opportunity of freedom to the personality of the neurotic patient, the very heart of whose disharmony lies in an inner repugnance, however bewildered and confused, to the untruth of the social unconscious comprising his milieu. Viewed analytically, normality is but the self-flattery through which we pretend we are not unconscious. By so pretending, however, we are only furthering our tendency to deeper unconsciousness.

As long as there is self-protection, there is self-limitation; as long as there is self-limitation, we are necessarily setting a limitation to the possibility of growth and consciousness in others. Only through rejecting such protection may we come to accept the testimony of the unconscious within ourselves. Otherwise, we ourselves become the inhibitors rather than the liberators of consciousness; we who are psychoanalysts become mere guardians of disease-processes instead of the willing repositories of these unconscious factors, as they exist in others, through our understanding and acceptance of these processes as they exist within ourselves. For consciousness grows upon the medium of consciousness. It cannot be nourished upon an extraneous soil. Theories of consciousness are extraneous. In the presence of the actuality of life, theories of life become mere intellectual snobbery. Being wise, sophisticated and remote, they are inadequate to meet life in its native simplicity. Bearing the testimonials of authority, the credentials of office, they do not come low enough. These insignia of rank only tend to intimidate personality in its natural simplicity. What is needed for the release of the neurotic individual is the personality who imposes nothing of his own and thus allows the completest opportunity for the unfolding of the repressed and introverted personality of others.

As psychoanalysis develops and our understanding deepens, it will be seen that it is not scientific equipment alone but also directness of outlook that make the psychoanalyst. It will be seen that the personalities who are adapted to an understanding of the needs of human life will not necessarily occupy places of importance amid the distractions of affairs, but that their place may be an unobtrusive one in which understanding for understanding’s sake will be their sole concern. The various rules laid down by medical or other syndicates with a view to determining what are the literal qualifications for a psychoanalyst are wholly beside the point. The qualifications for understanding are not literal. Although we may formulate the most meticulous of programmes setting forth the requirements of tuition, it will be found that personality will, in the final count, override them all. Besides, I cannot think that it is due entirely to the accidents of chance that the spokesman for the adoption of this or that recipe as a prerequisite to “sound training” in psychoanalysis should unfailingly submit a menu that tallies in detail with his own catalogue of merits. After all, psychoanalysis is a very large name for a very simple thing. I well know that this statement offers a delectable morsel to any who are disposed to misinterpret my meaning. It will be readily regarded as recklessly casting aside as valueless all the years of my own medical and psychological training. But the responsibility for such a misinterpretation rests upon those who are unable to distinguish between the culture that is applied academically and the academy that is applied culturally. All that I mean is that whosoever follows the calling of psychoanalysis is merely one who seeks to understand and accept life as it is without intruding himself or imposing his view or exerting his authority. Indeed psychoanalysis is essentially the abrogation of authority. For the psychoanalyst is not content but receptacle. Lacking method or design he offers nothing, but is the recipient of all there is of human experience as subjectively substantiated within himself.

But there enters here a consideration of vital importance and one that has not yet been adequately reckoned with and understood. If the psychoanalyst is to be the recipient, there must be those who stand to him as recipient also. If he is to understand, he must be understood. If the life of the analyst is to be a reality and not a system, he himself must in reality participate in the life in which he invites others to participate. If it is his thesis that human life cannot subsist alone, that communication is life, that it is the very meaning of consciousness, neither can he subsist without communication.

And so there need to be in the life of the analyst the personalities with whom he may share, with whom he may communicate, who accept him and are accepted by him in turn. For to analyze is to be analyzed, to understand is to be understood. Needless to say these are conclusions to which I have not come alone. I could not have. They are the outcome of my own opportunity of participation and expression, as the need of communication has come to unfold itself in my own experience.

Clearly, then, we who stand as the promoters of a new and untrammelled consciousness must look carefully into our own lives to discover whether we ourselves, as part of the social consciousness, are not theorists rather than unified personalities actuated solely by the law of understanding and of growth within ourselves. Clearly, we ourselves must realize the completely vicarious and repressed element underlying the expression of unconsciousness embodied in the social unrest of normality, and, fearlessly repudiating this collective reaction of substitution and evasion, break completely with the popular policies of compromise and untruth underlying it. In this course we shall take our stand for the freedom and clarity of a mode of consciousness that aims solely toward the growth of self-understanding and communication. For life is not a system, it is not a technique. Life is simple, and its course is one of quiet flow. In so far as psychoanalysis is technical, it is not life. In so far as its aim is normality, it is not free.

The choice is an unequivocal one. It is a choice between expediency and truth, between fixity and growth. For the habitual or normal mind whose criterion is expedience the choice is already determined; but for the personality that is sensitive to the values of life, the choice of growth is no less inevitable. It is organically so. Hence it is for each of us to make his choice on which side he will take his stand--whether, adhering to a theory of life, he will blindly protect himself against the recognition and acknowledgment of the vicarious element of normality and compromise within his own unconscious, or whether he will stand for a mode of consciousness that flings away every habitual protection and accepts only the conditions of life as they unfold themselves in the development of his own personality as well as in that of others. The outlook is really not ambiguous. The question is whether life will be a theory or system corroborated by the technical outfit of the consultation room or whether it will be the deeply fulfilled experience that comprises consciousness in its organic reality.

The definite biological theory on which this thesis rests implies an organic or societal continuum as the essential basis of consciousness. To understand this theory we shall be helped if, in the beginning, we will seek to replace the more or less arbitrary divergences of personal outlook with a conception that attempts to stand far enough removed from this personal mode to contemplate within its more ample formulation the personal outlook as well. For this purpose we must discover, as far as possible, our tendency to personalistic delimitation--a tendency due to the unconscious systematization of the restricted individual unit--and in this way approach consciousness anew from the more inclusive basis of its societal meaning.