CHAPTER III. The Origin of Our Individual Unconscious

THE ORIGIN OF OUR INDIVIDUAL UNCONSCIOUS

In the preceding chapter I attempted to indicate the analogy between the principle of relativity as set forth by the physicists and what I described as the principle of relativity in the sphere of consciousness. If the bipolar concomitance there outlined in its phylogenetic aspect possesses sufficient warrant, a no less consistent parallelism should be traceable in an ontogenetic concurrence of the two theories as we come to consider the principle of the relativity of consciousness in its individual implications.

If it is true in an ethnic comparison of mental values that a basis of absolutism is no more tenable in computing aberrations occurring in the sphere of consciousness than in the sphere of physics, it must also be true that a basis of absolute evaluation is inadequate to account for deflections of consciousness in its individual application. It is admitted that in the physical universe a principle of absolutism requires to be abandoned and a revaluation of standards established in its stead because it fails to take account of data extrinsic to its own static dimensions. Likewise, it would seem that, in the concomitant sphere of consciousness, an absolute basis of determination would be equally inadequate to reckon with data exclusive of its own absolute principle of measure and that, accordingly, there is here too demanded a restatement of values in terms of a more comprehensive conception.

In such an outlook the requisite readjustment is of so wide a scope that I do not find it easy to contemplate, far less to actualize. It involves no less a task than that of placing the fulcrum of one’s mental processes upon a basis that lies outside the habitual domain of one’s individual consciousness. For this reason the conception of the organic inclusiveness of consciousness, here understood, is, from our present individualistic viewpoint, a most difficult and elusive one. It is a conception that is not possible of comprehension on the basis of the static and absolute principle of consciousness that is our present mode of evaluation. In this conception, the evolution of individual knowledge enters the organismic sphere of the relative and subjective. It is only relatively, therefore, or through our subjective identification with it that we may participate in its meaning. As this subjective experience is the flux of life itself, as it is this component that is consciousness in process--the organic tide whose stream we ourselves are, the while we are carried along upon it--this experience is an extension which is, of its essence, inaccessible to objective cognition. This is the veil which life in its subjective reality draws across its features, rendering their meaning for ever imperceptible to objective observation. Except through the faint intimations of analogy, I cannot, of course, claim to do more than merely indicate the existence of this subjective extension. So that I must ask the reader to concede me the fullest measure of his hospitality by following my trend with the utmost intuitive participation on his own part. It is, after all, only in common that we may sense our common part in respect to the relativity of consciousness as a whole.

The child that is born amid the cultural influences of civilization comes at an early age to learn the names of things. With these labels he acquires his objective identification with the world about him. In these symbols are the talismans that insure the safety of his future wayfaring. They are indispensable to his proper equipment and an early adeptness in their use is a wise and salutary provision. In this same school in which the child is taught the handy designations for the objects surrounding him, he learns also to recognize the nameless signs of a certain immanent category called “right and wrong”--signs which, through the accidental empiricism of spontaneous trial and error, he comes likewise to sense and gradually to incorporate into the code of his adaptation.

As with others, who have been inured to a curriculum of daily adaptation from the impressionable years of earliest childhood, so with ourselves, it is well-nigh impossible to study the virgin soil of consciousness from our present adaptive premise without vitiating our conclusions with the bias of our own adaptation. And yet it is clear that an analysis of the reactions of consciousness, which fails to include the primary elements of which it is composed, leaves out of reckoning the basic ingredients of a structure which we are supposedly analyzing in its elementary content.

For the past three years I have been occupied with the daily challenge of my own habitual processes of adaptation--an inventorial procedure, be it said, which proved of the utmost discomfort in the necessity it disclosed for the fundamental reduction of personal assessments. The outlook of these inquiries, even though they mark as yet but the merest beginnings, will at least denote a tendency that cannot, I think, be without interest nor, I hope, without incentive in the further approach of others toward an envisagement of consciousness in its ultimate, pre-adaptive composition.

The present study, then, forms part of the altered conceptual insight into consciousness that was gradually induced through the spontaneous sequence of a long continued and uninterrupted experiment in individual reaction. The experiment consisted in repeatedly testing the personal reflex under the hourly present conditions of mood-variation due to the accidental release of affective stimuli arising from circumstantial and unpredictable sources both internal and external to the ego. The unprepossessing details of this brief excursion into the underworld of personal motivation must be reserved for some subsequent chapter. I am now concerned with the complete shift of basis which these experiments have forced me to take account of in my attempts to reckon with the recurring problems of consciousness as they are presented in the daily routine of my analytic work.

Within the scope of the present thesis we shall have to do solely with the mental reaction inculcated under the manifesto of our early induced presentiment of “right and wrong” or of “good and bad” with its concomitant incitement to hope or fear as reflected in the unconscious attitude of praise or blame surrounding the child. It is my conviction, based on the subjective test of personal experimentation, that the deeply entrenched root of our human pathology is to be traced alone to the conflict incurred through this suggestively induced image of right and wrong and that it is profitless, therefore, to seek beyond the impasse of this unconscious alternative for the ultimate source of neurotic reactions.

Because of some element implicit in the behaviour determining the “right” or “wrong” adaptation of the individuals surrounding the child in the formative period of his early growth, something is imposed upon him that operates to check spontaneous impulse. The check I am speaking of does not consist in the interdiction itself. Our admonitory “do” or “don’t” is in itself quite harmless. Indeed these positive and negative commands may serve an undoubtedly useful end. I have never known of untoward nervous manifestations occurring among animals because of the restraining warnings of maternal solicitude. On the contrary, such mediation commonly proves an effective safeguard against misadventure. Of the inhibiting influence itself, therefore, I am not speaking. What I have in mind is something far subtler than this. It will demand our most searching scrutiny if we are clearly to apprehend its meaning.

As I see this miscarriage of instinct incurred through our embargo of good and bad, it is the cunning pretence underlying the interdiction which induces the reaction that works mischief in the child’s organism. It is the insidious intimation of benefit or of harm inherent in the tabooed act itself that is the pernicious instance. The destructive occasion lies in the implied premium or forfeit appertaining to the act as it recoils upon the child in automatic retaliation. I believe that it is due to this enforced superstition of an arbitrary “good and bad” that there have been wrought the spurious reactions of our human consciousness. I believe that the utterly specious system of behaviour, which surrounds us as social beings on every hand, is definitely due to this falsely imbued suggestion of retributive sequence which, as commonly inculcated in early childhood, has been prompted through the implied mediation of invisible moral agencies. I furthermore believe that it is this pretence, and its unconsciousness, that is the basis of our adaptation, both individual and social, as embodied in the artificial code of morality represented in the collective unconscious of our present-day civilization.

What the adult arbiter of the child really has up his sleeve is the child’s conformity to him and his convenience. Accordingly, the parent or guardian lays down the proposition that a good little boy doesn’t destroy costly bric-à-brac or that only a bad little girl would play in the mud with her nice clean rompers on. Both these postulates are utterly false as every sponsor for them knows. But that is not the point. The point is that such statements are incomparably adapted to the ends of adult commodity. The truer rendering of the proposition in either instance would be to the effect that the misdemeanour in question would occasion inconvenience or chagrin to the parent. But so sincere a statement on the part of the parent might alienate the child’s jealously coveted affection, as we commonly term the infantile dependence we secretly tend to beget. Hence, the real motive of interdiction must be hidden from the child and a comprehensive edict cunningly invoked such as will place an effectual check upon him and yet amply safeguard the parental interest. It is this bogus morality which, by our unconscious social consent, the conscripted phantom called “good and bad” is unanimously commissioned to represent.

Because of this attitude of pretence in others whereby the child is tricked into complicity with the prevalent code about him, there is begotten this self-same reaction of pretence within him. This illusion that is in the air he learns to assimilate from others through imitative affinity, and from now forward the ruse becomes self-operative. What began as a social coup is continued as an individual policy. The silent intimation of a mysteriously pervasive immanence of “good and bad” having now been engendered, the child henceforth responds automatically, not alone to the signals of make-believe about him but to the signals of make-believe within him. For in unconsciously succumbing to the contagion of the autocratic system of “right and wrong” about him, this hobgoblin of arbitrary make-believe becomes equally systematized within his own consciousness. Accordingly, the pretence involved in interdictions of conduct (fear-blame reaction) is accompanied by the mental suggestion of “wrong” or “bad,” and the pretence underlying the inducements of conduct (hope-praise reaction) is accompanied by the mental suggestion of “right” or “good”--that is, of good or bad as it reverts upon the individual from the point of view of his personal advantage as reflected in the image of the parent.

An analysis, however, does not reach elementary principles if it merely discovers motives prompted by suggestion and repression corresponding to the two opposed factors of inducement and interdiction actuating human behaviour. It is not enough to invoke in explanation the sweeping denominator “self-consciousness.” Such an account is historic or psychological; it is not organic or biological. It is, I believe, only as we unearth the mental reaction intrinsic to the organism when it responds to the subjective inference of right or wrong in its personal inflection that we shall reach the basic element responsible for the organism’s inhibited mental states.

One would think, as we look about us to-day at the utterly destructive processes, social and political, that have been incited throughout entire nations of individuals “brought up” in this vicarious fashion, that the spectacle would give us pause. But we have had a too thorough bringing-up ourselves. Our own bringing-up has seen to it that we shall not look about us and learn what is but that we shall only respond to the suggestion about us and acquiesce in what seems. If we should really look about us and see unflinchingly into the meaning of things, our children would do so too, but that would be subversive of their proper up-bringing. This is the self-contradictory element in the adult’s “education” of the child. In truth, it is not possible to “bring up” a child at all. One may let a child grow up, naturally, as a plant, tending only the soil about its roots, or one may hinder its growth. But to bring a child up by moulding its personality to one’s own is organically contradictory. A child comes up, if at all, only of himself or in accordance with the law of his own growth.

If it is true, then, that this factor of pretence is the ultimate element in the dissociations of consciousness, what is the nature of this factor of pretence actuating our behaviour? As has been said, in order to secure a substratum adequate to build upon, it is requisite that we forgo at the outset our present conceptions based upon a system of valuations which presupposes an absolute principle of consciousness. It should be understood, therefore, that it is from the fundamentally altered premise of a relative basis of consciousness that the present thesis sets out.

In an objective view of the components of man’s consciousness, it may be seen that there are three determinants of the affective life, namely, one’s own self, the selves by whom one is surrounded, and the positive or negative reactions of the self in respect to other selves such as comprise our progressive or regressive interrelationships one to another. So that, to return to the analogy of the physical world, a diagram outlining man’s affective life would represent a contour of three components. There is first the dimension consisting of oneself; second, the collateral dimension, with its extension backward to one’s parents and forward to one’s offspring and comprising in general one’s social congeners, singly and collectively; and third, the societal extension representing the reactions that depend upon the co-ordination or non-co-ordination of individuals in the assimilative processes of their common activities. Thus our subjective or affective life, statically considered, is as truly tridimensional in its actuality as our cognitive or objective world, statically considered, is tridimensional in its actuality. Nevertheless, as was pointed out in the preceding chapter, our cognitive apprehension of the world of objects about us invariably presents an outline corresponding to the bidimensional or pictorial aspect that is our perceptual image of it. So in the subjective sphere, it may also be shown that our affective reactions invariably present a pictorial or bidimensional plane analogous to the bidimensional impressions comprising our objective perceptions, and that they are due in the subjective as in the objective sphere to the unconscious factor of the personal equation.

But, to adhere to the test of experiment, it has been my analytic experience growing out of the study of personal reaction that, owing to the distortion of affect within our actual daily life, we do not in fact participate in the tridimensional actuality that truly comprises our affective world. On the contrary, owing to the rebuff to spontaneous impulse incurred through the system of self-conscious diplomacy reflected in the social pretence of “right and wrong” as first voiced by the parent and seconded on all sides by the community about us, the real world of affects is unconsciously replaced by an artificial cosmogony whose outline is limited to only two components, namely, the self plus the immediate interest to the self as derived from the selves (collateral dimension) by whom the individual is surrounded (advantage or disadvantage, good or bad, praise or blame). Thus our affective reactions invariably present a merely pictorial or bidimensional area corresponding to the two extensions comprising the personal element of the self plus the element of advantage for the self from other selves. Because of this personal foreshortening of our affects to the artificial dimensions of self and self-interest, our subjective experience of tridimensional actuality is reported not in the reality of its three essential determinants but in the pictorial aspect of the two-dimensional plane that is our personal and autogenous reflection of it. It is, then, the substance of these pages that, just as the world of cubic actuality is mentally foreshortened into a bidimensional aspect of actuality determined by our static and autogenous perception of it, so our world of affects is correspondingly reduced to the bidimensional or pictorial aspect that is our socially reflected impression of it.

This brings us again to the question we were speaking of--the reaction of pretence into which the child is early inducted. It was to help clear away the difficulties surrounding this early adaptive reaction of our subjective life that I turned to the consideration of the dimensional components that comprise our affective world. We have seen that the essence of this element of pretence is its implication of retroactive gain or loss intrinsic to the social act itself and automatically returning upon its agent. Coming a little closer still, we see that this attitude of behaviour imposed upon the child upon grounds of its retributive sequence is induced in him through the cunningly conveyed intimation that such has been the personal experience of those about him--that they have learned from experience and so are qualified to give warning that “good” behaviour is requited in reward or pleasure to one’s self and conversely “bad” behaviour is requited in penalty or pain to one’s self.

My position is that an attitude toward the child which posits at the outset of life a world of affective actuality, comprised of his own ego plus his own egoistic advantage, arbitrarily contracts life to the unreal aspect of a mere two-dimensional image. It is to dispose the mind of the child in such a way that its entire universe of feeling is limited to a mere picture of life consisting of the flat and lifeless image of his personal or social adaptation in the light of his personal or social gain. It transforms the reality of life into a reflection of oneself in a world of self-reflections like one’s own. In other words, in falsely premising the bidimensional plane of one’s personal image as the basis of actuality, we substitute at the outset a primary condition of unreality for the inherent reality of life.

From the altered angle of a relative and inclusive attitude toward the problems of consciousness, I am led to think that this artificially contracted outlook is the real crux of the dilemma of the unconscious. I have come to think that these two factors--the factor of oneself and the factor of social advantage for oneself--are insufficient, that there is omitted a third factor essential to a completely rounded consciousness and that in the absence of it the other two present but a static and artificial image of life rather than life in the functional inclusiveness of its full-dimensional reality. I refer to the component of our societal co-ordination--to the factor of man’s organic continuum in the functional extension of his interrelationship with others. I believe that it is the miscarriage of instinct with respect to this societal co-ordination that is answerable for the artificial recoil of self-interest represented in our fancied apparitions of good or bad as seen from the limited point of view of one’s individual advantage. In the flat bidimensional plane which, in the absence of the inclusive societal factor, only reflects the pictorial aspect of actuality in the image of the self, there is lacking the rounded extension that is the full complement of life in its inclusive, societal meaning. To what degree we substitute this reflected aspect of life for the reality of an all-inclusive participation in life in its full-dimensional extension--if my own experience in this regard is any guide--has not as yet begun to be suspected by us.

This primary societal component of consciousness must not be confused with our secondary and adaptive social relationships. Our social adaptation is as self-reflective and unconscious as our individual adaptation. By the societal component I mean the organic continuity of consciousness that unites the individuals of the species into a confluent whole. In the social adaptation of its members, on the contrary, there is registered merely the collective response to the reaction of pretence that we have just seen in its individual expression as our personal foreshortening of life to the bidimensional image. In the reduction of life to the image of self in the light of one’s self-advantage, whether individual or social, consists the adaptive system that is the personal pretence within and about us. In this inversion of life that is the mirrored impression of each, as reflected in the aspect of others, is the systematization that is man’s unconsciousness. It is our non-inclusiveness of others that is the systematization of each. It is this perceptual interpretation of life on the basis of a reflected or bidimensional impression, limiting life to self and self’s advantage that is, I repeat, the meaning of our unconsciousness, both individual and social.

In studying this reaction of pretence in the social mind as reflected in the reactions of the individual, we are met with the need of a fundamental reconstruction of values in our reckoning with human personality as in our measures of consciousness generally. For, in this artificial gauge of conduct measured by standards of personal advantage, we find established in the individual a criterion of life that rests upon an unwarranted assumption of personal supremacy. This private criterion has become the arbitrarily assumed prerogative of each of us with respect to every other. For, through this distortion of the universe of reality into the unreal, bidimensional cosmogony that is one’s self-reflection of it, there is unconsciously built up within us a mental adaptation whose basis is an inflexible assumption of personal absolutism and autocracy.

In the ultimate reduction of analysis it may be seen that what we have, through Freud’s teaching, come to recognize as the reaction of resistance, within the individual personality, resolves itself into nothing else than this private prerogative of the personal absolute. The assumption of this personal principle of absolutism in the subjective sphere embodying the psychology of resistance is analogous to the absolute principle of evaluation applied to the physical universe--a principle which the physicists have lately shown is not competent to meet the test of universal applicability, for the reason that, in the absolutism of its own premise, it fails to account for data extrinsic to the static absolutism it embodies. Correspondingly, in the sphere of consciousness the absolute principle of personal evaluation comprising the adaptive basis of the individual is inadequate to stand as the universal principle requisite to an organismic inclusion of consciousness in its societal totality.

As was pointed out in the last chapter, the social mind interprets its objects of perception in the bidimensional aspect of its own pictorial and flat reflection of them. Likewise, our individual mentation, in its adaptive response to the retributive implications of so-called “right and wrong” or “good and bad,” recoils no less upon a two-dimensional plane in the affective reaction that is limited to the component of self plus the component of pleasure or pain for oneself. This flat, static impression of life, comprising the arbitrary systematization that is the personal absolute of each, is inadequate to stand as a universal principle whereby we may evaluate the phenomena of consciousness in the full round of its organic compass.

In substituting the judicial absolute of personal interest for our inclusive participation as relative elements in the full-dimensional reality of life as a whole, we have unconsciously adopted a basis which fails to reckon with our individual selves as contributory elements in the more encompassing unit which our individualistic basis now mistakenly presumes to include. Our present basis is, therefore, not an inclusive one. In so far as the individual rests his theory of consciousness upon an individualistic basis, his theory cannot include the larger whole wherein the individual is himself but a contributing element. The consciousness of the isolated individual cannot encompass consciousness in its societal inclusiveness. Only consciousness in its societal inclusiveness can encompass the consciousness of the individual.

In the measure in which we, as an organic group, come to adopt the conception of consciousness that accepts the intrinsic reality of our common societal life, we shall learn to repudiate the personal absolute that is our individual resistance and, correspondingly, to participate in an inclusiveness of consciousness with respect to which the individual is but a relative and adaptive component.