CHAPTER IV. The Unconscious Factor Within the Social System

THE UNCONSCIOUS FACTOR WITHIN THE SOCIAL SYSTEM

Whatever is true of the individual singly, is true of the individual collectively. Whatever is observable as neurotic process within the isolated personality of the hysteric or precoid, is equally observable as neurotic process in the collective personality of the social mind. The attitude of psychopathology, which ascribes to the social consensus, represented in the average-reaction commonly called “normality,” a criterion of constructive consciousness and health, and which, accordingly, seeks to correct the deflections of the aberrant neurotic personality in accordance with this limited outlook, is itself an expression of the bidimensional limitation that bases its system of consciousness upon an absolute principle of evaluation. After all, normality, like gravitation, is a mental abstraction. Our consensual normality is but the systematized abstraction embodying the absolute of its own unconscious basis, and, in its personal absolutism, stands opposed to a principle of relativity in the mental sphere. It is only as we abrogate the absolute standards now vested in the prevailing social systems about us and measure their dimensions in terms of the principle of an organic relativity, that we shall be enabled to challenge the element of personal systematization within ourselves and so encompass life in the actuality of a universal and inclusive consciousness.

Personal survival has been, from the beginning of man’s history, the chief concern of his self-interest. Inventing medicine with a view to his security here, fabricating religion with a view to his security hereafter, he has safeguarded his preservation for the moment through recourse to “cure,” and for the future through recourse to “salvation.” Even in the interchanges of our casual social relationships, there is still preserved within the folk-mind the vestiges of this dualistic self-interest. Upon our meeting, it is the accustomed reaction to make mutual inquiry into the condition of health of one another. “How are you?” or “How-do-you-do?” we ask. Similarly, in parting we commend each other to the clemencies of the future with the expression, “Good-bye,” that is, “God be with you.” In the obvious apprehensiveness underlying this unconscious attitude of the social mind there is in one instance the implicit conviction that we are wicked and in the other that we are sick! Both these reactions, however, merely betray the state of anxiety reflected in the fundamental condition of mind that is our ethnic self-consciousness.

In earlier times these two anxiety trends of the folk unconscious were duly sponsored through the common rites of medical and religious fetish under the combined auspices of a single functionary or guardian who, as priest or soothsayer, dispensed the benefits accruing from both. The fact is, I suppose, that the tribal medicine-man with his magic potion and amulet is psychologically, as well as ethnologically, our true progenitor. For to-day we observe the preservation of this concomitance of function between the two systems, represented by the science of medicine on the one hand and by the philosophy of religion on the other, in the current social phenomenon of our widely flourishing “sciences of mental healing” with their unescapable unconsciousness in metaphysical and theosophical implications. Aside, however, from historical analogies, the stupendous influence upon the societal mind of ecclesiastical and therapeutic canon cannot be denied.

Because of this preservation in our midst of such ancient repositories of human thought and conduct as are represented in the affiliated principles contained in the dogmas of church and psychotherapeutic system, a consideration of the psychology common to both these forms of our social adaptation cannot fail to help us understand the basic elements that enter into the making of our social personality. As illustration, let us consider on the one hand the Roman Church and on the other the system of psychoanalysis. The Roman Church represents at one and the same time both traditionally the longest established and politically the most compact organization of the many religious sects existing throughout our Western civilization. The system of psychoanalysis, representing as it does the most modern conception of medical psychology, possesses such scientific authority as only the ablest students of philosophy and medicine are qualified to bring to the substantiation of its principles. An analysis, therefore, of the social psychology that equally underlies and actuates the position of both these systems will not, I think, be without profit in the present study.

Due to the sophistication that was early begotten among the members of our human species through the limitation of man’s consciousness to the bidimensional alternative of a consensual “good and bad,” it is natural that we should find this same tendency to personal systematization expanded into the collective or social form we observe in the group reaction that is embodied in state or sect. Thus, from an organismic viewpoint, we should expect to discover the same resistances within the social as within the individual organism. Nor need we be surprised if, upon analysis, it should be disclosed that this social resistance represents likewise the bidimensional impasse comprised of our personal self-reflection.

Throughout the unconscious period of man’s bidimensional arrest commonly called ancient times, a period belonging chronologically to the past but pertaining psychologically to the present as well as to the future for probably an indefinite term, the attitude of the Church toward incipient doubt or heresy was, is and for ever shall be to apply the remedy of prayer and, failing this recourse, to apply the penalty of excommunication.

From the vantage point of the psychoanalyst’s disinterested and extrinsic angle of vision, such a policy appears manifestly unsound and without warrant. From his position of detached observer, it seems to him arbitrary and presumptive. And yet it must be conceded that, from the intrinsic viewpoint of a socially consolidated organization compact with the autogenous authority of infallibility, such a position is by no means inconsistent. A supremacy that is self-originated is self-operative. Autocratic prerogative and unimpeachable authority are here conterminous. Indeed the solidarity of the Church is unassailable precisely in that its premise and its conclusion are mutually inclusive. For inasmuch as both premise and conclusion are equally based upon the assumption of the personal absolute or the private prerogative of the system they embody, all access to it is summarily barred. If the Church precludes all question, dismisses all opposition, it is wholly within its self-determined rights. For by these same tokens all question, all argument, being of its nature extrinsic to its autogenic system, savours de facto of the aforesaid heresy of doubt and, as such, is automatically driven out of court as connoting a priori the presumptive fallacy of trespass. This relegation to itself of divine and hence unquestionable authority is the theological doctrine of self-actuative truth assumed by the Church to underlie its official pronunciamentos when it formally declares them to be ex cathedra.

I offer this preamble not without advisement. In its intimation of the heretical tendency of the present thesis, it will give to those to whom such tendency is unwelcome the opportunity to seal their ears against it. At the same time it will give to those of more pliant sympathies due notice of the undisguised aim of the present inquiry toward the adoption of a more comprehensive and open-minded outlook among us. For the trend of this thesis is in its intention confessedly subversive of the socially authorized version of truth now vested in the autogenous systematization that has come to underlie the principle of us psychoanalysts.

I do not know to what extent it is humanly possible, but, in so far as may be, let us adopt for the moment, at least mentally, a position of impersonal disinterestedness toward the social consensus in which we ourselves, as psychoanalysts, are also corporate elements. It will then become clear, I think, that the socially authenticated system, representative of us Freudians, embodies an unconscious attitude closely analogous to that of the social system embodied in the attitude of autogenous authority underlying the personal absolutism of the Roman Church.

To observe this element of social unconsciousness underlying the principle of Roman Catholicism has for us all a certain invigorating tang. With such a discovery there comes the refreshing release that is the spur to renewed investigation. It is the heartening response of the organism to its sense of conscious acumen. But, to observe the operation of the social unconscious within the autogenous systematization of principles which insures social coherence within our own consensus, entails a contemplation that is not pleasant. This contemplation disturbs the habitual repose of settled conviction that is our own security. It is to apply the acid test of self-analysis to our own socially systematized assumption of private prerogative and authority. Yet an attitude of impersonal disinterestedness presupposes that our inquiry shall proceed without regard to personal security. This attitude, indeed, is one which we ourselves have demanded of our patients as being an analytically basic one. It is, therefore, upon this understanding alone that an inquiry, which in its disregard of the personal equation is committed to a course equally unflattering to us all, may hope to be accorded an unbiased consideration. Surely in any other attitude the name of psychoanalyst can become only a term of opprobrium among us.

Let us, then, consider this factor of private prerogative or of the personal absolute, inseparable from the mental attitude expressed in the phenomenon of social systematization which we see in the Church’s position of assumed infallibility toward its postulants, and seek to discover whether this same tendency to social systematization may not lurk within our own psychoanalytic ranks. Let us see whether we, too, are not actuated by an unconscious element of personal absolutism that obstructs the freer and more adult mode of consciousness such as it is our avowed aim to attain.

In mentioning the unconscious element of absolutism constituting the closed compartment within a socially organized system of principles, I have cited Catholicism merely as a convenient paradigm. Protestantism or Mohammedanism are, in their assumption of self-appointed prerogative, not less indefensible on the same ground, for the element of the personal absolute underlies no less the private assumption of each. By reason of its higher degree of organization, however, Catholicism more fittingly illustrates the absolutism of its social polity in relation to this phenomenon of doubt or defection occurring among its members. This is its aptness in affording a convenient position of comparison with our own socially organized system of psychoanalysis in respect to the phenomenon of defection as envisaged by us.

Within the body of precepts comprising our own organization, the accepted mark of defection is a resistance, and the remedy we apply is analysis. For, with ourselves, analysis is explicitly the only effective means of overcoming the intractable tendencies which, in the determination of our organized principles of adjudication, constitute the sole need of our patient. In the event that the patient should remain so far recalcitrant as not to embrace the opportunity we offer him to accept our socially systematized interpretation of truth as it touches his own particular needs, he is automatically excluded from participation in the agencies of regeneration such as it is our special delegation to dispense. Whence there follows our regrettable but none the less inevitable ultimatum of “inferior type of personality” and his coincident elimination from the pale.

It is, of course, clear that the actuality of the phenomenon of resistance in the patient can no more be denied than the actuality of the phenomenon of doubt in the penitent. Moreover, in accordance with the ruling of psychoanalysis, our specification of the condition when we posit a resistance is as indisputable as is the specification of the Church when it posits a doubt as the underlying disorder of the individual postulant. In either case there is the position that the individual is impervious to the benefits of the system whose principles he is, in the judgment of the system, in need of embracing. Indeed, it is precisely this factor of doubt in the one case, as it is the factor of resistance in the other, that is the whole occasion of the individual’s quest of a means of adjusting this division within his personality whereof doubt or resistance is the idiopathic index.

The actual fact, then, of a resistance within the personality is beyond question. The fact is one that is equally admitted on the side of the individual as on the side of the organization, on the side of the defendant as on the side of the arraignment. But what is to be done about it does not as yet seem to me by far so clearly determined. I know, of course, that it is our attitude, based upon the repeated experience of us all, that any objection to psychoanalysis is invariably traceable to the resistance of the objector. This is a psychoanalytic corollary. It is accepted as universal among us all. So that a resistance to psychoanalysis is very justly, in the view of psychoanalysts, as self-convicting as is a doubt in the view of the Church. And from the point of view of psychoanalysis no less than of the Church the position of these two systems rests upon an undoubtedly sound basis, if we may be guided by the consensus of their several adherents as attested by the experience of each.

But the question which has of late come to engross my interest is whether these points of view are sound as embodied in their respective systems--whether, from a broader basis of envisagement, the intrinsic attitude of ourselves may not lend itself to an altered interpretation; whether there may not exist a criterion that transcends the scope of our present analytic outlook when we claim that the only possible motive for questioning our psychoanalytic position is found to lie in the resistance of the individual; whether, in brief, the socially entrenched systematization comprising the psychoanalytic affiliation possesses sufficient warrant for impugning the personally entrenched systematization comprising the individual. For, if the fallacy of the personal absolute underlies the systematization represented in the social consensus, in what way does the rigidity of the social prerogative differ from the systematized prerogative constituting the resistance of the individual?

For the purposes of our inquiry we shall be obliged to dismiss for the moment our habitual personalistic criteria of interpretation. We shall have to recognize, first of all, that what we call the individual is by no means the fresh and native expression of individuality pure and simple that we are accustomed to assume, but rather that he is an individuation resulting from the repressive forces acting upon him from the environmental social aggregate in which he is himself but an intrinsic and contributory element. For every individual arising amid the influences of the social system is but a special application of the social system about him. Whatever the code of the consensus, the individual is necessarily but an offprint of it--a new impression of the original by-laws. There is, therefore, the need to turn our attention not to the individuated excerpt of the system but to the original document wherein the system is primarily set forth. There is the need to discard the individual form and to occupy ourselves with the societal mould whereof the individual form is but the subsequent reproduction.

Assuming the broader outlook of this more encompassing sociological position, I think we shall come to see that the difference between the reaction of doubt, as interpreted by the Church, and the reaction of resistance, as interpreted by psychoanalysis, is, after all, only apparent--that the difference is by no means an inherent one, but that it is due merely to the altered circumstance of shade and light, so to speak, in which the two reactions are diversely reflected by reason of the contrasting sociological settings amid which the two phenomena have appeared among us.

As regards the sociological manifestation embodied in the Church, contrary to its age-old contention that doubt or question automatically indicated apostasy which reflexly discredited its adherent, it has long been shown experientially that such doubt or defection might be very logically and honourably entertained. Not only this, but it has been further made manifest that it is due precisely to the entertainment of such an attitude of debate toward the socially systematized consensus, represented in the Church, that there have arisen those far-reaching investigations of science out of which has sprung the splendid renaissance of modern thought with its accompanying incentive to human progress.

Hence the question that presents itself is this: May it not also be that, quite beyond the scope of envisagement of those of us who are intrinsic to the analytic consensus, there are motives inviting question of our position which do not fall within the category of resistance? May it not be that, from a position of extrinsic or impersonal evaluation, we shall obtain so inclusive a survey of the phenomenon of resistance on the one side and of the social phenomenon of organized systematization representing the establishment on the other, that the two reactions may be included in an encompassment that is equally hospitable to both? Surely it cannot be denied that, laying aside all consideration of personal involvement, the question of such a possibility is not without its vista of interest.

With a view to a fair appraisement of the contrast between the type of defection manifesting itself as doubt and the type of defection manifesting itself as resistance, there is first the need to take account of the widely dissimilar sociological aspect of the period in which doubt was originally viewed by the Church, as compared with the sociological countenance of the times in which resistance is viewed by ourselves, and, accordingly, to consider the difference between the two phenomena in the light of the contrasting sociological backgrounds surrounding each.

From this sociological angle the factor that immediately attracts our notice is the essentially negative, self-deprecatory character of the doubt-reaction in respect to the ancient dogmas of the Church. We note the sense of personal inadequacy that is its characteristic sign. We mark its habitually shamefaced, self-depreciative mien. For doubt, be it remembered, first arose as the self-accusing attitude of the subservient individual who lived under the social domination of monarchical forms of government in a period of man’s history when, owing to his subjugation to the unconscious suzerainty of a fanciful father-complex, he meekly bowed in servile obedience to the socially systematized authority arbitrarily vested in Church and State, as personified in the office of Pope and King. Under the prevalent domination of this image of indisputable authority, men’s social criterion resided in the apparent consensus of the personal absolute, social and individual, representing the particular individuation of a single man, rather than in the common supremacy of our impersonal relativity comprising the generic individuality of mankind.

But the social mind has in the last few centuries undergone a significant metamorphosis. To-day we have to reckon with this. We have to take into account the tremendous expansion of the consciousness of man sociologically and, from the point of view of the historical record of man’s rapid sociological ascent, mark the characterological difference in the temper of the individual’s defection to-day as compared with his defection of yesterday. In the implication of the rights of individual freedom of thought implied in the defection of doubt, the predominant factor was the individual’s acknowledgment of his personal remissness, of his unseemly presumptiveness toward the social constitution about him. Under the socially systematized autocracy of the Church’s absolutism, the individuality of man dared not stand erect and maintain the freedom of his individual expression.

But in the present hour the consciousness of man proclaims itself a freer manifestation. Under the impetus of our sociological progress, man’s individuality has more and more come into its own. And, though the socially organized prerogative has still the upper hand in respect to individuality, there are signs abroad to-day which are a significant advertisement of man’s urge toward an expression of individuality that is an earnest of yet wider sociological horizons ahead. I think that it is due in no small measure to the advent of this factor of man’s sociological rehabilitation that there is seen to-day the completely altered character of the individual’s resistance as it recoils before the element of personal absolutism embodied in the systematized consensus of psychoanalysis.

Despite its undoubted unconsciousness and personal systematization, note the essentially ruddier countenance of resistance as compared with doubt. A resistance, unlike doubt, is no admission of ineptitude. Subsisting under the sponsorship of a new and freer sociological order, resistance is fashioned of sterner stuff. It is no personal deprecation; it is a sociological affirmation. Far from being an abject confession of individual weakness, it is a proud assertion of individual strength. For although in the phenomenon of resistance there is to be seen the equally unconscious motive that is the protest of the individual absolute against the arbitrary domination of the socially systematized absolute comprising the popular consensus, there underlies this protest something that is more virile than this. There is here, I believe, a reaction that demands and that will ultimately have the consideration that is its due. Though the Church, while pre-eminent, might easily dispose of doubt, in our own democratic day it is doubt that has disposed of the Church. It seems to me that, unless we psychoanalysts recognize the group-form of unconsciousness underlying the social systematization embodied in the position of psychoanalysis when it pronounces the resistance of the individual as de facto anathema, without regard to the possible propriety of its remonstrance, we, like our less conscious analogue, the Church, shall ultimately find ourselves hoist with our own petard.

While the fact of resistance and of its unconscious motivation is admittedly true, yet to meet a patient’s assertion of individual right with the mere assertion of the group-right, which is the unconscious protectorate of the organized system, is certainly not to answer the patient’s need from the point of view of a larger and more encompassing mode of consciousness. If the assumption of arbitrary prerogative or of the personal absolute represented in the reaction of individual systematization is the meaning of resistance, then the private prerogative or the personal absolute underlying the systematization of the social consensus is no less a manifestation of resistance. For the attitude of systematization and of absolutism in the individual is necessarily but the reflection of a prior social systematization to which the individual’s adaptation is but a secondary response.

Clearly it is not possible for the socially systematized consensus embodied in Church, State or psychotherapeutic system to afford the requisite condition of release from a resistance thus constituted, when its own systematization is itself the social or group embodiment of this self-same reaction of resistance. In the nip-and-tuck attitude between the resistance of the system comprising the single individual and the resistance of the system comprising the social corporation of individuals, there stands the organic impasse of two mutually opposed absolutes. In the autocratic position of each neither may yield, for in the absolutism of both each represents an identical state of unconscious impaction. As neither the individual nor the consensus, in its enfolded self-systematization, is as yet conscious of the process in which it is the blindly contributing element, both factors represent but altered aspects of the common delusion of the social adaptation of man, single and collective, namely, the delusion of the supremacy of the will-to-self or the unconscious autocracy of the personal absolute.

Naturally, I cannot speak of these inadequacies of consciousness from a remote or detached position. Needless to say, since I am at this moment a contributing part of this social maelstrom comprising the system about me, I am no less embroiled than others in its social fallacy. So that what is here very inadequately apprehended by me as a theory is, I confess, still less adequately accepted by me as a living, integral experience. Let it not be thought, then, for a moment that, in presenting the social basis of consciousness that is the substance of this thesis, I am under any illusion as to my own inaptness to embody in myself the personal expression of the conception whereof this essay offers the organismic interpretation.

It is, however, only in the measure in which this less personal mode of approach becomes actual for me that my work with others grows in significance and in constructiveness of purpose. In this light I have come to feel more and more that it is only as we regard life from the point of view of man’s generic individuality that we shall truly encompass the meaning of the neurosis, either individual or social, in its true organic assessment. In this more inclusive outlook we shall gradually come to realize, I think, that the neurosis, whether appearing in the arbitrary systematization of the individual or in that of the group consensus, consists essentially in the substitution of the personal absolute that is our secondary individuation for the impersonal relativity that is our primary individuality. In this outlook we shall come to see that it is only in the common inherency of life that is comprised the consciousness of man in the fullness of its meaning.

Resistance, then, is the personal systematization of men as contrasted with the unsponsored individuality of man. The individual unit like the social unit is but an arbitrary system, and in the resistance of each of us is to be seen the self-determined cosmogony that is the individual fallacy of us all. Whether this personal prerogative embodied in a resistance has its expression in the single individual or in the collection of individuals comprising the social aggregate, the factor of systematization holding its guarantee of inalienable rights under the syndicate of our common unconscious, is, I believe, the very kernel of the world-wide dissociation which we now diagnose as the neurosis of the individual.

Thus, through this systematization of each one, there is repudiated the individuality of each other. In the personal absolute of the private consciousness of each, there is denied the relativity of the common consciousness of all. It is this systematization that is the meaning of repression. It is this personal prerogative that is the essence of resistance. And so, in the unconscious system that is within and about us there is summed up, I believe, the entire philosophy of the neurosis. Being ourselves intrinsic to the system, both individual and social, it is no more possible to deal with it objectively in its social than in its individual phase. Our only approach is the subjective approach. Only subjectively is it possible for each of us to envisage completely the system of repression within him that is his individual reflection of the social system of repression outside him. In thus relinquishing the absolute principle that is merely the autocracy of our privately arbitrated system of personalism and unconsciousness, we are in a position to forgo the unconscious absolute comprising our own resistance and to accept in its stead the relative inclusiveness of our conscious life as a unified and organic whole.