CHAPTER V. Sociological Implications of Unconsciousness From a Viewpoint of

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS FROM A VIEWPOINT OF RELATIVITY

Oscar Wilde says in one of his plays: “There are in the world two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it.” The epigram is peculiarly apt in telling us what appears, on the surface, to be true. But what appears on the surface to be true is not necessarily true inherently. Unquestionably there are these two fatal antitheses in life and in them undoubtedly is summed up whatever there is of tragedy in our human lot. But, in reducing life to these two issues of getting and of not getting what one wants, we fail to realize that these contrasting reactions are secondary to a condition of mind artificially induced in ourselves at the expense of a prior state of consciousness that is in its essence not antithetic but unitary.

Each of us is born in the midst of an established system whose password is conformity to its prescribed norm. Each of us becomes an automatic compartment within the systematized consensus that comprises its basis. The price of our initiation into this adaptive system is the forfeit of our primary individuality, and by the terms of its automatic statutes tuition is compulsory. Automatic obedience to traditional authority is the retroactive principle of its constitution. “Right” or “wrong” is the slogan of its guild. In the autogenous postulate of good or bad that is its absolute basis, our adaptive system stands rigidly opposed to a conception of truth such as comprises the relative and all-inclusive principle of consciousness in its organismic significance.

In the light of this ulterior motive of good or bad--of this adaptive response that is the secondary and reflected impression of each--is measured the conduct of us all. According as we see ourselves in this mirror of the systematized and prescribed norm is conditioned our happiness or unhappiness, our comfort or displeasure. But always the mirror of each that is the criterion of others stands as a solid wall confronting us. Reflected in the features of this one our bearing is quite pleasing; mirrored in the reaction of that one our countenance is not so prepossessing. And so it happens that, as we go on in life, we tend more and more to place ourselves in positions in which we may obtain the most flattering “likeness” of ourselves. Correspondingly, we tend to avoid those reflectors that distort our features to our own discomforting. In this way we come to “like” some people and to “dislike” others. So that, according to this account of our adaptation, what is called “ourselves” in the vernacular of the system about us is merely the reflection of ourselves as reproduced by the system itself.

In truth, because of the system of personal reflections amid which we move, our judgments are throughout undependable. We have no opinions, we merely reflect opinions. We have no perceptions, we have only preperceptions. We do not verify feeling through senses that are native to us, we imitate feeling by means of impressions that are extraneous to us. Thus there are great gaps within the sphere of our supposedly consistent experience--gaps involving wide intervals between our feeling and our reason, between processes that are organic and processes that are conscious. Our attempts to bridge these intervals have constantly led us astray and thus has come to pass the system of inconsistencies that is the unconscious. For, in this void of his reality man can only substitute the images that are his unreality, and no image may substitute for reality, no theory of life replace the organic consistency of life itself. Yet in our dissociative preferences we continually mistake the image of that which is for that which really is. Nor do we at all realize to what extent the actual masquerades as real. What is there, for example, more actual than illusion, yet what is there less real? An individual actually has a delusion but it is not on this account real. The voices he hears are actual to him (do they not call him by name?) but we who are outside his system know very well that they are not real.

My position is that, in our response to the impressions arising from the social system about us, our inferences are no more dependable than those arising from the private systems of the insane. Our confusion, like theirs, is the unconscious breach between perceptions that are true and impressions that are inferred, between life that is function and life that is merely enactment. It is again the disparity between life as a system or theory, and life itself. All of us are familiar with the inconsistency of people who, in order that life may prove comfortable in theory, devote their entire energies to making it miserable in practice. It is the inconsistency of unconsciousness with its inevitable alternation between the opposed extensions of a bidimensional image of life in place of the all-inclusiveness of life in its functional reality. It is the personal absolute underlying the consensual social system within and about us.

If this absolute embodied in the system is, then, a standard that is but arbitrary and artificial, each of us, since he is a reflection of such a specious criterion, is himself but a personal representation of this same absolute. If the individual is but a reflection of the system of rules representing the collection of individuals comprising the social consensus about him, then the consciousness of man, in both its social and individual manifestations, represents an absolute that is throughout false and undependable. If, in brief, our standard of truth rests upon our own self-reflection in a social system that is itself self-reflected, then the evaluation of the individual, as of the social organism about us, comprises throughout a merely fictitious image, and our criteria of verity are everywhere spurious and without support.

In the artificial pretence of “good and bad” or of “right and wrong” that represents the arbitrarily reflected aspect of life based upon the personal absolute of each, life, as I have said, is henceforth contracted into the opposite alternatives determined by the two components that comprise one’s own pleasure or one’s own pain. This shifting choice imposed by the contrary issues inseparable from our bidimensional outlook confronts us on every hand, and it is this limitation of us all to the artificial bidimension of personal loss or gain that reduces life to the tragedy of getting or of not getting what one wants.

Such a division of personality as this personal bias unconsciously entails, amounts to nothing short of a compulsion neurosis, the scope of which involves our entire social consciousness. The symptomatology of this mental division within the social personality finds its projection in such familiar antitheses as heaven or hell, love or hate, peace or war, idealist or materialist, Stoic or Hedonist, Jew or Gentile, aristocrat or proletarian, and so on ad infinitum. For such are our ever-shifting alternatives of getting or not getting as they are reflected in the assumption of private advantage underlying the so-called “good” and “bad” that is the preliminary outfit of us all.

In this eternal whether-or-no that is our superstitious alternation between good and bad lies the meaning of the social division constituting the reaction unconsciously sponsored under the shifting incertitudes of our popular forms and moralities. In our trembling vacillations between the ever-pressing issues of personal advantage, as apprehended through our superinduced images of “good” or “bad,” is the substance of the obsessive oscillations of will commonly saluted as man’s conscience, a reaction, however, in whose irresolutions an eminent psychologist long ago discovered the element of hesitation that tends to make cowards of us all.

This perpetual reflection of the self in the mirror of self-interest so operates as to invert completely the natural processes of life. Due to this unconscious distortion of reality, our every experience is viewed in the light of the fanciful image that is our own self-projection. On the basis of the absolute premise of self, that is the result of our own recoil upon the image of our own self-interest, everything is subordinated to the bidimensional component comprising our own personal aspect. For example, this inverted image of self, determining the personal absolute of each, underlies the delusion commonly concealed under what is popularly known as our “right.” After all, what is held most dear within each of us is this private reservation that is one’s own “right.” Indeed, it is no other factor than this alleged prerogative or “right” of the individual based upon his autogenous assumption of personal absolutism that, as already stated, is our unconscious “resistance” both individual and social. Taking our stand upon the inflexible basis that is the individual resistance or personal absolute of each, we approach life wholly from the position of this personal bias on the ground that it is our right. It is the preservation of this personal right that is the sole propriety of the law. But the laws of men as they appertain to personal claim and title are the direct antithesis of the law of man as it pertains to the organic unity of his life. In truth, what is called the rights of private ownership is shown upon analysis to be the ownership of private rights.

We do not see--being wholly won over to a policy of unconscious self-interest we will not see--that our so-called “right” is not a reality inherent in the conditions of life itself, but that it is an illusion secondarily derived from our personal reaction to the system of autocracy that is the unconscious self-interest of the social unconscious everywhere about us. Here we find the psychological concomitance between the reaction of resistance and the process of inversion, between the bidimensional aspect reflecting one’s own image and the unconscious illusion of the personal absolute assumed to be the private “right” of every individual. For, in the measure in which one’s outlook upon reality is restricted to a bidimensional or pictorial aspect of reality, one’s range of perception is necessarily confined to alternations of self-advantage or to the issues of good and bad such as are determined by the autocratic absolute of one’s own personal right. From the fixed background of personal right we can look out upon the world about us only from the angle of our personal satisfaction. In this outlook the sole test of human experience narrows itself to the question as to whether an issue bodes good or ill for me. My personal right being my standard of measure, every value will be weighed by me in accordance with its reading. Here, you see, is the very essence of inversion. Here in this element of personal prerogative the introversions of unconsciousness are to be traced to their biological root. Thus, in this repercussion of consciousness embodied in our assumption of personal right, we come upon the very nucleus of the neurosis.

I believe that in this bidimensional alternation of our unconscious self-reflection existing within the societal personality lies the basis of our social mania of competition, as it is the basis of our tireless discussions and altercations within the various spheres of man’s activity. It is again the obsessive shift of our compulsive self-interest, and our social alternations of competition merely reflect our own oppositeness. I believe that this delusion of self-interest is the sole validity of our vaunted “opinions” as of the endless wranglings and disputations and outstrivings that actuate our social interests generally. The claim that we go to war because our “right” is disputed is not true. We go to war because in the fallacy of our personal absolutism our assumed right is held by us to be indisputable. Far from possessing warrant for what is called our “right” to institute war, it is precisely because of the presumptive and illusory nature of our arrogated right that we are driven to this alternative of immeasurable wrong. The fact is not that we are right because we think such and such to be true, but that in our compulsive response to unavoidable alternative we think such and such to be true in vindication of our assumed right. In other words, our “rightness” is not the natural result of our logic but our logic is the enforced result of our “rightness.” By reason of this secret reservation of personal prerogative within each of us, everything is made subservient to this autocratic absolute of our individual right. If it is true, then, that the self-assurance and inflexibility of the personal absolute within each presents the true account of the mental and social rigidity comprising our resistances, there is here a significant commentary upon our so-called adult social consciousness.

This mechanism of unconscious autocracy underlies our sociological reactions in a degree that is beyond our suspecting, and it is to the social no less than to the individual consciousness that we must turn for a solution. If we disregard the individual implications of the social neurosis, it is not possible to envisage the social implications of the individual neurosis. Due to the subjective concomitance between the individual and the social aspects of consciousness, to attempt to deal with one and not with the other entails a contradiction that is organic. Just as in the individual personality there are alternations of will entailing contrarieties of mood that correspond to getting or not getting what one wants, so in the social personality there are these same alternations of will with their corresponding antitheses of mood depending upon our getting and not getting what we want.

The element of failure in Christianity is the element of the bidimensional in Christianity. Christ repudiates the consensus and the consensus exacts his life in return. Judas betrays Christ and in expiation exacts his own life. In the real motto of Christianity “Do unto others as ye would have others do unto you” there is betrayed the familiar alternative of secret self-interest. It reveals at once the mark of arrangement, of bargain, of conduct-with-a-view-to that here, as always, is the private guarantee of personal advantage. In the note of reciprocity underlying the Lord’s prayer, with its “Forgive us, as we forgive,” the bidimensional is at a premium. Only this bidimensional basis is adequate to account for the constant dissensions--religious, national, political and economic--that exist throughout the world of Christianity under the name of “right.”

The truth is that the consciousness of man is not secure within itself, and our right is the protection of our own insecurity. An insidious division underlies the personality of man. Beneath his outer show of amity and covenant there resides a restless self-doubt, an anxious fear, a divided will. At the heart of his consciousness there is a deep-seated uncertainty driving him to temporary appeasements which can find issue only in the alternations of getting or of not getting what he wants. It is everywhere the aspect of the personal advantage under a new and altered guise. It is everywhere the alternation of self-interest, with its bilateral illusion of advantage or disadvantage, due to our fear-ridden obsession of “good and bad.”

The vacillations of this illusive alternative likewise explain the anxious fascination of the shifting incertitudes of “fate.” Here in the uncertain eventualities of chance is the irresistible appeal of our endless speculations in enterprise and game. In the indispensable element of suspense that lends pith to the drama there is again echoed this artificial note of self-division. For that which constitutes dramatic suspense merely sustains the converse extension inseparable from a bidimensional situation, and the interest of the drama, as of all art-forms based upon the element of conflict or of periodic alternation, is its unconscious projection of the dual issues that reflect the shifting bidimensions of our social self-inversions.

With the descent of the curtain upon the bidimensional situation with which the accustomed drama invariably closes, there remains, in essence unaltered, the same situation upon which it first arose. This is why it is always necessary at the end to create an artificial situation such as will temporarily satisfy the demands of a seeming conclusion and bring the episode to a halt. But a conclusion in the sense of a resolution of elements is not possible. The drama that is built upon the dilemma of the bidimensional is inevitably committed to one or the other of its two horns. Thus the end can be designed only with reference to one of the two alternatives in accordance with the unconscious ambivalence of author as of onlooker. And so the question of termination rests always upon the issue as to whether the audience shall smile and be pleased with itself (comedy) or weep and feel sorry for itself (tragedy) according as it gets or does not get what it wants.

The art of the dramatist is, therefore, in the final accounting always constrained. It is this exigency that causes to be perpetrated in the name of dramatic precedent the unpardonable affronts to organic verity which we are constantly witnessing. In real life a girl, who has had a liaison with a man with whom her relationship has been wholly sexual or self-interested, does not confide the secret of her inadvertence to a subsequent suitor with whom she is now “in love” upon a no less self-interested basis. Such a course involves an organic contradiction. She knows in her heart that in the unconscious concealment of his equally secret self-interest in her it is as intolerable to him to have the secret of his illusion disturbed as it is intolerable to her to disturb her own. But in the drama the psychological verities are thrown to the winds, and the heroine, to the artificial delight of a bilaterally disposed audience, tells everything that has been in the “past” exactly as she would not tell it, and to the one person who hears it exactly as he would not hear it. But with drama that is bidimensional we must put an ending somewhere!

Such are the organic discrepancies with which our ablest writers, whether in the form of the drama, the novel or the screen, still continue to banter us. The reason is to be sought in the unconscious and compulsive bondage which they themselves are under with respect to the illusion of the alternative that is their own self-reflective basis.

It is this illusion of unconscious self-reflection that explains also the greater fascination of the bidimensional picture we see sketched upon the wall or presented in the pages of literature as contrasted with the inherent experience that is the tridimensional actuality of our daily life. It explains our greater pleasure in the surroundings which one’s art may contemplate or portray than in the surroundings which one’s life may by participation fill and render beautiful. For art as image is the portrayal of unreality; art as life is the expression of reality. Art to-day is merely the distinction of the individual interpreter. It is unrelated to the conscious aims of days and dreams that may be shared in common among all people. The truth is that in our prepossession with the bidimensional and pictorial our interest is centred far more in the distractions of art as image than in the inclusiveness of art as life.

This illusion of the pictorial aspect with which we replace the world of tridimensional actuality finds nowhere a happier vehicle than in the mechanical bidimension afforded through the medium of illusion achieved by the motion-picture. There is no device better adapted to reproduce the flat, scenic aspect such as gives the real zest to our dreams. For through the device of the motion-picture there is reflected the social drama that comprises our day, just as through the device of the dream there is reflected the individual drama that comprises our night. It is in this illusory bidimension of the photo-play that we are so much at home. We like its facile reproduction of ourselves. This is why we can accept without remonstrance the childishly naïve sequences standing for plot as represented in the bidimension of the screen. The same narrative would appear too utterly obvious and banal to pass muster in the solid perspective of the spoken drama, but presented upon the screen it finds ready acceptance, because in the motion-picture there is reproduced the pictorial aspect that corresponds to the habitual aspect of self-reflection that is our own image. We like moving pictures because we are moving pictures.

This element of unconscious dramatization, prompting the activities of the normal mind, we need somehow to realize within us. We need somehow to realize that in the manifestations of the unconscious comprising the collective enactment of the social drama around us there is this same reduction of actuality to aspect. For in the active motor images of the social mind with its manifold gestures of a self-reflective actuality there is inherently no less unreality than in the passive sensory images of the individual mind in the private theatre of its self-reflective phantasy-building. Yet so involved are we now in our retroactive processes that in our purblind efforts toward their presumably conscious readjustment we still proceed retroactively. Such is the futility of our personalistic methods of dream-analysis, as it is the futility of our personalistic envisagement of the disorders of affect comprising the neuroses.

In view of this central defect of our mental vision, whereby it is contracted into the artificial bidimension of the self- or dream-image, our outlook is everywhere distorted. Being vitiated throughout with the prejudice of the circumscribed and personal, our affective response is not spontaneous and true. As our subjective feeling is self-reflective or self-interested, our perception is necessarily pictorial and unreal. So that in our presumable contemplation of the objective world of reality, the experience that reaches us is not reality. On the contrary, in the element of the wish or dream that is our bias toward actuality, the aspect perceived is merely a foreshortened projection of the fanciful image of self. It lacks the tridimensional depth and solidarity of an inclusive reality.

This habit of personal dogmatization and autocracy has induced in us an autocracy of the mental processes generally. Our representations of the aspect have become, throughout, the organic antithesis of our participation in the real. From a basis of unreal images we can only reproduce unreal images. Out of a mental system of false impressions we can only elaborate impressions that are false. It is precisely this flat unreality of the pictorial, whether fanciful or actual, that lends to all our so-called “art” its obsessive fascination. Not only is there a distortion of reality in the flat mental picture we form of it, but in the necessarily detached adaptation of the mere onlooker each of us becomes unconsciously an arbitrary centre of personal opinionativeness. Each one stands as a sort of solar centre within a planetary system comprising his own self-determined affects. He thus reflects the universe surrounding him, and it is thus by him defined. And there has come to be built up in each of us in respect also to the world of art a system of personalism or unconsciousness that is well-nigh logic-proof in its absolutism.

Thus every stimulus--every impression that reaches our self-conscious mental retina falls upon the flat, self-reflecting surface of the wish, the dream or the personal right of each. Of such is the supposedly cognitive reaction underlying our “beliefs,” of such is the presumably affective reaction we express as “love.” But belief and love trace their etymology to a common organic root that unhappily betrays the equally illusory origin of each. In the Anglo-Saxon leof, meaning lief or wish or bias, both reactions are reduced to a single motivation that is the tell-tale of their phantastic import. And as belief and love (inverse cognition and inverse affect) are the very tissue of our personalistic consciousness, we may begin to understand to what extent the wish or the preconception comprising the bidimensional self-image underlies our every perception!

And so, after all, our world of “actuality” is not more real than our world of phantasy, our day not less self-reflective and unconscious than our night, our waking not less apparitional than our sleep. For both alike are motivated by the arbitrary reflection that is the inverted process of the will-to-self. As yet we do not realize that the personal absolute embodying our so-called “right,” motivated as it is by self-reflection and unconsciousness, is as truly the product of our day-dream as the wish, motivated by unconscious self-reflection, is the product of our night-dream. We do not as yet see that the wish or self-satisfaction comprising the sleeping dream of our individual unconscious is itself but a reproduction of the wish or self-satisfaction comprising the waking dream of our social unconscious. We have yet to recognize that here again in the oscillations of its unconscious form is to be traced the bidimensional alternation of our own self-reflection as determined by the “good” or “bad” aspect that is our social as well as our individual advantage.

Here, in the contrasting circumstances of its affiliation with the social unconscious on the one hand and of its personal isolation within the individual unconscious on the other, is doubtless the dynamic element determining the vacillation of form that comprises the periodic alternations of the sociological bidimension generally. After all, what is “good” for me is that which is socially approved, what is “bad” for me is that which brings me into disfavour with the social consensus composing my environment. If the social unconscious about me is willing to connive with my individual unconscious and applaud my egoistic self-strivings, all is well. If, on the contrary, it withholds acquiescence and repudiates my self-inverted interests, my state is a correspondingly unhappy one. This accounts for our artificial dependence upon the social give-and-take with which we hedge ourselves about and is the basis of the periodic alternations of mood that make up our day. Being unconscious, one is a prey to the unconscious about him. Being self-reflective, one reacts to the impressions of a self-reflective environment. This oscillation of mood, depending upon whether our adaptation toward the social consensus is assimilative or discordant, explains also the alternations of mood observable in the contrasting reactions characteristic of certain pathological states, as it is the basis of the daily variation of mood registered in the neurotic and in the normal constitution. It is here, too, that is found the basis of the pleasure-pain shift represented in our mood alternations of elation and depression, whether existing in the diurnal variations characterizing our normal mood alternations or in the more pronounced reactions characterizing the extremes of affective tone presented in manic-depressive insanity.

It cannot be too strongly urged that, however intrinsically opposite these extremes of mood may seem, they are in essence identical. For, in reality, these seeming antitheses represent but the obverse aspects of one and the same bidimensional portrait of personal advantage. As regards this intrinsic identity between such seemingly opposite mood-tones it is interesting to note the etymological concurrence in the Anglo-Saxon root saed (English sot, meaning filled), in which we find alike the source of such apparently unrelated derivatives of current usage as the words sad and satisfied. There is, indeed, an unescapable concomitance in the mental attitudes of joy and sorrow, of elation and depression, of satisfaction and sadness. This coincidence is but an altered form of the common alternative of good and bad, of praise and blame, of getting and of not getting, and, as always, its presence denotes the conflict involved in our inverted self-interest.

Doubtless to this bidimensional alternation are also traceable such sociological antitheses as one may witness in the contrary reactions expressed in our various economic and political factions. This one, failing to suspect the element of traditional self-reflection determining his so-called party affiliation, registers his personal allegiance under the socially augmented symbol or principle embodying the standard that is his private absolutism or right; that one, no less oblivious of the part he is automatically enacting in his character of party promoter, assumes the symbolic rôle that tends to further the party principle representative of the absolute criterion that is his right. So, too, are to be explained the alternations of reaction represented in the social antitheses of prohibition and anti-prohibition. The anti-prohibitionists are by imputation the ultra-liberal, the prohibitionists are by imputation the ultra-conservative element, but both are in point of fact equally the dupes of the personal reaction that is their own self-reflection. For both, in their unconscious response to what is commonly called “early training,” equally embody expressions of their original infantile reaction to the opposed issues involved in the social pretence of “good” and “bad.”

Extending into every phase of our social life, it is this bilateral motive that is likewise the failure of the schools. With credit, praise or privilege and their opposites (depending upon whether the child “succeeds” or “fails” as judged by the bidimensional standard of good and bad, of praise or blame constituting the arbitrary picture of his personal conduct), it happens that, through an unconscious substitution of the image of the child’s person for the function of the child’s personality, the entire incentive of the schools becomes ulterior and artificial. The so-called liberal schools of to-day are in no better case. Despite their much ado about advanced methods that will give greater freedom to the child they afford mere imitations of freedom. But this is freedom in aspect, not in function. It is merely the ideal of freedom contemplating its own image. Thus it is futile to attempt to alter our situation through recourse to mere progressive methods of education. The elimination of formal standards of efficiency is likewise unavailing. For the ulterior is present still. We find it present in the bidimensional attitude that actuates the entire pedagogic system with its underlying idea of preparation. Apparently it is not realized that this element of the preparatory or ulterior is the criterion also of the teachers, being likewise the basis of their own promotion as it is the standard of promotion in the world at large. But whatever is preparatory is based upon the illusion of the personal image. It is commentative, premeditated, moralistic, and substitutes a mental impression of life in place of life itself. When we offer an image of life for which we seek to “prepare” the child, the very basis of our educational programme becomes pictorial and untrue. Life knows naught of images in the personal sense. Life is the functioning of interests in constructive activities. The rewards of such activities flow naturally out of them and consist in a common earning for daily needs in common daily pursuits. The child, if given the opportunity, will learn to construct useful and beautiful things and his only reward will be the natural reward accruing from the intrinsic value, social and æsthetic, of the work produced. When schools will have become the productive plants of natural childish industry, there will not any longer be the absurd invention by the schools of ulterior rewards such as now supply the artificial stimulus necessary to lend vitality to their essential dullness. It will not be necessary for teachers to stimulate the industry of their pupils through resort to extraneous “merits” in palliation for their own lack of joy in the natural creativeness of spontaneous childhood.

There is, perhaps, no more subtle expression of the bidimensional replacement than in the psychological counter-impaction of the marital neurosis. In this conjugal vis-à-vis unconscious self-reflection is at flood-tide. This is why, in the opposite extensions of the conjugal conflict, there are presented concomitantly in husband and wife such familiar antitheses as are presented alternately in the single individual, as, for example, the opposed reactions of mania and depression, the psychasthenic and hysterical extremes, as well as the contrasts of homosexuality and paranoia. Where such reciprocal conditions exist, the opposite rôles are in every instance unconsciously assumed, of course, with entire consistency by the opposite parties in question. This explains also the anomaly presented in so seemingly contradictory a spectacle as that of a man of outwardly serious deportment enjoying vicariously, through the cosmetics and extravagances of self-adornment worn by a narcistically inverted wife, the satisfactions of an unconscious exhibitionism. It is the law of the marital neurosis, as of the balance-scale, that its termini are diametrically opposite and that their variation is inverse one to another.

The unconscious mechanism described by Freud under the term “psychic ambivalence” (Bleuler) is of all reactions perhaps the least understood, but, because of its invariable association with neurotic processes, it is as important biologically as any of the mechanisms that psychoanalysis has disclosed to us. Yet again, in this quality of contrast inherent in the manifestations of neurotic states, there are represented merely the two opposed extremes of reaction due to the division of impulse that is inseparable from the alternation of aspect we have traced to the illusion of the bidimensional self-image. This replacement, as we have seen, occurs normally as well as neurotically, socially as well as individually. It is again the to-and-fro of the pendulum of good and bad. It is again but the oscillation that is our obsessive reaction to the make-believe of the self-reflective and ulterior.

The truth is that we prefer our impressions of life to an understanding of life, and in the ambivalence of our response toward others, our reaction is friendly or antagonistic only in the degree in which they correspond or fail to correspond with our personally preconceived impressions. In the present ambivalent scheme of things, the ultimate poignancy of one’s grief is the element of secret pleasure it affords to others. The daily newspapers, seeking unconsciously to make capital of our human frailty in this regard, are ever alert to publish under glaringly conspicuous head-lines the most startling crimes and calamities. Under captions giving notice of some inexpressible “Horror” (a term supposedly conveying a sense of repugnance) they attain in fact their most intriguing effects. The newspapers are wise. They have read us before giving themselves to us to read and so are canny to supply the grim details we love to hear of another’s loss or hurt. It is this isolation of sorrow that is its desolation and its bitterness. Yet it may be traced wholly to the unconscious tyranny of this bidimensional division within us that we find the pleasure we do find, however adroitly repressed, in the unhappiness or calamity of those about us. It is, of course, not another’s calamity that is the real cause of our satisfaction, but in the ambivalence of our attitude as we contemplate his misfortune we feel, by contrast, or in a comparative count so much more fortunate than he. It is again but the projection of the bidimensional division within each of us individually as a reflection of the division within all of us socially. In this comparison of ourselves with others there is again reflected the bidimensional alternative that is the fanciful self-advantage of the personal image.

Turn where we will, this same phenomenon of mental alternation based on the bidimensional image looms ineffaceably before us. Opposed to the mental image “male” we project the mental image “female,” in contrast to the concept “religion” we place the concept “science,” against the psychological attitude of the artist stands the psychological reaction of the critic. Because of this mentally pictorial outlook among us, we fail to realize that in the unconsciously objective approach of the artist there is embodied an attitude that is as truly a criticism or evaluation of life as is the objective attitude of the critic toward the expression of the artist. We do not realize that in our unconscious personal alternation an element of criticism or evaluation everywhere substitutes the fallacy of a mental state toward life for the conscious reality of a state of life itself. Our bidimensional self-reflection is thus equally the impediment of art as of life. The insidious element of personal self-reflection is the fatal decoy no less of portrayer than of participant.

On the other hand, in the spirit of the more subjective artist what we sense is his insistent sway toward a self-realization that is impersonal. We feel that in the measure in which he yields it submission his expression becomes less and less a reproduction of life and more and more an actualization of life itself. This is because in the thought or feeling expressed through the art-forms of such a personality, he is himself not so much the causative or self-conscious agent reflecting a state of mind in relation to life as it seems, but rather the conscious link in a sequence that identifies him with a condition of life as it is. Thus again the truer the artist, the more he tends to round the orbit of his personality in a conscious universe of relativity; the more imitative the artist, the more he tends to oscillate uncertainly between the alternate phases that merely reflect the assumed absolute of his own ego.

So it is with our alternations, social and individual, pathological and normal, as they exist on every hand. There is the precoid and the hysteric, the homosexual and the paranoiac, the religionist and the sceptic, the moralist and the voluptuary. It is the world-old tragedy of getting and not getting what one wants, and in the self-satisfaction of the one as in the self-abnegation of the other the element of self-consequence is equal and identical. It is the ineptitude of virtue that it is but the bidimensional reverse of vice. Generosity, like humility, contains its ambivalent element of pride. Though from time to time we may dispense no slight favours, yet always we demand to hold the reins of power within our own hands. Let our protégés presume for a moment to assert their own individuality and straightway we rein them in. Indeed, if we will look into this, we shall realize that it is precisely the person toward whom we are most lavish of beneficence that is the one of whose native and unsponsored expression we are most jealously critical. The fact is that our virtues are really too good to be true and that our amenities, after all, reflect only our own self-advantage. Thus, from the point of view of good and bad, our lusts and our repressions are but interchangeable adaptations of the central theme of self, and in the alternations entailed in the popularly conceded distinctions assumed as morality and immorality there is preserved under merely reversed aspects this identical fetish of one’s own self-image.

Even in the sphere of psychology itself there is this same division inseparable from the personal absolute or the private arrogation that underlies the assumed right of each individual as reflected in our social contrasts of good and bad. For example, the propriety of studying the “merely motor expressions” of the behaviourists is regarded with grave question by the introspectionists, while the behaviourists as ardently doubt whether introspective studies are the legitimate matter of psychology at all. The futility of dissension is again its two-sidedness. What we omit to reckon with when we consider the vying of these two schools with one another is the element of the personal prerogative within them that unconsciously goads each to an intolerance of the other. For all “rights” being mutually opposed to and exclusive of one another, the “right,” or opinion, underlying any system except the system that is one’s own is, of its nature, inadmissible. In the irreconcilable assertions of the multifarious opinions of men, whether occurring in group or in single expression, there is always to be traced this underlying motive of personal right corresponding to the private prerogative of each. By rights I do not mean the natural rights that are universal and common, but the personal rights that are autocratic and pre-emptive. But whether our divisions be national, political, religious, economic, professional or familial, their underlying meaning is the same. So that, in this antithetical “response” characterizing the periodic alternations of our bidimensional self-reflection, there is registered a reaction of the organism that invariably escapes the attention of either disputant--the reaction, namely, of the will-to-self or of the private privilege coincident with an absolute basis of adjudication. As long as there remains this element of unconscious alternation due to the self-reflective interest that now actuates human motives, students of science, also, are as powerless to bring to their problems an attitude of disinterestedness as are our national delegates when they attempt to consider the problems involving all the subtle self-interest of a peace conference.

The really classic division of opinion in the world--the division that is of major importance even amid academic fields of thought--is the conflict between Science and Religion. That the religionists, in claiming the undoubted authenticity of sources confirmatory of the truth of revealed religion, have offered indisputable “proof” of the validity of their position, cannot be denied. That the scientists’ assertion of the doctrine of spontaneous evolution as opposed to the revealed truths of Theism rests equally upon the evidence of incontrovertible “proof” leaves likewise no room for doubt. In both instances, however, the proofs of each are acceptable only to the advocates of their own particular view and not to the advocates of the view that is opposite their own. But of what avail are the proofs of a position which are valid only in the minds which have anteriorly set out to prove it? What dependence is to be placed in the intellectual verifications of truth which are acceptable only to intellects which demonstrate them but which, in the view of those of an opposite trend, remain for ever inaccessible? These are reflections which necessarily force us to question very seriously our objective intellectualizations. If, in so wide and vital a division as that between Religion and Science, the “logic” on which is based the claim of each is so completely without meaning, beyond its facility to flatter established prepossessions, it is time that our “reasoning” upon all issues be summoned to account on suspicion that our position is, in every instance, merely the unconscious alternation due to the bidimensional image of gain or loss that is one’s personal self-reflection.

This blindness of the personal restriction within our subjective life is the more interesting when one considers the far more impersonal outlook that often characterizes man’s consciousness within the sphere of his objective interests. With the growing expanse of man’s consciousness there has arisen the widely inclusive and impersonal field of preventive medicine with its essential preoccupation with the communal weal. Through this wider sociological approach we have come gradually to realize the incomparably greater significance of activities directed toward safeguarding the health of the community or of the group-life as contrasted with interests directed to the personal cure of the individual as a single element within the social group. We have begun to recognize that where, through recourse to measures of public hygiene, it is possible to control the general sources of disease, conditions are rendered such that there may be no need to treat disease-process within the single individual. In Panama, for example, where, through a far-reaching programme of civic hygiene, the malaria-breeding organism has been almost wholly exterminated, the medical and sociological functions of the community have become so completely merged that with the appearance of the disease-bearing Anopheles it is no longer the physician but the civic authorities who are consulted.

Such are the signs of the broadening communal spirit that is coming to influence more and more the various measures of improvement amid the objective conditions of life about us. But, within the subjective sphere of man’s activities, his outlook is no whit more encompassing to-day than in the moment of his earliest quickenings of consciousness. The reason is not far to seek. Man’s subjective life is throughout overlaid and oppressed by his inverted obsession of personal acquisition. Viewing everything in the light of the reflection cast by his own image, a broad communal programme of life is for him as yet subjectively impossible. An outlook that would render his position a relative one and reveal it as but contributory to the organic life as a whole would straightway menace the illusion of his personal prerogative and rob him of what is now for him the basis of all his experience and the sum of his personality. He does not see that his “experience,” by reason of its inverted absolutism, wholly lacks the support of reality. He does not see that what he calls his personality is his successful collusion in the collective unconscious about him at the price of his habitual concession to impressions not primarily his own. This is why the psychopathologist is still futilely endeavouring to understand his patients from the static, personal standpoint of his own dogmatic absolutism rather than from the position of a relative and inclusive interpretation of consciousness. This is why the objective analyst remains always outside the real problem of the social disharmony represented in the nervous and mental disorders of the individuals by whom he is confronted. The truth is, he is himself a part of the disorder which in his unconscious absolutism he is presuming to treat in others. The tendency is one that exists among us all. For the taint of an absolutism within the social personality involves each of us equally as a contributing element in its fictitious structure. Hence the ultimate futility of our constantly shifting “methods.” Hence the ever-recurring therapeutic fads that represent first one and then another absolute system of cure. But though each such system may for a while claim our support, in due course it fades again and is in turn succeeded by another in accordance with the varying phases of our social alternations. Our enthusiasm, as well as its decline, must after all be reckoned merely as the alternate reverberations of the social consciousness in response to the unconscious alternations of the bidimensional absolute which has its existence in the individual and of which the social manifestation is but a reproduction.

As the neurosis is generic, involving the social system no less than the individual element, the system of psychoanalysis, as well as the individuals composing it, is equally included under its indictment. From Freud, therefore, as from the rest of us there is due the acknowledgment of the inevitable part occupied by psychoanalysis in the systematization or unconsciousness that is the social neurosis. The private assumption of each of us to the contrary notwithstanding, we who have followed Freud could not possibly have been inspired in our work by a conscious interest in the disorders of personality represented in the social anomaly of the neurosis. Being ourselves unconsciously involved in the social neurosis about us, we have been urged forward through an unconscious or personal interest in order to divert our minds from our own implication in its social significance. To this end it has been unconsciously our endeavour to direct assiduous attention only to the specific manifestations of the neurosis as it exists in individuals supposedly other than ourselves. In brief, we have been diligently occupied with the objective study of the neurosis in its obvious appearance in others as individuals presumably separate from ourselves, in order to escape the subjective acknowledgment of its actual presence within ourselves as contributory and interrelated elements in our common social consciousness.

With each of us, the real motive has been the unconscious grudge of our personal involvement in a world-wide enslavement to an artificial precept such as can only oscillate between the alternations resultant upon our self-limited bidimension of “good and bad.” When we can lay aside the incentives of personal self-defence and view our own reactions with impartial self-composure, we shall realize that it has been our own unconscious that first quickened the compensative defence-reactions which later culminated in the objective system we know to-day as psychoanalysis. For, with psychoanalysis as with other systems, its real incitement is found in the inevitable “come-back” that is the organism’s response to its sense of affront before the illusion of the self-image. Again, it is the automatic alternation resultant upon a basis of counter-relatedness inseparable from the delusion of the personal absolute as contrasted with the relativity of the individual in respect to life as an organic whole. Again, it is the artificial presupposition of our own “rightness” that is the strongest determinative of our conduct, and to this secret autocracy that is our own personal absolutism we have rendered everything subservient.

Men like to say that God created them, but in truth it is they who have created “God.” We like to employ this anthropomorphic image of absolute authority to our personal advantage. Rewarding the good and punishing the bad in accordance with the alternations coincident with the bidimensional aspect of an absolute Deity, this image of supreme authority represents merely the projection of the personal absolute based on the alternations of our own self-reflection. I do not doubt that beneath this vicarious image of a fanciful father-supremacy there ever remains the true and abiding principle that is the underlying reality of life. But, in the place of this principle of reality that is the unsponsored soul of man, we have timidly substituted such temporary cheats as are adapted only to lull our fancies with imperialistic dreams of personal empire. Indeed, in the personal projection actuating the social anomaly of religious belief the inverted bias comprising our own self-image has its strongest lodgment. It is here that the collective mind has tricked itself to its collective undoing. For in the current expression of our social inversion resident in this absolute arbiter of the moral law or of “good and bad” lies the very nucleus of our human pathology. And it is my position that the pretence, underlying the personal adjustment based upon early inculcated issues of self-interest and concealed beneath our specious determinants of “good” and “bad,” is no less the underlying fallacy of psychoanalysis. For, in its attempt to offset neurotic disharmonies due to an unconscious repression of the sexual life of the individual, psychoanalysis has recourse to adjustments that are the mere alternative of repression--a repression legislated by the dictates of an equally unconscious and repressed society, be its expression opportunistic, sublimative, or en règle.

Thus psychoanalysis, likewise, presents a policy that is but a desperate alternation between the only two issues that are available on the basis of the absolute criterion such as inevitably obtains in our present bidimensional or pictorially constellated scheme of consciousness, namely, a policy in which the reaction of the individual can only be in the direction of the reverse or opposite extension. Hence, however personally displeasing to us, there is the need that we who are psychoanalysts somehow recognize that we, also, are unconsciously subordinated to the moral dilemma that is the reflection of our own self-interest. There is the need that we see clearly that psychoanalysis, too, is still under the domination of a falsely imbued impression of good and bad with its attendant issue in the alternations of an unconscious social resistance.

This illusory antithesis of getting or of not getting what one wants, this irreconcilable ache of man’s unconscious is traceable again and again to the false assumptions of a self-reflective absolutism as arrogated by the individual as a single part or element in contradistinction to our organic consciousness as a whole. It is in the absolutism of the part that consists the dissociation of the whole; it is in the relativity of the part that consists the integrity of the whole. Within the sphere of man’s consciousness our fallacies of observation lie in the absolutism of the observer. On the other hand, in surrendering the bidimensional or pictorial illusion inseparable from the fixed position of the observer for the tridimensional actuality of our organic participation in life as an inclusive totality, we automatically yield it the full-dimensional component comprising the extension that is our confluent societal unity and which, in abrogating the artificial image of a personal and unconscious absolute, constitutes life in the encompassing scheme of the relativity of consciousness. In such a scheme there is offered to the dissociated personality, single and social, neurotic and normal, a readjustment that is fundamental. I believe it is only in the acceptance of the societal consciousness of man that there lies the ultimate step for each of us. For the principle of the relativity of consciousness is an organically unequivocal one. In its individual realization consists our societal integrity. In its societal realization consists our individual integrity. Only in the co-ordination of the two lies the fulfilment of our organic personality.