CHAPTER II. Formulation of an Organic or Societal Basis of Interpretation

FORMULATION OF AN ORGANIC OR SOCIETAL BASIS OF INTERPRETATION

Within the various fields of scientific investigation, there is the established precept that we set out from the simplest assignable elements as a basis for all future inquiry. Of such, for example, is the ground-structure of the chemical and the biological sciences, and it is likewise upon ultimately irreducible units that the furthest abstractions of mathematics rest their foundation. But in our approach to the biological elements of consciousness we have proceeded upon no such soundly established principle. Unconsciously presupposing here and taking for granted there, we have reasoned from premises that have lacked the warrant of elementary support. Hence in the study of consciousness we have, in our unconsciousness, unwittingly slurred our obligations to the very first principle of scientific method.

This circumstance, however, is not one toward which we need feel scornful. Our blunder has been inevitable. In the study of the elements of consciousness a factor is introduced into scientific reckoning that completely reverses habitual perspectives, and to trace with scientific conscientiousness this inexorable reversal of the personal mode requires of the student very special laboratory qualification. For, in turning to the study of the basis of consciousness, we are ourselves the primary elements of our own inquiry. Ourselves unconscious, we have attempted to fold back upon ourselves and, from a basis of prejudice, to recapture our primary, unprejudiced basis. From a now sophisticated personal adaptation of consciousness we have sought to regain the native, unsophisticated principle of consciousness of which our personal adaptation is the unconscious abrogation. Clearly, this task is of its nature self-contradictory. Only in the measure in which we realize that unconsciousness is our habitual mode and so allow it to cease automatically to dominate our lives may we come to study dispassionately the essential structure of consciousness through an unbiased examination of the primary elements of which it is composed.

Life has its beginnings in a continuous organic medium. Within this common organic medium our original infant organisms constitute identical elements. What we later regard as individuals are but corpuscles in a homogeneous, societal tissue. Organically, or from the point of view of their common and inherent affectivity, there exists no discrimination among these elements. Race or national separation, social or caste distinction have not entered into them. These are divergences that have no place in the organic origins of life. As integral members of an original organic matrix, the elements representing our primary infant organisms are no more differentiated psychically one from another than they are psychically differentiated from the life-source or the maternal organisms from which they have sprung. The mental life, being as yet wholly subjective and unaware, is simple, unitary. It is one with the organism’s inherent feeling. Subjective feeling, indeterminate and unqualified, is, in the primary organism, the sum of experience, the compass of life. Primarily the organism’s subjective feeling is its all. And as with the growing perception of outer objects life enlarges, this subjective mode is unaltered still. Our primary objective experience merges into continuity with inherent feeling. It is added to, included in the subjective life. So that in its incipient rapport with the world of objectivity, life maintains still a fluid, undifferentiated, confluent mode. For life is primarily affective. In the affect consists men’s common ground. In the subjective affect lies organic bed-rock. Here in the common inherency of native feeling is the primal menstruum of our human consciousness.

But there suddenly comes an interruption to this state of unification. The parent, as spokesman of a world of unconscious collusion in the defence of self or the exploitation of separativeness, strikes in sharply upon this unitary mode of being with a wedge of interdiction that marks the beginning of a cleavage within the personality which the subsequent years tend increasingly to widen and secure. With the sudden arrest of this early, unified mode through the entrance of the extraneous strictures of command and prohibition (suggestion or repression), the personality of the organism becomes automatically divided. For with command or reproof there is introduced the element of the ulterior. Organic harmony and confluence are no more. Into the life of confluence is now thrust the rude encroachment of personal motive--of motive based upon the outcome of promise or threat, of gain or forfeit. The inherent flow, the organic current of experience is now artificially checked. Henceforward expression is no longer spontaneous. Instead, a programme of conduct-with-a-view-to takes its place and becomes the dominant order of our activities. In the face of every summons the question must first be weighed--Will it be well or ill with me? Upon the issue of gain or loss depends the response--the issue of gain or loss for the now separated, individuated organism. An adjustment to the ends of self-interest is demanded. Everything is at stake; a fitting policy must be devised and the proper combination must be sought. Thus is obtruded self-consciousness, self-interest or that separation from its basic continuum that is incidental to the interruption of the organism’s essential life, and with it a new mode of consciousness embodying a fundamental opposition to the primary unity of life now takes its rise.

Is it not clear that the condition here described is nothing other than a dissociation of consciousness, that this interpolation of the self-motive involves a division of the personality in which there is presented the identical reaction that we have come to know as the essential mechanism of the neurosis? If so, then life in our present mode of adaptation is throughout a dissociation. That such is actually the case is the position of the present thesis. For it maintains that division of personality, or the neurosis, has its basis in this incipient cleavage embodied in the separation of the individual element from its original organic continuum through the interdiction of the organism’s early unitary mode, while integrity of the personality, on the other hand, is represented alone in the preservation throughout the growth of the individual element of its primary organic confluence.

Such a postulate is indeed very sweeping. It will be readily protested that it is too sweeping--that in effect it claims that the whole civilized world is in the grip of a mental dissociation, that it has its being, founds its organization upon a basis of unconsciousness. I can only answer that, however sweeping such a statement may seem in theory, this social implication of the neurosis is amply supported in actuality. For the unconscious reactions of the social mind about oneself are reflected unconsciously within oneself, the individual being but an element in our common consciousness. If one will permit himself to be sufficiently subjective in his own life to view with objective disinterestedness the reflections within himself of these unconscious reactions of the social mind, there will be little ground for protest against such an implication.

This indictment of the entire social mind, however, may rest upon no scant or uncertain foundation. We may not deal with so broad an issue with the personal conclusiveness of a merely dynamic or individualistic interpretation. Our approach must needs be genetic in its scope. We must take account of those integrations which mark the era of man’s first awareness and which reach back to the nebulous sources of consciousness itself. For the thoughtful student will demand to know the phylogenetic origin of this universal tendency to interdiction toward her offspring on the part of the mother. Whence her self-consciousness, he will ask. One’s answer must be largely intuitional, by which I suppose we mean that it must be gathered from sources that are coloured by intimations arising from one’s own organic life.

It would appear that in his separativeness man has inadvertently fallen a victim to the developmental exigencies of his own consciousness. Captivated by the phylogenetically new and unwonted spectacle of his own image, it would seem that he has been irresistibly arrested before the mirror of his own likeness and that in the present self-conscious phase of his mental evolution he is still standing spell-bound before it. That such is the case with man is not remarkable. For the appearance of the phenomenon of consciousness marked a complete severance from all that was his past. Here was broken the chain of evolutionary events whose links extended back through the nebulous aeons of our remotest ancestry, and in this first moment of his consciousness man stood, for the first time, alone! It was in this moment that he was “created,” as the legend runs, “in the image and likeness of God.” For breaking with the teleological traditions of his agelong biology, man now became suddenly aware.

That man’s spirit should have quailed before the wonderment of so complete an emancipation is not surprising. Sensing his utter isolation in the face of so strange, so unwonted a realization, he could only cling desperately to the one visible and concrete sign of the prenascent world from which he had newly emerged--to the urgent and ineradicable actuality of himself, the one and only link that remained to bind man to the vast and hitherto uninterrupted continuum of his primordial past. Yet turn where he would, the organic hiatus had now been made and its inexorable breach yawned wide and inevitable before him. Unable as yet to endure the contemplation of his new freedom and the limitless expanse it spread before him, equally unable to recross again the gulf he had lately spanned and recover the paths of his original instinctiveness and automatism, the soul of man stood divided against itself. For man could now neither venture forth nor yet return again. In his division he could only grope blindly amid uncertain ways. Before him stretched the stern demands of consciousness and reality, behind him lay the fictitious decoys of a phantastic and immemorial preconscious. His choice lay between the two, yet he was incompetent to follow either. It is, it seems to me, the intermediate stage in man’s development, comprised of these two contending issues and entailing the irreconcilable conflict of which each individual’s experience is a recapitulation, that is the phylogeny of the unconscious. This is the experience of us all as it expresses itself in the self-consciousness that underlies the personal adaptation of each, through our gradually enforced awareness of the self.

Considered also ontogenetically, the development of consciousness, contrary to accepted tenets, has by no means proceeded upon a fluent and harmonious course. In its very birth consciousness embodies a biological recoil--an organic impaction. Its very unfolding is an infolding, its begetting a misbegetting. For the rudiment of consciousness is self-consciousness. In its origin it is self-reflexive, self-relational. That is, consciousness in its inception entails the fallacy of a self as over against other selves. It is in this inevitable faux pas of man’s earliest awareness, of his original self-consciousness (original sin), that consists the error or lapse in the process of his evolution. In this factor of development marked by the recoil of our self-consciousness or by the inference of our counter-relatedness is to be traced the momentary decline in the progressive curve of man’s organic evolution. Yet such temporary recessions embody the operation of laws that are entirely within the order of our developmental descent. In the first dawnings of new and untried possibilities, it often happens that, as growth proceeds, conditions that are later to become assets in the developmental scheme are in their rudimentary phase very burdensome liabilities. The infant that has not yet learned to walk is wont to crawl with much ease and impunity, but with the finer adjustment of walking once acquired he may now move about his world in an upright posture with far greater agility and comfort than the movement of crawling could ever have afforded him. And yet many are the rude impacts and ineptitudes that attend the gradual acquisition of his new endowment. And so the developmental possibility offered man through his attainment of the stage of self-awareness is not less an onward stage in his evolution because in his awkward unaccustomedness he employs it to his own undoing. It is one of the glories of his growth which he may temporarily dim but not permanently extinguish.

With the further unfolding of the consciousness of man, or with his increasing awareness, there followed the recognition of the objective intervals between his congeners severally and between himself and them. His external senses of their very nature apprised him of such intervals, as, for example, those in relation to time and to space. With growing experience his perception of interval between himself and his fellows grew more and more insistent. It became indeed the basis of his operations. Besides, there were intervals which were not only spatial and temporal but intervals or differences that were attributive or circumstantial in their nature, such as vocal and featural differences, differences of sex, size, colour and of texture.

With this constantly growing, steadily deepening impression of difference, interval or separation in point of external characters, with this habitual looking out upon external or objective differentiation or otherness, something happened to the consciousness of man. That which happened was the faux pas in his evolution to which I have just alluded. For, through the suggestive influence of repeated observation of objective interval or discontinuity, man fell a victim to a trick of his own consciousness, and, from implications of disparity in the sphere of his peripheral contacts, he erroneously inferred differentiations in the sphere of his internal, nuclear, organic life. From data of observation in the field of his objective relationships he unconsciously drew analogous conclusions in regard to the essential continuities of his common, subjective consciousness, and so applied to the primary and inherent mode of his experience deductions which were warranted only with respect to the mode of his outer or objective awareness. From a difference of envelope he assumed a difference of content. From a dissimilarity of outer and accidental character he implied a disparity in the realm of his organic and essential life. Thus arose the initial confusion accruing from the employment of objective method in terms of the subjective mode.

It is my position that the fallacy involved in confusing the separate or objective with the confluent or subjective mode has become the very warp and woof of the collective mind, as it is the biological basis of the displacements characterizing the pathological references of the insane. Dealing cognitively (objectively) with our affects and affectively (subjectively) with our cognitions, we fail to envisage what is actually before us. Where there are two individuals--oneself, let us say, as compared with someone else--because of the dissociated feeling content with which each regards the other, our presumably objective judgment rests upon a complete subjective misconception. It is, of course, perfectly in order that people be demarcated by us one from another and from ourselves by characters that are external and accidental, and that this discrimination prevail even when such distinguishing characteristics are of a mental nature. But despite all such accidental differences, the original, inherent, organic life that is the underlying essence of any two individuals is common and identical. However different spatially, traditionally and characterologically, there is between them the essential bond of an inherent continuity, of an organic confluence.

It is interesting how the folk mind betrays its need of this underlying subjective unity in its effort to offset the objective tendencies of differentiation. In its desire to express its feeling of amity, its sense of mutual understanding, the habitual mind automatically employs the phrase, “It makes no difference.” For example, if one has been unintentionally thoughtless of another, he is at once put at ease with the reassurance that “it makes no difference”--it being obviously felt that difference is the essential condition against which the social mind must preserve itself. Similarly we say, “It is no matter” or “It is immaterial”--a material or objective basis of relationship being evidently likewise sensed as an impediment to unity. There is the same implication in the disparaging intimation contained in the phrase, “He has an object in view.” And more telling still is the coalescence of the two affiliated ideas of matter and disunity in the use of the single stem-ending employed in the words “object” and “objection,” the evident implication being that object and obstacle, or objection, are subjectively indistinguishable.

It seems to me that even such seemingly trivial etymological evidences betray the organic intolerance of differentiation within the sphere of the subjective life. However habituated we may have become to the subjective inferences of interval due to the objective report of our external senses, beneath these outer and accidental demarcations there is the persistent assertion of an underlying principle of unification and continuity. In our own customary dissociated feeling we lose sight of this completely, and, because of the confusion of modes within ourselves, our judgment of others as being subjectively different from us reaches the point of actual criticism and resentment.

A child early illustrates this tendency to erroneous inference when he refers to inanimate objects about him--a toy or household object--a disposition to thwart his will. For example, he will grow angry at some intractable plaything and strike or abuse it in peevish retaliation. And it is the unfortunate habit of unwise parents--that is, of parents generally--to encourage the child’s delusive tendency with some such corroborative remark as “naughty chair” (or whatever the offending instrument may be) and even to carry their complicity to the extent of themselves inflicting punishment upon the object in question.

This tendency to erroneous inference in the mental sphere is the fallacy of an objective method of psychiatry, as it is the underlying misapprehension of the clinical approach of psychopathology generally. Indeed, this misconception is responsible for many of the inadvertencies of reason that exist throughout our scientific ranks. It would seem, after all, that the people who know most are precisely those who suspect least. If the psychiatrist is asked what is dementia præcox, his answer consists merely in recounting the signs or symptoms “indicative” of the disorder. If he is directly confronted with the symptoms or indications of the disorder, he will tell you that they represent dementia præcox. With such a confusion in the mind of the psychiatrist one may well judge the confusion existing in the minds of people generally, and with this subjective confusion in ourselves one gains readily an idea of the kind of instruction which the student of psychiatry is now offered as a preparation for understanding the psychology of insanity! It does not occur to the psychopathologist to inquire what it is that constitutes the inherent condition whereof the specific symptoms as well as the generic term for them are but the pathological index. It does not occur to him to ask, in regard to this and other disease-processes, what it is that underlies the label as well as the appearances labelled. But unconsciously misled by the superficial or cognitive aspect of the real disharmony, he can only shift uncertainly from sign to countersign. The reason is that, lacking a societal encompassment of mental disorders, the psychiatrist does not recognize that a subjective condition is to be found alone within himself--that the condition for which, in his unconsciousness, he is now seeking the objective account is accessible only within the subjective processes of his own unconscious, as it is accessible subjectively only within the unconscious of mankind at large.

Because of this confusion within ourselves we fail to recognize that delusion is essentially of the affective mode, that its cognitive expression is but its secondary rationalization--a symbolic picture presented in lieu of the corresponding affect denied. It is this type of “reasoning” that is responsible for the tendency one sees everywhere within philosophical circles to make dark the things that are clear. Descartes’ dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” is the keynote to this cognitive fallacy. The tendency, as I said, even of us who are psychopathologists to evade the recognition of the element of unconscious replacement here--confounding cognitive form with affective actuality--is due, as always, to the bias of this self-same replacement within ourselves. Being social participants in the transposition of affect that is the societal neurosis, it cannot be otherwise. Hence this confusion between our perceptual and our affective modes is throughout a basic one, and as it is general in its origin it is necessarily general in its results.

We commonly accept the assumption that mysticism is an emanation of the Hindoo consciousness, when in point of fact the Hindoo consciousness is an emanation of mysticism. In truth, mysticism is a replacement that is not more endemic to India than to England or to America. For in mysticism there is expressed merely this underlying fallacy of reference that is habitual to unconsciousness generally. Mysticism is thus as symptomatic of our matter-of-fact normality as of the most occult form of transcendentalism. Psychologically, the normal mind is synonymous with the mystical mind. Such a replacement is, then, no isolated eventuality signalized in some sporadic neurosis or psychosis but, by reason of its ethnic scope, it underlies no less the genial illusion of the collective social mind presented in the form of amalgamated unconsciousness habitually disguised under the social symptomatology of our so-called “normality.” Because of the automatic and unconscious transposition of modes that characterizes our mental processes at their present stage of development, the situation is one that obtains among us all. In the organismic sense we are none of us thinking clearly because we are none of us feeling clearly. This fallacy of implied subjective differentiation is the whole meaning of unconsciousness and the basis of all delusion. I believe that it is upon this deep-seated fallacy of affect incident to the development in man of consciousness or of self-awareness that rests the foundation of the social as of the individual neurosis.

The situation with us is indeed a serious one. Except for one’s faith in the ultimate triumph of the forces of integration over the disintegrative tendencies of our evolution, the mind could only despair at the contemplation of the vicious circle of mutual self-destructiveness in which our present attitude of unconsciousness involves us. As difference or discrepancy in the subjective or organic mode is, from the point of view of the continuity and cohesion of the species, self-destructive, the maintenance of such separateness entails for each individual a desperate loss of his sense of organic integrity. Under the blindness of the retroactive self-defence to which his erroneously assumed separateness inevitably drives him, he fights the more desperately to maintain his artificial individualistic oneness, and, the more desperately he contends, the further he defeats the acceptance of his true organic oneness. It is the inevitable fallacy of our disparate modes.

Freud, then, is right when in seeking to solve the riddle of the neuroses he addresses himself to the personality as a whole. But he is wrong in positing a personal or preferential localization of this central personality as he does when he places this integral consciousness within the bounds of the separative individual. This is to frustrate at the outset the aim of understanding the processes of consciousness through succumbing oneself to the very mode of unconsciousness which supposedly it is one’s purpose to comprehend. It is an instance of one’s intentionally honest effort toward self-understanding failing to escape the pitfall of personal preference in its very outreaching toward the unprejudiced and true. The separative or the personal is unconsciousness. Discontinuity and unconsciousness are conterminous. Thus we are again and again brought back to the impasse which is our refusal to realize that the individual, as a self-appointed, unconscious unit, is but a separate and dissociated part, that only as the individual accepts his place as an integral, confluent part in the common, societal personality does he become a conscious, unified whole.

There is, then, the need to clear our vision through adopting the larger, more organismic viewpoint. There is the need to stand apart from the self and view it as the element that it is within the larger organism of mankind. From the organismic point of view the individual is as truly an element in the larger co-ordinated total comprising the ethnic organism of man, as the manifold cells comprising the individual body are elements in the larger whole constituting his individual organism. We have not as yet reckoned with the consolidated unity of this common societal entity. We have not reckoned with its organic urge in its influence upon human destiny. In our preoccupation with the dynamic or individualistic conception of the libido or of individual aggression, we have not reckoned with the genetic or organic urge that actuates the unitary race consciousness in its societal cohesion.

It is commonly taught by the schoolmen that self-preservation is the first law of nature. I do not believe it. I believe that the instinct of tribal preservation is by far the dominant urge among us. I believe that this instinct takes precedence over the impulse of self-maintenance to a degree that renders individual life insignificant in comparison. In face of the reflex assertion of the impulse of race-preservation the individual is brushed heedlessly aside. A group of miners will without thought descend one after another into a gas-filled chamber to rescue a fellow-workman from death and one after another share the fate of their comrade. We all know countless instances of this rescue-impulse as a response to the organic instinct of race unity. Nor is it confined to these more sensational expressions of the impulse. The scientist in his laboratory toiling daily with indefatigable energy, receiving usually a remuneration that is not adequate to his actual needs and too often without even the sympathetic appreciation on the part of his environment of the significance of his quest, as it relates to the communal need he would serve, expresses equally this same organic instinct of racial solidarity. Yet I do not lose sight of the secret unconsciousness and separativeness that actuate also the unconscious and adaptive reactions of even the most earnest and gifted of these thoughtful, patient investigators. I am not unaware of the delusions of competition and petty jealousy existing even among the ranks of the scientific student. I am not blinking the facts of his personal vanity, of his pride of place and distinction. I will not deny how like a child he is when, on the day of college commencement, he is afforded the opportunity to parade to music in cap and gown and vari-coloured academic emblems in order that, having assembled with his colleagues, he may unite in praise of an archaic deity in thanksgiving for His all-wise discrimination in having personally called him to the best of conceivable institutions in the best of conceivable lands, etc., etc. But, notwithstanding the obviously disparate regression observable in these vestiges of obsolete nursery rudiments, there is yet, extending beneath it all, the surge of an earnest, unifying purpose that embraces the confluent needs of human growth as offered in interests pursuant of common, social ends.

It is the inherent urge actuating this common societal impulse, as contrasted with the narrower motives of separateness and self, that is envisaged in an organismic point of view. I believe that through this organismic outlook alone we shall come to embody the meaning of the neurosis in its true, impartial significance. In this conception we shall be in a position to view differentiation, under whatsoever form it manifests itself, as the fallacy of self-sufficiency, as the delusion of separateness that it is. Whether presented in the more restricted, individualistic expression of an hysterical hemiplegia, for example, or under the wider social aspect, let us say, of national militarism, we shall no longer study the mere manifest content embodied in the obvious symptom or signal--a focal hemiplegia or a focal militarism--but we shall address ourselves, in each instance, to the societal personality as a whole that underlies each and that comprises for both the organic totality of consciousness. We shall realize that in that totality lies the responsibility for the division among its elements expressed alike in both manifestations. We shall see that in these two seemingly widely dissimilar instances, one expressing itself within the individual man, the other within the nations of men, the situation is the same. In one, differentiation is caused by a breach in the neural continuity of the organism as symbolized by the inert, functionally disaffected segment within the individual; in the other, by a breach in the societal continuity of the organism represented in the functional anomaly of manic self-assertion and segmentation within the social body as symbolized in the separative reaction that has lately so disorganized the Western World. However different in outer form, in both reactions there is alike expressed an unconscious assertion of autocracy or the will-to-self as opposed to the confluent life of the organism as a whole. And it is only as we view these expressions, one individual, the other social, as identical reactions and study them in an identical spirit of interpretation, that we shall recognize the essential principle of our biology exemplified in them, namely, the inherent inviolability of the confluent life of the organism, both individual and societal. Only in this organismic outlook shall we come to understand the true significance of the neuroses in the sense of really encompassing the disharmony embodied in them.

It should be clearly understood that in the view of this thesis it is not a question of discrimination between the social and the individual, but between the societal and the individual societally conceived on the one hand and the social and the individual individualistically conceived on the other.

From this position we have yet to encompass clearly the neurotic disharmony, individual or societal. We have yet to encompass in its real significance what is the most blatant expression of its societal embodiment. Because of our dissociative, individualistic outlook we have yet to consider the psychopathology underlying the phenomenon of war. We have failed to interpret its psychology in the light of the mental attitude that underlies and actuates it. We do not realize that the settlement of war is properly the concern not of politics but of psychiatry. Here, as elsewhere, we shrink from unearthing the actuality of the interred affect, preferring to preserve its image in the fanciful balm of our own illusions. Our horror of war is thus centred solely upon the façade it presents and not upon the inherent significance of war. Accordingly, our concern is merely to alter the aspect, the cognitive form, the mental picture, and, under this altered semblance due to our bidimensional alternation, we still retain the same affect submerged in the unconscious grievance of national separateness and antagonism. There is here the subjective fallacy of the transposed affect and the ancient metonymy of all unconsciousness.

A conspicuous symptom of our societal pathology is the subjective illusion underlying the latent “belief” that diplomatic overtures between nations are competent to cope with the essential disharmonies which, from time to time, tend to issue in the social symptomatology of war, but which are, in reality, due to causative factors deeply rooted in the psychopathology of man’s societal disunity. While not questioning the outstanding objective advantage of such superficial covenants as may secure to the social confederacies of nations at least a temporary cessation of their outward expressions of hostility, these surface amenities touch in no way the essential disorder. The real cause lies deeper and the real remedy must penetrate deeper. For the delusion of difference between nations, like the delusion of difference between individuals, is but the objective reflection of the subjective differentiation existing within the nation itself--a differentiation that is comparable to this same objective reflection existing within the individual as a subjective component of the national organism.

Just as the conflict underlying the neurosis of the individual is truly understood only through an analysis in the individual of the vicarious reactions that underlie it, so an understanding of the conflict underlying the neurosis that is societal may be attained only through an appreciation of the substitutive reactions of the group-mind as disclosed through an analysis of the group-consciousness.

Seen clearly, man’s restlessness to-day is, after all, the restlessness of intercepted growth. The tremors we are experiencing at this moment throughout the political and economic world undoubtedly owe their impulse to the awakening of a new order of consciousness. In the seething undercurrent of discontent throughout the social organism at the present time there is seen the symptom of a repression that is no longer reconcilable with the growing consciousness of that organism. As in the individual personality a condition of repression that has become too long pent must inevitably break forth in an ultimate overthrow of reason, so in the collection of individuals comprising the societal organism the ultimate response to a too long sustained repression can issue only in a correspondingly overwhelming disruption of the social personality.

In what has just been experienced sociologically as the World War, man is afforded an organic warning of the impending disintegration which lurks unseen beneath the surface crust of immediate and temporary social adaptations within the depths of his unconscious. In that far-sweeping manifestation there are felt the first rumblings of a sociological disturbance that bodes the utter destruction of our old order of habituations, and in that desperate expression of man’s social unconscious there is evident the need in which he stands of an earnest and far-searching self-analysis. For as overwhelming as is the catastrophe of the present war--and present it is--this catastrophe is but the detonator preceding the crash that is to come--a crash that has been gathering momentum within the unconscious of the race through centuries past and that will descend upon the world with inevitable fatality in the absence of a more societal and inclusive reckoning among us.

Without the recognition of the meaning of our disaffection, sociological as well as personal, without a more conscious realization of the social involvement of our personal separateness, it will not be possible for the creative forces resident within the personality of man to come into their natural fruition. But thus to encompass the organic disaffection that actuates the neurosis is to include it within ourselves. Thus to realize discrepancy is to make real within ourselves, where they exist in all their completeness, the division and antagonism of the disparate consciousness, be its countenance individualistic or social. Such a realization--such a comprehension of life in its manifold unconsciousness is a subjective, organic experience. The process is one that entails the slow divorce of self from the long habituations of our narrow domesticities, personal, familial and national. It involves the gradual sundering of the artificial sophistications of self-consciousness with which our childhood has been enclosed and in which were early laid the foundations of the dissociation that has now become automatic in the overwhelming impetus of its social involvement. The essence, then, of an understanding that truly encompasses the neurosis, consists in the recognition of our collective unconsciousness through the realization of a disaffection within and among ourselves as elements of a dissociated body-social.