CHAPTER III. The Organic Significance of the Unconscious

THE ORGANIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

In submitting a thesis which takes the position that the significance of the neurosis is its societal implication, and which lays the burden of its adjustment upon the societal mind at large, I fully realize that I am offering no welcome thought. The illusion of the separate self as all-sufficient and omnipotent is too obdurate not to regard with suspicion any attempt to dislodge it. Whatever the postulate, belief or argument, there lurks beneath it, in the mind of each of us, the unconscious determination to preserve intact the secret illusion of his own separateness. As long, however, as this affective fallacy underlies the reactions of our collective mentality, all efforts toward a reconstruction of society upon grounds of a more conscious and adult adaptation are futile. The adaptive and compensatory nature of the normal or collective mind occasions dissociation in all the activities arising out of it. With our mental outlook based upon illusion, our reactions are illusory. No matter how imposing in their manifest content, they are fundamentally spurious and undependable. For having been organically dissociated through the interdiction of the parent, normality is necessarily self-conscious and vicarious. This accounts for the ease with which the normal mind resorts to the replacements represented in mysticism. In the manifold expressions of mysticism the social mind finds its ulterior placations. This accounts for the habitual self-propitiations underlying its cherished superstitions and “beliefs,” and explains the whole meaning of the man-made immanence represented in the vicariously projected image of invincible omnipotence we call “God”--an image with which we childishly seek to ally ourselves in order to sustain our impotent separateness. Men are tenacious of the substitution that is their “God” in a degree far beyond their suspecting. It is in vain that they pretend to throw Him off in the mere insolence of their reactionary “disbelief.” In their very challenge is His sovereignty reaffirmed. For wherever there is dogmatism there is doubt, and beliefs that are denied are unconsciously not less fixed and ineradicable than beliefs that are affirmed. As long as there is unconsciousness so long will men be a prey to its tyrannical alternatives. Though they break or kiss the rod, it is upon them still.

Man will be slow to relinquish this symbol of God popularly employed by him as a defence against the free, unsponsored growth of his own spirit. It is a symbol, as are all symbols of the unconscious, that has been erected by us as a protection for the disparate self against the confluent life of our common organism. Indeed it is precisely in this collective illusion that is man’s most desperate recourse. Yet, in our very extremity and in the very tenacity with which we cling to this illusion, there is to be seen, as always, a symbol for which the only warrant is the profound reality that underlies it. In so far as the organically true is denied, there inevitably ensues the vicariously false, and the insistence of the substituted equivalent is invariably the more intense in proportion to the urge of the organic need withheld. It is organic law.

Recalling the past, it is interesting to consider how conscientiously we have carried the biological method of research into the various objective fields of scientific inquiry. Yet, in regard to the subjective sphere wherein our own reality resides, we have persistently befuddled our perceptions through an unconscious adherence to the childish tenets of fear and superstition, instead of studying the phylogenetic account of our inherent mental descent in the spirit of objective disinterestedness. For, unconsciously yielding habitual perceptions the supreme place even in the laboratories of consciousness, as embodied in the researches of analysis itself, we have continued to preserve the unconscious image of self habitually disguised under our personal interpretation of God. Restoring the form of the idol from time to time by covering the rent with a temporarily stouter fabric whenever the straw has appeared, we have continued to maintain the self-flattering programme of our vicarious and self-protected image-worship. Men apparently do not yet begin to recognize that the socially consolidated aberration constituting their image of God is an illusion that is identical with the individual expression long recognized by psychiatry under the clinical characterization of “ideas of reference.” Still seriously discoursing of the symbol called “God,” they assume that their image possesses an actuality apart from their own imagining.

More significant still, however, is the fact that psychiatry too has its God. Objectively defining ideas of reference in others, we have failed to reckon with the subjective presence of this same replacement within ourselves. While we psychiatrists would carefully note the tendency to transposed affects within the arbitrary systems of the insane, we have wholly missed count of this same tendency within our own autocratic system. Among psychiatrists the favoured Deity is Dementia Præcox. The symptoms, reactions and prognostications assigned to the image implied in this arbitrary superscription attain with us to a quite endless category. And such is the subtlety with which the insidious tendency to the vicarious (affective displacement) secretly insinuates itself even into the courts of the elect, that individual personality is again and again led into the unsuspected trap that is our habitual confusion of the symbol for the reality that underlies it.

In truth “Dementia Præcox,” the disease, is but the symbolic projection of dementia præcox, the actuality, ever resident in our generic unconsciousness. As it is the primary state of the infant psyche, its rudiment is preserved in the unconscious of us all. The understanding and acceptance of this biological substrate of consciousness within oneself offers the only condition of its solution. In this subjective course lies the whole significance of a really organic analysis. To hold a theoretical, objective attitude toward the insanities is to remain under the thrall of the social unconscious. To preserve our own repressions by attempting to deny this preconscious factor within ourselves is merely to perpetuate this regressive trend under its present symbolic guise. Theoretical substitution is the big-stick of normality of which an objective analysis is the butt-end. To maintain the normal, psychiatric, adaptive outlook is to be repressed, vicarious, theoretical. And by our attitude of aloofness we merely preserve in unconscious form in ourselves the symptom-complex we stigmatize as dementia præcox in others. But we cannot alleviate a mental disorder from which we stand apart. It is only as we accept the testimony of its rudimentary presence within our own consciousness that its significance in the consciousness of others may become clear.

Of dementia præcox, the disease, psychiatry is in fact more a cause than a cure, just as mothers and doctors who habitually hold to a mental attitude of personal ministration and concern, however handy they may be in untoward emergency, are more an occasion than a remedy for disease in general. And so the real disorder, after all, is not dementia præcox but psychiatry. When the psychiatrist will have come to understand dementia præcox or the preconscious within himself, this objective figment of his own disordered consciousness will spontaneously vanish.

To-day, the symbol of the social mind that is called “God”--the symbol under which man has worshipped himself so confidingly throughout the ages--is gradually losing its symbolic adequacy and, as is typical when the foothold of man’s unconscious threatens to be dislodged, he is hastily replacing his shattered idol with an image that bears a new, a subtler and a more plausible disguise. Even in schools representing developments of the Freudian psychology and presumably devoted to impartial analytic inquiry into man’s unconscious, we find this same unconscious self-worship shifted from the broken image of “God” to a merely revarnished symbol set up upon the same altar and called by the newer name of “Love.” Though the form is altered, the substance remains the same. It is again man’s self-love projected into the spurious objective that best lends to it the flattering security of the seemingly real.

I do not say that there is not in life an essential unity or love. I do not say that there is not for man an answer to the need he feels in his relentless but misguided pursuit of such an underlying reality. What I do say is that the unity he may find is the substance whereof the unity he is seeking is but the shadow; that in his unconsciousness he has not yet begun to seek the reality that is the need of his essential, organic life; and that, failing the reality which resides alone in the confluent, unified life of our common consciousness, he has pursued the temporary and personal satisfactions whereof such fanciful image-projections as “God” and “Love” are but hysterical replacements.

What is significant is the fact that, under however subtle a guise he may clothe it, every individual in the great confederacy of “normality” entertains and is actuated by some form of “belief”--a “belief” either in “God” or “Love” or in some other concept that is the emotional equivalent of these more general fabrications of our collective unconscious. But in the image fashioned of belief there is seen the inevitable process of compensation vicariously exacted of us by virtue of our denying the fulfilment of the organic reality of life. The dissociated mind can of necessity observe only dissociatively. In its repudiation of reality it resorts perforce to vicarious images of reality. It is for this reason that the normal mind is the mystical mind. In its organic disunity it cannot be otherwise. Although it seek under manifold signs and symptoms to conceal the tell-tale of its stigma, its blight is betrayed by countless evidences of its dissociation from the societal or organic personality. And it is not in the nature of the object that consists the element of the mystical in our human pathology but in the mode in which the object is regarded. The objects of man’s mystical devotion offer an infinitely varied range. They may readily be presented by a host of images expressing the widest discrepancy in manifest content--for example, one’s conception of the cosmogony, “the true artist,” a scientific discovery, the “error of mortal mind,” one’s exchequer, “to-morrow” with its ever receding illusion of postponement, or a cult of mental healing with texts setting forth the ultimate solution of life; or, on the other hand, an autogenic sexual fetish, as one’s body, the unreal image one causes to stand for one’s mother, a favourite offspring, “God,” or “the superlative woman.” Among certain people a very popular vehicle for the mystical mode is one’s “voice.” To-day, too, there are people who talk in subdued whispers of the spiritual virtues of raw foods and who dilate by the hour upon the merits of lettuce--as though it were the millennium. Then there is to be noted the high place in mystical sanctuaries which the family escutcheon occupies among its votaries. There are people extant (I confess I am one of them) who still tend to entertain the belief that a reality underlies the social concept “good family.” And--comedy of comedies!--such is the subtlety with which the element of the mystical or of vicarious self-worship evades the reality of consciousness that the very “sincerity” with which one comes to “relinquish” such objects of infantile illusion may itself actually rank among the spurious images of this identical category! Seriously fancying herself well on toward the goal of her analysis, if not quite arrived, one of my patients remarked to another: “I want nothing.” It was spoken very gently, almost imperceptibly, so in keeping was the rendering with the spirit of its author. But it is evident that at least she wanted to be regarded as not wanting anything, else she would have felt no occasion to remark her detached state. But how exquisite the subtlety here! Another says: “I want to get rid of things, that I may be more free.” Getting rid of things or husbanding them may equally fall within the mystical or dissociated mode. As for one’s “freedom” there is no object, unless it be one’s “truth,” that constitutes a more popular idol under which to hide the mystical fetish of one’s secret self-worship. But whatever the vehicle, that which gives to it the hall-mark of the mystical is its quality of an inner, esoteric experience possessing an indefinable, transcendental meaning revealed alone to the peculiarly favoured possessor. Observe here the characteristic element of distinction, the factor of favouritism, the inseparable paranoid element of special delegation. For the object, after all, as every object of the unconscious, is no other than the self or the parent from the point of view respectively of the parent or the self, and our civilized world of boasted normality becomes upon investigation but a nursery of ungrown childhood, filled to overflowing with bogus Gods and goblins!

As the child lost in the street anxiously scans the face of every passer-by in the hope of discovering the features of his mother, so the grown-up, who has lost the quiet continuity of his organic life and flounders amid a world of dissociative habituations and ulterior ends, eagerly searches the countenances of all whom he meets, in the driving urge to incarnate anew the cherished image of his mother. The difference is that everywhere and in every one he finds her. And not his mother alone but his father, his brothers, his sisters, uncles and aunts, and with them (such is the magic of unconsciousness) the whole array of traditional furnishings reminiscent of his childhood’s scenery. For as his images are born of his fancy, his fancy may create them at his will. Thus the world at large is but the family at large and the social genre but the mother.

In contemplating this identification of “the world” with one’s mother we come to sense more intimately the real significance in normality of the widely featured phenomenon of suggestibility. As suggestion is the affirmative expression whereof repression is the negative form, suggestion, like repression, is but the operation upon the individual of the will of the consensus, of which we all, of course, are the only too willing dupes. For just as our succumbing to repression is the individual’s rejection of the consensual mind, so our succumbing to suggestion is the individual’s acquiescence in the consensual mind. So that, whether the impetus be the factor of suggestion or of repression, whether it be offered in the positive inducements to “good” behaviour or in the negative disparagements to “bad” behaviour, in either case one is but fancifully subjecting himself to the domination of the parental will in the expanded guise of the consensual unconscious. Contrary to popular belief, suggestion is no clinical specific; it is a social pandemic. The doctor does not wield it, it wields him. So that as suggestion and repression, or the will of normality (normality means “accepted rule” by the way), are but the will of the parent, it is the will of the parent that is really the “power” of suggestion. And as the influence exerted by suggestion, like the influence exerted by the parent, is based upon the mental precept of good and bad, suggestion like repression is necessarily separative in its effect. For its self-reflective tendency necessarily induces in us the inversion of self-worship. Again it is the discontinuity of the dissociative self in the separatism of its own unconsciously induced image.

When we come to contemplate this childishness in ourselves, we are naturally loath to admit that all our beliefs are but make-beliefs, and our privately cherished convictions of certitude but the compensatory assumptions of mysticism and dissociation. To the man who entertains the inner conviction that the girl of his heart is just the one woman in the whole world for him, it were futile to point out his inconsistency by recalling an identical “belief” maintained no less stoutly by him a few months ago in regard to his last year’s beloved. It were as futile as to attempt to expound to a paranoiac, who has proof that he is descended from Napoleon, that he is the unconscious prey to unwarranted ideas of grandeur. Both of these esoterists will only look you blandly in the face and explain to you compassionately that “you just do not understand.”

Truly, of the tissue of illusion is the fabric of unconsciousness, whether presented under the form of hysteria, mysticism or suggestion. All being alike dissociative, all are alike inaccessible to the arguments of an organic logic. And more and more it seems to me that when we who are psychoanalysts consider our unconscious preoccupation with the concept, the symbolic equivalent, the theory of consciousness as a substitute for the daily lived actuality of man’s organic life in its totality, there is due the admission that psychoanalysis too, as it now exists among us, is itself no less an equivocation, a “belief,” an hysterical replacement for the common, organic confluence of our societal life. Indeed, precisely because of its high claim as representing the court of ultimate conscious appeal, psychoanalysis requires to be brought to book more than any other of the manifold dissociative reactions coming under an indictment that envisages our collective, social unconscious. We who are psychoanalysts talk of the joyous enfranchisement of consciousness and growth as compared with the palsying limitations of unconsciousness and regression, when all the while we neglect to impeach the unconsciousness of our own lives and the narrow interests of personalism and self that govern them. Because in our own normality we are ourselves so comfortably ensconced in the social security of the collective unconscious about us, we fail to recognize our own embroilment in it. And so, in the impregnable solidarity of mere mass supremacy, our own assumed validity passes unchallenged by us.

To cite an example that is closest to me: I have repeatedly held forth to patients concerning the potential joy inherent in adult love regarded in the light of the unifying principle of life, as though I myself participated in its subjective actuality in the simple, undifferentiated mode of my own daily living, when in fact I was only unconsciously exploiting the vicarious concept or symbol or theory of love, such as can only stand in the way of and obstruct the organic significance of love in its actuality. Thus, in spite of ourselves, unconsciousness makes disparate elements of us all. Indeed, it may more truly be said “because of ourselves” rather than “in spite of ourselves,” for, in an organic sense, self (the separative entity) and disparity are synonymous.

But, however serious a situation that involves a world-wide neurosis, we may not take it tragically. The tragedy of it, after all, is only the unconsciousness of it. When we shall have truly analyzed the drama of the unconscious which now we but enact, there can be no tragedy, for the fabric of tragedy is woven merely of the elements of human “fate” in its embodiment of the unconscious. There is the need, however, to view our situation thoughtfully. Consciousness, in the sense of a true comprehension of life, will come into its own only when we have learned to look upon the humiliating spectacle of our dissociated selves with what enforced forbearance we can temporarily command. Our present attitude will continue to endure until more and more the disheartening sense of our disparities becomes accepted by us in an outlook that, having grown inclusive, has become our automatic and habitual mode.

Paradoxical as it may sound, consciousness has turned the heads of us all! As it has turned them in a direction that has been inward upon our own image, each of us, as a result, has built of his individual organism a little separate entity unto himself--an entity which in its organic dissociation from life as a whole is necessarily wrought of a spurious fibre. Developmentally man is the biological snob par excellence. Scorning the slower accretions of growth that can alone imbue him with true biological culture, in his effort “to attain” he has attempted to pass too hastily from his humble category of vertebrate to the more socially elevated plane of “cerebrate.” The result is that what he assumes to be cerebration is really but a fictitious brain-state that has become entirely withdrawn from continuity with his organic life. So that from the point of view of consciousness in the sense of an integral mental life--the especial mark whereby we claim prerogative over all other species--man is, by this very token, the least integrant of them all!

And yet, when we think of it, our predicament is really no shame to us. Consciousness is, after all, a very recent asset among us. That we should treasure it narrowly, personally, is but the inevitable entail of its slow, laborious evolution. It is as if, in our societal separativeness, our race had grown grey before its childhood had begun and we were now out of breath keeping pace with ourselves. For it is only our separativeness that has prematurely burdened us with the crushing weight of self-imposed responsibilities such as are the concomitant toll of our hallucinated self-sufficiency. Unlike the adult, the spontaneous joy of children is their whole-hearted participation in the free, impersonal radiation of life. Unlike ourselves, their personal importance has not yet defeated their impersonal significance. As yet they do not live under the curse of a dogma of conduct. Theirs is no creed of behaviour that is of one cloth with an enforced pretence of “goodness.” Their lives are not a daily concession to fanciful needs of self-protection against an arbitrarily predicated world of “evil.” Adult vigilance, however, early inculcates its delusion of separateness--of a self to be defended against other selves--and its dissociative influence is slowly imparted to the confiding mind of childhood. In a world of dissociation this universal suggestion acts with powerful effectiveness, and the child of yesterday, having once been inducted into the general guild of secret mistrust and compensatory behaviourism and grown to parenthood, may be safely trusted to pass on without question the secret code of differentiation, self-distinction and disharmony to the offspring by which he is in turn succeeded.

When God called Adam and took him to task for going about naked (for eating of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”), asking him if he felt no sense of shame, Adam’s prompt response was to betake himself to the bushes overcome with embarrassment. Whereas obviously the logical response on Adam’s part would have been: “By no means. I am the outcome of your own handicraft and if there is any flaw in the product it is not for me to feel chagrin.” As a matter of fact, Adam was in nowise different from the rest of us. But there he crouched, submissively answerable for the work of his creator and there he has got us all crouching ever since! God, of course, employed the familiar parental recourse and intimidated Adam, calling from afar to him in his place of hiding. As was calculated, the strategy was completely effective and promptly brought Adam to his knees. All of which legend is but the allegorical statement of the simple organic truth that shame has first to be artificially induced in us before it can be experienced by us. Division or shame having been put into us, of course we feel division or shame.

If we have become aware of ourselves and of our unprotectedness, it has been quite in the order of our evolution. But by the same process it is now high time for us to realize that there is no need of protection, and accordingly to come out of hiding and recognize that our fear and our self-protection, being alike identical with the myth of Adam’s indiscretion, are alike induced in us by the identical process of an external word of repression or command thrust in upon an essentially inherent and consonant mode.

In the absence of our realization of this blunder into which we have fallen, from generation to generation we unconsciously repudiate the natural unity of our common life in favour of a life prompted by sophistication and disparity. Ourselves begotten of alien affects, our feelings in turn breed diverse cross-strains which can issue only in equally hybrid reactions. We refuse to see that the “evil,” alike with the “good,” is naught but the delusion of separateness extraneously induced in us through our artificial self-consciousness. This subjective division within us is the essential meaning of the all-pervasive bogey of our so-called incest-awe. As I see it, incest-awe is the organic inconsistency of this division within the organically indivisible sphere of man’s essential feeling. Normality is unconsciously under its thrall because, through its organic disunity, normality has unconsciously placed itself under its sentence. Psychically normality is incestuous and hence its awe. The degree of its awe or guilt-revulsion is precisely the measure of its psychic inbreeding. The more organically unwelcome the infolding, the more organically outraged or neurotic the personality, and, accordingly, the greater the awe or feeling-conflict resultant upon our unconscious intimations of organic “guilt.” Our sexual self-consciousness is the perennial fig-leaf of early tradition foliating anew in our critical Twentieth Century. It is the division of the self of behaviour from the self of spontaneity, of the self as disparate entity from the self as an integral element in our common organic life that is the meaning of the incest-awe as of the neurosis, in its social as well as in its individual expression.

When once we have assumed the broader organismic outlook, we shall see that, beyond a more extended compass of vision, there is really nothing of an innovation in this societal mode of envisagement. In respect to all systems coming under scientific observation, we have habitually entertained a biological conception of the relation inter se of the elements to their aggregate that is identical with the conception offered in the present theme. Hitherto the area generally considered has merely been circumscribed within narrower limits, that is all. When we shall have learned to move aside from our personal involvement in it, we shall see presented an organic phenomenon which upon examination consists of a dissociation within the societal organism. We shall see that this dissociation involves disharmony in respect to the mental and social relationships of the unit-elements or individuals that comprise ourselves and constitute inter se the larger biological aggregate of our common consciousness. Maintaining our impersonal angle of envisagement and turning to the idea of the sum of the more circumscribed biological aggregate constituting the individual, we see that this dissociation is, in reality, identical with the dissociation within the individual organism that manifests itself as impairment of harmony in respect to the physiological or functional relationships of the units or cells comprising its ultimate elements. When we lose sight of our place as common elements within the organic aggregate of mankind--as in the absence of an encompassing organismic point of view we must--we tend to separate arbitrarily the biological continuity of the two spheres, the individual and the societal. Because of our own subjective involvement we fail to recognize that the societal sphere, in the more inclusive sense, is the aggregate whereof the individual is the unit, precisely as in the more circumscribed physiological view the body cells are the units of which the individual is himself the aggregate. Between the two spheres there is a progressive continuity. There is no interruption of the organic transition from one to the other. For the psychological or the societal and the functional or physiological are continuous.

It is evident that every bodily lesion consists of a separation among the elements of the impaired part. If among the cells of the liver, for example, there is produced the condition of disharmony or disease represented by a state of inflammation, there inevitably occurs some partition, some breach in or interruption of their concerted function, or of the function of the organism as a whole. The unfailing signal wherewith the individual is apprised of the destructive process is the reaction subjectively registered as pain or a sympathetic awareness on the part of the aggregate organism of the disordered condition of these elements constituting a part of itself. Such a disordered state or lesion being thus reported to the central system, as it were, the immediate response is an outcry of pain and a prompt recourse to remedial aids. The organism as a whole, experiencing pain, reflexly demands relief, for the reason that impairment of the organism in any of its parts is a menace to its integrity as a whole. That is to say, when any one of us as an aggregate experiences pain in any part whereof he is the whole--when he experiences some local inflammation or separation within the elements of a part or organ within himself, he promptly directs his efforts toward its alleviation. But in the organic whole comprising the societal aggregate whereof he, as an individual, is the contributive element or part, the situation, as we shall in a moment see, is wholly altered. As related parts or elements within the larger organic aggregate, it is we ourselves who are the separative process--the circumscribed area of inflammation.

It is essential to bear in mind that the organic pathology of this biological lesion or separation that is the individual’s dissociation from the inherent continuum of his organic, racial congeners is a condition that is conterminous with the individual’s division or separation within himself. For organically there is no difference between himself and his congeners. Thus in respect to this societal lesion the individual element bears a twofold relation, an intrinsic and an extrinsic one. The element as an individual within the societal organism on the one hand is the source of the lesion. And on the other hand, as an organic participant in the confluent race consciousness, this same element or individual experiences the lesion as a menace to the integrity of his own organic consciousness or of his confluent life as a whole. The individual is thus the contained and the container, the stimulus and the response. Herein lies the unassuageable poignancy of the neurotic conflict. It is a conflict between the part and the whole, wherein the individual is the embodiment of both. Since he is unconsciously the part while inherently the whole, his conflict is one that is concomitantly individual and societal, for the individual and the societal factors are organically inseparable.

Just as in a comprehensive inquiry into the structural development of the organism it is necessary to consider not only the biological characters occurring in the development of the individual but also the corresponding characters observable in the development of the race, so in an organismic study of consciousness it is necessary that we keep in mind the essential parallelism between its individual and its phyletic trends. Analogous to what we know of the facts of comparative biology in the structural sphere, the organic consciousness of man, which we see expressed ontogenetically in the essential continuity of the individual personality, finds its phylogenetic expression in the inherent continuity of the societal organism. Accordingly, as the miscarriage of this primary continuity of consciousness is to be seen in the dissociation of the single personality, so the miscarriage of man’s societal personality is correspondingly to be seen in the social dissociation of the collective unconscious. After all, the consciousness of the individual is but the consciousness of the race in miniature, and the personal dissociation within the individual is, therefore, only the miniature expression of the social dissociation within our societal consciousness. In other words, as one’s individual organism is a replica of the social organism, the dissociation of the social mind is identical with the dissociation of the individual mind. For, since the societal and the individual factors of evolution are identical in their course, the social and the personal factors of dissociation are also identical. Hence the dissociation that is personal is necessarily social; the neurosis we study in the individual is necessarily concomitant to a neurosis within the wider social polity.

Let us now compare the difference in the subjective reaction of the individual according as he is himself the aggregate experiencing pain in any part of his organism, or as he is himself a part unconsciously contributing to the lesion within the organism comprising our common societal aggregate. As central system presiding over his own individual organism we have seen his prompt recourse to agencies of relief at the least trespass upon the integrity of any organ or part within himself. But observe the total reversal of reaction when he himself, as a single individual element, is the pathological instance threatening the integrity of the organic aggregate that encompasses him as a single individual element. Mark how he struggles in blind collusion with the disruptive process he unconsciously or separatively embodies. Such is precisely the behaviour of the neurotic individual and such is precisely the meaning of his “resistance.” For in such a situation he seeks recourse to every conceivable avenue of evasion and of symbolic disguise in order to escape the protests of pain in the central inherent system resident in the common societal consciousness and experienced by him in its continuum with his own essential life. In the spirit of his behaviour he is exactly comparable to an individual who, on succumbing to a local disease-process, would seek to stifle the organism’s premonitory pain in order to aid the toxic invasion and further its ravage within his own tissues! Such, however, in our unconsciousness is precisely the case with each of us. Each of us, in his misguided, ingrown self-interest, constituting in himself the pain and impairment that operate within and against the organic societal aggregate, contends in his self-protection not against but in favour of the disease-process which, from the point of view of the societal, organic life, is his own destruction. He seeks not its interruption but its continuance, not its remedy but its aggravation, precisely as the inflammatory process in any organ within the body seeks to maintain its separateness and prolong to a fatal issue the destructive process in the individual.

It is characteristic of separateness that it fights desperately for its own separative ends. Separateness, being destructive, must operate destructively. It would even seem that this self-destructive tendency on the part of the isolated component is the penalty imposed by the societal organism to safeguard itself against the tendency--among any of its elements as parts--to infringe upon the integral sum of elements constituting the organic whole. But if the separateness of the part is its own destruction, concomitantly the confluence of the whole is its own conservation. If the neurotic regarded individually, or as the embodiment within himself of a societal lesion, is an expression of separatism and pathology, the neurotic viewed organically, or as the embodiment within himself of the societal continuum, is no less an expression of confluence and health. If, in the first instance, he is himself the disorder that is his own separatism and unconsciousness, in the second he is the integration that is his own confluence and consciousness. It is this constructive aspect of the neuroses of which we have not yet taken account and of which we may take due cognizance only upon the basis of a wider, organismic interpretation of these disorders of the personality. It is the understanding of these disharmonies in the light of their congeneric significance, and their encompassment as morbid processes operating within the separative individual organism to obstruct the function of the societal organism as a whole, that is the significance of an organismic formulation of the neuroses.