CHAPTER IV

ORGANIC ANALYSIS OF REPRESSION AND OF THE FACTOR OF RESISTANCE FROM THE SOCIETAL VIEWPOINT

The psychic phenomenon with which Freud was confronted in the very inception of his work was the element of repression and its concomitant reflection in the objective reaction of resistance. The resolution of this factor of repression or resistance Freud came very early to regard as the essential problem of psychoanalysis. But, as we have seen, Freud’s conception of resistance was inevitably coloured by his own individualistic monocular, and in consequence it was not possible for him to view the neurosis of the individual in its societal implication. Lacking a societal basis of interpretation, he could not see that the resentment toward one’s fellows comprising the individual’s social resistance is merely the individual’s objective evasion of the subjective disaffection within his own essential organism. Mistaking the mere symbol of the individual for the inherent continuity of individuality, Freud could not see the biology of resistance as the breach it is in the individual’s continuity with life as a confluent, organic whole.

From an organismic viewpoint, the individual’s reaction of resistance or his effort to project upon his fellows the pain of his subjective curtailment and repression only illustrates further the essential sociology of the neuroses. In the fuller light of a societal basis it may be seen that the mechanism of social replacement embodying resistance is purely symptomatic of the individual’s constraint toward a surface rationalization of his own inherent grievance. His grudge is not personal, it is societal. It is not logical, it is biological. Residing wholly within himself, it involves only himself. His tendency to refer his grievance to the attitude of others is due to his own separative habituation and to his consequent effort to escape the seeming isolation of his biological responsibility toward it. And so the problem of resistance is central, not peripheral. Like its close kin charity (if not its very self in the garb of religious sentimentalism) the relinquishment of resistance is a benison that begins at home. It may not be inculcated through theoretical precept nor through the subtlest refinement of a technique based upon a system of analysis, but only through our actual participation in the societal confluence that is its underlying biology. Our very theory of resistance as an impediment to life is itself a resistance. For no formulation of life can function as life. It is only life itself in its organic confluence that may abrogate the separateness that is the essence of resistance. Whether in the societal or in the individual sphere, whether in the sphere we arbitrarily designate as psychological (mental) or in that we call functional (physiological), the question of health or disease hangs solely upon the issue as to whether the element--cell or system--functions integrally or separatively, congruently or resistantly. Under the limitations of a dissociative reaction toward the confluent, societal organism as a whole, such as constitutes our present socially affective mode, the individual organism cannot but react disaffectedly, and hence further the disruptive tendencies that breed disharmony within its own life. The dissociated organism can function only dissociatively.

If it is true of the world at large that each is against each, if throughout the tissue of the societal fabric every element is maintaining its own separateness against every other element, where may there be found a way to restore the condition of societal confluence that is the basis of man’s inherent life? Clearly, if this separation from the organic life takes place within the individual, its reconcilement must take place also within the individual. As, however, the individual is but a replica of every other individual--an organic world in miniature in the complex of sensations and emotions comprising his own personality--the reconcilement of the organic conflict within himself, or his own unification of personality as an integral part of the continuum uniting the whole, is also the reconcilement and the unification of himself with his congeners. Naturally, such a reconcilement cannot be the achievement of the individual as a separate social unit, but only of the individual as an integral element in the organic unit of our common life.

It is just here that there needs to be unearthed the essential fallacy of Freud, as of us all--a fallacy that has been the inevitable outcome of a habit of reasoning that is inseparable from the disparate social unit and its dissociative mode. Precluding within himself a participation in the organic societal mode, it was, of course, not possible that Freud should take account, in any inclusive organismic sense, of causative elements lying within this mode. Reasoning from the biased premises of an unconscious separatism, he could reckon only with elements falling within the scope of the separative mode, that is, he could only reckon personally--I mean in the sense of dissociatively rather than integrally.

In Freud’s conception of the neurosis the condition embodies a repression of sexuality. That is, sexuality, regarded as synonymous with the sexual instinct, is posited as the primary factor of which the attitude of repression is a subsequent issue. In other words, sexuality or the “libido,” as commonly understood (the separative will-to-self in the view of the present interpretation) is in Freud’s formulation the basic, antecedent element, and repression (whatever the occasion--lack of adequate outlet perhaps or the inadmissible character of the sexual impulse) is the organism’s automatic recourse operating as a result. So that Freud assigns the cause of a mental disharmony to the subject’s repressed sexuality, and the basis of his analytic procedure has been very logically the endeavour to remedy the situation through an adjustment of the sexual life. Accordingly, it is the essence of the individualistic position of Freud that the neurosis is represented in life’s repression of sexuality; while it is the essence of the organismic attitude here defined that the neurosis consists in sexuality’s repression of life. In brief, according to the dynamic conception of Freud, the basis from which individual life takes its origin is represented in a heterogeneous substrate that is biologically discrete and “polymorph perverse”; whereas in the genetic conception of the present formulation life traces its source to a homogeneous matrix that is organically confluent and unitary.

In the light of a conception which assumed that the integrity of consciousness resides within the personality of the individual, Freud’s confusion was inevitable. Yet viewed even from the standpoint of the individual, the factors of repression and sexuality can be regarded only in the light of organic concomitants. Under whichever of these alternate forms of reaction it may appear, both forms are the inevitable extremes of the dilemma due to the conflict that has been artificially created within the organism. Both are the individual’s restless evasion and substitution following inevitably upon its separation from its primary organic source. Although repression and sexuality are organic concomitants, being simultaneous in their occurrence and in their efficacy equal and contrary, the factor of repression is dynamically the prior instance. This is true precisely in the sense that the pressure of my hand as I lay it upon the table is dynamically the prior stimulus, though the two elements involved--my hand and the table--are from the point of view of the respective pressures exerted by each, mutually coincident and equal. Considered in the light of individualistic consciousness (unconsciousness), repression with its actuation in the alternative of infantile fear or “goodness” and sexuality with its compensatory reaction in the alternative of infantile defiance or “badness” are inseparable and conterminous. For repression and sexuality are equally the result in the individual of the factor of organic disunity in the societal consciousness. There is the need to emphasize the fact that the reaction of sexuality as it abounds among us is currently confused with the basic instinct of sex. In point of fact sexuality is the direct antithesis of this organic expression.

The vast mass of the literature of sexuality embraced under sexology, with its voluminous representation of man’s symbolic relation to life, will some day undoubtedly appear comparable in value to the equally formidable array of literary compilations that discourse of God and of man’s extraordinarily complex relationship to Him included in a no less voluminous theology. As articulate in form, as sympathetic in treatment and as logical in development as both these themes undoubtedly are, it will ultimately be seen, I believe, that both are equally open to serious criticism and both on identical grounds, namely, that in respect to the matter of each, there is no matter there. I mean literally that, in default of the objective reality of the subjects treated under the two discussions by their respective authors, both treatises are in their nature utterly spurious. In Ellis as in Calvin, in Freud as in Aquinas, the sexuality envisaged in one system no less than the divinity envisaged in the other lacks a basis of reality. Both are vicarious rationalizations of the collective unconscious due to the effort to compensate its repression of the organic integrity of our common, societal consciousness. The concept “God” in the one instance, and its counterpart, obsessive sexuality in the other, are in the meantime made to serve the expedience of temporary symbols.

It is noteworthy that man is the only species of the animal world whose communal life requires for its regulation a system either of sexology or of theology. Concomitantly, one cannot but remark the far stronger co-operative instinct existing among the animals and the consequently incalculably greater societal solidarity of our less “conscious” kinsfolk as compared with our own!

Approaching the problem of the neurosis anew from the vantage coign of a more inclusive, integral background, I have come to regard the factors of sexuality and repression as standing to each other in a relationship that is the exact reverse of that assumed by Freud--the factor of repression being from this altered viewpoint the primary cause and sexuality the incidental result entailed by it.

To make clear what I mean, it is necessary to view the societal aggregate, with its basis in our organic consciousness, as an entity distinct from that of the separative individual unit with its basis in our dissociated unconscious. The element of repression is incident to the interruption of our functional participation in the unitary race consciousness. The separative, dissociated attitude of mind that precipitates the obsessive, dissociated and resistant individual is a development consequent upon this interruption. So that it is only as we come to recognize our need to include the sphere of man’s integral organic life that the conception of repression as a factor anterior to sexuality may be understood in its biological import. To this end our conception of the organic societal consciousness needs to acquire the coherency of clearer form and definition. We need to take account of the original, racial solidarity of man’s consciousness and to consider the interpenetrations of common instincts and habits that originally ramified throughout the undifferentiated mental tissue of our common species, knitting its contributing elements into a unitary, homogeneous organism. We need to form a clearer image of the uniform, co-ordinated one-mindedness of this primordial, “multi-cellular” organism that was man. In brief, we need to recognize the individual that was originally the aggregate consciousness of the race. For, to consider man’s phylogeny at this period of his evolution is to consider a unitary organism. It is to break through the prejudice of the separative mode of individual men and reckon immediately with the unified principle of consciousness as a whole, from which only later there diverged the separative elements represented in the dissociated units we ourselves now comprise, but which unified principle survives to-day unaltered in the common unity of our confluent societal personality.

Such is the parent organism from which we trace the course of our psychobiological descent. Such is the parent organism from which we trace as well our psychobiological dissent! For it is evident that at a certain stage in the growth of this nuclear, racial organism there must have arisen those first faint stirrings which subsequently entailed man’s earliest reckonings with the nebulous beginnings of his self-awareness. This reaction whereby mind for the first time grew aware of itself was thus a societal reaction. It involved the aggregate, not the element. Its scope was ethnic, not individual. It was the primal awareness of man’s organic consciousness. In our unconsciousness we deny the reality of this biological phylum embodied in our organic consciousness and underlying the processes of our individual mentation. For this reason we seek perforce to appease our organic need through the imaginary solaces of a fanciful immanence that is but the unconscious symbol of the immanent and encompassing actuality of this common consciousness. In our unconsciousness we deny the collateral immediacy of our societal inclusiveness and for this reason we project the lineal image of indefinite extension composing man’s dream of a personal life eternal. Denying our organic unity of compass, we compensate in a fanciful unity of duration. Denied his societal participation in a communal earth, man’s need can only vent itself in the private illusion of a sectarian heaven. After all, life in its reality is immediate. Philosophy ad infinitum to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no “time” like the present! When we can enter heartily into the realization of the “pseudo” quality of our mental unctions, we may begin to sense more closely the organic inevitableness of such symbolic equivalents as the generic folk-image of “God” and the infinite corps of His understudies, impressed one after another into the service of man’s inverted narcism. We may, then, realize that nowhere is nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum more vigorously asserted than in the organic intolerance of consciousness toward the voids of unreality. We may, then, understand how, upon the slightest suspension of reality in the sphere of consciousness, a symbolic surrogate will inevitably fill the rift with a punctuality that is automatic. This is reality’s ultimate test of reality. It is the unfailing standard of the organism in its measure of the actual. Here is truth’s organic criterion.

In their original organic commonness, individuals were complete and sufficient. They were undisturbed by the separative attitude of mind that mars our present development with competition and dissension. They did not spend their days in self-interested comparison. They had not yet come into the conflict of a self-conscious image-worship. In this sense--that the mental tissue of our common species was then undifferentiated--the aggregate consciousness of the race was synonymous with the consciousness of the individual. It was an organically unified consciousness.

Through the organic violation on the other hand, involved in the primal recoil of self-consciousness within this societal organism, there is to be traced the biological history of our mental and social disharmonies. Here, I believe, is to be traced the inception of man’s collective unconscious and the phylogeny of the societal neurosis. Under the authority of this long-standing and consolidated system of repression the individual is born, and still under its shadow he enters upon the course of his development as an individual. It is this organized Mafia of societal repression, with its enormous weight of traditional and conventional authority--this repression within the collective societal unconscious, with its ready initiation of each new subject--that is the causative factor in the secondary reaction which we observe in the individual as “repression of sexuality.” In our own unconscious fealty to the system about us we fail utterly to comprehend that the repression which we observe in the individual is the result of a prior cause lying outside of the individual and that it consists of the repression within the collective, racial unconscious acting concertedly from without upon the now detached individual unit.

It is important to distinguish between the social prohibition operating upon the discrete element or individual as a response to popular covenant, and the societal prohibition that operates within the confluent aggregate and is coincident with our organic separation from man’s primary societal consciousness. The former is the result collectively of the latter, just as the neurotic repression is the result of it individually. For the societal repression is primary and the social reaction is a repression subsidiary to it.

To understand aright the essential conception of this thesis, it is necessary to have clearly in mind the basis upon which it rests. This basis is the distinction between the element that is societal and the element that is social, between the factor that is sex and the factor that is sexuality. It should be remembered that sexuality, whether in its social or in its individual manifestation, is here throughout regarded as an egoistic and infantile expression resultant upon the alternatives of secret self-interest secondarily induced in the individual in response to this same substitution and repression in the mind of the consensus about him. It is here held that the neurosis is a condition which indicts not the individual alone but society in general and that it consists in the substitution of this obsessive reaction of sexuality for the basic and inherent instinct of sex--that sex is an instinct that pertains not only to mating but to the unity of our congeneric life which, when unintercepted, is the function confluently of man’s conscious and organic life.

If it is true that the societal repression resident within the race is the factor that is the cause of the individual’s sexuality, it is evident that no amount of preoccupation with the individual factor or with the element of sexuality will avail to release a neurosis the source of which resides in the societal repression. The causative factor, then, that resides within the societal unconscious is the subjective factor to which the individual’s sexuality (or its counterpart, the individual’s repression) is the resulting objective response. As repression or sexuality of their nature constitute division, clearly they can have no place in the confluent subjective life. And as the neurosis is primarily a disharmony of the confluent subjective sphere, it is upon the continuities of this sphere alone that we must depend for the efficacy of an analysis that retains as its aim--the only logical aim of analysis--the recomposition or synthesis of the scattered elements of the personality into the organic unit of their original aggregate.