CHAPTER VII. The Biological Substrate of the Neurotic Conflict in Its Organic

THE BIOLOGICAL SUBSTRATE OF THE NEUROTIC CONFLICT IN ITS ORGANIC SIGNIFICANCE

In studying the neurotic diathesis one recognizes the existence of two marked reaction-types more or less clearly delineated one from another in mood and tempo, though they equally sustain the same central motif. The vicarious method of dream-analysis described in the last chapter as having all the appearance of adequacy, when inherently it is invalid, is especially characteristic of one of these two types of personality. The two types may be distinguished by the contrast between their specific reactions to the original repressive incident occasioning the organism’s primary dissociation.

I am not in sympathy, however, with the implication in the discrimination of types demarcated as “introvert” and “extravert.” These terms imply, as they are meant to imply, an essential difference of type rather than a circumstantial difference of reaction. In general the extravert is rather approvingly regarded in the light of a “jolly good fellow,” as contrasted with the introvert whose disaffectivity, on the contrary, tends to be regarded with an undisguised slant. As if the jolly good-fellowship of the hysterical type, with all its aggressiveness and ebullience, were not as truly a substitutive alternative resultant upon repression as is the reaction of his more silent, ingrown confrère of the opposite type! As if the affable, effervescent type were not as truly “shut-out” as his psychological vis-à-vis is “shut-in”! Psychiatry has a great deal to say about the shut-in type of personality but it has nothing to say about the shut-out type of personality. Yet of the two the latter is by no means a less serious form of dissociation, and certainly it is by far the more widespread in its results.

There are, then, two types of reaction to be discriminated. There is the type of individual who upon the initial stimulus to defence has recourse to a tactic of unconditional retreat. He simply withdraws in toto, and his attitude toward his congeners is thenceforward completely negative. He no longer sees nor is seen by them. They are so far outside his ken that their existence is not for a moment admitted by him. Excluded from the range of his actualities he does not even concede them an hypothetical status. Such is the autocentric individual. This personality is the subsequent precoid, if in his withdrawal he does not even so much as pretend acknowledgment of the external world; he is the later psychasthenic, or normal of the socially detached type, if he adopts the more temperate policy of a seeming rapprochement. In either case, enclosed within a system all his own, he lives entirely apart from the world of actuality, ruling alone (and of course supreme) over his self-determined cosmogony.

Then there is the type of personality whose course is the exact opposite of that just described, the difference of reaction being due to the modifying conditions, “constitutional” for aught I know, that attend the repressive occasion. With this type of personality, due to the fact that the arresting instance overtakes him, as it were, in the open, retreat is automatically barred. He is surprised in the act, discovered with the goods in his possession. Detection and apprehension are here simultaneous. Unable to deny the actuality of the situation, his instinctive recourse is in the direction of a desperate effort to palliate the attending circumstances. Resort to an alibi being out of the question, he seeks to exculpate himself by adopting a policy of a more or less truckling servility. He would atone his offence by propitiating his accusers and so winning a recommendation of leniency. Such is the allocentric type of personality. This type may be seen either in the so-called normal individual of the socially adaptive reaction or in the definitely efflorescent or hysterical neurotic, according respectively as he succeeds in conniving in the social pretence and unconsciousness about him and thus saves his own neck, or as he fails in his effort at social compromise--the process flatteringly known to-day as “sublimation.” In this event his failure of adaptation is due to the stronger urge within him of the factors that are allied with the underlying communism of his organic consciousness but which in his mental dissociation he is unable to co-ordinate with his innate experience.

Viewed biologically these two types represent, as I see them, a functional over-emphasis in the individual of the reactions pertaining to one or the other of the two fundamental co-ordinated systems underlying the biology of man’s confluent life and determining, when in balanced relation to one another, the integral health of the organism. I refer to the cerebro-spinal and the sympathetic nervous systems. The opposite recourses of behaviour, manifested in the two psychological types just cited, represent, I believe, the two extremes of reaction resultant upon the disturbed balance between these two systems coincident with the factor of repression.

In the preconscious form of life preserved among the animals, there has occurred no break between these two fundamental systems. In the feline series, for example, one observes the same graceful, organic undulations in the movements actuated by the voluntary muscles or in the reactions presided over by the cerebro-spinal system, as occur in the rhythmic and harmonious co-ordinations that characterize the function of the internal viscera controlled by the sympathetic ganglia. With man the picture is a very different one. Upon the introduction of suggestion or repression and their concomitant interdiction to his inherent feeling, there resulted an organic cleavage within his personality. Coincident with this artificial summons to an adaptive and ulterior response, the spheres of reaction corresponding to these two systems within the organism of man were henceforth divided. Affective responses within the organism’s subjective nuclear life, with its physiological substrate in the vasomotor and visceral reactions (sympathetic system), were no longer correlated with affective responses which, having their substrate in the nuclei of the brain and spinal cord (cerebro-spinal system), pertain to the objective, external adaptations observable in the organism’s voluntary activities. Hence, from this moment forward the co-ordination between the two systems became automatically impaired, and there could no longer be the smooth, uninterrupted confluence of function that originally united the two systems into a single co-ordinated unit.

The disintegrating effect of this artificial cleavage between these two reciprocal systems occurs only in the constituent that marks the adaptive cerebral reactions or in the segment or terminal mediating the relationships socially of the individual elements inter se. In the central or visceral system the organic unities remain intact. Here in the depths of man’s organic being, actuated by his involuntary, instinctive life, the disparity of separateness cannot enter. Here is unbroken continuum. Here the organism is susceptible to no interstitial flaw. In this central, involuntary system which is organically common and confluent throughout the species, the extraneous element of repression with its reaction in disparate, ulterior quests is automatically excluded, for in its native inherency the organism is one and indivisible. It is the peripheral portion of our organisms with its specialization into the external sense-organs, through which is mediated our recognition of objective difference or interval and through which occurs, as has been said, our consequent inference of intrinsic differentiation. In the peripheral system, therefore, the fallacy of separateness due to this biological fission may be enforced with seeming success. In a word, it is only in our social and external relations that the fallacy of organic differentiation works havoc in any positive or active sense.

In this generic schema is probably represented the physiological substrate of the schism within the organism caused by the impact from without of the trauma of repression, and there is represented as well the basis of the resultant contrast of reaction-types in accordance as the repression tends more strongly toward one or the other side of the divided reaction.

Replacing essential continuity with mere contiguity, or the unity of our organic life with the superficial gestures of an outer code, the normal of the hysterical type may rub surfaces, as it were, and play desperately at the game of vicarious unity. We see this everywhere exemplified among the devotees of normality in reactions that are apparently confluent but that are, in reality, determined cerebrally or peripherally in response to the division within the unitary organism of man. Such are the expressions to be seen, for example, in our religious hobnobbings, our spurious social covenants, our ingenious political and economic affiliations, and in the superficial flatteries and connivances common to normality generally. How definitely such vicarious reactions are an infringement upon man’s organic life is readily seen in the unfailing equalization that follows swiftly upon them, exacting their inevitable toll in the ultimate retributive penalties of national and industrial wars, of social and political dissension and in the world-wide expression of disaffection that marks the social periphery of our self-plumed “civilization.”

On the other hand the neurotic of the hysterical type, by reason of the greater sensitiveness of his organism, is held within the grip of this organic conflict. It permits him neither to fawn nor to defy whole-heartedly, but because of the irreconcilable urge of this inner conflict it keeps him ever torn between its two extremes. As an expression of the allocentric reaction he lives within a system that is divided against itself, sensing throughout life, only intuitively, the unassuageable pain of his division.

In direct contrast with this reaction the autocentric type lives within a system that is completely dissociated from the common, congeneric life. But, though the system is in itself uniform throughout, he suffers no less the affliction of his life’s incompleted cycle because of his organic separation from the socially reciprocal, peripheral system. The allocentric seeks in vain to atone to himself for his extradition from the co-ordinated organism in the spurious compensations of a peripherally (socially) separative system. The autocentric would annul the pain of his separation from the co-ordinated organism in the futile appeasements of a central (individual) system which, in its insulation, represents no less his complete dissociation from the world of actuality. The one would repair the organic breach within him through recourse to conciliations that lie exclusively within the social sphere (peripheral dissociation). The other would resort to reparations, which, being wholly enclosed within the ego, embody exclusively the individual factor (central dissociation). In brief, the allocentric sees himself as picture in the world outside of him. The autocentric sees the world outside of him as picture within himself. If the conduct of the latter personifies the smoke-screen, the conduct of the former is typical of the red-herring!

Here again we witness the vacillations between the social consensus and our personal resistance to its behests, between the opposed factors of suggestion and of repression, of personal advantage and of personal disadvantage, due to our unconscious alternatives of good and bad. In the disorganization pertaining to these two reciprocally dissociated spheres--the cerebral and the visceral--our unconsciousness consists, in either case, in the individual’s inability to realize a unification of personality comprised of the balanced inclusion of the two through the co-ordination of the organic and the conscious spheres of his experience.

It is my view that in the phenomena of repression or of sexuality artificial symbols are substituted for the natural gestures represented in the innate feelings of life and sex. In substituting the manifold symbols of expression for the natural gestures of spontaneous feeling, there is manifested a dissociation of the consciousness of man of which the union of his nuclear and peripheral fields of feeling (affectivity) is the biological basis. Just as the gesture is the motor expression of its concomitant sensory reaction, so is the symbol the motor expression of the sensory repression concomitant to it. As the gesture is the organic accompaniment of reality, the symbol is the vicarious barrier against reality. We find the sponsorship for the symbol in unconsciousness or in a mode that is personal, systematized, repressed, while the gesture has its sponsorship in a mode of consciousness or in a confluence of feeling that is impersonal, societal, organic.

If one may speak of ethnic modes, it may be said that in what is called the period of Greek thought--with its preference for form to substance, for “the good” conceived rather as beauty than as truth, for life felt more in its outward line than in its inner meaning--there is ethnically reflected the allocentric or peripheral type of reaction. A close sympathy with all that pertains to this early period of Greek culture is certainly characteristic of the strongly marked types of this reaction.

On the other hand, the era of Christ and of the psychasthenic reaction of Christianity, with its lugubrious reversal of the Greek motif, is a mode one finds pre-eminently adapted to the autocentric type of character, with its apotheosis of the symbols of love, of truth and of the spirit. Said Christ: “The spirit is more than flesh,” thus controverting the tendency of the Greek ideal, and an ascetic Christianity has flocked to him. But in the eidolon of Greek as of Christian there is offered again but the symbol. In the organic incompleteness of each there is presented only the inadequacy of the letter, of that which serves as a sign. In the first it is form, colour, substance; in the second it is the word, the concept, the spirit. To-day there are not wanting indications that there awaits man a period that is confluent of the two in which these symbolic or separative racial modes shall become absorbed in a unification of word and of substance. This moment of man’s organic realization within himself of the integrity of life in its totality will usher in a sociological renascence when man’s life will embody a mode in which the spirit is flesh.

The contrasting systems here denoted as allocentric and autocentric, corresponding to the contrast between the cerebral, peripheral or social mode of reaction on the one hand and the visceral, central or nuclear reaction-type on the other, merely mark anew a very old and commonly recognized division. Here in this more physiological envisagement of it there is offered merely a different conceptual basis. There is an analogous division in the experimental psychologists’ discrimination between motor and sensory. Doubtless also in the contrast more rhetorically defined as romantic and classical there is contemplated the same division of types, not to mention the contrasted reaction-types popularly known as temperamental and phlegmatic.

It is needful to remember that the allocentric type of individual is, within the peripheral division of his cerebro-social system, as truly self-centred as is the autocentric type within the central, visceral division of his sympathetic system. The difference is that the allocentric embodies dissociation in his seeming adaptation toward the social dream that is his day, and the autocentric in his seeming adaptation toward the individual dream that is his night. Every psychiatrist is familiar with the facility with which the dementia præcox patient may analyze his own dreams. But what avails his facility? He is by very virtue of it not less but rather more shut in, for his “analysis” is but the trick through which he subtly evades the social demands existing outside his own centrally dissociated mode. At all times he holds the stage of his self-determined drama, viewing the spectacle of it not as onlooker but as producer. What he permits you to see is but a play within a play, conceived and enacted within the theatre of his own mind. And so in the autocentric type embodied in the psychasthenic personality--the reaction of the type of normal or neurotic that is related to the precoid in its extreme expression--one may be led quite far from the touchstone of reality by reason of the very simplicity and quite genuine correctness of his “analysis.” And so no less with the allocentric type and the equally plausible decoys of his illusory system. What is needed is our realization that in the projections of one as in the intrajections of the other there is equally embodied the identical purpose of self-withdrawal from the common medium of reality.

Most significant of all is the need that the psychoanalyst realize, on the one hand, the peripherally determined tendencies of his own socially compensative reactions or of his own allocentric normality, and, on the other, the centrally biased trends of his own insularly compensative adjustments or of his own autocentric adaptation. Failing to accept, through his own analysis, the possibility of the completely theatrical or symbolic nature of the so-called actualities of his own day as they tend to be expressed in the immediate moment at hand, he may himself easily succumb to the fallacy of a too ready credence (analyst’s wish-fulfilment) in judging the validity of a patient’s presumable self-envisagement. This unconscious alternative which we trace again and again throughout the varying manifestations of the mind of man, whether in its single or in its collective expression, whether in the immediate reaction of the individual or in the remoter adaptations of the race mind, is equally the unconscious actuation underlying the system of psychoanalysis.

It would seem to mark some strange miscarriage in our sociological progress that a dualistic system, such as psychoanalysis, should have arisen as an emanation of Jewish thought, when one considers the essentially monotheistic tradition of the Hebrew consciousness. In this sense the sociological reaction of the Hebrew mind manifested in the dualistic principle of Freud, as exemplified in his basic theory of psychic ambivalence, would seem to denote some inadvertence in racial perception. Monotheism with its principle of a universal immanence of good is clearly a sublimation of the unitary preconscious mode (autocentric), just as the dualistic theism of the Gentiles, with its basis in the alternatives of good and evil, is the sublimation of an irreconcilable unconscious mode (allocentric). May it not be that unconsciously psychoanalysis is a Semitic repudiation of the basal law of Moses and of its preconscious principle of an underlying unity, precisely as Christianity is an unconscious repudiation of the same unitary precept as exemplified preconsciously in the teachings of Christ? May it not be, too, that these unconscious alternatives now actuating the dualistic systems of Jew and Gentile will ultimately resolve themselves into an organic monism of accord which, in the societal encompassment of each, will become equally understanding and inclusive through the united consciousness of both?