CHAPTER IX

ULTIMATE RESOLUTION OF THE SOCIETAL NEUROSIS IN ITS SOCIAL IMPLICATION

The first demand of our organic completion through a unification with another is a unification within oneself. From a basis of a divided self one can look out only dividedly. From a separative mode one can judge only separatively. If the individual embodies a symbolic replacement within himself, others about him appear to him necessarily also as symbolic replacements, and the degree of his resentment toward his own separateness is the measure of his resentment toward theirs. After all, the only implacable enemy of man is his own unconsciousness, and the reconcilement of himself to himself the severest test of his essential personality. Its realization is born of a patience that is not virtue but encompassment.

Man, in his unconsciousness, stands ever by himself and for himself. In the separateness of his personal resistances toward the societal organism as a whole, the individual has become marooned within his own insular habituations. But this isolated attitude of mind is a condition which, in our interpretation, is societally anomalous. Though originally imposed, this condition now automatically imposes itself upon the social personality. Thus far this organic disaffection of man has sought alleviation in the social convivialities that are but the syndicate of men’s collective unconscious. Men have sought to appease their personal isolation through the accommodations of mere objective agreement. They have substituted the symbols of social fraternization for the actuality of man’s organic consonance. Within the unconscious of man his secret disaffection has remained unaltered still.

So often this statement that every man is for himself alone has brought the rejoinder: “But why may he not be? Surely such selfishness is natural to man.” But is it? I do not think so. Of course I have not in mind the individual’s effort of preservation in the interests of his natural life and growth. I have in mind the private differentiations due to man’s mental attitude of self-distinction. In the conservation of interests incident to the individual’s instinct of physical preservation, man’s native experience entails no secret self-conscious design. But it is the tell-tale of man’s mental attitude of personal separatism that he is constantly under the necessity to pretend that he is not separative or for himself. This universal pretence reveals a biologically specious condition of life for which we feel a universal need of concealment. For whatsoever attitude of mind is not openly compatible with the personality imposes a division of the personality. A socially divided personality is a socially insecure personality. Back of the social mind that pretends it is not concerned exclusively for self lies a basis of social fear and distrust. Pretence is division of personality, and division of personality is fear. If the pretence and the division are social, the fear is social. The effort of numbers or of the social consensus to combine in support of their mutual fear is unavailing, for a consensus begotten of fear is an organically spurious consensus. At the heart of it lies a secret division. This is the travesty of normality with its secret soviet of fear.

The analyst or the psychiatrist whose outlook is objective fails to regard this consensual fallacy in its social as in its personal implication. Being of the social unconscious he cannot contemplate the social unconscious. Being himself divided he cannot realize his own division. We all prefer the satisfaction of seeming together socially to the reality of being together organically. We like the seeming integrity of the social unconscious because it conceals our own disaffection. It is only this seeming security of numerical preponderance, however, that affords us comfortable protection against the aberrations of the isolated, non-conformable or neurotic personality. Nowhere is the autocracy of unconsciousness more blindly cruel than in the mass impetus of our social consolidation. We are not unaware of the resistance of the individual to the social consensus, but we have yet to discover the resistance of the social consensus to the individual. The psychopathologist has offered interesting formulations regarding delusions of persecution, but none whatever regarding delusions that persecute.

The group work that has been gradually developing among my students and myself has consisted essentially in a reversal of this habitually objective course of the psychiatrist. Instead of studying ideas of reference objectively as expressed in the individual, we have studied ideas of reference subjectively as they occur socially among ourselves. Our experience as a group has led us inevitably to the conclusion that the personal analysis is a self-contradictory process, that only as the individual realizes through his societal experience the futility of the personal or private basis is it biologically possible to be truly in harmony with a healthy and constructive environment. If our position has any value and significance it is because it has come to us through the daily test of an actual living experience, and because as a societal experience it cannot fail to extend itself societally to others also.

Let it not be thought, however, that our efforts toward a social analysis have proceeded upon a smooth and untroubled course. If the individual has his “ups and downs” in the effort to unify his consciousness on the basis of a personal analysis, he meets no less with alternations of satisfaction and depression according as his resistances surge or ebb in his efforts toward a social unification of consciousness. If the individual analysis presents a situation that is unconscious and bidimensional, a group analysis presents a condition that is equally unconscious and bidimensional. In the bidimensional reaction of the individual toward the personal analysis, he tends, as we have seen, toward a permanent fixation upon the analyst which shows itself alternately in the mental reaction of “love” or of “hate.” But in either the personal or social situation he tends to hold tenaciously to this new object of his infantile affect in the secret hope of ultimately reconciling and amalgamating it with the love that underlies still the original mother-image. Unhappily, it is the invariable failure of the personal analysis that the patient carries his secret purpose to a successful issue. For either he remains fastened between the old and the new love-objects in a consolidated image-fixation upon the analyst, or else he returns to the original love-image afforded by the parent or to its surrogates, with or without the collateral aids of sublimation.

In the actual experience of our group analysis the tendency was essentially no different. But there was an additional recourse in the group analysis that is precluded in the personal analysis. In the personal analysis there is a bidimensional attitude toward the analyst that alternates constantly between infantile docility and infantile resentment, between sentimental approbation at one time and outraged disillusionment at another. But this alternation always occurs, of course, within one and the same individual. In the social analysis the situation is expressed quite differently. It was my experience that this diversity of reaction within the group led at first to the formation of reaction-clusters within the group, so that one unit became consistently docile toward the analyst and resentful among themselves, while the other unit became hostile toward the analyst and docile toward one another. Both alternations (resentment or docility) were, of course, equally spurious within each group of reactions.

The practical outcome in each sub-group was very different however. In the cluster that united against the analyst, a confederacy was formed that presented all the features of unconsciousness we have seen to characterize the collective reactions occurring everywhere throughout the domain of our normal adaptation. The psychology of this reaction, as we know, is the collective pooling of the unconscious of its members severally, with a view to the mass support afforded each individual within the unit separately. The result as it occurred in this cluster was a temporary deadlock and a corresponding re-adoption of the normal level of bidimensional standards, personal and social.

In the cluster in which the sense of resentment was limited to inter-reactions among its own members, while as a unit all held an attitude of friendliness toward the analyst, there was offered a form of group-unconsciousness that at least lent itself to progressive analysis and resolution. But here again there was discoverable the secret pooling of unconscious motives of personal interest and self-protection that in no way differentiated this group division from the former, that did not separate the “faithful” from the “unfaithful,” nor absolve the “docile” any more than the “resentful” from a secret complicity in the collective reaction that is the mass neurosis of normality.

It should be remembered that the plan of group analysis was adopted not because I had a priori found in it the logical solution of the neurosis. Not by any means. Neither had I inductively reached conclusions that led to any such logical determination. Not even theoretically was there at hand anything of the nature of a logical solution. A dissociation is not logical and its solution could not be logical. The neurosis is not a matter of the intellect and the process of its unravelling could not have been intellectually predetermined. As thought and affect are processes that occupy essentially different spheres, to think out a solution for a disorder of affect is self-contradictory. To attempt to do so is beyond the range of organic possibility. All that I had in mind in our group undertaking was to obtain affective conditions shared in common that might afford a basis for the observation of affective conditions withheld separately. It seemed to offer the opportunity to secure a relative and societal background against which the individual would be enabled to view in impersonal perspective his own hitherto absolute and personal evaluations. Up to this time I had for years worked on the group conception in the absence of any tangible background of experimentation. There was now needed the practical substantiation of this group conception in the actual assembling of “analyzed” individuals into an organized social aggregate. While the programme of group analysis entered upon by my students and myself came into an intensive application with the beginning of the year 1923, it was actually the summer of that year that marked the active inception of our experiment as an organized unit, our group having then its first opportunity of a practical test in the daily contact of its members; so that we were still at this time only feeling our way toward the ultimate outcome of an analysis involving more than two or three individuals.

In my view the really significant finding that has resulted from our close mental association as a group has been the opportunity of demonstrating through group experience the practical significance of the very unexpected disclosure upon which I chanced some years ago in my conception of the bidimensional image and its influence upon the reactions of consciousness at large. It is this conception which has proved to be the real foundation of our work. I am convinced that an adjustment of consciousness, whether analytic or conventional, whether of the laboratory or of the street, will ultimately demand that we bring to book the very origins of our mental and social systems of “thinking,” that we challenge our customary values of mental adaptation at their very foundation. Our problem resolves itself into one that shall challenge in every detail the fixed basis of an arbitrary and unconscious position of absolutism as contrasted with the fluent evaluations that alone pertain to a basis of conscious relativity.

Upon the basis of our prevailing personal criterion first inculcated through the alternative precept of good and bad, the mind of every individual existing under our present social system is disposed toward a dualism of outlook that renders every affective judgment of the individual irreconcilable and self-contradictory. For a basis that rests upon a mental standard or criterion of evaluations is necessarily moralistic and divided. A moralistic command entails a moralistic interdiction. Every affirmation contains in itself a negation that is equal and contrary. That is, every criterion of its nature entertains its opposite. Whatsoever I must be or think or feel, I must at the same time also not be or think or feel. Whatsoever I believe, to that precise degree I likewise disbelieve.

This is not so simple. It is not by any means so simple as we tend to make it. It does not merely mean, as we would like to think, that if I love good people I do not love bad people. Not at all. That would be obvious and a matter of fact. It would leave our absolutism quite intact and our criteria quite unchallenged in their fallacy. It means something far subtler than this. It means that if I love good people I do not love good people. It means that in the measure in which I love an object, in that measure I hate that object. It means, in sum, that, within a system of absolute measures, my concept “love” as my concept “good” is throughout fanciful and artificial, that, in disturbing the natural equilibrium of the organism, my mental criterion is resisted by a counter-judgment, which, being fanciful and artificial, tends in a precisely reverse direction at one and the same time. It means that every mental image, arising on the basis of our present absolute criterion, possesses unconsciously an ambivalent value. Stating the proposition in psycho-dynamic terms, every affective mental image is counterbalanced by an opposite image having an attractive force that possesses the quality of all bidimensional (or pendular) motion and accordingly it acts with a momentum the direction of which is at every moment precisely equal and reverse to its own impulse.

After many years in which I have been delving into the processes of the unconscious and striving to unearth its intricate mechanisms, I have come upon no phenomenon that has seemed to me of such basic significance as this illusory mechanism of unconscious dualism and conflict that underlies our absolute criteria of values, individual and social. Through Freud we have learned that a psychic ambivalence underlies the neurotic processes of the individual, but we have not yet learned that an equal ambivalence underlies the processes of the social unconscious. Furthermore, while Freud has shown that there is this ambivalence of motive underlying the individual process represented by the neurotic conflict, it remains to be seen that each term within this ambivalent outlook is itself likewise ambivalent--that psychic ambivalence necessarily presupposes at all times an essential condition of ambivalence that repeatedly doubles upon itself. For, if we will examine either term of our ambivalent proposition, we shall find that it too is based on opposed valences. That is, on our present absolute basis of evaluation, every term of our subjective judgment necessarily divides and re-divides with its very inception. Not only does the contrast between love and hate represent ambivalence, but love contains in itself an ambivalent motive, and hate contains in itself a motive that is equally ambivalent. And so, to whatever subjective determinant we may turn, there is inevitably this inseparable element of contrast due to our own subjectively bidimensional basis.

As regards the neurosis of the individual, we have learned through Freud that an unconscious system of images, operating to inhibit spontaneous thought and action, is the essential meaning of this disorder. Of course, Freud attributes such disorders of development to an associative inadequacy resident in the individual organism. But in the study of the social unconscious upon the inclusive basis of a relative method of approach, we shall recognize that an identical system of images operates to hinder the spontaneous expression of the social organism; that as there exists a neurosis of the individual that is due to an unconscious system of personal images, so there exists a neurosis of the social mind due to an equally unconscious system of social images; and finally that the latter condition within the social consciousness as a whole is the primary and essential disorder of which the individual manifestation is but a subsequent and secondary symptom.

It is not possible to speak of the group basis of analysis that has become the central feature of my own work without calling attention to a bidimensional situation that has made itself felt within the ranks of psychoanalysts themselves. Moreover, this situation has forced into prominence a hitherto unrecognized impasse within our psychoanalytic interpretations, precisely because of the inevitable conditions of an individualistic basis of analysis. The outstanding theoretical feature of Freud’s position toward his patients has always been a policy of “hands off.” With the inception of psychoanalysis it has been the signal position of Freud, and subsequently of us all, that the patient shall be left free of all domination or direction or suggestion, that in order that he come into a sense of adult responsibility toward his social environment generally he must come into a responsibility toward his own mental processes as they relate directly to the analyst. This policy of non-interference is one which those of us who have attempted to follow the psychoanalytic programme have adhered to with strict conformity. But it is clear that the analyst becomes automatically the all-engrossing criterion (transference) of the patient’s unconscious and that unconsciously the analyst assumes toward his patient a corresponding position of personal criterion. So that, however sincere our intention, there has resulted what is perhaps the weakest point in our psychoanalytic technique, a point that has warranted the most severe criticism of our work, namely, that treatment by psychoanalysis continues for a far too long and indefinite term.

To offset this embarrassment recourse is now had to a procedure whereby the analysis is brought to a conclusion at a certain definitely assigned period--a period to be determined by the analyst according to the circumstances in each case. The change proposed, then, is from a course of indefinite to a course of definite duration; from a procedure that, at least theoretically, places upon the patient the responsibility of terminating the analysis to a procedure that definitely takes this responsibility from him and places it in the hands of the analyst. But, in proposing that the analyst shall at an assignable moment in the analysis peremptorily determine upon a definite period at which the analysis shall cease, and in formally pronouncing that from this moment on the patient shall be cured, we are confronted again with the deadlock of the bidimensional and alternative. In this recourse we are merely resorting again to the legislation of suggestion and, unconsciously falling a victim to the pictorial concept “cure,” we are in no sense meeting the issue. For in the criterion of the suddenly achieved “cure” we are not less the unconscious victims of an illusory and absolute criterion than we were victims of a criterion that is illusory and absolute when we presumed the position that the patient must at all hazards be left in a position of freedom toward the analysis. In my view, this proposal of psychoanalysts themselves that we no longer assume a policy of non-interference but that we offer instead the arbitrary suggestion of spontaneous “cure,” there is sounded the death-knell of psychoanalysis as administered on the basis of the personal analysis. This does not mean, however, the death-knell of the basic position of psychoanalysis as deducible from the principle first enunciated by Freud. On the contrary, if we would enlarge the application of psychoanalysis to include the wider scope of our societal personality, there would be realized the necessary advance toward the full significance of Freud’s essential principle.

It is admittedly a part of the purpose of the present thesis to show that there do exist conditions which make treatment through the method of psychoanalysis, as it is at present, needlessly long. But to reduce the length of treatment calculated to adjust the distorted mind would seem as unreasonable as to curtail the length of treatment intended to adjust the distorted limb. As Freud remarked long ago, no one would question the validity of the orthopaedist’s method because of the length of time it requires. Why then all the outcry because of the length of time often required by the psychoanalyst’s method? It is my own feeling that if there are conditions which make the method of psychoanalysis needlessly long, what is required is the analysis of these conditions. I believe that under these circumstances the method will automatically adjust itself. But to shorten a course of treatment because it is long seems unintelligent to me. It seems merely shifting from one unconscious condition to its equally unconscious alternative.

Let us examine more closely the real alternative here. The fact is that by reason of the dualistic basis existing in the personal analysis, the analyst necessarily invites the indefinite continuation of the analysis on the part of the patient, no matter what he may theoretically say or do to the contrary. For the analyst is himself the victim of an unconscious criterion represented in his personal standard of “cure.” That is, he entertains for the patient an image of self-dependence obtainable alone through psychoanalysis. But in this standard of “cure” he entertains a wish-motive that is self-contradictory. For, in wishing to cure a patient through a process of self-dependence, the analyst, because of the involvement of his personal wish toward the patient, necessarily presents his cure through processes that interfere with self-dependence. It is again the bidimensional dilemma of the absolute or personal criterion, and an absolute criterion necessarily involves a wish-motive of two terms either of which unconsciously invites its opposite. In his personal criterion the analyst would both release a patient with a view to the patient’s self-dependence and at the same time retain a patient in order to make sure that his self-dependence is complete. With one gesture he would detain him while with the other he would set him free. This is undoubtedly an awkward deadlock. This is the very contrary of a cure that aims at self-dependence. For the analyst, whether in detaining or dismissing a patient, is acting for him. But, on the basis of the criterion of the personal image, there is inevitably this alternative. It is unescapable.

This solicitous attitude of mind, I concede, has undoubtedly tended to extend the course of the analysis to an indefinite duration. But does the alternative--the arbitrary manifesto that a certain time limit shall peremptorily conclude the analysis--really settle the issue? Does it not rather sustain than remove the dilemma? Of course, a theoretical assumption has been invoked that is calculated to warrant this procedure upon psychological premises--the premises, namely, that the analysis consists in the fanciful reproduction of the birth experience, that the trauma in which the birth culminates physiologically must be psychically reproduced through the trauma of sudden separation of the personality of the patient from that of the analyst. But does corroborating the illusory and symbolic dramatization occurring within the neurotic mind assist such a patient in disabusing his mind of the fallacy of the illusory and symbolic? In this alternative of a predetermined period for a patient’s withdrawal from analysis are we not merely having recourse to the more decisive position of the father as contrasted with the more lenient and compromising attitude of the mother-image? Further, in what we call the mother-father alternation are we not again merely projecting the dualistic criterion that is our own personal and contrasting basis of evaluation?

In my own work I have had an opportunity to realize convincingly the completely illusory and arbitrary character of this mother-father alternation. This has been shown in the fact that patients undergoing analysis with me have turned to my assistant, Mr. Shields, in the thought that they would find in him a less severe analyst than in myself, while patients who were being analyzed by Mr. Shields have turned to me in a similar hope. Needless to say, in either case, the patients were equally disappointed in their quest. Yet this alternation would have continued indefinitely had not a solution been found elsewhere, namely, under conditions of a social analysis in which a personal attachment is not permitted the conditions of lodgment necessary for completing the personal illusion of permanence and fixation.

I have come to the definite conclusion that in the individual analysis the neurotic patient pulls the wool over the eyes of the analyst and inevitably comes out the victor, because unconsciously the analyst is inevitably on the patient’s side. Besides, to show sufficient interest in an individual to sit with him in personal conference daily or three times weekly (whatever the routine may be) is to indicate to the very susceptible emotions of the neurotic patient that his presence is personally desirable. The situation is only interpretable on the part of the neurotic patient, with his unfulfilled personal emotions, as the implication that those emotions are fully reciprocated personally on the part of the analyst. For with whomsoever we enter into a personal situation of mutual secrecy we are in a situation of mutual complicity. In the secrecy and confidence of the individual analysis, in which there is the close, private, specialized relationship of one individual to another, there is the tacit disavowal in each of the commonness of the socially prevalent quality of all unconsciousness. As long as there is a private and personal system resident within the analyst, he necessarily corroborates the private and personal system resident within the patient in front of him. The fallacy of the private system is the illusion of personal secrecy. Clinically, it is the secrecy of unconsciousness that is the backbone of unconsciousness. Though a patient divulge in minutest detail all the data entering into his unconscious experience, he yet retains his unconsciousness if he retains a sense of secrecy toward it.

In our group activity, as we have seen, there were several, who in refusing to meet the organic demand for a social amalgamation of their personality, were forced unconsciously to seek the protective regression afforded either in family, in friends, or in some form of defence-reaction that led to the isolated activities of mere social or normal connivance. On the other hand, others, with no less motive of personal defence-reaction, sought protection in the alternative of family union which they contrived to secure among themselves, and unconsciously assumed collectively that I, as the analyst, could be arbitrarily delegated by them to the rôle of pater-mater noster! As I have said, there was thus formed once more an unconscious cluster, a cluster, however, that was no less an unconscious form of social encapsulation than the first.

Biologically it is the natural process that with the growth of their strength offspring become less and less attached or dependent upon the parent and that concomitantly there is more and more aptitude for equal give-and-take activities or play with their fellows, at first with brothers and sisters and later with those of their congeners with whom chance affords association. Of course, though, if the parent has a mental background that attaches the child artificially to him through the image-suggestion of omnipotence, then, on the basis of our present individual and social adaptation, the child cannot find in any of his contacts a natural medium of association. Although the child may leave his natural parent and associate objectively with his congeners, he carries with him the image of the parent, and naturally he foists this image upon all with whom he comes in contact. At the same time all who come in contact with him equally foist upon him the image of their omnipotent parent. Our position is that as this image is not personal but social it cannot be personally but only socially resolved.

The point would seem to be that the child cannot look for companionship in the mother or father as long as he holds the mother or father in the light of an image or criterion. Neither can he come into simpler relationships with his fellows on the basis of this criterion of the mother-image without investing the personalities of his associates with an equal image or criterion. The difficulty of the personal analysis is the preservation of an image-situation the while one endeavours theoretically to dispel the image. But in the natural give-and-take of human beings in their work and play activities under conditions of social analysis, there is afforded the reality of a social equalization that renders untenable the secret and obsessive fixation with which we merely look on one another from the background of the bidimensional picture.

The result of our group affiliation, to express it symbolically, has been a family of “good” and “bad” children, of whom some desired to run away from home while others were content to remain beside the family hearth. Socially, the result was a bidimensional division or alternative that exactly parallels the division or alternative within the individual. But there is this significant difference between the personal and the social analysis. In the individual the component that is unwelcome may be permanently repressed, while in the alternatives represented socially it is possible to stimulate these components into repeated recognition through the constant clashing resultant upon placing the opposed elements, represented by the alternate issues, under conditions of socially irritating contrast or competition. In the social analysis there is no letting sleeping dogs lie. Once the unconscious of one alternative reaction has been set upon the other, the fight is to the finish. There is not the private recess of personal secrecy into which one may retreat. There is not the recourse to self-partiality that allows a smoothing over of unpleasant reminiscences and a successful substituting of more flattering condolences.

According to our group or social conception of the neurosis it is assumed that the causative element in the production of these disorders is social or phyletic and that the correction of these disorders must proceed upon a social or phyletic basis. Our position is that the individual cannot be healthy whose consciousness is the outgrowth of an unhealthy social mind about him. It, therefore, becomes the essence of our group conception that the disorder of the individual presented manifestly in the individual’s “symptoms” may only be corrected through the analysis of the social processes constituting latently the individual’s collective medium.

As we first learned from Freud and as has been corroborated through researches in psychoanalysis made independently of Freud, the neurosis is synonymous with the repression of the instinctive life of man, and in the prevailing interpretation of psychoanalysis the remedy lies in the successful adaptation of the personal satisfaction of sexuality expressed both in direct physiological release and in the equivalents of sublimation. It is our position that this interpretation is far too narrow, that in interpreting the neurosis as due primarily to disorders within the sphere of man’s reproductive instinct, there is left out of account the disorders of instinct due to the obstruction of man’s tribal or congeneric life and to the consequent interruption of the creative expression of his personality as a societal unit. Our feeling is that sexuality, as it now exists, is very generally of an over-stimulated or obsessive character, owing to the undue and greatly aggravated insistence that has been vicariously brought to bear upon this sphere. In the absence of the natural outlets of man’s societally instinctive expressions through the common avenues of concerted work and play, the function natural to the physiological process of reproduction has been overburdened and inflated out of all proportion to its primary significance. While, as a consonant part of the congeneric instinct of man, sex is an undoubtedly powerful urge, in the self-interested and bidimensional bias of its autosexual, personal quest, this manifestation has become but a symbolic exaggeration of the natural instinct of sex. This exaggerated condition is due secondarily, however, to a repression of the reproductive faculty of man as naturally expressed in the creative interests of his common societal activities. As our give-and-take expressions among our fellows develop into activities that are reciprocally creative, in the same measure our obsessive drive toward the satisfactions of sexuality, whether repressed or indulged, will cease to dominate human personality in its present completely unconscious and bidimensional image insistence.