CHAPTER X

ULTIMATE RESOLUTION OF THE SOCIETAL NEUROSIS IN ITS PERSONAL IMPLICATION

I well recognize that in its matter this essay offers little that is new. What I have sought to do is rather to speak of our human reactions in the large from the basis of the altered consciousness of the handful of men and women whose group experience, as gradually it has grown and gathered strength and cohesion among us, has permitted the more subjective or societal realization of these reactions. But though it is true that there is little that is new in the matter of this essay, yet, in so far as the collective differences existing among us as a group have been allowed slowly to diffuse themselves gradually into the solution of our common acceptance of one another, it seems to me that in its mode at least our position offers an approach that brings us a step closer to the increasingly urgent problem of our human adjustment.

After all, the intrinsic mode underlying our conception is the real significance of our conception. To understand our position the reader’s only recourse is to repudiate the bidimensional alternatives of extrinsic moralities based upon precepts of a personalistic or self-restricted behaviourism. For the position of this thesis will be little understood in the light of the accustomed interpretations of the conventional social mind. Because of the unconscious bias of its own mental absolute it will appear to the social polity that, in the altered attitude here outlined, the social polity is threatened at its very foundations. In its tenacious hold upon habitual prepossessions the organized consensus does not realize that these foundations are already tottering. It will not see that in order to further the replacement of the already disintegrating structures of our present social system, a more widely envisioning concept of the organized consciousness of man must needs be invoked. In some way, though, there must first be brought home to each of us the realization that there can be no true unity within the societal organism as long as we are a prey to impressions that are but the give-and-take reflection of mental attitudes existing mutually in one another. As long as we fail to identify the tyranny of mental attitudes within the social unconscious with the reflection of similar tyrannical mental attitudes within the personalism and defection of each of us, man cannot rise to the reality of an organized social consciousness. As long, for example, as we fail to understand that when a mental attitude in others pleases or incenses us, it is necessarily but the reflection of a corresponding mental attitude in ourselves, we shall continue to praise or punish such mental attitudes, together with the acts resulting from them, with the mere retaliative measures of personal reward or redress. So that our attitude will continue to be, as now, the mere pro-and-con reaction to impressions determined by the unconscious self-reflection of our own “good and bad.”

It is precisely this illusion of mental oppositeness that we need to dispel. Harmony will follow automatically once we have accepted in its societal significance the affective unity of life. With this realization there will be no further need of the restraints of an alternative principle of morality which, in its bidimensional legislation, aims to establish merely a temporary balance between essential opposites. With the elimination of the individual hope-fear alternation the whole incitement to personal infringement will have been removed. What inducement will I have to cheat a man if he is myself? Or betray a woman if she is I? To what purpose will I seek to enslave another to my whim (call it love, marriage or what you will) if between us there is the acceptance of an organic compliance that allows the realization in each of the common unity of both? Why would I seek to outdo anyone in the invidious competitions of what is called “success,” if I know clearly that success comprises only the self-reflective distinctions existing within the unconscious of the social mind in response to the spurious incentives of the personal alternative as it exists within the unconscious of the individual mind?

Our prevailing personalistic basis is not applicable to an organismic viewpoint, because a policy that is self-reflective in the unconscious is self-contradictory in consciousness. Unity or consciousness of personality is organically preclusive of whatever is personal or unconscious in the personality. For every wish that is attained an equal disappointment is incurred. For every satisfaction that is secured a corresponding denial is imposed. To fulfil one’s wish is to abjure one’s reality. Asking is its own postponement, as striving is its own defeat. This inner homology between desire and its non-attainment is alike the hope and the despair of atoning to oneself unconsciously or personally for what is one’s need consciously or societally. As with compulsion-replacements elsewhere, the real occasion of prayer is one’s unanswerable attitude of mind in prayer. In the self-compensation of man’s want as an individual organism, he necessarily repudiates his inherent consonance as a societal organism. Thus our personal dearth and our personal plenty are organically the same. As the part embodied in one’s personal wish (unconsciousness) is intrinsically opposed to the whole embodied in one’s societal unity (consciousness), to desire is at the same time to fail of attainment as well as to covet. This is the paradox of our personalism and unconsciousness, as it is the impasse of the personal absolute underlying it. In the personal opportunism of the unconscious wish we would fancifully summon the processes of life to ourselves in place of contributing our individual function as common participants in the reality of these processes. Our contradiction, after all, is the division within ourselves, and the real impasse as always is the self-image embodied in the delusive alternative of good and bad.

I know, of course, that much that I have tried to set down in these pages has been said many times before and by those more competent of expression than I. Indeed, in its objective envisagement, the recognition among us of differences, personal, national and international, has become a commonplace. Even in the columns of our daily news items, these conditions of societal defection are mentioned time and again in the casual tone of the matter of course. Among the current comments one reads, for example: “The task of saving civilization seems rather hopeless when it doesn’t promise an immediate and private profit”; “When a statesman says he despairs of the world he means that he despairs of getting what he wants”; “All nations seem agreed that chaos may result unless other nations forsake their evil ways”; “Civilization is just a slow process of envisioning more rights to fight for”; and so on without end.

But no amount of objective observation, however astute, will avail in clearing personal outlooks. Too easily is one’s mere observation, however right and seemingly true, the embodiment of secret self-satisfaction and detachment. Personalistic observation, far from resolving the affective illusion of the onlooker, serves only to accentuate it. Dissociation within another individual that is observed by us but that does not quicken us to a realization of our own implication, automatically embeds us still deeper in the fixity of our own unconscious personalism. There is need to withdraw from our accustomed observations and to include within ourselves the dissociation that seems to lie outside of us but that is, in fact, the unconscious projection of our own dissociation. In this affective illusion of the onlooker, we are ever hoping merely to convince others of the disinterestedness of our interference with them. A disinterested interference is biologically impossible. To wish to convince others is to be unconvinced ourselves. True disinterestedness consists alone in our own self-realization.

The familiar French saying, “Tout comprendre est tout pardonner” is, like so much that is proverbial, almost true. It has assembled the right elements but in the wrong order. It gives to the letter dynamic priority over the spirit. It is hysterical replacement refurbished in the condensation of the epigram. It is but the literature of the neurosis. If we transpose the equation in such manner as to convert intellectual values into their organic terms, the proposition resolves itself into a form that is, I believe, much nearer the answer to the problem of our human pathology: To forgive all is to understand all. I have only this in mind in saying that the neurosis is societal, that it is common. This is what I mean in saying that differentiation is unconsciousness and that the factor of societal repression or the societal factor of separatism is anterior to the separatism of sexuality or to the factor of our individual repression. As the societal and the individual are organically one in mode, the unification of the individual is at least a step toward the unification of our societal consciousness. This is all I have in mind in speaking of consciousness as the encompassment of life. It is a mode of consciousness that is inclusive and that reconciles within itself the disparity that is social.

All this I had at first “in mind” only. It was, I confess, a theory with me and, like all such substitutive replacements, the theory held for me only an unconscious or symbolic significance. There was lacking in myself the recognition that the theoretical is identical with the symbolic. And so my position in stating that the theory of analysis is the neurosis of the analyst has lacked its personal acknowledgment within my own consciousness. Truly, unconsciousness cannot envisage unconsciousness. Secret separateness cannot encompass secret separateness. The division of each of us is the division within himself. The real grudge is one’s own grudge. After all, there is only one vice and that, paradoxically, is the virtue of being better than other people. Yet so tenacious are we of this our solitary shortcoming, that we will acknowledge all other “faults” rather than disclaim this one. But the task of ourselves as the task of our patients is the recognition of our own personalism and resentment. It is to forgive all within ourselves, that we may understand all within others who are societally no less ourselves. It is to realize that the whole intricate problem of our “understanding” is but the retributive fabrication of our own unforgiveness.

It is just here that the repressed and isolated individual resolutely balks. Such a solution, he declares, offers nothing for him. He does not discover in it an advantage for himself. Quite true. In his unconscious sense, there is nothing for him. His self-seeking is itself the very kernel of his delusion. It is only in the disparate bias of his arbitrary individualism (I do not say individuality) that he can apprehend anything so dissociative as an advantage for himself as a separate individual. It is only as the wilful, defiant, separative child that he is, that he would seek the treasure of life for himself, that he comes demanding a governmental form embodying a system of monarchical autocracy whereof he is to be the supreme ruler, when, in truth, life is of its very essence an organic democracy and the individual an element in its societal confluence. In the quandary of his organic involution the neurotic, if one might so crudely express it, is literally “hell-bent” on attaining heaven. He does not see, for he will not see, that life and self are irreconcilable. On the contrary, with every available device, with every recourse of subtlety and with ever more enticing symbols, he seeks to decoy the common, free gift of life into the circumscribed and artificial confines of his own self-bias.

In this deflection of his mental outlook he is far from the basis from which his experience originally set out--the organic basis in which the secret of life is its commonness and in which the commonness and the joy of it are one. As the analysis proceeds, synchronous with the gradual acceptance on the part of the patient of his mistakenness and of his growing responsibility toward this mistakenness through the widening of his societal outlook, there comes his automatic awakening to the realization of the inherent confluence of life in its utmost fulfilment. It is a slow process this that demands our reversal from an habitual attitude of disparity and separation to one of participation and confluence, from self and unconsciousness to consciousness and life, but it is the inevitable task of an analysis that bases its procedure upon an organismic conception of consciousness in its relative inclusiveness.

I am under no illusion as to the futility of reckoning upon any far-reaching assent to such a thesis as this. I know well that a thesis which confronts the securely entrenched ranks of the social unconscious is, in general, predetermined to defeat. In this unpromising outlook, however, I am not dismayed. Were I guided solely by personal inclination I would endeavour at least to narrow the scope of a challenge such as this. I would, for instance, absolve myself from the obligation of recording so sweeping and unwelcome an indictment as that which lays to the door of normality in the large the imputation of autosexuality and infantilism. To many, such a statement will seem extravagant, bizarre, unwarranted. So that, if I would propitiate my readers through the presentation of a more acceptable thesis, I should naturally wish, if I may not wholly withdraw this statement, at least to palliate its implications.

But as this statement seems to me essentially true, as it is the very crux of this thesis that unconsciousness is social and not individual, that the collective unconscious is the anterior factor to which the individual factor involving the neurosis is but the reflex response; as the central issue upon which my entire position must stand or fall is the conviction that the responsibility for the neurosis rests upon the societal consciousness in its ontogenetic phase within each of us; and above all, since my indictment of the social unconscious is one from which I am no more exempted than others, to withhold such a statement would be nothing other than the hesitation to affirm my real conviction and so retain the servility and introversion of my own social unconsciousness. This position is precisely the expression of what I believe to be the essential embodiment of the neurosis, and my wish to keep silent would be nothing else than my own unconscious wish not to relinquish the neurosis in which I share as a social element within it. Upon closer view, my unconscious fear becomes merely my wish to save my own individuation and unconsciousness at the expense of the participatory, societal confluence that alone constitutes consciousness.

This, as I think of it, is interesting, for upon reflection it grows still clearer that my reluctance would be again the neurosis within myself or the retention of the very separateness I am presumably undertaking to observe. After all, my irresolution would amount to my withholding not the statement but myself. It would represent my preference (as always it is my preference unconsciously) to withhold myself from my organic place as a confluent part in the societal aggregate. Instead of being one, therefore, with every other element comprising it, it would mean that I preferred to retain the illusion of my own disparateness, phantastically hoping in my dissociative mode thus to comprise in my individual self the self-possession that alone pertains to the acceptance of one’s share in our common, societal aggregate.

And so I have come to believe that, however unwelcome the imputation, it is only the societal indictment as it applies to oneself personally that affords the real opportunity of release from the neurosis of society. It is the illusion of differentiation that is the essence of the neurosis. It is the fallacy of our personal separateness that is the meaning of our societal discord. Through our mutual analyses and also in the contacts of our daily living as a subjectively organized group, we have come to realize that this subtle attitude of disaffection is extraneous to the essential life of man. Affective conditions recognized as results outside of us are affective conditions unrecognized as causes within us. Subjectively, societally, they are the same. From a relative or organismic basis there is no difference. Just as cosmically or in the objective universe there is no absolute time and space, so organically or in the subjective universe there is no absolute cause and effect. As objectively time and space are “relative to moving systems,” so subjectively cause and effect are relative to organic sequences. Accordingly, our need is to recognize the implication of the unconscious not as directed against others nor against oneself, but as including oneself equally with others in constituting together in our common life a single, societal unit.

There will, I know, be much misunderstanding in regard to what has been set down in these pages. If, by chance, the conventional artist should read this thesis, he will tell you that he understands and that he accepts it fully, on the ground that he finds its full realization within his own intuitions. But the artist will be mistaken. Should the conventional scientist read it, he will tell you that it is not possible to find substantiation for such a thesis within the scope of his authenticated formulations and that therefore he cannot understand or accept it. But the scientist will also be mistaken. Both will be quite right objectively, but this is, in itself, to miss the meaning of a conception that is essentially subjective. This thesis has been felt and written from an intrinsically relative mode, and it is only from an intrinsically relative mode that it can be felt and understood. As yet the artist knows feeling only in the absolute form of the images that exist within himself; as yet the scientist knows feeling only in the absolute form of the images that exist outside himself. The one lives within the dreams (fanciful formulations) arising within the personal system that is individual; the other lives within the concepts (theoretical formulations) transmitted to him from the personal system that is social. Yet I do not doubt that among both artists and scientists, as well as among many people who are technically neither artist nor scientist, there will be those who will partake more or less consciously of what is here more or less consciously partaken of. In the form of its presentation it is inevitably restricted to the objective symbol of the written word; nevertheless, in the subjective encompassment of each that is its common inclusion of both, it may equally reach and unite the basic personalities of poet and craftsman, of male and female, of artist and scientist.

In this sense and in this spirit of a common involvement in the unconscious of my fellows, I feel that to some, at least, my meaning will seem clear and my motive not untoward. For there are those who, like myself, are only “normal” under duress and who secretly revolt against the compromising yoke of the social as well as of the individual unconscious. It is for these that I have written. To speak fearlessly and with freedom to the few, who are fearless and free enough to understand, means far more to me and will, I believe, prove ultimately far more fruitful in making clear the real meaning of our human need than half-hearted statements muttered with bated breath and trimmed to suit the fear-ridden prepossessions of the collective mind as it tends in its blind autocracy to dominate the clearer vision of us all.

The more I consider the factor of one’s personal hesitancy to entrust himself unreservedly to the societal aggregate through unbosoming his own unconscious wish to repress his share in its collective dissociation, the more it is clear to me that in this very symptom of one’s own--for such it is--lies the strongest corroboration of the impersonal or societal interpretation of the neurosis. For, as I have said, it is the acceptance of the oneness of each of us individually within the encompassing societal organism as an aggregate that alone points the way to our release from the fear or separateness that is the neurosis of the societal organism.

To consider the instinct of the societal bond without mentioning its influence in the development of the formulations that have resulted from the conceptions of Freud, would be to waive acknowledgment of the very determinants which have made possible the present societal interpretation. Abstract truths are the personal relics of genius; their vindication in the concrete text of experience is the heritage of our common consciousness. If the significance of personality lies in the organismic consciousness of man, the springs of all creative genius are to be traced to this common source. This organic consanguinity is the very essence of genius. Holding its incisive course against all obstacle, this societal urge makes of genius the socially solitary expression that it is. The source of genius is nuclear, original, essential. Moving amid the surface crusts of “types” which in their restriction of outer contact may only absorb or reflect the impressions about them, genius eradiates from the common centre of our societal organism sustained by an impulse that is cosmic. For this reason, it is the unalterable sentence of genius that it break with every accustomed adherence. It is its law that it raise itself out of habitual inertias and see straight and clear, beyond all temporary immediacies, into the unfurbished truth of things. In this wise, in face of the personal criticism and resentment of the very world whose progress it was the all-engrossing effort of his genius to further, Sigmund Freud saw and reported what he saw, fearless, determined and alone. There is no more isolated appointment than this to which genius is summoned. It is in this appointment and in the societal implication of it, that lies the real significance of Freud. Should we fail to realize this, we would ourselves be overlooking the societal urge that is phyletically inherent in Freud’s psychology.

In the course of our development the period of men’s substitutive image-production was first interrupted through the return to reality inaugurated by Darwin’s theory of evolution. What still remained over in man’s mental life has been further threatened by Freud’s theory of the evolutionary processes of the unconscious. When the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Freud are carried to their ultimate social conclusion, the result will be the entire repudiation of man’s image-production and a re-uniting of his organic and conscious life into a single constructive whole.

In an essentially psychological study of this kind in which the effort has been made to trace the mechanisms of unconscious processes in their social application, there is not place for discussing the practical outcome, political, economic and industrial, that must follow through the very altered position of man’s conscious outlook as a result of a more inclusive interpretation of our societal background. It is impossible to conjecture the influence upon man’s behaviour socially and nationally that would result from a complete dispelling from his mind of the images that now occupy the place of his organic reality. How much the reaction that is ostensibly the most disastrous in our social life--the reaction of war--is due to the obsession of the social mind with mere images having no reality, it would only be extravagant to attempt to surmise. But these are practical considerations that must occupy us in subsequent discussions if the basis here outlined in its fundamental biology shall be found of value amid the growing processes of man’s thought.

There is a further statement I wish to make. In this statement I should like to be understood as speaking in the fullest sincerity of which I am capable, my feeling being uninfluenced either by sentimental modesty or by any deprecatory wish to refer to extraneous agencies the sponsorship for this record. This thesis in a very true sense is not my thesis--it represents no intellectual achievement of mine. On consideration it will readily be seen that of its very nature it could not be my thesis. The outgrowth of automatic conditions stoutly resisted by me, it is the product of environmental circumstances over which I had no control. It was exacted under pain of repudiating in actuality the theoretical interpretations for which my work has stood. It is the outcome of inevitable concession to the ordeal of facing in its grim detail the fabric of substitution and disparity composing the structure of my own daily living. Convictions have been wrung from me against my own personal will, against every tradition about me and in spite of every effort of subtlety on my part to escape their exactions. Through many months I have fought their acceptance over every step of the way. As, little by little, a more relative and societal conviction has been borne in upon me, it has proved that the realization I have so long and so resolutely resisted has been the actuality of my own separatism and unconsciousness, as contrasted with the undifferentiated, organic life of which my personal work has been but the theory. It is because this work in its actuality is the expression of an urge common to life, sweeping aside in the strength of its organic tide every claim to personal consideration, that there is due the acknowledgment that it has come to expression unbeholden to me, that its motive has been, as far as humanly possible, not personal but societal.

The organic theory here offered has been advanced by me hitherto on grounds of mere conceptual intuitions. Its present form embodies in its spirit of an impersonal, affective participation, however imperfectly fulfilled, the subjective record of an organic experience. In its plea for a wider acceptance of the common fellowship of man’s native consciousness, I well realize that it is only with the years that we may hope to yield it fuller accord.

I shall be glad if this embodiment of whatever societal acceptance may have found expression in these pages may bring a clearer meaning, a quieter understanding to any whose need has been deep and unfulfilled. For my own part, this expression is the response to what is the deepest demand of my own life--the need for the organic unification of personality that I feel resides alone in the common consciousness of man.

INDEX

Absolutism-- in affects, 39, 227 in present system of consciousness, 33, 43, 63, 104, 227 in psychoanalysis, 67, 68, 73, 101 in the Church, 66-68, 73 see also Personal absolute

Adler, 113, 174

Affects, 115, 121, 130, 178, 205, 227

Affective life, 115, 125 components, 57, 58, 62

Allocentric and autocentric-- complementary, 203, 213 definition, 188 reactions, 191-196, 218

Allosexuality-- and autosexuality, 207, 208, 211 definition, 201, 202 identical basis, 209 see also Sex

Alternative-- bidimensional, 80-85, 93, 96, 97, 226-228, 239 in art and drama, 85-87, 96 in psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychopathology, 97, 100-103, 229-233 individual expressions of, 88-91 occurrence in group analysis, 223, 224, 236 social expressions of, 85, 92-95, 99, 102, 207 see also “Good and bad”

Ambivalence, 86, 94, 196, 228 see also Alternative

“Anal complex,” 216

Analysis-- aim of, 26, 137, 164, 165, 166 see also Dream; Group analysis; Psychoanalysis

Aquinas, 158

Art, 87, 96, 183

Artist, 96, 218, 219

Autocentric-- see Allocentric

Autosexuality, 206, 215, 244 see also Allosexuality

Besant, Annie, 139

Belief, 47, 143

Bidimensional plane, 41, 42, 58, 60, 62, 104 see also Alternative; Relativity of consciousness

Bleuler, 94

Buddha, 218

Calvin, 158

Cerebro-spinal nervous system, 189-192, 194

Childhood-- consciousness of, 22, 23, 145 imposition of social images upon, 52-55, 58, 59, 92, 93, 116, 123, 132, 145, 213

Christ, 218

Christianity, 85, 193, 196

Church-- as social systematization, 65-75

Claparède, 156

Collective unconscious-- see Social unconscious

Complexes, 47, 72

Compulsion neurosis, 81

Consciousness-- absolutism of present system, 43, 44 as unconsciousness, 24, 110, 111, 114, 115, 119, 143 definition, 119 individualistic compared with societal, 51, 62, 109, 144 ontogenesis, 119-121 phylogenesis, 118, 160, 162 relativity of, 32-40, 48 unification of, 122, 126, 169, 173, 212, 218, 242 see also Dissociation; Self-consciousness; Societal concept of consciousness

Darwin, 249

Dementia præcox, 124, 136, 137, 195, 203

Depression, 91, 94

Descartes, 124

Differentiation, 129, 169, 178, 242 delusion of, 120-122, 125, 131

Dissociation-- individual and social, 45-47, 76, 109, 110, 132, 144, 148-153, 155, 176, 185, 241

Division of personality, 81, 85, 95, 147, 222 genesis of, 116-119 physiological substrate, 189-191 see also Dissociation; Neurosis; Repression

Doubt-- attitude of Church toward, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71 compared with resistance, 71-74

Drama, 85-88, 182, 183

Dream, 178-183, 185, 195 analysis, 88, 176, 177, 184 and personal absolute, 90, 111-113 and wish, 89

Eddington, A. S., 32

Education, 92, 93, 214 see also Childhood

Ego-sexuality, 201-203, 206-208 see also Sex

Einstein, 32, 36, 37, 38, 186

Eliot, George, 218

Ellis, Havelock, 158

Extravert, 187, 201

Family, 204, 234, 235

Feeling-- as subjective experience, 20, 21, 115

Freud, 1, 4, 5, 9, 14, 38, 47, 101, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 126, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 174, 199, 204, 236, 248, 249

Freudian analysis, 1-5, 38, 47, 138, 168, 172, 231

Freud’s theory-- of the neuroses, 12, 14, 37, 94, 108, 109, 126, 156, 157, 196, 228, 229, 236, 237 of resistance, 61, 154

“Good and bad”-- as image of personal advantage, 55, 59, 62, 81, 85, 90, 192, 200 bidimensional alternative, 53, 58, 62, 65, 78, 81, 91, 102, 103, 201, 227, 239 pretence underlying, 54-56, 58, 92 see also Image

Group analysis, 131, 223-226, 234-238, 246

Heterosexuality-- see Allosexuality; Homosexuality; Sex

Homophyllic, 208, 210

Homosexuality, 94, 97, 199, 211 and heterosexuality, 198, 200-202, 210 and paranoia, 174, 175 see also Sex

Hysteria, 63, 97, 143, 189, 191 social, 16

Ideas of reference, 136, 223

Image, 40-42 as substitution, 16 basis of marriage, 207 basis of sexuality, 14, 15 bidimensional, 53, 57-59, 226-228 contrasted with reality, 41, 79 of male and female, 96, 216 of parent, 55, 103, 173, 235 see also “Good and bad”; Mother-image; Social images

Incest-Awe, 147, 148

Individual-- as systematization, 70, 76 as separative element, 126, 150, 152, 153, 160, 243 as societal element, 115, 117, 127, 130, 148, 156

Infantilism, 215, 244

Insanity, 23, 24, 91, 124, 137 see also Neurosis; Social neurosis

Instinct, 60, 127 common societal, 200 organic instinct of sex, 202

Introvert, 187, 201

Jung, 113, 156, 204, 205

Kropotkin, P., 159

Libido, 156

Mania, 91, 94

Marriage, 93, 94, 204, 206-209

Masturbation, 211

Meyer, Adolf, xx

Mood-alternation, 91, 94

Mother-image, 141, 172, 234

Mysticism, 125, 134, 139-142

Napoleon, 218

Narcism, 157, 202

Nettleship, Richard Lewis, 106

Neurosis, 15, 76, 77, 83, 102, 117 and sexuality, 157, 173, 174, 209, 237 marital, 93, 94 source, 53, 125, 169, 173 see also Normality; Social neurosis

Neurotic personality, 13-16, 24, 44, 168, 191, 214, 243, 244 and organic consciousness, 11, 12, 23, 153, 209

Newton, 35, 36 Newtonian system, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38

Nietzsche, 23, 130, 218, 247

Normality-- and personal absolute, 47, 63 and sexuality, 173, 203, 209, 244 as criterion, 11, 27, 30 as neurotic manifestation, 12-16, 175, 176, 191 mysticism in, 125, 134, 139-141 unconsciousness of, 26, 27, 147, 179, 181, 203

Objective observation, 18 within subjective sphere, 19-21, 51, 121-124, 167, 176, 178

Organismic-- definition, 3 see also Societal concept of consciousness

Paranoia-- and homosexuality, 174, 175

Paranoiac, 94, 97, 143, 199

Personal absolute, 102, 103 and war, 83 as resistance, 61, 62, 76, 82, 84 as right, 82, 83, 90, 92, 98, 112 in psychoanalysis, 73, 101, 102 underlying social system, 45-48, 63, 70, 72-76, 80-84, 240 see also Absolutism; Resistance; Will-to-self

Personal equation, 4

Plato, 218

Precoid, 63, 97, 195

Preconscious mode, 10, 119, 137, 189, 196

Primary identification, 115, 116 principle of, 218

Psychasthenic, 94, 193, 195

Psychiatrist, 107, 124, 136, 223

Psychiatry, 123, 136, 137, 183, 187

Psychoanalysis-- alternative in, 103, 196, 198, 229-233 as social systematization, 65, 67-76, 101 as theory, 17-19, 21, 25 duration of treatment, 230-233 impasse in, 109, 172, 223, 224 misconceptions, 2, 197 personal absolute in, 3, 73, 101, 102 position of, 9, 10, 229 unconscious element in, 3, 143, 167, 234 see also Analysis; Group analysis

Psychoanalyst-- attitude toward patient, 24, 166-172, 181, 183, 195, 229, 230, 232-234 involvement in social unconscious, 110, 111, 183, 184, 222, 223 qualifications of, 28, 29

Psychology, 5, 33, 36, 38, 65, 97

Psychopathology, 63, 100, 101, 123, 124, 223 of war, 130

Ptolemaic system, 38

Relativity of consciousness, 32-40, 43, 45, 48, 51, 57-62, 104, 246

Religion, 64, 96, 98, 99

Repression-- and bipolarity, 216, 217 and sexuality, 156-159, 162, 163, 174, 193, 215, 242 and suggestion, 55, 142, 189, 192, 200, 201, 218 individual and social, 7, 13, 15, 30, 76, 77, 131, 154, 162, 163 physiological substrate, 189-193

Resistance-- as personal absolute, 61, 62, 76, 82, 84, 230 attitude of psychoanalysis toward, 69-76 compared with doubt, 71-74 individual and social, 43-45, 65, 75, 76, 152, 154, 155

Schreiner, Olive, 218

Self-- and sexuality, 15, 173, 200, 201, 210, 211 image of, 16, 58-61, 79, 82, 83, 141 preservation and race-preservation, 127

Self-consciousness, 116, 118-120, 125, 132, 147, 161, 162, 205

Sex-- and sexuality, 11, 156-159, 163, 193, 200-217, 237 as organic unity, 11, 163, 199, 208-212, 220 intermediate, 214, 215, 217 oppositeness in, 211, 213, 214, 216

Sexuality, 15 as replacement, 10, 163 see also Repression; Sex

Shields, Clarence, xix, 233

Social images, 96, 102, 135-138, 161, 229 and childhood, 51-55, 58, 59, 92, 93 as distortion of reality, 87-90 see also Image; Mother-image

Social neurosis, 101, 125, 130-133, 162, 245 and images, 229 individual implication, 84, 246

Social unconscious, 117, 133, 162, 222, 223, 228, 245 as basis of normality, 11-14, 26, 27, 44, 47, 176 see also Unconsciousness

Societal concept of consciousness, 31, 45, 46, 127-131, 148, 149, 160-163 see also Relativity of consciousness

Socrates, 218

Subjective sphere-- see Feeling; Objective observation

Sublimation, 189

Suggestion-- see Repression

Sympathetic nervous system, 189-192, 194

Transference, 167, 172, 230

Unconsciousness, 5, 15, 111, 126, 135, 144, 173, 178, 183-185, 192, 193, 204, 234 as resistance, 34, 76 underlying normality, 47, 125 see also Consciousness; Dissociation; Social unconscious

War, 14, 16, 34, 35, 83, 129-132, 249

Wilde, Oscar, 78

Will-to-self, 13, 75, 90, 98, 129, 156

Wish, 89, 111-113, 173, 180, 195, 232

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FOOTNOTES

The word “organismic” refers to the feelings and reactions common to the social body regarded as a coherent, integral organism. The term organismic, as I use it in its social application, is identical with the term organic in its individual application. The difference is that the term organismic is employed in a more generic sense. But in general the usages, organic and organismic, are interchangeable.

“The Preconscious or the Nest Instinct,” a thesis presented in outline at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Boston, Mass., May 25, 1917.

“Social Images versus Reality,” The Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Social Psychology, Vol. XIX, No. 3, Oct.-Dec., 1924.

“Our Social Evasion,” Medical Journal and Record, Vol. CXXIII, No. 12, June 16, 1926.

“Giebt es vielleicht--eine Frage für Irrenärzte--Neurosen der Gesundheit?”--Nietzsche’s Werke. Erste Abt., Band I. Die Geburt der Tragödie. Leipzig, 1903.

An instance of this inversion of natural expression is seen in the system of technique that is the obsession par excellence of singers. In the art of singing, as correspondingly in any art of life, technique is applicable only to the theory of vocalization but not to the actuality of spontaneous musical expression.

I realize that a patient should have the protection of the medical expert’s knowledge. This means that the analyst, if not himself a physician, should be directly associated with the office of a physician. We know, of course, that charlatanry exists no less within the medical profession than elsewhere; yet while a medical degree is in no sense a certificate of personal sincerity, it is a social surety of professional responsibility. On the other hand, I have yet to hear the suggestion offered that a physician who is not himself a psychoanalyst should be closely associated with the office of a psychoanalyst. It seems odd, as one thinks of it, that this provision should not have been offered by those who have been conscientious enough to recognize the reverse need. As a matter of fact, the number of instances in which mental disorders are mistaken for somatic conditions is incomparably greater than those in which there is failure to recognize the existence of the somatic component. If it is important that the analyst should be competent to trace the source of structural diseases, the internist should be equally competent to trace the source of mental disharmonies.

“To free our thought from the fetters of space and time is an aspiration of the poet and the mystic, viewed somewhat coldly by the scientist who has too good reason to fear the confusion of loose ideas likely to ensue. If others have had a suspicion of the end to be desired it has been left to Einstein to show the way to rid ourselves of these ‘terrestrial adhesions to thought.’ And in removing our fetters he leaves us, not (as might have been feared) vague generalities for the ecstatic contemplation of the mystic, but a precise scheme of world-structure to engage the mathematical physicist.”--A. S. Eddington, F.R.S., “The Theory of Relativity and its Influence on Scientific Thought,” The Scientific Monthly, Vol. XVI, No. 1, Jan. 1923.

It is, of course, not possible to trace through mathematical intricacies a detailed analogy between the cosmic theory of relativity, as it bears upon the objective data of an abstruse calculus, and the organic theory of relativity, as it bears upon the subjective data of the all-inclusive principle of psychology here regarded as the basis of a universally comprehensive scheme of consciousness. The comparison has significance for me merely in the aptness of its theoretical alignment with a conception of consciousness which includes data extrinsic to our habitual psychological system, i.e. the system intrinsic to ourselves and commonly accepted as the totality of consciousness.

Newton observed the universe from the point of view of his fixed position upon the earth. Einstein observes the universe from the point of view of all possible positions within the universe. Likewise our present-day systems of psychology regard the conditions of life from the position of observation that is one’s individual point of view toward them. In the conception here advanced these conditions, on the contrary, are regarded from points of view that are socially relative to and inclusive of all possible positions of observation.

The reader will recall that the conceptions of the physicists first led them to a theory of special relativity through their calculations of uniform motion, while their deductions came only later to embrace data pertaining to difform motion, or to motion that is not uniform, as contained under the conception of general relativity. With regard to the theory of relativity in the subjective sphere, it was upon noting the habitual deflections from a predictable organic constant, observable in the erratic reactions of the neurotic personality, that the conception of relativity in the sphere of consciousness first occurred to me. It was only subsequently that the relativity of consciousness as applied to the uniform reactions characteristic of the collective social mind came to shape itself into the organismic conception of relativity here outlined as the underlying principle of consciousness.

While representing in no sense a detailed correlation between them, there is nevertheless a certain analogy, not only in the manner of inception of the objective and subjective theories with respect to the observation first of difform or abnormal deviation, and later of discrepancies of normal or uniform reactions; but there is also this further concomitance between the two aspects of the principle. The Newtonian hypothesis takes account of motion or reaction in the planetary system only in the large, while the theory of Einstein is adequate in contemplating the motion of planets both in the large and in the small. Conversely, our present Freudian theory of the unconscious takes care of the reactions of the personality in the small or in an individual or particular sense, while the theory of the relativity of consciousness regards personality not only individually or particularly (whether regarded singly or in its collective social expression) but also societally or in the sense of consciousness in its universal or organismic meaning.

This psychobiological misconception is doubtless also aided in large measure by the physiological conditions of our visual organs of perception and by the bidimensional surface upon which our impressions of objects are received. Because of the disposition of the nerve terminals of the retina upon a flat or bidimensional area, our visual perception of objects is limited to impressions of a flat or bidimensional plane. If by means of binocular accommodation objects present to us the appearance of “depth,” it is of course not to direct visual perception that we owe our sense of perspective but to stereoscopic inference, seconded by our stereognostic experience of tridimensional solidity. Hence, what is actually “perceived” upon looking at an object of three dimensions is a visual facet, as it were, due to our own mentally flattened “cross-section” of the solid object before us as determined by the particular aspect of it that is momentarily presented to view. I think it cannot be doubted that this mechanism of our visual perception is a contributing factor in influencing our tendency to “see” mentally. One says “I see” when he means “I understand.” There is the same implication in saying that one “sees” the logic of such and such a statement. So, too, we speak of a “mental point of view” or of “intellectual vision.” This illusory character of our mental percepts probably owes its explanation also in part to the fact that our visual sense is the sense that best permits a distant and detached observation of rather than a contact with the surrounding world.

“Our Mass Neurosis,” The Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 23, No. 6, June, 1926.

“The Reabsorbed Affect and Its Elimination,” British Journal of Medical Psychology, Vol. VI, Part 3.

“Speaking of Resistances,” address before the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, New York City, June 10, 1926. Psyche, No. 27, January, 1927.

“The Heroic Rôle--An Historical Retrospect,” Psyche, No. 25, July, 1926.

Needless to say the distinction here made between “actual” and “real” is used very specifically.

“Insanity a Social Problem,” The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XXXII, No. I, Part I, July, 1926.

I recall an incident that occurred several years ago in the office of a prominent newspaper that well illustrates this point. A member of the staff was called to the phone to receive the details of a drowning, word of which had just been reported. One can picture the professional zeal with which he turned to the phone, alert with the eagerness of expectant acquisition. If a moment later he dropped the receiver and drew back with a sudden cry of horror, his whole face gradually altering to a look of dejection and pain, it was not because he had been disappointed in the expectation of a thrilling item of news. Not at all. The item was as tragic in its details as one could wish. The disappointment lay only in the fact that, on inquiring the name of the boy who had been drowned, he learned that it was his own son. It was only this circumstance, then, that explained why his countenance suddenly changed from satisfaction to pain. A matter of information which was to have been sold to his readers as a delectable item of news concerning the drowning of another man’s son became a poignant sorrow when the self-same news related to his own son. And so, upon examination, it may be seen that what really happened was an unexpected shift of affect due to the sudden alternation of the personal motive through the reversal of the bidimensional vantage.

“Psychoanalytic Improvisations and the Personal Equation,” The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. XIII, No. 2, April, 1926.

Consider the legend of the origin of the life of man as symbolized through the intuitions of the folk unconscious recorded in the Book of Genesis. For its discussion see “The Origin of the Incest-Awe,” The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. V, No. 3, July, 1918.

The term “consciousness” is used by the writer in two different senses, the one having to do with the mental sophistication of individual awareness, the other with consciousness regarded as an inclusive racial principle. The reader must rely upon the context for the distinction between the restricted individualistic interpretation on the one hand and the organismic interpretation on the other.

This mistaken tendency of inference has so far laid hold upon us as to mislead our perceptions even in respect to judgments concerning data which lie altogether within the objective mode. To cite an instance of homely type quite remote from the present argument:--when we speak of two buckets of water, drawn from a common source, in reality our concept is buckets of two waters. For the accident of their separation in space and of the demarcation of the bulk of each by the outline of its container leads the mind, habituated to the fallacy of subjective inference, to posit a difference or a twoness of essence where there is but a difference or twoness of outer circumstance or accidental condition. Hence there results a concept not of two buckets but of two waters, whereas the apparently two waters dipped from the same source are essentially one.

“The Need of an Analytic Psychiatry,” The American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. VI, No. 3, January, 1927.

An example of the blindly impulsive character of this instinct often recurs to me. I was standing with a lady on the shore of Lake Zürich. A sudden storm arose and we could see plainly that two young men in a sail-boat well out in the middle of the lake had lost complete control of their craft. To the crowd that had gathered on the quays it was evident from the way the sail was jibing from side to side that the boat would overturn. A number of launches began hurrying toward it. As the boat capsized, throwing the men into the lake, my companion, suddenly tearing off her gloves, dashed toward the water. I managed to seize her just as she reached the water’s edge. On my rallying her and inquiring just what might be her plans with reference to two men a full quarter of a mile out in the lake and closely surrounded by competent rescue parties, she was unable to account for her impulsive reaction beyond declaring that she “just couldn’t let them drown like that!” Here was an individual with as goodly a share of unconscious egotism as the rest of us, but in whom at the sight of danger to others the self-instinct was completely subordinated to the organic behests of our common societal instinct.

“Character and the Neuroses,” The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. I, No. 2, February, 1914.

We overlook the fact that it is not the content of a belief but rather the mere condition of believing that determines its errancy or truth. The word belief, as has been said, is a derivative of the Anglo-Saxon leof, meaning preference, but we do not recognize that what one “believes” is merely what one wants to think. There are undoubtedly as many devout believers among the devotees of Science as of Religion, and upon inquiry we should probably find that the pet beliefs of the scientist rest upon as unreasoning an attitude of mind as those of the religionist. The point is that whatever is thus believed in response to personal preference is arbitrary and doctrinaire, be it evolution, relativity, or God.

It is really the element of secret emotionalism that constitutes mysticism. It is again a phase of the private alternative whereby we get what we want. What is called “intellectual mysticism” is but a secondary rationalization of this emotional element. But there is need of discrimination. While it is true that conceptions arising from intuitional inference may readily be begotten of emotionalism, yet the same inferences when based upon biological analogy cease to be mystical. Nietzsche’s “primordial unity,” because biologically inferred, seems to me a quite unemotional and inclusive conception. In the biological consistency that unites the most highly differentiated species with the lowest single unicellular organism, the mind straightway finds substantiation for Nietzsche’s conception. Whereas the “metaphysical unity” of the religionists is, on the contrary, a wholly mystical conception. Through this postulate the mind is immediately involved in such vagaries as one connects with the doctrine of transubstantiation or with the flights of Annie Besant and her astral bodies!

But one can perhaps still more aptly illustrate the distinction in question by considering the totally opposed meanings--the one intellectual, the other emotional--contained in the word “vibrations” according as it is used by the scientist in regard to mathematically mensurable physical wave-lengths or as it is employed by the “hypersensitive personality” to describe certain sensations presumably recorded somewhere in the region of the epigastrium in response to subtle but invisible “psychic communications.” In defining the term mystical one must not fail to include the attitude of mind that leads one scientist, who has failed to understand the investigations of another, to refer to those investigations as mystical. I am inclined to feel somewhat strongly on this point because of the fact that my conception of the primary biological unity of the organism and its influence upon the subsequent development of the personality has tended to be regarded quite arbitrarily in the light of a mystical interpretation. (See note 1, page 10.)

There is a story reminiscent of juvenile days in my own home that is to the point. An older brother, then between four and five years of age, was being given his bath in the nursery as was customary in those days. Hanging above the mantel was a picture of the Sistine Madonna. The youngster being freed of his clothing ran skipping about the room. His governess happened to be present, and being duly horrified or, what is more probable as I remember her, acting in response to a sense of duty, she gently chid him for his lack of modesty, saying “Jesus doesn’t love little boys who go about that way.” The child looked up at the picture of the nude infant with doubtless a more discerning sympathy with Jesus’ views than grown-ups are wont to attribute to the wisdom of childhood, and looking his would-be instructress quietly in the eyes he replied incontrovertibly: “He does it hisse’f!”

If the story of my brother’s life should ever be fully told, as some day I hope it may, it will help us realize the unerring fatality of an early enforced system of repression and its logical effect upon the individual’s subsequent life as upon its close.

The biological (organic) continuity between the societal or psychological and the functional or physiological spheres is interesting in view of their obvious homologies as shown in the marked suggestive influences which we see passing over from the psychological sphere and affecting the processes pertaining to the functional or physiological sphere and doubtless operating no less in the reverse direction. One wonders without undue presumption how many so-called “organic” diseases are not primarily functional and hence functionally modifiable through the integral, societal agency of an organic analysis, provided, of course, that the separative process has not already crystallized into the static condition of structural alteration. At least it is clear that many so-called physical derangements need to be frankly regarded in the light of sheer somatic hysterias. See “The Psychological Analysis of So-called Neurasthenic and Allied States,” The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. VIII, 1913-14, page 246, note 1.

An analogous condition is demonstrable in the physical universe in the fact that the phenomena of gravitation (such as planetary motion) and the phenomena of electricity (including the motion of light) have been proved to be so intimately related to one another as to be regarded now by the physicists “as parts of one vast system embracing all Nature.”

The Southern negro has a definition of libido that is biologically truer than that of either Freud, Jung or Claparède. He refers to inadequacy of the sexual life as a lack of “ambition.”

It should be recalled that in the view of the present thesis sexuality as it exists socially among us is, in essence, narcistic throughout and that hence sexuality, including so-called normal sexuality, is, in my conception, a repression, and must be definitely discriminated from the spontaneous and biological expression embodied in the native instinct of sex. (See p. 10.)

One may find the objective evidence of this statement amply set forth in P. Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution. Here Kropotkin traces in a very conclusive way the presence of the societal instinct in the lower animals and in primitive man. Kropotkin errs, however, when he reaches the levels of development expressed in the social organizations of man. For he fails to discriminate between the instinct of societal solidarity that is the natural cohesion of a species and the quite premeditated and ulterior expressions of social accord represented in the mutual self-interests of man’s collective adaptations.

“An Ethnic Aspect of Consciousness,” The Sociological Review, Vol. XIX, No. 1, January, 1927.

If, in the flash of so brief an interval of time (speaking ethnologically) as fifty years or so, a plan were effected involving the complete segregation from one another of all the individuals comprising the societal organism of the species, the result, notwithstanding the many millions of years required for the gradual evolution of the race up to the present time, would be its complete extermination! Such a consideration allows us to realize, at least objectively, how closely interwoven are the elements comprising our societal organism and how dependent is the integrity of the whole upon the organic participation of its parts.

A striking instance of psychoanalytic unconsciousness may be seen in the analyst’s quite naïve attitude toward his own unconscious need for such infantile pacifiers as he finds in the obsessive use of tobacco. That such diversions are no more adult than the use of the rubber ring or nipple of his infancy he does not for a moment suspect, the concomitance of such practices with the oral eroticism of his childhood having only a theoretical significance for him. The truth is, the psychoanalyst wants to smoke. Of course, it is not consistent with his teaching and if he is to have his way in the matter some process must be devised that will make it consistent. And so in his authoritarian suzerainty he forthwith decrees that the patient who objects to a smoke-filled room is a prey to unseemly resistances, and that his or her attitude of mind, not the analyst’s, must be promptly looked into with a view to summary treatment.

Let me say at once that this nomadic young lady did me the honour to remark that she sensed immediately upon meeting me that my attitude was entirely different from that of other analysts. Of this she made haste to assure me at the outset. In thinking of it, a wince gives place to a smile as I recall the trustful complacency with which I benignly accepted as a statement of fact the cunning decoys of this seraphically unconscious individual, her flattering reassurances seeming to me at the time clearly to indicate the very rare perceptions of this unusually discerning young person! The aftermath as it has come to pass in the brief succeeding years enables me unhesitatingly to aver that my severely reproved colleagues were at least not more unconscious than I.

See note 1, page 15.

See note 1, page 56.

See note 1, page 10.

See note 1, page 10.

Perhaps this distinction of type has its societal counterpart also in the opposite psychological reactions embodied in the esoteric tendencies of Catholicism with its markedly autocentric organization, as compared with Protestantism’s more allocentric trends. The difference between the two types of reaction is also seen in the broad geographical contrast that separates the consciousness of Asia from that of Europe.

See discussion of opposed reaction-types independently determined by M. Geiger, “Neue Complicationsversuche,” Philos. Studien, XVIII, 1903, pp. 347-436 and also by myself, The Determination of the Position of a Momentary Impression in the Temporal Course of a Moving Visual Impression, The Johns Hopkins Studies in Philosophy and Psychology, No. 3, The Psychological Review, Psychological Monographs, Vol. XI, No. 4, September, 1909.

“Psychiatry as an Objective Science,” British Journal of Medical Psychology, Vol. V, Part 4.

Narcism (homo-erotism) is a reversion of interest representing a sexual reaction to the pictorial affect or to the personal image. Autoerotism (ego-erotism) represents an arrest of the individual’s sexuality due to its impact with the personal image or with the social self-reflection about him. Narcism embodies the reflection of the individual’s erotism in its social phase. Autoerotism is the absorption of the individual’s erotism in its personal phase. Autoerotism is thus central and represents the retroversion or interception by the organism of its efferent interests. This occurs in the individual inversion expressed in the sensory images of dementia præcox. Narcism is peripheral and is expressed in the social inversion pertaining equally to the motor images of homosexuality as to the sensory images of paranoia.

While a student of Jung’s in the early days of psychoanalysis, at the time when Jung was the very organ of Freud’s genius, the clear emanation of his spirit, I remarked to him one day that I had come to the conclusion that the neurotic individual inevitably married his mother. Jung’s reply, alert as a flash, was characteristic of his brilliant, inclusive scope of vision. “I have come to the conclusion,” he said, “that every individual inevitably marries his mother.”

The word like is from Anglo-Saxon gelic, compounded of ge, meaning together, and lic, meaning body.

“Convention in Psychoanalysis and Its Interpretative Inhibitions,” a paper read at the Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Atlantic City, May 10, 1918.

See note 2, page 208.

In a recent meeting of psychopathologists a paper was presented which described the results of a questionnaire that had been distributed among the students of one of our prominent American universities, the object of which was to learn the nature of the sexual life of the college students. The figures compiled from the answers submitted showed in the author’s view a surprisingly high percentage of masturbation and homosexuality. But what is of interest is the fact that in the interpretation of the author of the paper, as well as in that of every member who participated in the discussion, the concept of masturbation was restricted solely to personal practices on the part of the single individual, while the concept of homosexuality was confined entirely to the manifestation of sexual interests or activities occurring between persons of the same sex! Apparently it was not suspected that these manifest expressions of autoerotism or homosexuality are the least widespread or significant forms of its occurrence, that the really important and far-reaching expression of these disorders of instinct occurs in the latent form represented in the symbolic substitutions of heterosexuality as commonly practised, for example, in houses of prostitution. Yet these latter expressions were avowedly regarded as real expressions of heterosexuality and, accordingly, its devotees were naïvely interpreted as presenting a psychological adaptation which showed a frank contrast to that of their “homosexual” confrères! It is hopeless to expect any scientific understanding of anomalies of reaction that pertain to our subjective life as long as scientists themselves persist in confusing the objective appearances under which these anomalies are disguised for the subjective actuality of these anomalies themselves.

“The Genesis and Meaning of ‘Homosexuality’”--a development of the principle of identification or the primary subjective phase of consciousness. See The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. IV, No. 3, July, 1917.

It is not by accident but by some inner, intuitive design that man has adopted the symbol he employs as the sign of infinity. In the mark of the mathematicians--consisting of two circles that are one, one circle that is two, wherein is neither beginning nor end--is expressed the character of the infinite and all-inclusive in a form of conjunction so complete as not to be susceptible of possible increment.

The reader is reminded that this book was outlined in 1923. From that time to the time of publication (1927), the group analysis, proceeding along the lines indicated in this chapter, has further substantiated the thesis here stated.

See note 1, page 53.

See note 1, page 15.

We are warned, of course, that this new shift of technique will arouse in us unprecedented resistances. But let us be wary lest we capitulate too easily to this ready-to-hand ogre of “resistances”; for by the same token we have been warned throughout these analytic years that we must expect unprecedented resistances to the former dictum of psychoanalysis--a dictum which imposed without parley or mitigation a rigid analytic policy of non-interference. Our inconsistency is but another instance of the automatic illogic of the alternative, of the inevitable compulsion of the personal criterion.

“The Group Method of Analysis,” The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. XIV, 1927, “The Laboratory Method in Psychoanalysis,” The American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. V, No. 3, January, 1926.

It should be clearly explained that group analysis is not my analysis of the group but that it is the group’s analysis of me or of any other individual. In our laboratory usage, “group” does not mean a collection of individuals. It means a phyletic principle of observation. This phyletic principle of observation as applied to the individual and to the aggregate is the whole significance of group analysis.

I hold that the word “spirit” employed in its biological connotation belongs to the legitimate equipment of the laboratory. Because the religionists have carried it off and perverted it to sentimental uses, I shall not surrender the claim of the scientist upon it. And so by “spirit” I do not wish to indicate anything akin to the ghostly itinerants reputed to stalk o’ nights, nor to that beneficent impulse that moves people to cheer the afternoon of life by “doing good” when the infelicities of age or infirmity have dulled the edge of less salutary proclivities. Neither have I in mind any philosophical concept whatever, nor least of all a conception savouring of a religious purport, all of which seem to me equally apparitional. I mean merely man’s innate, unprompted or unchecked feeling as expressive of his organic life. That which in man responds to natural beauty, actual or inferred, is of the sphere of the spirit as I use the term.

“There are ages, when the rational and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one full of fear of the intuition, the other full of scorn for the abstraction; the latter just as irrational as the former is inartistic.” Nietzsche, Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays.