Part 2 — 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.⁠[58] 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.⁠[59] 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.