Note 153 — LECTURE IX THE ORGANIZATION OF UNCONSCIOUS COMPLEXES

While these pages were in press, Lord Haldane in his Montreal address (before the American Bar Association), which has attracted wide attention, developed the psychological principle of “Sittlichkeit,” as applied to communities, the nation and groups of nations. By “Sittlichkeit” is meant the social habit of mind and action underlying social customs, the instinctive sense of social obligation which is the foundation of society. This plainly includes what is often called the social conscience and actions impelled thereby. In further definition of this principle Lord Haldane quotes Fichte as stating “Sittlichkeit” to mean “those principles of conduct which regulate people in their relations to each other, and have become matter of habit and second nature at the stage of culture reached, and of which, therefore, we are not explicitly conscious.” The point was made that the citizen is governed “only to a small extent by law and legality on the one hand, and by the dictates of the individual conscience on the other.” It is the more extensive system of “Sittlichkeit” which plays the predominant rôle. Out of this system there develops a unity of thought and “a common ideal” which can be made to penetrate the soul of a people and to take complete possession of it. Likewise there develops “a general will with which the will of the good citizen is in accord.” This will of the community (inspired by the common ideal) is common to the individuals composing it. Lord Haldane goes on to make the point that what is now true within a single nation may in time come to be true between nations or a group of nations. Thus an international habit of looking to common ideals may grow up sufficiently strong to develop a general will, and to make the binding power of those ideas a reliable sanction for their obligations to each other. With this thesis, ably presented and fortified though it be, we are not here concerned. The point I wish to make is that this conception of “Sittlichkeit” which Lord Haldane in his remarkable address, destined I believe to become historic, so ably develops and applies to the solution of a world-problem is in psychological terms identical with that of complexes of ideas and affects organized in the unconscious.