The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND THE HUMAN MIND

from stammering and nervousness; and whenever he was in a narrow enclosed space he had a feeling of unpleasantness and discomfort, often of actual fear. As he had experienced this ever since he could remember, he thought it was a normal trait which he shared with the generality of the human race. In the War, living and sleeping in dugouts brought his horror of narrow spaces to a head, and often forced him to spend his nights in the trenches rather than sleep in the safety of the dugout. At last he realized that this fear was something abnormal. He grew more and more nervous and he had to be sent to hospital, suffering from severe stammering, headache, and depression ; he either could not sleep or, if he slept, had terrifying battle-nightmares.

Rivers got him to write down his dreams and try to recollect any incidents of early life which they recalled. He eventually recalled an incident which took place before he was four, and seems to have been the origin of his morbid fear. He had gone alone to the house of an old rag-and-bone man who used to give the children a halfpenny for various objects they picked up ; and on his way out, which lay through a dark, narrow passage, found the street door shut. He was too small to open it ; and at the same moment a large dog at the other end of the passage began to growl.

As he recollected the incident, the memory of his childish terror came vividly back ; but from that moment on the irrational fear of closed spaces became very much less, and his general condition improved. Probably he had been forbidden to have anything to do with the old man, and his guilty conscience saw to it that the memory of the fear was repressed. He remembered that ever afterwards he had been afraid even to pass the house.

The feeling of guilt is the commonest cause of repression. An act is over and done with ; it cannot be undone; and yet we know it was wrong and wish it undone. Instead of facing things out, we try, in the terms of the moralist, to stifle the pricks of conscience—to forget the heavy sense of guilt. But the sense of guilt may be associated with any kind of action. In the case just quoted, the guilty act was an act of disobedience to parents. It may be murder, and spring from the lust for power, as with Lady Macheth’s crime. It may be sexual transgression, real or imaginary, as is very frequently the case with boys and girls of a rather idealistic type during their adolescence. Such repressions are apt to work out

in uncontrollable motor impulses, either irrelevant to their cause or symbolically associated with it. Shakespeare seems to have heard of such a case and used it in his invention of Lady Macbeth’s sleep-walking gestures.

Some mental patients are constantly washing their hands and displaying an exaggerated regard for cleanliness which may become so excessive that they have to be certified insane ; this, as with Lady Macbeth, symbolically expresses the desire to be rid of guilt’s uncleanliness. And as sexual offences are commonly regarded as “ dirty,” this ritualistic washing is frequently the result of sexual escapades.

Besides such direct symbolizations the Unconscious may make use of other mental mechanisms, such as simple association. An impulse which is thought of as guilty or shameful seeks and finds expression ; we strive to repress its further activity ; we succeed in blotting out the memory of the guilty incident—but only by switching the impulse, so to speak, from its normal outlet on to something else which happened to be associated with that moment of intense experience. This is especially common with the sex impulse, and results in what is generally called sexual fetishism, where the most heterogeneous acts or objects are found to give some degree of sexual excitement and pleasure, and the normal attraction of the Opposite sex is correspondingly weakened. There are men who form collections of women’s boots or, a common police-court case, find themselves driven to cut off the pigtails of young girls.

These facts throw a vivid illumination upon human motives. For one thing they show how futile it is to interpret human acts in terms of reason or advantage, or of a balance-sheet of pleasure and pain. This sort of mental accountancy, which the utilitarian school of Bentham and Mill brought into vogue in the middle of last century, is too rational ; indeed, the whole philosophy of utilitarianism is one gigantic rationalization—it invents polite and logical reasons to account for the workings of obscure and irrational impulses. In our conduct we may be partly guided by reason, but we are not impelled by it. We are pushed and shoved by impulses and_strivings which have nothing to do with logic, whose end and aim is not pleasure but expression in action.

It is widely believed among psychologists that many repressions may, so to speak, make a deal with the repressive forces and

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