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

BOOK 8

find relief in an ennobled form. This they call sublimation. Artistic and literary gratifications are considered by these authorities to be sublimated repressions. The sublimated sexual impulse they think may have given the world many acts of devotion as well as poems and works of art; the will to power may have been sublimated to help in scientific discovery and the creation of great works of art. And so on. But this attribution of intellectual and esthetic achievement to sublimation may easily be carried too far. There has been extraordinarily little repression in the lives of many great artists and thinkers to account for their achievements. It is questionable if sublimation, as thus defined, can be treated as anything but an extreme type of symbolization, or whether it can be credited with more than a little amateurish art, writing, research, or devotion.

So far we have made very little use of the term “complex.” Its definition will introduce nothing really new to the reader of §§ 4, 5, and 6 of this chapter. It is typically a mental system coloured with emotion, connected with some instinctive urge, linked up with an organized set of associated ideas and in conflict with the more dominating system of the mind. So it is more or less repressed. It differs in degree rather than in nature from a secondary personality on the one hand and a simple repressed impulse on the other. It never has the importance of a secondary personality ; the main personality is affected by it but remains in control.

Among all the troubles of mental development, the formation of repressed complexes is the commonest. One might almost call it the normal experience, since different sides of the self are almost bound to come into conflict during development, and unreasoning repression seems often the simplest way of dealing with such a conflict. It is the method to which young people resort very readily. The more effective the repression the less the normal conscious self knows about the repressed side of his nature, though it is still active and still influencing him; but at the same time, the more independent and active the complex becomes. Furthermore, the more the complex is cut off from the main consciousness and reflective reason, the more devious, primitive and irrational the ways in which its pent-up energies force their way into action—until in the extremer cases we get hysterical paralysis; irrational fears, compulsions, fetishisms ; the power of de810 THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

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CHAPTER 7

cision brought to a standstill; or a hidden sense of guilt undermining the entire fabric of self-respect and self-confidence.

The discovery that such repressed bits of mind exist and continue to act in the Unconscious is one of the great achievements of modern psychology ; the resolution of insurgent complexes is one of the main tasks of psychological medicine, while their prevention should be a prime aim of education. In concluding this section, we will draw attention to one property of the mindsystems out of which repressed complexes spring. ‘They are one and all invested with a double quality of simultaneous attraction and repulsion. ‘This is, if you like, another way of saying that they are fraught with conflict, for conflict will only arise when one part of the self desires, another part dislikes or is disgusted ; but the fact is so important that it deserves stressing. This double quality, positive and negative in one, has been called ambivalence. Normally animals can suffer little from this double-edged attitude of mind, because they live so much in the present and have so little capacity of reflection or recollection. The germ of it is present in them, however, and can be brought into prominence artificially, as in Pavlov’s dogs, which suffered from neurasthenia and hysteria because they were subjected to conflicting impulses. But in man, matters are far more elaborate; and when we begin to reflect, we realize what a part is played by ambivalent systems of feeling in the development not merely of every individual one of us, but also of the most deeply ingrained human traditions.

Whole tracts of our own nature may come to have this quality. The sex-impulse is the most obvious. case in point. It is very common for adolescent boys and girls to combine passionate urgings of their sexual instinct with fear and disgust at the idea of its physical manifestations; and this attitude may continue into adult life. But in the same way the urge to power and self-expression may become tinged with ambivalent feeling, and an explosive mixture of self-assertion and _ selfdepreciation result.

Or particular objects or ideas may become thus charged, as it were, with contradictory

feeling. The attitude of children to parents is the most familiar example. The boy loves and respects his father. But the

father is the source of punishment and prohibition as well, and the boy is frightened of his anger and galled by his authority.