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

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND THE HUMAN MIND

He loves, fears, admires, and dislikes all in one. Hence, frequent cases of difficult children who improve enormously on being sent to school. And there is every nuance according to sex and temperament and circumstances of parent and child. Wife or husband may become similarly doublecharged with the electricity of mental life. Physical attraction and satiety, the desire for stability and the irritation of being tied for life, real affection and the friction of daily domesticity—these and many other pairs of impulses may be at work chargingup the ideas centred on the marriage-partner. In extreme cases, there may be the most violent oscillations between passionate love and wild hatred ; or the positive and negative may be locked in a continuous, indecisive, and exhausting struggle.

Many religious ideas are similarly doublecharged. In most religions love and fear are intimately blended in the attitude towards the god. In more primitive religions, it is rather objects and persons that are ambivalent, and they become ambivalent in a special way to which the epithet tabu is given. Something or someone—a king, a place, an action, an object —is regarded as both sacred and forbidden, often almost unclean—both revered and, in certain aspects, abhorred. As one anthropologist has put it, there are two kinds of holiness or sacredness to primitive man, good-holiness and bad-holiness ; and both are combined in what is tabu. Many of us can recall a similar ambivalence in our own early struggles with religious propositions, and the history of Manicheanism seems to present that indecision on a gigantic scale.

§ 12 Psycho-analysis

The repressed complex in one or other of its protean forms is at the root of most neurotic disorder. Different methods of getting at the peccant complex and eradicating its symptoms have been used. Suggestion under hypnosis was for long the chief deliberate method of attack. Its usual alternatives were to send the patient a long sea-voyage or give him a rest-cure. But when the root of the mischief was in a deep-seated and long-continued conflict, the voyage or the nursing-home would often give renewed opportunity for the conflict to rage without interference from outer claims; and the last state of the patient was worse than the first. Even if the rest did benefit the patient, in most

cases it only cured effects and left the cause unaltered. And the same objection applied to hypnotic suggestion; it often removed symptoms but did not touch the cause, which sooner or later broke out in new effects.

In the War, many cases of shell-shock were successfully treated by another use of hypnotism. When it became clear that the patient’s neurotic state was due to some violent shock of horror, disgust or fear, the terrifying or shameful memory of which he was suppressing, hypnosis was employed to recover the lost memory. We have given several examples of this, and of how the recovery was often difficult and accompanied by deep-seated resistances ; but once recovery was accomplished the symptoms generally disappeared. This ‘‘ blowing off” of symptoms and cause in one blast of remembered emotion is sometimes called “ abreaction.” There is no doubt as to the efficacy of the method; but it has its limitations. For one thing, abreaction alone may merely cure a particular incident of mental breakdown. The man became neurotic because of a terrible experiencebut in most cases also because of some inner conflict which was the opportunity of the experience. When the conflict has been long-continued and severe, abreaction alone will not cure it ; the man goes back to the trenches apparently healthy, but receptive soil for the next violent shock that is to befall him.

In the, neuroses of peace-time there is often no single experience from which the patient’s illness dates; usually the conflict itself becomes gradually more acute; and the complex grows by feeding on the experiences of years.

Persuasion and waking suggestion have also been used ; but they too often fail to reach the true cause of the complaint. During the present century, the method known as psycho-analysis has come into ever greater prominence.

Historically, the method of psychoanalysis grew out of the method of abreaction, which was discovered by Breuer (18421925) in 1880. Towards the end of the nineteenth century Sigmund Freud became associated with Breuer in developing the method. Later, Freud, pursuing the subject by himself, became progressively more dissatisfied with the results of abreaction alone, and came to place more reliance on analysis. ‘The first method which he adopted was the method of “ free association.” ‘The patient in this method is asked to make his

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