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

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND THE HUMAN MIND

complex * in early childhood. CEdipus, it will be remembered, unwittingly killed his own father Laius, and married his own mother, Jocasta. The Freudian view is that every boy passes through a phase when he is stirred by a sexual attraction towards his mother, a sexual jealousy of his father, and that the reverse arrangement holds good for girls. This attitude may be complicated and modified and varied in many details, but the basic principle, Freud asserts, is always traceable. There is always a conflict and restraint. The passage through this phase in development and the conflicts which it inevitably engenders, leave indelible marks for good or ill on the personality. Out of this primary conflict emerges the normal self, shorn of the primitive possibilities of incest and parricidal violence.

The Freudians claim that the Unconscious, which, as we have pointed out, necessarily thinks in symbols, does so in forms that are almost universally the same for everyone. They give a list of things which symbolize sex, and it is an amazing list. Nearly everything in the world, it seems, from a church steeple to running water, possesses sexual significance in the human mind. With a Freudian dictionary of symbols, the practitioner, they claim, can, as it were, translate the contents of dreams and the ideas thrown up in free association and give them meanings which must remain unsuspected by the patient until he has conquered his resistances. There is an element of truth in this conception of symbolism, but it seems to the present writers that the Freudians—who frequently seem to outdo and caricature Freud—carry this too far and make it too definitive.

Latterly Freud has shown a disposition to define the operative aspects of the mind more exactly. He divides it up into an “Id” which is the whole reservoir of impulsive reactions, the Ego which is the superficial layer of the Id in conscious contact with reality, and the Super-ego which in man (and man alone) is developed out of the Id ; it represents the repressions of instinct characteristic of man and dominates the Ego. ‘This Super-ego or moral or ideal self is first evoked, he asserts, by the conflict of the Edipus complex. It will be convenient to return later, when we discuss conduct, to this question of the interacting parts into which the mind for the purposes of an analysis of conduct, can be divided.

Adler has opened up a very valuable variation of psycho-analysis by stressing how the sense of inferiority, from which so many

human beings suffer in their early years, produces by over-compensation an exaggerated or even abnormal desire for success, power, and accomplishment. The mere fact of being a child, forced to obey the prescriptions of its elders and confronted with the task of learning all about the world and the conduct of life in a few short years, in itself conduces to a feeling of inferiority ; the failures to achieve must always be so many, the thwarted sense of helplessness in face of superior authority is inevitably so often aroused. And if to this be added strict and uncomprehending parents and teachers and an ambitious but over-sensitive nature, the conflict between self-depreciation and self-exaltation is almost inevitable. Many young men whom their elders stigmatize as conceited and pushing have been forced into this attitude by the conviction of their own inferiority which was imposed on them in early life and which they are trying to stifle in the depths of their Unconscious ; it is a protective covering of their own inferiority-complex.

Jung has attempted to do fuller justice to the complexity of the mind than either of his rivals. For him, it is a general urge of life, rather than the particular urge of sex or of mere self-assertion, which drives us on towards finer adaptation and fuller satisfactions. He undermined much of the Freudian analysis by pointing out that, even if we discovered some infantile “ cause ”’ of adult conflict, it was rarely likely to be the whole cause. For, once conflict comes into being, any later clash of impulses is likely to be drawn into the existing battle ; and any new repressed impulse, even if different from the old, will almost always form an alliance with its fellow rebel. In Dr. Prince’s Miss B (§ 6), when she fell in love, the repressed sexual impulse took sides with the worldly or selfish impulses repressed in earlier years.

And sometimes, Jung argues further, another step may be taken, and the new experiences may come to colour the old. Physical sex-impulse repressed in adolescence, for instance, may come to be projected back and colour some incident of childhood which had to do with mere childish curiosity about forbidden, but not necessarily sexual, things ; or sex may come retrospectively to colour the child’s inferiority-complex and project a tinge of sexual jealousy into his simple envy of the grown-up size and strength of his father. Thus when Freudian analysis discloses an infantile complex, it may have really discovered a mare’s

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