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

BOOK 8

nest, a chimera manufactured by the patient’s own mind in maturer years.

For this and other reasons, Jung deprecates a too exclusive concern with the patient’s individual past. Knowledge of the past is often necessary to understand the present ; but it is the setting of the patient’s mind at the present moment which is important for his future cure. One final point on which Jung has done great service is in stressing the innate differences between human beings in their ways of thinking and feeling and reacting. If we would understand a man, whether as personality or patient, we must pay as much attention to these as to external incidents of life.

Finally, as we have noted, Jung claims that there is a racial as well as an individual Unconscious. Some of the Unconscious was always there. He has adopted a quasiLamarckian view of mind, maintaining that in the Unconscious there is a store of racial memories, laid up in the course of generations as what he calls Archetypes or primordial images. It is these Archetypes, he supposes, which form the basis of dreamsymbolism and of mythology and religion as well.

With such secessions and rivalries among the schools of psycho-analysis, many of the acerbities that characterize sectarian controversy have appeared. Psycho-analysis can easily become a controversial weapon and the dignity of science has been waived for the amusement of the vulgar. Some of the Freudians have accused Jung of genteel dismay at the revelations of universal sexuality which psycho-analysis was making, and to have shrunk timidly and unscientifically from following out the conclusions to be drawn from his work; while they account for Adler’s ‘“‘ Will to Power” by hinting that this is what one would expect in an ambitious Jew. On the other hand, Jung has ascribed Freud’s constant preoccupation with the “ father-complex” to his Hebraic ancestry and the attitude of his race to their jealous god, Jehovah. But the psycho-analysis of a thinker does not necessarily destroy the validity of his thought.

We have dealt thus explicitly with these rival schools of thought, because their differences still bulk very large in current discussion. But we may confidently expect that, when the current edition of The Science of Life appears twenty-five years hence, the whole controversy between Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, and other brands of psychologists will have been relegated to the attics of scientific history. Each party

814.

THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 7

is making its contribution to truth, and less partisan psychologists are already drawing impartially on all those divergent explorers in the field of psychological observation for a more solid edifice of theory. Let not our criticisms seem to be a depreciation of their work or, above all, a belittlement of Freud. Sigmund Freud’s name is as cardinal in the history of human thought as Charles Darwin’s. These psychoanalysts, under his leadership, have created a new and dynamic psychology, one that thinks in terms of activities and strivings, of impulses and conflicts, in the place of a flat and lifeless picture of mental states.

If the facts of hypnotism first demonstrated the existence of the Unconscious, it is the psycho-analysts who have shown its extent and its importance in our daily life, in sickness as in health. They have made the study of dreams a valuable and interesting branch of psychology, have shown the connection between the methods of thinking found in primitive peoples and those adopted by the Unconscious. They have rightly stressed the frequency of regression, the mind’s return backwards to the past and its simplicity, the need of attaching due weight to apparently trivial slips and to foolish symbols, the importance of hesitations and other impediments to the free flow of thought in unveiling the hidden complex hedged round with paralysing resistances. It was they who first stressed the principle of abreaction; they drew attention to the important idea of sub-

limation whereby impulses directed to a .

lower activity such as physical sex-gratification can be harnessed to other and higher aims. If the Freudians have overstated their case in dealing with the (dipus complex, they drew much-needed attention to the fact that the child’s relations to his father and mother are amongst the most fruitful sources of troublesome repressions and conflicts in later years.

Last, but not least, they have largely helped us to understand the truth (so hard at first to grasp) that neurotic disorder is in its essence purposive. ‘The symptoms, however much distorted by repressing forces, however poorly adapted to their aim, do represent an urge towards adjustment in the repressed Unconscious. It is a striving in perplexity. ,

§ 13 Minds Out of Gear and In Gear

Insanity is not a definite disease like measles ; it is merely a convenient term

——