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

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND THE HUMAN MIND

content, but is all the time trying to humiliate her still further by depriving her of the privileges due to her exalted station.

That is “ Rule Britannia’s ” version. The medical officer informs us, however, that she is really a poor woman who had previously been a domestic servant, in which capacity she had experienced more than the usual amount of hardship and drudgery. Eventually, perhaps as the result of some more definite shock of which we have no record, the strain resulted in dissociation, and what had been repressed came to the top, while the painful reality see-sawed out of consciousness. The mechanism is like that at work in Dr. Prince’s case of double personality. But there the split was between two warring parts of one nature, both of them compatible with the ordinary affairs of life ; while here the split is between one part of her nature adapted to the harsh drudgery that was the only reality for her, and another part so incompatible with any reality open to her that it could only manifest itself as fantasies and wishes. And further, the wishes, being recognized as unreal, were repressed, and then, being out of contact with reality, could elaborate themselves in naive, childlike, dreamlike ways. “ Rule Britannia ” is a wish-personality come into control of a body.

After the crisis the conflict still continued, but now reality had to be repressed. Hard facts kept on telling her that she was not in point of fact on a throne, or even at liberty; and so the Unconscious manufactures “reasons” to explain the anomaly, and she asserted that the machinations of a powerful persecutor were to blame for her present circumstances.

This is the familiar process we have already encountered and called rationalization—the manufacture of reasons to cloak with justification our unacknowledged wishes and impulses. The “ reasons’? here are glaringly false and pitifully inadequate to us proud possessors of normal judgment ; but do not let us be too proud of our rationality. “Rule Britannia’ is only exemplifying in extreme form a process which is at work in eyery one of us—though from its very nature it is always so much easier to detect it in others than in oneself !

Here is another lady suffering from delusions; but her delusions are of rather a different kind. She believes that Mr. X, a gentleman of her acquaintance, is passionately enamoured of her and has for years been scheming to marry her by force. Her record was until quite recently a blameless

one. She was unmarried and had reached a considerable age without a blemish on her reputation when she began hinting to her friends of Mr. X’s unwelcome attentions. The hints grew broader ; she spread stories that she was being followed. Finally she insisted that he was plotting to abduct her, and wrote to the police to demand protection. On investigation, it turned out that Mr. X, far from having any passionate interest in her person, merely knew dimly of her existence. But the lady continued to stick to her story ; and eventually had to be removed to an asylum.

“Methinks the lady doth protest ‘too much,” says the Queen in Hamlet, when the Player-Queen reiterates her aversion to remarriage. Our poor little old maid is the victim of similar over-much protestation, but carried to a pathological extreme. She has suffered for decades from tke repression of her natural impulses of sex and affection. She has never acknowledged the existence within herself of anything so unladylike, and accordingly has developed a defensive mechanism of pious prudery. Then one fine day she found herself attracted by Mr. X ; but she never knew it, for the attraction, naturally linked up with the repressed complex, was never consciously acknowledged. Her repressed wishes, however, were all the time trying to bring him into her thoughts ; accordingly the frontier police of the conscious mind, in the shape of her inveterate prudery, not liking that a man should be admitted so frequently to the sanctum, only allowed him in after he had been disguised as a wanton male, assailant of female virtue. The repressed impulses succeeded in slipping the ideas of Mr. X, love and marriage into consciousness ; and the repressing ego still satisfied its moralizing tendencies. These delusions grow like warrumours ; and even now the lady is able to keep everything coherent by explaining that her removal to the asylum was part of her wicked lover’s schemes for bending her to his will.

Such a delusion is an example of what is called projection. The repressed complex, felt as something alien which the sufferer would like to get rid of, is projected outside, as it were, and attached to some quite innocent scapegoat in the external world. Here again, we find all gradations from insanity to everyday behaviour. ‘The “ protesting too much ”’ of the Player-Queen is a frequent symptom. The repressed urge inside us makes itself such a nuisance that we attack it wherever we find it outside, thus

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