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

BOOK 8

acquiring an agreeable sense of virtue, without, in fact, becoming more virtuous. For this reason, as Bernard Hart rightly says, ‘‘ whenever one encounters an intense prejudice, one may with some probability suspect that the individual himself exhibits the fault in question or some closely similar fault.’ The people who prohibit mixed bathing or protest against the immodesty of female dress are seldom those who have obtained the wise man’s rational control of desire ; usually they have merely repressed their violent instincts, and are dimly aware that these impulses, undisciplined by reason, are likely to throw them off their moral perch if unduly stimulated. The repressive attitude often taken up towards the dances of primitive peoples by missionaries is in part at least an outcome of the same machinery. Because of excessive repression, certain things which should be natural, and could be beautiful, become painful, disgusting, or shocking ; and in violently attacking the unfortunate natives’ customs, the missionary is too often attacking his own repressed self.

The most striking characteristic of lunatics, after their loss of contact with reality, is their lack of logic. The lady who calls herself “Rule Britannia” is still a good scrubber of floors; and she does not let her belief in her regal state interfere in the least with a perfectly cheerful and thorough performance of her daily task of cleaning the ward. The two sets of ideas concerned with royalty and with floor-scrubbing might seem to be incompatible. So they would be if they met; but they do not meet. They are prevented from meeting by the machinery of dissociation and repression. Dissociation does its best to keep them in separate compartments and make it hard for them to achieve contact; should they begin to do sO, repression steps in, forces criticism into the Unconscious, and substitutes absurd “reasons? for Reason. The mind thus becomes divided into what have been aptly called “‘ logic-tight compartments,” in which different systems of ideas can develop in splendid isolation. Sheltered behind such barriers, the lamb of a delusion can grow and flourish safe from the wolfish logic that would otherwise devour it.

Repression and dissociation are not simply morbid phenomena. Their morbid manifestations are exceptional; normally they are adaptive and useful. They are the protective part. of the mind’s machinery, for defending itself from disruption when confronted with two opposing impulses or two incompatible sets of ideas. The 820

THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 7

world is so complicated, conduct so difficult, and yet the need of firm belief and speedy action so vital, that it would be impossible to work out every problem of thought and morals on its rational merits. If we did try to do so, our minds would either disintegrate, or we should be immobilized like the ass in the fable, between the two exactly equal bundles of hay.

The arrangements by which the mind conserves its unity and its force in the midst of a chaos of warring facts and ideas are, we may recapitulate, of several kinds. There is first, the capacity, for belief by suggestion, submission to authority, unquestioning loyalty, and obedience. This disposition, most evident in the earlier half of life, must have done much to facilitate gregarious tribal existence in the opening stages of human society. Next, there are the faculties of repression and dissociation, which parcel out the mind into compartments. Some repressing or inhibiting force is always needed to maintain dissociation, so that the two agencies generally act in conjunction. Sometimes the split is complete, the compartments become quite impervious to each other’s ideas and impulses. More often, however, there is a certain leakage of ideas from one compartment to another. When this is so, another faculty of the mind comes into play—distortion. Repressed ideas which cannot be altogether repressed are distorted and disguised so that they can gain expression and enter consciousness without a disabling conflict.

We have already mentioned the chief methods of distortion. Rationalization is perhaps the commonest obsession, and compulsive expression, as in Lady Macbeth’s washing of her hands, is another. Projection we have already explained. Unacknowledged transference of the repressed impulses to new aims and objects is yet another channel. The transference of repressed maternal instincts to pets is familiar ; many of the hobbies of elderly bachelors and the hoarding impulses of misers and certain types of collectors are also examples of this process acting in relation to the willto-power or sexual suppression.

All these ways of distortion occur. All of them are convenient and necessary protective mechanisms of the mind. But all can be dangerous. All are bounded on the other side by insanity. Some degree of repression and dissociation seems necessary to achieve action, some rationalization is often essential for selfrespect. But it can be safely laid down that certain things are