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THE essential forces entering into the development of human character are the primitive inherent instincts, and the early environment, education, and training, together with what might be called pride of personality. While these influences may be regarded as the major factor in character formation, we cannot overlook the fact that our desires and wishes enter very largely into the fabric of personality growth and development.
One of the great objects of all education and child culture is to assist the child in getting control of his instincts. As we regard our inherent instincts and emotions we recognize that, concerning any one of them, three possible things may happen - repression, substitution, and sublimation.
1. Repression - The instinct may remain natural or it may be more or less repressed. There is in all very young children a tendency to exhibit themselves. Our modern sense of modesty is not inherent; it is wholly an acquirement. If the instinct to "show off" is not modified in the child by education and training, we have a case of more or less reprehensible exhibitionism; yet in this necessary suppression of a primitive instinct we often engender serious conflicts in the human mind. The infantile urge to exhibit one's person may later manifest itself in the proud exhibition of one's elaborate mansion and its unique porcelain collection.
One of the most interesting cases of repression that I ever dealt with came to my notice about a dozen years ago. A young woman of thirty-two was suffering from recurrent spells of nausea and actual vomiting. This went on for a year, until the patient was reduced almost to skin and bones. Six weeks in the hospital made little change in her appearance. All efforts to stop the vomiting had been unsuccessful, and it was in this extremity that emotional analysis was resorted to. The patient insisted there was nothing on her mind, and no doubt she was sincere in this affirmation; but in less than a week of patient probing we succeeded in uncovering the fact that about four years previous to this trouble she had begun to entertain a secret affection for a certain unmarried man who resided in a town not far from the village in which she lived. She saw this man frequently in both a social and a business way. He had never paid any special attention to her, but she gradually grew to be very fond of him. After this secret love had been indulged for about a year, she decided it was only folly on her part to lose her heart to someone who didn't care for her, and she resolved to conquer it. She began systematic repression, and believed she had succeeded. Her appetite was poor for a few months, but after another year had gone by she found herself in apparently good health and going along quite unmindful of her futile romance, and this status prevailed for a year or two - until one day when she received the announcement of his marriage. The moment her eyes fell upon the engraved card, a sickening feeling struck her in the pit of the stomach. She tried to pull herself together, and she insisted that it was some time after that - at least several days, if not several weeks - before the nausea began to creep upon her, to be later followed by persistent vomiting. By the time she called medical help, she had become convinced that she was the victim of some malignant internal disorder. It did, indeed, look as if this woman was going to vomit herself to death. Between twenty-five and thirty physicians were consulted at one time or another, and all recommendations had been of no avail.
When her attention was called to the fact that her nausea came on simultaneously with the receipt of the news of the marriage of this man, she began to see the light, and her mental life was adjusted accordingly. Within three weeks the vomiting had ceased. The patient began to gain in weight, and she made, from that time on, an uneventful recovery. She said, when finally dismissed, "Doctor, even yet I can hardly realize how a buried idea could produce such grave physical symptoms". And that is exactly it. An ordinary normal individual may suppress emotions ad infinitum and not have the health seriously affected, but in the case of certain people with delicately balanced nervous systems, when their wishes are unfulfilled and are forcibly suppressed, this repression begins to manifest itself as a physical symptom of some kind - nausea, dizziness, trembling, weakness, and so on.
2. Substitution - Through training, the tendency of the child to exhibit oneself and take pride in one's body is gradually replaced with another emotion, acquired modesty, and when this is done gradually and at an early age, the resultant psychic conflicts are minimized and usually are of little consequence. And this psychic transformation is greatly helped if the youth possesses an older and confidential friend, or if he lives day by day on confidential terms with his parents or some other adult member of the family.
A few years ago I came across a so-called "social climber", but she was not climbing very successfully. She really lacked the back-ground and endowment for a social career, aside from the fact that her husband's income was wholly inadequate to sustain her in the realization of such an ambition. She had come to the place where she could see that her aspirations were doomed to failure, and she was all broken up over it. Life wasn't worth living unless she could cut a wide social swath of some kind. The wreck of her ambitions occasioned the wreck of her nerves. She had all the fifty-seven varieties of symptoms that go with so-called nervous exhaustion, everything from dizziness and tremors to nausea and palpitation of the heart, and even insomnia.
While everything within reason was done to help her physically and nervously, it didn't amount to much until I outlined a career of social service, starting as a club woman and working into avenues of activity that would gratify both her desire to serve and her ambition to show off and be somebody among her friends and neighbors. This was a career she was fitted for and was financially capable of pursuing; she entered into it with avidity, and she succeeded. In a year or so she was again perfectly normal - healthy, happy, and useful - far more useful than she could ever have been had she achieved her ambition to be a social leader.
This is what we mean by substitution. Instead of harmfully suppressing our wishes, let us sort out those which are incapable of fulfillment within a reasonable time, and put in their place the nearest equivalent we can discover which is in the realm of immediate possibility of achievement.
3. So-called Sublimation - This is the third way in which an inherent instinct may be disposed of or modified - by a glorified type of substitution or transformation into another form of activity. Take, for instance, the perverted urge known as observationism , typified in the case of a "peeping Tom" who figured largely in the newspapers a few years ago. Now, this desire to pry into the forbidden, if it were sublimated, could be converted into the pursuit of the scientist, who indulges his observation urge in useful work, in peering through a microscope to discover the unknown causes of disease and to unravel other mysteries of science.
It is the purpose of education to guide youth in its early efforts to carry its natural impulses, based on inherent instincts and emotions, up through substitution and sublimation into the ideals of our higher thinking. There is no question but that psychic energy can be diverted; it can be transferred or transmuted. Proper mental training does enable one to effect transference of desire from one object to another or from one channel to another. But more about sublimation in the final section of this chapter.
Parents and teachers should direct their efforts to teaching sublimation as a corollary of repression. The disturbances resulting from a repressed emotion should be transmuted by means of sublimation attained through progressive displacement.
When this emotional problem is not properly handled there is very apt to occur - in connection with some period of stress and strain in later life - a reversion of emotional behavior to some older and not sublimated channel, and it is this back flow of repressed emotions that produces so much of our nervous trouble and emotional derangement.
The behaviorists deny the existence of all instincts. They explain everything in terms of reflex action. What the rest of us call an inherent instinct, they are wont to designate as a conditioned reflex. While there is some truth in their idea of reflex training, we cannot fail to observe that the different forms of protoplasm, as harbored by the different species of plants and animals, are possessed of unique, specific, and inherent endowments of reaction potential. I think McDougall's definition of instinct is as good as any. He defines an instinct as "An innate disposition which determines the organism to perceive (to pay attention to) any object of a certain class, and to experience in its presence a certain emotional excitement and an impulse to action which finds expression in a specific mode of behavior in relation to that object".
One of the difficulties we have in dealing with either the behaviorists or the Freudians is that they have different definitions for all our psychological and biologic terms. They are wont to promulgate their theories by means of their own special terminology. For instance, Freud classes the tender emotion as an inhibited (Edipus complex and regards love as the sublimation of the sex instinct. Philosophically speaking, the whole Freudian doctrine is wrong, in my opinion, in that it contemplates life as evil, while the goal of death is all that is ideally good. It is, moreover, a wholly mechanistic view of life.
In my opinion there is no death instinct in the case of normal minds, as suggested by Freud. The first law of all living things is self-preservation; the urge to live is inherent in all normal organisms. The so-called death instinct is an error in the Freudian philosophy. The mistake of Freud and of some of his later rivals is that they recognize in the human mind only two contending groups of instincts, whereas we believe there are no less than five possible groupings of human impulses of such dignity as to enable them to precipitate psychic conflict. Freud regards his libido - the sex group of impulses - as the mischief-making complex, the instigator of all our psychic conflicts; but we could with equal propriety select any other one of the five groups of human emotions and build upon it a new school of psychoanalysis, in the end making five different schools.
It is a great mistake for a man or woman already tainted with discontent constantly to indulge in the day-dreaming type of wish. It is harmful continually to give expression to wishes which are wholly impossible of fulfillment. The constant indulgence of these impossible wishes, and even their verbal expression, only assists in the accumulation of unfulfilled wishes in the subconscious mind, and this is certain to be productive of mischief in subsequent years. A great many people are contributing to their future unhappiness by giving expression to such statements as "I wish I had a million dollars", "I wish I had this, or that". Of course, the degree of mischief depends upon the seriousness with which the wish is indulged. The half humorous expressions of this sort which some people are in the habit of making need not disturb the psychologist, but I think if we allow ourselves to wish for the impossible we are indirectly contributing to the sum total of our future psychic conflicts.
We must not lose sight of the theory that the mind is divided into three phases of consciousness:
In discussing the Freudian view of the subconscious it should be made clear that what the psychoanalyst calls the censor, the psychic critic, is supposed to reside in this borderline region of preconsciousness. This psychic term, censor, is in many ways like the term will. It designates a psychic function, but does not connote a discrete psychic power. The will, we know, is the sum total of all positive mental activity. It represents to the mind what the sum total does to a column of figures; and so, since the censor is the sum total of all the critical, censorious, or conscientious ideas and ideals of human intellect, it is convenient to have a term to express the functioning of this group of mental activities which are at the bottom of all psychic conflicts, just as it is convenient to have the term will to use in designating the summation of psychic choice and decision.
The word psychoanalysis has come to be connected with Freud's concept of nervous disorders and emotional upheavals, and while the Freudian philosophy, at its foundation, is not sound, in my opinion, nevertheless, we are beholden to Freud for very much that has been helpful in our concept of the neuroses, and we are highly indebted to him for the technique of psychoanalysis, tho some of us prefer to use the term "emotional analysis", in view of the fact that we do not agree with Freud's exclusive sex idea as to the origin of all these nervous troubles.
The idea of repression, as generally accepted by modern psychotherapists, is that sooner or later, in the career of a developing mind, unacceptable wishes are destined to come up into consciousness. These are the wishes of a primitive biologic nature, and they are out of harmony with the ideals acquired by education; and so there must necessarily ensue conflicts between the primitive urge of old Mother Nature and the acquired standards of civilization. If these unacceptable wishes are unsatisfied, repressed without proper assimilation or elimination, not suitably sublimated, then, in the case of certain hereditary predisposed individuals, nervous symptoms sooner or later make their appearance.
It cannot be doubted that many experiences of early childhood, gone entirely out of conscious memory, figure in these repression complexes. Again, we repress our complexes not so much because of any pain or disgust which accompanied the original experience, but because of the fact that such things, if not suppressed, would cause us pain or embarrassment at the present time.
Overmuch suppression seems to engender anxiety, an attitude of generalized apprehension, and it is not unlikely that many of our nervous symptoms are but a defense reaction against this indefinite and harassing anxiety. Our repression is a defense against the unbearable ideas or unwise wishes. In both cases, it would appear that our real self, the conscious ego, is trying to escape from something which it greatly fears.
It should be remembered that the psychoanalysts do not visualize the memories and complexes of the subconscious as peaceful and passive complexes slumbering in harmless rest - not at all. They rather look upon these latent and submerged memory-feelings as dynamic repressions - as rages, hungers, fears, passions, and drives; as the residue of the primitive pre-human animal mind.
As an illustration of the working of psychoanalysis let me cite the case of a young man eighteen years of age, who had a subtle form of eye trouble, which none of our experienced oculists had succeeded in curing. There was no question that there was some trouble, because his eyes would water whenever he tried to study. He said it felt as if there were some very fine particles of sand on the lids. Again and again the oculist said he did not have granulation of the lids. Time after time his glasses were changed, but his eye trouble was such that he had to give up school.
It is interesting to note that this lad, when he was eight years of age, had the measles, and that there was some real transient eye trouble which made it necessary for him to quit school. Here we have the starting point of this eye complex. He knew that if his eye trouble were sufficiently serious he would not have to go to school. He hated school. He was a dreamer, highly imaginative and impractical. He liked to write poetry in the spring and tramp through the woods. He read along the lines in which he was interested, and it was this fact that gave me the clue to his case. He could read any number of his favorite books without difficulty.
I made up my mind that his eye trouble was largely a subconscious defense reaction against going to school - that his subconscious had determined to maintain it as an alibi. His parents, tho they could ill afford it, had provided private teachers, and, in a way, had kept up his education. He liked this private tutoring much better than being with the common herd in the school-room.
But now, at the age of eighteen, he fell violently in love; and, of course, things began to happen right away. The young lady was not enthusiastic about him. She frankly told him that, if his eyes were so bad, he could not get a college education and so could hardly hope to make a living for her and for the family they might have to raise. This put a powerful displacing idea into the subconscious mind of the boy; an effective idea, since it was a sex notion - one of the master emotions. It didn't take this new idea sixty days to begin to displace and rout out the old eye complex. The young man suddenly decided that he was eating too much starch, and that this wrong diet was responsible for all his eye trouble. He all but cut starches out of his diet, and immediately his eyes began to improve. They really improved - several physicians admitted it. They ceased to water. He was extraordinarily keen in carrying out the program of making up his studies and preparing to take his college entrance examinations in the fall. He is now in his junior year. He has had one or two attacks of indigestion and a few other nervous upsets during these two and one-half years of his college career, but he is never bothered with his eyes. In fact, in all correspondence with the young lady of his choice he is ever telling her how strong his eyes are.
My purpose in narrating this case is to show that old Mother Nature is somewhat of a psychoanalyst herself; that the ordinary contacts of society and the experiencing of certain emotions are, in and of themselves, effectively carrying on, betimes, this same program of emotional displacement and sublimation that the medical psychoanalyst is wont to carry out in his practice of mental medicine.
In discussing Freud's libido, let me begin by saying that I do not recognize the existence of such a thing in the Freudian sense. As already stated, I am disposed to recognize five great groups of human impulses or urges.
Freud would include in his libido the urge for race preservation in contradistinction to, and in conflict with, the ego, the urge for self-preservation; and, practically speaking, there is some truth in the contention. But it is a mistake to try to explain all nervous symptoms on this basis. The fact that the Freudian doctrine works out in practice now and then merely serves to indicate how often the sex complex is the one which has been unwisely over-suppressed. In the study of a thousand cases of emotional suppression, I found that in slightly over five hundred it was the sex complex that was the offending cause. Because sex is such a prominent feature in human experience, the Freudians have succeeded more or less, even tho operating on a somewhat erroneous hypothesis.
There is no doubt that we should have a proper place for Freud's libido if we could limit it or confine it more directly to a purely sex meaning. There is undoubtedly some truth in his contention that in the development of the emotional nature the sex wish, or, if we may so express it, a limited libido, may become fixed upon some person or even some object, and that at a later time the emotional nature may regress to this point of fixation and thus set in operation an entirely new and apparently inexplicable group of symptoms.
It is easy to over-emphasize the importance of the early emotions having to do with the physical contact of the child with its parents. Undoubtedly there is some sort of pleasure connected with the contact of the child with the mother's breast aside from the satisfaction of the nutrition instinct; but I fail to see why so much sexual significance should be attached to this, as the child certainly shows the same sort of avidity when it sucks its own thumb. The sucking instinct is strongly inborn as a part of the nutrition instinct, and it is probably connected with some sort of personality satisfaction; but I see no reason for such labored arguments to prove it has a sex significance.
Thus, while I recognize the existence of such a grouping of psychic powers in the human mind as Freud designates by the term libido, I do not assign to it anything like the alldominant role that Freud does. I prefer to discuss each case in the light of the actual findings in it - findings which can be naturally and easily recognized, and which do not require that we assume so much of Freudian philosophy and terminology.
In the study and treatment of a certain group of psychic conflicts, it is sometimes well to view the human mind after the manner of the later Freudian concept of a limited libido and the ego. This concept of psychic activity consists in dividing the mental life into the following two groups:
1. The libido - the sexual group of instincts and emotions - those thoughts and feelings which have to do with race preservation.
2. The ego - the non-sexual emotions and instincts - those feelings, reactions, and ambitions which are concerned in self-preservation.
Of all the emotions representative of the ego group of instincts, the earliest to be experienced is probably hunger.
Very early in life the child is forced to abandon its conception of the world as merely a pleasure resort. It is compelled increasingly to give up its life of fantasy and to accept an existence of reality; and concomitant with the development of this concept of the reality of the world there comes gradually to be built up this ego system of non-sexual complexes. It is the system of conscious urges which is coordinated with the enforced recognition of the reality of existence.
In its early days the child looks upon its parents as the ideal. It desires to be like them when it grows up. It is largely imitative of them, and further, through this process of identification of itself with its parents, it comes gradually to build up the domain of idealism within the ego system of complexes; and this domain of the ideal is the birthplace of the psychic censor, that mental power which early dares both to criticize the ego group of complexes and to censor the libido, the sexual system of complexes. Later on, this censorship of the mind becomes expanded into conscience in connection with recognition of the moral standards of right and wrong, and with the expanding appreciation of things spiritual and supreme. And so the ego urges continue to develop; and with the early over-throw of Narcissism, or self-worship, the censor complex comes into existence; and eventually, with progressive expansion of the realm of consciousness, conscience itself begins to materialize.
If, then, we are going to recognize man's mind as consisting of these two domains of psychic activity, we are forced to admit that conscience resides with the ego complex and not with the libido. This is clearly shown by the fact that in the dream-life the most conscientious and upright individual will permit himself to indulge the libido instincts to their fullest extent, without a dream-blush of shame. Clearly, conscience is not at home in the libido realms of the subconscious.
We often find cases in which this developing conscience, this psychic censorship of our feelings and emotions, is carried to the extent that an individual becomes possessed of some generalized feeling of guilt. He just simply feels guilty of something. This state of mind is often associated with the inferiority complex. In other cases, instead of an indefinite feeling of guilt, the individual becomes possessed of a strange feeling of illness.
When we undertake to reduce the actual warfare and the sham battles of the psychic nature to the lowest possible terms, we visualize the conflict as occurring between the libido - the sex emotions, the domain of race preservation - and the ego - the non-sexual emotions, or those which we have otherwise classified as the life urge, the power urge, the worship urge, and the social urge.
Janet would have us believe that the neuroses are largely due to a subtle form of dissociation. He believes that our nervous symptoms are largely the result of failure to maintain a certain subtle cohesiveness of consciousness. As he expresses it, there is lack of normal tension, and with this relaxation and letting down of the normal state of holding consciousness together, there is bound to occur a loss of control over certain of the more loosely held complexes, followed by those symptoms which we recognize as the neuroses. Freud wants to account for all our nervous disorders on the ground of repression and the subsequent conflict; and I suppose the behaviorists would account for our nervous manifestations by saying that we have so many experiences for which we have no corresponding verbal symbols that we are suffering from a wild riot in the domain of the unverbalized psychic life.
And who can say that there is not some truth in all three of these theories? I am inclined to believe there is. Janet seems to me to be most nearly right when it comes to the study of hysteria and a certain group of definite personality disturbances, going on down to multiple personality. I am inclined to think that Freud is right in the more common, every-day group of neuroses, the so-called fears, dreads, obsessions, and anxieties, along with the fatigue and brain-fag of so-called neurasthenia.
Janet teaches that diminution of psychic tension results from emotional exhaustion, but he is not very clear about what produces the emotional exhaustion. Perhaps, after all, we have to fall back on Freud's concept of repression and conflict to account for the exhaustion. Janet seeks to put all our nervous troubles into two great groups - first, hysteria, which he regards as a localized lowering of psychic tension; and second, psychasthenia, in which there is generalized lowering of tension.
In my own dealings with nervous people, I find that I am constantly utilizing both of these concepts of the neuroses. While I do not accept the basic Freudian philosophy, I find that I am all the while successfully utilizing the Freudian technique when it comes to exploring the mind, and in some respects when it comes to treatment, tho the methods of treatment which have proved most successful in my hands have been those of Dubois's scheme of reeducation - freely and frankly telling the whole truth to the patient.
While I am very favorably disposed toward Freud's theory of repression and conflicts, I am not able to go so far as to accept his hypothesis that everything undesirable in human nervous behavior is due to conflict between a hypothetical libido and the more generally accepted group of ego complexes. I find that when I postulate five groups of possibly dominant complexes in the psychic life, I am able to utilize much more of the Freudian philosophy in an effort to understand the symptoms and vagaries of neurotic patients. There is no doubt that when one psychic complex becomes dominant over its fellows, these subordinate urges begin to utter protest in the form of certain nervous symptoms; and it is highly probable that when they temporarily gain the upper hand of the tyrannically over-lording urge, they seek gratification along hysterical lines; and that when they fail thus to assert their individuality to the point of gratification, they set up a continuous protest as manifested in various obsessions, fears, and even generalized anxiety.
We must not forget, in this connection, the role of buried or latent childhood fantasy. You can start up a neurosis by the subconscious indulgence of a childhood fantasy, just as much as by passing through some actual and distressing experience. I am of the opinion that many times a dream, tho it is unremembered on waking, is the starting point of certain obsessions and nervous manifestations.
Our repressed wishes survive secretly in some realm of the subconscious, perhaps at a point of fixation developed in the emotional experiences of childhood; and ultimately these forgotten impulses seek to escape or find expression in certain modified forms - in the language of the psychotherapist, by displacement, distortion, and disguise - as well as by the symbolism of dream -life and more definitely by means of the nervous symptoms and psychic obsessions associated with the so-called neuroses.
Generally speaking, I think we have three great groupings of the neuroses, and they are:
1. The psychic group - The neuroses that are definitely intellectual. They are based largely on suggested fears, and embrace the dreads, phobias, inferiority complex, etc. - the chronic worries as distinguished from the anxiety states. This group also includes our hypochondriacs and others who chronically spy upon themselves.
2. The emotional group - The group definitely exhibiting the anxiety state. This includes those patients in whom complex suppression is manifesting itself in physical nervous symptoms, such as tremors, weakness, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, and the like. This group finds its most striking expression in those symptoms which are on the borderline of hysteria - what we might call the physical group of the neurotic manifestations. Here are also to be found all cases of nervous tension, mental conflicts, or brain fag, together with the anxiety neuroses or what is sometimes called psychasthenia. There may be more or less emotional depression in this group, but it is usually of a periodic nature, and fatigue is often the prominent feature, causing these patients to be regarded as victims of nervous exhaustion or so-called neurasthenia.
3. The behavior group - We have a whole class of nervous manifestations which represent a defense reaction on the part of the patient - an effort to get away from an unpleasant environment or to dodge doing something he dislikes doing. These are the cases of maladjustment and more or less chronic indecision. They are procrastinators. They don't want to face the problem and solve it now. They want to dodge the issue. They are the people who have brain-storms and mood-swings. They have more or less dissociation, as Janet would say, and the typical representations of this group are hysteria, on the one hand, and double or multiple personality on the other. Paranoia may even belong in this category.
All of these groups taken together are more properly denominated the psychoneuroses, tho they are often spoken of as neurotic disorders, neurasthenia, etc.
It is entirely possible for one person to be simultaneously afflicted with more than one of these neurosis groups. In fact, we see individuals right along who are afflicted with all three. They not only have a mild psychic type of fear and dread, but they are also afflicted with the emotional phase, and in some cases even with the tortures of the behavior or dissociation group.
It is these composite neuroses that puzzle the doctor and so terrify and harass the patient, not to mention what they do to his friends and family. All are capable of analysis - of being worked out, run down, segregated - and then, if the patient will intelligently co-operate, they can be eliminated - cured. Practically speaking, all are curable, but not by any ordinary form of treatment, medicinal or physical. While therapeutic measures are sometimes of transient help in the management of these cases, the real cure consists in discovering the truth and facing it with manhood and womanhood, and staying on the job until new habits of nervous reaction are developed to displace the older and deleterious reactions.
Spiritualism panders to the egotistic human desire for excitement and adventure. The average man likes to dabble in the extraordinary. We tend to overlook the remarkable nature of the common occurrences of every-day life, and long to make contact with big things and unusual events. We enjoy the exhilaration of talking through the air; wireless telephony and radio appeal to our imagination; and we long to project the experiment one step farther - to hoist our spiritual aerials and get the wireless waves from other worlds. The one seems little more impossible than the other - provided we lead ourselves to believe in the existence of a world of spirits.
But we must not overlook the fact that in the case of wireless telegraphy we have been able to master and understand, more or less fully, the laws which underlie and govern its successful operation. There is a universality about it. Any man, under given conditions, who will comply with the physical requirements pertaining to wireless telegraphy, can both send and receive messages. It is not a matter of personal endowment or peculiar gifts. And herein is the great weakness of the spiritualistic claims. No laws are discoverable, no rules are known, except those self-imposed dogmas of the mediums pertaining to darkness, etc., all of which lend themselves so favorably to the perpetration of fraud. No universal precepts are forthcoming which will enable the sincere spiritualistic inquirer to make reliable contact with the shores of another world. The "rules of the game" are wholly ephemeral; we have no reliable code, the following of which will insure successful communication with the spirit world.
Science does not assert that such laws will not be discovered. The scientist, while recognizing the universal presence of the law of gravitation, does not for a moment deny the fact that a magnet will cause a handful of iron filings to rise directly upward, and thus defy gravitation. Science admits that magnetism can overcome the general law in this case. What science asks, in reference to the spirit world, is merely that it be shown some dependable rule of action, which obtains and operates there. Science recognizes that magnetic attraction can levitate certain metals and suspend them above the earth, and it does not for a moment maintain that there are not in existence spiritual forces and powers which could levitate the human body. Science merely contends that such forces have not yet been discovered.
The skepticism of science only serves to make the occasional phenomena of spiritualism, which baffle us, the more fascinating to the average person. We are constantly meeting with people of a certain type, who are burning up with an unconscious craving for "an extension of ego", and these become ready and willing victims of the propaganda of spiritualism. They are not satisfied with making contact with the material world about them; they want that extension of ego which reaches out to worlds beyond. They long to conquer regions that are invisible and unknowable. They are not content with the limitations of the finite; they want, as it were, to touch elbows with the infinite.
Other persons are favorably inclined toward the phenomena of spiritualism through pure curiosity and the commonplace desire for excitement. We all have to admit that it appeals to the spirit of adventure to hold hands around the m ystic circle, in the dim light of the séance room, and expectantly await messages from an unseen world. It is unusual, odd, freakish, even sensational, and that is what appeals to the average mind. The daily press, for the same reason, plays up in its headlines only those occurrences which are out of the ordinary. The newspapers have discovered that this is what the average person is interested in reading.
In connection with our discussion of pain-and-pleasure and life-and-death wishes and complexes, attention might be called to a more strictly psychological phase of this question, namely, the fact that when we are young we so often wish that certain disagreeable persons were out of our way; we should be glad never to see them again, and commonly give expression to this wish by saying, "I wish you were dead". The child early discovers that the dead do not come back to bother us, and, in his frank sincerity, wishes that individuals who pester him were dead and buried. But as we grow older, especially around the time of adolescence, we begin to worry over all these people whom we wished dead. We learn from the Bible that "Whoso looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart", and if we are of a religious nature we come to the conclusion that we have already committed a host of murders in our hearts. We now come to regret these murderous wishes of our childhood days, especially against those who have really died in the meanwhile; and so we seek to find some way to help the situation, to mollify the conscience.
There comes, then, as a comfort to us, this doctrine of spiritualism - that our friends whom we wished dead are not in reality dead at all, but very much alive, having simply found a portal to a higher and better life. We therefore take a keen but more or less unconscious delight in proving, through spiritualism, that the victims of our death-wish are happy, alive and enjoying pleasure; and thus we hope to antidote the psychology of our regrets and to appease an accusing conscience.
That we mentally follow our friends and associates to the other world is shown by the funeral rites and customs of primitive peoples. The Chinese worship their ancestors and seek to live on good terms with them. The savage knows that his compatriots are composed of both good and evil traits of character, of things which give him now pleasure, now pain, and so after the departure of his friend to another world he seeks in devious ways to appease him, and otherwise to show himself friendly, so as to prevent the newly departed spirit from wreaking vengeance on those who still live. His mental conception of the spirit of the departed member of the tribe he projects outward, seeming to recognize it as a real thing in the mist, in a hazy cloud, in the shadowy forest; and in many other ways he imagines he is able to detect the spirits of the departed.
It cannot be said that modern spirit mediums have done much to refine this primitive concept. They tell us about the clothes that departed spirits wear, and other material things in their environment. The spirit land of to-day seems just about as grossly crass as the Paradise of either Mohammedan or Jew, and just about as material and puerile as the Happy Hunting Ground of the North American Indian. In fact, this spirit land can hardly approach, in beauty of imagination, the mythological spirit abode of the Greeks. The ancients freely and frankly indulged their most fantastic dreams and then projected them out to constitute the stories of their mythical folk-lore. The ridiculousness of the modern spiritualistic concept is born of the fact that we feel constrained, in these days, to preserve a semblance of scientific thinking, and so we only become the more ridiculous when we seek to combine scientific reasoning with the fantastic imaginings of spirit beliefs.
Sublimation is nothing more nor less than the coordinating of two diametrically opposed tendencies so that they will work together harmoniously for a common end; in other words, the union of contending influences in mind or body, so that their more or less perfect integration makes for progressive development. It is an effort to push our activities up from the lower levels to the higher levels of integration, and when harmony reigns where formerly conflict raged, we speak of the completed process as sublimation. And this is all consistent with the theory of progressive and directive evolution, which teaches us that higher organisms are evolved from the lower groups.
We must recognize, to begin with, that conflict lies at the very basis of life. Elementary life is never peaceful, and it is not strange, therefore, that conflicts should arise between the self-preservation urges and the higher urges of race preservation, as well as between other groups of psychic complexes. Just as certainly as conflict is the basis of physical life, it is early manifested as a part of the developmental phase of psychic life. If we postulate as primitive instincts such impulses as self-assertion and self-abasement, we can hardly refrain from recognizing that such emotions are destined ever to be in comparative conflict.
Repression is not the only possible result of mental struggle. The conflict may be solved in a way that both of the conflicting elements attain a degree of satisfaction; and this form of resolution of the conflict is called sublimation or integration. The war between poetic and scientific ideas may be resolved by a modification of both views, producing a more comprehensive system of ideas called philosophy. Conflict between actual inferiority and the wish for power or superiority may be resolved by accepting one's limitations and making the best of the abilities one possesses. The general conflict with reality may be resolved by accepting it temporarily as it is, and then trying to make it conform to one's ideals. Similarly, authority may be accepted and at the same time questioned.
Pugnacity may be sublimated into so-called scientific boxing, commercial competition, and social rivalry, all carried on according to definitely formulated rules. To do a thing according to rules is always to some extent a sublimation. Pugnacity may also be sublimated into competition in school examinations and athletic contests. It may be expressed in the combat of political campaigns. In these sublimations the subject lives out his pugnacity, and at the same time conforms to the social order in which he lives. Our anger is up-stepped to a higher form of resentment called righteous indignation; our bestial sex impulses are advanced to the more glorified phases of romantic courtship and marital devotion; our early and barbaric instincts of torture and cruelty become transmuted into our comparatively harmless proclivities of teasing, bantering, and joking. Thus are our early and inhuman urges finally transmuted into our play-life and civilized humor.
Other primitive impulses may be sublimated in the same way, and this is the ideal resolution of mental conflict. In this way a person avoids both mental ill health and the formation of undesirable traits of character.
Common illustrations of the sublimation of the normal sex impulses are to be found in those religious orders which demand celibacy. The priest up-steps his sex emotions to the highest levels of love for humanity and devotion to his calling. At least, the vast majority of the individuals belonging to these religious orders are able to do this to some degree. How many times we hear of a woman disappointed in love taking the veil! Such women, no doubt, are many times successful in displacing their ordinary sex feelings with a higher and largely sublimated affection for the sick and the friendless.
Many an over-ambitious business man who has discovered the undue development of selfishness and greed in his drive to amass wealth, has sought relief from an oppressive conscience by engaging in a program of philanthropy and social benefaction. There may, indeed, be more or less pride and self-satisfaction entering into the charitable and humanitarian endeavors of many of our well-to-do citizens; nevertheless, there is also in them much sublimation of the baser emotions of greed and property acquisition.
I can remember meeting, in my student days, a young man who was an inordinate scrapper; he was all the time fighting, quarreling, contending. He was unpopular among the students and always in trouble with his teachers. I recall a heart-to-heart talk in which he told me that he longed to get over this fault, but that whenever he tried to put it away, it would come up in some embarrassing situation, and he would fly off the handle, hit somebody, or do something else that was foolish. He was always suffering from remorse and filled with regrets as a result of these emotional sprawls and temperamental outbreaks.
This young man had a difficult time deciding what to do in life. Eventually, in connection with the revival efforts of a well-known evangelist, he "got religion" and decided to become an evangelist. He jumped into his training for the ministry in dead earnest; he enlisted in a very active and somewhat spectacular cam paign of fighting sin and the devil. As the years have gone by, I have watched him. He exhibits a changed disposition. True, underneath his religion he still has a highly irritable and unstable temperament; but it is usually controlled now, and he is not ill as a result of emotional suppression. He has made a profound transformation of his pugnacious temperament. He is still a fighter, but now he is fighting evil. He has sublimated his former high-tempered, fiery disposition into the righteous indignation of a man of God who is engaged in making continuous assaults upon the strongholds of sin. He has found the psychic equivalent to give balance to his former disagreeable and scrappy disposition.
I could fill this book with stories of the successful sublimation of undesirable traits of character. When one has a strong wish, a profound desire of some sort, it is dangerous to undertake to suppress it bodily into the subconscious. Far better to start out on some sort of campaign for direct and frank displacement, or for this more round-about or glorified form of substitution which we call sublimation.