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Title: Psychopathology and politics
Author: Harold D. Lasswell
Release date: March 23, 2026 [eBook #78273]
Language: English
Original publication: Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1930
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78273
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND POLITICS ***
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
AND POLITICS
By
HAROLD D. LASSWELL
Assistant Professor of Political Science, The
University of Chicago; and author of _Propaganda
Technique in the World War, etc._
_“From him who has eyes to see and ears to hear
no mortal can hide his secret; he whose lips are
silent chatters with his fingertips and betrays
himself through all his pores.”_
--An Old Physician
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO · ILLINOIS
COPYRIGHT 1930 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PUBLISHED OCTOBER 1930
_Second Impression May 1931_
COMPOSED AND PRINTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A.
PREFACE
An understanding of political life can be sought by examining
collective processes distributively or intensively. In my _Propaganda
Technique in the World War_ (New York and London, 1927), I undertook to
analyze the factors which modified collective attitudes by examining
the symbols to which many millions of people had been exposed, without
paying heed to the order in which these symbols entered into the
experience of any particular person. In this preliminary treatise
on _Psychopathology and Politics_, I am likewise concerned with the
factors which impinge upon collective attitudes, but the method of
procedure is radically different. It is no longer a question of
inspecting the symbols to which innumerable individuals have been
exposed; the present starting-point is the lengthy scrutiny of the
histories of specific individuals. The procedures and findings of
psychopathology are relied upon for the purpose in hand, since they are
the most elaborate and stimulating contributions to the study of the
person which have yet been made.
Candor enjoins me once more to express my indebtedness to my former
teacher and present chief, Charles E. Merriam, of the University of
Chicago, who some time ago sensed the importance of psychopathology for
political science, and who has been willing to encourage my own forays
in the field, without, of course, feeling bound to indorse my results
either in principle or in detail. Through him it became possible to
have facilities for special work with Professor Mayo, of Harvard
University, whose perception of the bearing of psychopathology upon the
understanding of social life is bearing fruit in novel and important
experiments in business. The tenure of a Social Science Research
Council Fellowship (1928-29) made it possible to continue my studies
abroad.
Circumstances have thus been such as to bring me in contact, sometimes
fleeting and sometimes prolonged, with men who represent divers
standpoints in psychopathology. Many of these have kindly placed
their minds and their facilities at my disposal, and I hereby return
thanks for the generosity and patience with which they treated an
inquiring, if somewhat innocent, investigator. No one who knows the lay
of the land in modern psychology, deeply pitted by the trenches and
shell-holes of battling schools, will imagine that all the men whom
I am to name see eye to eye with one another, or that they will look
with equanimity upon the results of my explorations. To name them is, I
hope, not unduly to incriminate them.
Among those from whom assistance has been received are to be included:
Dr. William Healy, Judge Baker Foundation, Boston; Dr. William A.
White, superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C.;
Dr. Ross Chapman, superintendent of Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital,
Towson, Maryland; Dr. Earl D. Bond, superintendent of the Pennsylvania
State Hospital, Philadelphia; Dr. Mortimer Raynor, superintendent of
Bloomingdale Hospital, White Plains, New York; Dr. C. MacFie Campbell,
superintendent of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, Boston; Dr. Harry
Stack Sullivan, formerly of Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital; Dr.
N. D. C. Lewis, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital; Dr. Samuel W. Hamilton,
Bloomingdale Hospital; Dr. Gregory Zilboorg, Bloomingdale Hospital;
Dr. F. L. Wells, Boston Psychopathic Hospital; Dr. Edouard Hitschmann,
Vienna; Dr. Paul Federn, Vienna; Dr. Alfred Adler, Vienna; Dr. Wilhelm
Stekel, Vienna; Dr. S. Ferenczi, Budapest; Dr. Theodor Reik, Berlin;
Dr. Franz Alexander, Berlin (now of the University of Chicago). My
colleagues, Dr. Stewart B. Sniffen and Professor Leonard D. White, made
valuable suggestions during the process of editing the manuscript,
several of which I adopted.
Permission to quote freely from my previous publications was received
from the editors of the _American Political Science Review, American
Journal of Psychiatry, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,
International Journal of Ethics_, and from the University of Chicago
Press and the Chicago Association for Child Study and Parent Education.
I wish especially to express my gratitude to those who cannot be
singled out by name, but whose co-operation in submitting themselves to
prolonged scrutiny was of the greatest possible help.
It ought to be pointed out that the cases actually cited are only
a fraction of those which I have examined, or which I have in my
possession. Only enough cases have been abstracted to serve the
purposes of exposition, to supply a background for the theoretical
material. The obscurities which result from an unlimited multiplication
of “little Willie stories” have been sought to be avoided by curtailing
their number and their extent.
The first part of the book proceeds in rather dogmatic fashion, and
this no doubt tends to obscure the highly unsatisfactory nature of
the materials and methods of contemporary psychopathology. The later
chapters are given over to the critical and constructive discussion of
these matters, and should fully indicate the highly provisional, though
potentially significant, character of the whole.
H. D. L.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Life-Histories and Political Science 1
II. The Psychopathological Approach 15
III. A New Technique of Thinking 28
IV. The Criteria of Political Types 38
V. Theories of Personality Development 65
VI. Political Agitators 78
VII. Political Agitators--_Continued_ 106
VIII. Political Administrators 127
IX. Political Convictions 153
X. The Politics of Prevention 173
XI. The Prolonged Interview and Its Objectification 204
XII. The Personality System and Its Substitutive Reactions 221
XIII. The State as a Manifold of Events 240
APPENDIX
A. Select Bibliography 268
B. Question List on Political Practices 276
Index 283
CHAPTER I
LIFE-HISTORIES AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
Political biography as a field of political science has long been
relied upon to furnish a vivid corrective to the overemphasis laid upon
the study of institutional “mechanisms,” “structures,” and “systems.”
The legal and customary position of the House of Commons, the House of
Lords, the monarch and the electorate, as expounded in the commentaries
of Gneist and Dicey, suddenly take on new meaning when viewed through
the lens of Morley’s Gladstone, Strachey’s Victoria, or Lee’s Edward
VII. The German imperial system of Laband is more fleshly and less
transcendental when one has studied the lives of Bismarck or William
II. An institutional account of the constitutional development of the
United States without a life of Marshall and a life of Lincoln would
be but the dregs of a rich and ebullient history. Political science
without biography is a form of taxidermy.
When the tumultuous life of society is flayed into precedents and
tanned into principles, the resulting abstractions suffer a strange
fate. They are grouped and regrouped until the resulting mosaic may
constitute a logical and aesthetic whole which has long ceased to bear
any valid relation to the original reality. Concepts are constantly
in danger of losing their reference to definite events. Notions like
liberty and authority require a new birth of meaning after they
have followed the tempting path of abstraction but a little way. If
conceptions are to serve and not to master the mind, their terms of
reference must intermittently undergo the most rigorous scrutiny.
The use of “institutional” categories in describing political life is
indispensable, but the publicists who employ them have little to say
about the “personal” influences which modify the expected behavior of
“legislatures,” “executives,” and “judiciaries.” It is no news that
“leadership” is an important variable in predicting the course of
events, but the standard treatises on politics have next to nothing to
offer about the traits of various kinds of agitators and organizers,
and nothing to say about the kinds of experiences out of which these
differences arise.
This limitation holds for the books about the theory of the state
and of politics which are written by Englishmen like Sidgwick and
Laski, Americans like Garner and W. W. Willoughby, and Europeans like
Jellinek, Schmidt, Kjellén, and Kelsen. No doubt these men possess
or have possessed a living sense of political realities. Of Sidgwick
it is related that he was wonderfully adept in entertaining his
circle for hours with incisive comments and amusing anecdotes about
public men. But of this “humanity” of politics there is little to
be found in what he wrote. Political biography has been relied upon
chiefly to convey a sense of the unpredictable in human affairs, and
to adorn an after-dinner tale. At its best, political biography has
contributed to an understanding of the factors which differentiate one
human personality from another. But it is no secret that the literary
biography or autobiography omits or distorts much of the intimate
history of the individual, and that many of the facts which modern
investigators have found to be important are numbered among the missing.
Where is it possible to secure a supply of life-histories in which
the usual conventionalities are ignored, and which are taken by
specialists in the sociological, psychological, and somatic influences
which play upon the individual? There exist in modern society sizeable
collections of such material which have hitherto been accorded slight
attention by students of social science. I refer to the case histories
of those individuals who have been ill, and especially those who have
been cared for in hospitals and sanitariums.[1]
The richest body of psychological and sociological facts is found
in the files of the institutions for the care of the mentally
disordered, although the material available in general hospitals is
of value. The case history of a patient in a good mental hospital
is a document to which many have contributed. There is a report
of the physical condition of the patient as it is revealed in the
routine examination on his admission to the institution. This may be
supplemented by transcripts of previous and subsequent examinations.
There is also to be found the rating attained by the subject on several
general-intelligence and special-aptitude tests. There is a report of
the preliminary interview and the diagnosis by the psychiatrist. This
is amplified by a summary of the proceedings at staff conferences to
which the patient is presented, and which is attended by the whole
body of physicians and psychiatric social workers attached to the
hospital. The usual routine is for the physician and social worker
in charge to present a summary of the case, to introduce the patient
for observation, and to engage in general colloquy upon the diagnosis
and therapy after the patient has been escorted out of the room.
The patient may be brought before several staff conferences for
the purpose of discussing whether he is in a condition permitting
of release, parole, or transfer. During his stay in the institution
the nurses, as well as the physicians who make rounds, add their
descriptive comments upon his behavior. The social service department
gets in touch with relatives and acquaintances and prepares a
biography of the subject. Occasionally the patient will volunteer an
autobiography, which is filed with the general record. Correspondence
with individuals who have interested themselves in the case will often
disclose valuable details. The exhibits frequently include letters
written by the patient before, during, and after his illness, together
with published works, drawings, paintings, and plastic productions. In
some instances the record of a single patient who has been admitted,
released, or transferred becomes very voluminous.
It is due to the growing emphasis upon the importance of understanding
the personality as a functioning whole that modern medical men are
willing and anxious to assemble data about the behavior of the
individual in his family, business, and recreational relations. Such
facts are often useful to the physician in making his diagnosis and
in deciding how to handle the patient. The modern emphasis upon the
rôle of reverie in developing one’s traits and interests has led
to the inclusion of data about night dreams, daydreams, ambitions,
grievances, enthusiasms, and loyalties of the subject. Not infrequently
the productions of the patient are recorded in his own words by a
stenographer who is present during certain interviews with physicians.
All these psychological and sociological data increase the significance
of the case record for the individual who studies it for the purpose of
understanding the total developmental history of the person.
Sometimes the case histories concern people who are without mental
disorder, but who have, for one reason or another, been committed for
observation. The German government was not the only one in the late war
which sometimes resorted to the expedient of avoiding the appearance of
internal dissension by referring pacifists to a mental hospital. The
records of the kind obtained under these circumstances are often of men
and women without pathology, and serve to control the conclusions which
rest on the study of pathological cases.
Quite often the specifically pathological features in the record of a
sick person are very meager. Thus, one prominent politician, the mayor
of a large city, was brought to a mental hospital suffering from an
alcoholic psychosis,[2] delirium tremens. He was only “insane” (to use
a nonscientific term) when he was passing through this acute alcoholic
episode, and was soon released. But the record of what he said and did
during the delirium casts a brighter light on the deeper motivations
of his political career than many pages of conventional biography. The
hallucinations and delusions which he experienced were not entirely
stereotyped for the disease. Since he was no longer able to maintain
his repressions, his inner fantasy life came out in the clear, and his
personality structure stood revealed. Another politician showed nothing
abnormal except a propensity for collecting women’s shoe heels, which
he found sexually stimulating. He came to the medical psychologist
to be freed from his fetishist perversion, and in so doing he made
possible the preparation of a document which intimately revealed the
origin of certain political interests. From the point of view of the
political scientist the most valuable parts of his history happened
to be quite far removed from the narrowly circumscribed pathological
symptoms.
The value of some records is enhanced by the fact that, besides the
pathological productions of the patient, they contain much information
which is volunteered by the person when he is himself again. Some
forms of mental disorder show recurrent intervals of disturbance and
normality, and during the “clear” interludes the patient is quite
competent to furnish autobiographical data. Often the “remissions” in
the individual’s condition extend over several years, although they
may be momentary. Another form of mental disease is characterized by
the fact that the sufferer’s difficulties center about a single system
of ideas which, if left untouched by the interviewer, permits him to
be dealt with as an ordinary individual. It should be evident from
the foregoing that, contrary to popular impression, the histories to
be found in institutions for the care of the sick are by no means
exclusively confined to pathological subjects or to the merely
pathological aspects of the person.
Some of the life-histories which are summarized in this monograph come
from mental hospitals. Others have been collected from volunteers who
were outside mental institutions and who were aware of no serious
mental pathology. They have been undertaken on the understanding that
our knowledge of human nature in politics would be advanced if “normal”
individuals were studied with the same care which is often bestowed on
the abnormal.
So the book includes persons who are “sick” and persons who are “well.”
In the main the material is printed for the first time. There are no
retrospective interpretations of historical personages. The chief unity
of the study lies in the fact that it is restricted to politically
interesting people who have been studied while alive by specialists
under conditions of unusual intimacy.
The purpose of this venture is not to prove that politicians are
“insane.” Indeed, the specifically pathological is of secondary
importance to the central problem of exhibiting the developmental
profile of different types of public characters. Our job is not to
catalogue the symptoms at the expense of the main patterns of the
personality. We have not finished when we know that a modern Rousseau
suffered from paranoia; that a modern Napoleon has partly atrophied
genitalia; that modern Alexanders, Caesars, and Blüchers are alcoholic;
that a modern Calvin is plagued by eczema, migraine, and kidney stones;
that a modern Bismarck is hysterical; that a modern Lincoln shows
depressive pathology; that a modern Robespierre displays a eunuchoid
habitus; or that a modern Marat suffers from arthritis, diabetes, and
eczema. “Psychopathography” is legitimate and useful, but pathography
is not our aim.[3]
Nor is it the purpose of this book to make a hit-and-miss collection
of isolated anecdotes about the relation between early experiences
and specific political traits and interests. Not that this sort of
thing is not a liberalizing experience. Our conventional schemes of
“political motivation” seem curiously aloof from the manifold reality
of human life when we discover the private basis of public acts. John
B, to choose a random instance, is a busy, aggressive, and successful
salesman who spends a great deal of time and money on the care of the
blind. He takes time away from his business to serve on the board of
governors of institutions for the blind, and he handles many financial
campaigns on their behalf. Measures looking toward the improvement
of public or private care for these unfortunates are certain of
his support before legislative committees, on the platform, and in
personal conference. The study of his early memories finally revealed
the incident in which his ardent interest in the blind was rooted.
When he was between three and four years of age, his little sister
pulled an eye out of his favorite cat, and he was terribly distressed.
His concern for the safety of his pets was the original drive toward
protective work for the blind which matured into his adult activity.
It would be possible to fill many pages with reports of “critical
experiences” of this kind, and their importance is far greater than is
usually supposed.
If diagnostic labels and isolated anecdotes do not satisfy us, what do
we want? The answer can be succinctly stated thus: We want to discover
what developmental experiences are significant for the political traits
and interests of the mature. This means that we want to see what lies
behind agitators, administrators, theorists, and other types who play
on the public stage. Can we conceive the development of the human
personality as a functioning whole, and discern the turning-points
in the growth of various patterns of political life? Can we uncover
the typical subjective histories of typical public characters? Can we
place this subjective history in relation to the physical and cultural
factors which were developmentally significant?
Even this ambitious project does not exhaust the scope of this study.
We want to see whether the intensive investigation of life-histories
will in any way deepen our understanding of the whole social and
political order. The life-story of a Hottentot or an American reveals
the concrete reality of images and moods as they are experienced
seriatim by those whose life is caught up in the web of violently
contrasting cultures. The trained student of society discerns a wealth
of culture patterns whose full meaning in human experience can only be
revealed by securing the subjective history of those who are exposed to
them. In some cultures the child is slapped, switched, and beaten; in
some cultures the child is rarely the target of corporal punishment.
Does this mean that the children in the first culture will harbor
revenge and welcome violence in social life? In some cultures, parental
control is negligible from the fourth to the fourteenth year, and in
other cultures supervision is strict and continuous. What difference
does this make in the developing view of the world in successive
generations? Those who are within the same culture are exposed to many
minor variations in social practice, and we may hope to ascertain the
consequences of these differences for the minds of those who undergo
them.
This book is in harmony with a trend which has been growing in strength
in the social sciences. Social science has been moving toward the
intensive study of the individual’s account of himself. This is a
movement which is poorly conveyed by the phrase, “an interest in human
biography,” because the term “biography” is full of irrelevant literary
and historical connotations. The person’s own story is not a chronology
of everything he thought and did, nor is it an impressionistic
interpretation of what he experienced. The life-history is a natural
history, and a natural history is concerned with facts which are
_developmentally_ significant. The natural history of the earth is not
a rehearsal of every event included within the series, but a selective
account of major changes within the series. Dated events matter, but
they matter not because they have dates but because they mark phases.
When biography is treated as natural history, the purpose is to pick
and choose the principal epochs of development and to identify their
distinctive patterns.
The study of life-histories as natural histories is a very recent
phenomenon. The social sciences have barely begun to exploit this
approach. It is of very great significance that Comte, after spending
a lifetime in the preparation of his great system, finally saw
that the capstone was missing, and at the time of his death was
frantically trying to improvise it. His projected treatise was to
deal with personality development and differentiation (_La morale_).
It was never finished. There is something symbolic of the history
of the social sciences in this story of Comte’s long preoccupation
with institutions, his belated recognition of the possibilities of
personality study, his hurried effort to make good the omission, and
the fragmentary nature of the results achieved. Social science is in
the belated-hurried-fragmentary phase of growth.[4]
Comte’s fragment was never expanded by French sociologists. The
comparative morphology of culture became all-absorbing, and this was
concerned with the pantomime of what men did, and sporadically with
what men thought. Comte executed his earlier volumes only too well.
When the mental processes of primitives came to be studied by Durkheim
and the Durkheimians, these “primitive mentalities” were examined for
the sake of revealing highly abstract “forms” of thought, and not to
reveal the individual sequence of human experience under different
social conditions. The efforts which have been made to fill the gap
have rested upon no massing of empirical data and have been fortified
by no critical reflection on the methodological problem of improving
the reliability of the data. The most promising sign of the times
in France is the synthetic approach to social psychology which is
sponsored by Blondel at Strassbourg.
In Germany the social scientists were so occupied with the _Streit
um Marx_ and the triumphs of the comparative historical school that
a comparative morphology of subjective histories, if one may indulge
the phrase, did not arise. The prodigious influence of Kant in the
direction of multiplying epistemological subtleties stereotyped a
penchant for high abstraction in the consideration of psychological
phenomena. The great successes of the physical sciences seemed to
rest upon the ruthless division and re-division of phenomena until
they became amenable to manipulation and control. The combination of
Kantian acuteness with scientific atomism was capable of producing the
extremes of physiological psychology and the obscurantist revulsion
against submitting the sacred mystery of personality to the coarse
indignity of exact investigation. Curiously enough, the modern era of
personality study was introduced as a protest against the laboratory
emphasis, and meant a capitulation to the spirit of scientific
irreverance. Personalities could be compared and typologized. The
pioneer was Dilthey, the philosophic historian; but neither he nor
those who followed him collected and published actual accounts of
intimate subjective experiences. Sociological overemphasis on the group
was only partially compensated in Simmel’s theoretical exposition
of individuality, but there was no happy synthesis of category
and fact in his work. The field ethnologists neglected to assemble
autobiographical accounts, and only the fine sensibilities of Vierkandt
made possible the utilization of fragments for the sake of comparing
the inner life of primitive man with that of modern man, a task which
was performed with rather more subtlety than by the French. The early
social psychological impetus of Lazarus and Steindhal produced vast
collections of folk-lore materials, but the task of threading folk lore
and folk ways onto the developmental history of representative persons
remained undone.
The great innovator in the subjective field was Freud. His book on
dreams is one of the most unique autobiographies in history, and his
publications set the pace for those who wanted to record the actual
outpourings of the unrestrained human mind. Here at last was a truly
scientific spirit who recorded everything of which the human mind
was capable, and looked at it critically in the hope of finding the
laws of mental life. He broke through the irrelevant barriers of
conventionality and brought dark continents of data into the light of
inquiry. He proposed theories which were supposed to be tested by the
data, and devised a special procedure for securing data.
The scientific habilitation of the anonymous, intimate life-history
document as a source for the study of culture was especially the work
of William I. Thomas. He and Florian Znaniecki undertook and completed
their remarkable study of _The Polish Peasant in Europe and America_.
One volume was devoted to a long autobiography which included the most
intimate facts in the life of a Polish immigrant to the United States.
The work of Thomas left an abiding stamp on American sociology through
the department at the University of Chicago. Franz Boas, dean of
American ethnologists, has been keenly interested in the primitive’s
story of himself, and has collected and urged the collection of many
such documents. Paul Radin published the life-story of a Winnebago
chief in 1916. The importance of “the boy’s own story” was early
recognized by William Healy in his study of delinquents, and has been
extended in every direction.
So, in stressing the value of the study of the concrete sequence of
individual experience for political science, we are expressing a
trend of interest which is already well founded in social science.
Our quest for full and intimate histories has led to the exploitation
of a relatively new source of material, the case-history records of
hospitals. It has led to the application of psychopathological methods
to the study of normal volunteers as a control on the inferences
drawn from the institutional cases. It has led to a detailed study of
the prolonged interview technique as a method of personality study
(especially psychoanalysis), and to the formulation of improved methods
of investigation. It has led to the statement of a functional theory of
the state, a theory which springs directly from the intensive scrutiny
of actual life-histories, and the realization of what political forms
can mean when seen against the rich background of personal experience.
These studies are admittedly incomplete. The documents relied upon
suffer from various shortcomings which have been specified in detail
at an appropriate place. The number of documents on hand is limited.
Caution would counsel deferred publication of even these materials.
But the many objections to publication have been outweighed by certain
positive advantages. The publication of such a collection of materials
will serve to familiarize the professional students of government with
the kinds of fact and interpretation which are now current among the
specialists in important fields of study. Familiarization is especially
necessary in dealing with personality histories because some of the
material is unconventional and invariably produces initial emotional
difficulties among unsophisticated readers. But science cannot be
science and limit itself to the conventional. Some of the facts are
not pretty, and they are not the topics of polite conversation. But
the medical scientists who dabble with the excretions of the human
body for the sake of diagnosing disease and understanding health are
not bound by the limitations of banality and gentility in their work.
And if political science is to become more of a reality and less of a
pseudonym, there must be discipline in dealing objectively with every
kind of fact which is conceivably important for the understanding of
human traits and interests.
Familiarization, then, is one function of this set of studies. Another
purpose is to set up tentative hypotheses about personality growth
on the basis of available materials. The mere statement of these
hypotheses about the growth of agitators and administrators will
sharpen investigation. Perhaps those who have direct access to better
histories will be impelled to use them in checking and revising the
working conceptions herein set out.
The general scheme of presentation begins with some chapters which
sketch the psychopathological standpoint in its historical setting
and which review the current criteria of political types. Then comes
selected life-history material. The concluding chapters discuss
the bearing of personality studies on general political theory and
criticize existing methods of study.
CHAPTER II
THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGICAL APPROACH
One of the standing obstacles in the path of personality research
is the difficulty of describing the personality as a whole at any
given cross-section of its development. In despair at the myriad
difficulties of the task, academic psychology has long evaded the
issue and concentrated its attention upon the minute exploration of
detached aspects of the individual. The manuals of physiological
psychology are full of painstaking accounts of how atomized aspects of
the individual’s environment (the “stimuli”) modify the reactions of
selected parts of the individual. What these manuals characteristically
omit is a workable set of conceptions for the classification of the
phenomena which are the objects of investigation in personality
research. It is impossible to found a science of geology without
inventing terms to distinguish plateaus, plains, mountains, and
continental blocs, even though all these phenomena possess the common
attributes of “matter.” What matters for the geologist is how the
differences and not the likenesses come to pass. Much of the academic
psychology, in its quest for precision and prestige, has quit studying
the problem with which it is ostensibly engaged, and has substituted
a minor field of physiology therefor. In so doing, it has lost any
criterion for testing the relevance of the results of particular
researches for the understanding of personality because it has no
master concepts of personality.
The psychopathologist has never been able to evade the necessity of
summing up the personality as a whole because he has been compelled
to make important decisions about the future of the personality as a
whole. The psychiatrist must continually decide whether John B and Mary
C will, if released from careful supervision, commit suicide or murder,
or whether they will be dependable members of the community. Thus the
clinician has found it imperative to search for signs which have high
predictive value in relation to the major social adjustments of the
individual.
The psychopathologist has had the great advantage of seeing many
trends of the personality which are normally subordinated to other
trends when they have escaped from control and achieved Gargantuan
proportions. The clinical caricature throws into imposing relief the
constituent tendencies which make up the functioning person, and draws
attention to their presence and their processes. “Normality” involves
a complicated integration of many tendencies, a flexible capacity to
snap from one mood, preoccupation, and overt activity to another as
the changing demands of reality require. The pathological mind, if one
may indulge in a lame analogy, is like an automobile with its control
lever stuck in one gear: the normal mind can shift. One has a queer
feeling as one passes around the wards of a hospital for the custody
of the more seriously disordered patients that if one could assemble
the scattered parts of the mind that one could create at least a single
supermind. There in one corner is a melancholic who is stuck in the
mood of despondency; in another corner is a manic who is expansive
and elated; elsewhere is a man whose self-esteem has achieved cosmic
dimensions; in the back wards is a deteriorated mind in perpetual
repose. Every conceivable nuance of preoccupation and mood with which
we are normally familiar seems to be dissatisfied with its minor rôle
in a healthy integration, and intent upon autocratic mastery of the
mind. The clinical caricature draws attention as sharply as possible
to the components of the healthy mind. So every theory of pathological
manifestations must presently become expanded or assimilated into a
comprehensive account of human psychology.
The gross clinical material reveals the intimate interrelationships
between soma and psyche. The patient who suffers from obsessive ideas
may find relief from obsession by showing hysterical symptoms; and
hysterical symptoms may clear up, only to make way for obsessive
symptoms. “Pure pictures” are almost pure theories. The patient who is
suffering from a definite organic lesion may complicate his troubles
by “worry,” and “worry” may be one of the factors in bringing about a
physical disease picture. There is evidence that psychological factors
are among those significantly operating in such diseases as common
colds, asthma, catarrh, hay fever, hyperthyroidism, gall-bladder
trouble, gastro-intestinal ulcers, irregular menstruation, and sexual
impotence.
Fresh vitality has come into modern psychology from the clinic. The
psychopathological approach has gradually vindicated itself as more
and more of its conceptions find a permanent place in the vocabulary
of psychology and social science. Modern psychopathology is itself a
recent development, and undoubtedly the most revolutionary figure is
Sigmund Freud.
The spectacular and influential nature of Freud’s work is sufficient
justification for devoting some space to a brief account of his
standpoint and his innovation in method. As we shall have occasion to
illustrate, his method is of more general application to practical
problems of political research and political practice than is usually
understood.
When Freud was a student in the University of Vienna, the triumphal
progress of microscopic methods of studying cellular structure was
sweeping all before it. Congeries of mental symptoms in the living
were frequently found to be correlated with the discovery of certain
definite cerebrospinal lesions on autopsy. The future seemed to
rest wholly in the hands of those who used the dissecting knife and
the lens. Before Freud graduated from the University, he became
demonstrator to Brücke, the eminent physiologist; and he labored in
the laboratory of Meynart, the distinguished psychiatrist of his day.
Freud’s first publication was a result of laborious laboratory work.
While materialism reigned, psychological phenomena were degraded to
the status of trivial epiphenomena. But at this very time a revival
of psychogeneticism arose in French psychiatry under the impetus of
Charcot. Charcot had achieved eminence in pathological anatomy before
he turned in middle life to the study of mental maladies. By 1883 he
had demonstrated the possibility of producing hysterical symptoms
by means of ideas (verbal stimuli). Time and again he hypnotized
individuals and produced muscular contractures, hypersensitivity, and
hyposensitivity, together with allied symptoms of hysteria.
Breaking away from the laboratories of Vienna, Freud journeyed to the
Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris to work with Charcot, where he stayed
from the autumn of 1886 to the spring of 1887. Here he was thrown in
touch with the current of ideas which was giving concrete content to
the notion of the “out of conscious” and its dynamic consequences for
human behavior. Pierre Janet was busily accumulating the observations
which were published to the world in 1889 under the title,
_L’automatisme psychologique_. Early chapters appeared in the _Revue
philosophique_ as early as 1886.
Freud had just missed a spectacular rise to fame when he failed to
recognize the anaesthetic possibilities of cocaine in surgery. He
published a review of the literature on cocoa; and a young Vienna
colleague, Koller, struck by some of the data which Freud had
assembled, announced the discovery in 1884 which immortalized his name
in medical history. Freud pondered for many years on why the idea
should have eluded him, and perhaps his desertion of the laboratory was
due to his sense of partial failure.
In Paris he acquired a point of view which was bound to bring him into
conflict with the materialistic pundits of Vienna. Hypnotism was itself
looked upon as an artifice of charlatans. Wagner-Jauregg reflected the
ruling tradition when, only a few years ago, he said, “The trouble
with hypnotism is that you never know who is pulling the other
fellow’s leg.” Freud was met by derisive laughter when he announced
at the Medical Society of Vienna that male hysterics were to be found
in Paris. For hysteria, as one of the pedants reminded him, was
philologically derived from “hysteron,” meaning uterus, and therefore
couldn’t possibly occur in males. This was an echo of the days when
hysteria was supposed to be due to a migratory uterus and women were
turned upside down to bring it back in place.
In 1881 and 1882 Breuer had treated a girl suffering from hysteria,
and his interest was renewed in the case in conversation with Freud.
Breuer remembered that when he treated the patient under hypnosis, she
recalled the first episode in which a symptom had appeared, related
it with every evidence of excitement, and discovered on waking that
the symptom had disappeared. Breuer and Freud began to study hysteria
from this point of view and published their results. Charcot had
demonstrated that ideas could cause hysteria; Breuer had found that the
discovery of pathogenic ideas could cure hysteria.
In 1889 Freud returned to France, this time to the other center of
hypnotic research, Nancy, where Liébeault and Bernheim were doing
remarkable things. Freud here saw something the full significance of
which did not at once dawn upon him.
A subject was hypnotized and given a “post-hypnotic suggestion” to
raise an umbrella at a certain signal after coming out of hypnosis.
The subject was then awakened from hypnosis, and presently, when the
stipulated signal was given, obediently raised the umbrella, although
still inside the room. When asked why he raised the umbrella, _he
said that he wanted to see whether it was his or not_. Thus did he
rationalize (a concept later developed) the gratification of an impulse
_which he did not himself at first recognize_. When challenged to
explain himself, he merely produced a plausible interpretation of his
own conduct.
The immense significance of this train of events is great enough. It at
once raises the searching question: To what extent are we in ignorance
of our own motives and accustomed to improvise merely plausible
explanations of and to ourselves? But an even more notable phenomenon
occurred. _If the subject was asked again and again to try to remember
why he raised the umbrella, he sooner or later recalled (to his own
surprise) that he had been commanded to do it._
The full import of this observation did not instantly dawn on Freud.
But he continued to have difficulties with the patients whom he sought
to hypnotize. They sometimes held out against his suggestions, even
though they had accepted them many times before, and seriously impeded
the progress of the search for the traumatic episode. He gradually
abandoned hypnosis, leaving the patient in a waking state in a relaxed
position with instructions to report every incident connected with the
early appearance of the symptom under investigation. Vestiges of the
hypnotic technique remained as late as 1895, when he would still lay
his hand on the patient’s forehead as a stimulus to recollection.
This method also encountered crippling difficulties. A patient would
sometimes lie for hours without saying a word, totally unable to
recover a relevant reminiscence. To meet this obstacle, Freud presently
hit upon the simple expedient upon which he thenceforth relied. He
instructed the patient to say anything and everything that popped in
his head, regardless of its propriety, logic, or triviality.
Freud found that all ramblings of his patient could furnish him with
clues to the underlying and unavowed impulses of the sufferer. He
became able to guess the nature of the buried episode in which the
impulse had received its present type of manifestation. Thus the
patient might begin by saying that she had seen a red-headed man in the
street and that she always despised red-headed men--except of course
her dear brother. Day after day apparently random allusions would build
out the picture of her great interest in anything reminiscent of her
brother’s looks and acts, all of which would be bitterly condemned. But
if she were asked directly, she would maintain that her brother was a
fine, upstanding man, and a credit to the family.
The analyst, after listening to the eddies of talk, and noting the
patterns along which they seemed to whirl, would presently locate
a hidden rock beneath the innocent surface of the stream--in this
case, an unacknowledged load of hatred against her brother. Bit by
bit, stories of real or fancied childhood tyranny would come floating
along the stream. Then suddenly, amid tears and violent gestures,
might come the story of a long-forgotten incident which involved an
intimate aggression on the part of the brother. The patient, manifestly
relieved, might speedily recover from her hysterical disabilities and
return to the active responsibilities of life.
Freud’s theory of what he saw began modestly enough, leaned heavily
upon Charcot, Bernheim, and Breuer, and was mostly founded upon
observations made upon patients who were handled by hypnosis and not by
the new procedure which later was called psychoanalysis. He published a
contribution to the theory of the psychoneuroses in which he laid down
the proposition that a distinction could be drawn between one group,
the anxiety neuroses, which depended on mental conflict, and the actual
neuroses, which were not due to mental conflict but to masturbation and
coitus interruptus. In the first case, mental energy was converted into
bodily symptoms, and in the latter case bodily energy was supposed to
be converted into bodily symptoms. In Freud’s early articles there is
little to forecast the course which he was to follow as his brilliant
imagination viewed the behavior of the individual from the new vantage
ground which he had discovered.[5]
Whether his particular theories survive or fall, the standpoint which
he achieved by ruthlessly applying his method is of the greatest
value. His method, which grew from the necessities of an exasperated
physician, led him _systematically to treat every manifestation of
the individual as part of a related whole_. Freud’s mental set had
been furnished by the data of hypnosis, which seemed to show that
patients suffer from reminiscences. When he dropped hypnosis and tried
to force recollections, his mental set had not altered, for he was
still in search of the original, the traumatic episode. When he asked
his patients to say anything that came into their heads, he was still
hunting the elusive memory of a definite early experience. But quite
without realizing it, his original mental set had widened, and with
momentous consequences for his own subsequent development. If one were
given to exaggerations, one could say that the world of psychological
investigation had suddenly begun to turn on a new axis.
What was the nature of this new mental set? Intently watching his
patients, not for word for word accounts of what had happened, and
looking upon everything else as “irrelevant,” Freud learned to look
for meanings and not for reports. Every dream, every phrase, every
hesitation, every gesture, every intonation, every outburst began
to take on significance as possible allusions to the “traumatic”
episode. Allusions to hated objects, reminiscent of a brother, failure
to mention a hated sister until days had passed, although other
members of the family had been passed in review--every deviation from
comprehensiveness--was eagerly scrutinized for the clue it might afford.
The technique of therapy consisted in using clues to facilitate the
patient’s search for relief. The problem was to discover the nature
of the patient’s conflict and to volunteer interpretations for the
sake of helping the patient to dare to bring into full consciousness
the unavowed impulse which had once frightened his socially adjusted
self into frantic repression. This involved the interpretation of the
symptom as a compromise product of the patient’s ideal of conduct; and
the out-of-conscious impulse, which, though denied access to the full
consciousness of the sufferer, possessed enough strength to procure
partial gratification. The symptom was thus a symptom of conflict
between the socially adapted portion of the self and the unadapted
impulses of the personality, and the symptom was a compromise between
partial gratification of the illicit and partial punishment by the
conscience. The particular form of the “conflict” depended upon the
traumatic experience and the antecedent history of the individual.
Far more important than these therapeutic elaborations is the shift
in standpoint which made them possible. Since Freud was on the search
for the literal by way of the symbolic, he raised hitherto neglected
manifestations of human behavior to the dignity of significant symbols,
wrote them out, and introduced them into the literature of human
behavior. There could be no sharper illustration of the prepotency of
“mental set” for the seeing of “facts” than the difference between
the clinical reports of Freud and Janet. Freud, convinced that the
eluctable energies of the organism could betray themselves in every
image and in every gesture, painstakingly recorded the dreams and
day-fantasies of his patients. Janet, who continued to assume that
dreams were nonsensical confusions attributable to the diminished
tension of the sleeping organism, seldom made any allusion to dreams.
His pellucid description of grimaces, gestures, sentiments, and
theories of his patients led back to relatively recent moments when the
patient failed of adjustment. This failure of the patient to mobilize
his energies in smooth adaptation to the exigencies of social reality
was then imputed to a defective biopsychical mechanism, to a lowered
“psychological tension,” due to a miscellany of possible causes, among
which was mentioned “the exhaustive effects of emotional excitement.”
Therapy consisted in restoring the capacity of the individual to
mobilize and deploy his energies at the highest “levels” of adjustment.
This was to be achieved by a variety of means--by hypnotic suggestion,
rest in a simplified environment, and the usual repertory of the
psychotherapist.
But the golden flash of psychological insight eluded Janet. At bottom
he had little respect for the concrete reality of the mental life of
his patients. Although he talked the language of psychogeneticism, it
had a poor and not a rich connotation in his mind. I think this is
due to his too exclusive reliance upon hypnotism, for the mental set
of the hypnotist is derogatory to most of the concrete productions
of the patient. The patient, one feels with a shrug, will presently
come to the important experience; why take the superimposed material
too seriously? Then, too, the patient may be put in order by direct
command. Janet relates with some pride how people in the waiting-room
of his office would marvel when a woman, bent nearly double, would be
admitted into his sanctum, presently to emerge, erect and cured--until
the effect wore off.
Freud learned a new respect for the concrete reality of mental life in
his concentrated effort to divine the hidden conflict without resorting
to hypnosis. His weakness as a hypnotist was in a sense the beginning
of wisdom. A patient who is deeply hypnotized is but infrahuman.
Barring commands which do violence to the moral code of the individual,
the subject will passively execute the commands of the hypnotist. The
patient descends from a complicated “nearly normal” person to a waxy
caricature of a human being. The unhypnotized patient of Freud is in
relatively full possession of all the resources of the ordinary waking
self, and must be dealt with as a complex human being.
The widest gateway to psychoanalytic development became the study
of dreams. And here again we are dealing with something which came,
not from laborious reflection upon underlying concepts, but from the
urgencies of the clinical situation. Just as we found that Freud had
taken up a new post of observation in practice before he discovered
its implications in theory, we find that in such a detail as the
investigation of dreams, his theoretical preoccupations contributed
less than his everyday necessities. Freud’s patients continually thrust
their dreams upon him; and he, now in pursuit of clues to what lay
behind, presently took them seriously, and found in them many helpful
indications of unspoken things. He would assist the free-fantasies of
the patient by asking what came into his mind about any detail of the
dream, and he attentively followed the long chains of superficially
meaningless associations.
It began to appear that Freud had stumbled upon, and then brilliantly
elaborated the possibilities inherent in, a new way of using the mind.
He trained his patients in a technique of free-fantasy which they
could subsequently use for themselves as a supplement to the logical
technique which society ostensibly tries to foster. It at once appeared
that he had discovered a method of thinking which was applicable far
beyond the confines of the clinic and which could be added to the
repertory of the mind.
The interpretation of dreams was the bridge which brought Freud from
the confines of the clinic to the analysis of the whole psychology
of individual development. The dreams of patients and the dreams of
non-pathological persons showed such homogeneity of symbolism that
the gap between the “normal” and the “sick” seemed to close. Popular
lore already furnished a clue to dreams as wish-fulfilments, whether
found in the “well” or “ill,” but popular lore also treated them as
reminiscences, prophecies, and omens, or as confusions, depending on
the transitory context of the moment. Freud had a double orientation
in dealing with the individual. He regarded him as motivated in the
present by impulses which eluded his own consciousness. He regarded
these motivations as having achieved their present form in concrete
historical events in the life of the individual. The nature of the
present could be made clear to the conscious mind if the organizing
episode could be recalled. This recall could be greatly facilitated by
paying special attention to the “irrational” or non-adjustive aspects
of the person’s present conduct. The “irrational” would seem rational
enough if the unacknowledged motives were made manifest, and if the
historical as well as the contemporary allusions were sought after.
Sooner or later the unrecognized motives would disclose themselves in
consciousness, if the individual waited attentively; but the process
could be greatly helped by using a different style of thinking than the
logical.
No one has more dramatically and repeatedly shown the limitations (as
well as the advantages) of logical procedures of thought than Freud.
No one has made a more important contribution to the technique of
supplementing logical thought by other methods of thought than Freud.
This is the aspect of Freud’s work which has immediate and constant
relevance to political as to every other sort of thinking, and to which
it is important to devote more extended consideration.
CHAPTER III
A NEW TECHNIQUE OF THINKING[6]
The prevailing theory is that men who make important decisions in
politics can be trained to use their minds wisely by disciplinary
training in the practices of logical thought. Legal training is
supposed to mold the mind to ways of dealing with the world which
subordinate whim to principle. Formal instruction in the social
sciences is intended to equip the mind for the detached consideration
of social consequences, and everyone agrees that this implies a
large measure of self-awareness for the sake of reducing the play of
prejudice.
The nature of logical thought has been carefully examined by an array
of able writers. Their conclusions may be provisionally reported by
saying that logic is a guided form of mental operation. It is not
something marked off from impulse, but a progressive elaboration
and differentiation of impulse. It proceeds by the affirmation of a
starting-point, which is in fact a vague indication of the goal to be
reached, and develops by the criticism of the material which appears
in consciousness according to its relevance to the end in view. If
the judge begins by wanting to settle a controversy consistently with
precedents, he has indicated in advance the shadowy outline of the
desired termination of his efforts. If an administrator wants to reduce
complaints against his handling of the postal service, he starts with
a different mental set from the judge, but, like the mental set of the
latter, his first act is to bring into view the state of affairs which
he hopes to find when he quits thinking. He is accustomed to guide the
operations of his mind by this preliminary characterization of the
terminus sought. No thinker can haul into the center of attention the
material which indicates how the terminal situation is to be attained.
The thinker must wait attentively for whatever appears. If he wants
to deal with such a simple practical matter as getting to the railway
station, and his mind continues to fill with images of the one he left
behind him, his accustomed means of asserting control is to reiterate
the practical end and to hope that he can “keep his mind on” taxicabs
or autobusses. Alternating with periods of reiteration and expectancy
and illumination are episodes of “No” and “Yes,” which evidence the
existence of guided thought.
It would be misleading to stop with this formal description of the
characteristics of logical thinking. Logical thinking is not a
hocus-pocus to be applied here and there and everywhere. The previewing
of events presupposes familiarity with the sorts of events to which
the previewing relates. It usually involves analysis of the contingent
future in the light of analogies with the past, which is simply a
means of refining general familiarity through systematic methods of
inspecting reality. General knowledge of lending and borrowing must
be supplemented, for many purposes, by detailed examination of the
quantitative dimensions of various routines. The precise nature of the
relationship between changes in the rediscount rate and the price of
call money requires analysis far beyond impressionistic familiarity.
There need be no illusion that the specification of the terminal
situation provides an immovable constant for thought. We can imply, as
we have implied, that logical thinking begins by sketching a figure on
the canvass and leaves the details to be filled in during the course of
the thinking. But the starting-point is often subject to many shifts,
and the initial sketch is more or less subject to remaking. The judge
who starts in pursuit of consistency-with-precedent characteristically
must add conformity-to-principles-of-policy. A plurality of ends is
always involved, and usually appears.
Everybody knows that the pluralism of ends goes far beyond “official”
ends. A sophisticated and discerning judge may discover an embarrassing
conflict in the controlling precedents, and cast about for other social
purposes than conformity-to-precedent to guide him. He may scrutinize
the principal economic, cultural, and political changes in the society
in which he operates, and discern the appearance of a new set of rising
dominant values, and decide to diminish the cost of social change by
seeking to facilitate their introduction. If this hypothetical judge
believes that he should not consciously enact his private prejudices
into law, and if the social values are so confused that uncertainty
rules, the judge is well advised to flip a coin (in chambers) and
govern his decision accordingly. If the judge finds himself favorably
disposed toward any alternative to begin with, he will take himself
as an object of investigation to determine the extent and origin of
his prejudice. His logic thus involves the use of self-scrutiny for
the exposure of private values which load the dice for or against
a particular point of view. Besides the values which are “public,”
there are complicating values which are the residue of one’s “private”
history.
All these points are stressed in greater or less degree in the current
writing on the use of the mind. The avowed purpose of our professional
schools is to increase the amount of logical reflection in the world,
and the set complaint is that people somehow or another manage to think
very clumsily. In spite of our best efforts to disseminate logicality,
people are always “letting their prejudices run away with them,” even
when they have a baggage of good intentions.
The stock alibi for the failure of the schools to improve the
character of thinking among those who hold positions of power is
that the human mind offers a perverse opacity to the rays of reason.
Somehow or other our training doesn’t take; but this is attributed
not to the deficiencies of logic but to the resistances to it. All
this is reminiscent of the reply of the Christian to the taunt that
Christianity has failed. He says that Christianity isn’t to blame, but
the lack of it. The logicians say that the cure of bad logic is more
and better logic. If the human mind refuses to be educated, that’s just
too bad.
Our thesis is that our faith in logic is misplaced. Exclusive
emphasis upon logic (even where logic is adroitly used) incapacitates
rather than fits the mind to function as a fit instrument of reality
adjustment.
The supposition that emotional aberrations are to be conquered by
heroic doses of logical thinking is a mistake. The absence of effective
logic is a symptom of a disease which logic cannot itself cure. We have
been misled by supposing that the mind can rely upon a single technique
of operation when this isolated technique has serious limitations.
A totally different technique of thinking is needed to get on with
the task of ridding the mind of the distorting results of unseen
compulsions. Since our schools have found no place for the cultivation
of this additional technique of thinking, our judges and administrators
and policy-makers are turned loose on the world armed with faith in
logic and incapable of making their minds safe for logic. Logical
thinking is but one of the special methods of using the mind, and
cannot itself achieve an adequate inspection of reality because it is
unable to achieve self-knowledge without the aid of other forms of
thinking.
The technique of free-fantasy offers many points of contrast with
logical thinking. It is unguided rather than guided association. From
a given starting-point, no effort is bent toward the exclusion of the
trivial, the trite, the embarrassing, the filthy, the nonsensical. The
mind is permitted to run hither and yon. It is hospitable to everything
which germinates in the mind, and is subject only to the effort to
steer clear of the molds of logical thinking. There is no specific
definition of an objective, and no intermittent intervention in the
flow of material to register its pertinence or impertinence to this
rather specific objective.
Free-fantasy is not to be confused with free word associations which
begin with simple stimulus words and end when the first few words
which pop into the mind are put down. Free-fantasy is not a momentary
relaxation of selective criticism, but prolonged emancipation from
logical fetters.
Free-fantasy differs from the ordinary daydream, the night dream, and
the visions which arise in sleeping or waking by the circumstance that
it is embarked upon with the vague, generalized purpose of rendering
available new subject matter for logical thought. The frequent
interventions which characterize logical procedures are suspended,
the better to serve the ultimate purposes of reality adjustment.
Daydreaming which is not used for this general purpose does not
represent a technique for using the mind.
The ultimate paradox of logical thinking is that it is self-destroying
when it is too sedulously cultivated. It asserts its own prerogatives
by clamping down certain restrictive frames of reference upon the
activity of the mind, and presently ends in impoverishing the activity
which it purports to guide into creative channels. It becomes
intolerant of the immediate, unanalyzed, primitive abundance of the
mind, and by so doing destroys its own source.
More seriously, too, for the mind which is engaged with social life,
logical procedures exclude from the mind the most important data about
the self. Directed thinking, whether about the self or something
else as an object, is impatient of the seemingly trivial, and this
impatience with the seemingly trivial is the rationally acceptable
guise in which the impulse to avoid rigorous self-scrutiny gets itself
accepted. The mind which is freely fantasying produces distasteful
evidence of the facts about the self which the socialized self wants to
avoid. This is why free-fantasy is not learned by rote, but achieved
through trying experiences, usually under prolonged supervision.
There are wide individual differences in acquiring the technique
of free-fantasy. Logical controls are often so gradually released
that progress is almost imperceptible for several weeks of daily
contact with a psychoanalytic interviewer. Frequently, of course,
the logical controls fall away quite rapidly, and the exposure of
the underlying preoccupations proceeds apace. Freud developed the
technique, and drills his subjects, largely in relation to their
dreams, but this is in no sense its exclusive application. The purpose
of the psychoanalytic interview is not served if the patient is merely
relieved of a few annoying symptoms; its purpose is to equip him with
a means of handling his mind which will enable him to go it alone. In
developing the free-fantasy procedure, Freud added a powerful tool
to the repertory of those who would use their mind with some hope
of disentangling themselves from the compulsive domination of many
vestigial remains of their “private” histories.
It is quite possible to train people to use the free-fantasy method
with considerable success and to outfit them with a device which they
can use in the ordinary problems of professional and private life.[7]
The instances which I shall presently adduce are from the fantasies
which were produced by a judge in the course of a series of interviews
which he undertook after his curiosity about the method had been
aroused by the therapeutic treatment of a member of his family. Any
specific allusions are disguised.
One day the judge commented at the beginning of the interview that
a certain attorney irritated him in some unexplained way. He found
himself acutely conscious of his own prejudice against the man, and
in trying to deal fairly with him often leaned over backward and
showed him an embarrassing favoritism in sustaining his objections.
There was always a struggle to hold the balance even. This seemed to
indicate the conspicuous operation of some unrecognized set of motives
in relation to this particular individual. The judge, who was already
partly skilled in the use of free-fantasy, began to report whatever
came into his mind at the mention of the attorney, without regard to
logic or scruple. “Cigar smoke ... black cigar ... vile and pungent
and stuffy ... corridor ... courtroom ...,” and so on and on. The word
“corridor” reappeared several times in the course of his associations,
and the interviewer initiated a new chain by using the word as a
stimulus. After some time, there came up a vivid memory of an incident
in the corridor of the law school where the judge had studied. A
fellow-student, who was a man with a great reputation as a promising
mind, dropped cigar ashes by accident on the judge’s overcoat. The
judge remembered his angry impulse to “sock” the offender, an impulse
which he instantly subdued, and that he accepted the apology, which
seemed to end the incident. Associations were continued to find why the
brilliant rival had so incensed the judge, and the trail led back to
certain incidents and reveries in early adolescence, but this material
is not relevant here. The connection of his hostility toward his former
rival with the attorney before him was due to one of the attorney’s
mannerisms, which recalled the way the student had flecked ashes
off the end of his cigar. When this tie was exposed, the compulsive
animosity and the overcompensatory reactions disappeared from the
attitude of the judge in relation to the attorney.
Another illustrative detail may be taken almost at random from the
record. On one occasion the judge began to enumerate the three
principal alternatives which lay before him in deciding a pending case.
He remembered two of them but hesitated several seconds before the
third came into his mind. This led him to remember that he had often
casually noticed that this third possibility seemed to elude him,
although on reflection he felt that it deserved as much attention as
the other two. He began spontaneously to relax and report everything
that crossed his mind, and produced a long string of catch phrases
from law and politics like “freedom of contract,” “life, liberty,
and pursuit of happiness,” “freedom of speech and assembly.” He
presently noted that a picture was forming of one of his old law-school
classrooms. He felt that someone was just about to speak to him, and
had to resist the temptation to turn around. Then there came across
his mind a long series of incidents in which one of his law professors
was the principal figure. This teacher was reputed to possess a
mastermind and a caustic tongue; and the judge, though he had always
wanted to make a great impression on him, had met with no particular
success. The professor had a habit of using his most ironic tone of
voice when he spoke of “this freedom of contract.” Now it happened
that the attorney who was arguing for alternative No. 3 before the
court pronounced the word “freedom” with unction. This aroused in the
judge’s mind the ironic tone of the old professor’s voice, and this
in turn brought back the rather humiliating failure he had been in
his efforts to impress the professor. He now exhibited a tendency to
repress everything connected with the episode, including the attorney’s
argument.
The world about us is much richer in meanings than we consciously
see. These meanings are continually cutting across our ostensible
criteria of judgment, and compulsively distorting the operations of
the mind whose quest for an objective view of reality is consciously
quite sincere. Good intentions are not enough to widen the sphere
of self-mastery. There must be a special technique for the sake of
exposing the hidden meanings which operate to bind and cripple the
processes of logical thought. With practice one may wield the tool
of free-fantasy with such ruthless honesty that relevant material
comes very quickly to the focus of attention which we call “waking
consciousness.”
It would be possible to fill many volumes with illustrations of the
hitherto unseen meanings which have been discovered by men and women
who have learned to use the free-fantasy technique. They have often
been able to find how and why their emotions tended to be aroused
favorably or unfavorably toward individuals of their own or the
opposite sex who exhibited certain traits, and to understand why they
tended to choose certain secretaries, to sponsor certain protégés, and
to be impressed by certain witnesses and attorneys. They have been
able to inspect the phraseology of law, politics, and culture, and to
extricate themselves from many of the logically irrelevant private
meanings which they read into it.
Freud developed the technique of free-fantasy well over a quarter of
a century ago, but it is still beyond the pale of the schools. Our
professional and graduate schools make no effort to readjust their
methods to fit the minds of future men of authority for self-knowledge.
The sententious admonitions to “know thyself” are no adequate
substitute for special discipline in the ways of self-understanding.
We have tried to cure the failures of logical training by homeopathic
doses of sermonizing, rather than by the discipline of supplementary
techniques of using the mind. The mind is a fit instrument of
reality testing when both blades are sharpened--those of logic and
free-fantasy. Until this fundamental proposition is adequately
comprehended, the professional training of our judges, administrators,
and theorists will continue to furnish discipline in self-deception
rather than self-analysis.
CHAPTER IV
THE CRITERIA OF POLITICAL TYPES
The free-fantasy method of exploring the mind is of very general
application to the problems of life. In particular we are interested
in examining the results of its use for the purpose of laying bare the
natural history of personality growth and differentiation. All sorts of
politicians are met with in society, and our special task is to relate
the selection of these adult rôles to certain critical experiences in
individual development. But before we can proceed farther, we need
to examine the nature of the criteria which are currently used in
identifying various political types.
The popular speech of every state and neighborhood swarms with names
for varieties of political behavior and types of politicians. The study
of political differences may very well begin by sifting the common
vocabulary. Some of the popular images are derived from experience with
government officials. Within the last hundred years the policeman has
appeared over Western Europe, and a history of the popular conception
of his rôle could be written around terms like “bobby,” “cop,” and
“_Schupo_.” Whatever differences in dress, manner, social position,
and common humanity are supposed to exist between a “civil servant,” a
“_Beamter_,” and a “_fonctionnaire_,” there are common lineaments in
the composite stereotype. A thick chapter in human experience could be
entitled “The Bureaucrat,” wherein would be recorded the innuendo of
popular comment on a necessary evil. The “legislator” is identifiable
through all the detailed contrasts between the “congressman,” the
“M.P.,” and the “M.d.R.”
The popular tongue is rich in expressions which fill out the
official cast of characters in the political drama by peopling the
public stage with figures whose traits are essentially irrelevant
to their office. There are men of ideas--“anarchist,” “socialist,”
“liberal,” “communist,” “conservative.” There are men of ideas and of
action--“reformer,” “revolutionary,” “martyr.” The history of American,
British, French, German, medieval, Graeco-Roman, and every civilization
could be written for the sake of showing how the carriers of public
power figured in the eyes of the various groups within and without the
culture.
This profusion of types in the popular firmament of politics is
supplemented by the types which have been isolated by serious students
of culture, who have sought to impose order upon the life of the past.
Among the political forms which have been described by the historians,
the “benevolent despot” of the eighteenth century, the “demagogue” of
Athenian democracy, the “prince” of the Italian Renaissance, and the
“despot” of the oriental empires spring at once to mind. The masterly
sketch of the evolution of the public official with which Max Weber[8]
has enriched social science is, it is to be hoped, the forerunner of
many elaborate studies. The traits and arts of political leaders have
been most systematically handled by Aristotle, Machiavelli, Robert
Michels, Christensen, and Charles E. Merriam.[9]
These typologies, whether popular or scientific, possess several
features in common. They may converge to what is practically the same
picture. When W. B. Munro described the “reformer,” he filled out the
popular image which arose in the American mind at a certain phase
of American political evolution.[10] Practically every scientific
conception is a refinement and generalization of some term in general
circulation, though with local connotations.
The scientific and the popular typologies may include the same kinds
of fact as their starting-points. The fact of supposed political
conviction gave rise to the “liberal,” but it is a far cry from the
rather shadowy lines of the popular image to the finely wrought
lineaments of Ruggiero.[11] The means employed in encompassing
political objectives christen the “lobbyist,” “propagandist,” and
“agitator.” The idea that private motives are not merged in public
motives is carried in “renegade,” “sorehead,” and “tyrant.” The idea
that private motives have been firmly fused into public purposes is
one connotation of the “martyr.” The fact of informal ascendancy is
celebrated in the “boss.” In the “bureaucrat” it is implied that the
office has molded the man, and that the office tends to attract those
especially likely to develop such qualities. The Western European idea
of a judge almost necessarily refers to a functionary who carries
certain paraphernalia and proceeds with ceremony. The leanness of the
“fanatical agitator” figured in the popular mind long before Kretschmer
gave it his scientific blessing.[12]
Both popular and scientific conceptions range from the particular to
the general. The British “election agent” is closely bound to a recent,
special social setting. The “leader” keeps a stable nucleus of meaning
for the description of a social rôle among widely separated peoples in
widely separated periods.
Popular and scientific conceptions are at one in that they may present
developmental and not merely descriptive implications. The notion of
a lean and bitter agitator is not entirely a static, cross-sectional
description of a fortuitous juxtaposition of traits, but a hypothesis
that bodily irritations operate dynamically to foster the selection of
forms of activity which enable the individual to give rather free vent
to his animosities.
Both popular and scientific types may be taken as objects of study
to determine the factors in their formation. The popular idea of a
“reformer” in America bears a certain photographic resemblance to
actual personalities who figured as public advocates of restrictive
laws. It is possible to study the process by which the stereotype of
the lean and spinsterly kill-joy arose, and to see why it persisted.
Every body politic has its gallery of political mummers, and
political history needs to be rewritten to explain the unique and
the typical qualities of these popularly conceived rôles. Stuart A.
Rice has developed a technique for the identification of contemporary
stereotypes of this kind.[13] Rice took photographs of a senator, a
bolshevik, and a bootlegger, and after obliterating the names asked
various test groups to tell what designation best fitted each picture.
By examining the erroneous identifications, it became possible to
detect the mental pattern popularly associated with the class name.
An interesting contribution to social science would be the detailed
examination of the factors affecting the rise and fall of those
political typologies which have been seriously proposed by scholars.
The exaggerated picture of the omnipotent leader drawn by Carlyle no
doubt had something to do with Carlyle’s sexual impotence and his
compensatory idealization of the potent; but the popularity which this
exaggeration enjoyed among certain classes of English society was due
to the dislocation of older economic institutions and the rise of
threatening collective ideologies. The new business enterpriser felt
the intoxicating vanity of the self-made man, and the decayed landlords
felt the necessity of individualistic protests against the age of
cities and machines.
Suppose we examine in more detail the intellectual structure of
scientific political types. This requires special attention to the two
terms involved, the “political” and the “types.” Two ways of defining
the “political” are current in social science. I will speak of them as
the “institutional” and the “functional” methods of definition. Within
any community there are many patterns of activity whose form and whose
magnitude may be singled out for study. There is the production and
distribution of material goods and services; the main patterns by which
these operations proceed can be called the economic institutions of the
community. There is the settlement of disputes, and the defense and
extension of interests which are believed to be collective; these are
the political or governmental institutions of the community. In the
same way religious, charitable, and a host of other institutions may be
discerned.
These institutionally derived categories fall short of clarity and
comprehensiveness. Some social processes occur within the framework
of every institutional process. Thus the settlement of disputes is
a prominent characteristic of government as we know it; but it is
not, and never has been, and cannot by the nature of things be, a
monopoly of government when government is defined as an institutional
division of social labor. No institution ever quite monopolizes the
function which it most distinctively exercises. But this need not
lead to confusion. When the settlement of disputes is a prominent
function of one group in society, and there is no other group which
participates in the same function in the same degree, there is no
hesitation in deciding to call the first group the “governors” and to
call the patterns according to which they are selected and operate the
“political or governmental” institutions of the community. If there is
a rival adjuster of differences, the distinction is by no means clear,
as when the “church,” “business,” and the “state” are rivals. Perhaps
the governors can be identified by finding who it is who handles the
coercion employed in defending or extending communal enterprises,
though this criterion may from time to time fail to differentiate.
But, on the whole, these doubts are marginal doubts. Ordinarily it is
possible to find a division of labor and a set of sentiments which
can be called the “government of the state.” The marginal instances
call attention to the fact to which allusion has been made, the
fact that no “institutional” process quite monopolizes the function
which it most distinctively exercises. It is therefore advisable to
describe communal processes by two sets of terms, one of which refers
to “institutions” and the other to “functions” which are found within
the various institutional frameworks. Much of the literature of
social science consists in terminological quibbles about the “proper”
words to use in this institutional or functional sense, often without
appreciating the essential nature of the matter at issue. It is, of
course, of the highest importance to understand the difference, and of
minor importance to agree upon the words with which to describe the
distinction.
From what has been said, it is clear that a word like “political” may
be given an “institutional” or a “functional” meaning in a particular
context, and that--and this is the most important consequence--any
contribution to the understanding of the “institutional” process is a
contribution to the understanding of the wider “functional” process,
and the reverse. In this resides the unity of the social sciences. The
apparent disunity arises from the differences in starting-point of
particular inquiries. One begins with a series of phenomena which are
selected from a single institutional process, and another begins with
a series of phenomena which are selected from several institutional
processes according to some functional conception.
This unity of destination and disunity of starting-point is abundantly
manifested in the scientific study of human behavior. The specialist
on some phase of the political process, institutionally conceived,
who is asked to classify the types of political behavior, devises
his categories on the basis of the institutional processes which he
knew best. It would be possible, were it worth the effort, to pass in
review the typologies which have been propounded from time to time
by specialists in executive organization, public administration,
judicial administration, legislation, political parties, propaganda
and conspirative organizations, political revolution, nationalism,
imperialism, interstate methods of adjustment (war, diplomacy,
conference, adjudication, mediation, arbitration), and all the other
topics in political science.
At first glance, the functional method of defining political types
would seem to lead to even greater congeries of categories than the
institutional method. From the functional standpoint politics is found
wherever, to use the older terminology, “wills” are in conflict. This
implies that intensely political manifestations in society are not
confined to government officials and parties, but to banking houses,
manufacturing enterprises, distributing services, ecclesiastical
organizations, fraternal associations, and professional societies.
It is probable that the most aggressive, power-lusting individuals
in modern society find their way into business, and stay out of the
legislature, the courts, the civil service, and the diplomatic service.
If this be true, the student of political personalities will find the
most interesting objects of study in J. P. Morgan and Company, in the
United States Steel Corporation, and among the clerical or educational
or medical politicians.
It follows from what has been said that the study of politicians who
are chosen from a single institutional process makes a contribution
to the general study of politicians in every institutional process,
and that the conscious abstraction of categories until they are
comprehensive opens a wider range of exact comparison. This may
eventuate in an actual simplification of some fundamental conceptions.
Of course, institutional processes differ in the scope which they give
to certain human drives. Today the church offers less opportunity for
the use of physical violence than it did in the sixteenth century, and
very much less opportunity than the police force, the private detective
agency, or the political gang.
The advantages of comprehensiveness and possible simplification have
been sacrificed by the political scientists of the schools because
they have conceived their task in too narrow a spirit. They have
been slow in studying the manifestations of human nature in politics
because they have been saturated with sectarian pride in legal and
philosophical distinctions; or they have checked their theories with
their coats, and plunged into technical work. A body of theory which
interacts fruitfully with philosophy, law, and technology is still very
poorly developed. The formal sociological systems have been sacked for
“premises” but neglected for hypotheses. (Witness the exploitation of
the concept of “solidarity” in recent juridical theory.) The task of
the hour is the development of a realistic analysis of the political in
relation to the social process, and this depends upon the invention of
abstract conceptions and upon the prosecution of empirical research.
It is precisely this missing body of theory and practice which Graham
Wallas undertook to supply in England and which Charles E. Merriam
has been foremost in encouraging in the United States. It is the
deficiency which led Catlin to propose to substitute what I would
call the “functional” for the “institutional” definition of the field
of political science.[14] This necessarily implies a new respect for
the possibilities of using the ingenious suggestions to be found in
the sociological systematists, a new curiosity about diverse ways of
approaching events, and a new sympathy for parallels to institutional
phenomena.
Various obscurities can be removed if we generalize our terms
from the narrowly institutional to the broadly functional plane.
Terms like “statesman” and “despot” were minted of the metal of
political experience in communities where the high road to power was
governmental. It is true that in Athens it was difficult to draw very
sharp lines between governmental and other forms of communal activity,
on account of the intimate interlacing of all institutional processes.
Nevertheless, terms like “statesman” and “despot” came to refer to
forms of political activity in a narrowly institutional sense, and such
is their connotation today.
But this connotation requires generalization and revision. The road to
power in our civilization is by no means an exclusively governmental
highway, for technical implements have scattered authority and created
an industrial feudality. The directors of large corporations have to
make decisions which are far more important for the daily happiness of
mankind than most of the decisions of governments. Since government is
so largely the agent of corporations, the government is hardly master
in its own house.
The concept of the statesman has long carried the implication that
anyone who exercises social power outside the government is in hot
pursuit of an exclusively private advantage. Is this any longer
tenable? Is there not such a thing as the “institutionalization of
business” which arises when a given enterprise plans to operate
indefinitely and is thus forced to calculate its interests over long
periods of time? One of the major elements in this calculation is the
necessity of taking precautions against a withdrawal of favor on the
part of the community at large. This is the core of the political way
of thinking, and assimilates the policy of aggregations of private
power to that of the state which is guided by statesmen. It is timely,
therefore, to disentangle the concept of statesmanship from its
historical association with a single institution.
Some of the many senses in which the “politician” is used may be
disposed of by drawing a clean distinction between the “business
man” and the “politician.” The business man may be defined as one
who pursues a private advantage with little regard for conceptions
of public right. The politician, in the here-selected “best” sense
of the word, uses persuasion on behalf of his conception of public
right. The politician pursues a genuine integration of interests in
the community; the business man is satisfied with a compromise among
competing private interests. The importance to political theory of the
distinction between integration and compromise has quite properly been
stressed by Mary L. Follett.[15] An integration of interests is the
solution of a conflict in such a way that neither “party” recognizes
that so much has been won and so much has been lost in the outcome.
It represents a reinterpretation of the situation in a sense which
renders the old line of battle, the older definition of interest,
irrelevant. It is illustrated when a wage controversy is disposed of by
the decision to try to divide the advantages of economies in production
which may be brought about through new co-operative procedures. The
essence of the contrast between integration and compromise is that
between a synthesis and a trade. The politician is a discoverer of
inclusive advantages, and the business man is a higgler for special
advantages. Whether, as Adam Smith said, an invisible hand shapes a
social synthesis from the general pursuit of private profit, we do
not have to decide upon here. The contrast is between the conscious
objectives of the individuals concerned. It should be observed that
politicians are not limited to government and that business men are not
limited to private ventures. The “boss” is one form of the business
man in government; the director of a large private concern may be a
politician in the sense used here.[16]
Having drawn a necessary distinction between the institutional and the
functional meaning of the “political,” we are in a position to discuss
the “type” concept. A “type” is a relation, and we may classify types
according to the relations chosen. Political types may be set up on a
three-fold basis: by specifying a nuclear relation, a co-relation, and
a developmental relation.
What is meant by the choice of a nuclear relation may be illustrated
by the concept of the _Machtmensch_ as elaborated by Eduard Spranger
in his _Lebensformen_. Spranger, the distinguished educational
psychologist of the University of Berlin, has developed a morphology
of personality on an original basis. Dilthey, it will be recalled,
ushered in the modern era of typological inquiry in his famous address
before the Berlin Academy of Science.[17] Dilthey selected forms of
distinguished cultural activity and posited trait-constellations
to fit. By the process of abstracting from many concrete fields of
achievement, he finally built up his description of the sensual,
heroic, and contemplative types. Most eminent political figures
naturally fall in the second category. Spranger’s approach has much in
common with that of Dilthey. He proceeds on the hypothesis that all
possible valuational dispositions are shared by all men. By inspecting
human culture, Spranger comes to the conclusion that six distinctive
cultural fields have materialized six valuational dispositions in
man. Thus the cultural activities having to do with wealth production
correspond to the economic value tendency. Science corresponds to the
theoretical, art to the aesthetic, religion to the religious, the state
to the power tendency, and society to the love tendency. Spranger goes
on to deduce the attributes of each personality in which one value
tendency predominates, and traces out the implications for each field
of activity of the predominance of this tendency. Thus the political
man is the one whose principal value is the pursuit of power. The
essence of power is understood to be the capacity, and usually the
will, to impose one’s own values as permanent or transitory motives
upon others. The political man in science tends to substitute rhetoric
for truth and to use ideas as forces (in the sense of Fouillée). In
economics the political man tends to reach his ends by diplomacy and
negotiation, by intimidation or violence, or by other political means.
In art the political motive leads to efforts to impress by flamboyant
decorative display. In social life the political motive, with its
forcible urge toward self-aggrandizement, must usually disguise itself
in fostering the interests of some collectivity. The god of the
political man in religion is a god of might who requires mighty men to
serve him.
In developing his image of the _homo politicus_, Spranger is
fully aware that his “pure” type seldom exists. The bold, frank
aggrandizement of self is rarely tolerated in society, for “the
greatest power manifests itself as collective power,” and the man
who cherishes power must achieve some measure of socialization or
he is outlawed. Although in principle no warm-hearted lover of his
fellow-men, he must keep his contempt to himself or feign expansive
sentiments of group loyalty. Indeed, self-deception is perhaps the
rule, for the political personality with a strong artistic component
possesses a florid imagination which dramatizes his personal history
and subordinates all reality to ambitious plans. It seems to me that
Spranger does not sufficiently stress this aspect of the political man,
this large capacity for playing the impostor upon himself and others.
The gist of Spranger’s generalization of the political man is
schematically expressible in terms of desire-method-success. The
political man desires to control the motives of others; his method may
vary from violence to wheedling; his success in securing recognition in
some community must be tangible. These are the nuclear relations which
are essential to the type definition.
Naturally there are a number of necessary annotations to be made on
this formula. Sometimes the man with a thirst for power is unable to
indulge and quench his thirst, for his physical and social equipment
may be too meager. And how are we to appraise results? _Wer regiert
denn?_ Power over others is partially exercised by every living being;
but in any hierarchy of the powerful, some are on the lowest tier, if
current social criteria be applied. The bedridden, complaining wreck
may be of no significance except as a burden upon the care of a single
nurse. Accepting the current values of society, such an individual
would be on the very bottom of the heap. And yet, as Alfred Adler
has so often insisted as to make the point peculiarly his own, the
hysteric may use his symptoms to win a high degree of submission from
his immediate environment, and this may be all that he cares about. And
some of those who give up the visible struggle for social influence may
retire to distil their bile into poisoned darts against the pursuit
of external pomp, and secure reputation and eminence by embodying the
results in sparkling rhetoric.
The man who runs his village may become more acutely aware that he does
not run the county; and when he runs the county, that he does not run
the province; and so on up the ladder. His appurtenances of power may
be deferred to by those about him, yet his own soul may smart with
the shackles of a larger slavery. Thus, Spranger is right in saying
that, when one succeeds in penetrating the psychology of the search
for power, it becomes comprehensible that he whose nature is bound
up in the pursuit of authority is most keenly sensible to the limits
of his own freedom, and consequently suffers so keenly from nothing
else in life than his own subordination. Sensing this, the Stoics long
ago contended that the essence of liberty is the self-sufficiency
which makes no demands on others. Ascendancy involves dependence,
a reciprocal relationship which has been exhaustively described
by Simmel.[18] But there are some who combine easy success with
indifference. These are no doubt recruited from among those who have
natural suggestive power to certain groups--they possess the _charisma_
of Max Weber.[19]
Allowing for these annotations, the nucleus of Spranger’s thinking may
be repeated. The _homo politicus_ is characterized by the following
relationship between desire, method, and success: desire to control
the motives of others; methods varying from violence to wheedling; and
success in securing communal recognition.
Spranger’s subtle comments in elaborating this simple, central
conception are among the most valuable in the literature of society.
Starting from bold simplifications, he succeeds in formulating pictures
which give richer meaning to the details of political life in all
the institutional processes of culture. Of course the literature of
political science is full of types which are described as Spranger
has described the political man. Michels and Merriam have listed the
qualities which they find in political leaders as a class. Conway has
propounded his familiar trichotomy: crowd-compellers, crowd-exponents,
and crowd-representatives. The possibility of defining types according
to the reactionary, conservative, liberal, or radical nature of the
opinions championed has often been discussed.[20]
The scheme which will be employed in presenting case materials stresses
the capacity of political personalities to play rôles which are either
specialized or composite. Hobbes was a theorist and an agitating
pamphleteer; he is scarcely thinkable as an agitating orator and
organizer like Garrison. The “pure-type” agitator is represented by
the Old Testament prophets. Bodin combined a memorable contribution to
political theory with the arduous duties of a successful administrator.
Masaryk won his spurs in philosophy, sociology, cultural history,
agitation, and organization. Numberless are those who have shown
excellent organizing ability but who have been innocent of theoretical
interests or of agitating power. Some political assassins and tyrants
have enjoyed the use of violence as a _ding an sich_. The central
point in deciding where to place a political figure is to discover
the form of activity which means the most to him, and to modify the
classification according to his success in combining this with other
rôles. Marx wanted to impress himself upon mankind, certainly; and he
craved the skill of a Lassalle, who could step on the platform and
dominate the turbulent emotions of the crowd. But more: Marx wanted
unreserved admiration for the products of his mind. He toiled through
years of isolation and poverty to make his assertions impregnable. It
was more important to attain theoretical completeness than to modify
his technique of social intercourse. Lassalle was the composite leader
who could woo an audience, organize activities all over Germany, write
excellent books, and win a place for himself in many circles of life.
Marx was the limited specialist who had to exact submission to the
assertions of his mind, come what may.
Table I brings out the distinction between specialized and composite
types.
TABLE I
Political Rôles
Administrator Agitator Theorist
_Specialized types_:
Hoover *
Old Testament prophets *
Marx *
_Composite types_:
Cobden * *
Bodin * *
Lenin * * *
Other combinations may be indicated. By adding a fourth column for
those who resort to violence, the schematic possibilities are enlarged.
Most theorists have been agitators in some measure, and it is often
a matter of taste whether emphasis is to be placed on one or the
other feature of their activity. Characteristically, the theorists
have sought to appeal to the sentiments of their contemporaries by
pamphleteering or by the direction of their speculative interests to
immediate ends. Hobbes and Rousseau were shut off from oratory and
organization, but no small part of their writing was intended to add
fuel to the flames around them. Such men as Tom Paine are able to
strike off excellent formulations of political theory in the heat of
the fray.
So far we have been discussing types which are distinguished according
to some nuclear relation among a few variables. The characteristic
mode of elaborating such a type is to imagine a host of situations in
which the type may be found, and to describe the resulting picture.
This is the elaboration of the preliminary sketch on the basis of
sophisticated experience with social life. For these impressionist
methods it is possible to substitute a more formal procedure. Having
chosen a central primary relation, is it possible to find, by
reference to specific instances, the relative frequency with which
other traits are associated with the nuclear ones. The starting-point
may be either institutional or functional, of course: those who are
“judges,” “legislators,” or “bosses” may be investigated, or those who
are “statesmen,” “conciliators,” or “administrators.” We have already
had occasion to stress the point that institutional definitions and
functional definitions do not precisely coincide, although either is a
valid point of departure for research.
The result of the formal procedure outlined is to define
“co-relational” (correlational) types. A recent monograph by Fritz
Giese may be used to illustrate the possibilities.[21] This is a
statistical treatment of the data available in the German _Who’s Who_
of 1914. After Giese had eliminated those who were included on account
of their hereditary position only, he had over ten thousand names
left. He then distinguished thirty-three varieties of activity, which
were grouped into the five major categories of art, social science,
physical science, technology, and practical life. He also classified
his subjects into those who were honored because of high-grade but
essentially routine professional accomplishment, those who enriched
their field of activity by some creative contribution, and those whose
creativeness was unrestricted to their occupational field. The three
types were the skilful, the productive, and the freely creative.
Since the individual is not confined to one field of activity, the
following scheme of connections was built up to show the relation
between the person and the form of activity: (_a_) income source (the
person regards a particular field as a “bread and butter” occupation);
(_b_) successive activity field (the individual has deserted one field
for another); (_c_) field of simultaneous double-production; (_d_)
recreational activity. The relation of a person to a field of activity
may show a splitting of his personality or a compensatory function.
When a politician consciously decides to play golf or to collect
pictures to relieve his mind from exclusive political preoccupations,
he is realizing a compensatory value in this chosen field. When he
finds himself impelled to try to live a double life of scientific
investigation and political propaganda, he is exhibiting major, and
contrasting, tendencies in his personality (splitting). Sometimes the
tie between fields of activity which the same individual exploits is
factual similarity, as when a politician becomes a literary man to the
extent of writing the political history of a period. Sometimes the
connection is a functional relationship, in that the same biopsychic
dispositions are to be assumed to operate. Thus, business promotion and
politics are intimately allied; sculpture and politics are not.
Giese’s detailed analysis showed that those engaged in politics reveal
the most heterogeneous affiliations and backgrounds. He raised the
question whether it was proper to think of a distinctive functional
gift which would characterize all those in political positions. When
compared with art, especially architecture, and engineering, the
heterogeneity of the political population is very evident. Indeed,
the manifold connections of politically active persons with other
fields suggest that political life depends upon very widely dispersed
capacities of human nature, as does teaching, history writing, and
journalism. But there is one important exception which is clearly
brought out by the figures. This was a group of politicians who
rose from humble circumstances and devoted themselves assiduously
to organization and agitation. They offer a sharp contrast to those
for whom political life was a sport, hobby, or honorary distinction.
For the organizing and agitating group we may postulate a functional
disposition of some kind.
The results show how the institutional approach to a problem may
eventuate in the isolation of one group which very probably coincides
closely with a functional group in other institutional activities.
Some of the agitating and organizing people weren’t yet in politics at
the time the 1914 census was made, and some of them were so busy with
private organizations that they never made the formal transition to
politics in the institutional sense.
Another conclusion which bears on the same point is Giese’s discovery
that those who were freely creative in politics had much more in common
with those who were freely creative in other fields than they had
with those who were merely productive in their own. Giese’s method of
classifying his freely creative group is too ambiguous to justify one
in considering his conclusion of more than suggestive value, but it is
possible that he has isolated a functionally homogeneous group which
cuts across all institutional lines.
Some of the studies of political personalities have carried the
quantitative method far enough to substitute scales for rank orders
at various points. Various reaction tests have been used in the hope
of discovering constant differences among those who play different
political rôles. Henry T. Moore undertook to decide whether there is
such a thing as a temperamental predisposition toward conservatism or
radicalism. He defined radicalism as “an attitude favorable to sweeping
changes in social institutions, especially changes along lines opposed
to class interest,” and classified the opinion expressions of students
according to the degree of radicalism or conservatism indicated. He
then applied a series of reaction tests to the students and reached the
following conclusion:
Our evidence so far as it goes points to some innate basis of
difference. This basis does not seem to be the level of general
intelligence or of emotional stability, nor in any general
superiority or inferiority in learning or attention, but in such
specific factors as greater speed of reaction, ease of breaking
habits, readiness to make snap judgments, and independence in the
face of majority influence. The last of these differences is the
one most clearly indicated.... If one man is by nature more keyed
up for speed and flexibility, and the other is more designed for
regularity of function, we can hardly expect that government of the
hyperkinetic by the phlegmatic and for the phlegmatic can fail to
develop periods of stress and strain.[22]
Floyd Allport classified students into typical and atypical members of
the community, discovering whether they took up prevalent or minority
positions on various political questions. He then applied a battery of
tests to the students and found that certain traits of the atypical
(whether the opinions were “radical” or “conservative”) proved to be
homogeneous. Thus, not only do the “extremes” meet, but also those
who hold minority positions along a hypothetical continuum of opinion
distribution.[23]
W. H. Cowley, at the instigation of Charles E. Merriam and L. L.
Thurstone, undertook to compare leaders in chosen situations. He used
twenty-eight tests of such traits as aggressiveness, self-confidence,
intelligence, emotional stability, and speed of reaction. While his
tests were differentiating within the same group between leaders and
followers, he reports that they did not distinguish between leaders as
a class and followers as a class. He thus felt justified in denying
that leadership is a universal trait of particular persons, and
criticized efforts to itemize “traits of leadership.”[24] Further
applications of the blanket-test technique are under way.[25]
Gilbert J. Rich opened out a new field of investigation when he
studied certain complex physiological and biochemical variables among
leaders and followers. He measured the hydrogen-ion concentration of
the saliva, the acidity of the urine, alkali reserve of the blood,
and creatinine excretion of the urine. The least excitable subjects
showed the most acid saliva and the most acid urine. The rating of the
subjects was open to criticism, and was obviously much less refined
than the biochemical techniques employed.[26]
The types which we have just been considering show more than a
cross-sectional picture of the adult personality. They have made the
transition from itemizing the instantaneous pictures to the selection
of features of the immediate picture which show how the type has come
to be. They are thus more than co-relational types; they have made
some progress toward developmental types. When Giese found the group
of political personalities of humble origin and persistent organizing
and agitating activity, he postulated a common dynamic of development,
a homogeneous functional disposition toward this sort of thing. Moore
wanted to extricate the formative influence of temperamental reactive
sets, and the other investigators have likewise sought to ascertain
developmental factors in the production of the adult picture of traits
and interests.
Almost every nuclear and co-relational type carries developmental
implications. The terms which are used to characterize motives
have dynamic, genetic, formative coronas of meaning which, vaguely
though they may be sketched, are emphatically present. When Michels
says that a “Catonian strength of conviction” is one mark of the
political leader, it is implied that if one pushed his inquiry into
the adolescence, childhood, and even infancy of the individual that
this ruling characteristic would be visible. Of course, Michels
does not himself develop these implications; it is doubtful if he
has tried to find the early analogues of the trait which he called
“Cantonian strength of conviction” on the adult level. But the dynamic
penumbra of the term can lead empirical investigators to scrutinize
the behavior of children from a new point of view. Many of the terms
which are used to describe adult traits are no doubt unpredictable
from the less differentiated traits of infancy, childhood, and youth.
But the growth of full-blown developmental types requires the sifting
and refinement of terms until they are adequate to the description
of sequences of growth. Developmental types will describe a set
of terminal, adult reactions, and relate them to those critical
experiences in the antecedent life of the individual which dispose
him to set up such a mode of dealing with the world. Developmental
types will not only include the subjective account of the history of
the personality but will embrace the objective factors which were
co-operating to produce the patterns described.
The notion of a developmental type may be illustrated by examining
the place which is assigned to the political man in the chief modern
characterological systems. Hans Apfelbach has used five dimensions for
the description of characters. Each one is described as a gamut between
two polar opposites, and a sixth pair of polar opposites is introduced
into the system. The scheme is indicated in Table II.
This gives a formal range of sixty-four types of character formation
without allowing for subtle variations in quantity. The first
combination which Apfelbach specifies is, symbolically, ABCDEF. This is
a very masculine, sadistic, hyperemotional, moral, intellectually keen,
and upright character. Among men this is the type of the organizers,
politicians, the great preachers, generals, dictators, and the like.
Among women, this is the type of the organizer of every description,
especially the political or patriotic enthusiast, like Joan of Arc.
It should be observed that the terms “masculine” and “feminine” are
not used in a mutually exclusive sense. Carrying on the tradition of
Weininger and Fliess, these terms are employed to designate traits
which may be present in different proportions in the same person.[27]
TABLE II
Dimension Polar Elements
Sexuality Masculine A
Feminine a
Psychomotility Psychosadistic B
Psychomasochistic b
Emotionality Hyperemotional C
Hypo-emotional c
Morality Moral D
Immoral d
Intellectuality Superior E
(specialized) Inferior e
Accessory elements Altruistic F
Egotistic f
The political man appears in Jung’s system at various intersections of
his underlying scheme. The essential cleavage in Jung’s classification
is between those whose psychic energy (libido) flows outward
toward objects (extraversion) and those whose libido flows inward
(introversion). The former enter into full affective relations with
the world around; the latter are mainly focused on their private
interpretations of experience. In addition to these fundamental dynamic
relationships, Jung sub-classifies with reference to our fundamental
psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition. These
functions may operate against one another consciously or unconsciously.
So, when thinking predominates in consciousness, feeling is repressed;
and the reverse. Intuition is understood to be a kind of instinctive
comprehension, a function peculiarly dependent upon the unconscious.
According to the predominance of one or another of these basic
functions, Jung constructs four special types of extraversion and
introversion.
Certain conspicuous political types belong to Jung’s category of
extraverted thinkers. These individuals try to bring their whole
life-activity into relation with intellectual conclusions, which
in the last resort are always oriented by objective data, whether
objective facts or generally valid ideas. By his formula are good and
evil measured: all is wrong that contradicts it, and all is right
that corresponds to it; all is accidental that is neutral toward it.
Just as the extraverted thinking type subordinates himself to his
formula, he seeks to subordinate all others to it, as a manifestation
of a universal inspiration. His moral code forbids him to tolerate
exceptions, and he would bend all to suit the scheme. “One really
should” or “one must” figure largely in his program. If the formula is
wide enough, Jung remarks that the extraverted thinker may figure as a
reformer, a ventilator of public wrongs, and a propagandist. But the
more rigid his formula, the more likely he is to grow into a grumbler,
a crafty reasoner, and a self-righteous critic.
Many politicians answer to the general description which Jung gives
of the extraverted, intuitive type. The intuitive is unattracted by
the established values; he is drawn to the possible rather than to
the actual. He seizes hold of new objects and ways of doing things
with eager intensity, only to abandon them cold-bloodedly, when
their implications become obvious. The irresistible magnet of the
rising sun fires his imagination and guides his activity. For the
risen sun and the setting sun there is no enthusiasm, no special
hostility, only indifference. Here is the facile promoter, who senses
the dawning future and speeds from project to project, bored with
routine and detail after projects have been accepted and the blueprints
finished.[28]
The types of Apfelbach and Jung are based upon a small number of
reactive mechanisms which are supposed to influence in different degree
the growth of the personality. These “mechanism” types may contain
many useful leads, but the methodological problem in isolating these
hypothetical mechanisms is unsettled. A “stable” reaction in adulthood
may be far from stable when viewed at successive growth periods. These
“mechanism” types seem to encourage endless classificatory ventures
at the expense of detailed reporting of life-histories. For reasons
which have been set forth, subjective histories are of the greatest
importance to social science; and any excessive interest in “mechanism”
which minimizes the importance of elaborate individual records is to be
deplored. Jung and Apfelbach say very little about the principal epochs
of individual development, and distract attention from the career as a
whole, as this career is structuralized in successive phases.
Before outlining our developmental conception of the _homo politicus_,
we return to the work of Freud, for his method has enabled him to
keep close to the subjective sequence and to use classificatory terms
in relation to the successive phases of impulse organization in the
developing personality.
CHAPTER V
THEORIES OF PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT
It will be remembered that Freud’s search for signs of the traumatic
situation led him to uncover the contemporaneous functioning of all
sorts of unconscious motivations in both the diseased and the healthy
personality. The quest led him farther. Freud felt impelled to set
up a schematic representation of the typical genetic development of
the human personality. This grew out of the comparative study of very
thoroughly analyzed cases and was rooted in empirical observation.
Freud has always kept close to his data; and no matter how far his
imagination soared, actual clinical experience was the starting-place
and the landing-field for the flight.
The energy of a developed personality can be treated as dispersed in
three directions: in the affirmative expression of socialized impulses,
in unsocialized impulses, and in the maintenance of resistance charges
against unsocialized impulses. The original forms of energy expression
which are available to the infant are in many ways incompatible with
the demands of human intercourse. The infant must surrender many
primitive forms of gratification, if he is to be loved, and to avoid
discomfort and pain. He must build up a self which represents the
demands of society. The surrounding adults coerce and wheedle him
into taking their commands for his own laws. The conscience is the
introjected environment which imposes limitations upon the antisocial
impulses. As the infant and child grows, he avoids conflicts with the
environment by removing the locus of the conflict within himself, and
plays nurse, mother, and father to himself. He learns to control his
own excretions and to chasten his own murderous rages. He achieves
individuality of emphasis by accepting the socialization of his major
impulses.
But this incorporation of the requirements of the social order into
the personality does not proceed smoothly, nor does it abolish the
primitive psychological structures which have been developed and
apparently discarded at each step of the way toward adulthood. Much
of the energy of the personality is spent in blocking the entry of
the unadjusted impulses of the self into consciousness and into
overt expression. Careful scrutiny of individual behavior over a
twenty-four-hour period strikingly shows the extent to which the
personality is controlled by very elementary psychological structures.
Moments of fatigue, moments of deprivation, moments of irresponsible
reverie, all betray the presence of tendencies which are unassimilated
to the world of adult reality.
Freud began to build up his conception of personality development
by the gradual universalization of phenomena which he encountered
in actual clinical work, and which he first described in relatively
modest and restricted terms. He began his original psychological
contributions by stressing the rôle of sexuality in the etiology of
certain neuroses. He found that all sorts of pathological conditions
and developmental abnormalities were apparently due to some shortcoming
in sexual integration. This emphasis upon sexual adjustment as a
necessary prerequisite of healthy adulthood met with so much opposition
that Freud’s energies were taken up with defending and elaborating his
position. Now the sexual function is essentially a species function
and stresses the biological uniformities of man at the expense of
individuality. A topic like “personality development” requires a
comprehensive theory of individuality, and this Freud did not develop
until the split with Adler, who insisted upon the rôle of a drive
toward individualization and who denied that the much neglected “ego
instincts” of Freud were enough to support a comprehensive theory.
The story of Freud’s neurosis-sexuality-personality theories begins
with his earliest independent psychological contributions. Many
clinicians before Freud had been abundantly impressed by the frequency
with which sexual troubles seemed to beget “nervous” troubles. In
his hypnotic work, Freud was especially struck by the frequency with
which specifically sexual episodes were involved in the pathogenic
experiences. Freud now proceeded to generalize about the sexual element
in neurosis, and announced that neurosis was a function of deviated
sexual life.
Freud armed in defense of his generalization with two new weapons. The
first was his experience in letting his patients talk it out and in
treating most of their productions as symbolic of something else. He
acquired facility in interpreting what other people took literally as
being a disguised representation of something else. So, when Freud was
confronted with cases which were not manifestly sexual, he felt able to
treat the non-sexual elements as symbolic representations of sexuality
and to justify himself by claiming that his more intensive research
procedure supplied him with the sustaining facts. Needless to say,
those who had not themselves experienced the shift in standpoint which
Freud had achieved were alienated by his seeming arbitrariness.
Freud’s second reliance was on an inclusive theory of sexuality.
Undaunted by the ridicule heaped upon his sexual theory of the
neurosis, he carried the war into enemy territory by extending the
whole concept of sexuality backward from puberty through the life of
the growing child to infancy.
At first glance this might appear to be a cheap, dialectical trick to
confound his critics by telling them that “sex” meant all the things
they had called by other names. Freud’s _Three Contributions to Sexual
Theory_ was saved from being a rhetorical quibble by the virtuosity of
his imagination and by the apparent definiteness of the connections
which he traced between the various features of childhood development
and the patterns of healthy and perverse adult sexuality. Careful
analysis of biologically efficacious intercourse shows that it is a
complex integration of many acts. It involves a partner of the opposite
sex. Its essential feature is an increasing tension until the point of
explosive release, followed by perfect relaxation. The male must be
sadistic enough to run the risk of hurting the female by injecting the
penis in the vagina. The participants must be willing to indulge in
all sorts of preliminary play for the sake of heightening the critical
tension, involving tongue, lips, nipples, and all the erogenous zones
of the body.
Comparing the details of this completed pattern of the unambiguously
sexual act with the earlier activities of the infant and child, Freud
drew a host of analogies. Children indulge in play in sexual postures,
exhibit their sexual parts to one another, and take pleasure in sexual
peeping; but Freud carried his analysis of the sexuality of children
much farther. Child specialists had often remarked that the nursing
male child frequently exhibits the phenomenon of an erect penis and a
desire to suckle for some time after hunger contractions cease. The
general pattern of the sequence hunger-nursing-peaceful relaxation
follows the characteristic curve of the sexual act. Freud suggested
that inspection of the nursing pattern reveals that the pleasure
derived by the child goes far beyond immediate biological necessities.
This excess gratification Freud treats as a primitive outcropping of
the sexual instinct, which need not be supposed to appear suddenly
with the maturation of the glandular apparatus, but may be thought of
as growing like the usual biological process by integrating partial
components into one complex synthesis.
Sexual differentiation arises gradually, for at first distinctions of
sex are not recognized by the child. The human animal is bisexual,
a concept which Freud took over with some reservations from Wilhelm
Fliess. Distinctions are achieved within the world of family
experience. The child is attracted sexually toward the parent of
the opposite sex but is too weak to compete for the loved object.
Thus the father, who is too mighty to be killed and put out of the
way, is copied by the son, who seeks to absorb his power into his
own personality. The repression of the father-hostility, mother-love
sentiments produces the Oedipus complex. The child achieves a
socialized self by playing the rôle of the father in relation to his
own impulses. The “latency period” arises from four to six, according
to Freud, when the early sexual struggle against the father is given
up. The fear of the father (the “castration complex”) leads to the
passing of the Oedipus phase of growth.
Now Freud specified a variety of difficulties which arise whenever
there is failure to achieve successful integration of the partial
components of the sexual instinct. He connected homosexuality,
psychological frigidity and impotence, exhibitionism, sadism,
masochism, voyeurism, and a variety of other abnormalities with
definite failures in integration. Sometimes the individual becomes
obsessed by ideas which have a disguised sexual meaning, and sometimes
he indulges in physical symptoms which possess a similar unconscious
significance. The first is an obsessional neurosis, and the second is
hysteria.
The stress which Freud laid upon the sexuality of the child, and upon
socialization by intimidation, broke with revolutionary violence in a
culture which swaddled its infants in sentimentality. The child of the
poets was like this:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory we do come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
--William Wordsworth
The child of the Freudians was like this:
The child, at one time or another in its life, is, in a sense,
auto-erotic, narcissistic, exhibitionistic, inclined to play the
rôle of “Jack the Peeper,” incestuous, patricidal, or matricidal,
homosexual, fetichistic, masochistic and sadistic [G. V. Hamilton,
_An Introduction to Objective Psychopathology_, p. 301].
As early as 1898 Freud had begun to elaborate the idea that sexuality
begins at birth. But as late as 1900, when the _Interpretation of
Dreams_ appeared, he wrote in a footnote that “childhood knows
nothing, as yet, of sexual desire.” With the elaboration of his sexual
theory, Freud became less preoccupied in defending himself against his
psychiatric colleagues than in perfecting defenses against his friends.
Freud began to build up a circle in 1903. Of the original group,
Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel were the two who were destined to
achieve the most subsequent attention. By 1906 Ferenczi of Budapest and
the Zürich contingent--the eminent Bleuler and his assistants--became
cordial and interested. In 1908 a conference was held at Salzburg, and
in 1909 G. Stanley Hall invited Freud to lecture at Clark University.
In 1910 an international society was organized at Nuremberg, and the
institutionalization of the psychoanalytic trend was well launched.
The first cleavage came about when Freud and Adler finally broke in
1911. In and out of season Adler stressed the “masculine protest,” the
drive of the human being to master every situation in which he finds
himself. The individual specializes in overcoming his short stature,
his enuresis, his ugliness, and his other defects; his principal drive
is to differentiate himself rather than to perform his species function.
Adler represented several other currents of dissent from Freud. Freud
had felt compelled to stress the antisocial drives of human nature,
and Adler held a less Hobbesian view. The “social-feeling” component
of human nature was accorded a place in the Adlerian system; and when
the “socially useful” norms of individual adjustment were violated by
the individual, “inferiority feelings” ensued. Therapy consisted in
bringing this interpretation home to the maladapted person, leading him
to relinquish his socially useless means of mastery and to allow his
“social feelings” to express themselves more freely. Adler’s therapy
showed that he represented a pedagogical-ethical reaction against
Freud’s denial of the training function of the scientific analyst.
Freud said repeatedly that the business of the analyst is to expose
the patient to himself, and to leave it to the patient to work out
his particular modes of adaptation to reality. Adler wants to give the
patient a general scheme of thinking and to let him have some practice
in indulging the “social feelings” of his nature.
Adler likewise represented a protest against the complexities of
Freud’s style of thought. The distinction can be drawn best, perhaps,
by saying that Freud proceeded from symptoms to meanings, and from
meanings to other meanings, and from other meanings to conditions.
The analysis consists in uncovering lifelong chains of meaning
attached to particular objects. Janet never achieved this process,
and Adler short-circuited it. Adler begins with the symptom and
proceeds as directly as possible to the condition. His books abound in
succinct characterizations of cases, and “symbolic” material is at a
minimum. Employing his orienting principle, he directs attention to a
sympathetic reconstruction of the social relationships of the patient
and selects those problems which the individual has tried to master
by antisocial or personally crippling devices. The “common-sense”
simplicity of Adler’s observations commends his doctrines in circles
which are repelled by the alien terminology and the elaborate
interpretative machinery of Freud.
Under the perpetual hammering of Adler, Freud undertook to expand upon
his sketchy theory of the ego. At first Freud was inclined to say
that Adler had nothing to add because he had himself spoken of the
ego instincts as well as the sexual instincts. Such a solution was
hardly satisfying, and the self did not find a suitable resting-place
in Freud’s theoretical system until the rôle of narcissism (love of
the self) was taken up and set forth at length. This “saved” the
sexual theory, and it made the analysis of ego processes a problem of
major interest to psychoanalysis. Stress was laid upon the fact that
when the individual’s libido flows outward toward objects, and when
obstacles or deprivations are imposed upon this outward reaching, the
libido turns back upon the self. This excessive libidinization of the
self rendered subsequent adjustment to reality very difficult, and
many personality deformations and formations are traceable to this
developmental warp.
The break between Freud and Jung in 1913 had less immediate importance
for personality theory than the previous schism. Like Adler, Jung
undertook to subordinate the rôle of sexuality; but Jung accomplished
his purpose, less by postulating concurrent ego-instincts than by
invoking an inclusive energy concept which would embrace sexuality,
ego-drives, and many other accessory manifestations. Jung, paralleling
Adler again, came to the rescue of human nature, postulating a moral
trend in the unconscious. And Jung, like Adler, frankly advises and
trains his patients. Jung’s two distinctive lines of innovation were
concerned with dream interpretations and ethnological applications.
Jung expanded dream interpretations for the sake of laying bare the
“racial unconscious.” Using saga material and dream material, Jung
undertook to deflate the claims of sexuality and to demonstrate the
limited applicability of the Oedipus idea.
Freud was assailed at a vital spot and rallied to defend himself in
_Totem and Taboo_. He scored a point over Jung, who had relied on saga
material, by drawing heavily on the ethnological summaries of Frazer in
the _Golden Bough_ to justify the universality of the Oedipus complex.
This was Freud’s first contribution to systematic social theory, and
will come up for consideration in that connection. From the standpoint
of personality theory, perhaps the most valuable passages are those
which describe the infant’s overvaluation of thought--the “omnipotence
of thought,” as it was phrased by a patient.
Some years later Jung, now on his own for some time, devised his
classification of personality types and vastly increased popular and
technical interest in the subject. This in turn has stimulated the
group around Freud to develop a formal psychoanalytic characterology.
In this task they were assisted by some early communications of Freud,
wherein he took note of some of the character types met with in his
practice. This literature will be referred to in connection with the
case histories which are to be discussed immediately.
The other schisms between Freud and his pupils (involving Stekel and
Rank) have been less significant for personality theory thus far,
although Rank’s sociological interests may germinate now that he is
away from the immediate presence of the master.
Freud, who had obstinately clung to the phraseology of sex, rejecting
every proposal for an overmastering set of terms which would carry less
restricted connotations, executed a brilliant maneuver in 1926 and
proposed to regard human activity as manifestations of two principles,
the life and the death instincts. Life consists in accumulation and the
release of tension; and, generalizing this phenomenon, we have the life
and death drives.[29]
Suppose we put aside further exposition of the analytical personality
theories, and in the light of these conceptions set up a general
formula which describes the developmental history of the political man.
The most general formula would employ three terms. The first component,
_p_, stands for the private motives of the individual as they are
nurtured and organized in relation to the family constellation and the
early self. We shall have occasion to see that primitive psychological
structures continue to function within the personality long after the
epochs of infancy and childhood have been chronologically left behind.
The prominence of hate in politics suggests that we may find that the
most important private motive is a repressed and powerful hatred of
authority, a hatred which has come to partial expression and repression
in relation to the father, at least in patrilineal society, where the
male combines the function of biological progenitor and sociological
father.
The second term, _d_, in such a formula describes the displacement of
private motives from family objects to public objects. The repressed
father-hatred may be turned against kings or capitalists, which
are social objects playing a rôle before and within the community.
Harmonious relations with the father of the family may actually depend
upon the successful deflection of hatred from private to public objects.
The third symbol, _r_, signifies the rationalization of the
displacement in terms of public interests. The merciless exploitation
of the toolless proletariat by the capitalists may be the rational
justification of the attitude taken up by the individual toward
capitalism.
The most general formula which expresses the developmental facts about
the fully developed political man reads thus:
_p_ } _d_ } _r_ = _P_,
where _p_ equals private motives; _d_ equals displacement
onto a public object; _r_ equals rationalization in terms of public
interest; _P_ equals the political man; and } equals transformed into.
The _p_ is shared by the political man with every human being.
Differentiation rises first in the displacement of affects on to public
objects, and in the molding of the life in such a way as to give an
opportunity for the expression of these affects. The non-political
man may feel himself aggrieved against a brother and against every
fellow-worker with whom he comes in contact. His mind may be taken
up with personal fantasies of love or hate for specific people, and
his ideological world (his attitudes toward the state, the church,
the destiny of man) may be very poorly elaborated. He is a fly in the
meshes of his immediate environment, and his struggles are fought in
terms of the world of face-to-face reality. When such a man displaces
his affects upon a person who happens to be a public object, this does
not make him a political man. Impulsively killing a king who happens
to insult one’s sister does not make a politician of the regicide;
there must be a secondary elaboration of the displacement in terms of
general interest. It is the rationalization which finally transmutes
the operation from the plane of private to the plane of public acts.
Indeed, the private motives may be entirely lost from the consciousness
of the political man, and he may succeed in achieving a high degree of
objective validation for his point of view. In the “ideal” case this
has gone so far that the private motives which led to the original
commitment are of feeble current importance.
Upon what does the displacement and the rationalization depend? No
doubt the general answer is that the selection of certain public
objects depends upon the “historical” accident of the patterns offered
by the personal environment of the individual at critical phases
of growth. It is safe to predict that more politicians rise from
families with political traditions than without them. But this very
broad conclusion requires no technique of intensive investigation of
individual instances to support it. If the psychopathological approach
to the individual is worth the trouble, it must disclose a variety of
relatively novel circumstances which dispose individuals to adopt,
reject, or modify the patterns of act and phrase which are offered in
the environment. Provisionally, we may assume that the puberty phase of
biological growth, which coincides with increasing social demands, may
be the period in which the attitudes toward the invisible environment
most rapidly crystallize.
The details may be more hopefully dealt with if somewhat homogeneous
groups of politicians are investigated for the purpose of bringing out
significant differences in their developmental history. The agitators
are the first to whom special attention will be paid.
CHAPTER VI
POLITICAL AGITATORS
The essential mark of the agitator is the high value which he places
on the emotional response of the public. Whether he attacks or defends
social institutions is a secondary matter. The agitator has come by
his name honestly, for he is enough agitated about public policy
to communicate his excitement to those about him. He idealizes the
magnitude of the desirable social changes which are capable of being
produced by a specific line of social action. From the standpoint
of the administrative mind, we may say that an agitator is one who
exaggerates the difference between one rather desirable social policy
and another, much as the lover, according to Shaw, is one who grossly
exaggerates the difference between one woman and another. Whether
agitators behave like physicians or surgeons, as Munro would have it,
they are united in expecting much good to come from single acts of
innovation. The agitator easily infers that he who disagrees with him
is in communion with the devil, and that opponents show bad faith or
timidity. Agitators are notoriously contentious and undisciplined;
many reforming ships are manned by mutineers. The agitator is willing
to subordinate personal considerations to the superior claims of
principle. Children may suffer while father and mother battle for the
“cause.” But the righteous will not cleave to their families when
the field is ripe for the harvest. Ever on the alert for pernicious
intrusions of private interest into public affairs, the agitator sees
“unworthy” motives where others see the just claims of friendship.
Believing in direct, emotional responses from the public, the agitator
trusts in mass appeals and general principles. Many of his kind live
to shout and write. Their consciences trouble them unless they have
periodic orgies of moral fervor. Relying upon the magic of rhetoric,
they conjure away obstacles with the ritualistic repetition of
principles. They become frustrated and confused in the tangled mass
of technical detail upon which successful administration depends.
Agitators of the “pure” type, when landed in responsible posts, long
to desert the official swivel for the roving freedom of the platform
and the press. They glorify men of outspoken zeal, men who harry the
dragons and stir the public conscience by exhortation, reiteration, and
vituperation.
The first life-history to be excerpted here is that of Mr. A. This is
no “institutional” case. Mr. A is aware of no mental pathology, and
has never consulted a neurologist, psychiatrist, or “nerve doctor.”
He is one of those who at first reluctantly, then whole-heartedly,
allowed himself to be studied with the same thoroughness, intimacy,
and detachment with which an obviously unstable person would be
scrutinized. Mr. A at once saw the advantage for the progress of
science of an accumulation of life-histories taken from men who regard
themselves as perfectly normal, since so much of our case material is
from the ill.
A’s claim to a place among the agitators is not open to question.
He was compelled to resign his position when the United States went
into the World War on account of the tenacity with which he argued
the pacifist position. He had previously run for Congress on the
socialist ticket. Suspected of unorthodoxy in the theological school,
he steadily became more radical in his views, and was expelled from
one denomination. Previously he had been the secretary and principal
spokesman for a civic reform organization which had vigorously attacked
corruption in municipal affairs. He gradually became convinced that
“white collar reforms” were futile as long as the capitalistic system
prevailed in this country, and presently threw his energy into the
propaganda of labor organization and socialism.
A leading characteristic as moralist, socialist, and pacifist has
been his truculence in public on behalf of his cause. Mr. A speaks
rapidly, with great fervor and earnestness, and his discourse
is studded with abusive epithets, sarcastic jibes, and cutting
insinuations. He confesses that he has taken an unmistakable pleasure
in “rubbing the fur the wrong way.” He enjoyed nothing better than
accepting invitations to lecture on social and economic subjects
before conservative audiences, and scandalizing them by declaring that
“organized business and organized crime are hard to distinguish from
one another,” “corruption and capitalism are one and inseparable,” and
“capitalism depends on markets, markets ultimately depend on force, and
force means war.” Thus war was the logical result of the capitalistic
system.
Mr. A prides himself on his ability to cut holes in the logical fabric
spun by conspicuous men. He has engaged prominent preachers of the
gospel in correspondence, arguing that something in their writings
leads logically to the conclusion that any war, not excepting the last
one, is wrong, and that they should confess this openly, declaring
their sorrow for having been infected with un-Christian war-hysteria.
He believes that right reason is the hope of mankind, and the name of
science is exalted in his mind. He was glad to lay his own life-story
on the altar of science, and in the name of science to endure the
embarrassment of recalling private facts which most of us try to forget.
Mr. A’s later convictions have been held with enough intensity to
redefine many of his earlier opinions. Thus his pacifism brought him
into sharp opposition to the government, which resented his expression
of the truth as he understood it. Mr. A warmly champions the cause of
the individual against official interference in matters of taste and
conscience, and has modified his early enthusiasm for prohibition.
Although censorious, accusatory, didactic, and defiant in public
address, he is cordial and winning in those face-to-face situations
where he is unaware of hostility. His eyes twinkle with good humor,
and he is gentle, responsive, and anxious to impress. His speech and
gestures are quick, and his manner is alert and often tense.
A’s physique inclines toward the asthenic end of a hypothetical
pyknic-asthenic scale, such as Wertheimer and Hesketh have constructed
from Kretschmer’s observations on physical types.[30] He is noticeably
lean, but strikes the impressionistic observer as being toward neither
the tall nor the short end of the scale. The legs are somewhat longer
than the length of the body warrants, and the bony structures of
shoulder, hip, knee, and ankle are prominent. The thin face is rather
delicately molded, and is given added dignity and distinction by a neat
Van Dyke beard. The chest is flat, and the upper ribs fall inward.
His erect carriage seems to be a compensation against a predilection
toward a scholarly stoop. In middle and later middle life he has been
bothered by gastro-intestinal disorders.
The second son of an impecunious village parson, he grew up in
straitened circumstances with a brother somewhat his senior. The mother
died when A’s youngest sister was born, and the children were cared
for by the father and a succession of elderly housekeepers who left
faint memories behind them. A and his brother went to an old-fashioned
ungraded school, entering at the same time in spite of their disparity
in years, so the younger one would not be left alone in the house.
From a very early age A had a certain sense of hostility toward his
brother, and a feeling of his own superiority. For a reason that is
not clear, the school children teased his brother as the preacher’s
son, but left him alone. A was more agile than his brother, and climbed
trees and wriggled into tight places with ease. He prided himself in
doing things which his brother hesitated to try, and seems to have awed
him somewhat, for he remembers having heard his brother tell another
schoolboy to let A alone, “because when he gets mad, he can lick me.”
The older boy was held responsible by the father for pranks which were
really joint enterprises. On one representative occasion, the father
left the house to make a call, ordering the boys to stay indoors. They
decided to go out, and their father, who discovered footprints in the
snow outside the door, gave the older boy a sound whipping, but let A
off scot-free. The younger son was unquestionably the favorite, and his
father would frequently chide the older boy for being a dullard, and
point with pride to the ease with which A could get his lessons.
Indeed, A got on famously at school. One of his teachers, who chanced
to be a college man, told his father that A was brilliant and
promising. A also remembers a glow of elation when a relative wrote to
say that arrangements must be made for him to have a college education,
since he had shown that he could be a worthy successor to his uncle.
This uncle was a famous professor, who had written well-known
philosophical books, and remained a great hero in the eyes of the
family.
The father slept in the same bed with his two sons until they were
well along in the teens. For as long as he can remember, A found the
touch of his father very pleasant, though the touch of his brother
was repugnant. A’s strong hostility against his brother, based on
their rivalry for the affections of the father, received a certain
justification in the critical episode which occurred as his older
brother, who matured early, approached puberty and began to have
emissions. The preacher was horrified, for he took this as a sign of
masturbation, and masturbation was sinful and dangerous.[31] When he
thought that A was sound asleep, he would gravely lecture the older
boy on the evil consequences of self-abuse. Sometimes the son would
wake up in the morning and discover that an emission had taken place
during the night. In a hushed and contrite whisper he would say to
his father, “I’ve gone and done it again!” at which the parent would
exclaim reproachfully, “Oh!” The boy was presently taken to a physician
who seems to have modified the excitement of the father and in some
measure to have reassured the son that his manhood was not irreparably
lost. Dark rumors about self-abuse were whispered through the village
from time to time. The neighborhood idiot was supposed to have brought
idiocy upon himself by self-abuse, and a bachelor in the village who
went insane was supposed to have suffered from the same vice.
A listened to the rumors and to the nocturnal dialogues between his
father and elder brother, and gathered that ominous things were
connected with handling one’s self. He felt ashamed of his brother, who
brought so much suffering on his father, and silently determined never
to be a disappointment to his father. The tag end of a biblical passage
about bringing the gray hairs of his father to the grave in shame
ran through his mind, and he resolved never to repeat his brother’s
weaknesses.
A’s older brother surprised everybody about this time by suddenly
changing from a phlegmatic lad into a fervent religious enthusiast. He
became converted under dramatic circumstances and joined the church,
thus propitiating the unknown powers which might visit horrible
punishment upon him for his private iniquities. In this he was running
true to the adolescent pattern. Adolescence is notoriously the time
when the temptations of the “flesh” multiply and when many youths,
oppressed by their “animal” impulses, seek to escape from the burden
of guilt by adopting the ceremonial patterns provided in the religious
observances of society. Adolescence is so often a period of high
ideals, which are typically reaction formations to “low desires,” that
adolescence is the happy hunting ground for proselyters of every breed.
When A’s own emissions began, he was terribly upset by worry and
self-accusation. About fifteen he got an emission after a boy had
fooled with his genitalia, thinking he was asleep. He was taut with
sinful pleasure while the seduction was taking place, which added
to his guilty feelings. This was the time when he, too, exhibited a
fervent interest in the church. He quickly “overcame” masturbation,
but until late in life there was always a “fight” to overcome his
“wayward” impulses and his erotic imaginings. In his dreams he often
saw roosters and hens performing sexual acts in the barnyard of his old
home, and the reappearance of the old scenes is indicative of his early
sexual curiosity. Many more of his dreams used common sexual language.
Sometimes he was making his way across a valley of snakes, or he was
naked and walking toward a goal he could never quite make out. The
nude female figure was usually repressed, though it occasionally came
through.
He was taken off the farm, on which his father eked out a supplement
to his meager salary, by an aunt, who insisted that the boy must have
better school facilities. This aunt had always taken a great interest
in this promising motherless nephew, and tried to fill his life with
the affection which would have been his had his mother lived. As a
small boy he had often come on short visits to his aunt. He had slept
in the same bed with her, and his lively curiosity about the female
figure was partly satisfied by glimpses of his aunt at the morning
bath. The aunt had a family with all of whose members he was on good
terms, and he was supremely happy to live in town with them. Out on
the farm he had been undernourished, but here he was filled out and
flourished. He took an active part in the church and in the social
activities of the neighborhood.
The early intellectual promise which A had displayed was no mere flash
in the pan. He was one of the brilliant students in high school, and
passed his college-entrance examinations with such distinction that
he entered college with a mild intellectual halo. He resolved to make
good scholastically, and this he did, finishing the four years at a
first-rate institution at the top of his class.
As time passed, he began to dissent from many of the dogmas of his
immediate social environment. During high-school days he had been
assigned to act the devil’s advocate and defend the free-trade side
in a tariff debate. The more he read and thought about it, the more
convinced he was that the free-trade position was sound. His relatives
without exception were high-tariff Republicans, and his arguments were
countered with sentimental rather than rational appeals. A’s conversion
to free trade led him to come out for the Democratic candidate for
the presidency. He remembers that the first time he announced this
heresy one of his aunts violently pushed her chair away from the
table, exclaiming in vexed, incredulous, and reproachful tones, “And
to think that my own sister’s son could say such a thing!” His college
course in biology converted him to evolution, and he argued this out
at great length with one of his uncles, who was a traditionally minded
preacher. A began to develop a feeling that intellectual brilliance
meant dissenting from the convictions of middle-class people like his
own relatives.
So far his nonconformity was strictly confined to a few theories. He
was a member of the prayer-meeting group in college, and his fraternity
consisted mainly of embryo doctors of theology who scrupulously upheld
a rigorous code of personal abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, strong
language, and women. One of the young men who had the temerity to
enter the house with a lighted cigarette had it gently but firmly
removed from his lips. It was in college that A took part in his first
law-enforcement drive. The state prohibition law was poorly observed,
as A had good reason to know, since he had a collection route which
took him to “drug stores” and other equivocal establishments about
town. “Tea” was openly ordered at the bar and drunk on the premises. A
conceived the idea of leaving posters in these places to advertise the
law-enforcement meetings, thus creating something of a stir.
Just before graduating from college A had a talk with a favorite
professor. The professor asked him what he proposed to do, and was
much interested when A said that he wanted to become a minister. The
professor said that during his own active years in the pulpit, before
he began to teach, he had learned at least one thing. Every man who was
intellectually honest and independent would sooner or later discover
that he questioned his own dogmas, and a period of bitter anguish would
ensue. If a man were intellectually honest, he would never flinch from
the truth, even for the sake of wife and family. But when the period
of doubt arose he advised A not to abandon his work too abruptly. He
had himself lived through six months of torture during which he had
been on the verge of dropping everything and going into business. But
finally he had arrived at a faith which he could defend, and stuck
to it. “I would rather be drawn and quartered than preach anything I
do not believe,” he declared emphatically. This conversation made a
deep impression upon A, leading him to anticipate doubts as a mark of
intellectual keenness and honesty.
Thus far in his life he had never questioned the tenets of the strict
and simple theology of his immediate surroundings. Indeed, he had never
met anybody who questioned it. Only a single episode had slightly
jarred his complacency and left a tiny scar behind. At one time his
Sunday-school teacher had been a young professor of theology who was
much more liberal than his contemporaries. A boy in the class had dared
to ask something about the authority of the Bible, and the teacher,
without the least trace of embarrassment, had replied that authority
should not rest on blind faith but upon clear reason. “If the Bible
told you to kill your father and your mother, you would not do it. You
would not be bound to do it. The justification of the Bible is that its
teachings prove to be sound in the experience of all reasonable men.”
In the divinity school the first course which A attended was on the
authority of the Bible. It was taught by a smug and full person of some
eminence. A was accustomed to distinguish himself by bold opinions,
and he undertook to challenge several of the propositions which were
supposed to be accepted and repeated by rote. His main point was
that authority rested on reason, not on faith. For his pains he got
the reputation of being a smart and troublesome upstart of doubtful
orthodoxy. His former Sunday-school teacher was a member of the
faculty, and A wrote a thesis on the authority of the Bible, in which
he elaborated the line of argument which had so much impressed him.
Only the constant intercession of this professor kept A from being
disciplined, or even expelled, at various times.
The young man was disposed to take rigid theology none too seriously
on account of his increasing disrespect for his father. A and his
brother both felt duty bound to return home every summer to help
with the farm work. Their father was happy enough to have them
rejoin him, but matters never ran smoothly. The father was quick to
reassert his parental authority and to criticize freely. Most of the
unpleasantness was as usual at the expense of the older son, but some
of it was deflected against A. Both sons were uncomfortably aware of
the uncouthness of their father in comparison with city preachers. He
laughed too boisterously at his own stale witticisms. His ever present
dignity was a little ludicrous when he wore an alpaca coat into the
fields on the hottest midsummer day.
The social life at the divinity school was wholly satisfying. The
students were warmly welcomed by the maidens of the local churches,
and several became engaged. A proposed to two girls during his career
there, and was turned down as often. He very quickly recovered his
good spirits after a night or so of melancholy. The first girl was a
relative whom he had known for many years, and the second was a close
friend of the family. The double defeat was something of a bruise to
his dignity and fed his determination to make a dent on the world.
A’s first congregation was in one of the poorer quarters of a little
city. A had no doubt of his towering intellectual superiority over his
parishioners, and he found it exasperating when an uneducated housewife
presumed to gossip about the dubious orthodoxy of his beliefs. At the
end of three years he resigned in disgust at the peppering of criticism
directed against his ideas. Looking back at the incident, he feels that
he was too hasty.
It was at this first charge that A began to make good copy for the
press, and to win a reputation as a sensationalist. He organized a Law
and Order League to harry criminals and the police. His pulpit rang
with stinging philippics against law-breakers and cowardly public
officials. All this gave him a zestful sense of making a stir in the
world of real affairs, so that he turned down an offer to join the
faculty of a famous university where his old Sunday-school teacher was
now located.
A’s new pastorate was among working people in a large city. He at
once began to hound the officials for non-enforcement of the law. He
led raiding parties to visit the biggest gambling hells and put it
up to the police to shut them. Renewed criticisms began to appear of
his opinions, and the governing body of his denomination asked him to
recant or resign. He refused to budge, and he was soon expelled. He
was immediately called to lecture before an ethical society, where his
comments on current religious and social problems won a wide hearing.
Although attracting much attention, the society was exceedingly poor
and A spent a little legacy which he had received upon it, indifferent
to his own future.
During these exciting troubles he became a socialist and joined the
socialist party. He had sympathized with the hard lot of the poor
since he could remember, and had cast his vote for Bryan as a symbol
of protest against the indifference of the privileged classes to the
privileges of anyone but themselves. His favorite college professor had
lost his job during the anarchist hysteria, when he came out against
the “judicial murder” of the Haymarket suspects. A was profoundly moved
by the spectacle of a man who backed his precepts of independence
with sacrifice for their sake. The argument which finally won him for
socialism was that political democracy is impossible until economic
democracy is realized, and that socialism is simply democracy in
industry. The principles of democratic brotherhood, once put to
practice in the world of work, would soon govern public relationships
of every kind.
His new convictions opened to A a new field of agitation and publicity.
Ignoring or overcoming the coolness of certain “horny-handed” elements,
he rushed into the little band of socialists, and was presently the
congressional candidate. In this campaign he conducted a whirlwind tour
of the district and enjoyed himself immensely.
A finally married a capable, motherly school-teacher whom he had known
for several years, but whom he had been prevented from marrying until
the death of her parents, who heartily disapproved of him. During his
bachelor years in the ministry he had certain knowledge that various
women were far from averse to becoming the preacher’s wife or mistress.
One married woman became the foremost worker in the church and
passionately assured him, “I am at your service day or night.” Another
woman, whom he barely recognized, came to the pastor’s study, declaring
that they must be married at once and “end this awful agony for both
of us.” He had not been aware that any agony had begun, and was in no
mood to begin it. He recognized that a wife would be a protection, but
most of the women who threw themselves in his way were so homely that
abstinence remained a pleasure as well as a principle.
For many years there had lurked in his mind the fear that he might not
be potent, and he was humiliated to find that he was at first unable to
consummate the sexual act. Since he first attempted sexual intercourse
when nearly fifty, and had practically never masturbated, his troubles
were not atypical, and they fortunately proved to be transitory. He
regretted having failed to consult a physician before marriage, and was
not at ease until the first of his children came.
Shortly after marrying, A came to the end of his financial resources,
and found it necessary to relinquish his lecturing for other work
until a suitable congregation should requisition his services. When
a call finally came, the war broke out in Europe, and A denounced it
with his customary ardor. He had read a book which popularized Prince
Kropotkin’s thesis that mutual aid and not struggle is the key to
the evolutionary process. War was irrational because it contravened
the principle of mutual aid, and it was un-Christian because it
set the hand of man against his brethren. As the hour of America’s
participation drew nearer, A saw that his outspoken position would
cause trouble. But he was accustomed to take a radical view and stick
to it, and the idea of compromising his independence for the sake
of family obligations was intolerable. His characteristic optimism
also misled him into overestimating the amount of pacifism which his
congregation would put up with, and soon he was forced to resign.
A was left financially high and dry, and rather hoped that his wife
would be willing to starve with him, if need be, as a gesture of
sanity in a war-mad world. He was left financially dependent upon his
family, and upon such support as was forthcoming from wealthy radical
sympathizers. Since his own professional opportunities were curtailed,
and he never applied for other types of work, he was left dependent
upon others. He was somewhat embarrassed by this, but was never
depressed by it, or by the social ostracism which was entailed by his
unpopular stand. As he once expressed it, “melancholy is alien to a
fighting nature.”
Looking back over A’s career, certain private motives appear which were
well organized in his early family life, and continued to operate with
considerable strength during his adult years.
A had a strongly repressed hatred for his brother. He was consciously
aware of his own coldness toward the brother, but succeeded in barring
from consciousness any recognition of the emotional charge on this
attitude. The older boy was his rival for the affection of his father,
and A’s quickness and boldness were cultivated in an effort to outstrip
his brother. He showed many of the traits of the over active younger
child, as Adler has frequently described them. A felt rather ashamed
of his brother, who went through school and college with no special
distinction, and whose modest subsequent career was prosaically
respectable. A struggled to keep hostile thoughts about his brother out
of his mind, and sought to keep his attention away from the brother by
corresponding or visiting with him infrequently.
Although A never frankly faced his own animosity toward this brother,
he was plagued by a sense of guilt for his unfraternal attitude.
This conflict was partially resolved by a reactive formation and
by displacement. The reactive formation was the reverse of the
anti-brother drive, but it was only supportable by displacing
his affection upon remote social objects. He generalized his own
prohibition against brother-hatred to all society, and identified
himself with the workers and with humanity at large, serving a
poverty-stricken congregation, spending his own money on the work of
the church, adopting the socialist dream of a brotherly state, and
demanding the abolition of fratricidal war.
His love for the downtrodden and for humanity (this reactive
displacement of his own brother-hostility) was buttressed by the
usual rationalizations. The democratic ideal in politics, the ideal
of effective equality in political power, had his support, and he
adopted socialism when it was presented to him as industrial democracy
(brotherhood), the indispensable antecedent of genuine political
democracy (brotherhood). His early prohibition appeals were cast in the
form of an appeal to the brotherhood sentiments. He argued that every
man was his brother’s keeper, and therefore bound to refrain from an
example which might lead his weaker brother to dash his foot against a
stone. War meant the destruction of mutual (brotherly) aid among those
who were brethren in Christ. A’s brother-hatred, so manifest in his
younger days, and so potent in arousing guilt feelings, created this
disposition to choose generalized brother-substitutes to love, and to
elaborate brotherly ideologies to defend his position. Then by keeping
his distance from the physical brother, he could maintain a comfortable
adjustment.
Another significant private motive, whose organization dates from early
family days, but whose influence was prominent in adult behavior, was
A’s struggle to maintain his sexual repressions. He erected his very
elaborate personal prohibitions into generalized prohibitions for all
society, and just as he laid down the law against brother-hatred, he
condemned deviations from the rigid puritanical code by which he lived.
Individuals who possess superego structures of such rigor often try to
protect themselves from the strain of sexual excitement by keeping away
from “temptation,” or by removing “temptation” from their environment.
Thus Mr. A avoided exposing himself to “lewd speech” and “immoral
suggestion.” Consciences of such severity can often be traced back
in deeply analyzed cases to unusually strong repressions at the time
when infantile masturbatory activities are being curbed. And it often
happens that the rôle of the intimidator is taken not only by the male
but by the female imago. In another highly moralistic person, who was
thoroughly psychoanalyzed, this came out distinctly. Thus for several
days the subject dreamed of standing before a butcher shop where he
had been sent by his mother, and where he saw his father sharpening
long knives. Or he saw his mother, dressed as Brünnhilde, carrying a
sword, while he cowered on a marble stairway. After many dreams of this
kind, the original situations finally burst into view. They involved
what were interpreted as direct threats to cut off a hand if the child
didn’t cease handling himself.
That A was never able to abolish his sexuality is sufficiently evident
in his night dreams and daydreams. In spite of his efforts to “fight”
these manifestations of his “antisocial impulses,” they continued
to appear. Among the direct and important consequences which they
produced was a sense of sin, not only a sense of sexual sin, but a
growing conviction of hypocrisy. His “battle” against “evil” impulses
was only partially successful, and this produced a profound feeling of
insecurity.
This self-punishing strain of insecurity might be alleviated, he found,
by publicly reaffirming the creed of repression, and by distracting
attention to other matters. A’s rapid movements, dogmatic assertions,
and diversified activities were means of escape from this gnawing
sense of incapacity to cope with his own desires and to master
himself. Uncertain of his power to control himself, he was very busy
about controlling others, and engaged in endless committee sessions,
personal conferences, and public meetings for the purpose. He always
managed to submerge himself in a buzzing life of ceaseless activity;
he could never stand privacy and solitude, since it drove him to a
sense of futility; and he couldn’t undertake prolonged and laborious
study, since his feeling of insecurity demanded daily evidence of his
importance in the world.
A’s sexual drives continued to manifest themselves, and to challenge
his resistances. He was continually alarmed by the lurking fear that
he might be impotent. Although he proposed marriage to two girls when
he was a theology student, it is significant that he chose girls
from his immediate entourage, and effected an almost instantaneous
recovery from his disappointments. This warrants the inference that
he was considerably relieved to postpone the test of his potency,
and this inference is strengthened by the long years during which he
cheerfully acquiesced in the postponement of his marriage to the woman
who finally became his wife. He lived with people who valued sexual
potency, particularly in its conventional and biological demonstration
in marriage and children, and his unmarried state was the object of
good-natured comment. His pastoral duties required him to “make calls”
on the sisters of the church, and in spite of the cheer which he was
sometimes able to bring to the bedridden, there was the faint whisper
of a doubt that this was really a man’s job. And though preaching was a
socially respectable occupation, there was something of the ridiculous
in the fact that one who had experienced very little of life should
pass for a privileged censor of all mankind.
He had long practice in the art of the impostor. From the plight of
his older brother, A learned that he would lose the affection of his
father if he was discovered to have indulged in certain practices
like masturbation. He resolved never to do anything to cause his
father to withdraw his affection, and when he was not entirely
successful in living up to this ideal, he pretended to virtues which
he did not possess. Never once was he found out, and his life was
the life of a “model” boy and man. This reputation he owed in part
to his abstinences, but likewise to his concealments. He learned to
cultivate the mask of rectitude, and succeeded in carrying off the
rôle so successfully that he was never found out during adolescence or
adulthood.
Cut off by his impotence fears from loving others fully and completely,
A loved himself the more. He had unbounded confidence in the brilliance
of his mind, and this intellectual arrogance was nourished by the easy
ascendance which he won over the poorly educated people among whom he
worked. He was careful to keep in environments where his mind would
not be put to the test of keen competition. A didn’t compete with the
clergymen who had the largest posts in his denomination, he struck out
for himself in no hazardous business or professional enterprise, he
took up and finished no piece of investigation; instead he cut a big
figure among the workers, among whom he was the best-educated and the
best-known leader. His chances of being elected to Congress when he was
nominated were never good, and he had everything to gain and nothing to
lose by making a campaign. After the days of his scholarly ascendance
in high school and college, A fell out of competition in academic
pursuits.
He valued his capacity to produce words. Ferenczi remarked in
conversation with me that the revolutionary agitators who had come
to his attention had been noticeably deficient in the intensity of
their emotional attachment to objects. They were notably indifferent
to the accumulation of property, and they were lacking in possessive
jealousy in their sexual life. This deficiency in warmth of affective
experience was sensed by the revolutionaries themselves, who felt
that they were in some way estranged from others. Their orgiastic
indulgence in language is to be interpreted as an effort to heighten
the affective intensity of their own lives. Either because the
emotional life is physiologically defective or because the libido is
too narcissistically fixated, this general description holds true of
some obsessive and many psychotic persons. It was no doubt a factor in
the history of A.
Before following out the full implications of this struggle of A’s
to repress his sexuality, we will take up another topic of major
and not unrelated importance. I refer to A’s ambivalence toward his
father. A was not conscious of the full force of his hatred and
his love for his father, but his personality history is full of
evidence of the formative influence of these bipolar attitudes. In
the course of his competition with his older brother, A accepted
abstinence from genital indulgence as the price of holding paternal
preference. Now psychoanalytic findings are unanimous in showing that
genital indulgence is not given up without a continuous struggle,
and that recurring waves of sexuality break against the barrier of
the introjected prohibition, and reanimate hostile impulses against
the sanctioning authority. It is of the utmost importance for A’s
development that he fought to bar from consciousness any hostile
thought directed against his father, and that he succeeded in
repressing his father-hatred very deeply. He was able to identify
himself with the father, and to copy many of the paternal standards and
attributes. The strength of these identifications is indicated by the
tenacity with which A held to certain paternal patterns. Although his
much-touted uncle had been a famous writer and professor, A remained a
preacher, even when tempted by a flattering offer to leave his first
humble parish for the faculty of a great university. He cherished the
paternal prejudice against money-making and money-makers. His boyhood
home was where some wealthy people spent their summers, and A’s
father would speak contemptuously of “the fashionables” who loitered
ostentatiously past the house. This was an additional determiner of A’s
subsequent devotion to the welfare of the poor, which manifested itself
in financial sacrifice and socialist agitation. A was very susceptible
to old men, and idealized not only his early teachers, but a venerable
pacifist who approved of his wartime conduct.
The negative side of A’s attitude toward authority came out in the
choice of the abstract (remote) objects upon which to vent his hatred.
The hostility which was denied conscious recognition and direct
indulgence against the actual father was displaced against substitute
symbols, such as the dogma which required the acceptance of the
Scriptures by faith, of the capitalistic system, and of the militarists.
When A was introduced to a stranger, he was genial, talkative, and
anxious to impress. When he was aware of opposition in his environment,
he overreacted at once, hurling a vast repertory of jibes and flouts
and sneers at the offender. This gives a clue to an important element
in his makeup which will come out very distinctly in subsequent cases,
namely, a strong latent homosexual trend. When the individual is not
able to achieve full heterosexual adjustment, the sexual libido tends
to work itself out in more primitive ways, and one of the phases of
emotional development is the homosexual epoch. Earlier, however, than
the adolescent homosexual period is the phase connected with the
suppression of auto-erotic activities. The child characteristically
uses its nutritional object (nurse-mother) for the sake of stimulating
his own erogenous zones as much as possible. This “incestuous” drive
is curbed, and the child is denied the pleasure of promiscuously
fingering others, and of manually stimulating his own genitalia.
Though the nurse or mother, who is the target of the desires of the
child, also administers the prohibitions, the sanction which lurks most
prominently in the background is the strength of the father. Reduced
to its ultimate expression, this sanction is the threat of depriving
the child of his much-valued organs unless he observes the “hands off”
prohibition. The “normal” development is for the hostile protest at
authoritarian interference to subside, and for the child to copy the
idealized father. The repression of hostilities and the identification
with the father do not take place instantly. Identification is not
achieved without a phase in which the child plays a femininely passive
rôle toward the father, and this is the passively homosexual reaction
which may for one reason or another be unusually strong. A’s fantasies
of his father’s beautiful skin are common screen fantasies for more
primitive drives.
A’s tendency to overreact to the stranger who is merely polite,
and to interpret the stranger’s interest as a “personal” one, is
characteristic of the one in whom this passive “winning” rôle is of
some importance. He tries to create an overpersonal relationship
in those somewhat formal situations where ordinary conversational
requirements are such as to force conventional compliments.
The overreactive hostility toward those who merely differ from him is
partially motivated by the desire to punish those who have rejected
the affection which he all too quickly volunteers. This wound to his
narcissism demands that wounds shall be inflicted on the offending
objects. Now it is commonly observed that repressed drives are likely
to secure partial gratification in the very activities which are in
part a protection against them. Sneers and jibes would at first seem
to free him from those who arouse and reject him, but this is not
the whole result. A exceeded the bounds of convention and became
recklessly provocative. His wild assaults and defiances tended to
provoke the social environment into attacking him, and thus to gratify
two powerful unconscious drives. He wanted to be forced into a passive,
feminine, victimized rôle, and to inflict upon himself the punishment
which he deserved for excessive hatred of others. Thus A felt quite
happy, escaping moods of depression, as long as he was indulging his
hostility against conspicuous conventional authorities in society, and
as long as he was suffering from society’s retaliatory measures. His
romantic idea of starving to death as a gesture of sanity in a war-mad
world is indicative of his pleasure in the “martyr rôle.”
He could not endure “inharmonious” people, and built up a “soft” and
overindulgent group around him. He had a small group of admirers who
turned to him for advice and who looked up to his superior wisdom
and moral courage. Nothing pained him more than the slightest jar in
personal relations. This disparity between his demands for gentleness
in the primary group, and his genius for creating a disturbance in a
secondary group, suggests the tension produced within his personality
by the struggle with the feminine component. He was careful to keep
away from close-working subordination to a powerful personality. He
stayed in environments where his authority was unchallenged. In the
church he was both a financial pillar and the pastor, and among the
socialists he was sustained by the halo of moral and cultural prestige.
It is noteworthy that though A was venomous when publicly opposed,
he was capable of a wooing and persuasive strain which he could
effectively use in his proselyting work. His humor was of the
mock-modesty variety, and relieved the moral earnestness of his
discourses. A showed much tenacity and skill in following people whom
he once loved and respected, and in attempting to convert them to a
community of views with him. He displayed a strong impulse to enter
into and to cultivate personal interchanges by correspondence.
That A found the task of asserting himself in the world rather arduous
is suggested by the desire for dependence upon women. He entered
into a whole series of “platonic” friendships (“platonic” in the
popular and not in the correct use of the word) with women, and he
accepted economic support from his wife for several years. He was very
“sensitive,” and required a great deal of coddling in the home.
There are indications of the way in which his very early experiences
influenced his trait formation. The infant takes pleasure in activities
centering about the mouth, and this at first involves pleasurable
sucking and later on, as the teeth begin to push through, this involves
pleasurable biting. In our culture this leads to a withdrawal of the
nipple, precipitating one of the major crises of growth. Weaning is the
first substantial loss which is inflicted upon the individual after
birth, and the way in which it is met establishes reaction patterns
which may serve as important prototypes for subsequent behavior. About
the time that the weaning deprivation occurs, the child is exposed to
another set of conditions which demand sacrifice. He is supposed to
control the elimination of his feces by giving up a part of his body
at regular intervals. The growing child is also supposed to sacrifice
another source of irresponsible pleasure by blocking his impulses to
handle his genitalia. When the taboo on handling the genital organs
for erotic purposes is set up with particular stringency by the
methods adopted to curb early masturbation, some of the energy of the
personality regresses to reanimate previous auto-erotic dispositions.
This involves strengthening of the anal and oral components of the
personality.
On the basis of the oral and anal origin of various traits, Karl
Abraham has worked out a psychoanalytic theory of character
formation.[32] The material which is available on A is too scanty to
reveal the psychological mechanisms of infancy and early childhood.
If a cross-section of his later character traits be tentatively
interpreted in the light of Abraham’s scheme, it may be said to show a
predominance of traits from the oral phase of development. A striking
characteristic of A has always been his optimism. He has never become
despondent and passed through serious “blue spells,” whether he lost
his job, reached the end of his financial resources, lost a bride, or
suffered social ostracism from all but a small though admiring circle.
Disappointments and some illness have brought him comparatively little
worry. Abraham traces this trait to the earliest level of character
organization, saying that it indicates a child who, thanks to the
abundance of nursing care, is accustomed to find the world responding
copiously and quickly to his demands. A always felt an inner assurance
that he would be cared for, and that all would come out for the best in
the end “to those who serve the Lord, and are called according to his
purpose.” He accepted a position of economic dependence upon his wife,
and upon the charity of radical ladies, without conflict. His nurse
was still there to provide for him. A never showed any interest in
accumulating money, and generously shared all that he possessed. His
small legacy was eaten up by the society over which he presided, and he
was always on the poverty line.
He not only gave bountifully of such money as he possessed, but
copiously of his ideas. Automatically he took the lead in conversation,
genially pouring forth streams of ideas. The savagery of his attack
on those who disagreed with him, though an oral trait in part, stems,
according to Abraham, not from the sucking phase of early development,
but from the next succeeding or oral-sadistic phase.
Those individuals who have difficulty in accepting their
heterosexuality are cut off from normal sex life, and seek to emphasize
the acts preparatory to, and not consummatory of, copulation. An
interest in sexual peeping was in some measure gratified by A’s
experiences in listening to the personal difficulties of those who
came to him for counsel. The high value which he placed on appearing
before the public, while perhaps adequately accounted for on the basis
of his father-identification, probably had the additional advantage
of gratifying his exhibitionistic drive. Since drink is in legend and
life a frequent precursor of copulation, the reformer exaggerates its
importance, and tries to stop it. Alcohol was early associated with
sexual excesses in the mind of A, and his hostility to it was something
more than a simple reflection of his milieu.[33]
A’s intensity of manner betrayed the magnitude of the neurotic
conflicts within his own personality. This intensity is not alone
due to the insecurity arising from the failure to exterminate his
own conscious awareness of sex, nor to his sense of sin for erotic
impulses, nor to his fears of impotence, nor to the reaction organized
when he was competing with his brother for the attention of the father.
His sexual inhibitions removed from him one of the most dependable
means of disposing of the tensions which arise from the miscellaneous
frustrations met with in the course of daily life.[34]
We have traced A’s demand for widespread emotional response to his
difficulties of personal adjustment, especially in the field of early
sexual development. We have followed through the displacement of the
drives, which were originally organized with reference to the family
circle, on to remote social objects, resulting in the espousal of
ideals of social change. We have seen that A’s particular technique for
arousing emotional response was denunciatory oratory, and that such a
technique expressed important underlying drives of his personality.
Since A happened to be a socialist, it is natural to compare him
with the socialist thinkers studied by Werner Sombart in _Der
proletarische Sozialismus_. There is no doubt that A is numbered among
the “artificial” rather than the “natural” men, since his relation to
reality is less direct than with the “natural” type. But it cannot be
said that social criticism was as deeply motivated in his life as among
the men mentioned by Sombart. He expressed himself not only in radical
agitation but in conservative, moralistic agitation. His career was
not wrecked at any particular point in his history, and he possessed
no mania for destruction, although showing much resentment against his
family, and indulging in an active fantasy life. He was fundamentally
an agitator, and secondarily a social radical.
CHAPTER VII
POLITICAL AGITATORS--_Continued_
B is an agitator who uses his pen instead of his tongue. He has
achieved eminence in newspaper work, beginning as a news editor and
editorial writer. At twenty, when he held his first newspaper job, B
led a fight against the red-light district of the city, exposing the
pimps, panderers, and prostitutes in sensational style. He has always
responded quickly to the appeal of the underdog and revealed injustices
wherever he found them, and he won great popularity among minority
racial and national groups whose claims he championed before the
American public. It is noteworthy that B has never been converted to
“isms” and responds to the call of specific abuses. No one who knows B
has ever questioned his sincerity, for the news value of his campaigns
is often much less than the personal risks incurred.
B has a high reputation for absolute truthfulness and reliability,
often carrying his scruples to what his fellow-newspapermen think are
unwarranted extremes. On one occasion, he threw up an excellent job on
a very well-known newspaper on a point of honor. The paper had divulged
the source of a story which he had received in confidence, and which
he communicated to the editor in confidence. Later he was made the
editor of an important newspaper. For five months he produced brilliant
results, when a misunderstanding arose with the proprietor over another
point of honor. In a despondent moment he resigned, but the proprietor
refused to let him leave, offering a substantial raise. He let himself
be persuaded to go back, but refused to accept the raise. Before long,
new points of honor arose, and he broke away for good. His passion for
justice made him a favorite with his staff; and his quiet good sense
and studiousness made him a name among older men and intellectuals.
Some of his reforming campaigns were very thinly veiled displacements
of his own private motives. At the age of fourteen he was seduced by
a colored woman, and he reacted to this experience with fright and
disgust. He left a school which he attended after a series of boyish
escapades which culminated in an argument over missing laundry. The
laundryman was a negro. It was on his first newspaper job that he led
the fight to clean up a red-light district, featuring the fact that
both colored and white prostitutes were available.
B was one of the numerous family of a Civil War veteran on the
Confederate side. His father carried himself like a soldier and
expected his children to act like soldiers under all circumstances. He
was spare, thin, and active, and his temper was short. He was boss in
the house, ordering his wife about a great deal, and demanding implicit
obedience from the children.
The mother of B was eleven years younger than her husband. She had
ten children in quick succession, and she spoiled them, and was
much beloved. She did all the cooking, washing, and ironing for the
household, and slaved to allow the children to obtain an education.
Everybody but her husband thought she worked too hard. She was herself
eager for learning, but had no opportunity to continue her studies
after marriage. Although poor, she was proud, and never asked alms or
assistance of any kind. Though “obstinate as a mule,” she was timid
and shrinking in ordinary relations. Her routine was only broken by
occasional headaches.
The father was a very suspicious man, and B bore the brunt of it. B was
the sixth child and from an early age had trouble with his next older
brother, who was three years his senior. On one memorable occasion the
elder brother attacked him with a knife. B was able to take the knife
away from him without being hurt. The affair was reported to the father
by an aunt who was living in the house, and who always sided with the
older boy. She said that B had been the aggressor, and in spite of his
indignant assertions of innocence, B was soundly whipped. Such episodes
aroused in him a deep protest against injustice, and an abiding
hostility against his father. Years afterward the truth came out, and
the father apologized, but animosities had grown too formidable to be
ceremoniously brushed aside. B cherished a long list of grievances
against his father. Once his father asked him to print some letters; he
presently found that this was for the purpose of comparing them with an
inscription on the lavatory wall.
Genital activities had their usual connotation of sinfulness. His
father went so far with his prudery that B, who was once discovered
naked in his own room, where he was slowly dressing, was severely
reprimanded. Shortly after being seduced by the negro woman, his
sense of guilt, combined with his ever present resentment against his
father’s unjust treatment, led him to run away from home. After staying
away from home and working his way through school for about a year
and a half, he returned home and went to work in the neighborhood,
attracted chiefly by the prospect of being back with his mother.
It is noteworthy that in his career B was constantly finding pretexts
to escape from a situation in which he was popular and successful.
Salary increases, promotions, and social recognition came to him, but
he managed to extricate himself from every such situation, often on a
“point of honor.” An excellent journalist, he always had a new door
open. Thus he passed from one editorial desk to another, and even to
a private news-service venture which turned out well in spite of the
heavy handicaps on such an undertaking.
How can such behavior be accounted for? Let us suppose that friendly
treatment on the part of superiors tends to activate a strong
homosexual drive which has been repressed, but which continues to
threaten to find expression. This unconscious drive urges him to
intimacy with persons in the environment, whereupon his conscience,
reacting blindly against the outlaw impulse, seeks to provoke a flight
from the environment, and thus to escape from the exciting objects of
desire. The outcome is a compromise formation in which the illicit
hope of being attacked and violated by the environment is gratified
by imagining that the environment has compromised his “honor.” The
conscience is gratified by the retreat from temptation. No sooner is
B in a new environment than the tension begins to accumulate all over
again. By throwing himself with zeal into a new and strange position,
where the environment is impersonal, success comes, and with success
and habituation to the milieu, there come familiarity and friendship.
This produces the familiar strain by reactivating the unconscious
homosexuality, and the defending conscience finds another retreat
imperative.
What specific justification is there for the hypothesis just proposed?
B finally came into a situation from which he could scarcely escape
by the usual tactics. He scored one of the great successes of his
career by being invited to accompany a government commission which
investigated conditions abroad, and covered the assignment in brilliant
style. He was shown all manner of courtesy. Working under high
pressure, he plunged into another assignment, and once more had the
journalistic world at his feet. But the strain of success was too much.
This time he sought release, not by flight to a new job, which was
difficult, but by developing a delusional system. In short, B went into
a psychotic phase, and substituted for the world of reality a fantasy
world of such sinister dimensions that he was justified in trying to
escape from it. Unable to concentrate on his work, he moved restlessly
from one town to another, and launched forth on long automobile tours
with his wife.
The actual content of his delusional productions gives a clue to his
mental conflict. He had ideas of reference, imagining that people on
the street were looking at him mysteriously. He claimed that he was a
party to the Teapot Dome scandal and that there was a dictaphone in
the house. On the way to be examined at a sanitarium he claimed that
he was being trailed by policemen. Upon admission he claimed that the
orderlies were policemen, that he was being electrocuted, that his bed
was wired to record all his movements, and that filthy songs were sung
to him (with homosexual content). Discharged from the sanitarium, he
was taken to a family reunion. He claimed to be treated as a negro,
and declined to eat with family or sleep in the house. B claimed that
a forest fire was caused by him and that books in the library were
re-written on his account. On a motor trip he claimed that insulting
remarks were made to him at every gas station. He turned against his
wife (he had been sexually inactive in marriage), and finally called
her a snake who ought to be killed, and proceeded to try it.
During the course of his psychosis it emerged that he recalls a sexual
seduction by his older brother, and that he had been bothered by
this fancy all his life. There was material to show that his father
was likewise implicated in his homosexual fantasies, and that he had
“eroticized” the injustices of his father and the physical attacks of
his brother.[35]
The history of B belongs to a borderline group between agitators
and administrators. His administrative ability is manifest in the
managing editorships which he held, and in the special service which
he organized and for a time conducted. His rôle as an agitator (in
writing) began when he was twenty, and continued for more than another
score of years. When this record is taken in juxtaposition to that
of A, it shows how differences in displacement affect the growth
of the personality. B was never able to displace his hatred and
affections to remote, impersonal objects with the degree of success
which characterized A. The campaigns of B against injustice were more
concrete, more limited, and more personal than the agitations of A. It
will be remembered that B’s first crusade was against black-and-tan
houses of prostitution, and this was in the nature of a revenge and
a penance for his early experience with the colored woman. B was
raised in a relatively inarticulate environment. His father made no
public appearances, no member of the family achieved more than a
rudimentary education, and no conversation was possible beyond the
visible environment. Since B went to work at sixteen, he saw the
world more from a concrete point of view while A was peering at the
universe through the theoretical lenses of the schools. His history
shows prolonged preoccupation with his own specific grievances against
the original objects--against the father, brother, and aunt. This was
a factor which disposed him to greater susceptibility to persons in
the immediate environment than A. Although driven to become a rather
seclusive child who read books more often than he played, no one
took a special interest in his intellectual prospects. His maternal
grandfather was said to have been a brilliant teacher, but not much was
made of this model when B was a boy.[36]
Unlike A, B lacked the trick of dramatizing himself before a crowd.
Inspection of his early history in the home shows that he lacked the
practice in imposture which may be a prerequisite of this ability.
B was never able to carry off a pose to impress his family with his
own virtue and promise. Indeed, he had very early evidence of his
own shortcomings, and his father not only accused him of sins he did
commit, but padded the record with many that he had not contemplated. B
was never able to get away with much.
The foregoing excerpts from the history of B illustrate how closely the
behavior of the victim of a functional disorder may connect with the
fundamental drives of the personality. Functional mental disorders are
efforts at adjustment that fail, and the materials employed are those
which the personality has available on the basis of its developmental
history.
In the paranoid case just discussed, “grandiosity”--delusions of
grandeur--was not as prominent as it often is. Grandiose delusions
seem to be linked with very strong impotence fears. This connection
may be shown in gross clinical caricature in the case of C. This man
belongs to the well-known group of verbose cranks who often surround
themselves with admiring circles of disciples, and do nobody much
harm. C went so far as to run for president of the United States on a
minority ticket.
C came into medical hands quite by accident. He belongs to a very
common type which preserves the personality sufficiently intact from
deterioration to pass for well, though eccentric. C got into a dispute
with a colored expressman over the charge for moving his goods to a new
apartment, and the expressman called the police, who presently turned
C over to a hospital. C imagined that the negro was plotting to ruin
him by stealing his most valuable books and manuscripts. He announced
that he was going to be the next president of the United States of
America, since the reign of the present incumbent was to be short, and
damned short at that. On the next inauguration day he will take charge
by divine power, and after that his red-headed wife will be given full
authority. He said that during the last presidential campaign he had
a conference with the governor of New York concerning the leadership
of American parties. At that time the governor told him that he was a
wonderful man and a logical party leader. He declared that though as a
rule he does not believe in prophets, one absolutely reliable prophet
had testified that he would be president. This man had a vision in
which a wedge was drawn between the Democrat and Republican parties,
and an unknown man arose who was to rule the world. This man would have
six letters in his name. He is “Six and Six,” and this exactly fits C.
C’s real name is “Arabulah the Divine Guest.” Using this name, he wrote
a nine-thousand-word treatise on politics and world-peace which he
said was thought to be supernaturally brilliant.
He was sure that he got into the hospital through a damnable trick of
his enemies. “It is prophesied that I am to be the next president. To
defeat this, they put me here. I’m just a martyr, but I’ll come out on
top in the end.” He would be president in fulfilment of prophecy.
C more than hinted at the scientific secrets at his command. He had
recently consulted Dr. A of the government about his process for the
manufacture of diamonds. More pressure was all that was needed. He
declared that he is a wonderful amateur chemist, and that he has a
process for manufacturing coal that he learned confidentially from a
shoemaker.
When a young man he was appointed a clerk in one of the government
departments, but was thrown out of a job when the Democrats were
elected in the late eighties. He then became what he called a promoter
of inventions and an inventor.
A clue to the source of his delusional system is furnished by his
sexual history and fantasies. At the age of fifty-nine he married a
widow with two children. He describes his wife as of surpassing beauty,
and as for himself, he declared that he possessed three testicles, and
that he is a perfect specimen of a man, a most beautiful Apollo from
the neck down, and asked to pose as a model. He refused, however, to be
photographed, or to disclose anything further about his sexual history.
Impotence fear as the root of the luxurious tree of grandiose delusions
is sometimes directly demonstrated by the obvious nature of the
invention on which the individual is engaged. The mysterious perpetual
motion machine turns out to be a crude version of the sexual organs.[37]
Shortly after C left the hospital, he was busy on the stump, haranguing
large audiences as a presidential candidate on a protest ticket.
C would not be taken seriously by many people of much culture and
discernment, but there are paranoid types who are plausible enough in
their accusations to win the support of discriminating men. Many of
them are “litigious paranoids,” and, as implied by the term, they are
characterized by the legal and agitational means which they exploit
for the redress of grievances. They succeed in rationalizing their
motives so adroitly that they are very dangerous troublemakers. Even
when psychiatrists diagnose them as psychotic, they are able to put
up a front so successfully that they are often released from custody
by judge or jury. Were the data available it would be interesting to
calculate how much this active and by no means uncommon element in
society costs in terms of litigation fees and damaged reputations.
One of the smoothest customers of this description is D. After leaving
high school because of his ambition to earn money, he presently
became a traveling salesman for an electrical company. He was very
successful and soon accumulated enough to start himself in business,
aided somewhat by the money of the woman whom he married. From the
beginning he was involved in numerous lawsuits with big corporations.
He was finally sent to the penitentiary for having assumed the name of
another company which was already operating. Since the address of the
new company, as well as the name, was so similar to that of the older
concern, he received mail and checks intended for the corporation. His
own story is that he was persecuted by a certain big corporation, which
tried consistently to ruin his business, even poisoning the mind of
his wife against him (who soon divorced D). Whenever a suit was being
tried against him, he claims always to have found a representative
of the big corporation in town. These ideas of persecution extended
through the trial, which he asserts was unfairly conducted, and to the
penitentiary, where he claimed that officials were in league with the
corporation to keep him imprisoned. His conduct was such that he was
finally transferred from the prison to a mental hospital, where his
attitude was that of contemptuous superiority. He collected evidence
against the hospital, listening to all who complained of any sort of
cruelty and incompetence, and constantly occupied himself with schemes
to release prisoners and expose his persecutors.
D has an impressive, deliberate manner. There are no marks of the
maniac about him to fit into the popular idea of a “crazy man.”
In conversation with strangers he puts his own case, and the
case of others, with seeming moderation, emphasizing the obvious
difficulties in the way of collecting conclusive evidence, and showing
scrupulousness about affidavits and other documentary material. He has
succeeded in establishing connections with prominent people in many
walks of life, and is devoting himself to the cause of the underdog,
with special reference to those unfortunates who are thrown into insane
asylums and kept there by enemies who league themselves with doctors
and superintendents.
He is associated with groups of people who band together in little
agitational organizations with such unexceptionable names as
Vigilantes of the Constitution, Foundation for Legal and Human Rights,
American Equity Association. Their indictment of modern jurisprudence
is pithily formulated in the slogan, “One Law for the Rich--Another Law
for the Poor.” The object of one of these associations is:
To secure to all persons the rights, privileges, and immunities
which are theirs under the Constitution and laws of the United
States, and to which they are justly entitled as members of the
human family.... Those aided are: worthy cases unable to hire legal
counsel; victims of corrupt practices; friendless and unfortunates
restrained in Institutions, who require assistance; ex-service men
who have not been able to have legitimate claims considered, etc.,
etc.
One of the cases which is often referred to in the papers published
by this group is that of William J. O’Brien. The headline of one
article reads as follows: “Poor Private Wm. J. O’Brien, Sane
Veteran of the Apache Indian Campaign, Railroaded to the Madhouse.
Denied Justice--Denied His Day in Court--No Trial--No Lunacy
Proceedings--Illegally Held 34 Years....” In the body of the article
this statement occurs: “Mr. O’Brien indulged in some disorderly
conduct in the office of the War Department. He was immediately
arrested, charged with assault which he did not commit, and brought
into the Supreme Court.” I examined the record of the O’Brien case and
found that “some disorderly conduct” consisted in visiting the War
Department, shooting two clerks, and trying to shoot some more before
his gun jammed.
The inference should not, of course, be hastily drawn that all the
claims made by agitators, even of the psychotic stamp, are pure
fabrications. That is to be determined in the individual instance. Thus
the slogan about “One Law for the Rich--Another Law for the Poor” has
very reputable support in the findings of such surveys of criminal
justice as the one at Cleveland, in which Dean Pound of Harvard had
a responsible share. But in the case of the litigious paranoids
the underlying private motivation is so imperious that wholesale
distortions of truth are inevitable. Sometimes reckless accusations
bring cruel results, as when another psychotic, E, claimed that a
certain Captain K was shot in the back while circling over a flying
field. This fabrication got to the family of the soldier, who had been
informed that the Captain had been killed in an aeroplane accident, and
caused much unnecessary suffering.
The history of F affords some contrasts to what has gone before. F took
up agitation in middle life. It will be remembered that A directed much
of his agitational zeal against culture objects which were sanctioned
by his family and the “substantial” elements in the nation. F was the
reverse of a nonconformist. He was no pacifist, but a soldier-patriot.
The enemies of his country were his enemies, and he denounced them
up and down the land. The authority of revealed religion was not a
debatable question; the enemies of Christianity were his enemies and he
went on the platform to expose them.
Several of his patriotic and religious lectures became famous among
the smaller communities of the land. He told the story of a renegade
who impersonated Christ for the purpose of collecting funds to
start an insurrection against the American government in one of our
dependencies. He gave a thrilling account of how he sought out and
apprehended this monster. A Y.M.C.A. worker, in a testimonial letter,
declared, “Every man sat spellbound as the speaker bared the facts in
the most sacrilegious undertaking of modern times to thwart the plans
of the American government.”
F was a moving spirit in the opposition to the Covenant of the League
of Nations because the name of God was not mentioned in it. His
argument on the point is said to have impressed President Harding. One
of F’s public pronouncements on the subject read as follows:
There might be no trespass in an “Association of Nations for
Conference” coming together if they did nothing but _confer_, and
did no acting or legislating whatever, _if_ they beforehand and by
common consent did the following before the whole world:
1st, Acknowledge Almighty God before the world, with a promise to
serve _Him!_
2nd, Acknowledge allegiance to God’s Peace Plan--the Kingdom of the
Prince of Peace--for world peace, which the Bible provides for!
3rd, Ignore all man-made plans for peace, such as World
Federations, Hague Tribunals, World Leagues, World Courts and
all forms of _Human_ world-governments, which the Bible provides
against!
4th, Refrain absolutely from everything that has the slightest
tinge of world-alliance, world-control, or world-domination
influence or world concert of civil action, the human
instrumentalities that Holy Writ severely prohibits.
5th, Especially for the United States. Refrain absolutely from
everything that contravenes our U. S. Constitution and the
Declaration of Independence! (And every nation should alike protect
their Constitution!)
When thru centuries of trial the world failed to keep _the
Covenant_ written at Sinai by the Hand of Almighty God Himself and
_He_ promised that _He_ would give the world “A New Covenant” for
peace, which _He_ did, then how can the world, except anything
whatsoever from _The League of Nation’s Covenant_ written at Paris
by the mortal hands of just mere men like Wilson, Lloyd George,
Clemenceau & Co.?
After serving in the army as a young man, F joined the secret service,
and spent several years in pursuit of the enemies of law and order.
His record was excellent, and when the World War came he was put
in charge of secret military police. He became overzealous in the
performance of his duties, spending an altogether disproportionate
amount of time investigating two Mennonite ministers who were alleged
to have letters in their possession written in German criticizing the
Liberty Loan. He claimed to have found ground glass in the bread served
to men in camp. When the laboratory did not confirm his findings, he
said that he mixed ground glass with flour and submitted a sample to
the laboratory, which reported no ground glass, thus confirming his
suspicions that the laboratory staff was composed of aliens--a German,
an Austrian, and a Turk. He began to make direct accusations that some
of the camp officers were in league with the enemy. One of them he
accused of using a German private in his office for translation work,
and intrusting him with a key to the iron safe where the United States
secret codes were kept. Presently F was referred to a psychiatrist
for examination, to whom he complained that he was the victim of a
persecution by a little clique of officers. He managed to publish an
interview in the press asserting that ground glass in the food had
made fifty men ill at a certain training camp, and this led to much
unnecessary anxiety among the folks at home.
F’s anxiety to “do his bit” in the suspicion-ladened atmosphere which
surrounded America’s entry into the war led his suspicious nature to
overdo the matter. When some of his efforts were blocked by fellow
officers, he began to develop persecutory ideas. But he was soon able
to dispense with them by reinforcing his identification with the
interests of the nation and God, and displacing his suspicions upon
more generalized foes. When his secret-service work was blocked, he
was able to make a transition to agitation, where he balanced the
lost gratification of cherishing secret knowledge with the pleasure
of exhibiting it in public. The record does not contain enough early
childhood material to justify one in venturing to select the determiner
of his capacity to make such an adjustment. The history simply
furnishes a striking example of how a flight into agitation may perform
the function of keeping the personality in some sort of passable
relation to reality, when it has met a serious setback. It gives
another instance to the sum of those which show the difficulties which
may be created in society by those whose personality is influenced by
strong paranoidal trends.
The histories so far abstracted have had to do with male agitators
of various kinds. Miss G, when thirty-five years of age, came to the
physician complaining that she was constantly bothered by blushing,
stage fright, uncertainty, palpitations of the heart, and weeping
spells. She is known to be forceful, ambitious, and aggressive. Her
contentiousness is notorious. She is active in the support of all
kinds of measures, particularly for the emancipation of women from the
domination of men. She rose to her present distinction from a very
humble position as a handworker, and she champions the radical cause.
An early reminiscence was recovered during analysis which had been
completely buried before. Sometime between the ages of five and
three she had been asked by a nurse to touch her nurse’s genitals,
and threatened with dire things if she told. When she was in bed
with her mother, she had to fight against a powerful compulsion to
touch her mother’s genitalia. This early assumption of the male rôle
was strengthened by her father-identification. In the analysis she
reported that she and her father possessed many common traits, such as
stubbornness. As sometimes happens with children showing traits of the
opposite sex, their brothers or sisters reveal cross-traits. Thus her
younger brother cooked and sewed. Her father took her side in family
altercations with the mother (the father was an artist). The mother was
religious, and on the death of her mother the patient was religious
for six months from a sense of possible guilt for having precipitated
her death. Everybody said that she ought to have been a boy since
she showed so much physical dash and hardihood. Between six and ten
she often stole money from her parents, and was caught reading other
people’s letters.
As a child she suffered seriously from vague worries. At the age of
seventeen she was unable to read her own compositions before the class.
She talked rather badly in groups and before strangers, but was very
effective in face-to-face conversations. In public she spoke best when
attacked. She had a constant fear of being subordinated to a man, and
was constantly on the alert to assert herself. She had a horror of
marriage, which she thought of as gross subordination to the crude
physical desires of men. One budding love affair broke up when the man
went insane and died.
For a long time she longed to have a child, but only one child. She
wished that there were some other means of impregnation than by using
a man, but finally decided to bend to the inevitable. Several years
before analysis she looked around to select a man to be the father
of her child. It was a year after she became acquainted with the man
before she could bring herself to coitus, and she felt befouled. After
the birth of the child she became utterly indifferent to the man, and
broke off their relationship. She was, of course, sexually frigid.
What is the meaning of this demand for a child, and for but a single
child? It was essentially a subconscious demand for the penis to
finish her assumption of the male rôle. The psychoanalytical study
of the growth of the female personality stresses the importance
which this motive assumes.[38] Gregory Zilboorg has analyzed certain
post-pregnancy psychoses from this point of view, and in so doing has
thoroughly surveyed the theoretical field.[39]
Castration dreams appeared in the guise of losing muffs and keys.
Homosexual dreams took the usual shape of a nude homosexual figure.
Horrified by dreams of sexual intercourse with her father, she began
the analytical process. Her narcissism expressed itself in both simple
and disguised form. She dreamed of being the mayor and of humiliating
men in all manner of ways. She dreamed of influencing the whole world
(telepathic dreams). Incidentally, she credits dreams with some
prophetic significance. Once she dreamed of a clay field over which she
was passing which changed to plowed land, signifying work, and, sure
enough, she found a job the next day. Another time she was crossing a
brook and saw an ugly body in the stream, and developed laryngitis the
next day.
The narcissistic component was strong. She felt the universal rule
of the analytical situation to say everything that crosses the mind
to be a personal command from the doctor. She bitterly resented this
subordination to a man, and finally broke off the analysis. She showed
a record of having been quite rebellious against those in authority
over her--shop foremen and party leaders.
Miss G had an enormous masculine complex. She chose masculine goals,
and ruled out the female rôle as far as she could. Her narcissism
brought her from obscurity to distinction, though at the cost of
several neurotic difficulties in which her repressed drives found
crippling expression. She swings between vanity and inferiority
feelings. She blushes when praised, she blushes in public because of
the dependence of her sex on men, and she is timid in the presence of
academic people. She always feels ill at ease with strangers, and lives
in isolation from society.
In theory and in practice Miss G is for free love, and for the complete
equality of the sexes. She sought out politics as a career as a means
of expressing the male rôle of dominance, a drive which was powerfully
organized in her early childhood experiences.[40]
What has been said about the agitator may be brought together at this
point in a provisional summary. Our general theory of the political man
stressed three terms, the private motives, their displacement on to
public objects, and their rationalization in terms of public interests.
The agitator values mass-responses. Broadly speaking, this requires an
extension of the theory to make it possible to divide politicians among
themselves according to the means which they value in expressing the
drives of their personalities. Now what is there about the agitator’s
developmental history which predisposes him to work out his affects
toward social objects by seeking to arouse the public directly?
Why, to state it another way, is he the slave of the sentiments of
the community at large? Why is he not able to work quietly without
regard to the shifts of mood which distinguish the fickle masses?
Why is he not able to cultivate interests in the manipulation of
objective materials, in the achievement of aesthetic patterns, or in
the technical development of abstractions? Why is he not principally
concerned with the emotional responses of a single person, or a few
persons in his intimate circle? Why is he not willing to wait for
belated recognition by the many or by the specialized and competent few?
Agitators as a class are strongly narcissistic types. Narcissism
is encouraged by obstacles in the early love relationships, or by
overindulgence and admiration in the family circle. Libido which is
blocked in moving outward toward objects settles back upon the self.
Sexual objects like the self are preferred, and a strong homosexual
component is thus characteristic. Among the agitators this yearning for
emotional response of the homosexual kind is displaced upon generalized
objects, and high value is placed on arousing emotional responses
from the community at large. The tremendous urge for expression in
written or spoken language is a roundabout method of gratifying
these underlying emotional drives. Agitators show many traits which
are characteristic of primitive narcissism in the exaggerated value
which they put on the efficacy of formulas and gestures in producing
results in the world of objective reality. The family history shows
much repression of the direct manifestation of hatred. There is
often a record of a “model boy” during the early years, or of a shy
and sensitive child who swallowed his resentments. Repressed sadism
is partly vented upon objects remote from the immediately given
environment, and favors the cultivation of general social interests.
The youth has usually learned to control by suppression and by
repression the full amplitude of his affects, and this is a discipline
in deceit. The narcissistic reactions prevent the developing individual
from entering into full and warm emotional relationships during
his puberty period, and sexual adjustments show varying degrees of
frigidity or impotence, and other forms of maladjustment.[41] Speaking
in terms of early growth phases, the agitators as a group show marked
predominance of oral traits.
Distinctions within the agitating class itself may be drawn along
several lines. The oratorical agitator, in contradistinction to the
publicist, seems to show a long history of successful impostorship
in dealing with his environment. Mr. A, it will be recalled, was
able to pass for a model, and became skilled in the arts of putting
up a virtuous front. Agitators differ appreciably in the specificity
or the generality of the social objects upon which they succeed in
displacing their affects. Those who have been consciously attached to
their parents, and who have been successful impostors, are disposed to
choose remote and general objects. Those who have been conscious of
suppressing serious grievances against the early intimate circle, and
who have been unable to carry off the impostor’s rôle, are inclined to
pick more immediate and personal substitutes. The rational structure
tends toward theoretical completeness in the former case. Displacement
choices depend on the models available when the early identifications
are made. When the homosexual attitude is particularly important,
the assaultive, provocative relation to the environment is likely to
display itself; when the impotence fear is active, grandiose reaction
patterns appear more prominently.
CHAPTER VIII
POLITICAL ADMINISTRATORS
Some administrators are full of ideas and others are seldom attracted
by novelty. Some do their best work under a rather indulgent chief;
others fall to pieces unless there is strong pressure from above.
There are administrators who derive their influence over subordinates
from the authority of their positions rather than from the authority
of their personalities. There are some who may be depended upon for
the conscientious performance of detailed tasks, while others neglect
details and think in terms of general policy.
Viewed developmentally, it appears that one group of administrators is
remarkably akin to the agitators, differing only in the fact that they
are bound to particular individuals more closely, and thus displace
their affects upon less generalized objects. This gives a certain
independence to the administrator from the compulsion to “get a rise
out of” large numbers of the population. It ties him more securely,
however, to the members of his own environment, whose relations he
seeks to co-ordinate. The administrator is a co-ordinator of effort in
continuing activity.
The group which is allied to the agitators includes those who show
imagination and promoting drive. The history of H belongs in this
class, and has the incidental interest of showing how H behaved in war
time.
While it is accurate to say that H is diplomatic and seemingly open
and frank in dealing with his superiors, it should be added that
in situations which involve the fate of his own projects, he is
noticeably overtense, and likely to evaluate himself much higher than
others. He becomes slightly accusatory if his demands are rejected. The
elderly executive with whom H did his best work sometimes complained
that a conference with H was as fatiguing as a whole day’s work. The
older man felt that H might be entirely broken up if his projects were
rudely rejected, and he also believed the young man to be too valuable
to damage. H recognizes that he has often found himself shirking when
his superiors let him alone, and wonders why this attitude, which is
contrary to his own interests, should take hold of him. H displays a
tendency to behave arrogantly toward subordinates, and when he was in
the army it was obvious that he could maintain discipline only through
the formal authority vested in him.
H is an only child. His father was a big, overpowering person, who
was a strict disciplinarian. The parents were very prudish in sexual
matters, and one of his embarrassing memories is the confusion and
vexation of his mother when he asked her about babies. Left to his own
resources, and stimulated by a variety of incidents to explore sexual
problems on his own initiative, the boy became involved in a set of
episodes and reveries which he tried to keep from the family, and thus
met every family situation with some anxiety lest his sins should
find him out. H grew into a hyperactive and seemingly light-hearted
youngster, who obeyed his parents implicitly and met strangers with
ingratiating charm. H was constantly occupied with the task of adopting
a manner toward authority which would conceal his secret preoccupations.
About the age of four, H surprised his parents in a sexual embrace,
and vividly recalled his own mixture of burning curiosity and
embarrassment. Some of his early dream fragments indicate that he
repressed a powerful hostility toward his father, who he thought was
hurting his mother, and likewise repressed hatred of his mother, who he
felt was disloyal to him.
His experiences continued through a long chain of incidents. There was
mutual exposure of sexual parts between him and a playmate of his own
age. A deeply repressed episode was a seduction in which he played the
principal part. He was meanwhile completely successful in playing the
rôle of model boy.
When H was ten years of age, however, there transpired an incident
which for a time branded him in the neighborhood as a nasty little
renegade, and which had many subsequent repercussions. He touched the
exposed sexual parts of a neighbor girl, who was somewhat his junior.
The sister and brother of the girl were interested spectators. The
children told the cooks, and the news finally got around to the mother
of the girl. She took it calmly enough, but thought she ought to tell
the boy’s mother. H’s mother passed the story to his father, which was
the worst thing that could happen, from H’s point of view. His father
administered a sharp dressing-down, and forbade him to play outside
the yard for a fortnight. H’s father was very angry, and lectured him
about his sins every night for a while. Presently the father went over
to see the neighbor, and seems to have taken the line that the girl
was as much to blame as his son if not more so. This tactless behavior
completely alienated the neighbor.
Now this neighbor happened to edit an important newspaper, and ever
afterward this newspaper lost no opportunity to assail the efficiency
of the department in the city government headed by H’s father. These
attacks continued over many years, and H’s father occasionally threw
it up to him that he had been responsible for the original quarrel.
As it was, the boy was ostracized in the neighborhood for a year or
more, and was not invited to go to parties, although he could play
with the children. But H was self-conscious, and sought companionship
farther away. The brother of the girl thought that he ought to turn
against H, and there were some fights.
At fourteen H began to go to high school. He kept away from the
swimming pool during the first year or two because he was much
embarrassed by the lack of hair around his genitals. This supposed
retardation, about which he worried a great deal, lasted but a short
time, when a new set of worries came up. He now believed that his penis
was abnormally large, and that his testicles were too low-hanging and
perhaps deformed. In college he was nicknamed “Cocky,” on account of
his jauntiness, but he secretly suspected that this was an allusion to
his penis.
A chum taught him how to masturbate, and he continued to do so for
about six months, when his emissions became so frequent that his mother
told his father. For once, H’s father handled the situation with good
sense, and after a kindly interview in which the father explained that
it was not a good idea to indulge excessively, H quit. But even this
matter was not terminated, for the disturbing reverie remained that
perhaps his excessive masturbation had permanently impaired his manhood.
H had a lively curiosity about his mother’s body of which he was
intensely ashamed. He recalls loitering in his mother’s room while she
made ready to change her clothes, hoping that she would forget to send
him out. He found himself speculating about the shape of her body, and
was several times on the verge of spying through the keyhole. But his
impulse was inhibited when he remembered the story told by his father
in which a “peeper” was spoken of with the greatest contempt. H dreamed
of sexual intercourse with his mother on several occasions, nearly
always during periods of unusual strain. These dreams were deeply
buried and came out into the clear with great difficulty.
His sexual curiosity extended to animals, and he stimulated the sexual
parts of his dog. This further associated sex with the bestial and
unclean, and convinced him of his own guilt for so much as wondering
about it.
H’s first sexual intercourse cost him much worry. It occurred during
his second year in high school. He had been sent with the family
automobile to drive home a guest, and noticed a girl of about his own
age who was gay and flirtatious. On the way home he picked up the girl
with two boys whom he knew slightly. All of them had sexual intercourse
with the girl. He was terribly worried that he might reach home too
late. His strict father had laid down the rule that if he got home
at any hour of the night, he was to wake up the family and give an
account of himself. In his haste he neglected to inspect the car and
his father found some hairpins in the tonneau. H denied that he knew
anything about them. The incident, however, was not closed. He saw an
item in the newspaper about several men who were arrested for rape, and
wondered whether he had committed a horrible crime himself with his
companions. Before long the girl became pregnant and was brought before
the juvenile court. She named another gang of boys, and this gang
accused H and his two companions of being to blame. He was horrified at
the prospect of going into court and dragging his family to disgrace.
H was afraid that his partners in wrongdoing would confess, but he
denied everything to his father, and his father’s political influence
kept him from being haled into court. But for at least a year the black
cloud of possible exposure hung on the horizon of his mind.
All during his high-school days he had occasional sex intercourse, but
every episode was marred by some disagreeable features. While there
were such experiences with girls of low social standing, he had many
friendships with girls of good social position whom he idealized as
above sexuality. He attended a private school which was patronized
almost exclusively by children from very wealthy families, and H, who
was handsome, well dressed, quick, and agreeable, found his friends
among them. He was often in their homes and admired the signs of wealth
and culture. He became sensitive of the cultural limitations of his own
parents, and was afraid to entertain his school friends at home, but
fortunately from his point of view his father was willing to furnish
enough money to make it possible to hold up his end of the social
bargain at exclusive clubs and restaurants.
In college H continued to draw a sharp line between those who could
be petted, but who were too rich and refined to be approached for
intercourse, and those who could be petted, and who were poor enough to
be asked for intercourse. He continued to associate with a smart and
wealthy set, and finally concentrated his attention on the daughter of
a rich business man whom he wanted to marry. His left-handed affairs
continued at irregular intervals, and he felt remorseful when he had
the perversions performed on him.
Enough has been reported to convey an impression of H’s inner state.
His unsatisfied sexual curiosity had been whetted by his prudish
parents. His father defended his own ascendancy in the home by
ordering the boy about a great deal, and H responded to authority by a
system of reactions which became characteristic of him. He was tactful,
deferential, and acquiescent, qualified by inner resentment and rare
gestures of defiance. The father was not a friend but a barrier to be
circumvented, and the father’s hegemony was protected by the sense of
guilty inferiority which he had created in his son. Family differences,
such as arose when the father objected to housekeeping details, or when
the boy wanted more freedom to use the car, always showed the same
balance of forces--mother and son versus the father. The mother did not
defend herself by robust contradiction but by weak complaints. There
were only two instances in which the boy flared up enough to resist his
father openly.
If H had been more successful in winning applause outside the family,
it is quite possible that his position would have been made much easier
inside it. His social charm brought him into the most influential
circles, and this gratified his parents, but his father was a man of
action who felt that while wealthy friends were an asset, his son
ought to show more positive achievements. Though he never nagged H,
the father’s sternness, suspiciousness and absence of praise made a
deep impression on the boy, and gave him a sense of insecurity and
inadequacy. Although H scored no great successes, he went along without
academic catastrophe until college. He was suspended at the end of
his Freshman year for poor work, but came back after six months,
during which he pretended to his father that he was still in school.
The suspension was partly due to the advice given to the dean by his
fraternity brothers, who had found him very hard to manage, and wanted
to “bring him to his senses.” H was having a fling, since he was away
from home for the first time, and away from the intimidating father.
Presently he steadied down enough to get along.
Reminiscences of his guilty sexual experiments, deeply charged with
guilt-feeling, were continually bobbing up to interfere with his
progress. Once he was assigned to debate in high-school public-speaking
class. His opponent proved to be the brother of the girl with whom
he had the notorious incident several years before. The brother was
a prominent school leader who had no doubt forgotten the affair, but
it continued to weigh on H. He always had felt uncomfortable in the
other boy’s presence, and on this occasion, being poorly prepared, the
situation became so unbearable that he fainted.
He began to study agriculture at college, but soon found that he
had made a mistake. His family owned a ranch which he often visited
during vacations, and very much enjoyed. Farming was an avocation of
his father, and H had the idea that ranching was a genteel occupation
without much work, and with much ordering of other people about.
He vaguely thought of himself as a country gentleman of cultivated
leisure. The war saved H from agriculture. He took up aviation, without
losing “credits,” partly because the snobbish mother of his favorite
girl was bowled over by the uniform, and partly because he thought it
would be better to go into the war, if he had to go, as an officer than
as a private. His father’s influence secured a deferred classification
for him in the draft, and H, though feeling quite small about it, said
to himself that it was better for people to die who were without his
own advantages and achievements.
His career as an officer in the camp brought out the traits to which
reference has previously been made. His engaging deference toward
his superiors won them all, but he had trouble with the men. His own
insecurity led to an arrogant pose on his part that offended every
man in the company. He also discovered that the moment discipline was
relaxed he became very careless in performing his own duties.
The same constellation of traits reappeared in his administrative
career, modified by the fact that he learned to assume a less
provocative attitude toward his subordinates. He made a very good
record, and proposed a number of changes that were adopted for the
improvement of the service.
Looking back over H’s history, the striking thing is his prolonged
worry about his adjustment to specific persons. H was never able to
make the hurdle into abstract interests. Even his administrative ideas
were closely tied to the immediate context of the service. H’s life was
very much dominated by his relationship to definite people, and this
meant a prolonged carry-over of early attitudes to these individuals.
Unlike B, who could rightly feel that his father and brother and aunt
were treating him unjustly, H was all too aware that he “deserved” more
than he got. His success as an impostor was rudely interrupted in some
early episodes.
Another “marginal” history shows what happens to some men with
agitating aspirations who are not able to disentangle themselves
from a place inside an organization and to give themselves up wholly
to agitational work. Mr. I is a type occasionally met with inside
administrative staffs who makes a serious problem for himself and
others. He radiates plans that he neglects to execute, and he is
supercilious and defiant toward superiors. He lacks the drive, however,
to move over into agitational work entirely by identifying himself
with a sufficiently dramatic cause. Sometimes this is due, as in I’s
own case, to powerful early identifications with particular projects,
and with administrative work as such. When such a person can be pried
loose from certain of these early fixations, he often proves capable of
fulfilling the expectations which he is able to arouse.
The father of I was a man whose extraordinary talents won him great
distinction, but who never quite managed to come through as brilliantly
as people had a right to expect from one so richly endowed. I’s father
could talk five or six languages and read many more. He was educated in
England, France, and Italy, and after serving as a professor of modern
languages, his interest in educational problems led him to become the
head of a famous preparatory school, and later of a public school. He
spent most of his time reading, and during the last decade of his life
drank heavily, but without impairing the quality of his work. Someone
who knew him pronounced the man “a self-centered intellectual who
died without a friend.” The mother of I was an adopted daughter of a
member of the British aristocracy, and was brought up in distinguished
social and intellectual circles. The mother was exceptionally active
in all sorts of humanitarian enterprises but lavished much time and
love on the boy, who was “dreadfully spoiled,” and accepted everybody’s
judgment that he was a budding genius.
True to anticipations, the boy shot through school like a meteor,
ranking first in his subjects, and taking every available honor with
ease. In college he branched out into social and political life on a
large scale, and joined about twenty organizations, managing to have
himself put on every important committee.
Like his father, the son took up public-school work. Becoming
interested in psychology, he did some graduate work, and quickly
published a book that received very favorable comment among those
best qualified to judge it. The idea of educational reform fired his
imagination, and he lectured far and wide, engaging in agitations to
secure legislation which would authorize a number of experimental
schools.
The part of his history which is especially interesting to the student
of administration is this: He was continually at outs with his
superiors and colleagues. His first teaching position began with a
feud, and lasted but a little while. He was invited to resign his next
post. He was asked to resign the next position. He was asked to resign
the next position. These entries appear monotonously through his record.
Everybody conceded the brilliance and fertility of his mind, and did
homage to the originality of his plans. He began work but failed to
carry it far, seeming to think that work planned was work done. His
methods were always aggressive. Seized of an administrative idea, he
went to his superiors. When they criticized the scheme, or rejected his
suggestion, he often took the bit in his teeth and tried to run the
ship in his own way.
More than once financial irregularities have been discovered in
connection with his work. He has given out checks when no funds were
available, and run unduly large expense accounts. Whenever he has been
in financial jams, he has turned to other people for aid as a matter of
course, seeming to feel that he has a claim on the world for support.
He has always been childishly dependent on his wife for praise. He
resented his wife’s motherhood, but has been overindulgent with the
two children, who, his wife says, have no respect for him. He likes to
be the center of attention, and is a clever showman, and a great deal
of a bluffer. He is usually not high tempered but affectionate. He is
inclined to be accusatory toward his wife--“a vixen”--but his wife
appears to be a keen person, who was enough impressed by his precocious
brilliance to marry and to pamper him, but who in later years has
delivered herself of pointed comments on his character.
It seems that he has gone through several periods of alternating
exhilaration and despondency. The exhilarations came when he had a
position and when life became a little monotonous or a little hard.
At least one of these swings was sufficiently pronounced to lead to a
period of retirement in a sanitarium. During this time he was asked
what kind of work he liked best, and replied, “Reforming the world--my
first choice; second, exploiting the world.”
The strength of his narcissism is self-evident, and the feminine marks
in his character are numerous. He expects to be nurtured and supported
by the world as a matter of right. He demands constant “mothering”
from his wife, and coddles the children. His father-hatred, which was
thoroughly repressed in the family, comes out in his difficulty with
father-surrogates, and in his determination to change the educational
system at points where the father took it for granted or overtly
defended it. The selection of the pedagogical rôle is itself indicative
of the strength of his father-identification. What seems to have
happened in his development is a fixation of interests in a relatively
narrow sphere in which the affects are so powerful and at the same time
so contradictory that difficulties are assured. He finds it impossible
to shake off his managerial aspirations sufficiently to devote all
his time to the propagation of ideas. Although his affects are
displaced upon abstract problems, they are not displaced upon objects
sufficiently removed from his father, and the displacement does not
succeed in making it possible for him to achieve an impersonal attitude
toward his superiors and colleagues in educational administration. The
exaggerated praise heaped upon him as a boy had much to do with the
narcissism. His incapacity to follow through is no doubt related to his
early conflicts over genital activity. The chief point of significant
contrast with A is that the narcissistic component interfered more
seriously with H’s development, since it led him to insist upon playing
an administrative rôle. A’s environment was less prostrate before him,
and he was able to avoid assuming administrative obligations where he
would be cramped and subordinated.
The history of J, which has been reported by Alexander,[42] shows what
lies behind a powerful administrator’s thirst for responsibility, and
reveals how changes in the working relations inside an organization may
disorganize the individual.
J was a driving executive whose superiors deferred to his judgment
and accepted his plans. His abounding energy sought an outlet through
the assumption of heavier and heavier responsibilities inside the
organization. Finally, a change in the chief executive brought J under
the immediate control of a man who handled him with cool assurance,
holding him firmly but considerately to his own formal sphere of
action. Confronted for the first time in his life by a more powerful
personality who knew how to regulate him, J took the wife of another
man for his mistress, and in spite of the remonstrances of those who
knew him, he held tenaciously to both the mistress and the wife.
An analysis showed that J was characterized from early childhood by a
notable split in his personality. Side by side with his aggressive,
masculine drive there existed a strongly repressed, though powerful,
feminine tendency. His personality is to be rendered intelligible only
as a compromise formation between those two incompatible motives. The
repression of the passive component produced a regressive fixation upon
the wife, who was compelled to play a markedly maternal rôle, and to
humor his every whim. He resented it if his every wish was not defined
and fulfilled before he had to go to the trouble of putting it into
words. J has delicate aesthetic sensibilities, and is a cultivated
amateur in the arts.
In sharpest imaginable contrast to his behavior at home was his
insatiable thirst for authority and responsibility in his professional
life. One of his dreams acutely symbolized him as a giant automobile of
untold horse-power, whose body was a light French coach of the rococo
period.
As Alexander comments, J’s life-problem was to indulge his passive
demands without doing violence to his masculine ideal. But this was
not accomplished without strain. He could earn periods of indulgence
in aesthetics by exaggerated aggressiveness in his work, but as his
feminine tendencies were gratified, his masculine ideal was endangered,
and he would be driven back to high-pressure management. The
psychological significance of his work was symbolized in the following
dream: He was penetrating a thick sheet of cardboard with a needle,
and continually asking for new sheets to bore through. He succeeded
in going through several thicknesses. The cardboard represented his
occupational problems, and the needle his penis. His professional
activity was largely a sublimation of his aggressive, active sexuality.
The equilibrium between his aggressiveness in work and his passivity
in marital life was upset by the new chief executive, who skilfully
hemmed in his activity. Alexander remarks that it is impossible for
a man who has struggled all his life against very strong unconscious
homosexuality to serve under a strong man. The dominating personality
arouses the latent attitude, and the subordinate must resort to special
means of maintaining his repression. In the case of B, which we have
previously considered, the means of restoring some sort of equilibrium
was escape (by resigning), but when that became very difficult, he fled
into a world of fantasy (a psychosis). J met the crisis by breaking
through the sublimation of his heterosexuality, and taking a mistress
as an outlet for his thwarted drives. Further than that, he vindicated
his masculinity in a very dramatic way. He not only took a mistress,
but he took the wife of another.
From now on, he was dependent on both women to preserve the equilibrium
of his personality. Previously the equilibrium had been maintained
between wife and work; now it depended on wife, mistress, and work, for
the aggressive, masculine component required the mistress to make up
for the limitations imposed upon his working sphere.
Alexander reports that in the course of a long analysis this remarkable
split in the personality was traced back to early childhood. “At the
age of four he was already the same person.” At the age of four he
continued to drink milk out of a bottle, stubbornly resisting every
effort to break him of the practice. But--and it was with an emphatic
“but” that J produced the reminiscence--at the same time the boy was
especially adventurous and independent, riding all by himself out on
the highway. Here was the same antithesis that later expressed itself
in his peculiar relation to wife and work. The child won the right to
indulge his infantile, oral tendencies in one particular by exaggerated
boldness in other respects. This solution was the prototype for his
later life.
The rôle of the bottle was later taken by his wife, whom he often
treated like an inanimate object whose only function was to
minister to his needs, while his work, and later his mistress, were
the successors to the bicycle, by means of which he was able to
prove his independence and his masculinity to himself and the world.
The castration fear, which was aroused by the means adopted to break up
his infantile masturbation, favored the oral fixation, and came into
conflict with his strong masculine genital drive, laying the basis for
this notable character split.
* * * * *
The records so far discussed have had to do with inventive or driving
administrators. A type often met with in the public service is the
conscientious, overscrupulous official, whose touchiness, fondness
for detail, delight in routine, and passion for accuracy at once
preserve the integrity of the service and alienate the affections
of anybody who has to do business with the government. K was such a
man. For some years he was in the forestry service, where part of his
duties was to mark the trees that might be cut by private lumbermen.
The lumbermen naturally argued that the straight, sound trees should
be cut and the damaged ones left for seed. K took a variety of other
factors into account, and spent days measuring and estimating position,
growth rates, and shade area, exasperating the lumbermen with his
everlasting and often superfluous scrupulousness. He keenly felt his
responsibilities as a public servant, and disliked the very appearance
of succumbing to private pressure. At one time K resigned the service
in disgust because of “uncivil” treatment by a superior, but his
“touchiness” was much more deeply rooted in his nature than he had any
idea.
The record of K is not only the story of a pedantic official but of
an ardent patriot. One of the highest forms of patriotism is supposed
to be volunteering for posts of conspicuous danger in war. K pulled
all the wires within reach to get a place on the front line, and only
the point-blank refusal of his superiors to allow him to squander his
technical ability prevented him from achieving his desire. From a
close examination of his intimate history we learn how one variety of
superpatriot comes to be.
K was the youngest of four children. His next brother was eight years
his senior, his sister was five years older than this brother, and his
oldest brother was eighteen years ahead of him.
He never remembered a time when his mother and father, who were
divorced when he was eight, were on good terms with each other. They
seldom spoke, except to quarrel. This family background was reflected
in the mental life of the growing child. K was notoriously nervous and
timid. From a very early day he began to be preoccupied with why he
was different from everybody else in the world. His sense of isolation
and strangeness led him to believe that perhaps he was the only real
person in the world and that everybody else was an illusion. He would
sometimes come up wonderingly to touch his mother, and then himself,
to see if she, too, were real. He speculated on how he could get away
from the human shadows around him, and became convinced that he could
fly. Several times he laboriously climbed up on the seat of a kitchen
chair, spread his arms like a bird, and leaped into space. Every time
he crashed to the floor, his frightened mother rescued him, but he
always felt surprised and rather aggrieved that he should fall, and
secretly believed that he could fly after all. This type of reaction
characteristically appears where emotional conflicts in the home create
an acute problem of emotional orientation for the child.
As a small boy he was sent by his mother to follow his father when he
left the house, and to report where he went. K developed a strong sense
of guilt for this, and after the divorce was afraid that his father
would return and take revenge on him in some unknown and horrible way.
His father did occasionally reappear, and once invited the boy to spend
the night with him, but K was too frightened to accept.
The family often lived in the country, and the self-consciousness of
K in the presence of strangers was heightened by frequent removals
into new and often isolated places. One of the towns near which he
lived when about nine was on a frontier. Gun-play was frequent, and
K remembers having seen the corpses of men who had been shot down in
street brawls. There were ominous-looking fellows around town, and the
boy gave them a wide berth.
The death of his mother when he was twelve robbed K of his main
emotional support in a dangerous world. She died after two years of
suffering from an infected limb. She would also spit into bits of
papers and burn them in the stove. K wondered why she did this, and
later developed a reverie the importance of which will soon appear.
The older members of the family were left with K on their hands, and
they decided to club together and put all thought of marrying out of
their heads until he was able to stand alone. The boy did not then
realize the sacrifices they made for him, but he later discovered that
his older brother put off marrying the girl of his choice until she
broke off the engagement and married someone else. It was not until
about the time that he graduated from high school and the home was
broken up that he became aware of what he owed them, and ever after he
was plagued by the thought of his unworthiness, and his incapacity to
repay his brothers and sister for their care. Up to that time he had
experienced no particular sense of gratitude, and although his older
brother once or twice referred to his dependent position, his private
feelings were mainly of resentment against the restrictions imposed
upon him.
And these restrictions were not inconsiderable. The family ran a
greenhouse, and the drudgery involved in such an occupation was
incessant. There were slips to transplant, beds to weed, and loads
to pull and carry. There were long hours of boredom over routine
occupations. K was expected to dash home from school at the earliest
possible moment, and to lend a hand with the endless chores about the
place.
Occasionally he succeeded in evading his duties. He stopped to play on
the way home from deliveries, and he stayed at school on some pretext
or other to join the drill squad. But he was always haunted by fear
and guilt. His older brother was a strict disciplinarian, and beat
him several times. His sister occasionally let him have some spending
money, but as a rule he was tightly cramped financially. When his
gang organized into a drill squad, and chose their uniforms, he was
humiliated when the necessary dollars were not forthcoming from home.
K was worried by what appeared to be a lack of physical stamina and
endurance. This idea (which had no basis in fact) in part grew out of
his efforts to do what his brothers did. They occasionally broad-jumped
or pulled weights, and of course K made a poor showing beside them. But
for the unconscious hostility against them, such unequal results would
not have disturbed him. His morbid worries about his strength led him
to submit to a great deal of bullying by town toughs.
His adolescent years were marred by perpetual anxieties about his
social adequacy. He had been the victim of an explosion which left his
face marked with powder stains, and this repugnant tattooing, which
disappeared very gradually, embarrassed him for years.
K’s older brothers and sister sometimes took him with them to parties
because there was nobody to leave him with, and an annoying sense of
being in the way added to his growing sense of social inadequacy.
During high-school days he fell in love with the daughter of the most
influential man in the locality, but as her social standards became
more exacting, his lack of money, leisure, and prestige made it
impossible for him to travel with her set. One of the most humiliating
episodes in his life was the one which broke up their relations. K had
arranged to meet her at a dancing class. Another girl called up to see
if he would take her, but he said he wasn’t going. His oldest brother
had listened in on the telephone extension, and was astonished to see
K appear all dressed up and on the way out. He launched forth on a
tirade, declaring that K gallivanted around throwing money away and
shirking his job, though he was absolutely dependent on others for his
daily bread. K was cut to the quick, and went back to his room churning
with too many emotions to call up and offer explanations to the girl.
K had taken it for granted ever since he was a small boy that he would
go to college. He traced back his determination to an incident when
he was driving across the plains one magnificent starry night. He sat
in the bottom of the rig, rapt in contemplation of the sparkling sky,
while his mother chatted with her neighbor. Suddenly he asked how he
could find out about the stars, and she replied that people could study
all about them in college. He then and there resolved to go to college,
and never had a moment’s doubt about it, although the members of his
immediate family went no farther than the common school.
In spite of his inferiority feelings, K was not cut off from some
measure of recognition in high school. His dependable and sympathetic
qualities impressed themselves upon those who came into close daily
contact with him, and he was made an officer of his high-school class.
He was respectful toward his teachers and good in his studies.
College was an entirely different affair. His personal worries
multiplied during the transition period. Lacking funds, he sought
a scholarship. The only one tenable from his district to the state
university was in ceramic engineering, and after looking up “ceramic”
in the dictionary, he applied and was selected for admission. The work
proved to have no particular interest for him, and his social life was
even less satisfying. He was met at the college town by the members
of a church group who lived together in a dormitory (some friend had
written them), and he, though never devout, stopped with them during
the first term. This marked him as a non-fraternity man. He waited
tables in a fraternity house, and as bad luck would have it, a former
teacher wrote highly recommending him to the consideration of this
particular fraternity. When a committee broke the news to him, he was
utterly confused and made such a lamentable impression that it was not
possible to extend him the bid. One of his odd jobs was beating carpets
at a sorority house, and this turned out to be the sorority that had
pledged the girl with whom he had been (and still felt) in love.
For relaxation K was forced into the domain of the kitchen maids.
A servant girl struck up a friendship with him, and he had sexual
relations with her. He had tried intercourse once during high-school
days, and had a premature emission, a practice which often bothered him
later, providing a permanent source of humiliation.
Transferring to another college, he began his work in forestry, in
which he had acquired some interest during hikes with a friendly
high-school teacher. Handicapped by lack of money and worried by a
mounting sense of social inadequacy, his life was no more successful
than before. In high-school days he envied a talkative lad who
astonished the company by glibly recounting anecdotes about Napoleon.
One of his relatives whom he had known as a boy left an ideal of social
charm which never was attained.
K’s inner uncertainties finally reached a point which led him to
resolve that he ought to discover once for all whether forestry
would prove to be a proper vocation. He left college and joined the
government service. This was to be the great test of his ability to
master himself.
So keen was his preoccupation with self-mastery that he resented
every effort to influence him, and acted with unnecessary strictness
in dealing with private lumbermen. He was often deprived of human
relationships during his days in the field, and gradually his mind
became more and more enmeshed in morbid reflections about himself.
His mind simply refused to concentrate on the technical volumes which
he had brought with him to improve the solitude. Reveries which had
been slowly germinating on the periphery of his attention now began to
foliate. K had always wondered why his mother burned those little bits
of paper. It dawned on him one day that she might really have died of
tuberculosis, and that he must therefore be predisposed toward that
disease. Early in his high-school days, he had begun deep-breathing
exercises, though he had never freely admitted to himself or anybody
else what lay behind it. He always gave the usual account of his
mother’s death to insurance examiners, smothering his doubts in
affirmation.
This was his state of mind when America entered the war. He found
himself saying that since he was going to die anyhow from a loathsome
disease, he might as well die at once and get it over with. Enlisting
without delay, he sought to reach an exposed position as rapidly as
he could. But the government had different ideas, and assigned him to
a branch of the service where his technical skill would prove useful.
In his disappointment, all the old feelings of inadequacy returned.
Interviewed by an officer he floundered and stumbled, neglecting
to report essential facts about his training and experience. The
accidental intervention of an acquaintance straightened out the matter,
and secured the authority to which his record entitled him. At first
he was very much embarrassed in the company of lumberjacks, but his
behavior never showed his confusion. His actual record was, as usual,
excellent, and his conscientious efficiency won the indorsement of
everybody who knew him.
K married a rather dominating school-teacher whom he had known for some
time. When things went badly, as they often did, he was partially
impotent, and also showed the phenomenon which has been christened
“Sunday neurosis.” Every Sunday afternoon when he was at home he would
find himself assailed by deep depression, and would weep quietly to
himself.[43] In spite of these neurotic troubles, K was able to make
an important place for himself inside a bureaucracy, when he came back
from the army.
From one point of view, K’s character may be summed up by saying that
his overscrupulous performance of duty was an elaborate effort to
demonstrate his potency, and that his longing for danger came at a
time when he was willing to surrender the struggle. K’s morbid moods
and persistent feelings of inadequacy are self-imposed penalties for
his hostilities against the environment. He possessed very powerful
aggressive drives which were partly expressed in the adoption of a
self-ideal which was far more ambitious than anything deemed feasible
by the family. His narcissism was such that he was prevented from
viewing himself as an object, and from modifying his demands upon the
world for recognition, and upon himself for production, until these
demands bore a closer relationship to his own skills and opportunities.
The basis for his obsessive scrupulousness was laid during early
childhood, when he was torn between father and mother-loyalties, and
acted out within his own nature the clashes that occurred between
them. His strong mother-identification is shown by his belief that he
suffered from her diseases, and would die from tuberculosis as she had
died. He preferred death to a reduction in his demands upon himself
and the world. Such a reaction has in it the primitive demand of the
child to treat the world as controllable at will by the omnipotent
fantasy. His genital difficulties testify to the intensity of the
castration conflict, and show the passive-oral regression. K deeply
resented having to adjust to the world at all. His capacity for hard
work was achieved against high resistance, and in part had the value of
a penance. Thus when workless days came around, he was always ill at
ease, and sometimes showed the spells of weeping on Sunday afternoons.
To work was to prove his potency, and to supply a ritual substitute
for and defense against his antisocial impulses. He was unable to
emancipate himself very far from the reactions of the people in his
immediate environment.
* * * * *
As a class the administrators differ from the agitators by the
displacement of their affects upon less remote and abstract objects.
In the case of one important group this failure to achieve abstract
objects is due to excessive preoccupation with specific individuals in
the family circle, and to the correlative difficulty of defining the
rôle of the self. Putting agitator A at one end of the scale, we may
place administrator K or H near the other. Agitator B was less able
to displace than A, as shown by the more personal character of the
reforms which interested him. K or H were so concerned about definite
people, and about their own failures in relation to many of them, that
emancipation was unattainable.
As a hypothetical construction from these “marginal” cases, we may
suggest that another group of administrators is recruited from among
those who have passed smoothly through their developmental crises. They
have not overrepressed powerful hostilities, but either sublimated
these drives, or expressed them boldly in the intimate circle. They
display an impersonal interest in the task of organization itself,
and assert themselves with firmness, though not with overemphasis,
in professional and in intimate life. Their lack of interest in
abstractions is due to the fact that they have never needed them as
a means of dealing with their emotional problems. They can take or
leave general ideas without using them to arouse widespread affective
responses from the public. Tied neither to abstractions nor to
particular people, they are able to deal with both in a context of
human relations, impersonally conceived. Their affects flow freely;
they are not affectless, but affectively adjusted. Very original and
overdriving administrators seem to show a fundamental pattern which
coincides with that of the agitators; the differences in specific
development are principally due to the cultural patterns available for
identification at critical phases of growth.
CHAPTER IX
POLITICAL CONVICTIONS
Political prejudices, preferences, and creeds are often formulated in
highly rational form, but they are grown in highly irrational ways.
When they are seen against the developmental history of the person,
they take on meanings which are quite different from the phrases in
which they are put.
To begin, almost at random, with L. He believes that the United States
ought to join the League of Nations and that our government ought to
lead the world toward conciliation and peace. He is a Republican in
party preference, and possesses well-rationalized judgments on a number
of public questions. It is for none of these reasons that his history
is of special value to the political scientist. What his intimate
history does disclose is an exact parallelism between his political
opinions and those of his father and mother, and, besides that, a
conscious anxiety on his part to conform to the parental pattern of
belief and occupation. He has a strange premonition that if he goes his
own way something terrible will happen. Thus L is not only a simple
conformer, but a compulsive conformer.
He is the youngest of four children. The next older member was a
brother who was killed when L was eight and the brother was seventeen.
Since L was so much younger than the other children, he was at first
petted and spoiled. He slept around with all the members of the family,
but mostly with his mother. A cousin of his own age with whom he
visited provided the immediate point of departure for much exaggerated
sexual fantasy. The cousin initiated him into various sexual practices
when L was seven. He began very early to masturbate, and the habit
stayed with him as a problem until he was through college. A certain
masochistic element appeared when he got erections at an early age
upon being spanked by a girl playmate. He was sexually stimulated when
attending to the natural wants of small children.
L developed his guilty fantasies about his sinful impulses until he
began to fear that grave retribution would be visited upon him or his
family on account of his secret crimes. It was at this time that his
brother, who was his favorite in the family next to the mother, was
killed while out on a boyish escapade. L was profoundly stirred by
this. His forebodings of disaster seemed to have direct confirmation,
and he soon developed whole congeries of compulsive rituals.
When L went to the bathtub, he felt that something terrible would
happen to his family, and especially to his mother, unless he plunged
his head under water and held it there just as long as he had the
breath. He became afraid of taking a bath because of this compulsive
drive to duck his head under the water. Often in the bathroom he had
the same feeling that disaster could be prevented only if he succeeded
in drinking all the water that gushed out of a faucet. At night he
would be seized by the sudden conviction that he must bury his face in
the pillow and keep it there just as long as he possibly could without
suffocating. Once he swallowed a pin after long inner debate over the
efficacy of this measure. Several times he hung over the edge of the
roof on top of the house until he barely had strength enough to swing
back to safety on top of the porch. He felt that he could permit no one
to pass him on the street. Later he thought he must outstare people,
and calculated that if he kept staring until seven out of ten people
dropped their eyes, that all would be well.
His mother was the central figure in L’s anxieties. He evolved quite
independently a theory which had been anticipated many centuries
before by some primitive people and philosophers. He believed that his
mother had a spirit which left her body the moment any member of the
family left her alone, and that this spirit was forced to undergo all
sorts of trials and tests. The spirit would always come back to his
mother’s body before any member of the family spoke to her. In some
magical fashion his own acts relieved the burden which was laid upon
his mother’s spirit. Even in adulthood, he found an occasional fantasy
which was reminiscent of the preoccupations of those years. Not long
ago he was floating on the water in a swimming pool and found himself
thinking that his mother could never hold her head under water as long
as he could hold his foot under water.
With all his timidity, removal to a strange environment was a severe
trial. Just before high-school days his family moved to a new
community, and he never quite overcame his sense of strangeness. He
had always been a coward, shrinking from physical combat. One of his
first memories is of sitting on a curb with an older brother, who
suddenly proposed that he should fight the little brother of another
boy. L began to fight, but was overcome by fear and ran away. Later he
was the center of a small clique of children in his block, all of whom
were very much his junior. One of his group bragged about L’s physical
prowess to the leader of another group, but when the challenge was
issued L backed down. He was worried by his own timidity, but seemed
unable to do anything about it.
He made a handful of friends in the new environment, but was on
intimate terms with no one. With one boy he was able to talk somewhat
freely about sexual fantasies, and L once proposed a sexual experiment
to a neighbor girl. When he was repulsed, his guilt was enormously
increased.
About this time L began to think seriously of entering the ministry,
so that he might always think “pure” thoughts and do “pure” things.
When he went to college he at first roomed with boys from his high
school, but they talked so openly about sex that he felt the atmosphere
was deplorable and demoralizing. Before the month expired, he sought
a new room and went into a solitary retreat. During the first year of
his college life he was acutely religious and besought church services
regularly. He sought guidance from the sermons upon personal and
political questions.
Having developed the idea that he must live up to the family ideal at
any price, L felt that he could never depart from the opinions and
customs of his parents. In politics he was a stout Republican, and
later, when in a religious mood, he heard his preacher espouse the
League. He felt that he ought to support the League, but was plunged
into a serious conflict, because he thought his parents were against
it. Greatly to his relief he discovered that his father and mother had
also been won over to the League by a preacher, and that his lapse from
orthodox Republicanism would not bring dishonor on the family.
His father-hatred fantasies were very oppressive. They took the form
of believing that if only his father were dead, his mother would have
a much easier time of it. L’s father was suffering from a steadily
advancing paralysis. At nine he dreamed that his father was in the
bathtub and that around him were fat, red snakes that were bound to
devour him. L who was standing by in the dream, awoke in a fright. He
often dreamed that his father was away and that his mother was happy
with him.
L still shows many signs of his early neurosis in some of his
ceremonial acts, and in the timid conservatism of his character. The
private meaning of his political convictions is clear enough, for
they are self-imposed obligations to lift his load of guilt for the
murderous and incestuous fantasies which he long struggled to repress.
The opinions of the family were sanctioned as a kind of religion. It is
interesting to see how at first he invented a large array of ceremonial
practices to substitute for his own illicit impulses, and later worked
off his guilt feelings through the religious patterns which were
provided by society, and which were revalidated on the basis of his
private meanings. The acceptance of the political convictions of the
family was on a par with the acceptance of theological dogma.
Among the nonconformists to the family pattern we may choose M, whose
history was taken by Stekel. M was a prominent socialist who agitated
for an economic brotherhood of man, and whose most important private
motive in this particular was a bitter hatred of his own brother.
Most of this hatred was displaced from his brother on to capitalistic
autocracy, and overreacted against by a social ideal of fraternal
equality. His hatred of his own brother was not entirely disposed of by
this displacement, and it was necessary to keep at a distance from him,
and from many of his traits. Thus M despised music because his brother
liked it, followed a style of dress at the opposite pole from his
brother, and nearly walked out on the physician when he discovered that
the physician had treated his own brother.
M spent the years agitating at home and abroad, spending a year and a
half in prison. Thus he succeeded in gratifying his masochistic desire
to be punished for his hatred by provoking society to avenge itself
on him. The motivation in this personality is notably similar to that
which has been more elaborately sketched in the history of A.
Another nonconformist appears in the history of an anarchist who was
once a patient of Stekel. N carried his social doctrine beyond the
sharing of property, insisting that wives should be in common. He took
the initiative by urging his wife to cohabit with the male members
of his anarchistic society, while he demanded access to the wives of
others. His own wife finally fell in love with another man, and asked
N for a divorce. But before arrangements could be made, she became
pregnant by her new partner, who was poor, and asked N to acknowledge
the new child as his own, since this child would fall heir to some
money from its supposed grandfather, the father of N. He consented
to this, as he had to the divorce, but his self-esteem was hurt by
his wife’s desertion. He had always felt elated when his wife came
back to him after each of her erotic adventures, and now he was all
broken up. Stekel believes that N’s espousal of communal principles in
theory and practice was powerfully motivated by an irrational desire
to humiliate his father by playing a generous rôle with his sexual
partner, and substituting the morality of generosity for his father’s
possessive monopoly of the mother. When his wife-mother deserted
him, N’s brilliant career was ruined, and he resorted to opium, and
finally secured a revenge on his father by blocking his ambitions for a
successful son.
A father-hatred (due to unrequited love) of remarkable intensity was
the basis of another career which Stekel examined. O was the young
leader of an anarchist band whose anarchism went beyond precept to
dramatic practice. O had his companions conduct some holdups to get
money to start an anarchist paper. O was an illegitimate child who was
brought up and spoiled by an overindulgent mother. When he realized
that he had a father who was still living, but whose identity was never
divulged, his anger boiled up against his mother upon whose affections
he no longer had monopolistic claim, and against his unknown father,
who refused him love and distinction. For he had no doubt that his
father was a rich and important personage. O displaced much of his
animosity on to remote, abstract symbols of authority, like kings
and capitalists, and devoted himself to destroying them. Much of his
affection was likewise displaced upon abstract ideals of a fatherless
fraternal society, living together without coercion. His sadistic
impulses were by no means entirely sublimated upon remote goals and
harmonious means, for he led his companions on common robberies. O
threw a thick mantle of rationalization over his murderous impulses
and his criminal acts, seeking to justify coercion in the name of a
coercionless ideal which could only be laboriously achieved in the
world.
It is the history of such cases, in which the emotions are peculiarly
intense, which leads one to conclude that political assassins have
hated their fathers with unusual bitterness. E. J. Kempf remarks in his
psychopathology, after reviewing the historical evidence in the cases
of Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield, and of Booth, the
assassin of President Lincoln, as follows:
The writer does not hold that every case of severe affective
repression in youth, due to the father’s hatred or a father
equivalent’s, will lead finally to a parricidal or treasonable
compulsion. It is only held that such affective repressions produce
a revolutionary character which, if given an appropriate repressive
setting during maturity, will then converge upon the parricidal
act. Without the rather specific type of affective repression in
his youth, he would be invulnerable to parricidal suggestions later
on.[44]
Illegitimate children, especially when the identity of their father is
undisclosed, carry with them the perpetual query, “Who is my father?”
Indeed, the fantasy of belonging to other parents than those physically
in the family is sufficiently widespread as a disguised hostile reverie
against the actual parents to enable everyone to appreciate in some
measure the mental state of the illegitimate child. “My father may be
rich and powerful.” “My father may be an aristocrat of distinguished
lineage, and he is denying me all my just privileges.” Such fantasies
are taken up and spun out in the reveries of the victim. There is a
presumption that those who suffer from this kind of social inferiority
are especially numerous among those who commit acts of political
violence, as Lombroso held.
P accepted violence, but of a different kind. P is a patriot who proved
his patriotism by volunteering in the late war during the course of
which he was distinguished for bravery in action. His deepest longing
is for war to come again. He is in favor of an aggressive foreign
policy since it increases the chances of war, and war he would welcome
again as he welcomed it before.
P has a younger brother and an older sister. His mother died when he
was six and his relations have been strained with his stepmother, who
entered the family shortly afterward. His father was a very successful
professional man.
P began to fall behind in his schoolwork when he was about seven
years old. This brought him into disrepute at home, for his previous
promise led everyone to expect much from him, and the change seemed
to prove that he was “lazy.” The family has nagged him ever after,
hoping to stimulate him to work harder. Just why he failed to continue
to cope successfully with the demands of school becomes fairly clear
when his reminiscences of the period are recovered. He had loved his
second-grade teacher and had been her special favorite, and both his
marks and his enthusiasm were high. The third-grade teacher impressed
him as stern and cruel, and he soon began to despise the sight of her.
The boy’s work began to crumble, for his mind was full of hostile
fancies about his new teacher, and of yearning fancies for the teacher
whom he had just lost.
His emotional life was further disturbed about this time by the loss
of his nurse. P’s stepmother discharged her as soon as she came. Now
the nurse was the lad’s main love, for his own mother had been ill
for some years before her death. The nurse’s presence gave the child
that stable reassurance which is so necessary if the mind of the child
is to be kept free from morbid fears. In P’s case, there were strong
reasons why this reassurance was necessary. An insane man lived across
the street and terrified the passers-by by screaming at everyone who
passed. Shortly after his mother’s death P went under ether for a minor
operation and was terrified that he would die. The fear of suffocation
reappeared in dreams and nightmares, and he was very timid about
learning to swim.
The stepmother was a disturbing element as a strange and unknown
quantity in the environment, and a competitor for the affection of the
father. When she discharged the nurse, P thought of her as a malignant
influence. His troubles at school were exaggerated by his home changes,
and his mind became preoccupied with fantasies directed against his
stepmother, or some substitute.
P’s father was ambitious for the boy. P remembers him as quick to
reprove and slow to praise. He dreamed of his father’s death, and of
seeing his father in an accident. But his manifest attitude was one of
respectful affection. No matter what happened in the home, he excused
his father by reflecting that the stepmother was to blame. However, on
the deeper level, it appeared that he held his father accountable for
the death of his mother and the disappearance of his nurse.
At school P was popular because of his good physique and his docile
nature. But his studies came hard. Having failed on college-entrance
tests, P bolted and joined the army. The war came along just in time
to give him a dignified retreat from an unbearable personal situation.
He hoped that his father would think about him with pride. He was
bitterly self-accusatory because of his failure to “make good,” and
felt a strong unconscious need of punishment. Under these conditions he
entered army life with enthusiasm, and made a fine record for personal
courage.
Once the war was over, his troubles began again. He succeeded in
entering college, but college felt like a nursery. He felt that his
army experience sophisticated him above schoolboy tasks and chatter.
All his old worries returned, complicated by his longing for a new war.
He had a long series of difficulties in his occupational life.
Seen against this background, his militarism is perfectly intelligible.
War gave him a chance to destroy, wildly and extensively, and also a
chance to work off his guilt feelings by exposing himself to death. His
repressed hatreds were partly turned against himself. An interesting
feature of his ideology is that his longing for personal participation
in war is combined with indignation against the exploitation of
backward peoples by the imperialist powers. He identifies with the
“underdog.”
Q, a contrast to P, is a pacifist and a socialist. His intimate history
shows that relatively simple association of ideas upon which this
depends. From an early age Q showed a morbid fear of blood. Later
on, when he heard that western capitalism meant war and bloodshed,
he experienced a profound emotional revulsion against “capitalism,”
“imperialism,” and their associated concepts, and called himself a
“socialist,” “pacifist,” and “internationalist.”
The blood-phobia itself was a powerful factor in developing his
character. By slow degrees, he was able to push the screened memories
back until he recovered a simple incident which was heavily ladened
with affect, and whose recollection disposed of the blood-phobia, even
though it was not completely analyzed. Q’s father was accustomed to
shave in the kitchen on Saturday afternoon, and Q as a small child
took a great interest in the proceedings. Occasionally the father cut
a pimple on his face with the big razor he was using, and flinched as
the blood spurted out. He immediately swabbed the cut, and presumably
forgot it. But Q did not forget so quickly. He found himself much
engaged in speculating about it, drawing the inference that all the
reddish projections on the body are full of blood, that, indeed, the
body is a reservoir of blood; and that the reddish formations are in
danger of being punctured, so the blood will spurt out and run off.
Q had previously seen his father naked in the bathtub, and he thought
that his father had rubbed soap over his nipples with the palm of his
hand and not with the fingers, from which he concluded that the nipples
must be especially tender, and whenever he washed himself, Q carefully
avoided his own nipples and massaged them most delicately with the palm
of his hand.
His brother had the habit of biting his finger nails until the blood
came, and the family reproached him for it, prophesying that all sorts
of infections might set in. Q began to expect that something disastrous
would happen, and he was not altogether averse to having it happen
because of his jealousy of the brother. But it came with a great shock
when his brother did actually develop an infection, thus confirming his
own suspicions about the necessity for stopping outflows of blood.
About this time Q was playing with his older sister, and in the course
of a scuffle his hand slid down his sister’s body and over her breast.
Q distinctly felt a nipple catch for a moment beneath his fingers, and
he was instantly terrified for fear that his sister would bleed to
death. The breasts, he thought, must be partly filled reservoirs of
blood, since they were soft and yielding.
During his fourth year Q’s grandmother died, and he was horrified to
think of what would happen to one he loved. He had seen a photograph of
a reclining nude with a beatific smile and the caption “Death” beneath.
From this he surmised that people were undressed when they died, and
lowered naked into the ground. But he had seen worms in the ground,
and the worms would attack the body. Since the nipples were prominent
and therefore easy to reach, the nipples would be eaten through first.
He shuddered to think of the worms gnawing away at his grandmother’s
nipples, and sometimes woke up in a fright, having dreamed that the
worms were biting off his own nipples.
Once Q came running into his aunt’s house and discovered a small infant
cousin nursing at the breast. His aunt hastily readjusted her dress.
Because of the care with which the breasts were guarded from exposure
by his mother, sister, and aunt, he leaped to the conclusion that they
had something to do with the secret relations of men and women.
He had all sorts of trouble trying to figure out how these relations
were conducted, but when he was about eight he originated a theory that
temporarily solved the problem. Q figured that a man and woman must lie
on the bed with their faces close together. The male would then squeeze
the breasts, alternately pressing and releasing them, as if they were
balloons. Then they turned over and rubbed their anuses together. Not
long after, he completed his theory of procreation by imagining that
children must be born through a hole in the stomach from which the
blood gushed copiously. The cutting must be very painful and bloody.
Haunted by the fearful prospect of a world which might at any time
knock a hole in his body and deprive him of blood, Q was a bundle of
excessive timidities. He was afraid of his grandmother’s cat, he ran
to his mother if he saw a dog, and he was afraid that a horse would
bite off his hand if he fed it. He hated to watch a ball game for fear
a foul tip would hit him, and he avoided bugs, worms, and lizards
like the plague. Q never put up a fight outside the house, and cried
when the other boys of the neighborhood bullied him. Sometimes he was
taunted as a Jew but he never fought back, much to the disgust of his
father. His forebodings spread to thunder, lightning, fire, redness,
and numerous articles of food.
In marked contrast to his cringing demeanor abroad was his attitude
toward the older brother, ten years his senior. Time after time he
would pick a quarrel and pummel the older youth, until the brother
tired of the situation and gave him a sharp blow. Thereupon he went
to someone for comfort. Q’s father felt that the older boy might be a
little rough, but that the little fellow had something coming to him.
The mother was uniformly comforting, although she reproved both boys
for not behaving as brothers should.
The boys were profoundly hostile to each other, although usually
cordial. The older brother made himself conspicuous for his tenderness
during a serious illness of Q, running errands with alacrity, and
watching constantly by the bedside. When it became clear that Q would
live, the older boy’s devotion stopped abruptly, indicating the
unconscious basis of the exaggerated reaction. He was overreacting
against a death wish against his brother as an intruder between him and
the mother.
Q envied the achievements of his older brother, and often compared
himself unfavorably with him. The older boy not only stood at the
head of his classes, but earned his way by playing the violin.
Although Q stayed at the head of his classes, he was by no means as
self-supporting as his brother. The brother-hatred appeared in such
dreams as:
_Dream 1._--My brother is getting married. He is in a dress suit. A
long line of young men in dress suits are coming up to congratulate
him. As the first one reaches out his hand, he falls backward and
all the others fall over one another like tenpins.
_Dream 2._--My brother and I are walking down the street near
home. I hear a scream. An Italian is chasing a woman with a baby
who seeks refuge in a store. The Italian knocks her down. Then my
brother goes into the store and tries to deal with the Italian, but
is knocked down. I enter and knock down the Italian.
The brother-jealousy is of secondary significance in Q’s history. The
crux of the blood-phobia was a critical experience whose traumatic
effects were due to the strength of the affects which were mobilized
and repressed. Q slept with his father, and the blood-letting incident
aroused his slumbering desire for the death of his father and his own
active fear of suffering mutilation (castration). Blood derived its
significance because it involved a reinstatement of the most acute
phase of the conflict. To escape from it, Q fainted unless he succeeded
in getting out of the sight of blood at once. It is noteworthy that
Q did not at once faint when the razor cut the pimple; it was not
until the elaboration of the fantasy had continued, and the affects
had become greatly concentrated, that the blood came to signalize
an instant and overwhelming emergency from which a kind of suicide
(fainting) was the only escape.
The following terse dream expresses something of the underlying
situation:
_Dream 3._--I am looking down a city street which is covered with
snow and lighted by street lights. The President of the United
States is walking along the street and suddenly slips and falls. My
attention is then called to a place farther down the street where
two tumblers are leaping over a rope stretched across the street.
They are leaping backward and forward with a curious mechanical
motion.
The rhythmic leaping is a pictorial symbol for the pulsations of
genital excitement. The President is an authority substitute for the
father. When the father is out of the way, genital activity will become
safe. Since the father prescribes sexual abstinence (abstinence from
handling the genitals), this expresses a desire to give greater freedom
to the repressed impulses of the subject’s character. The repressed
positive identification with the brother shows itself in opposing two
tumblers instead of one to the father.
_Dream 4._--A goose or ducklike creature is being chased back and
forth across the road by two dogs. The creature has a red bill
and head, a blue back and wing feathers, and a white breast. The
white, fuzzy dogs chase the animal back and forth but do not reach
it because of their overanxiety. After two round-trips the animal,
which moved with a curiously mechanical motion, runs toward a man
who has come to the door and jumps between his legs. The man is
middle-aged and his hair is white. He is in white pajamas. He says,
“My leg is the leg of weakness; my health is hell....” I am in a
winter coat standing outside the house of a friend of my sister’s
in whom I remember having had a mild interest, but which led to
nothing since she was older than I, and not very attractive. I had
just delivered a valentine. The scene is illuminated by a street
light, and is especially clear because snow is on the ground. The
man in the picture is unknown.
The odd creature with the red bill and head symbolizes the penis. The
two dogs (brothers) try to capture it, but the father protects it.
However, the hope of achieving masculinity is not wholly dashed because
the old man is growing weaker.
For some time the productions of Q showed that sexuality was powerfully
linked with death, and that the death was to be his own rather than
that of his father, or simultaneously with the death of his father.
As the castration anxiety lifted, the blood fear abated, and dreams,
word-associations, posture, and other significant reactions altered
toward greater ease and assertiveness.
We have seen that well-rationalized theories and preferences are not
alien fungi on the personality, but an important expression of the
essential trends of the personality. Thus theories are at least as
indicative of the individual who espouses them as of the ostensible
subjects of speculation. Pessimism, for example, is common in old age,
when the sexual powers decline and the individual projects upon the
world the sinfulness which he feels for wanting to indulge beyond his
powers, and defy his inadequacy. The mechanism of this sort of thing
stands out most clearly in extreme cases, such as R. R believed that
the world was going from bad to worse and that wars and rumors of wars
were devastating the earth. He spent so many hours over a plan to
secure the peace of the world forevermore that he developed a confusion
state. He would go out in a park, find a secluded spot and weep over
the troubles of the world as Jesus wept over Jerusalem. One day in
passing a market he saw some chickens in a coop without any water.
The cruelty of this was more than he could bear, so he went home and
went to bed. His ideas were that he had been chosen to work out the
salvation of the world, and that he had been endowed with unusual,
indeed supernatural, understanding of men’s motives, and special power
to heal insanity.
R elaborated a private form of religion. He said that he was worshiping
the sun as God, as a symbol of Christ and truth (actually, of masculine
virility). When it became necessary for him to commune with his spirit,
he was in the habit of facing the sun and repeating a litany of his
invention, which ran:
To the sun, the heart of the world! It warmeth the earth with its
loveliness. Glory to God! It riseth in the east, lighting the dark
corners of ignorance and wickedness. Glory to God! It chaseth the
darkness before it like the host of Syria before the children of
Israel. Glory to God! It chaseth the darkness before it like the
host of Syria before the children of Israel. Glory to God! etc.,
etc.
He began to chant, and then assumed an exalted, heroic pose, with his
arms and head thrown back. Presently he felt that a big storm was
coming that would ruin the world. The world is like a giant serpent, a
serpent asleep.
R’s story is not sufficiently detailed to show much about the
development of those reaction patterns which disposed him to meet
old age in such a way. He was the only child of a poverty-stricken
family who played by himself and got on well with his books. Some
local lawyers took an interest in him and helped him through school.
He read law and was admitted to the bar. After making a precarious
living for a number of years, he was elected to various local offices,
and then to Congress. He was reputed to be an impractical dreamer, and
enjoyed making rather fanciful speeches. His legislative career as
recorded in the _Congressional Record_ was undistinguished, containing
the usual quota of pension bills and “extensions of remarks” during
tariff debates. He was opposed to the annexation of the Philippines,
and hostile to imperialism; in this he went along with his party, and
likewise indulged a personal conviction. He practiced law desultorily,
after having been defeated for the legislature, and devoted himself to
study and writing. His one published volume is a vague disquisition on
human affairs, which accurately reflects the indeterminate, rhetorical,
and meliorative quality of his thinking. He married a woman of his own
age when he was a young man. There were no children.
When the paranoid rather than the manic-depressive strain runs through
the character, nebulous and all-embracing pessimism about the world
is sharpened to specific accusations. Everyone who is prominent in
public life is a potential object of such attacks. One might hazard
the conjecture that the importance of an individual in the community’s
estimation may be measured by the number of “crank” letters to him and
about him. One such crank, S, wrote a trunkful of letters accusing
public men of graft, of being dominated by “Big Biz,” and offering
suggestions to government officials. He complained of being persecuted
and victimized by prominent people, especially by Harry F. Sinclair,
the oil man. This was attributed by him to the fact that he had written
a letter to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court calling His Honor’s
attention to the Teapot Dome scandal which was being ventilated in the
press, and naming Mr. Sinclair as the responsible party. Since then Mr.
Sinclair had prevented him from getting a job, and paid his own sister
to throw him out on the street. During his divorce proceedings he
wrote to the American Bar Association to protest against the “shyster
lawyers” who were representing his wife, and claims that Mr. Taft and
Mr. Root answered him in the papers the following day. When Mr. John
W. Davis was a presidential candidate he wrote to him, describing the
various attacks to which he, S, had been subjected. Mr. Davis neglected
to reply and did nothing about it, so S prevented his election, and
feels that Mr. Coolidge owes him something for being elected. “I wrote
to Hearst and I believe that turned the trick.” In this letter he
divulged the fact that Mr. Davis was connected with Wall Street, and
this hint was enough to arouse Mr. Hearst. In reply to the routine
question, “What is going on in the world?” he answered, “More deviltry
than there ever was before.”
Unfortunately the history is too meager to explain S’s development,
except by analogy with others who have displayed the same behavior.
Certainly his life-story would, if accessible, reveal the effects of a
disorganizing family environment. We do know that his father was drunk
much of the time, and that the children had an unhappy lot. At five S
went to live with his grandparents who wanted to take him away from
his drunken father. At about fifteen he came back for a while. Shortly
afterward he saved his sister from being strangled to death by their
father, who in a drunken tantrum had her by the neck against the wall.
S became a good mechanic, but disintegrated in later life.
Another “crank” devised an ingenious theory to explain President
Wilson’s conduct. T says that he discovered that Mr. Wilson was not
a citizen of the United States. He first made this revelation on his
draft questionnaire, and when this became generally known, Mr. Wilson
went to France to escape the anger of the enraged citizenry of the
United States; later Mr. Wilson fell ill of a guilty conscience at new
revelations that he made. Mr. Wilson was part of the Masonic conspiracy
which had been hatched against him when he was very young. T’s
stepfather, who was a Shriner, probably furnishes the material for this
delusion. As for T himself, he believed that he descended directly from
Mary, Queen of Scots, and that he had foreknowledge of the approaching
end of the world. The members of the millennium are “a creed and not a
denomination,” and only twenty million people will be saved, over whom
T will rule.
* * * * *
From the excerpts included, it appears that the significance of
political opinions is not to be grasped apart from the private
motives which they symbolize. The degree of insight into objective
relationships is one thing; the extent to which “private meanings” are
accreted to the “public” or “manifest” meanings is another. When we
see the private meaning of public acts, the problem of interpreting
the full significance of political behavior presses itself upon our
attention. Are there any implications for the general theory of
the political process which follow from the intensive scrutiny of
individual subjective (and objective) histories? This is the question
to which we next turn.
CHAPTER X
THE POLITICS OF PREVENTION
Political movements derive their vitality from the displacement of
private affects upon public objects. The intensive scrutiny of the
individual by psychopathological methods discloses the prime importance
of hitherto-neglected motives in the determination of political traits
and beliefs. The adult who is studied at any given cross-section of
his career is the product of a long and gradual development in the
course of which many of his motivations fail to modify according to the
demands of unfolding reality. The adult is left with an impulse life
which is but partially integrated to adulthood. Primitive psychological
structures continue in more or less disguised form to control his
thought and effort.
The state is a symbol of authority, and as such is the legatee of
attitudes which have been organized in the life of the individual
within the intimate interpersonal sphere of the home and friendship
group. At one phase of childhood development the wisdom and might of
the physical symbol of authority, typically the father, is enormously
exaggerated by the child. Eder traces the significance of this for the
state in the following words:
What occurs as we come more in touch with the external world, when
the principle of reality develops, is the finding of surrogates for
this ideal father. We discover that the parent is not all-wise,
all-powerful, all-good, but we still need to find persons or
abstractions upon which we can distribute these and similar
attributes. By a process of fission these feelings are displaced
on to and may be distributed among a number of surrogates. The
surrogates may be persons, animals, things or abstract ideas; the
headmaster, the dog, the rabbit, the Empire, the Aryan race, or any
particular “ism.”
He comments that it is upon this self-ideal that is formed the
possibility of leadership, of leaders, and of the supreme leader,
who is the one capable of doing all that the child once thought the
physical father could do. The unconscious motivation is reflected in
the sober formula of Blackstone, “The sovereign is not only incapable
of doing wrong, but even of thinking wrong: he can never mean to do an
improper thing; in him is no folly or weakness.”[45]
There is very deep meaning in the phrase of Paley’s that “a family
contains the rudiments of an empire.” The family experience organizes
very powerful drives in successive levels of integration, and these
primitive attitudes are often called into play as the unobserved
partners of rational reactions. To choose another extract from Eder:
The behaviour of the elected or representative politician betrays
many characteristics derived from the family. For example, during
the time I filled a political job in Palestine I noticed in myself
(and in my colleagues) the satisfaction it gave me to have secret
information, knowledge which must on no account be imparted to
others. Of course good reasons were always to be found: the people
would misuse the information or it would depress them unduly
and so on--pretty exactly the parent’s attitude about imparting
information, especially of a sexual nature, to the children....
At the back of secret diplomacy, and indeed the whole relationship
of the official to the non-official, there rests this father-child
affect. This also serves to explain the passion aroused in former
days by any proposed extension of the franchise.
In the sphere of political dogma, unconscious conflicts play the same
rôle which Theodor Reik discussed when he drew a parallel between
religious dogma and obsessive ideas.[46] Dogma is a defensive reaction
against doubt in the mind of the theorist, but of doubt of which he is
unaware. The unconscious hatred of authority discloses itself in the
endless capacity of the theorist to imagine new reasons for disbelief,
and in his capacity to labor over trivialities, and to reduce his whole
intellectual scheme to a logical absurdity. Sometimes this appears in a
cryptic formula to which some sort of mysterious potency is ascribed,
but which is hopelessly contradictory in so far as it possesses
any manifest meaning. The celebrated doctrine of the unity of the
trinity is an instance of such culminating nonsense. Words lose their
rational reference points and become packed with unconscious symbolism
of the ambivalent variety. The description of sovereignty found in
Blackstone refers to nothing palpable, and functions principally as an
incantation. Much solemn juridical speculation, since so much of it is
elaborated by obsessive thinkers, ends thus. Deep doubts about the self
are displaced on to doubts about the world outside, and these doubts
are sought to be allayed by ostentatious preoccupation with truth.
Defiance of authority is defiance of the introjected conscience, and
involves a measure of self-punishment. We have seen how a powerful need
for self-punishment is the stuff out of which martyrs and sensational
failures are made; but of more general importance is the rôle of
the sense of guilt in supporting the _status quo_. Deviation from
accepted patterns becomes equivalent to sin, and the conscience visits
discomforts upon those who dare to innovate. Radical ideas become
“sacrilegious” and “disloyal” in the view of the primitive conscience,
for they tend to represent more than a limited defiance of authority.
They put the whole structure of the personality under strain. The
childish conscience is easily intimidated into preserving order on
slight provocation; it knows little of the capacity to consider the
piecemeal reconstruction of values. “Radicalism” is felt as a challenge
to the whole system of resistances which are binding down the illicit
impulses of the personality, rather than as an opportunity for detached
consideration of the relation of the self to the rest of reality. There
is little boldness in political thinking which is not accompanied by an
overdose of defiance, for even those who succeed in breaking through
the intimidations of their infantile consciences must often succumb in
some measure and “pay out.” Much of the struggle, the fearful _Sturm
und Drang_ of the emancipated thinker, is his unconscious tribute to
the exactions of the tribunal which he erected within himself at an
early age, and which continues to treat innovation as _ipso facto_
dangerous. The non-obsessive thinker is one who can coolly contemplate
revisions in the relations of man to reality unperturbed by his
antiquated conscience. Often readjustments of human affairs which are
proposed are driven to absurdity because the original mind is compelled
to transform his mere departure from the conventional into a defiance
of conventionality. When one perceives the operation of this powerful
self-punishment drive, and the secondary efforts to free one’s self
from feelings of guilt for defying the authorized order, it is possible
to remain understandingly tolerant of the eccentricities of creative
minds. To put the point a bit sharply, it is safe to say that the
adult mind is only partly adult; the conscience may be four years old.
The conscience, the introjected nursemaid, reacts undiscriminatingly to
change, and construes it as rebellion.
The organization of motives which occurs in adolescence possesses
direct significance for the interpretation of political interests.
The physical and mental storm of puberty and adolescence often
culminates in the displacement of loves upon all humanity or a
selected part of it, and in acts of devotion to the whole. It is here
that the fundamental processes of loyalty are most clearly evident
as they relate to public life. S. Bernfeld has written extensively
on the psychology of the German youth movement. He comments on the
very different lengths of puberty, and distinguishes between the
physical and the psychological processes. When the psychological
processes outlive the physical ones, certain characteristic reaction
types arise. Dr. Bernfeld believes that the discrepant type prevails
most characteristically in the youth movement, and he enumerates its
characteristics. The interests of this group are turned toward “ideal”
objects like politics, humanity, and art. The relation to these objects
is productive, since the youth tries to produce a new form of politics
or art. There is always a great deal of self-confidence present, or
many symptoms of a repression that has failed. This is expressed in
the high opinion of one’s self and the low opinion one holds of his
companions. An outstanding individual, the friend or master, is loved
and revered. Often this love for a friend is extended to the whole
group. The sexual components of the personality do not concentrate on
finding objects, but in creating a new narcissistic situation. Bernfeld
distinguishes this secondary narcissism from infantile narcissism on
the ground that it is accompanied by deep depression reminiscent of
melancholia. The reason lies in the formation of an ideal self that
attracts a great part of the libido and enters into contrast with the
real ego, a process which is particularly characteristic of the complex
or discrepant type which he found in the youth movement.[47]
Political life seems to sublimate many homosexual trends. Politicians
characteristically work together in little cliques and clubs, and many
of them show marked difficulties in reaching a stable heterosexual
adjustment. In military life, when men are thrown together under
intimate conditions, the sublimations often break down and the
homosexual drives find direct expression. A German general has gone so
far as to declare that one reason why Germany lost the war was that
the command was shot through with jealousies growing out of homosexual
rivalry. Dr. K. G. Heimsoth has prepared a manuscript describing the
rôle of homosexuality in the volunteer forces which continued to
operate against the Poles and the communists after the war. In the case
of certain leaders, at least, the reputation for overt homosexuality
was no handicap; indeed, the reverse seemed to be true. Franz Alexander
has suggested that one reason why homosexuality is viewed with contempt
in modern life is the vague sense that complex cultural achievement
depends on an inhibited sexuality, and that direct gratification
tends to dissolve society into self-satisfied pairs and cliques. The
observations of Heimsoth throw some doubt on the wisdom of this “vague
sense.”[48] The prominence of alcoholism and promiscuity among like-sex
groups has often been observed, and both indulgences appear to be
closely connected with homosexual impulses.[49]
Political crises are complicated by the concurrent reactivation
of specific primitive impulses. War is the classical situation in
which the elementary psychological structures are no longer held in
subordination to complex reactions. The acts of cruelty and lust which
are inseparably connected with war have disclosed vividly to all who
care to see the narrow margin which separates the social from the
asocial nature of man. The excesses of heroism and abnegation are alike
primitive in their manifestations, and show that all the primitive
psychological structures are not antisocial, but asocial, and may often
function on behalf of human solidarity.[50]
Why does society become demoralized in the process of revolution? Why
should a change in the political procedures of the community unleash
such excesses in behavior? Reflection might lead one to suppose
that since important decisions are in process of being made, calm
deliberation would characterize society. Evidently a reactivating
process is at work here; there is a regressive tendency to reawaken
primitive sadism and lust. The conspicuous disproportionality between
the problem and the behavior necessitates an explanation in such
terms. Federn published a sketch of the psychology of revolution in
his pamphlet _Die vaterlose Gesellschaft_ in 1919. When the ruler
falls, the unconscious triumphantly interprets this as a release from
all constraint, and the individuals in the community who possess the
least solidified personality structures are compulsively driven to acts
of theft and violence. An interview which Federn gave to Edgar Ansel
Mowrer in 1927 on the occasion of the Vienna riots reviews in somewhat
popular form some of his conceptions.
Vienna, Austria, July 20.--“Distrust of father was the chief
cause of the Vienna riot,” said Paul Federn, onetime president of
the Psychoanalytical Society. From a psychoanalytical standpoint
all authority is the father, and this formerly for Austria was
incorporated in the imposing figure of Emperor Franz Josef. But
during the war the father deceived and maltreated his children, and
only the material preoccupations of life and the joyous outburst
when at the close of the war the old authority broke asunder
prevented Austria from having a revolution then.
The state again built up the old ruling caste and began to hope for
restoration, and therefore an abyss opened between Vienna, which
under socialist leadership is trying to replace the traditional
father principle by a new brotherhood, and the Austrian federal
state, which had returned to a modified father idea. Trust in
father is the child’s deepest instinct. Vienna first respected the
Austrian republic, but gradually this belief was undermined by the
continual misery, by newspapers preaching fanaticism and by legal
decisions which virtually destroyed the people’s belief in the new
father’s justice.
Accordingly there occurred a spontaneous manifestation which
unconsciously drove the disillusioned and furious children to
destroy precisely those things on which the paternal authority
seems to rest--namely, records and legal documents.
Why the peaceful Viennese should suddenly be transformed
temporarily into mad beasts is also clear to the psychoanalysts.
Had the police offered no resistance the crowd would soon have
dispersed and no harm would have been done. But once the police
fired blood flowed and the mob reacted savagely, responding to
the ancient fear of castration by the father which is present in
all of us unconsciously in the face of the punishing authority.
Therefore, fear grew along with the violence, each increase leading
to new violence and greater fear, as appeasement can only follow a
complete outbreak and as the inhabitants were widely scattered in
their houses it took three days before the last hatred could fully
get out.
One further point can only be explained by psychoanalysis. The
social democratic leaders are at heart revolutionary, but they
did not wish this demonstration. They realized that revolution in
little Austria today would be suicidal, and, therefore, at a given
moment called out the republican guard with orders to interfere and
prevent violence. The guard arrived much too late.
Why did not the leaders send out the guard at 6 a.m. when they knew
the demonstration was beginning? They say they “forgot.” This is
_a flagrant_ example of unconscious forgetfulness. The socialists
forgot to take the only step which could have prevented something
which they consciously disapproved, but unconsciously desired.
The Vienna riots were in the deepest sense a family row.[51]
Eder speculates about the unconscious factors in the well-known
tendency of certain political alternatives to succeed one another in
crude pendulum fashion.
I think it was Mr. Zangwill who once said that it is a principle
of the British Constitution that the King can do no wrong and his
ministers no right. That is to say, the ambivalency originally
experienced toward the father is now split; the sentiment of
disloyalty, etc., is displaced on to the King’s ministers, or
on to some of them, or on to the opposition.... Modern society
has discovered the principle of election, and the vote to
give expression to the hostile feelings toward their rulers.
Psychoanalytically an election may be regarded as the sublimation
of regicide (primary parricide) with the object of placing oneself
on the throne; the vote is like a repeating decimal; the father
is killed but never dies. The ministers are our substitutes for
ourselves. Hence the political maxim of the swing of the pendulum.
Alexander and Staub have undertaken to explain the unconscious basis
of the crisis which is produced in the community when criminals are
permitted to go with no punishment or with light punishment. The study
of personality genesis shows that the sublimation of primitive impulses
is possible on the basis of a kind of primitive “social contract.” The
individual foregoes direct indulgences (which have the disadvantage
of bringing him into conflict with authority), and substitutes more
complex patterns of behavior on the tacit understanding that love and
safety will thereby be insured. When another individual breaks over
and gratifies his illicit impulses directly on a primitive level, the
equilibrium of every personality is threatened. The conscious self
perceives that it is possible to “get by,” and this threatens the
whole structure of sublimation. The superego tries to maintain order
by directing energy against the ego, perhaps subjecting it to “pricks
of conscience,” for so much as entertaining the possibility of illicit
gratification, and seeks to turn the ego toward activities which reduce
temptation. This may involve the reconstruction of the environment
by seeking to eliminate the “non-ideal” elements in it, and may be
exemplified in the panicky demand for the annihilation of the outsider
(who is a criminal) for the sake of keeping the chains on the insider
(who is a criminal). Every criminal is a threat to the whole social
order since he reinstates with more or less success an acute conflict
within the lives of all members of society. The success of the superego
depends upon imposing certain ways of interpreting reality upon the
self. When reality grossly refuses to conform to the “ideal,” the
energies of the self are divided, and an acute crisis supervenes. The
superego undertakes to reinforce its side of the contradictory ego
trends by punishing the ego, and by forcing the projection of this
situation upon the outer world. Certain aspects of the outer world
become “bad” because they are connected in private experience with the
pangs inflicted by the taskmaster within, the conscience. A strong
conscience may enforce this “distortion” of reality upon the self
to such a degree that the self acts on quite fantastic assumptions
about reality. These are most acutely manifested in such phenomena as
confusion states, hallucinations, and delusions, all of which are forms
of deformed reality. When reality becomes “ominous,” violent efforts to
change may appear futile, and safety is sought in physical flight, or
in physical passivity and autistic preoccupation. Since our conceptions
of reality are based upon little “first-hand” experience of the world
about us, the superego usually has a rather easy time of it.
Political movements, then, derive their vitality from the displacement
of private affects upon public objects, and political crises are
complicated by the concurrent reactivation of specific primitive
motives. Just how does it happen that the private and primitive drives
find their way to political symbols? What are the circumstances which
favor the selection of political targets of displacement?
Political life is carried on with symbols of the whole. Politics has
to do with collective processes and public acts, and so intricate are
these processes that with the best of intentions, it is extremely
difficult to establish an unambiguous relationship between the symbols
of the whole and the processes which they are presumed to designate. To
the common run of mankind the reference points of political symbols are
remote from daily experience, though they are rendered familiar through
constant reiteration. This ambiguity of reference, combined with
universality of use, renders the words which signify parties, classes,
nations, institutions, policies, and modes of political participation
readily available for the displacement of private affects. The
manifest, rational differences of opinion become complicated by the
play of private motives until the symbol is nothing but a focus for
the cumulation of irrelevancies. Since the dialectic of politics is
conducted in terms of the whole, the private motives are readily
rationalized in terms of collective advantage.
Politics, moreover, is the sphere of conflict, and brings out all the
vanity and venom, the narcissism and aggression, of the contending
parties. It is becoming something of a commonplace that politics is
the arena of the irrational. But a more accurate description would be
that politics is the process by which the irrational bases of society
are brought out into the open. So long as the moral order functions
with spontaneous smoothness, there is no questioning the justification
of prevailing values. But when the moral order has been devalued and
called into question, a sincere and general effort may be made to find
a reflectively defensible solution of the resulting conflict. Politics
seems to be irrational because it is the only phase of collective life
in which society tries to be rational. Its very existence shows that
the moral order, with all its irrational and non-rational sanctions, is
no longer accepted without a challenge. A political difference is the
outcome of a moral crisis, and it terminates in a new moral consensus.
Politics is the transition between one unchallenged consensus and the
next. It begins in conflict and eventuates in a solution. But the
solution is not the “rationally best” solution, but the emotionally
satisfactory one. The rational and dialectical phases of politics are
subsidiary to the process of redefining an emotional consensus.
Although the dynamic of politics is to be sought in the tension level
of the individuals in society, it is to be taken for granted that
all individual tensions are not removed by political symbolization
and exertion. When Y hits a foreman in the jaw whom he imagines has
insulted him, Y is relieving his tensions. But if the act is construed
by him as a personal affair with the foreman, the act is not political.
Political acts are joint acts; they depend upon emotional bonds.
Now people who act together get emotionally bound together. This
process of becoming emotionally bound is dependent on no conscious
process. Freud said that he was made clearly aware of the emotional
factor in human relations by observing that those who work together
extend their contact to dining and relaxing together. Those with
whom we work are endowed with rich meanings on the basis of our
past experience with human beings. Since all of our motives are
going concerns within the personality, our libido is more or less
concentrated upon those with whom we come in touch. This reinforces
the perception of similarities, and supplies the dynamic for the
identification process. Even the negative identification is a tribute
to the extent to which the affective resources of the personality
become mobilized in human contact.
People who are emotionally bound together are not yet involved in a
political movement. Politics begins when they achieve a symbolic
definition of themselves in relation to demands upon the world. The
pre-political phase of the labor movement as sketched by Nexo in his
_Pelle the Conqueror_ is an able characterization of what the facts may
be. The workers had plenty of grievances against their employers, but
individuals took it out in sporadic acts of violence, and in frequent
debauchery. It was not until a new “set” of mind was achieved with the
appearance of socialist symbols, and their adoption, that the tension
found an outlet in political form. When J hits a foreman on the jaw
because the foreman swore at him, J is not acting for the working
classes; but after J becomes a socialist, his acts are symbolically
significant of the expanded personality which he possesses. Acts cease
to be merely private acts; they have become related to remote social
objects. The conception of the self has new points of reference, and
points of reference which interlock with those of others.
It is of the utmost importance to political science to examine in
detail, not only the factors which contribute to the raising and
lowering of the tension level, but the processes of symbolization. In
regard to the former aspect of the problem, data will have to be taken
from specialists of many kinds, but in regard to the latter problem,
the student can come into ready contact with the raw material. The
stock in trade of realistic politics is the analysis of the history of
“pressure groups,” ranging from such associations as the Fabian Society
through political parties to conspirative organizations. What are the
conditions under which the idea is itself invented, and what are the
conditions of its propagation? That is to say: What are the laws of
symbolization in political activity?
I wish to call attention to certain possibilities. Several social
movements will be found which represent a desire on the part of an
intimate circle to perpetuate their relationship at the expense of
society. It is worth remembering that Loyola and the other young men
who founded the Jesuits were in long friendly relationship before
they hit upon their famous project. Not only that: they were anxious
to remain in some sort of personal relation through life, and they
invented many expedients before they hit on the final one. What we had
here was a friendly group which desired to preserve their personal
connections before they knew how they could actually do it. It is less
true to say that institutions are the lengthened shadow of a great man
than that they are the residue of a friendly few.
Other social movements will be found to have adopted their project
from a lone thinker with whom they have no direct connection. The
process here is that one member of the group, with whom the others are
identified, is impressed by the scheme, and interprets and defends it
to the others. He gets a hearing because of his emotional claim on
the others, and he may whip the doubters and waverers into line by
wheedling or by threatening to withdraw affection.
The formation of a radiating nucleus for an idea is especially common
among adolescents, and among those who function best in single-sex
groups. Thrasher has described gangs which had a mission in his book
on _The Gang_, and the literature of youth study is full of instances
of two’s, three’s and quartettes which have sworn undying fealty to
one another, and to a project of social reform. When the idea is
embraced later in life it not infrequently appears among those who have
shown pronounced evidence of emotional maladjustment. Much social
and political life is a symptom of the delayed adolescence of its
propagators, which is, of course, no necessary criticism of its content.
The psychology of personal, oratorical, and printed persuasion by means
of which support is won for particular symbols has yet to be written.
William I. Thomas long ago commented on the quasi-sexual approach
of the revivalist to the audience. Some orators are of an intimate,
sympathetic, pleading type, and resemble the attempts made by some
males to overcome the shyness of the female. Other orators fit into
the feared yet revered father-pattern; others are clowns who amuse by
releasing much repressed material; others address the socially adjusted
and disciplined level of the personality. Thus the relationship between
the speaker and the audience has its powerful emotional aspects,
which are not yet adequately explored. There are some who excel in
face-to-face relations, but who make a poor showing out on the platform.
The processes of symbolization can be studied with particular ease
when widespread and disturbing changes occur in the life-situation of
many members of society. Famine, pestilence, unemployment, high living
costs, and a catalogue of other disturbances may simultaneously produce
adjustment problems for many people. One of the first results is to
release affects from their previous objects, and to create a state of
susceptibility to proposals. All sorts of symbols are ready, or readily
invented, to refix the mobile affects. “Take it to the Lord in prayer,”
“Vote socialist,” “Down with the Jews,” “Restore pep with pepsin,” “Try
your luck on the horses”--all sorts of alternatives become available.
The prescriptions are tied up with diagnoses, and the diagnoses in
turn imply prescriptions. “A sinful world,” “Wall Street,” “a collapse
in the foreign market”--all sorts of diagnoses float about, steadily
defining and redefining the situation for the individuals affected.
Political symbols must compete with symbols from every sphere of life,
and an interesting inquiry could be made into the relative polarizing
power of political and other forms of social symbolism. Certainly the
modern world expects to fire the health commissioner rather than burn a
witch when the plague breaks out.
The competition among symbols to serve as foci of concentration for
the aroused emotions of the community leads to the survival of a small
number of master-symbols. The mobilization of the community for action
demands economy in the terms in which objectives are put. The agitation
for the control of the liquor traffic passed through many phases in
America until finally legal prohibition became the chief dividing-line.
To prohibit or not to prohibit grew into the overmastering dichotomy of
public thought.
Symbolization thus necessitates dichotomization. The program of social
action must be couched in “yes” and “no” form if decision is to be
possible. The problem of he who would manipulate the concentration
of affect about a particular symbol is to reinforce its competitive
power by leading as many elements as possible in society to read
their private meanings into it. This reinforcement and facilitation
of the symbol involves the use of men of prestige in its advocacy,
the assimilation of special economic and other group aims, and the
invention of appeals to unconscious drives. Propaganda on behalf of a
symbol can become a powerful factor in social development because of
the flexibility in the displacement of emotion from one set of symbols
to another. There is always a rather considerable reservoir of unrest
and discontent in society, and there is nothing absolutely fixed and
predestined about the particular symbol which will have attracting
power.
The analysis of motives which are unconscious for most people, though
widespread, gives the propagandist a clue to certain nearly universal
forms of appeal. The moving pictures which have been produced by the
communist government in Russia are often remarkable examples of the use
of symbols which not only have their conscious affective dimension, but
which mobilize deep unconscious impulses. In one film, for instance, it
is the mother who suffers under tsarism and fans the flames of revolt.
Analysis has disclosed the general, and presumably universal, meaning
of the attachment to the land. The boy-child’s wish for union with the
mother, for all-embracing care and protection, undergoes some measure
of sublimation in social life. Eder remarks that it finds expression
in attachment to the earth, the land, the mother-country, home. The
_Heimweh_ of the Swiss, the pious Jew’s desire for burial in Palestine,
and a host of similar manifestations are instances of this emotional
tie whose significance for state loyalty is large.
At first sight it might appear questionable that political science
can ever profit from the disclosure of motives which are supposed to
operate in the unconscious of every human being. If these motives
are equally operative, how can they throw any light on differences
in political behavior? And are we not able to point to conditions of
a more localized and definite nature which suitably explain why the
Republican party loses out when the farmer loses his crops? Or why
there is revolution in 1918 and not in 1925?
The mere fact that motives are more or less universal does not
mean that they are always activated with the same intensity. They
may block one another, until some exciting condition disturbs the
adjustment and releases stores of energy. Indeed, the exploration of
unconscious motivation lays the basis for the understanding of the
well-known disproportionality between responses and immediate stimuli,
a disproportionality which has been the subject of much puzzled and
satiric comment. Farmers do vote against the Republicans when the crops
fail through adverse weather conditions, although reflection would tend
to minimize the possibility that the party in power exercises much
authority over the weather. Oversights in personal relations which seem
very slight do actually give rise to huge affective reactions. The clue
to the magnitude of this notorious disproportionality is to be found
in the nature of the deeper (earlier) psychological structures of the
individual. By the intensive analysis of representative people, it is
possible to obtain clues to the nature of these “unseen forces,” and to
devise ways and means of dealing with them for the accomplishment of
social purposes.
Modern democratic society is accustomed to the settlement of
differences in discussion and in voting. This is a special form of
politics, for differences may also be settled with a minimum of
discussion and a maximum of coercion. In its modern manifestation,
democracy and representative government have enthroned “government by
discussion,” that is, “government by public opinion.” President Lowell
some time ago pointed out that public opinion could only be said to
exist where constitutional principles were agreed upon. Differences
must be treated as defined within an area of agreement. Democratic
and representative institutions presuppose the existence of the
public which is made up of all those who follow affairs and expect to
determine policy in discussion and by measures short of coercion. The
public has a common focus of attention, a consensus on constitutional
principles, and a zone of tolerance for conflicting demands respecting
social policy.
When debate is admissible, some standards of right are tacitly admitted
to be uncertain. The zone of the debatable is not fixed and immutable,
but flexible and shifting. Questions rise and debate proceeds; and
presently the resulting solution is no longer discussible. It has
become sanctified by all the sentiments which buttress the moral order,
and any challenge is met by the unanimous and spontaneous action of the
community in its defense. In the presence of a challenge, the public
may be dissolved into a crowd, by which is meant a group whose members
are emotionally aroused and intolerant of dissent.
What light does the study of the genesis of personality throw on the
factors which determine which symbols are debatable? What is the
mechanism of the process by which the moral patterns are broken up,
discussed, and eventually reincorporated in more or less modified form
into the moral consensus of the community?
The growth of emotional bonds among individuals of diverse cultural
and personal traits is the most powerful solvent of the moral order.
A valuable treatise could be constructed on the theme, “Friendship
versus Morality.” It is well-known that governments are continually
handicapped in the impersonal application of a rule by the play of
personal loyalties. Robert E. Park has stressed the importance of
curiosity in the field of interracial relations. In no small measure
this is very primitive curiosity about the sexual structure and
behavior of odd-looking folks. When personal ties are built up,
exceptions are made in favor of the friend; what, indeed, is the
constitution among friends?
The mechanism is clear by which issues once settled are presently
non-debatable. Growing individuals incorporate the end result into
their own personalities through the process of identification and
introjection. Once a part of the superego of the rising generation,
the moral consensus is complete. Where no dissent is tolerated and
dialectic is impossible, we are dealing with a superego phenomenon.
Certain symbols are sacrosanct, and aspersions upon them produce the
crowd mind and not the public.[52]
Even this brief sketch of political symbolization has shown ample
grounds for concluding that political demands probably bear but a
limited relevance to social needs. The political symbol becomes ladened
with the residue of successive positive and negative identifications,
and with the emotional charge of displaced private motives. This
accumulation of irrelevancy usually signifies that tension exists in
the lives of many people, and it may possess a diagnostic value to the
objective investigator. The individual who is sorely divided against
himself may seek peace by unifying himself against an outsider. This
is the well-known “peacefulness of being at war.” But the permanent
removal of the tensions of the personality may depend upon the
reconstruction of the individual’s view of the world, and not upon
belligerent crusades to change the world.
The democratic state depends upon the technique of discussion to
relieve the strains of adjustment to a changing world. If the analysis
of the individual discloses the probable irrelevance of what the person
demands to what he needs (i.e., to that which will produce a permanent
relief of strain), serious doubt is cast upon the efficacy of the
technique of discussion as a means of handling social problems.
The premise of democracy is that each man is the best judge of his own
interest, and that all whose interests are affected should be consulted
in the determination of policy. Thus the procedure of a democratic
society is to clear the way to the presentation of various demands by
interested parties, leaving the coast clear for bargain and compromise,
or for creative invention and integration.
The findings of personality research show that the individual is a
poor judge of his own interest. The individual who chooses a political
policy as a symbol of his wants is usually trying to relieve his own
disorders by irrelevant palliatives. An examination of the total state
of the person will frequently show that his theory of his own interests
is far removed from the course of procedure which will give him a happy
and well-adjusted life. Human behavior toward remote social objects,
familiarity with which is beyond the personal experience of but a few,
is especially likely to be a symptomatic rather than a healthy and
reflective adjustment.
In a sense politics proceeds by the creation of fictitious values. The
person who is solicited to testify to his own interest is stimulated
by the problem put to him to commit himself. The terms in which he
couches his own interest vary according to a multitude of factors, but
whatever the conditioning influences may be, the resulting theory of
his interest becomes invested with his own narcissism. The political
symbol is presumably an instrumental makeshift toward the advancement
of the other values of the personality; but it very quickly ceases to
be an instrumental value, and becomes a terminal value, no longer the
servant but the coequal, or indeed the master. Thus the human animal
distinguishes himself by his infinite capacity for making ends of his
means.
It should not be hastily assumed that because a particular set of
controversies passes out of the public mind that the implied problems
were solved in any fundamental sense. Quite often the solution is a
magical solution which changes nothing in the conditions affecting the
tension level of the community, and which merely permits the community
to distract its attention to another set of equally irrelevant symbols.
The number of statutes which pass the legislature, or the number of
decrees which are handed down by the executive, but which change
nothing in the permanent practices of society, is a rough index of the
rôle of magic in politics.
In some measure, of course, discontent is relieved in the very process
of agitating, discussing, and legislating about social changes which in
the end are not substantially affected. Political symbolization has its
catharsis function, and consumes the energies which are released by the
maladaptations of individuals to one another.
But discussion often leads to modifications in social practice which
complicate social problems. About all that can be said for various
punitive measures resorted to by the community is that they have
presently broken down and ceased to continue the damage which they
began to inflict on society.
Generalizing broadly, political methods have historically been of three
kinds: the method of violence, of exhortation, and of discussion.
All these methods have the common characteristic that they are to
be applied in the settlement of conflicting demands, and not in the
obviation of conflict. In so far as they rest upon a philosophy, they
identify the problem of politics with the problem of coping with
differences which are sharply drawn.
The identification of the field of politics with the field of battle,
whether the theater be the frontier or the forum, has produced an
unfortunate warp in the minds of those who manage affairs, or those
who simply think about the management of affairs. The contribution
of politics has been thought to be in the elaboration of the methods
by which conflicts are resolved. This has produced a vast diversion
of energy toward the study of the formal etiquette of government. In
some vague way, the problem of politics is the advancement of the good
life, but this is at once assumed to depend upon the modification of
the mechanisms of government. Democratic theorists in particular have
hastily assumed that social harmony depends upon discussion, and that
discussion depends upon the formal consultation of all those affected
by social policies.
The time has come to abandon the assumption that the problem of
politics is the problem of promoting discussion among all the interests
concerned in a given problem. Discussion frequently complicates social
difficulties, for the discussion by far-flung interests arouses a
psychology of conflict which produces obstructive, fictitious, and
irrelevant values. The problem of politics is less to solve conflicts
than to prevent them; less to serve as a safety valve for social
protest than to apply social energy to the abolition of recurrent
sources of strain in society.
This redefinition of the problem of politics may be called the idea
of preventive politics. The politics of prevention draws attention
squarely to the central problem of reducing the level of strain
and maladaptation in society. In some measure it will proceed by
encouraging discussion among all those who are affected by social
policy, but this will be no iron-clad rule. In some measure it will
proceed by improving the machinery of settling disputes, but this will
be subordinated to a comprehensive program, and no longer treated as an
especially desirable mode of handling the situation.
The recognition that people are poor judges of their own interest is
often supposed to lead to the conclusion that a dictator is essential.
But no student of individual psychology can fail to share the
conviction of Kempf that “Society is _not_ safe.... when it is forced
to follow the dictations of one individual, of one autonomic apparatus,
no matter how splendidly and altruistically it may be conditioned.”
Our thinking has too long been misled by the threadbare terminology of
democracy versus dictatorship, of democracy versus aristocracy. Our
problem is to be ruled by the truth about the conditions of harmonious
human relations, and the discovery of the truth is an object of
specialized research; it is no monopoly of people as people, or of the
ruler as ruler. As our devices of accurate ascertainment are invented
and spread, they are explained and applied by many individuals inside
the social order. Knowledge of this kind is a slow and laborious
accumulation.
The politics of prevention does not depend upon a series of changes in
the organization of government. It depends upon a reorientation in the
minds of those who think about society around the central problems:
What are the principal factors which modify the tension level of the
community? What is the specific relevance of a proposed line of action
to the temporary and permanent modification of the tension level?
The politics of prevention will insist upon a rigorous audit of the
human consequences of prevailing political practices. How does politics
affect politicians? One way to consider the human value of social
action is to see what that form of social action does to the actors.
When a judge has been on the bench thirty years, what manner of man has
he become? When an agitator has been agitating for thirty years, what
has happened to him? How do different kinds of political administrators
compare with doctors, musicians, and scientists? Such a set of
inquiries would presuppose that we were able to ascertain the traits
with which the various individuals began to practice their rôle in
society. Were we able to show what certain lines of human endeavor did
to the same reactive type, we would lay the foundation for a profound
change in society’s esteem for various occupations.
Any audit of the human significance of politics would have to press far
beyond the narrow circle of professional politicians. Crises like wars,
revolutions, and elections enter the lives of people in far-reaching
ways. The effect of crises on mental attitude is an important and
uncertain field. Thus it is reported that during the rebellion of
1745-46 in Scotland there was little hysteria (in the technical
pathological sense). The same was true of the French Revolution and of
the Irish Rebellion. Rush reported in his book _On the Influence of the
American Revolution on the Human Body_ that many hysterical women were
“restored to perfect health by the events of the time.” Havelock Ellis,
who cites these instances, comments that “in such cases the emotional
tension is given an opportunity for explosion in new and impersonal
channels, and the chain of morbid personal emotions is broken.”[53]
The physical consequences of political symbolism may be made the topic
of investigation from this point of view:
When the affect can not acquire what it needs, uncomfortable
tensions or anxiety (fear) are felt, and the use of the symbol or
fetish, relieving this anxiety, has a marked physiological value
in that it prevents the adrenal, thyroid, circulatory, hepatic and
pulmonic compensatory strivings from becoming excessive.[54]
Political programs will continually demand reconsideration in the light
of the factors which current research discloses as bearing upon the
tension level. Franz Alexander recently drew attention to the strains
produced in modern civilization by the growing sphere of purposive
action. He summed up the facts in the process of civilized development
in the following way: “Human expressions of instinct are subject to
a continual tendency to rationalization, that is, they develop more
and more from playful, uncoordinated, purely pleasure efforts into
purposive actions.” The “discomfort of civilization” of which Freud
recently wrote in the _Unbehagen der Kultur_ is characteristic of the
rationalized cultures with which we are acquainted. Life is poor in
libidinal gratifications of the primitive kind which the peasant,
who is in close touch with elementary things, is in a position to
enjoy.[55] Modern life furnishes irrational outlets in the moving
picture and in sensational crime news. But it may be that other means
of relieving the strain of modern living can be invented which will
have fewer drawbacks.
Preventive politics will search for the definite assessment, then, of
cultural patterns in terms of their human consequences. Some of these
human results will be deplored as “pathological,” while others will
be welcomed as “healthy.” One complicating factor is that valuable
contributions to culture are often made by men who are in other
respects pathological. Many pathological persons are constrained by
their personal difficulties to displace more or less successfully upon
remote problems, and to achieve valuable contributions to knowledge
and social policy.[56] Of course the notion of the pathological is
itself full of ambiguities. The individual who is subject to epileptic
seizures may be considered in one culture not a subnormal and diseased
person, but a supernormal person. Indeed, it may be said that society
depends upon a certain amount of pathology, in the sense that society
does not encourage the free criticism of social life, but establishes
taboos upon reflective thinking about its own presuppositions. If
the individual is pathological to the extent that he is unable to
contemplate any fact with equanimity, and to elaborate impulse through
the processes of thought, it is obvious that society does much to
nurture disease. This leads to the apparent paradox that successful
social adjustment consists in contracting the current diseases.
If “health” merely means a statistical report upon the “average,”
the scrutiny of the individual ceases to carry much meaning for the
modification of social patterns. But if “health” means something more
than “average,” the intensive study of individuals gives us a vantage
ground for the revaluation of the human consequences of cultural
patterns, and the criticism of these patterns.[57]
If the politics of prevention spreads in society, a different type of
education will become necessary for those who administer society or
think about it. This education will start from the proposition that it
takes longer to train a good social scientist than it takes to train
a good physical scientist.[58] The social administrator and social
scientist must be brought into direct contact with his material in
its most varied manifestations. He must mix with rich and poor, with
savage and civilized, with sick and well, with old and young. His
contacts must be primary and not exclusively secondary. He must have an
opportunity for prolonged self-scrutiny by the best-developed methods
of personality study, and he must laboriously achieve a capacity to
deal objectively with himself and with all others in human society.
This complicated experience is necessary since our scale of values is
less the outcome of our dialectical than of our other experiences in
life. Values change more by the unconscious redefinition of meaning
than by rational analysis. Every contact and every procedure which
discloses new facts has its repercussions upon the matrix of partially
verbalized experience, which is the seeding ground of conscious ideas.
One peculiarity of the problem of the social scientist is that he must
establish personal contact with his material. The physical scientist
who works in a laboratory spends more time adjusting his machinery
than in making his observations, and the social scientist who works in
the field must spend more time establishing contacts than in noting
and reporting observations. What the instrumentation technique is to
the physicist, the cultivation of favorable human points of vantage is
for most social scientists. This means that the student of society, as
well as the manager of social relations, must acquire the technique
of social intercourse in unusual degree, unless he is to suffer from
serious handicaps, and his training must be directed with this in mind.
The experience of the administrator-investigator must include some
definite familiarity with all the elements which bear importantly upon
the traits and interests of the individual. This means that he must
have the most relevant material brought to his attention from the
fields of psychology, psychopathology, physiology, medicine, and social
science. Since our institutions of higher learning are poorly organized
at the present time to handle this program, thorough curricular
reconstructions will be indispensable.[59]
* * * * *
What has been said in this chapter may be passed in brief review.
Political movements derive their vitality from the displacement of
private affects upon public objects. Political crises are complicated
by the concurrent reactivation of specific primitive motives which
were organized in the early experience of the individuals concerned.
Political symbols are particularly adapted to serve as targets for
displaced affect because of their ambiguity of reference, in relation
to individual experience, and because of their general circulation.
Although the dynamic of politics is the tension level of individuals,
all tension does not produce political acts. Nor do all emotional bonds
lead to political action. Political acts depend upon the symbolization
of the discontent of the individual in terms of a more inclusive self
which champions a set of demands for social action.
Political demands are of limited relevance to the changes which will
produce permanent reductions in the tension level of society. The
political methods of coercion, exhortation, and discussion assume that
the rôle of politics is to solve conflicts when they have happened.
The ideal of a politics of prevention is to obviate conflict by the
definite reduction of the tension level of society by effective
methods, of which discussion will be but one. The preventive point
of view insists upon a continuing audit of the human consequences of
social acts, and especially of political acts. The achievement of
the ideal of preventive politics depends less upon changes in social
organization than upon improving the methods and the education of
social administrators and social scientists.
The preventive politics of the future will be intimately allied to
general medicine, psychopathology, physiological psychology, and
related disciplines. Its practitioners will gradually win respect in
society among puzzled people who feel their responsibilities and who
respect objective findings. A comprehensive functional conception of
political life will state problems of investigation, and keep receptive
the minds of those who reflect at length upon the state.
CHAPTER XI[60]
THE PROLONGED INTERVIEW AND ITS OBJECTIFICATION
The empirical material assembled in this book has appeared in the
course of prolonged interviews with individuals under unusually
intimate conditions. This method of the prolonged interview has now
had a history of some thirty years in the form devised by Freud,
but so far there are very few efforts to objectify the events which
transpire there. Otto Rank has written a series of studies of the
“interview situation” which is the most important effort so far made to
characterize the distinctive features of the method. But the empirical
material which is so far reported does not rest upon the verbatim
recording of what happens, except in a few specimen instances of highly
pathological cases, and attempts are only now being made to record some
of the principal physiological changes in the subject.
It will be remembered that Freud learned to predict the future course
of reminiscence by watching word slips, random movements, and many
other acts which were formerly dismissed as chance occurrences. He also
found that he could abbreviate the laborious efforts of the patient
to recall the traumatic (the original) episode by proposing various
interpretations. It is at this point that the cautious physician
and psychologist have picked serious quarrels with psychoanalytical
findings. They allege that the patient produces the kind of material
which the analyst suggests is to be brought forth, and that the whole
process is one of putting a rabbit in the hat which you triumphantly
extricate later on. They have seized upon the schisms in the analytical
fold, and declare that you eventually dream about anima figures if you
are analyzed by Jung, that you relive birth traumas if you are analyzed
by Rank, and that you welter in a galaxy of anal, oral, and urethral
symbols if you are deeply analyzed by Freud. You talk about inferiority
feeling if you work with Adler, and about castrative anxiety if you
work with Freud.
One might suppose that after thirty years of labor there would be in
existence a body of documents which could be consulted by a group of
competent specialists who were trying to reconcile their differences
and doubts about what actually goes on in the analytical interview.[61]
At the present time the interview situation is poorly reflected in the
notes taken by the analyst at the expiration of each period (if and
when he takes them). Nobody knows what processes distort the reporting
practices of different listeners, and nobody knows the value of the
published scraps. Since one of the avowed purposes of therapeutic
analyses is to bring the person to stand on his own feet and to stop
leaning on others, or upon symptom indulgences, personal relations
are usually broken off at the end of the interview. This obviously
impedes the possibility of following up the subsequent history of
the personality, and of ascertaining the stability of the supposed
therapeutic results. The case-history documents available in good
institutions have the advantage of representing the combined product
of several people who are in touch with the subject, and who may be
supposed to operate as a check upon one another. But these documents
are usually short, and betray the psychopathological slant of the ones
chiefly responsible. And these documents are typically incomplete
in reporting the whole personality of the subject on account of the
clinician’s interest in the more circumscribed disease phenomena
displayed.
When John Brown reports an episode in which he was told that his nose
would be cut off if he didn’t quit handling himself, how do we know
what importance to assign to the alleged reminiscence? Are we to accept
this as a historical statement? Are we to construe it as a fabrication
which, however, shows what he wanted to have happen, or supposed would
happen, if he disobeyed orders? Are we to interpret it as a sign of his
fear of the interviewer, couched in the language of the past, because
this mode of exercising the imagination has been trained into him? Are
we to interpret this as a sign of his hatred of the interviewer, on the
theory that a self-punishing fantasy is a defense of the conscience
against a murderous impulse of the unadjusted portion of the self? Are
we to accept it as an effort to win the approval of the interviewer
by reporting the kinds of things which he has learned to suppose the
interviewer wants to hear, a supposition which is based upon a private
study of psychoanalytical literature? Are we to accept it as an
“original trauma” and to expect an immediate or eventual decrease in
the neurotic anxiety which the individual shows? Are we to look upon it
as a screen reminiscence for a genuinely traumatic episode in which the
threat was made, not against his nose, but against his penis? Or is it
a screen for a prohibited impulse which was once activated, and which
seized upon a past episode and gave it the significance of a threat?
These are a few of the specific questions which can be raised about
the proffered material, and the scientific problem is to devise more
convincing demonstrations of the available theories, or more conclusive
refutations, than we now have. What are some of the criteria of a
“traumatic episode”? If the reminiscence is accompanied by much affect
(excitement), there is a presumption of its authenticity. And how is
affect measured? We depend at the present time upon the observer’s
judgment of the variations in the voice, and shifts in posture, or
the twitches and jerks of the body. This can be augmented under
experimental conditions by taking a continuous record of variations in
blood pressure, respiration, galvanic reflex, etc.--all of which offer
some indication of excitement.[62] We are thus able to improve our
assessment of the possible significance of the reports, speculations,
and general fantasies of the subject. It may be that in due course
we shall be able to differentiate on a physical basis between
“suppressions” and “repressions,” and that we shall be able to follow
through the transformations from beginning to end of the interviewing
process.
Our judgment of the “traumatic episode” is also influenced by the
subject’s certainty. If the subject reports that he believes what
he remembers, this has some value in raising a presumption. This is
especially true if the subject has fought against the idea, but it has
spontaneously continued to appear and plague his associations. But a
reported sense of certainty is flimsy stuff, unless this certainty
survives for some time. We know that individuals try to escape from
anxiety feelings by a flight into explanations, and that they are
ready to volunteer or to accept all kinds of interpretations of their
behavior rather than to continue to endure anxiety. This is the
basis for the credulity of the neurotic, and explains why everything
from mysterious “glandular unbalances” to “astral perturbations” are
accepted from time to time as completely adequate explanations of
personal troubles. So the subject’s reported certainty must survive
even disparaging suggestions and prolonged self-scrutiny, and become
emancipated from affect, if it is to be taken very literally.
Another criterion is the consistency of the reported episode with all
the other relevant facts. There must be something wrong about the
report that K was brutally punished by his father at a time which was
some years after the parent’s death.[63]
The obstacles which lie in the path of a research program which calls
for objective records of as much as possible of what transpires in the
interview situation are not to be minimized. The bulk of a verbatim
report of an hour’s conversation per day over several months is
almost overwhelming. But historians are accustomed to plow through
whole libraries of pages about Napoleon or Bismarck, and from the
standpoint of a comprehensive theory of personality development any
personality is almost as good as any other, although high elaboration
and distinguished achievement are advantages.
There are some points in favor of applying this technique of
personality study to people who are normal, at least in the sense
that they are suspected of normality by themselves and others. There
is a moral to be learned from some of Freud’s early mistakes when he
assigned critical significance to certain childhood experiences which
later investigation showed were very common. The clinical caricature
is invaluable for the high relief in which certain tendencies of
the normal are revealed. Indeed, “normality” is more difficult to
understand than disease, from one point of view, since it involves a
complicated integration of many tendencies, a flexible capacity to
snap from one mood, preoccupation, and overt activity to another, as
the changing demands of reality require. Normality is complexity and
integration, and it ought to be approached as directly as possible as a
control on the pathological.
The main advantage which the normal subject hopes to glean from the
analytical interview is a judgment of the importance of this, in
comparison with other, psychological methods. Records being as they
are today, only one who has been through the mill can talk with
much assurance about what happens, and if he has a critical mind,
he isn’t too sure then. The analytical interview is a discipline in
self-scrutiny. The subject learns to exploit a new method of using the
mind, which he tries to cultivate and to correlate with the logical
methods to which he is partly accustomed in ordinary adult life. The
new technique of using the mind is the free-fantasy technique, whose
chief function is to produce new material for logical consideration.
The interview necessitates the reactivation of the individual’s
struggle with his antisocial impulses. This happens be the subject
sick or well, for every individual possesses more or less active and
powerful antisocial drives. Every personality displays some pathology
in the form of remainders of the Oedipus phase of growth. The socially
adjusted portion of the personality takes up the battle again against
the unsublimated drives, and a considerable amount of neurotic anxiety
is generated in the process. The problem is to encourage the subject
to face these unadjusted remnants frankly, to bring them to the full
focus of waking consciousness, and to discharge their bound energy.
This comes to pass in the roundabout way of recapturing the original
episodes in which the neurotic solution was invented. The work of
reminiscence is the preliminary to liberation and understanding.
The interview substitutes the talking-out for the acting-out of
personality drives. One learns to recover the critical points in
one’s past history by watching the present for clues to the full
meaning of the present situation, and this includes the inspection
of reminiscences. A reminiscence is always relevant to a present
situation, and serves the double rôle of annotating the present and
reporting the past. The interview experience is long and arduous, and
the subject learns very slowly to deal with himself as an object in
a world of objects, and to free his judgment more and more from the
distorting effects of primitive psychological structures.
The analytical situation is so arranged as to facilitate this process
of self-inspection. The provocations to act out rather than think out
are reduced by simplifying the sensory present. The subject lies in
a relaxed position, and is better able to observe those stiffenings
of the body, those variations in respiration, those oscillations of
visceral tension, those impulses to scratch and finger which escape
ordinary attention, but which are indicative of the meanings put in
the current situation. The sensory environment remains substantially
constant, and the interviewer handles the situation on a rather fixed
routine. The subject is temporarily encysted from the demands of
professional and conventional tasks, but the interviewer is present
to prevent the individual from dissipating his energy in musings which
are quickly forgotten. The interviewer is a prod to associate freely,
and a spur to the critical consideration of the material supplied by
the freely moving fancy. The necessity for verbalization brings the
acts of fantasy into clearer focus than usual, which is a necessary
preliminary to moments of sustained logical reflection. Since the
interviewer permits the subject to disregard the usual amenities of
society, and to let his fantasies fly for the sake of finding where
they land, regressive responses are permitted to appear. That is, the
individual is not required to adjust to a conventional world of adult
reality, but is permitted to reactivate earlier forms of dealing with
the world. In the world of adult reality, the multiple tendencies of
the individual are canalized into conventionally acceptable forms,
and the most maladapted drives may display themselves in unobtrusive
variations on the pattern. When conventional reality is no longer
present, and the individual is encouraged to watch his partly forming
responses, rather than to co-ordinate, condense, ignore, or suppress
them, these tendencies spread forth diffusely in imagination and
reminiscence. When this process continues far enough, the individual
achieves a high degree of insight into the genetic development of his
current preoccupations and traits.
Since the analytical process is a period of strain for the subject, it
may be wondered why it is bearable. Fortunately for the investigator,
there are many advantages to the participant which sustain and fortify
his conscious purpose to persevere until understanding has been
substantially deepened. The analyst treats every manifestation of the
personality, no matter how trivial, with respectful interest. This is
exaggerated unconsciously by the subject, who greatly overestimates
the personal affection which the interviewer has for him. Some of
the energy of the personality is always free to begin new object
attachments, and this energy is concentrated upon the interviewer.
The subject is permitted to talk at length about himself, and when
the interviewer listens attentively and patiently, the subject
identifies himself with the listener on the basis of a common attitude
of interest in a beloved object. The interviewer’s ascendancy in
technical knowledge (his authority) resembles the authority of the
adults who were once supposed to possess unlimited knowledge. The
day-by-day solicitude tends to reinstate the emotions of the early
family situation in which the child could play irresponsibly, under the
watchful, responsible care of the adult. The subject relaxes the effort
to keep bawdy, disloyal, mean, and revengeful thoughts from welling
into this mind. The frank expression of these thoughts in ordinary
social life would bring down punishment upon his head, or mark him
out as a victim of mental disorder. The subject is enabled to welter
in unsocial or antisocial ravings and imaginings, and the process of
developing these symptoms in the presence of another person becomes
an absorbing part of his daily, weekly, and monthly existence. The
subject intensifies his warm emotional interest in the one who exempts
him from society’s code of reticence. This is a mark of the analyst’s
tremendous power, and also of the analyst’s special interest in the
subject. The free-fantasy procedure even exempts the individual from
abiding by the ordinary forms of logic and grammar. He is also able to
enjoy the pleasure of impressing someone else with the brilliance of
his language. From time to time, new insight comes into old habits and
worries, and the zest of intellectual comprehension is added to the
other pleasures.
At first sight the teaching or research interview might seem to
sacrifice the most powerful motive upon which the interviewing
procedure has relied, namely, that of securing relief from disturbing
symptoms. The individual who is suffering from some crude pathological
disturbance, like a functional gastro-intestinal disorder,
psychological impotence, obsessive ideas and compulsions, comes to
the interviewer as a weak person seeking aid of a stronger. If he has
been shuttled from one internist to another perhaps receiving derisive
looks and contemptuous preachments, the objective interest with which
the psychotherapist treats his symptoms produces a keen conscious
and unconscious gratification. Even the symptoms are beloved parts
of the self, and like the ugly ducklings, they are sometimes treated
with special affection (Ferenczi). The hope of being relieved of the
annoying symptoms, which is consciously present in many pathological
cases, is supported on the unconscious level by an old infantile
attitude which expects the interviewer to work miracles. Even some of
the antisocial impulses of the personality may welcome the therapeutic
situation. These antisocial tendencies are themselves not entirely
gratified in the symptoms, for the nature of a symptom is a compromise
between these antisocial tendencies and the socialized impulses of the
self. Nunberg has pointed out that the unsocialized portions of the
personality may support the misguided hope that the outcome of therapy
will be the boundless and unlimited gratification of their demands.
There is also evidence of the existence of a compulsion to confess
(Reik) to antisocial tendencies, which are rejected by the socialized
self, and thus to gratify an unconscious need of punishment.
Now the sense of being sick and the desire to get well are not entirely
absent from any normal person. No one is entirely free from remnants
of his adjustive problems, and no one is entirely satisfied with
himself. At the beginning of the interview, this motive may appear in
consciousness as nothing more substantial than the innocuous belief
that any increase in self-knowledge will enable one to deal even more
satisfactorily with personal problems as they arise.
Among the other motives which play into the analytical situation,
and enable the subject to go through with it, may be mentioned a few
very primitive ones. Life has meant the blocking of many impulses by
authorities whose power cannot be successfully defied on the spot.
Hatreds can only express themselves under these conditions with some
prospects of success when they seek to overcome the superior by
trying to take his power into one’s own personality by copying him.
That is to say, the individual seeks to identify himself with the one
who possesses superior knowledge in the analytical situation, and by
becoming like him, to secure independence, and thus to annihilate
him as an intimidating and obstructive external object. There may be
a desire to secure a weapon by means of which other people may be
eviscerated, and deprived of their power to outstrip the individual.
On the conscious level, these motives are partly visible in excessive
aspirations for self-mastery and control. This taking-in and biting-off
of the analyst’s power is also rooted in some of the earliest reaction
patterns which the infant displays toward objects. The sheer pleasure
of talking, and giving and withholding information is also present.
As the subject withdraws attention from the original symptoms or
motives, concentrates on the game of dilating upon the past, and
indulges in prohibited delights, the analytical situation becomes an
orgy of illicit pleasure. Emotions are released from old channels and
find new objects of crystallization, especially in the person of the
analyst. The interviewer who permits this “transference” is now in a
position to aid the subject in coming to grips with the underlying
unsocialized impulses of the personality. The behavior of the subject
has by this time given a host of clues to the history of his emotional
growth. The analyst continues to stimulate the individual to scrutinize
his associations, to state honestly the wayward wishes flit across his
mind, or which lurk half-seen in the marginal recesses of attention.
Back and forth, bit by bit, there is reconstructed the subjective
history of a life. To put it metaphorically, old sores run anew,
smoldering embers of jealousy and lust flame once more, and ancient
wounds yawn again. Reminiscence reguilds the faded tapestries of the
past, and restores to the full glare of consciousness the cobwebs of
the mind which house the spiders of malevolence and lechery. Primitive
meanings, once appropriate to a situation, and later projected
unintentionally into the adult world, are recovered and criticized in
the light of their appropriateness to society. Regressive reliving,
which is powerfully supported by narcissism and the repetitive
compulsion, is observed and overcome.
It should not be supposed that the secrets of the mind are exposed for
the asking. The method of repression is a primitive means by which
the feeble, nascent self seeks protection from impulses which, if
tolerated, if not shut out with unreflecting violence, would overrun
it (Alexander). When the self becomes strong and stable, primitive
impulses can be permitted to develop farther in consciousness without
imminent danger that they will pass over into action by controlling
the motor apparatus. Now the critical, reflecting, deciding self must
not be crippled by an unduly strong conscience. The structure which
we know as the conscience is begun in early childhood, and is formed
by the incorporation into the self of the orders and commands which
are administered by authority. When the self is weak, as during these
formative years, the conscience relies on crude methods to protect its
hard-won ascendancy over the antisocial drives in the personality.
It visits penalties of anxiety upon the self whenever there are any
signs of leniency toward these impulses. The conscience keeps its
summary, sadistic quality long after, and neurotics are properly said
to suffer from an excess of conscience. Blind denial of the existence
of fundamental trends in the personality must be supplanted, and the
_obiter dicta_ of the conscience subjected to the criticism of the more
mature and experienced self. An obstacle to this procedure is furnished
by those energies of the personality which are specialized in resisting
the antisocial impulses which have been repressed and denied direct
and undisguised access to consciousness. Any lowering of resistance
subjects the individual to acute anxiety, as the conflict between the
socialized and the unsocialized drives is reinstated. All sorts of
subterfuges are hit upon to obviate the necessity for enduring this
anxiety and bringing the hidden into consciousness, where it can lose
its charge. The overcoming of this resistance to taking up the battle
again is a major process in the prolonged analysis.
The recapitulation of the drives which the individual has experienced
throughout his life is the process which lends unique value to the
psychoanalytic interview record. The literature of psychoanalysis
is full of sample fantasies which are assigned to places in the
hypothetical sequence of personality growth. Over twenty years ago
Freud wrote some preliminary remarks on character types, especially
stressing the rôle of certain excretory pleasures in the development of
some psychological structures. The sucking, biting and anal retention
interests of the infant and young child have been the subject of
theoretical treatment by several analysts, among whom Abraham is the
most important. Ferenczi has sketched a comprehensive theory of the
rise of genital interests on the part of the child, and this has been
amplified in various directions by Reich. The differences between male
and female development have been sketched by Sachs, Deutsch, and Horney.
It is not within the necessary limits of this discussion to go farther
into the nature of the hypotheses which have been proposed by these
various investigators. We will be able to formulate them more precisely
when we have succeeded in objectifying what happens in the course of
the interview, and this is to be achieved along the lines previously
sketched. Some day we can state hypotheses more definitely which can be
taken and tested by non-analytical methods. Some of these conceptions
can be confirmed or eliminated by the direct observation of children
of all age groups. It is quite possible, however, paradoxical though
it may sound, that the best way to study some phases of infancy and
childhood will be to study the adult. There is some reason to believe
that the superior expressive power of the adult, whether in words or
in drawing, may render explicit many states which are beyond the scope
of one who merely looks at movements. If we find that the subjective
reconstructions during the adult analysis check closely with the
results secured by modified analytical and behavioristic procedures
applied directly to older children, we will have more confidence
in the material which purports to relate to very early experience.
We may also test out as far as possible the “historicity” of the
reminiscences produced at different phases of the analysis. It should
be said in passing that the analysis of children requires important
revisions in the externals of the technique, as Anna Freud has shown.
I want to stop at this point to comment upon the significance of the
fact there should be such a thing as the psychoanalytic method of
dealing with the genesis of personality. How does it happen that at
the end of the nineteenth century there appeared in Western European
civilization this remarkably intricate procedure? Why do we regard it
as worth while to spend months or even years in constant introspection?
Viewed in the large, I suppose this is the most spectacular sign of the
value crisis in our civilization. Here is an effort to stimulate the
individual to the reconstruction of values, not on the basis of imposed
authority, but through prolonged scrutiny of the self as a process.
The processes of the human personality are subjected to the same
patient, arduous, and minute inspection which has proved so successful
when applied to the objects of the physical world by the naturalist,
astronomer, and microscopic specialist. The end result of a long and
successful analysis is an individual who is able to interpret his
relation to the world in terms of a few master-symbols. These symbols
take on meaning because they have been acquired in the course of a long
apprenticeship under the exacting eye of another. These symbols define
for the individual in comprehensive terms his relation to unfolding
reality. They permit in favorable instances added smoothness of
adjustment, and offer a means of relief from disproportionate feelings
of futility, despondency, persecution, and omniscience.
The appearance of a system of communicable master-symbols for the
definition of one’s relation to the universe is anything but a novel
phenomenon in the culture history of mankind. At one time a leading
question was, “What is God’s will for me?” The belief was that this
could be made manifest after the reading of Holy Writ, reverent
supplication, and sudden revelation. Our Western civilization has
sapped at the pillars of this structure of thinking. We are committed
to the persistent querying of the world of change, and the problem is
always “_How_ does it change?” How do the routines of the seeable,
smellable, touchable, audible, tasteable universe actually work? In
what characteristic order do the subjective events of the mind follow
one another? In what order do subjective and objective events occur?
And no matter how many intermediate links in the sequence have been
named there always remain new intermediate and new all-embracing frames
of reference to be identified and placed in orderly relationship.
Values are sought to be defined, not on the authority of another, but
in the act of scrutinizing processes. We place enormous value upon
the quest for sequences, and discover our new values in the act of
broadening or deepening our understanding of change. If you tell a
sophisticated carrier of Western culture that God reveals his wisdom
after the reading of a printed passage, he will be less impressed by
what is put in than by what is left out of the account. What relation
is there between what is read and what is decided? Can you set up
controlled repetitions for the sake of testing the predictive value
of these generalizations? Are there other words which can be read but
which will result in the same decisions when the reader has the same
pecuniary stake in acting a certain way? And so on and on.
It is worth noticing that the symbols supplied by analysis are not
“ought” words but “process” words. You are not told to die for your
country; you are told to face all the values which you can find in the
situation. This does not, however, eliminate the “arbitrary” character
of decisions actually reached. The decision comes with all the shock
of revelation, of inevitability, of unexpectedness; the individual may
only control decisions by rehearsing the pertinent values until he
finds himself in the clutches of a judgment. This willingness to accept
uncertainty, to scrutinize intermediate terms and pertinent values, is
an outcome of the analytical discipline.
Such a procedure grew up in a civilization whose values have been in
confusion since the medieval cosmology broke down. President Masaryk,
serious thinker and scholarly writer, began his sociological work with
a study of suicide, which he found to be a rough index of the value
strains in culture. When emotional bonds are forged with exponents of
life-patterns of different design, the mental stage is set for both
creative originality and destructive disintegration. The individual
must assume the load of working out his own scheme of values, and many
are disorganized in the attempt.
The validation of the prolonged interview as a contributor to our
dependable knowledge about life depends upon objectifying its
processes; the achievement of its implications for the reconstruction
of the hierarchy of individual values is an impressionistic and often
turbulent experience.[64]
CHAPTER XII[65]
THE PERSONALITY SYSTEM AND ITS SUBSTITUTIVE REACTIONS
So far in this book human behavior has been interpreted in terms of
various “tendencies” which such behavior is supposed to manifest.
Suppose we call into question this type of psychological explanation.
What, after all, is a “tendency”? It postulates a relationship between
events, one of which is taken as the terminal situation, and others of
which are treated as relative approximations to the type situation.
Terms like “wishes,” “desires,” “instincts,” “impulses,” “drives,” and
“motives” are all employed in this sense.
For purposes of analysis, tendency interpretations may be divided into
five main classes, depending on the nature of the relationship which
is postulated between the approximate and the terminal situation.
First, personality events may be interpreted as approximations toward,
or realizations of, goals (terminals) which are communicated by the
subject. We may believe a man who tells us that he is running for a
train when we see him dashing along the street toward the railway
station.
Second, personality events may be interpreted as degrees of
approximation to subsequent events which are actually observed. Mr. C’s
solicitude for the health and welfare of the needy ones of the district
may be construed in the light of his subsequent campaign for Congress.
Third, personality events may be treated as degrees of resumption of
terminal situations of a type which have already been observed. Lying
in bed after waking up in the morning, whenever there are difficulties
to cope with, may be interpreted as a reactivation of an earlier
psychological impulse to lie still and be waited on.
Fourth, personality events may be construed as approximations to
“normal” terminal events which are observed for the biological or
cultural category of the individual. Thus heterosexuality may be
postulated as a tendency of a human being, although he consummates no
heterosexual adjustments.
Fifth, personality events may be interpreted in terms of end situations
which are “extreme” for the members of the species or the culture. Thus
the acts of man may be viewed as degrees of approximation to murder,
suicide, and incest.
Each sense in which the tendency conception is used is valid and useful
for certain purposes, and is exposed to characteristic liabilities to
error. Thus if we accept the man’s statement that he is running to
catch a train, we may be wrong; he may be running to the woods beyond
to escape the constable.
The reactive type of statement is an alternative (I should prefer to
say a supplement) to tendency generalizations. When we make a reactive
statement, we specify quite definitely the antecedent-consequent
relation to which reference is made. The specific stimulus-response
description of the events which elicit the knee jerk, or call out an
avoidance reaction to yellow cloth, illustrates what is meant here.
Of course the stimulus-response style of thinking is not nearly as
exhaustive, and the tendency style of thinking is not nearly as
ambiguous in actual application, as might appear at first glance. The
stimulus-response statement of how to elicit the knee jerk which is
usually given may be predictively valid in eight cases out of ten; but
there are “exceptions” which show how wide is the context of factors
which it would be necessary to include in the picture, were it nearly
complete. And when the stimulus-response mode of thinking is extended
from such relatively stable and touchable situations to those which
involve complex central (subjective) events in the sequence, it becomes
in reality a disguised form of tendency interpretation.
The chief possible virtue of tendency conceptions is in introducing
some sort of order in complex phenomena. If the observer tries to
enumerate all the body movements, all the electronic gyrations, all
the nuances of social adjustment which are thinkable in a given
constellation of personality events, he is likely to become lost
in aimless classification, and to prove barren in the invention of
procedures which are calculated to elicit particular aspects of the
whole which may be of high predictive value. The human mind is able to
operate with a very small number of categories with which to introduce
order into events, particularly when these are, for the most part,
still defined qualitatively. Clarity of thought demands economy in the
orienting frames of thought.
How a tendency simplification may lead to fruitful research for
predictively valuable particulars is shown in the case of Freud, in
contrast to Janet. Janet made remarkably clear classifications of
the psychopathological facts as he saw them, and although his terms
and categories were abundant, his work was comparatively sterile of
novel procedures for the modification of human personalities. Even
his classificatory pursuits were hampered by his little-criticized
assumptions. His notion that dreams were passing confusions which
were traceable to diminished psychological tension in sleep deprived
dream material of all significance as classifiable data, and he almost
completely ignored it. Freud, who tended to operate with a few bold
tendency simplifications, brought into the range of observation whole
categories of data which have high predictive value.
When tendency simplifications are used until vast numbers of instances
accumulate of their supposed operation, “subtendencies” (such as
the variations of the manifestations of the Oedipus constellation)
multiply apace until the problems of rendering one tendency consistent
with the expressions of another one carry scientific speculations
into the logical molds of legalism and dogmatic theology. If the
subtendencies are not modified, and long lists of special tendencies
are added, terminological difficulties likewise arise in applying the
unwieldy list. The long inventories of supposed instincts are less at
fault because they imply an unwarranted assurance about the innate
propensities of man than because they are “too numerous to mention,”
and introduce confusion rather than orienting principles in the field
of study.
Although the prediction of one set of tangible reactions from another
is the aim of scientific formulation, this by no means implies, then,
that the reactive style of thinking is the one best calculated to guide
the attention of the thinker to the selection of the most fruitful
hypotheses (“if” predictions). Indeed, especially valuable results have
been secured in the personality field by the pattern of thinking which
views a cross-section of facts as an expression of a few tendencies.
But a reactive style of thinking which operates with a few
simplifications might prove useful in the study of human personality
at the present time, since both the psychoanalytical and the
“itemistic” psychologies have a plethora of particulars with which they
are familiar, but suffer from certain crippling viewpoints inherent in
their early starting-points. Psychoanalysis is well accustomed to the
use of a few orienting terms, but since these are stated in “tendency”
form, there is much lack of emphasis upon rendering the objective marks
of their manifestation precise. The inventory psychologies though
accustomed to precision are accustomed to overlooking the woods for the
trees.
Can the personality be viewed as a system, and can we think of it in a
few terms which can be gradually objectified, and which indicate the
principal varieties of personality manifestation? If the personality
is a true system, interferences which are introduced at various points
ought often to produce substitutive reactions at many remote parts of
the personality. Personalities may be compared from one cross-section
to another, and from one personality to another, by exposing them to
similar interferences, and by examining the substitutive reaction
sequences which emerge.
For the purpose of summing up the personality at any given period, we
may consider it to be a constellation of the following action patterns:
object orientations, adjustive thinking, autistic reveries, somatic
reactions.
The object orientations of the individual are describable as various
degrees of assertiveness, provocativeness, or submissiveness toward
sexual and non-specifically sexual objects in the environment. In
extreme instances the individual may be abusive, insulting, domineering
toward superiors, colleagues, clients, and subordinates in his
profession, and toward his wife or mistress in intimate life; or he
may be cowed in his work and timid in his sexuality; or he may show
extreme variations between his professional and private levels of
behavior. These are the differentiating reactions upon which it is
hoped to throw some light by the examination of the personality system
in its principal manifestations.
Adjustive thinking has to do with the relationship of the individual
to reality. It issues in socially relevant acts, which on the
creative level mean contributions to science, art, administration,
and philosophy. Autistic thinking is highly egocentric, but adjustive
thinking when it dwells upon the relationship of the self to its
surroundings is able to treat the self as an object among objects.
Autistic reveries are non-adjustive to reality. They may be divided
into several classes of which morbid-suicidal, pessimistic,
megalomanic, denunciatory, and persecutory reveries are particularly
common. In exaggerated form they become the most conspicuous feature
of the personality, and various clinical names are used to distinguish
them. Common, and representative, themes are suggested by these
quotations: “I’m a hopeless sinner”; “The world’s going to the dogs”;
“I’m the slickest guy in the world”; “The President is the Judas of
mankind”; “The President is using death-rays on me.” Autistic thinking
flourishes in greater or less abundance in every personality whose
history is taken for any length of time.
The somatic reactions at any given cross-section of the personality are
striped muscle movements and tensions; heart and circulatory reactions;
gastro-intestinal responses; skin adjustments; organic sexual behavior;
respiratory, pupillary, and urogenital adaptations; inner glandular
action on the biochemical balance of the blood; heat production (fever
and certain metabolic alterations not included before); electrical
conductivity; and immunological responses. Under the same environing
conditions individuals show wide variations in physical behavior, and
when these manifestations show certain gross deviations from norms,
though no organic lesion can be shown to be present, the presumption
is that the energy of some mental process has been converted into
somatic form. This notion of hysteria (and what may be called hysteroid
reactions) was classically formulated by Freud. Every individual who
is closely scrutinized shows, from time to time, tendencies to urinate
excessively (though no adequate physical explanation is apparent), to
refrain from passing feces, or to suffer pains in the back or neck.
The comparisons which may be made among personalities on the basis of
the nature of the substitutive reactions which arise when they are
subjected to similar conditions may be illustrated on the gross level
by citing some “experiments” which society has tried. Mr. A is a member
of the city council in one of our large cities. On two occasions,
when he was defeated for re-election, he developed autistic reveries
to such an extent that he was confined in a sanitarium under the care
of a psychiatrist. Thus Mr. A met a deprivation in the sphere of his
orientation to social objects (political activity) by developing
exaggerated autistic reveries (depressive preoccupations). The case of
A may be thrown up against that of Mr. B. When Mr. B lost out in his
campaign for re-election to the legislature, he began to worry about
his health, and although the physicians could find no adequate physical
basis for his trouble, he developed a host of gastro-intestinal
disturbances which incapacitated him from regular professional
life. His substitutive reaction was somatic. Another man, a Mr. C,
was defeated and spent most of his time writing a subsequently
well-recognized book on political theory. His substitutive reaction
was in the sphere of consecutive, theoretical, adjustive thinking.
It will be remembered that one of our driving administrators, J, had
his administrative duties curtailed and immediately took the wife of
another for his mistress showing that his object orientation in the
world of affairs was a substitute for his object orientation in the
sexual field.
From this point of view, we are able to examine the relative function
which political activities and preoccupations play in the personality
integration of the individual. For one it is an alternative to mental
disorder, for another it is an alternative to physical disease, for
another an alternative to aggressive sexuality.
Now it is of interest and importance to observe that the study of
the life-histories of these men showed that their mode of meeting
the world had become organized rather early. The man who developed
somatic symptoms had shown a physical upset after losing a contest for
the presidency of his class in college, and also in adolescent and
preadolescent deprivation situations. Alexander traced the basis for
the personality splitting in J to very early childhood.
I want now to indicate how the prolonged interview throws much light
on personality development, and lends itself to consideration from
the point of view outlined here. If the analyst is “insulted” by
the subject in the course of a day’s interview, the subject may the
next day report somatic trouble, or morbid reveries, or unusual
kindliness toward an annoying person, or a burst of creative work. The
interviewer, taking such facts in juxtaposition to others, may be able
to predict the kind of substitutive reactions which this person is
likely to show in a whole range of social situations, and to predict
retrospectively the form of reaction which was manifested at different
levels of development. The trained psychoanalyst watches the subject
like a hawk for clues of this kind; the possibility of removing his
“hunches” from the realm of art into the area of dependable knowledge
depends upon the objectification of his observations, and upon the
development of specifically experimental methods.
A method by which some certainty is to be introduced in personality
records is by testing the coincidence of observations taken through
time by observers who occupy specified positions in relation to the
subject. Very important applications of this procedure have been made
to child study by several child psychologists, more particularly by
Florence Goodenough and Dorothy Thomas. A set of categories were set
up to describe various acts, such as “smiling,” “physical contact with
other child,” and “physical contact with object.” The definiteness of
each term was then tested by having two independent observers make the
same number of observations at fixed intervals during a prescribed
period. The results showed which categories were ambiguous, and
which categories were sufficiently clear to justify their inclusion
in behavior studies. It was discovered, for example, that “smiling”
behavior showed much less definiteness than “physical contact with
another child.” This procedure makes it possible to measure the error
of a measuring procedure and is strictly comparable to the calibrating
process common to the physical sciences in determining the relative
reliability of measurements made by a particular instrument. The social
scientist is compelled to rely on the use of his eyes, and the problem
is to standardize the use so that objective results can be secured.[66]
Such methods of devising and testing categories for the observation
of behavior need urgently to be developed for the study of courtroom,
legislative, committee, mass meeting, and other types of behavior in
situations of immediate political interest. It is possible to record
the differential reactions of participants, and to distinguish that
which is inherent in the rôle performed (chairman), and that which is
the individualized penumbra of the act (individual gesture).
These objective categories and recording practices can be extended
to the study of behavior wherever dominating and submissive behavior
is found. The gap between the studies of children and the study of
personalities in complicated adult political situations can be filled
in with the idea of finding reliable criteria of the stability of
political reactions. Some early studies have been made which suggest
that types of dominating behavior are isolable at very early ages.
Charlotte Bühler detected children who dominated through pressure of
activity, despotic behavior, and “leadership” behavior. Her monograph
reproduces photographic illustrations of what she means by the terms
employed.[67] An outgrowth of her work is the experimental study by
Marjorie Walker at the Minneapolis Institute of Child Welfare (under
direction of Anderson and Goodenough). An observational study by
Mildred Parten at the same place showed that in uncontrolled play
activities the dominating or submissive rôles might be strikingly
monopolized by individual children.[68] By methods which are less
objective but much better than simple impressionism, there have been
a number of “political types” observed in later development. Karl
Reininger kept a careful record of the behavior of his pre-puberty
schoolboys, and brought out very clearly the functional distinction
between the “leader” and the “specialist.” The specialist might
temporarily guide the group in some activity for which he was
particularly competent, but the leader kept him within limits and
reassumed the direction as soon as the special activity was over.
Reininger has many shrewd observations to offer about the bearing of
what he saw on the whole range of social psychological theory, and
his monograph is a beautiful example of how a circumscribed empirical
study can be given meaning and distinction against a broad theoretical
background.[69] Hildegard Hetzer watched the spontaneous groupings
of children in play groups, and shrewdly distinguished organizers,
specialists, and social leaders from one another.[70]
At a still later level is the study which Viktor Winkler-Hermaden
made of the psychology of youth-movement leaders. These leaders are
recruited from youths who are not much ahead of their groups in age,
and in a well-balanced and penetrating chapter he contrasted the
“ruler,” “teacher,” and “apostle.”[71]
Special studies of dominating and submissive types in various
situations ought to be made with some reference to the reaction-type
classifications for the age period which are made by competent
students. Since puberty-adolescence is of so much importance, the
categories which are proposed in the literature ought to be examined
by the special investigator. H. Hoffman gives a modified list of the
puberty types described by Spranger and Croner in one section of
his general book on character formation.[72] Suggestions on various
distortions of development which lie behind certain forms of dominating
and submissive behavior are to be found in August Aichhorn’s lectures
on _Verwahrloste Jugend_.[73] This is the most valuable book to a
student of youth which has yet been explicitly devoted to the subject
by an analyst. Aichhorn reports in his eighth lecture the results of an
extremely important experiment which he made with the most aggressive
and uncontrollable boys under his supervision (he has served for many
years as the head of a home for homeless boys). The whole group was
put together, and the staff members were instructed never to interfere
with them, short of stopping permanent injury. These “hard-boiled”
youths broke up the furniture, mauled one another, and wore out several
attendants before they gradually tamed down. After having learned that
they could not taunt the environment into punishing them, and into
justifying their own suspicions of it, they went through a process
of character re-education. The behavior of the group is reported in
graphical form, and representative instances of what occurred are
recited in the text of the lecture. Several specific genetic hypotheses
are set up to explain particular kinds of behavior on the part of the
boys with whom Aichhorn has had intimate touch.[74]
Will we be able to predict from objective studies made of preadolescent
boys who dominate their play groups that one set of them will stand
a high chance of dominating play and work groups in adolescence? Can
we thus isolate rather stable developmental sequences for various
trait constellations which are of direct importance to the student of
politics? Can we achieve a composite picture for a given culture by
studying overlapping age groups for a two-year period? Certainly the
way is becoming clearer to an effective relationship between political
science and the disciplines associated with the study of the growing
individual.
One of the difficulties which lie in the path of successful
collaboration with psychiatrists and child psychologists is that the
political scientists have not themselves made it entirely clear just
what the adult differentials are whose genetic history they would like
to understand. What are the questions about the specifically political
life of the individual which the political scientist would like to
have included in any master-inventory of possible facts about the
intensively studied individual?
The following classification of political attitudes is intended to
have suggestive value rather than formal completeness. The first
section of this classification refers to the political preferences
and expectations or forebodings of the individual investigated.
Some individuals cherish a fraternal and some a paternal ideal. The
anarchist, socialist, and democrat talk the language of equality among
a family of brothers; the monarchists preserve a father.[75] A series
of other ideological distinctions are perhaps sufficiently clear from
the terms used.
CLASSIFICATION OF POLITICAL ATTITUDES
SECTION A. POLITICAL VIEWS
I. Preferences
Paternal ideal
Fraternal ideal
Strong central authority
Weak central authority
Revolutionary ideal
Counter-revolutionary or reactionary ideal
Cataclysmic change
Evolutionary change
Indulgent toward coercion, secrecy, ruthlessness
Insistent upon persuasion, openness, scrupulousness
Emancipatory, defensive, expansive ideal for group
World-unity ideal
II. Expectations and forebodings
Small political change can have great results
Small political change can have some results of value
Little of value can be accomplished by politics
Revolutionary changes imminent, eventual, contingent
It is probably in relation to political practices, as distinguished
from political views, that the intensive study of the individual
has the most to offer. I have included a list of questions in
Appendix B which are intended to suggest the sort of thing which
is directly pertinent to the interest of the political scientist
in this regard. How has the individual acted as a subordinate when
confronted by superiors of various kinds (in the army, in school, in
fraternity organizations, in business, in party clubs, in propaganda
organizations, in administrative hierarchies, and the like)? How has
the individual acted as a superior when confronted by subordinates
of various kinds? Besides considering the behavior of the person as
subordinate or superior, we may inquire into his attitude toward
individuals who have not been members of his various organizations,
but who have been possible helpers or obstacles. Thus he may have
approached strangers for money, or sought to win diplomatic support
from another organization against a common menace. His tactics may be
classified according to the means employed and the measure of success
attained. Special attention may likewise be devoted to the behavior
of the individual, not toward particular persons, but toward publics,
which are necessarily anonymous. Summarizing:
SECTION B. POLITICAL PRACTICES
I. As subordinate
Confronted by superiors who are
A. Strong, brutal
B. Masterful but rather objective
C. Weak
Reaction (conscious)
1. Does not assume a friendly mask (exterior) even though
he sees it would be an advantage (seeks to escape, becomes
stubborn, surly, assaultive, joins anti-authoritation acts
engaged in by associates, continues to contemplate revenge long
after)
2. Does not see or press up own individual advantage because
of attachment or intimidation (deference without conscious
hostility, pronounced affection, intimidated sacrifice of
associates to curry favor, overgratitude)
3. Combines friendly mask with conscious acts of hostility
(plays up qualities admired by chief, whether imitative of
chief or expressive of the chief’s repressions)
4. Irrational elements in adaptation at a minimum
II. As authority
Confronted by subordinates who are
A. Strong, hostile, dangerous rivals
B. Strong and objective
C. Weak
Reaction
1. Does not refrain from taking up a hostile front even when it
is recognized to be inappropriate
2. Takes apparently friendly line while pursuing hostile
purposes
3. Does not take strong-enough measures to secure efficiency or
respect (too indulgent of mirrors of self or of those who work
out frustrations)
4. Objective (inflicts narcissistic wound when advantageous,
reassures when useful, develops abilities of subordinates,
thwarts when dangerous)
III. In dealing with possible helper or obstructor who is outside
organization (most effective tactics chosen and range of tactics)
Appeals to logical standards
Appeals to sentiment
Non-violent and violent coercion
Inducement (tangible advantage)
IV. In dealing with public
Types of tactics chosen, success
Forms of expression, thought, and interest may be singled out for
special consideration. What is intended here is sufficiently apparent
from the captions:
SECTION C. FORMS OF EXPRESSION, THOUGHT, INTEREST
I. Forms of expression
(Includes all symbolizing forms: political editorials, novels,
poems, paintings, cartoons, plastic media, plays, acting)
Most effective style
Analytical and dialectical
Persecutory (sarcastic, denunciatory)
Enthusiastic
Humorous
Commanding
Range of style wide or limited
II. Mode of thought
Quick or slow to suggest policies or tactics
Almost totally uninventive
Systematically collects data prior to judgment
Impressionistic improvisation
Welcomes suggestion and criticism before decision
Impatient of suggestion and criticism before decision
Anxious to justify decision to those about or to world
Indifferent about justifying decision
Stubbornly holds to decision
Oscillates in decision
Much influenced by facts and arguments (or little)
Much influenced by appeals to sentiments (or little)
Much influenced by personal inducements (or little)
Much influenced by coercion (or little) (note that influence may
be negative as to direction)
Genuine pursuit of general interest in exercise of discretion, or not
Elated by victory or depressed
Genuine or narrow in sharing credit
Deeply depressed by defeat or satisfied in defeat
Interested in programs and values
Interested in processes and methods
Long-run or short-run objectives
Aims at immediate or eventual political action
Presses through to a decision capable of being tested
Conclusions or decisions vague
Ideal of responsible personal participation
Consistency between opinion and practices
Self-consciousness of own techniques
Conforms or not to family pattern (exaggerated, adoption of
opposite, ...)
III. Political interest
Formulated early and persists through life
Formulated early, lies dormant, reawakened
Aroused early, disillusioned
Aroused late
By this time it is perhaps superfluous to comment that every fact is
defined from the point of view of an observer, and that the problem
is to specify as definitely as possible the angle of observation of
the recorder. Trait lists are meaningless unless they can be filled
in by a fact-collecting process which surveys the various situations
with respect to which it is of possible relevance. It is very obvious
to the psychopathologist that the man who is “aggressive” at work
may be “timid” in sexuality. All too frequently personalities are
supposed to be “aggressive” when a certain number of raters have
agreed on it, without stopping to consider whether the raters have a
chance to become acquainted with the behavior of the individual in
many situations. The multiplication of ratings by persons who are in
a poor position to judge the subject (even by “intimate” friends who
do not, however, act as sexual partners) adds nothing but a spurious
specificity to the data. The interviewer who listens to the intimate
life of the individual through many weeks and months is in a very
strategic position to become acquainted with details of individual
reactions which even intimates have not seen. A “rating” must be taken
with special reference to the history of the relations of the rater
and the rated. It may be that we shall presently find that the ratings
of analysts in dealing with certain types of people who can be easily
identified do not substantially deviate from those of “intimates” or
even rather casual acquaintances of certain kinds. Such knowledge will
enable research to proceed with more certain pace toward the time when
we shall know what to look for and how to elicit what we want with the
maximum of economy. The specialist who interviews a man for an hour may
be able, during the course of what appears to be an ordinary social
relation, to find the tell-tale signs which detailed research has shown
to be invariably, or almost invariably, connected with particular
impulse systems and developmental histories. As Bjerre so well put it:
As soon as our intercourse with a certain person is no longer
governed by common interests, but by a desire to acquire a
knowledge of his inmost being, we immediately abandon the formal
content of his utterance and begin unconsciously to seek for
whatever indication of his inner life appears in his speech
independently of, or even in spite of, his conscious will.[76]
What is achieved is a correlation of the results of “casual” contact
and “intensive” study, a correlation which is the common target of a
converging attack upon the understanding of the human personality.
Some day we shall know how to validate the saying of the old physician
which is on the title-page of this book: “From him who has eyes to
see and ears to hear no mortal can hide his secret; he whose lips are
silent chatters with his fingertips and betrays himself through all his
pores.”
CHAPTER XIII
THE STATE AS A MANIFOLD OF EVENTS
Implications have continually been drawn in the foregoing pages
about the bearing of the intensive study of individual personalities
upon the meaning of the political process as a whole. Since the
psychopathological approach to the individual is the most elaborate
procedure yet devised for the study of human personality, it would
appear to raise in the most acute form the thorny problem of the
relation between research on the individual and research upon society.
We are therefore justified in devoting more extended attention to the
theoretical problem involved than we have yet taken occasion to do.
It may be asserted at the outset that our thinking is vitiated unless
we dispose of the fictitious cleavage which is sometimes supposed to
separate the study of the “individual” from the study of “society.”
There is no cleavage; there is but a gradual gradation of reference
points. Some events have their locus in but a single individual, and
are unsuitable for comparative investigation. Some events are widely
distributed among individuals, like breathing, but have no special
importance for interpersonal relations. Our starting-point as social
scientists is the statement of a distinctive event which is widely
spread among human beings who occupy a particular time-space manifold.
Subjective events occupy definite positions in the flow of events, and
the problem of explanation is the problem of locating stable relations.
Since subjective events are not open to direct observation, but are
inferred from movements, the observer, O, must infer the existence of
subjective terms in the sequence by imagining what he would experience
under all the similar circumstances which he can survey and compare
to his own experience. Reduced to its simplest terms, the observer’s
procedure is that of isolating a subjective event which he wishes to
investigate, and of searching for the “externals” which will make
the conditions of its occurrence clearly communicable to others.
These externals are sometimes fairly clear, and can readily be stated
in precise, “touchable” form. The sensation of “roughness” can be
predicted to follow the application of certain objects to specified
parts of the skin. A transition from a rough to a smooth object may
also produce “flinching,” which can be somewhat definitely described,
and which accompanies and (perhaps) initiates some of the subjective
events.
When any observer undertakes to talk about the state, he may choose
specific subjective experiences, such as a sense of loyalty to a
community, and say that all who have this experience (and/or certain
others) under specified conditions make up the state. Such specified
conditions may include the act of testifying to it when asked by an
intimate friend, or when warned that the community is in danger. The
concept of the state may be amplified by searching for the external
circumstances which precipitate the appearance of the subjective events
which are characteristic of stateness.
Such a method of defining the state absolves us from “superindividual”
constructs. The locus of the subjective events is still individual.
The group is not a superindividual phenomenon but a many-individual
phenomenon. The time-space abstraction of the “group” is just as “real”
or “unreal” as the time-space abstraction called the “individual.”
They are both equally real or unreal, and they stand and fall together.
The state has duration. It is a time-space frame of reference for
individual events. Particular individuals may pass on, but if the
overwhelming majority of those who occupy a certain geographical
area continue to experience the subjective events of the type chosen
as critical for the state, the state endures. The state is thus
independent of any one individual, but it ceases to exist when enough
individuals change their minds or die without procreating.
I have not yet defined the particular events which are to be treated as
the marks of the state. In the sea of subjective events we must choose
certain typical ones. Now definitions of this kind can be developed
most advantageously when we proceed, not by a method of rigorous
exclusion, but of relative emphasis. Suppose we tentatively begin by
saying that the distinguishing experience is that of communal unity,
when it is manifested by the use of coercion against outside and inside
disturbers of the communal order. Imagine an observer is overlooking
a primitive village. He sees a band of young men whose behavior he
interprets thus: They are wearing painted stripes, brandishing spears,
and having left the village, they engage in fighting a band of young
men from a neighboring village. Is this evidence of the existence of
the state? The facts are insufficient to justify a decision. Closer
observation may show that these young men all live in one quarter
of the village and that other young men are idling about. When the
“warriors” come back, they are only cheered by those who live in one
section. Those who live there may prove to be members of one family,
some of whose young men have avenged a private wrong in which the
village as a whole has no part. The system of claims and expectations
which is the essence of the communal order is not at stake. The
communal order must be involved if the state is involved.
Robert H. Lowie[77] has shown that the term “state” may properly be
used to designate even the most primitive communities, and that the
common distinction between a prestate and a state period of cultural
development is a distortion of the facts. The simplest peoples known,
the Yurok of northwestern California, the Angami of Assam, and the
Ifugao of northern Luzon, all have a sense of belonging to a social
unit larger than a kin group, and act in overt defense of this
order. The theft of property of one kin group, when committed by a
fellow-villager, is mulcted by a traditional fine, but the theft, when
committed by a marauding outsider, is punished by death. In the case
of adultery, warring families inside the village are merely engaged in
adjusting the size of the penalty; it is universally assumed that some
penalty is due.
The marginal cases notoriously play havoc with definitions. The
statement made before that the distinguishing mark of the state is
the experience of communal unity, when it is manifested by the use of
coercion against outside and inside disturbers of a communal order, is
too narrow to cover a small but extremely interesting series of facts.
There may be no use of coercion against outsiders, for the war pattern
may be entirely absent from the community, although violence against
insiders who threaten the communal system of claims and expectations
appears to be universal.
The view so far proposed rests upon a frank acceptance of social
“parallelism.”[78] Hans Kelsen has subjected the theories of
parallelism of psychological states (common emotion and the like) to a
sharp, and in many ways devastating, criticism. He says that “common
emotion, common volition and common idea can never mean anything more
than a description of the coincidence in consciousness of a number of
individuals.” But
if one really wished to consider the state as consisting of a
community of consciousness such as this, and as a matter of
fact, such a realistic, empirical psychological meaning is often
attributed to what is called the collective will or the collective
interest of the state, then, in order to avoid inadmissible
fictions, one would have only to be consistent enough really to
consider the state as formed only by the contents of those whose
consciousness had shown the necessary agreement. One would be
bound to realize that community of will, feeling or thought, as
a psychological group manifestation, fluctuates tremendously at
different times and places. In the ocean of psychic happenings,
such communities may rise like waves in the sea and after a brief
space be lost again in an ever-changing ebb and flow.[79]
In this keen dialectic Kelsen has been led astray by a failure to
recognize the time dimension of the events referred to by such a
concept as the state. Subjective facts are located in time in relation
to one another when viewed from the standpoint of any observer. The
concept of the state involves similar events in relation to one
another within a duration. The concept of the state includes this
idea of a temporal frame, and can best be grasped as a relational
system (a manifold) in which a certain frequency of subjective events
is maintained. Thus the state is not abolished when some individuals
sleep or occupy themselves with the banalities of existence, unless
the state is defined with reference to a duration of a few seconds
or hours or days. But there is no reason whatever for choosing such a
transitory frame of reference. It is just as valid to use a year as a
minute, or a decade as a year, for the time dimension. Thus the state
can be treated in what Kelsen speaks of as an “empirical psychological”
sense. It is a durable empirical fact just so long as a certain
frequency of subjective events occurs. If Kelsen agrees that contents
of consciousness are “empirical,” he is bound to see them in a world
of duration, and he has no authority to prescribe that the state must
refer to subjective events as a “knife-edge instant.”
The state, then, is a time-space manifold of similar subjective events.
Kelsen is incorrect in alleging that the acceptance of the parallelism
of psychological phenomena as a fundamental fact destroys the state as
a permanent institution.
Mere parallelism of psychological events does not give us the state,
for a distinguishing type of subjective event must be selected if
we are to characterize the state, the family, and other social
groups. Kelsen is entirely correct in criticizing those theories
of the state which invoke parallelism but neglect to specify the
particular “contents of consciousness,” “since not every and any group
manifestations formed upon the parallelism of psychic processes is able
to constitute that community.”
That subjective event which is the unique mark of the state is the
recognition that one belongs to a community with a system of paramount
claims and expectations. This recognition of belonging does not
necessarily imply an indorsement of this state of things. The essence
of the state is this recognition, and the individual may indorse or
deplore the fact without abolishing it. One need not be sentimentally
bound to the order; it is enough if the order is noted.
This unique experience is never found unassociated with other
subjective events. The recognition is usually amplified by pride in
belonging to the state, and by a determination to enforce the order
upon one’s self and others. One’s recognition of the order is usually
accompanied by an idealization of one’s participation in it, by an
idealization of the order itself, and by a condemnation of deviations
from it. All this is frequently expressed as the “sense of justice”
which is the foundation of certain theories of law and the state.
The subjective event which marks the state is usually manifested in
various “externals.” Thus the use of coercion is well-nigh universal.
The externals may be broadened to include behavior which may be treated
as a substitute for coercion. Ordering and obeying relationships which
function in a coercive crisis may continue when peace comes. There
may be an apparent “elaboration backward” of processes antecedent to
coercion in foreign and domestic affairs, and this may obviate a resort
to the _ultima ratio_. The regulation of the use of coercion, and the
maintenance of a certain degree of mobilization during non-crisis
periods, devolves upon “leaders,” who may preside over initiations,
goods distribution, and general ceremonials. The process by which
“heads” are selected may involve electoral colleges, elections, and
agitations.
It is worth observing that in the description of political processes
terms are employed which often carry no “subjective” connotations on
their face. But in fact every term unavoidably carries subjective
implications, and if these be ignored, there is danger that social
theory will hypostatize “patterns” or “traditions” as extra-subjective
entities, endowed with distinctive energies and amenable to special
laws.
Often the subjective “burr” on the pattern is so dim that the
subjective need scarcely ever be made explicit. Many generalizations
can be made by disregarding the subjective element and focusing
attention upon the transformations through which the associated
patterns pass. Linguistics has achieved notable success by this method.
Phonetic arrangements are named as objects of investigation and the
fact discovered that those sounds which occur in certain relationships
presently alter in regular ways.
It is theoretically possible to make a rough scale of descriptive
conceptions according to the relative fulness or thinness of the
subjective element in the pattern. To express this symbolically, the
complexity of the _S_ to the _E_ (subjective to external) varies
between nearly 100 and nearly 0. The contemporary prominence of what is
called “social psychology” is due to the effort to draw attention to
the consideration of patterns in which the _S_ factor is large.
The failure to stress the subjective dimensions of the events
referred to as “processes,” “patterns,” or “customs” is not only due
to the circumstance that the _S_ is often negligible, but that the
objective element may often appear with other subjective elements.
John B may rise when the national anthem is played, but he may do so
“automatically” with his mind mostly preoccupied with the sore on
his heel. The particular _S_ which is meant when the full pattern of
patriotic ceremonialism is discussed may thus be supplanted by another
_S_ with the same _E_. Thus the act becomes an entirely different
phenomenon, and may erroneously be classed with patriotic ceremonialism
in the full sense.
This point has far-reaching consequences for political science. The
accurate comparison of behavior patterns depends upon comparison of
the whole pattern. It must not be automatically inferred that _S_
exists where _E_ is found. The nature of the subjective factor can be
inferred from extending the observation in several directions. It may
be lengthened (John B may complain of a sore heel after the anthem). It
may be more intensively scrutinized within the same period (John B may
be seen to shift his weight from one foot to another, and to frown when
one heel touches the floor).
Descriptive political conceptions are undergoing a continuous
redefinition in the life of society, and unless the student of
political processes is on the alert to test his descriptive conceptions
in the light of changing reality, he will operate with falsifications
and not with simplifications. “Voting,” to choose an instance, is a
concept of the greatest complexity. It does not alone consist in the
dropping of ballots into urns or boxes or hats, or in the punching
of buttons on a machine. These external elements, the _E_’s, in
the concept of voting are not the heart of the matter. What count
especially are the subjective terms in the constellation of which these
externals are a part, and a highly variable part at that. How seriously
do people take the responsibility of collecting information about the
personalities and issues with which they are confronted and judging
these matters in the light of a conception of the public interest?
Voting is an entirely different matter when individuals are coerced
into casting ballots a certain way and when they are free, leisured,
and interested. To call the casting of ballots under all circumstances
“voting” is to deprive the term of most of its significance.
It is highly probable that the phenomenon which is loosely called
voting in Chicago is today quite different from what is was fifty years
ago; it is radically true that the phenomenon called voting in London
is something different from voting in Cook County.[80] How are we to
decide what meaning to assign to particular aspects of the political
process as we observe them at different times and places? The ocean
of subjective happenings which are related to external movements of a
kind often associated with politics is ever changing, and it cannot be
described by inventory methods. Not inventory but sampling is essential
if empirical definiteness is to be attached to a term.
Speaking very generally, two modes of procedure are possible. The first
is to begin with the externalities which are a rather fixed feature of
a pattern of social behavior with which the investigator is familiar,
and to proceed to find out how the subjective features of this pattern
change. One may study “balloting” or “modes of punishment” and the like
from this point of view. Throughout Western European culture there
prevails such relative homogeneity of pattern that research may proceed
directly from this starting-point.
The field ethnologist, who deals with cultures of a drastically
different kind, must often use another avenue of approach. A set of
external movements like “balloting” may not be sufficiently widespread
to permit comparison. The ethnologist must proceed by stating to
himself the subjective fact whose presence he would like to detect
(such as a desire to participate earnestly in deciding communal
problems), and participate as fully in the daily life of the people
as he can, in the hope that presently he will divine such a subjective
viewpoint and its characteristic modes of expression. It is true that
there are some movements of man whose significance is practically
universal, but these are too few to enable the utter alien to dispense
with a long period of participation in the day-to-day life of the
people. What happens is that the observer presently begins to recognize
the subjective fact behind the movements of the body, but this
primitive judgment of his is a diffused judgment, based upon a mass
of subtle particulars which he may long be unable to isolate in his
own thinking and to point out to others; indeed, this process is never
complete, or we should have a complete understanding of human life.
Obviously both points of departure for research have their advantages.
The American student of social patterns in Western Europe has thousands
of subtle meanings established in common with Frenchmen, Germans, or
British. This is an enormous time-saving asset. If anyone undertakes to
use the ethnologist’s approach to a familiar culture, the results are
likely to strike the participant in that culture as perfectly obvious
and hardly worth the effort.[81]
The whole aim of the scientific student of society is to make the
obvious unescapable, if one wishes to put the truth paradoxically. The
task is to bring into the center of rational attention the movements
which are critically significant in determining our judgment of
subjective events, and to discover the essential antecedents of those
patterns of subjectivity and of movement. For all the people who are
startled to find that they have spoken prose all their lives, there are
many to emulate the rustic who “know’d it all the time” when scientific
facts are stated about human nature. That which is known implicitly and
based upon diffused, unverbalized experience must be made explicit if
new ways of dealing with the world are to be invented.
The work of investigation may eventuate in statements of the subjective
constellations which find expression in particular cultural forms, or
in the description of the subjective constellations which are connected
with forms which are universal for all men. The frame of reference of
the social scientist is the culture; the frame of reference of the
human psychologist is the species.
What is known as the “quantitative method” provides a valuable
discipline for the student of culture because it directs his attention
toward the discovery of events which are often enough repeated to raise
a strong presumption that a particular sequence does actually exist.
These events must be so defined that similar events can be identified
by other workers. This necessitates an operational definition of the
concept, which is to say, terms must be used to specify the position of
the observer in relation to the configuration which it is proposed to
describe.[82]
The impatience among students of culture with the slow-footed
quantitative approach is partly due to the diffuse, implicit nature of
the experiences upon which is based the judgment about a subjective
event outside one’s self, and the resulting bias of the student of
culture against exaggerating the significance of items in the pattern.
The statement that “his life-experience has been hued with melancholy”
is a generalization which presupposes a knowledge of a prodigious
number of facts. Or the statement that “the prestige of public office
is greater in Germany than in any country” depends upon possible
observations as numerous as the sands of the sea. Any proposition
in Bryce’s _Modern Democracies_ or in Masaryk’s analysis of Russian
civilization refers to tremendous ranges of data. Of course, the
experience of any observer is puny beside the Gargantuan proportions
of the facts, and able inquirers always proceed upon a sampling basis.
They get in touch with men of every income group, every religious,
every racial, and every provincial group; they study the manifestations
of the culture in painting, literature, mathematics, legislation,
administration, and physical science.
The procedure of a Bryce was quantitative in the sense that many
observations were accumulated before inferences were fixed, but it was
not quantitative in the special mathematical sense of the word. The
student of culture is often alienated by the quantitative approach,
because the quantitative method necessitates the simplification of the
number of facts taken into account; the impressionistic-quantitative
approach of the student of culture gets an undivided reaction to the
whole and makes simplification afterward, perhaps revising and indeed
oscillating at frequent intervals.
There is more in common between the student of culture, and
especially of alien culture, and the student of the individual by
prolonged-interview methods than might appear at first sight. The
ethnologist confronting the manifestations of an alien culture and
the psychopathologist confronting the alien manifestations of the
unconscious secure unique training in their research for meanings in
details which escape the attention of the naïve man. Both form their
idea of the subjective events from a multitude of signs, which may
be spread over months of intimacy, and both are somewhat inclined to
disparage the search for simple external facts which can be relied upon
to indicate a specific subjective content.
The psychopathologist possesses the most elaborate known means of
exploring the manifold subjective events which may be associated
with external movements. Besides the conscious subjective experience
there is a rich unconscious life which he is especially proficient
in exposing. Thus our movements are not alone the outcome of simple
conscious processes; they are said to be “overdetermined” by a variety
of factors.
This concept of overdetermination is not unknown to popular common
sense. We know that John B is proud of being an American, and that he
wants to fight for his country; we comment slyly that John B’s best
girl likes the uniform, and this is one reason why he volunteers.
And more than that. We know that action is not always the outcome of
experiences that point in the same direction. We may know that John B.
is anxious to stay on the job a month longer and to get a promotion,
and that going into the army at a given moment means sacrifice. Thus
his mind is partly divided against itself. What psychopathological
methods do is to disclose yet wider vistas, and to expose the operation
of factors which cannot be readily seen. Thus a deep longing for death
may be a contributing factor to heroism.
The psychopathological approach is embarrassing less in the specific
content of its revelations than in the wealth of meaning which it
discovers behind what is at first glance but a simple pattern. The
rôle, of a particular subjective experience and of a movement cannot
be fully appraised apart from the total context at which it functions,
and this method discloses a wider context than common sense is aware of.
Now the multiplicity of human motives has always been a source
of embarrassment to people who wanted to manage men or merely to
understand them. The clumsy machinery of judicial administration has
been worked out along certain lines in the hope of introducing some
degree of uniformity into adjudication by limiting the consideration
of the motives which operate in a particular case. The judge is thus
supposed to limit himself to the determination of the existence
of a particular state of facts, and to act in a particular way if
these facts can be established according to a prescribed procedure.
The movement toward the standardization of the discretion of public
officers expresses itself in this general pattern of thought:
An act is prohibited by the state.
Certain prescribed “externals” shall establish the fact of the act
having been committed.
The actor shall be dealt with in certain specified ways.
This crusade against the subjective element in the mind of the public
officer is in some measure determined by the desire of the judge or
civil servant to avoid responsibility.[83]
The psychopathological approach precipitates something very like a
panic among those who have tried to box the manifestations of human
life into conventional common-sense categories. A dozen motives seem to
bloom where but one was found to bud before.
Let us see what this does for political theory. The prolonged study
of individuals enables us to discern the details of the process by
which the political pattern, as we meet it in adult life, comes to be
achieved by individuals.
When X runs for office or passes judgment, his behavior is
overdetermined by motives, conscious and unconscious, which were
organized in successive patterns during infancy, childhood and youth.
The recognition of belonging to a communal order never functions in
isolation, and the comparison of life-histories shows that this is
implanted in the child on the basis of meanings which he has elaborated
in his struggle, first against inhibitory factors in the environment,
and presently, when he has introjected the demands of the environment,
against his own antisocial impulses.
The early restrictions which the environment imposes upon a child
are important in that they are met by reactions on his part which
predispose him to meet subsequent limitations in certain ways. These
early restrictions are imposed upon the child by inflicting pain or
by distracting attention to pleasurable stimuli. Inhibition is thus
established in the organism by _force majeur_ on the part of the
environment, since the infant is simply overpowered or outgeneraled by
the environment.
Thus far in his development the growing individual has not become
socialized in the sense that he has become self-regulating in
relation to objects in the environment. The infant learns “sphincter
morality” (in the phrase of Ferenczi), but this involves no emotional
relationship to objects. His pleasures remain on his own body
(autoplastic), and the environment is an instrument for removing bodily
tensions in the simplest manner. Gradually the child begins to look for
gratification by lively erogenous activities upon the body of another.
This outward push of activity is again limited and frequently blocked
by _force majeur_. In the place of sexual relations to objects there
now appears a new form of relation, and the child socializes himself by
incorporating the practices of those about him.
It will be remembered that emotional bonds are established in two
ways: by object choice (for sexual acts) and by identification.
Identification, Freud writes, is the original form of emotional tie
with an object. It can become a substitute for a libidinal object tie,
and it may arise with every new perception of a common quality shared
with some other person who is not an object of the sexual instinct.
This latter is partial identification. The qualities of the object are
copied (introjected). The energy for the identification is said to be
supplied by aim-inhibited sexual instincts. The name of the state, the
ceremonial acts of deference toward ceremonial symbols--all this and
much more is characteristically a feature of the child’s growth.
Characteristic, that is to say, frequent, but not invariable. Children
are always brought in relation to a system of interferences and
indulgences (ways of raising children), and they always perceive an
order of some kind. But in some cases when a nation lives subjected to
a state, the recognition of the state relation may be accompanied by
resentment.
The state pattern itself prevails when many people take it as more than
a mere state of affairs, and the idea is reinforced by “irrelevant
meanings.” Some individuals impose motivations upon others through the
state pattern. These individuals, whether despots or enthusiasts, may
be termed “radicles,” the active ones who serve as radiating centers
for the preservation and amplification of the state pattern.
Freud treats the state as an emotional unity.[84] The members of the
state identify themselves with an abstract object (the idea of the
state) and are bound emotionally by the partial identification which
arises in perceiving an analogous relationship to the object. Kelsen
has objected to this conception of the state as a real subjective unity
by arguing that identification is a process between individuals, and
that each member of a state cannot be thought of as having entered into
personal relationships with every other member. Even if his narrow
construction of identification were well founded, the state could still
be treated as a real subjective unity on the basis of interlocking
identifications. A has identified with B and B with C, and one of the
features of B which the child A would typically take over (introject)
would be the name and other symbols of the state.
Indeed, it is the interlocking character of identifications which
reasonably insures the incorporation of the state symbol into the
child’s conception of himself. There is such a process as negative
identification, the rejection of patterns which are connected with
hated persons. The child is usually exposed to many adults and
contemporaries, and if they all associate themselves with the state,
the child is almost certain to reject only those patterns which pertain
exclusively to the hated individuals. This is the fundamental reason
for the staying power of patterns once accepted in a group.
It has been customary in the psychoanalytical literature on social
and political processes to describe the state as a universal
father-substitute. We are at length in a position to discuss the
problems raised by such a generalization. The distinctive contribution
of the psychopathological approach is the plurality of individual
meanings which it discloses. It is an anticlimax to discover that
the appearance of diversity is, after all, spurious, and that those
who insist upon the strenuous simplification of human motives are
justified. The point which I wish to insist upon is that the data
revealed by the psychopathological procedure are far more significant
for political and social science than this single-track generalization
would lead one to suppose.
The special value of the psychopathological approach is that it
represents a supermicroscopic method of utilizing individual instances
for the study of culture patterns. If we begin with a political pattern
and view it against the private histories of actual people, we find
that this pattern takes on variable meaning from one individual to
another, but that broad groupings of associated meanings are possible
of ascertainment. Any subjective event which is frequently associated
with a political pattern is important. Valid generalizations depend
upon multiplying cases which are selected from different groups in
the culture, and which are studied by methods capable of disclosing
subjective contexts. This is the point where quantitative procedures
can be made profitable to the student of culture, whose attention is
riveted on patterns whose subjective element is important.
But are these studies likely to lead to anything valuable if subjective
events are so variable that any subjective event may be associated
with any other subjective event? Why not terminate the investigation
at the outset by saying that the general law of probabilities can be
relied upon to predict the frequency with which any two of a number
of specified subjective events may be expected to occur together?
Is not our empirical inquiry likely to terminate in an inventory
of subjective states and their frequently accompanying movements,
thus foredooming any effort to discover more-frequent-than-chance
simultaneities, antecedents, and successions? If you look long enough,
won’t you find every subjective event associated with every other one?
A great many facts tend to substantiate this point of view. It is true
that many imposing psychological schools of thought have arisen, run
swiftly for a time in narrow channels, and then stagnated in a shallow
pool of “faculties” or “instincts,” mere inventories of patterns which
are abstracted from all concrete events and which are therefore capable
of being combined in any event in nearly infinite combinations. The
search for specific connections slacks down, and the psychological mill
pond is only stirred when somebody throws a stone in the pool in the
form of a new theory of specific causation, which troubles the waters
until it is found that the specific event is found to occur with only
chance frequency. In this sense the only contributors to psychology
are those who are sufficiently naïve, or sufficiently unscrupulous,
to exaggerate the rôle of a specific type of experience. So we have
psychologies based on “fear” or “love” or “imitation,” or we have a
long string of separate terms, “sub-fears,” which multiply as the range
of concrete observation widens, and the failure of the selected factor
to explain everything is made manifest, or disguised.
Thus a history of psychology could be written by taking “completed”
systems, analyzing the functional equivalence of the categories
applied, and reducing every new system to a collection of synonyms
for the terms of preceding systems. This hypothetical history of
psychological theories would show how an inquirer, much impressed by
certain experiences, would seize upon certain terms to describe them,
and how, confronted by more and more empirical realities, he would
modify the distinctive meaning of his explanatory conceptions out of
existence. A history of psychoanalytic terminology, such as Rank has
sketched in his treatment of genetic psychology, might be raw material
for such a comparison.
Would nothing remain but dictionaries of synonyms, all rather dubious
contributions to the grist of linguistic research? It might be that
our projected history would show that each psychological system left
a permanent legacy behind it in the form of a significant “mechanism”
which had not previously been stressed. Now the whole world of
“causation” is implicated in any event, and the whole number of
significant mechanisms which may be discerned in the “mind at a moment”
is infinite. So our hypothetical volume might conclude by accepting the
assumption that some events can be brought about by more than chance
frequency, subject to the reservation that experimental confirmation is
never reliable as to the future. The critical configurations may never
“reappear.” We commonly say that the probability of an event’s future
repetition is greater if it has been oft repeated in the past. But
there is no means of demonstrating that the future contains analogous
configurations to the elapsed. The probability of the future repetition
of an event is “no probability.” If events appear to be predictable,
this is so because our knowledge of contingencies is limited, and our
sequences of similar configurations may still be treated as special
instances of “no sequence.” The stable is a special case of the
unstable, to put the ultimate paradox. The discovery of aggregates
of mechanisms whose rearrangement in short periods would enrich the
apparatus of social control is the dream (the mirage?) of psychology.
Whether these objections will be well founded depends on the outcome
of the test, and are incapable of dialectical resolution. It may be
pointed out that the search for generalized mechanisms rests on no
firmer logical foundations than the search for subjective sequences,
since mechanisms are likewise aspects of the world of events, and as
such are subject to the same “no probability” laws of recurrence.
It should be repeated that the aim of life-history investigation is
not to arrive at such thin generalizations as the statement that the
state is a universal father-imago (symbol). What matters to the student
of culture is not the subjective similarities of the species, but the
subjective differences among members of the same and similar cultures.
The life-history configuration is precisely the one which has special
meaning for the study of culture, and has its own valid place as an
object of investigation in the world of events.
* * * * *
We may at this point briefly retrace the steps which have been taken in
this monograph. The psychopathological approach has been examined in
its historical setting, and the distinctive value of the free-fantasy
method of using the mind has been illustrated. Its importance,
likewise, for the understanding of political types has been shown with
special reference to the agitators and the administrators.
The general formula for the developmental history of the political man
employs three terms:
_p_ } _d_ } _r_ = _P_
_p_ equals private motives, _d_ equals displacement on to public
objects, _r_ equals rationalization in terms of public interest. _P_
signifies the political man, and } means “transformed into.”
The political man shares the _p_, the private motives which are
organized in the early life of the individual, with every man, and
the _d_, the displacement on to public objects, with some men. The
distinctive mark of the _homo politicus_ is the rationalization of
the displacement in terms of public interests. Political types may be
distinguished according to the specialized or the composite character
of the functions which they perform and which they are desirous of
performing. There are political agitators, administrators, theorists,
and various combinations thereof. There are significant differences in
the developmental history of each political type.
The hallmark of the agitator is the high value which he places on
the response of the public. As a class the agitators are strongly
narcissistic types. Narcissism is encouraged by obstacles encountered
in the early love relationships, or by overindulgence and admiration
in the family circle. Libido is blocked in moving outward toward
objects and settles back upon the self. Sexual objects which are like
the self are preferred, and a strong homoerotic component is thus
characteristic. Among the agitators yearning for emotional response of
the homoerotic kind is displaced upon generalized objects, and high
value is put on arousing emotional responses from the community at
large. The oratorical agitator, in contradistinction to the publicist,
seems to show a long history of successful impostorship in dealing
with his environment. Agitators differ appreciably in the specificity
or in the generality of the social objects upon which they succeed in
displacing their affects. Those who have been consciously attached
to their parents and who have been successful impostors (“model
children”) are disposed to choose remote and general objects. Those
who have been conscious of suppressing serious grievances against
the intimate circle, and who have been unable to carry off the
impostor’s rôle successfully, are inclined to pick more immediate and
personal substitutes. The rational structure tends toward theoretical
completeness in the former case. The object choices for displaced
affects depend on the models which are offered when the early
identifications are being made. When the homoerotic attitude is the
important one, the assaultive, provocative relation to the environment
is likely to display itself; when the impotence fear is active,
grandiose reactions figure more prominently.
As a group the administrators are distinguished by the value which they
place upon the co-ordination of effort in continuing activity. They
differ from the agitators in that their affects are displaced on less
remote and abstract objects. In the case of one important group this
failure to achieve abstract objects is due to excessive preoccupation
with specific individuals in the family circle, and to the correlative
difficulty of defining the rôle of the self. Very original and
overdriving administrators show a fundamental pattern which coincides
with that of the agitators. The differences in specific development are
principally due to the culture patterns available for identification
at critical phases of growth. Another group of administrators is
recruited from among those who have passed smoothly through their
developmental crises. They have not overrepressed powerful hostilities,
but either sublimated these drives, or expressed them boldly in the
intimate circle. They display an impersonal interest in the task of
organization itself, and assert themselves with firmness, though not
with overemphasis, in professional and intimate life. Their lack of
interest in abstractions is due to the fact that they have never needed
them as a means of dealing with their emotional problems. They can
take or leave general ideas without using them to arouse widespread
affective responses from the public. Tied neither to abstractions nor
to particular people, they are able to deal with both in a context of
human relations, impersonally conceived. Their affects flow freely;
they are not affectless, but affectively adjusted.
The psychopathological method was also employed to discover the
significance of political convictions, for it is evident that beliefs
are expressive of a rational and logical “manifest” content, and that
they symbolize a host of private motives. In this connection there
was passed in review the history of a compulsive conformist to the
pattern of the family, and the histories of several nonconformists. The
private meaning of militarism and pacifism, and of the pessimism and
censoriousness of old age, were explored.
Attention was then turned from the case-history fragments to the
problem of drawing out the implications of intensive personality study
for the theory of the collective political process.
Political movements derive their vitality from the displacement of
private affects upon public objects. The affects which are organized in
the family are redistributed upon various social objects, such as the
state. Political crises are complicated by the concurrent reactivation
of specific primitive impulses. One might suppose that when important
decisions are in process of being made society would deliberate very
calmly; but the disproportionality between the behavior of man during
wars, revolutions, and elections, and the requirements of rational
thinking is notorious. Evidently a reactivating process is at work
here; there is a regressive tendency to reawaken primitive sadism and
lust.
Political symbols are particularly adapted to serve as targets for
displaced effect because of their ambiguity of reference, in relation
to individual experience, and because of their general circulation.
Although the dynamic of politics is the tension of individuals, all
tension does not produce political acts. Nor do all emotional bonds
lead to political action. Political acts depend upon the symbolization
of the discontent of the individual in terms of a more inclusive self
which champions a set of demands for social action.
Political demands are of only a limited relevance to the changes which
will produce permanent reductions in the tension level of society. The
political methods of coercion, exhortation, and discussion assume that
the rôle of politics is to solve conflicts when they have happened.
The ideal of a politics of prevention is to obviate conflict by the
definite reduction of the tension level of society by effective
methods, of which discussion will be but one. The preventive point
of view insists upon a continuing audit of the human consequences of
social acts, and especially of political acts. The achievement of
the ideal of preventive politics depends less upon changes in social
organization than upon improving the methods and the education of the
social administrators and the social scientists.
The empirical material utilized in the book was brought together in
the course of prolonged interviews with individuals under unusually
intimate conditions. At the present time there are no satisfactory
records of what actually happens under these interview conditions,
and it is important for the future of personality study to improve the
methodology of these procedures. The objectification of what transpires
in the interview can be secured by arranging for a verbatim transcript
of what goes on, and by recording the physical changes which occur.
Effective personality research depends upon viewing the personality
reactions as a system, and upon perfecting the procedures by which the
substitutive reactions of this system may be exposed. Broadly speaking,
the personality may be treated as a system of object orientations,
adjustive thought, autistic reveries, and somatic reactions. The
problem is to introduce interferences into the system, and to reveal
the substitutive reactions for comparison and further analysis. Every
“fact” about personality events is to be defined from the standpoint
of a specified observer, and a major problem for the future is to
check the “facts” of the observer in the prolonged interview against
the “facts” of observers in other situations. Personality research can
be made more valuable for political science when the adult reactions
are clearly seen which chiefly interest the political scientist (see
Appendix B).
What, in general terms, is the relationship between research upon the
individual and upon society? There is no cleavage; there is but a
gradation of reference points. Events which are of collective interest
always have an individual locus, and these events may be studied in
their relation to the sequence of events “within the individual” or in
relation to the events “among individuals.” The distinctive event which
serves as the orienting frame for political research is the recognition
of belonging to a community with a system of paramount claims and
expectations. This event, when distributed with sufficient frequency
among the individuals who occupy a given territory during a specified
time period, define the state, which is thus a manifold of events.
Research which studies the order of events “within the individual” or
“among individuals” is equally relevant to the understanding of the
state; the difference is a difference of starting-point and not of
final result.
When the state is seen as a manifold of events the conditions of whose
occurrence are to be understood, the theoretical foundation is laid
for both the intensive and the distributive inquiries upon which the
politics of prevention can be built. In particular will it be possible
to profit as the years pass, and as psychopathology widens the range of
its investigations, and increases the dependability of its methods.
APPENDIX A
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
The literature of psychoanalysis from its inception to 1926 is
conveniently available in John Rickman’s _Index Psychoanalyticus,
1893-1926_. The _Gesammelte Schriften_ of Sigmund Freud have been
published by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Vienna,
in eleven volumes. This publishing house puts out most of the
literature of the circle around Freud. Of Freud’s books the beginner
may be referred to his _General Introduction to Psychoanalysis,
The Interpretation of Dreams_, and _Three Contributions to Sexual
Theory_. An English edition of Freud’s collected papers is in
process of publication. The most important technical journal is the
_Internationale Zeitschrift für arztliche Psychoanalyse_. There is an
English journal, _The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis_, and
an American one, _The Psychoanalytic Review_. (A French periodical has
recently appeared.)
Among the “orthodox” psychoanalytical treatises the following are of
particular importance:
Ferenczi, S. _Bausteine zur Psychoanalyse_. Leipzig, 1926.
----. _Versuch einer Genitaltheorie_. Leipzig, 1924.
Ferenczi, S., and Hollos, S. _Psychoanalysis and the Psychic
Disorder of General Paresis_, “Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph
Series,” No. 42. New York and Washington, 1925.
The psychological manifestations of a physical disease are
predicted on the basis of the psychoanalytical theory of
personality development. Of great methodological importance.
Abraham, K. _Klinische Beitrage zur Psychoanalyse aus den Jahren
1907-20_. Leipzig, etc., 1921.
----. _Psychoanalytische Studien zur Charakterbildung_. Leipzig,
etc., 1925.
The most influential approach to the problem of character
formation. Amplified in many directions by Jones, Glover, etc.
Alexander, S. _Psychoanalyse der Gesamtpersönlichkeit_. Leipzig,
etc., 1927.
A notably lucid presentation of the general theory. Recently
translated as _The Psychoanalysis of the Total Personality_ and
published in the “Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series.”
Hartmann, H. _Die Grundlagen der Psychoanalyse._ Leipzig, 1927.
A very important book which views analytical concepts in relation
to the data of experimental psychology.
Deutsch, Felix. “Experimentelle Studien zur Psychoanalyse,”
_Internationale Zeitschrift_, IX (1923), 484-96.
Reports the demonstration of the mechanism of repression by the
use of post-hypnotic suggestion.
Kempf, E. _Psychopathology_. St. Louis, 1921.
Stresses the function of the autonomic functions, and undertakes
to amplify psychoanalytical theory in this direction.
Among those who have broken off from Freud, after having been
associated with him, are Stekel, Jung, and Adler. Stekel has published
ten volumes of case histories which are valuable for the beginner
who needs to acquire a sense of what sort of thing the human mind is
capable. The other two are of more theoretical importance. Jung’s
_Psychological Types_ is of the most immediate interest to social
scientists, although his speculations about the “racial unconscious”
are suggestive. Alfred Adler’s standpoint is set out in his _Individual
Psychology_. His circle in Vienna publishes a journal.
An excellent manual is _The Structure and Meaning of Psychoanalysis_
(New York, 1930), by William Healy, Augusta F. Bronner, and Anna Mae
Bowers.
The psychoanalytical movement can be placed in the general perspective
of medical psychology by referring to such a manual as William A.
White’s _Outlines of Psychiatry_ or Bernard Hart’s _Psychopathology_.
There are excellent books in German on medical psychology by Kronfeld,
Birnbaum, Schilder, Kretschmer, and many others. The general movements
in the field can be followed in the _American Journal of Psychiatry_
or the _Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases_, the latter of which
is edited by William A. White and Smith Ely Jelliffe, who also
supervise the well-known series of books, usually translations, called
the “Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series.” Pierre Janet’s
_Psychological Healing_ reviews the general history of psychopathology.
Among the innumerable articles and books which undertake to appraise
the clinical and normal implications of psychoanalysis, the symposium
edited by Hans Prinzhorn may be chosen, _Krisis der Psychoanalyse_
(Leipzig, 1928), Band I (the projected second volume will not appear).
Otto Rank, who has likewise broken with Freud, is publishing a series
of books on the psychoanalytical interview which promises to serve as
a bridge between the general theory and the objective studies of the
interview situation which are in progress in America.
On the special problem of personality and character types, the volume
by A. A. Roback, _The Psychology of Character_, may be instanced as
a very comprehensive guide to the literature. His _A Bibliography on
Personality_ is also available. An acute analysis of typologies was
offered by O. Selz before the German experimental psychologists in
1923. See the following:
Selz, O. “Über die Personlichkeitstypen und die Methoden ihrer
Bestimmung,” _Bericht über den VIII. Kongress für experimentelle
Psychologie_. Jena, 1924.
Klüver, H. “An Analysis of Recent Work on the Problem of
Psychological Types,” _Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases_,
LXII, No. 6 (December, 1925).
The current output is reviewed from time to time in relation
to tests by Mark A. May, Gordon W. Allport, and certain other
psychologists who are especially interested in the field. The
_Psychological Index_ can be consulted for the purpose of keeping
abreast of the large quantity of published material.
The most influential recent book is Kretschmer’s _Physique and
Character_. The somatic factors in personality are stated with charm
and brevity by E. Miller, _Types of Mind and Body_. Useful summary and
critical volumes are by William I. Thomas and Dorothy S. Thomas, _The
Child in America_ (New York, 1928), chapters viii-xiii inclusive, and
by R. G. Gordon, _Personality_ (New York, 1926).
The psychoanalytical literature which has undertaken to deal with
politics or politicians explicitly may be appended here:
Pfister, Oskar. “Analytische Untersuchungen über die Psychologie
des Hasses und der Versöhnung,” _Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse_, II
(1910), 134-78.
----. “Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse für die Staats- und
Gesellschaftslehre” (Vortrag an VI. Int. Psa. Kong., Hague,
September 8-11, 1920), abstract in _Internationale Zeitschrift_,
VI, 400.
----. “Die menschlichen Einigungsbestrebungen im Lichte der
Psychoanalyse,” _Imago_, XII (1926), 126-35.
The _Imago_ is the psychoanalytical journal which is devoted to
applications of psychoanalytical theory to the interpretation of
culture.
Sachs, Hanns. “Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse für Probleme
der Soziologie” (Vortrag), abstract in _Centralblatt für
Psychoanalyse_, II (1911), 464-69.
----. “Ein Traum Bismarcks,” _Internationale Zeitschrift_, I
(1913), 80-83.
Sachs, Hanns, and Rank, Otto. _Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse für
die Geisteswissenschaften._ Wiesbaden, 1913.
This was published in the “Grenzfragen des Nerven und
Seelenlebens,” No. 93, a series which contains many volumes
of great interest to social scientists. Kretschmer now is the
responsible editor. The book also appears as No. 23 in the
“Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series.”
Rank, Otto. “Der ‘Familienroman’ in der Psychologie des
Attentäters,” _Der Künstler_ (virte vermehrte Auflage; Leipzig,
etc., 1925), pp. 142-48.
This fragment first appeared in 1911.
Storfer, A. J. “Zur Sonderstellung des Vatermordes.” Leipzig, etc.,
1911.
Parricide and regicide are punished with unusual severity in
different legal systems.
Abraham, Karl. “Amenhotep IV (Echnaton),” _Imago_, I (1912), 334-60.
One of the earliest applications of analytical concepts to a
historical personage.
Freud, Sigmund. _Totem und Taboo_. Leipzig, etc., 1913.
Outlines his hypothesis of the origin of culture in an original
parricide by a band of revolting brothers, who resented the
monopoly of the females by the old man of the tribe, and who
undertook to repress memories of the crime. See the discussion by
Malinowski of this hypothesis in _Sex and Repression in Savage
Society_ (New York, 1927).
----. “Zeitgemässes über Krieg und Tod,” _Imago_, IV (1915-16),
1-21.
----. _Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse_. Leipzig, etc., 1921.
An application of Freud’s theories to the psychology of crowds
and social institutions. See William McDougall, “Professor
Freud’s Group Psychology and His Theory of Suggestion,” chapter
xvii of _Problems of Personality_ (ed. Campbell and others; New
York, 1925).
----. _Unbehagen der Kultur_. Leipzig, etc., 1929.
Jekels, Ludwig. “Der Wendepunkt im Leben Napoleons I,” _Imago_, III
(1914), 313-81.
Kaplan, Leo. “Der tragische Held und der Verbrecher,” _ibid._, IV
(1915), 96-124.
Jones, Ernest. “War and Sublimation.” Read before the British
Association for the Advancement of Science, Section of Physiology,
September 10, 1915; published in _Reports_ of the Association,
LXXXV, 699 ff.
----. (ed.). _The Social Aspects of Psychoanalysis_. London, 1923.
Tausk, Viktor. “Zur Psychologie des Deserteurs,” _Zeitschrift_, IV
(1916-17), 193-204, 228-40.
Blüher, Hans. _Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen
Gesellschaft_. 2 vols. Jena, 1917.
Bernfeld, Siegfried. “Die Psychoanalyse in der Jugendbewegung,”
_Imago_, V (1919), 283-89.
----. “Über eine typische Form der männlichen Pubertät,” _ibid._,
IX (1923), 169-188.
Federn, Paul. _Die Vaterlose Gesellschaft_. Leipzig, etc., 1919.
Clark, L. Pierce. “A Psychologic Study of Abraham Lincoln,”
_ibid._, VIII (1921), 1-21.
----. “A Psycho-historical Study of the Epileptic Personality in
the Genius,” _ibid._, IX (1922), 367-401.
----. “The Narcism of Alexander the Great,” _Ibid._, X (1923),
156-69.
----. _Napoleon: Self-Destroyed_. New York, 1929.
Kolnai, Aurel. _Psychoanalyse und Soziologie_. Leipzig, etc., 1920.
Lazell, Edward W. “Psychology of War and Schizophrenia,”
_Psychoanalytic Review_, VII (1920), 224-45.
Rinaldo, Joel. _The Psychoanalysis of the Reformer_. New York, 1921.
White, William A. _Thoughts of a Psychiatrist on the War and
After_. New York, 1919.
Low, Barbara. “Civic Ideals: Some Psycho-analytical
Considerations,” _Sociological Review_, 1922.
Boven, William. “Alexander der Grosse,” _Imago_, VIII (1922),
418-39.
Berger, G. “Zur Theorie der menschlichen Feindseligkeit,” _ibid._,
IX (1923), 344-67.
Lorenz, Emil. _Der politische mythus, Beitrage zur mythologie der
Kultur_. Leipzig, etc., 1923.
Illustrates the state-father relationship from the lore and
literature of many cultures.
Reik, Theodor. _Geständniszwang und Strafbedürfnis: Probleme der
Psychoanalyse und der Kriminologie_. Leipzig, etc., 1925.
Outlines in masterly fashion the implications of the need for
punishment and the compulsion to confess for criminology.
Reik has also published extensively on religion from the
psychoanalytical standpoint.
Kohn, Erwin, _Lasalle der Führer_. Leipzig, etc., 1926.
Alexander, Franz, and Staub, Hugo. _Der Verbrecher und seine
Richter_. Vienna, 1929.
A sketch of criminology from the psychoanalytical standpoint,
drawing heavily on Alexander’s conception of the neurotic
character, as distinguished from the neurotics who show hysteric
or compulsive symptoms.
Friedjung, Josef K. “Zur Psychologie des kleinen Politikers,”
_Imago_, XIV (1928), 498-501.
Among those who have undertaken from allied fields to apply
psychoanalytic viewpoints may be mentioned William F. Ogburn, who read
a paper before the economists in 1918; Thomas D. Eliot, sociologist;
Harry Elmer Barnes, historical sociologist; E. D. Martin, social
psychologist; Preserved Smith, historian; R. V. Harlow, historian;
W. H. R. Rivers, ethnologist; and Theodore Schroeder, lawyer. See
especially:
Barnes, Harry Elmer. _The New History and the Social Studies_,
chap. iii. New York, 1925.
Discusses the bibliography in English.
Swoboda, Hermann. “Zur Psychologie des Parlamentarismus,”
_Oesterreichische Rundschau_, Band XIV, Heft 1, January 1, 1908.
----. “Die Kunst des Regierens,” _ibid._, Band XVII, December 15,
1908.
----. “Der Volksvertreter,” _ibid._, Band XXXII, Heft 3, August 1,
1912.
These articles of Swoboda are the first well-considered
applications of psychoanalysis to politics by a non-specialist.
The first article treats the rôle of parliamentarism as
“catharsis,” and specifically refers to the work of Breuer and
Freud.
Aside from specifically psychoanalytical efforts to interpret
individuals and collective trends, there have been many efforts on the
part of other psychiatrists and physicians, or their followers, to
offer such interpretations. The whole literature of “pathography” is
abstracted and discussed here:
Lange-Eichbaum, Wilhelm. _Genie-Irrsinn, und Ruhm._ Leipzig, 1928.
Students of politics will be most interested in the references and
abstracts concerning Rousseau, Alexander the Great, Amenhotep IV,
Bismarck, Blücher, emperors and princes, Frederick the Great, Lincoln,
Loyola, Ludwig II of Bavaria, Napoleon, and Robespierre. Möbius put
“pathography” on a scientific basis. The following is one of the best
of the “pathographies,” since it stresses the diseased aspects of
the personality in the perspective of the total development of the
subject’s career:
Heidenhain, Adolf, _J.-J. Rousseau, Persönlichkeit, Philosophie and
Psychose_, “Grenzfragen des Nerven-und Seelenlebens,” Heft 117.
Munich, 1924.
The study of the effect of individual pathology on culture, and of
culture upon individual pathology, is envisaged as a program in the
following:
Birnbaum, Karl. _Grundzüge der Kulturpsychopathologie_,
“Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens,” Heft 116. Munich, 1924.
The reckless extension of individual pathological terms to the state of
society as a whole has caused much confusion, but a case can be made
out for a valid use of the concept of the pathological. Thus:
Schneersohn, F. “Zur Grundlegung einer Völker- und
Massenpsychopathologie (Soziopsychopathologie),” _Ethos_, I
(1925-26), 81-120.
This includes an exhaustive bibliography of the efforts of
psychiatrists to extend their conceptions to society, and a
detailed consideration of the methodological issues involved.
Special attention should be called to the forthcoming volume by Harry
Stack Sullivan on _Personal Psychopathology_ in which a systematic
treatment of the whole field of psychiatry and sociology is presented.
Dr. Sullivan has vastly stimulated a _rapprochement_ between physician
and social scientist in the United States. See the _Proceedings_ of
the two colloquiums on personality investigation, held under the
auspices of the American Psychiatric Association, first published in
the _American Journal of Psychiatry_ for May, 1929, and May, 1930, and
separately obtainable.
APPENDIX B
QUESTION LIST ON POLITICAL PRACTICES
This question list refers directly to the organized political life of
the subject. Questions which are designed to elicit preferences are not
included. For general personality questions and trait lists, the usual
sources may be consulted for suggestions.[85]
The question list here must, of course, be modified if used orally or
with naïve subjects. An effort is always to be made to elicit specific
incidents which arise in the mind. “Reminiscences” and not theories
about the self are desired.
1. List the various associations and organizations of which you
have been a member and in which you enjoyed rights which were
approximately equal to those exercised by everyone else. Specify
in each case whether you were almost inactive, moderately active,
quite active. State when you became a member and how your
subsequent activity fluctuated. Give dates when possible. Remember
that you have been a member of various democratically organized
political units. Mention also the prep-school class organizations,
school and college organizations, alumni associations, profession
organizations, civic associations, parties, and elective public
offices. Organizations which were autocratically organized (that
is, which exercised authority over those who had no formal right
to choose the officials) should not be included. Do not omit
associations of war veterans, Daughters or Sons of the Revolution,
pacifists, anarchists, reform agitators, constitutional defense
leagues, etc.
2. List the various organizations with which you have been
associated either as one in autocratic authority or as one subject
to autocratic authority. This should include schools which you
have attended, appointive offices in the government, most business
connections, trusteeships, etc.
3. List your various free-lance activities which have involved
scarcely any organization but which have been a source of income.
Partnerships which have involved practically no staff, private
secretaryships, and such are meant to be listed here.
The following questions are intended to bring out the salient facts in
connection with your relationship to each democratically organized and
autocratically organized association or institution with which you were
affiliated. Answer for each organization which you have listed in so
far as applicable.
4. Just how did you become a member of this organization? What
steps did you take? Who helped you? Why were you taken in? If
you organized this body, why did you do it? When did you first
entertain the idea? How did your plans develop? What assistance
did you get and by what means? What was your reputation inside
the organization when you first came in? Were you, for instance,
ignored or regarded as promising or accepted and given
responsibility immediately?
5. What friends or enemies did you have inside the organization
when you first came into it?
6. To what offices or positions of authority in the organization
were you elected or appointed?
7. In each case explain how it came about. When did you first
entertain the idea that selection was possible? How much did you
hesitate and ponder before deciding to try for the position or
before accepting it if it was thrust upon you? What alternatives
did you consider? With whom did you talk over the matter? What was
urged on you? What were the disadvantages which deterred you or
the advantages which lured you? Just what did you do to get the
office or position? Who were your chief aids? Who were your chief
competitors? What were the points in your favor and in favor of the
others? How did the various cliques, groups, and other components
of the organization line up? Sketch your strategy and practices in
dealing with each one before selection. Did any issues of policy
figure and how?
8. What were the cases in which you ran or were considered at one
stage or another for selection? Answer the questions as before for
each instance.
9. What appointive power or influence did you exercise in office?
Whom did you consult in making or influencing these appointments?
To what extent did you consider competence? The rewarding of
friends? The division or elimination of your opponents?
10. What objectives, if any, had you thought out when you assumed
responsibility?
11. What were the chief issues on which you took a position? How
did your influence make itself felt in each instance (in public
speaking, interviewing, appointive pressure, etc.)? How did each
major issue happen to emerge? How did you arrive at your position?
Whom did you consult? What considerations were balanced on both
sides of the question? To what extent did you make issues by
interjecting specific proposals into the situation? How did you
happen to do this? What were the elements in the organization which
were lined up on either side of the question? What concessions
did you make in order to achieve your ends? Do you regard your
concessions as too cheaply bought as you look back upon them? What
results did you secure which satisfy you?
12. During your tenure were there personal misunderstandings,
quarrels, and hatreds between you and anybody? How did they come
about? What did you do and what was the relation of what you did to
what happened?
13. Were there personal misunderstandings, quarrels, and
antipathies among others inside the organization which you were
asked to settle or which you tried to settle? What did you do and
what relation did it bear to what finally happened?
14. Were there personal misunderstandings, quarrels, and
antipathies between members of your own organization and people in
other organizations which you were asked to settle or which you
tried to settle? What did you do and what relation did it bear to
what finally happened?
15. Did your organization have any ill feelings as a body for other
organizations or groups when you came into office? What did you do
to inflame or reduce it? What effect? Why?
16. Did your organization have any friendly feelings as a body for
other organizations or groups? What did you do to cement or to
disrupt these relations? Why? With what effect on the course of
events?
17. Did your organization develop any friendly or unfriendly
relations with organizations or groups to which they had been
previously indifferent during your term in office? What did you do
that had anything to do with this result? Why?
18. Did your organization use physical, legal, or other forms of
pressure upon any other organization or group during your term?
What was your rôle in suggesting, supporting, directing, or
obstructing the adoption of these tactics? Why? What resulted?
19. Did your organization use physical, legal, economic, or other
forms of pressure upon any of its own members during your term?
What was your rôle in suggesting, supporting, directing, or
obstructing the adoption of these tactics? Why? With what effect?
20. By whom were you praised during and after your term of office
for your record? How were you praised or recognized and honored and
for what? Effect on you?
21. By whom were you adversely criticized during and after your
term in office for your record? How were you censured and for what?
Effect on you?
22. Were you re-elected or reappointed, promoted or demoted, after
serving your term or before? Why?
23. How did you get along with your immediate superiors,
collaborators, and assistants? To what extent did you manipulate
them? What different tactics did you employ with each? What success?
24. What were your formal and ceremonial duties in the organization
as an officer? Did you enjoy them?
25. How did you enjoy your other official activities?
26. As a non-official, or non-position-holding member of the
organization, what did you enjoy about it? The ceremonies? The
routine operations? The uncertain features?
27. As a member of the rank and file, what policies and activities
did you initiate, support, or oppose? Why? How much did you do and
to what effect? How did the elements of the organization line up?
Were you usually in the minority or the majority? What elements
were usually with you?
28. How did your reputation change during your years in the
organizations?
29. What particular friends and enemies did you acquire?
30. As a member of the rank and file, did you have personal
misunderstandings, quarrels, and hatreds between you and other
members? Why? What did you do? Results?
31. Did you arbitrate any grievances or try to smooth them out?
Success? Why?
32. What was your attitude toward other organizations or groups
with which your organization either competed or had some relations?
As a member of the rank and file, what did you do to change or
intensify prevailing attitudes? Influence?
33. Did your organization use physical or other means of
pressure against outside organizations and other members of your
organization? As a member of the rank and file, what did you do and
with what effect? Did you think your organization was the best of
its kind?
34. Have you severed your connection or become inactive? Why?
35. If you are still active, what are your plans and hopes?
36. How did this particular organization touch the administrative,
legislative, and judicial branches of the government? The political
parties? How? What methods were used to bring pressure to bear?
What was your part in them?
37. As you look back on your life in the organization do you think
of practices which you indulged in or tolerated which you regard
as perhaps questionable? Instances? Did you so regard them at the
time? What would have happened if you had not indulged in them?
Should an organization be run on a different basis now?
38. What effect did life in the organization have upon your
activity in the politics of the community at large? Did you have
impulses to express yourself publicly or privately upon matters
which you felt it expedient to follow? Or were you driven to such
expression and activity?
39. If you were to judge entirely in terms of your experience as
a member of this organization, what would be your judgment of the
honesty and efficiency of the public service and the party machine?
40. What political prejudices or philosophies were current among
various elements inside the organization?
41. Think of various members of this organization who were rather
typical. How did you act toward them when you met them? What topics
of conversation, of anecdote, etc., did you indulge in? What
activities in common were there?
42. Did you think that you were imposed upon by any members as you
look back upon it now? Did you estimate some of them too highly?
Who? Why?
43. Did you underestimate some? Who? Why?
44. Were you estimated too high or too low? By whom? Why?
45. What things apart from common dishonesty would have caused you
to lose standing in the organization? What opinions and activities
would have compromised you?
46. Did you risk loss of standing at any time by word or deed? Were
you tempted to? Why did you refrain?
47. When you tried to add others to the organization, whom did you
seek? What type of people, in general, were you interested in?
48. Did the organization live up to your ideal? Why?
49. Who were the most powerful ones in the organization at
different periods? What were your relations with them? What did you
do consciously to win them? Success? What did you do to antagonize
them? How did they take it? What, in short, was the attitude of the
leaders toward you?
50. Did you ever have a sense of frustration arising from your
failure to participate in discussions of policy, either because you
hesitated to express yourself or because you expressed yourself
badly?
51. What is your matured judgment of the utility of this
organization in society?
52. How did your organization connections help or hurt you socially
or any other way?
53. How did your outside connections help or hurt you in the
organization?
54. What, generally speaking, were your advantages and
disadvantages with reference to securing and holding a prominent
position in the organization?
55. In general, what place did this organization play in your life?
56. With respect to each one of your so-called free-lance or very
personal activities, answer such questions as these: How did you
happen to take it up? Upon what factors would your success and
failure depend? What did you do to manage the persons upon whom
success or failure depended? With what result? What reaction
did your experience have upon your outlook upon political life
generally?
INDEX
Abraham, Karl, 103, 150 n.
Adjustive thinking, 226
Adler, Alfred, 71 ff.
Administrators:
definition and histories of, 127 ff.;
general theory of, 151 ff.
Adolescence and politics, 187
Agitators:
definition and histories of, 78 ff.;
general theory of, 124 ff.
Aichhorn, August, 230
Alexander, Franz, 139, 178, 182, 199, 220 n., 254
Allport, Floyd, 58
Anderson, John, 232
Apfelbach, Hans, 61, 62, 64
Aristotle, 39
Attitudes, 234 ff.
Autistic reveries, 226
Bernfeld, S., 177
Bernheim, 20
Biography, political, uses and limitations of, 3
Birnbaum, K., 200 n.
Bjerre, 239
Blackstone, 175
Bleuler, 71
Blondel, 11
Blüher, Hans, 178 n.
Boas, 13
Bodin, 54
Boss, 48
Breuer, 19
Bridgman, P. W., 251 n.
Brücke, 18
Bryce, 252
Bühler, Charlotte, 230
Burrow, Trigant, 201 n.
Carlyle, 42
Case histories, 3 ff., 78 ff.
Catharsis, 195
Catlin, G. E. G., 46
Charcot, 18
Chave, 59 n.
Chicago, University of, 13, 201 n., 207 n.
Christensen, 39, 53 n.
Composite types, 53
Comte, 10
Consensus, 192
Convictions, political, 153 ff.
Conway, 52, 53 n.
Co-relational types, 55
Cowley, W. H., 59
Crises, political, 179 ff.
Croner, Else, 232 n.
Crowd, 193 n.
Debate, zone of, 192
De Grange, 10 n.
Democracy, 194 ff.
Despot, 46
Deutsch, Helene, 123 n.
Developmental types, 60
Dicey, 1
Dictator, 197
Dilthey, 11, 49
Discussion, 194 ff.
Dream, 26
Durkheim, 10
Eder, 173, 181, 190
Education, 201
Ellis, Havelock, 83 n., 199
Emotional bonds, 185, 192
Energy of developed personality, 65
Events, subjective and external, 240 ff.
Exhortation, 196
Fabian Society, 186
Familiarization, a purpose of the study, 14
Federn, Paul, 180, 234
Ferenczi, S., 71, 97, 103 n., 105 n., 150 n., 213, 220 n., 255
Fliess, 62, 69
Follett, Mary L., 48
Forms of expression, thought and interest, 235 ff.
Formula for development of political man, 75
Frazer, 73
Free-fantasy, 32
Freud, 12, 17 ff., 64, 65 ff., 103, 104 n., 111 n., 179 n., 199, 204
ff., 223, 256 ff.
Friendship and politics, 192
Functional meaning of politics, 42
Garner, J. W., 2
Giese, Fritz, 55, 56, 57, 60
Glover, E., 103 n.
Gneist, 1
Goodenough, Florence, 229
Gosnell, H. F., 53 n., 249 n.
Gould, 7 n.
Hall, G. Stanley, 71
Hamilton, G. V., 70
Hartman, Dale, 59 n.
Healy, William, 13
Heimsoth, K. G., 178
Hetzer, Hildegard, 231
Hobbes, 54
Hoffmann, 232
_Homo politicus_, 50
Hoover, 54
Hypnosis, 20
Identification, 256
Institutional meaning of politics, 42
Interview as a method, 204 ff.
Intimacy and politics, 187
Ireland, 7 n.
Irrationality and politics, 184, 193 ff.
Janet, Pierre, 18, 104 n., 223
Jellinek, 2
Jones, E., 103 n., 179 n.
Jung, 62 ff., 73 ff., 205
Keilholz, A., 179 n.
Kelsen, Hans, 2, 243 ff., 257 ff.
Kempf, E. J., 115 n., 159 n., 197
Kjellén, 2
Koller, 19
Kretschmer, 40, 81
Kropotkin, 92
Laband, 1
Lange-Eichbaum, W., 7 n., 200 n.
Laski, H. J., 2
Lassalle, 53
Lasswell, H. D., 3 n., 28 n., 39 n., 202 n., 204 n., 205 n., 221 n.
Lazarus, 12
Lee, Sir Edward, 1
Lenin, 54
Liébeault, 20
Logical thought, limitations of, 28 ff.
Lombroso, 7 n.
Lowell, A. L., 53 n., 191
Lowie, R. H., 243
Lynd, R. S. and Helen, 250 n.
Machiavelli, 39
Marx, Karl, 53
Masaryk, 53, 220
Masturbation, cultural history of, 83 n.
Meaning of political patterns, 248
Mechanism types, 63
Merriam, Charles E., 39, 46, 52, 53 n., 59, 249 n.
Meynart, 18
Michels, Robert, 39, 52, 53 n., 60
Möbius, 7 n.
Moore, Henry T., 58
Morgan, J. P., & Co., 45
Morley, John, 1
Movements, vitality of political, 173 ff.
Mowrer, E. A., 180
Munro, W. B., 40, 53 n.
Nancy, 20
Nexo, 186
Nuclear types, 49
Nunberg, 220 n.
Object orientation, 225
Old Testament prophets, 54
Paine, Tom, 54
Paley, 174
Park, Robert E., 192, 193 n.
Parten, Mildred, 230
Pathological, 200
Personality, 221
Persuasion, personal, oratorical and written, 188
Political methods, 196
Political movements, 173 ff.
Political patterns, 248 ff.
Political practices, 235
Political symbolization, 183 ff.
Political tension level, 185
Political types, 38 ff.
Politician, 47
Politics:
and conflict, 196;
effect of, on politicians, 198;
institutional and functional meaning of, 42
Prevention, politics of, 173 ff.
Propaganda and unconscious motives, 189
Psychoanalysis, 15
Psychopathology, 15
Public, 193 n.
Quantitative approach, 251
Radiating nucleus, 187
Radin, Paul, 13
Rado, S., 179 n.
Rank, O., 74, 205, 220 n.
Reactive interpretation, 222
Reich, Wilhelm, 105 n.
Reik, Theodor, 175, 213
Reininger, Karl, 231
Revolution, 179
Rice, S. A., 41
Rich, Gilbert J., 59
Rinaldo, Joel, 104 n.
Rohmer, 53 n.
Rôles, specialized and composite, 54
Rousseau, 54
Ruggiero, 40
Ruml, B., 201 n.
Rush, 199
Sadger, Wilhelm, 103 n.
Schmidt, 2
Sexuality, rôle of, 66 ff.
Shaw, Bernard, 78
Sidgwick, 2
Simmel, Georg, 11, 52
Smith, Adam, 48
Social scientist, 201
Somatic reactions, 226
Specialized types, 53
Spranger, Eduard, 49 ff., 232 n.
Statesman, 46
Staub, 182, 254
Steindhal, 12
Stekel, Wilhelm, 71, 74, 157
Strachey, Lytton, 1
Sullivan, Harry Stack, 126 n., 207 n., 233 n.
Sward Keith, 59 n.
Symbolization in politics, 185 ff.
Symbols, political, as targets of displacement, 183
Tendency interpretations, 221
Tension level, 185
Thomas, Dorothy S., 229, 230 n.
Thomas, W. I., 12, 188, 230 n.
Thurstone, L. L., 59
Tissot, 83 n.
Types:
co-relational, 55;
developmental, 60;
institutional and functional, 42;
nuclear, 49;
specialized and composite, 53
Typologies, popular and scientific, 39
Values, changes of, 201
Vienna, University of, 18
Vierkandt, 12
Views, political, 234 ff.
Violence a political method, 196
Voltaire, 83 n.
Wagner-Jauregg, 19
Walker, Marjorie, 230
Wallas, Graham, 46
Weber, Max, 39, 52
Weininger, 62
Wertheimer and Hesketh, 81
White, William A., 179 n.
Willoughby, W. W., 2
Winkler, Viktor, 231
Wittals, Fritz, 22
Wordsworth, W., 70
Zilboorg, Gregory, 123
Znaniecki, F., 12
FOOTNOTES
[1] See Harold D. Lasswell, “The Study of the Ill as a Method of
Research on Political Personalities,” _American Political Science
Review_, November, 1929.
[2] “Psychosis” means the more serious mental disturbances; “neurosis”
means the less serious ones.
[3] The best summary of this literature is Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum,
_Genie-Irrsinn und Ruhm_. See also the works of Ireland, Lombroso,
Möbius, and Gould.
[4] See De Grange’s excellent treatment of this matter in his paper on
the methodology of Comte in the case book to be published by the Social
Science Research Council.
[5] What has been said above is current in the biography of Freud by
Fritz Wittals, and in Freud’s autobiographical sketches.
[6] Modified from “Self-Analysis and Judicial Thinking,” _International
Journal of Ethics_, April, 1930.
[7] The training should, of course, be conducted by a specialist alert
to his responsibilities.
[8] “Politik als Beruf,” in _Gesammelte Schriften_.
[9] I summarized some of this literature in “Types of Political
Personalities,” _Proceedings of the American Sociological Society,
1927_. Reprinted in _Personality and the Group_ (edited by Burgess).
[10] _Personality in Politics._
[11] _The History of European Liberalism._
[12] _Physique and Character_, chap. xiii.
[13] _Quantitative Methods in Politics_, chap. v.
[14] _The Science and Method of Politics._
[15] _The New State._
[16] It is not profitable to pursue these distinctions farther. I
should prefer to distinguish the statesman from the politician by
treating the latter as a function of a democratically organized
community and as one who is limited to persuasion in the advancement of
his conceptions of public right. The statesman may use force, and is
not necessarily a function of democratically organized society.
[17] His viewpoint is best expressed in “Die Typen der Weltanschauung,”
in _Weltanschauung-Philosophie und Religion in Darstellungen_ (edited
by M. Frischeisen-Kohler).
[18] _Soziologie_, chap. iii.
[19] _Grundriss der Sozialökonomik_, III, 1.
[20] See Robert Michels, _Political Parties_; C. E. Merriam, _American
Party System_, and _Introduction_ to H. F. Gosnell’s _Boss Platt and
His New York Machine_; Martin Conway, _Instincts of the Herd in Peace
and War_; Lowell, _Public Opinion in War and Peace_; Rohmer, _Die Vier
Parteien_; A. Christensen, _Politics and Crowd Morality_; W. B. Munro,
_Personality in Politics_.
[21] _Die öffentliche Persönlichkeit._ Beihefte zur _Zeitschrift für
angewandte Psychologie_, Vol. XLIV.
[22] “Innate Factors in Radicalism and Conservatism,” _Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology_, XX (1925-26), 234-44.
[23] Allport really used a rank-order method of handling opinion
expressions which he unjustifiably treated as marking definite
positions along a base line. Thurstone has greatly improved the
technique of opinion measurement. See Thurstone and Chave, _The
Measurement of Attitude_ (Chicago, 1929). For Allport’s original paper
(with D. A. Hartman), see “Measurement and Motivation of Atypical
Opinion in a Certain Group,” _American Political Science Review_, XIX
(1925), 735-60.
[24] “Three Distinctions in the Study of Leaders,” _Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology_, Vol. XXIII (July-September, 1928).
[25] By Keith Sward, Social Science Research Council Fellow, and
others. I discuss the problem of evaluating test results later on.
[26] “A Biochemical Approach to the Study of Personality,” _Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology_, Vol. XXIII (July-September, 1928).
[27] Hans Apfelbach, _Der Aufbau des Charakters_. Cf. Otto Weininger,
_Geschlecht und Charakter_; Fliess, _Ablauf des Lebens_.
[28] C. G. Jung, _Psychological Types_, chap. x.
[29] _Beyond the Pleasure Principle._
[30] “The Significance of Physical Constitution in Mental Disease,”
_Medicine_, V (1926), 375-451.
[31] The popular superstition about the dangers of masturbation seems
to have become widespread in Western Europe in the eighteenth century.
Havelock Ellis dates it from the appearance of a sensational book by
an anonymous English doctor which was called _Onania: or the Heinous
Sin of Self-Pollution and All Its Frightful Consequences in Both Sexes,
Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice, etc._ This is said to
have passed through eighty editions and to have been translated into
German. Tissot, a physician of Lausanne, contributed his _Traité_ on
the same subject in Latin in 1760. This appeared in French four years
later, and subsequently in nearly all European languages. His watchword
was that masturbation was a crime, “an act of suicide.” Voltaire
popularized his viewpoint in the _Dictionnaire philosophique_, and
the tradition became firmly set. See Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the
Psychology of Sex_, I, 248-49. The cultural relativity of this attitude
toward masturbation is brought out in ethnological reports.
[32] _Psychoanalytische Studien zur Charakterbildung_ (International
Psychoanalytische Bibliothek, 1925), Nr. XVI. Freud’s first
contribution to the subject was published in 1908. His brief article,
“Charakter and Analerotik,” is reprinted in the fifth volume of the
_Gesammelte Schriften_. Others who have written in the same field are
Sadger, Ferenczi, Jones, and E. Glover.
[33] Joel Rinaldo paraphrases Freud in his _Psychoanalysis of the
“Reformer”_ and without supporting cases argues that the reformer is
always a meddling hysteric. This is not to be taken for granted, for
he may more often prove to be an obsessive type, when he shows mental
pathology. For the best picture of the two clinical types, see Janet,
_Les névroses_.
[34] See Ferenczi, _Versuch einer Genitaltheorie_ (Internationale
Psychoanalytische Bibliothek, 1924), Band XV, esp. Sec. V. Also Wilhelm
Reich, _Die Funktion des Orgasmus_.
[35] See Freud’s discussion of paranoia in his “Psychoanalytische
Bemerkungen über einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von
Paranoia,” _Gesammelte Schriften_, Band VIII.
[36] This grandfather committed suicide at an unreported age, and his
youngest son is said to be “very nervous.” B’s oldest sister had a
nervous breakdown in high school. The third sister is “neurotic.” B is
described as having been a frail infant, and a shy child. Bed-wetting
continued until he was twelve or fourteen, and he occasionally had
attacks of indigestion. Physical examination failed to disclose any
significant physical factor in his difficulties.
[37] Examples are given in Kempf’s _Psychopathology_, and in other
textbooks on the subject.
[38] See Helene Deutsch, _Psychoanalyse der weiblichen Sexualfunction_.
[39] See “The Dynamics of Schizophrenic Reactions Related to Pregnancy
and Childbirth,” _American Journal of Psychiatry_, VIII (1929), 733-66.
[40] The physician in charge of this case comments that there may be a
homosexual _anlage_ on the physical level, but that this is not certain.
[41] Harry Stack Sullivan has stressed the critical importance for
personality growth of the adolescent phase in which the individual is
impelled to enter into intimate emotional relations with one or two
other persons of his own age. Those who partially fail in this show
various warps in their subsequent development.
[42] “Der neurotische Charakter,” _Internationale Zeitschrift für
Psychoanalyse_, XIV (1928), 26-44.
[43] Abraham and Ferenczi have reported cases of this kind.
[44] _Op. cit._, p. 448.
[45] See the chapter on “Psycho-analysis in Relation to Politics” in
_Social Aspects of Psycho-Analysis_ (London, 1924).
[46] “Dogma und Zwangsidee,” _Imago_, XIII (1927), 247-382.
[47] Succinctly described in “Über eine typische Form der männlichen
pubertät,” _Imago_, IX (1923), 169 ff. On the homoerotic elements
see Hans Blüher, _Die deutsche Wandervogelbewegung als erotisches
Phänomen_, and his more elaborate volume cited in the Bibliography.
[48] I was kindly permitted to see this manuscript which is not yet
published.
[49] See Sandor Rado, “Die psychischen Wirkungen der Rauschgifte,”
_Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse_, XII (1926), 540-56; A.
Keilholz, “Analyseversuch bei Delirium Tremens,” _ibid._, pp. 478-92;
and Stekel’s volumes.
[50] For a sketch of the unconscious processes involved in warfare see
S. Freud, “Zeitgemässes über Krieg und Tod,” _Imago_, IV (1915-16),
1-21; Ernest Jones, _Essays in Psycho-Analysis_; William A. White,
_Thoughts of a Psychiatrist on the War and After_.
[51] _Chicago Daily News_, July 20, 1927.
[52] The distinction between the crowd and the public is best developed
in the writings of Robert E. Park. Freud undertook to explain the crowd
on the theory that an emotional bond was forged by identification
of the individual with a leader, and by a process of partial
identification through the perception of this similar relationship
to the leader. He set out from the observation that when people are
interacting upon one another they behave differently than when they
are alone. The loss of individuality represents a relinquishment
of narcissistic gratification which can only come when libido is
directed outward toward objects. Freud’s theory applies strictly to
a special case of crowd behavior only. Crowd states may also arise
when interlocking partial identifications occur on the perception of
a common threat. Crowd behavior often arises before anybody assumes a
“leading” rôle, and rival leaders are “selected” by the crowd.
[53] _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, I, 231.
[54] Kempf, _Psychopathology_, p. 704.
[55] Franz Alexander, “Mental Hygiene and Criminology,” _First
International Congress on Mental Hygiene_.
[56] For an appreciation of the rôle of the pathological person in
society see Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum, _Genie-Irrsinn, und Ruhm_, and Karl
Birnbaum, _Grundzüge der Kulturpsychopathologie_.
[57] Something like this is no doubt the thought in Trigant Burrow’s
very obscure book on _The Social Basis of Consciousness_.
[58] This point was forcibly made by Beardsley Ruml in his speech
at the dedication of the Social Science Research Building at the
University of Chicago. See _The New Social Science_, edited by Leonard
D. White, pp. 99-111.
[59] I have suggested that those who write human biography should be
included among those who require this comprehensive training. See “The
Scientific Study of Human Biography,” _Scientific Monthly_, January,
1930.
[60] Modified and expanded from “The Psychoanalytic Interview as a
Method of Research on Personalities,” in _The Child’s Emotions_, pp.
136-59.
[61] See Harold D. Lasswell, “The Problem of Adequate Personality
Records: A Proposal,” _American Journal of Psychiatry_, May 1929. Also
Appendix B of _The Proceedings of the First Colloquium on Personality
Investigation_.
[62] We are now engaged upon studies of this kind at the Personality
Laboratory in the Social Science Research Building at the University of
Chicago. Harry Stack Sullivan is conducting a series of researches on
expression changes, with particular reference to schizophrenia, which
are of the greatest importance.
[63] The topic of reliable criteria will be dealt with in detail in the
reports upon experiments in progress.
[64] The best technical discussions of the nature of the analytical
situation are in the writings of Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Nunberg, and
Alexander.
[65] Expanded from an article with the same title which appeared in the
_Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology_, January, 1930.
[66] Dorothy Swaine Thomas and Associates, _Some New Techniques for
Studying Social Behavior_.
[67] “Die ersten sozialen Verhaltungsweisen des Kindes,” _Quellen und
Studien zur Jugendkunde_, Heft 5.
[68] Referred to by John E. Anderson, “The Genesis of Social Reactions
in the Young Child,” _The Unconscious: A Symposium_. These researches
are abstracted in William I. Thomas and Dorothy S. Thomas, _The Child
in America_.
[69] _Über soziale Verhaltungsweisen in der Vorpubertät_, “Wiener
Arbeiten zur pädogogischen Psychologie” (herausgegeben von Charlotte
Bühler and Viktor Fadrus), Heft 2.
[70] _Das volkstümliche Kinderspiel_, Heft 6, in the same series as the
above.
[71] “Psychologie des Jugendführers,” _Quellen und Studien zur
Jugendkunde_ (herausgegeben von Dr. Charlotte Bühler).
[72] _Das Problem des Charakteraufbaus_, pp. 68-80. See E. Spranger,
_Psychologie des Jugendalters_, and Else Croner, “Die Psyche der
weiblichen Jugend,” _Schriften zur Frauenbildung_, Heft 6.
[73] _Internationale Psychoanalytische Bibliotek_, Band XIX.
[74] See especially p. 278. Harry Stack Sullivan is tracing out
the developmental history of various forms of personality in his
forthcoming volume on _Personal Psychopathology_.
[75] Paul Federn commented in his pamphlet that a democratic state must
depend upon a democratic family life.
[76] See his excellent methodological chapter in _The Psychology of
Murder_.
[77] _The Origin of the State._
[78] Not to be confused with mind-body parallelism, which is not
accepted.
[79] Cf. Kelsen, _Der Soziologische und der juristische
Staatsbegriff_; “Der Begriff des Staates und die Sozialpsychologie,”
_Imago_, VIII (1922), 97-141; “The Conception of the State and Social
Psychology,” _International Journal of Psycho-Analysis_, V (1924), 1-38.
[80] Perhaps the most important part of the Merriam and Gosnell study
of _Non-Voting_ is the symposium of conversational scraps which suggest
what balloting actually means to various classes and sections of a
modern metropolitan community.
[81] Such criticism has been directed against the pioneer venture of
the Lynds, _Middletown_.
[82] An able discussion of the operational concept is in P. W.
Bridgman, _The Logic of Modern Physics_.
[83] Alexander and Staub have commented on this in _Der Verbrecher
und seine Richter_. But it is principally due to the suspicion of the
public officer.
[84] See his sketch of social psychology in _Massenpsychologie und
Ich-Analyse_.
[85] More specifically, Kretschmer’s _Psychobiogramm_, published in
H. Hoffmann, _Das Problem des Charakteraufbaus_, as an appendix;
Heyman’s trait list (republished in _Gesammelte Kelinere Schriften_,
Dritter Teil); the psychograms of W. Stern (in _Die differentielle
Psychologie in ihren methodischen Grundlagen_), of Baade, Lipman, and
Stern (_Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie_, Band III), of P.
Margis (Breslau dissertation, 1911, _Das Problem und die Methoden der
Psychographie mit einer Individualanalyse von E. T. A. Hoffmann_), of
L. Lewin (_Friedrich Hebbel: Beitrag zu einem Psychogramm_ [Berlin,
1913]), of E. Stern (“Patho-psychographische Untersuchungen,” _Archiv
für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten_, Band LXI), of F. Kehrer and
S. Fischer (“Modell einer klinisch-experimentellen Pathographie,”
_Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie_, Band LXXXV);
the outlines of Dr. Paul Federn (_Schema der Libidoaufnahme_, MSS in my
possession), of F. D. Wells (MSS in my possession), of G. V. Hamilton,
of Adolf Meyer (mimeographed MSS in my possession), of Amsden and Hoch,
of Floyd Allport, and the lists of Woodworth, Laird, House, Freyd and
Thurstone.
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