Mechanisms of character formation; an introduction to psychoanalysis

Front matter

Class riiEiJ

Book._-i-

Gopyrigta^^..

Preface

Psychology seems always to have been in danger of gravitating, on the one hand, in the direction of metaphysical abstractions and, on the other hand, in the direction of a refined physiology. The carefully conducted laboratory researches under wholly artificial conditions, have, as a rule attracted little general interest and therefore had few practical results. Certainly the field of mental medicine has benefited practically not at all as a result of all the years of laboratory psychology. A man seems to have been considered by the psychologist as an object of experiment and rarely as a human being in a social environment. True, the behaviorists may change all this but in the meantime a new psychology has come into existence, borne of the sufferings and the heart aches of the mentally ill — ^the psychology which is called psychoanalysis and, no matter what the remote history of events preceding its birth, properly also bears the name of its real creator. Prof. Sigmund Freud of Vienna — Freudian. / This is a psychology which had its origin in trying I to help sick people, in trying to alleviate their suf- 1 ferings and from the very first dealt with men and women in the raw, as they really were. This is the psychology I propose to give in outline in this book and which might well be called Humanistic not only

PEEFACE

in the accepted Protagorean meaning of that term but also because it deals with human beings, their hopes and fears, their aspirations and despairs, their good and their evil qualities as every one, but especially the priest and the physician knows them. It is a psychology which has opened the door to the understanding of man and as such I believe is the psychology which will prove of the greatest pragmatic advantage. It is some such scheme as I have outlined in this work which I think should be taught in the medical schools. Later it will find, I am sure, a much wider usefulness. Surely, however, the physician should know something of the principles which govern the operations of the most important of all the endowments of man. He should have some guides to help him to a real understanding of his patients and to point added ways to help them in their difficulties. A properly understood mental symptom may easily be the most important means of dealing with a given situation. The physician, therefore, of all men, should try to see deeper than the spoken word, he should be able to see what is hidden beneath. Such knowledge is often of inestimable value. This volume on The Mechanisms of Character Formation, merely tries to lay down the broad principles which underlie human behaviour and which are necessary to comprehend before one can have a real appreciation of mental facts and their true meanings.

W. A. TF.

Contents

CHAPTEB PAGE

Preface v

I Introduction 1

Chapter II The Genetic Approach To The Problem Of Consciousness

In the growth and development of science there necessarily has to be passed through a stage which is devoted to the observation and collection of facts before general laws can be formulated which are calculated .to explain these facts, before meaning can be read into them. The observation and collection of facts belongs to the descriptive stage of development, while the explanation of their meanings belongs to the interpretative stage. Plants and animals in large numbers had necessarily first to be described and classified before such a far reaching generalisation, for example, as Darwin's, to account for the origin of species, could be formulated.

Such far reaching interpretative formulations will be found, upon examination, to presuppose a deterministic attitude of mind that proceeds upon the assumption that none of the phenomena in question are sufficiently accounted for on the theory that they are accidental or fortuitous in origin, but that, on the contrary, they have only been made possible by what has gone before, namely by an efficient cause. This deterministic attitude, which sees in every phenomenon only the outgrowth of that which preceded only, has to be elaborated in order to realise that a complete explanation would involve a complete uncovering of the past. In other words any phenomenon can only be understood as the culmination of a series of events and is only what it is because they were what they were. The meaning of any particular fact is therefore only to be gathered when we have learned its history ; we can only understand it when we have come to know its past which made it possible. This is the genetic approach which considers phenomena as end results to be understood only by understanding their past out of which they grew and of which they are an expression.

In the sphere of the psyche it is but natural that a definite deterministic and genetic method should be long delayed as we are not only dealing with phenomena which are so complex as to be too long a way from concretely expressed laws for us to see any possibilities of explanation but, too, we have been dominated for generations by the theory that psychic events, many of them at least, are brought about ^^at wilP' in some mysterious way which precludes the necessity of even attempting to bring them under the operation of natural laws.

A reaction from this crude conception of mental phenomena, from this hit and miss type of explanation which explains mental facts by the most obvious superficial causes and relegates many of them to the category of accidental or chance occurrences.

has come about in recent years as the result of a clearer understanding of the reasons of certain types of mental reactions, with a result that the theory of determinism has definitely taken its place in the field of psychology, — a place that it has long occupied in the biological sciences. The difference between this method of chance explanation and the method of determinism, which demands that for every phenomenon there must be an efficient cause, can perhaps be best illustrated by certain biological experiments. I will call attention to two small aquatic Crustacea ^ of the same genus, but for a long time considered of separate species. The Artemia salina, which was only found in water containing from 4 to 8 per cent, of salt, and the Artemia Milhausenii, which was only found in water containing at least 25 per cent, of salt. The differences in these supposedly different species consisted in the main in the differences in the size and shape of the tail lobes and number of hairs borne by these lobes. It has been definitely shown by experiment that these two species could at will be transformed one into the other by varying the percentage of salt in the water, and this transformation was so accurately dependent upon the percentage of salt that with a given percentage of salt it was possible to predict with perfect certainty a definite length of tail with a definite number of hairs borne upon its lobes.

1 Marshall: "Biological Lectures and Addresses." II. The Influence of environment on the Structure and Habits of Animals. Macmillan & Co., New York, 1894.

In other words, what appeared to be an entirely fortuitous characteristic of these two species was in some way accurately dependent upon the percentage of salt in the water which they inhabited.

A perhaps somewhat more instructive example is the example of heliotropism in certain animals and plants. It has been known for a long time that animals and plants were in some way attracted or repelled from sources of light. The old biologists were content with saying that they liked or did not like light. Such an explanation, it goes without saying, was superficial and unsatisfying. Accurate experimentation has proven precisely the conditions under which these phenomena manifest themselves, and has shown also the inadequacy of this type of explanation.

Loeb demonstrated that what actually took place was that the plant or animal in question moved, not necessarily toward the lightness or darkness, and was therefore positively or negatively heliotropic, but moved in the direction of the rays of light even though at times this took a positively heliotropic animal into a relatively less lighted area. He experimented^ with the caterpillar of the Porthesia chrysorrhoea by placing two test tubes in the direction of the rays of light entering from a window. In the rear test tube he placed the caterpillars. A second test tube between this and the window he cov-

2 Loeb: "Studies in General Physiology." I. The Heliotropism of Animals and its identity with the Heliotropism of Plants. University of Chicago Press, 1905.

ered with black paper, with the exception of a narrow strip running lengthwise with the tube. The caterpillars moved from the brightly lighted unprotected test tube into the darker test tube, and although they are positively heliotropic they moved from a lighter to a darker area, but in common with all such motions, however, they moved in the direction of the light rays.

We see in these tropisms very definite reactions of organisms to specific influences in the environment, and we are tempted to see certain analogies in the realm of mental action and to conclude that mental action is always definitely determined, and if perchance the reasons for any special mental reaction are not apparent it is because, unlike the example of the caterpillar just given, the conditions which bring it about are highly complex and are the resultant of many impulses acting in various and often in opposite directions. The movement of the caterpillar from the light into the darkness one is tempted to compare with the movement of a man, who, in the summer time, will cross a brightly lighted street to get on the shady side.

The fortuitous and apparently accidental occurrence of certain mental phenomena in the psychoses has been constantly assumed, and it is only recently that we are getting away from this viewpoint to the deterministic one as I have already illustrated. The same thing happened in biology with regard to this class of phenomena also. I refer to the phenomena of heteromorphosis such as the older biol-

THE GENETIC APPEOACH 19

ogists had observed. For example,^ tlie occasional regeneration of a tail in the place where the head ought to be in certain lower animals. This, like the phenomena just mentioned, however, has all been reduced to definite reactions under the influence of specific stimuli, and can be carried out at will in the laboratory. If a certain species of hydroid, for example, be suspended horizontally in the water so that the branches are directed downward the polyps on these branches disappear and the branches gradually transform themselves into roots. Being placed, in other words, in the environment natural to roots they develop into roots,, and so one organ can literally be transformed into another by changing the environmental conditions.

Even the realm of morphology which deals oniy with forms has been invaded and each form is now believed to be a ** diagram of forces,"^ a sort of final compromise among all the different forces within and without which tend to alter its form. Plateau^ showed that the minute sticky drops on a spider's web, their form and size, their distance apart and the presence of tiny intermediate drops were in their every detail explicable by the law of surface tension and that the spider had absolutely nothing to do with these results.

And thus does science deal with matters that have

sLoeb: loc. cit. XXXI, On the Transformation and Eegeneration of Organs.

4 Thompson, D'Arcy Wentworth, Magnalia Naturae ; or the Greater Problems of Biology. Science, Oct. 6, 1911,

5 Cited by Thompson, loc. cit.

been considered accidental, inexplicable, fortuitous, chance occurrences. That there will always remain a great unknown with which the philosopher may deal, does not alter the necessities of the scientific method which must proceed from the known to the unknown according to the principle laid down by Kant that we should exhaust every means to find explanation in the light of those properties of matter and forms of energy with which we are already acquainted.

If we will consider for a moment the pathway along which biological phenomena have finally found a culmination in man I think we may admit, for purposes of description, that the earliest types of reactions which living beings show were largely physical, that is, such reactions for example as depend upon the amount of moisture in the environment, upon the temperature, upon expansion and contraction, and the like, that, however, very early, and perhaps from the first they assume in addition a chemical or a physico-chemical character; the problems of nutrition, of metabolism, are found in the unicellular organisms and are confessedly of a chemical and a physico-chemical nature. The nervous system comes into existence relatively low down in the animal scale, and when we find it we find a very simple series of ganglia and nervous cords, which, in their earliest beginnings, have largely to do with problems of nutrition directly or indirectly. Probably these earliest forms of nervous systems are more nearly comparable with what we call in the human being the sympathetic, or the vegetative nervous system. It is only relatively late in animal development that we find the central nervous system, and last of all that we find evidences of anything to which we can properly give the name of psyche.

From this evolutional point of view we may consider, for descriptive purposes only, the various functions as we see them exhibited in man. The physical reactions are such as are involved in the maintenance of the erect posture, the relation of the various curves in the spinal column, the adaptation of the joint surfaces to one another, and numerous other things : the chemical and physico-chemical reactions are still largely taken up with matters of growth, of nutrition, and of metabolism; the central nervous system functions occupy a still higher place and serve for bringing about larger co-ordinations between the various parts of the body; while the psyche manifests itself in all mental functions at a level hardly approached even by any of the lower animals.

If we will take the broadest concept of the relation of the individual to his environment and of the functions of these various levels, if I may so call them, we will see at once that the individual is always endeavouring — ^to use a teleological term — to bring about an adjustment between himself and his surroundings, and that in order to do this is always in a position where it is advantageous to be able to concentrate all efforts in a given direction and make everything subservient to that particular end. The first function is the function of adjustment or adaptation. The second function is the function of integration, and at each level we find the functions of the organism subserving both of these ends. As we proceed from the physical through the various nervous levels to the psychological level we find that each series of functions, as they increase in complexity, also serve to more thoroughly and more efficiently integrate the individual and therefore make it possible for him to bring all of his energies together and concentrate them upon a specific goal. At the same time this function of integration is the very necessary pre-condition to efficiency of adjustment to the environment. Let me illustrate.

If I were to specify the type of instrument which man uses at the various levels to bring about these two ends, namely adjustment and integration, I should specify first, at the physical level, the lever. This is exemplified by the type of action between muscles and bones which serves the purpose of integrating man's frame-work so that he may direct his exertions toward any particular end he wishes and thereby effect to that extent an adjustment with his surroundings. At the next level, the physico-chemical, the hormone is the type of instrument which is used to effect these two purposes. The chemical regulation of metabolism is a means whereby the body is related to itself in its different parts so that it grows and develops as a whole, each portion receiving and utilising only its proper amount and character of nutriment to serve the specific purpose of the development of that part in so far as it may be useful to the whole organism. Integration is thus served, the organism as a whole is raised by this integration to a higher level of efficiency and thereby adjustment with the environment to a greater nicety is rendered possible. This hormone regulation which is effected through the medium of the endocrinous glands is already in the higher animals under the control, very largely at least, of the vegetative nervous system, and so even at this level we are dealing with nervous control. At the next level, the level of the central nervous system, the reflex is the type of instrument which is used.

The reflex is brought about by contact between the individual and the environment. It may be simple, it may be compound, it may be conditioned or unconditioned, but it is by building up series of intricately interrelated reflexes that the organism comes to respond accurately to certain aspects of its environment. It is needless to illustrate further how this process of compounding of reflexes serves both the purposes of integration and of adjustment. Still higher and further advanced in the course of evolution the type of instrument which is brought into play to effect these two purposes is the idea. The idea not only integrates by keeping before the individual the goal which he is endeavouring to reach and thereby serving to bring all his forces to bear to that specific end, but it also reflects the environment much more accurately than can the stimulus which brings about the reflex and thereby leads to a much finer adjustment. And last of all we have arrived at that region which Mr. Spencer called the region of super-organic evolution^ the region of social psychology in which conduct gets its values from the approval or the disapproval of the community of which the individual forms a part. The type of instrument which is used at this level to effect the double purpose of integration and adjustment is the social custom. Customs serve to integrate society rather than the individual perhaps by binding all its units together to a common end, but in so doing they serve also to effect a more efficient adjustment of the individual to the requirements of the community.

It will thus be seen that in the process of evolution there is an orderly progression from the lowest to the highest types of reaction until they culminate in the reactions at the psychological level, and these latter take on social values.

While the individual may properly be considered as a biological unit, still the brief summary which I have given of the evolution of his various types of reaction shows a constant interplay between the individual and his environment which precludes the possibility of considering the individual as apart from the environment, and this impossibility is especially to be borne in mind when the individual is considered as a social unit and his reactions are considered from the standpoint of the social level.

All this is preliminary and necessary to the understanding of the place that the psychological type of reaction occupies in the general scheme of the individual's development and it is also necessary to the understanding of how by a process of evolution the type of reaction which the individual manifests gets its values reflected from the social community. Conduct is the basis upon which the community judges the individual. The individual may think as he pleases and the community has no interest in his thoughts, but he must act along fairly well defined lines if he expects to be left undisturbed. Conduct, therefore, has a social value and its social value is based upon its worth to the community, that is, its social efficiency.

The main emphasis of this argument should be placed upon the fact that socially efficient conduct is an end result, depending, not simply upon psychological integrity but back of that upon integrity at all reacting levels. Each level is dependent upon the one beneath, its historical antecedent. Conduct is the end result of the whole complex of mechanisms and resulting compromises and its efficiency is a function of their integrity.

For purposes of illustrating this process of integration and adaptation let us take the example of the person who is learning to play the piano and see what happens. On the sheet of music there are a mass of signs that stand for notes of different pitch and duration, combinations of such signs indicating chords, other signs indicating pauses, and various directions as to rapidity or slowness, expression, loudness, repetition of certain portions, etc. The piano keyboard is composed of black and white keys arranged in certain definite relations to each other. The notes on the sheet of music each refer to a certain one of these keys and no other and in order to know exactly to which it refers the player must be able to ^*read music.''

All this mass of impressions presented to the learner are just so many separate perceptions, jumbled together, without arrangement and without meaning. As the days pass by, however, there begins to emerge from this mass a perception of relationship among its several parts, it begins to become comprehensible, it takes on meaning. The relation between the printed notes and the piano keys becomes definite, the keys are struck and sounds that are pleasant are produced if the correct relationship has been maintained in the striking, sounds of an unpleasant quality if a mistake has been made. The mass of perceptions are beginning to arrange themselves in an orderly way. They are being constellated.

Now this process continues and the orderly arrangement of mental states as related to these outside conditions becomes more and more extensive and more and more perfect. There is taking place an adjustment of the individual to the environment, a building up of a certain relationship between the outside conditions — the sheet of music and the piano keyboard — and the individual, and this relationship becomes progressively more and more exact and more and more efficient. As the adjustment becomes more perfect disharmonies with their resulting painful mental states are less frequent — the harmony and efficiency of the adjustment is improved with practice.

It will be helpful at this point to point out briefly some of the differences in the state of consciousness of the beginner on the piano and of the finished product, the accomplished performer.

At first while learning, each movement is painfully conscious, the fingers have to be watched, each note separately observed, and the required movements are slowly and awkwardly executed. When proficiency has been acquired the same results are accomplished far better, with much less effort, and with so little attention that an occasional glance over the shoulder and even entering into the conversation of those about does not seem to interfere. At first a note has to be carefully looked at in order to recognise it, then the signature, the tempo, the various directions, and its relation to other notes in the other clef have all to be separately observed before it can be finally sought out on the piano and struck in its proper time and place. Later all these things are appreciated at a glance and the reproduction is instantaneous. In this way hundreds of notes in all sorts of relations and combinations may be struck in a single minute as the eye skims rapidly across the page of music, and the translation from the printed signs to the appropriate sounds is relatively immediate.

It will be seen that a relationship has been established with outside conditions that is very definite, the adaptation of the individual to the environment is highly efficient and takes place in a way so nearly absolutely fixed that it is practically predictable. There has been established by a slow process of growth a complex of mechanisms, mechanisms that are automatic or quasi-automatic in character so that whenever the appropriate stimulus is applied the whole machinery goes off in a perfectly well defined way in all its various parts. This is the adaptive side of the process of learning.

In addition to the phenomena described there is another series of phenomena that equally deserves notice. The beginner in endeavouring to correlate his muscular movements to correspond with the musical score is, we say, very awkward. He not only makes many mistakes, his movements are not accurately adjusted to the specific ends, but he makes many unnecessary movements. His whole body is more or less involved in the effort. He twists and turns in his seat, bends forward to look more keenly at the notes, screws his head to one side and perhaps sticks out his tongue or makes strained grimaces as he attempts difficult adjustments with his fingers that require him to strike several notes at once, using both hands at the same time. These are the result of the diffuse discharges of energy that we see in all learning processes and especially in the natural development of the child and are the expression, on the neurological side, of the opening up of new channels, tlie preliminary phenomena to the selection of a final common pathway along which the nervous energy gets its most efficient outlet. The eye and the hand have, so to speak, to learn to operate harmoniously together and to do this must open up new paths of association. "When the process of learning has been completed the various parts of the body involved have come to act harmoniously together for the accomplishment of the common end with the elimination of all unnecessary movements. This is the process of integration.

In this description it will be recognised that we are describing a sort of activity that reminds us of the reflex. The reflex, however, is still more rigidly defined in its possibilities, its response is, to all intents and purposes, absolutely the same always, whenever a stimulus is applied. Then, too, it is no longer under the control of the individual but occurs whether or no. The piano playing activities on the other hand are always under the control of the subject. He may play or not, as he sees fit, and he may vary the production from the written direction to suit his own whim. The various activities of his fingers in seeking the notes are, however, not changed in either instance, they go on in their accustomed way in both cases.

This type of activity is called automatic, though it will be seen from the description that it is really a complex product containing, it is true, many automatic components, but containing also many that have not reached that degree of definiteness of response — activities that are still in the proving ground of automatisms.

One of the changes then that has been undergone in the process of learning is a change toward an automatic character of the reaction. With continuous practice the activities become more and more automatic.

Another change, which it is important for us to note, is a change in the degree of awareness that accompanies these activities. The change toward greater automatism implies this change. From a condition of very acute awareness of every minute adjustment in the beginning there is reached a con- ! dition of almost absent awareness when a high grade of efficiency has been reached. At least those \ portions of the adjustment that have become truly ! automatisms have become activities of the unaware region of consciousness.

To put the matter a little differently, when the same or similar conditions in the environment are repeatedly presented to the organism so that it is called upon to react in a similar or almost identical / way each time, there tends to be organised a mechan- ' ism of reaction which becomes more and more automatic and is accompanied by a state of mind of less and less awareness. Or to put the obverse. Consciousness, or at least clear conscious awareness, appears only upon attempts at adjustment to conditions that are unusual, at ^^ moments of conflict, '^ on those occasions the like of which have not previously occurred in the experience of the individual and in relation to which, therefore, there has been no possibility of organising reactive mechanisms. To pnt it again in a little different form. Clear consciousness does not accompany reaction to stimuli when the issue in conduct can only occur in a single direction, when there are no alternatives. Consciousness is an expression, as it were, of conflict. It arises in response to stimuli under conditions that make it possible to react by a choice of a line of conduct in any one of many directions.

This state of affairs calls to mind an analogy. Consciousness arises only under conditions of conflict, conditions of great complexity, of increased resistance as compared with the facile reaction along the definite lines of a reflex arc. When in the path of an electric current, a complex network of wiring is introduced that raises the resistance to the passage of the current, we find that accompanying its passage there goes along a marked rise of temperature. As heat goes along with increase in resistance in an electric circuit so consciousness goes along with increase in resistance in a mental circuit. Herrick^ has said ^^the various degrees or grades of consciousness are expressions of successively higher forms of the co-ordination of forces."

We must think then of full, clear consciousness as only accompanying those mental states of adjustment to new and unusual conditions : conditions per-