Psychoanalysis and behavior

Front matter

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Preface

This is an attempt at interpreting human conduct from the psychoanalytical point of view. The unconscious and involuntary play a tremendous part in human life, the more tremendous as they usually masquerade as conscious and voluntary. Courts and public opinion, disregarding that fact, either praise or condemn, either reward or punish. Psychoanalysis passes no judgments and only seeks to understand and help.

The author has not felt the necessity of restating historical and theoretical facts to which he devoted a previous book: "Psychoanalysis, its history, theory and practice." The various schools of analysis, however, having reached almost identical conclusions as to human behaviour, although they started from different premises, the last four chapters of the present book shall describe the paths followed by the four best known psychoanalysts, Freud, Jung, Adler and Kempf.

New York City. September 1920.

Table Of Contents

Preface, 7

I. THE ORGANISM

I. The Unconscious, 13

Contents

VI. THE PSYCHOANALYTIC TREATMENT I. Hypnotist and Analyst, 269

VII. THE FOUR SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS I. Freud. The Pioneer, 289 II. Jung. The Zurich School, 305

III. Adler. Individual Psychology, 319

Chapter I: The Unconscious

To the majority of people, our conscious life appears as the most important, if not the only important, form of life. Most of our rules of behaviour, most of our judgments on human actions are based upon that estimate of our conscious life.

And yet we are conscious of very few things at a time and we are conscious of each one of those things only for variable, some times/ very shorty periods.

After a week, a day, an hour or a fraction of a second, the various things we were conscious of drop out of our consciousness, temporarily or permanently. We may witness a theatrical performance, be conscious of it that evening, think of it perhaps the next day, mention it several times in conversation, remember it years after when it is alluded to in our presence, and then "forget it."

But the impression made on us by that performance does not die off. It only becomes unconscious. That impression and millions of others are stored up in our "unconscious" where they continue to live as unconscious elements.

These impressions meant either active or passive reactions to certain stimulations, the yielding to or resistance to those stimulations, memory-images of satisfied cravings and of repressed cravings, joy or pain, longing or hatred, in other words, all our life from the day of our birth, with all its struggles against reality, its compromises with reality, its victories and defeats, etc.

All that past which we are constantly carrying with us and to which we are constantly adding, is bound, according to what elements predominate in it, to colour strongly our conscious view of life and to determine our conscious activities.

A neurologist, a sexual pervert, a sculptor and a manicure would react very differently to the sight of a woman's hand. An egotist would be unable to notice in his environment things of a neutral type, that is, unlikely to affect his egotism favourably or unfavourably. To a farmer, a certain accumulation of clouds might only suggest a danger to his crops; the same meteorological phenomenon might transport a painter with artistic joy. A chemist or a sailor would place a totally different construction on tjieir observations of the same clouds.

We know that unconscious factors cause us to engage in certain forms of activity, to become in- [14]

What Made Me Do That?

sane, to fall asleep or to remain sleepless, to love a certain type and to remain frigid to another. They influence our methods of reasoning, making us at times illogical and one-sided, stubborn and unjust.

In other words our entire life is influenced, if not entirely determined, by unconscious factors.

Our unconscious is the greatest time and energy saving machine, provided it functions normally. Some of our simplest conscious acts presuppose an enormous amount of unconscious work. Stepping aside to dodge an automobile, simple as it appears, is only made possible by innumerable "mental" and "physical" operations such as realizing the nature, size, direction and speed, of the dangerous object, selecting a safe spot at a certain distance from it, performing the necessary muscular actions, etc., etc.

On the other hand we may, without any apparent reason, perform useless, absurd, harmful actions and be genuinely grieved or puzzled over our behaviour. We ask ourselves "What made me do that?"

Our unconscious made us do that. Our behaviour was dominated and determined by one or several factors unknown to us and which, unless investigated systematically, may remain unknown, puzzling, detrimental, if not dangerous, and may at some future time be once more the cause of irrational behaviour.

Our unconscious "contains" two sorts of "thoughts" : those which rise easily to the surface of our consciousness and those which remain at the bottom and can only be made to rise with more or less difficulty.

Our unconscious is like a pool into which dead leaves, dust, rain drops and a thousand other things are falling day after day, some of them floating on the surface for a while, some sinking to the bottom and, all of them, after a while, merging themselves with the water or the ooze. Let us suppose that two dead dogs, one of them weighted down with a stone, have been thrown into that pool. They will poison its waters, and people wishing to use those waters will have to rake the ooze and remove the rotting carrion. The dog whose body was not fastened to any heavy object will easily be brought to the surface and removed. The other will be more difficult to recover and if the stone is very heavy, may remain in the pool until ways and means are devised to dismember him or to cut the rope holding him down.

Another simile might be offered. Out of fifty persons assembled in a room, not one may be think- [16]

The Unconscious Is Permanent ing of the multiplication table. Yet if some one points out three chairs worth six dollars a piece and asks the audience how much the three together are worth, the part of the multiplication table containing the answer shall rise to the surface of everybody's consciousness, to sink back into the unconscious a second later.

Other thoughts would not rise so willingly into consciousness: those associated with some painful or humiliating memory or with the repression of some human craving. Only a special effort aided by many association tests will in certain cases cut the rope that holds those "dead dogs tied to their paving stone."

Such thoughts are called complexes and they are the most disturbing element in our life, for, unknown to us, they exert a strong influence on all our mental operations and on our bodily activities.

It is not so much our consciousness as our unconscious which IS our personality. Our conscious thoughts are fleeting and changing, our unconscious is more permanent. If we take a list of some hundred words and ask a person to tell us what comes at once to his mind when he hears each word spoken, it will be noticed that the answers which come without any hesitancy would be the same several months afterward. Those answers, in fact, by their wording, present a striking picture of the personality, a picture which only changes when the personality undergoes distinct modifications.

Only the words referring to the person's complexes are likely to change, as if the unconscious was trying to conceal the place where the "dead dogs" have been buried. In reaction tests, in fact, the subject's failure to give the same answer is taken to indicate a hidden complex. But even the varying answers given in such cases are closely related to one another.

When we remember how our unconscious has "grown," that is, through the accumulation of memories and repressions from the day of our birth, or even from our prenatal existence to the present day, we must realize that a large proportion of the elements which constitute it is primitive, infantile or childlike, unadapted or only partly adapted. Its influence on our behaviour is not likely, therefore, to facilitate our adaptation to the innumerable rules imposed by a more and more complex civilization.

Through all our life our unconscious follows us like the shadow of an archaic self, prompting us to seek a line of lesser resistance, or to give up the struggle with the modern world, to indulge ourselves in many ways which are no longer accept- [18]

Wrong Suggestions able socially; when childlike or infantile elements predominate in it, its influence may unfit us completely for life in modern communities unless we are brought to a clear realization of the ghostly power masquerading as ourselves and which tries to pull us back.

When the man we were yesterday offers us suggestions as to conduct, we are probably safe in accepting them. When the boy we were at 15, endeavours to convince us that his way was the only way, the struggle for mastery between ourselves and the boy may usher in a neurosis. When the infant we were at one or two years of age, coaxes us to indulge ourselves as he did and we yield to his entreaties, we may regress temporarily or permanently to a level at which we shall be adjudged insane.

Academic psychologists have suggested a number of very interesting but meaningless words to designate the varying degrees of unconsciousness, such as foreconscious, preconscious, subconscious, etc. . . .

For scientific purposes the word unconscious is sufficient. Instead of distinguishing degrees of unconsciousness which may easily change, it is preferable to assign reasons for unconsciousness. The multiplication table in the above illustration was unconscious because it was not needed, for reasons of economy. It became conscious when needed. Other factors, mentioned previously, remain unconscious because the thought of them is repressed or suppressed. Some are forgotten, because they are insignificant, some because the memory of them is weighted with unpleasant connotations as one of the dead dogs was weighted with a paving stone.

It is the task of psychoanalysis to make us thoroughly familiar with the content of our unconscious that we may on every occasion determine whether the voices talking to us from the past buried in us are the voices of civilization or the voices of regression.

Psychoanalysis forewarns us against any undue influence it may exert in the conduct of our lives and helps those of us who may have listened to the wrong voice to free themselves from their slavery.

Instead of saying, as academic psychologists would put it, that the psychoanalytic technique can make unconscious factors foreconscious and finally conscious we should say that it can establish a relation of cause-effect between certain acts and certain unconscious factors.

For that reason psychoanalysis is the only key to an understanding of human behaviour. Ethics [20]

Every Case Is Peculiar and statute books only record the various compromises which mankind in its onward march has had to make with reality. They have, however, no absolutely scientific value, because they are based upon the conception of an inexistent being, the average human being.

Psychoanalysis on the other hand discards the "average" man or woman and deals solely with the individual.

The neurotic applying for treatment who states that his case is a "very peculiar one" is both right and wrong. His case as a clinical picture is probably a very common one but as the content of one man's unconscious is necessarily very different from that of any other man's unconscious, no case can be prejudged from the observations made in any other case. Every case is "peculiar."

The law and current ethics criticize or punish a pool for containing a dead dog which is held down by a powerful weight, and for poisoning those who drink of its water.

Psychoanalysis looks for the corpse at the bottom of the pool and endeavours to remove it. Neither before nor after the operation does it pass judgments or pronounce sentences.

To understand is to forgive, but in spite of its frankly determinist attitude in matters of behaviour, psychoanalysis does not condone unethical or criminal behaviour. Hygienists would not insult or punish the infected pool but they would fence it off until the contaminating substances had been removed. Irrational and criminal individuals should be likewise restrained and isolated, not for purposes of castigation, but until such time when dangerous factors in their unconscious have been removed and when re-education has enabled them to resume their place among normal individuals.

The subject of the unconscious is discussed very clearly in non-technical language by William Lay in "Man's Unconscious Conflict" (Dodd, Mead and Co.) pages 48 to 126.

This book is an excellent primer for those who wish to familiarize themselves with the terminology of psychoanalysis.

Advanced readers may study Jung's book "Psychology of the Unconscious" (Moffat Yard) which requires a certain knowledge of folklore, ancient religions and psychiatry.

The chapters on Instincts, Memory Images and Tropisms in Jacques Loeb's "Forced Movements, Tropisms and Animal Conduct" (Lippincott) will also prove very valuable from the mechanistic point of view.

Chapter Ii: Body And Mind, An Indi- Visible Unit

Academic psychologists simplify their tasks by allotting the body to physiologists and occupying themselves exclusively with the mind. Applied psychology of the analytical type has been compelled to discard that arbitrary division of the human organism into "mental" and "physical."

Physiologists prying their way into obscure "physical" phenomena have innumerable times reached a sort of middle kingdom in which it seems impossible to produce anything "physical" without producing at the same time something "mental," in which, to every "physical" stimulation, there corresponds a "mental" effect and to every "mental" stimulation corresponds a "physical" effect.

After observing the constant interrelation existing between secretions, attitudes and emotions, one no longer feels justified in speaking vaguely of the influence of the mind on the body or reciprocally. One can no longer understand life unless one admits that mind and body are one.

The task of the psychoanalyst would be a hopeless one if he ever attempted to study the so-called "mental" disturbances as purely "psychic" phenomena; the physician who would treat bodily ailments as purely "physical" manifestations would be baffled and impotent.

It is only the profoundly ignorant who at the present day pretend to know the limits of the physical and of the mental and attempt to attribute certain phenomena to the mind and others to the body.

Cut off a frog's head, thereby removing the brain which is commonly supposed to be the seat of the mind, of the intelligence, of consciousness, etc. The frog then should be " entirely dead" or at least should not be expected to perform any act, except of a purely reflex type, showing any "intelligence." And yet if you apply a strong stimulus such as a drop of prussic acid to the skin of the frog's stomach, one of the legs will at once try to reach the burnt spot and to remove the harmful stimulus.

Such a "reflex" act proves that, even in the absence of any thinking apparatus, the organism is aware that something harmful is happening to one of its parts and endeavours to perform appropriate motions to protect itself against further destruction.

If a set of nerves and muscles can "think" as [24]

Nervous Hunger clearly as that, unassisted by any brain or mind, the so-called purely physical must be endowed with a remarkable proportion of "mentality."

The deplorable inaccuracy of the words mental and physical is well illustrated by experiments made on dogs.

Feed a dog every possible morsel that will induce him to overeat until the beast turns in disgust from the most appetizing food.

Inject into that overfed dog blood from a dog who has been kept hungry for two days and the overfed dog will throw himself on food "as though" he were hungry.

The same experiment could probably be performed as successfully on a man. The man, however, would wonder at the possibility of his experiencing hunger after being surfeited with all sorts of dainties. He would doubt the testimony of his "senses," and speak of "nervous hunger," of "imaginary hunger," vague terms which explain nothing.

If a dog is infuriated by the presence of a cat, he will display for "reasons" which to him and the onlookers appear "plausible" and "logical," symptoms of anger such as the dilatation of his pupils, bristling of the hair, snarling, stiffening of the body, defensive poses.

Inject a small amount of adrenin into the veins of that dog or any other dog of not especially vicious disposition, and in the absence of any cat or any other disturbing element, he will, "without any reason" stare, snarl, bristle up his hair, and generally express, through threatening attitudes, violent anger.

When large amounts of adrenin are released into the human blood stream owing to the abnormal functioning of certain glands, set in motion perhaps by some obscure unconscious thought, a man may likewise assume an attitude of anger, "without any reason," and may justify his attitude by "imagining" a grudge against some people, or impatience at certain things. His attitude may later on appear to him absurd and incomprehensible. He may then excuse himself on the plea that "he lost control of himself" or "he was not himself."

A crowd may congregate and indulge in some ridiculous or violent deed of which, the following day, every individual member may feel deeply ashamed. "Crowd psychology," "mob suggestion" will then be invoked, the assumption being that all the individuals constituting the crowd had at one time a sort of "collective mind" dominated by one and the same obsessive "thought."

A curious light is thrown upon the behaviour of [26]

Mob Psychology mobs by the behaviour of copepods, small crustaceans, when carbonated water or beer or alcohol are poured into the aquarium in which they disport themselves. As long as their water remains pure, they are apparently in full possession of their "free will" and displace themselves as they please. As soon as the ingredients mentioned above are added to the water, they all abandon their occupations and go to mass themselves at the end of the aquarium which is turned toward the light.

If one continues to drop at intervals small quantities of carbonated or alcoholic liquids into the aquarium, the little mob remains in the same position. It cannot turn round. Nor can the helpless animals partake of their food, if that food happens to be placed at the opposite end of the aquarium, that is, away from the source of light.

Drain the polluted water or place the copepods into fresh water and the mob will soon disperse, each small animal regaining its freedom of individual motion and of direction.

Pour into the aquarium strychnin, caffein or atropin and the copepods will once more gather into a mob, this time, however, at the end of the aquarium furthest removed from the light.

Their previous "fondness" for sunlight has been replaced by a "craving" for darkness.

Prophets, artists, reformers, lovers, may undergo all sorts of trials, brave starvation and death in order to seek their ideal, and some day they may forsake their ideal. Lovers having recovered from their "infatuation" may recall with astonishment or shame many absurd things they said or did once and look upon their former love object with disgust or even hatred.

Certain animals like copepods can be fooled a number of times and be made to fall in love now with the sun, now with the darkness. Others which, were they human beings, would be said to learn very quickly from experience, are never victimized but once by their "idealistic cravings" and afterward lead a perfectly "sensible" life.

Take some newly hatched caterpillars and deposit them at the foot of a rod or stick on which the sunlight is shining. They will all climb to the top and stay there, staring at the sun, apparently engrossed in the contemplation of their "ideal." In fact they would starve to death unless some one fed them a small piece of green leaf.

As soon as they partake of that food, their obsessive sun worship seems to disappear. They climb down the barren stick and seek other stores of food, never bothering any more with the sun or other sources of light. [28]

The Electric Dog

Watch the behaviour of bees at mating time. Male and female can only fly in one direction, that is toward the sun, and their amorous ecstasy carries them into "higher regions," "uplifts" them, takes them "far from the earth." The sexual act performed, they both become once more creatures of the earth, fly back to their native hive and no longer feel the "fascination of the empyrean."

An invention described recently in publications devoted to electrical science shows how difficult it would be to draw an absolute line of demarkation between actions apparently due to physical and chemical causes and actions apparently due to the exercise of our "will power" and prompted by "feelings," etc.

The electric dog has two eyes supplied with condensing lenses focussed on two selenium cells. Selenium is an element whose electrical properties change under the influence of light. The selenium cells control two electro-magnetic switches. Two motors, on the right and left, can propel the dog forward or backward.

When light, as for instance from a small flash lamp, is thrown on both eyes, the current is switched on to both motors and the dog advances toward the light. When the lamp is held to the right, the right motor only is actuated and the dog turns to the right. The dog follows the light in the most complicated manoeuvres. Shade the light and the dog stops; reverse the motors and the dog runs away from the light, dodging it wherever it may come from.

Thus a moth will rush toward a flame, thus owls fly in distress from any bright light, thus human beings are perhaps "propelled" toward a goal, which they think they are striving for, thus the races of the earth once started on their westward wanderings, thus cities and towns, when not restrained by natural obstacles of an insuperable nature, like mountains or bodies of water, spread to the westward.

Naturalists manage to make the problem a little more complicated by telling us that animals and plants which are "fond" of light, that is which are involuntarily and unavoidably determined by light, are also "fond" of blue and green, while animals which are negatively heliotropic, that is "fond" of darkness and afraid of light, are "fond" of the colour red.

And experiments on thousands of human beings have revealed that men are most deeply aff"ected by blue, women by red.

Whenever experiments first made on animals [30]

Cats, Dogs and Men have been tried on human beings their results have been found to confirm the first observations.

We know that the same method of training makes both a man and a passenger pidgeon sexual perverts. Laboratory experiments have proved that female cats and female dogs react more slowly to anger stimuli than the males of both species, the result being a smaller percentage of sugar found in their urine. Observations made on college students of both sexes prove that the rule holds good when human beings are concerned. Human subjects, unfortunately, cannot be used as frequently as they should be to assure us of the universal application of certain biological and biochemical laws.

Some day when we abandon our wasteful method of dealing with criminals and give unredeemable offenders an opportunity to pay for the damage they have inflicted by submitting to scientific experiments likely at times to result in death, we may be able to ascertain accurately in what measure chemical determinism, for example, rules the lives of men.

Specialization being the only road to thorough knowledge and efficiency, body and mind must at present, for the sake of convenience, be treated separately when in distress. Internist and analyst, however, must co-operate, both applying the latest methods devised in their particular field and submitting to each other the doubtful details of every case.

While analysts agree that innumerable diseases of the so-called physical variety are induced or invited by some unconscious predisposing factor, no analyst denies the value of medical help or would suggest doing without it. If a subject has been so weakened by a wrong mental attitude that his body has become an easy prey for certain bacilli, all efforts should be made to check or eliminate those bacilli in order to avoid the further inroads they might make on the organism.

Specific medical treatment should be sought under the direction of a physician who keeps himself well informed as to the latest therapeutic methods, the most efficient pharmaceutic preparations, etc. The family physician, the surgeon, the average specialist, however, cannot be expected to follow all the research work done in applied psychology.

Although Freud and other prominent analysts have stated that psychoanalytical practitioners need not have medical training, an analyst should possess a good working knowledge of anatomy, physiology and neurology. Reciprocally, every physician should receive some elementary training in applied [32]

A Basis for Co-operation psychology, regardless of whether he is to take up the practice of general medicine or to specialize in some particular branch of the medical profession.

Then, those who treat the more obviously material part of the organism and those who treat the more intangible part of the personality can co-operate intelligently in relieving the ailments of the human unit.

Two books are absolutely essential to readers desiring to study the problem of the interrelations of body and mind from the modern physiological point of view. Loeb's book mentioned in the bibliography for the preceding chapter and W. B. Cannon's capital work "Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage" (Appleton). The latter book contains a very readable and entertaining summary of many experiments made by Cannon and his students not only on laboratory animals but on themselves as well, showing the chemical changes which correspond to the various "emotions." G. W. Crile's "Man an Adaptive Mechanism," while not as recent as Cannon's book, should also be consulted.

Chapter Iii: Nerves And Nervous- Ness

Nerves, nervous and nervousness are terms which should be used less frequently and less carelessly. "My nerves are on edge" or "I am a nervous wreck" are picturesque expressions devoid of any meaning and which convey a very inaccurate picture of what is taking place in the organism.

To the layman, nerves are just nerves; the nerve which a dentist "kills" and the nerve which makes our heart palpitate are to him identical things.

In reality there are in the human body two nervous systems whose appearance, colour, make up, distribution and functions are as different as night is from day.

There is the sensori-motor system, or the system of nerves which bring to the brain the information about the condition of the various parts of the body and about the way in which those parts are affected by the environment: the nerves which tell us what the eye "sees," what the mouth "tastes," what tlie nose "smells," whether the water in which we poke [34]

The Autonomic Nerves our toe is cold or hot, whether the apple we hold is hard or soft.

That system also transmits from the brain to the various muscles definite orders based upon the information received. Motor nerves open or close our eyes, cause us to chew or spit out certain kinds of food, to extend our arm toward a desirable object or withdraw it from a dangerous object, etc.

The sensori-motor nerves are white fibres enveloped in a fatty sheath interrupted at intervals by nodes.

Besides this system there is another nervous system for which various names are being used, such as the vegetative system, the sympathetic system or the autonomic system. These nerves are white fibres covered by a very thin membrane instead of a thick sheath and presenting a more regular appearance owing to the absence of nodes.

Instead of issuing directly from the spinal column as the sensori-motor nerves do, the autonomic nerves, with the exception of the vagus which has its root in the brain, take their roots in a column of ganglia located in front of the vertebrae.

Although this system disintegrates soon after death, for it is poorly protected and its ganglia lie close to tissues which putrefy readily (nasal mucous membrane, buccal cavity and intestinal canal), it is older than the sensori-motor system and it is fully developed at birth.

The autonomic system supplies the internal organs of the body, tear glands, sweat glands, salivary glands, hair roots, lungs, heart, stomach, liver, intestine, adrenal glands, bladder, rectum and genitals. It carries motor impulses, but scientists are not agreed as to whether it carries sensations It also controls in part the movements of the pupil

The autonomic system is divided up into two sub systems which we shall designate as the cranio sacral division or end division and the thoracico lumbar division, or sympathetic division or middle division.

The two divisions are absolutely antagonistic in action. For instance the cranio-sacral contracts the pupil, the sympathetic dilates it; the cranio-sacral division slows down the heart action, the sympathetic division accelerates it.

The cranio-sacral division promotes all the activities which build up the individual and assure the continuance of the race.

The sympathetic division which extends from the neck to the upper sacral region, decreases or stops all those activities in emergencies and releases safety devices. [36]

The Nervous Balance

For instance the cranio-sacral division causes saliva to flow, which helps the disintegration of food in the mouth; it causes the stomach glands to secrete gastric juice and the stomach to contract regularly and vigorously, which activates the digestion and speeds the digested food on its way into the intestine; it contracts the intestine and hence assists the elimination of waste matter; it holds the rectum and bladder openings closed until the proper accumulation of feces or urine makes voiding necessary; it regulates the heart beats, prevents the pupil from admitting too much light and focuses it so that it throws a clear image on the retina; finally it fills the exterior genitals with blood and enables them to perform their specific functions.