The secret springs

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. Introduction 3

II. In Love and Marriage 15

II

— not even the fact that he has it. His conscious mind is the mind with which he thinks, or believes that he thinks. His imconscious mind is a mind of animal instincts, of inherited aptitudes, of racial traits. His unconscious mind governs his actions, his beliefs, his character, his health, and his happiness much more powerfully than does his conscious mind. Indeed, in these activities his conscious mind usually does little more than supply him with reasonable explanations for unreasonable actions and opinions which his unconscious mind has dictated.

So far, here is no new discovery either. The late William James ascribed to Frederick Myers the credit of having first arrived at the scientific conception of this "subliminal self." But before it was accepted by scientific psychologists it was vaguely recognized by many poets and philosophers. The Russian novelist Dostoievsky, for example, not only illustrated it in his characterizations, but accurately described it in his analysis of the motives of many of his heroes. Bergson made good use of the theory of the imconscious mind throughout his Creative Evolution^ and particularly in his pages on instinct and intelligence. And, most famous of all, Freud and his following of psychoanalysts have founded a whole school of psychology and of medicine upon it, and contributed an enormous library of research and argument to its study and imderstanding.

If found that Doctor X was well aware of all this previous research and that he had availed himself of everything in the Freudian theory that could help him. But be was not a Freudian. He was not purely a psychoanalyst. Unlike the Freudians, he did not confkie himself to studying chiefly the suppressions of the sex instinct in the subconscious mind. He had found that the suppression of any one of a half-dozen other instincts would affect the health in exactly the same way. And, by this enlargement of the Freudian theory, he took the curse of excessive sexuality off the unconscious mind, and he made it possible to discuss the whole business, without offense, in unprofessional print.

I kept insisting, as I say, that it should be so discussed — that a matter of such importance to the common man should be made known to him. And out of that insistence the following book has finally arisen. I have protected Doctor X from a breach of professional ethics by concealing his name. I have so disguised my accounts of his cases that his patients themselves would not recognize them. I have not attempted to be scientific, or exhaustive, or authoritative. I have tried merely to make clear and interesting to the average lay mind a department of science so important and so revolutionary that it is perhaps the greatest addition made to the sum of human knowledge since Darwin formulated his theory of evolution and the descent of man.

Chapter II

THERE came, one day, to Doctor X, a very able and well-known lawyer who had apparently been breaking under a strain of overwork. ' ^ As a matter of fact, ' ' Doctor X says, '*I soon learned from conversation with him that the strain was probably caused by a weight of unhappiness in his married life. In treating him, I noticed that he had an odd interest in the subject of hands. He remarked mine, which, he said, gave him a feeling of confidence and security . . . although my hands are rather delicate than powerful. He declared that he could read character from hands, particularly the character of a woman. His own hands were immaculately cared for and always freshly manicured. When I met his wife I noticed that she had hands of remarkable beauty and that she was rather proudly conscious of them. I concluded that he had probably made her so by his praise of them."

It seemed evident that this interest in 15 hands indicated some peculiarity in the mental life of the patient, but he was imaware of the origin of it. He could only offer the explanation that he looked at hands as an index of character. Then, in talking to Doctor X about the circumstances of his marriage, he related an illuminating incident.

He recalled that the first time he met his wife he was at a card party with a yoimg woman to whom he was then engaged. They played cards at the same table, his fiancee playing as his partner, opposite him, and his future wife playing as the partner of his opponent. His fiancee did not play well. His future wife played with great success. He became irritable with the girl to whom he was engaged, and before the evening ended he quarreled with her and she gave him back his engagement ring. Within a week he transferred the ring to the finger of his present wife.

Doctor X said, *' Your wife has a remarkably beautiful hand.'*

''Yes," he said. "I think her hands were what first attracted me to her. Do you know, when we were playing cards that night, I could hardly keep my eyes off them ! ''

"And your fiancee,'* the doctor asked, ''were her hands pretty?'*

He stared and blinked a moment. "That's i6 f tinny," he said. "I was just thinking of the contrast between them — ^and how it showed at the card table. She had very short, stubby fingers, and the index finger of her right hand was withered. I remember the thing got on my nerves. I wanted to stop playing rather than have her expose it.*'

''A psychologist,'' Doctor X said, ** would conclude that you had translated a criticism of her hands into a complaint about the way in which she 'played her hands.' "

He thought it over. ''Undoubtedly," he agreed. ''I felt at the time that I was unreasonable — irritable — impatient — but I couldn't control myself."

'' Now, tell me," Doctor X said, *' what is it that has given you this fixation about hands? It must have occurred very early in your childhood. If it wasn't your mother, it may have been yotir father, or a nurse, or some relative who took the place of a parent — some aunt, perhaps. What?"

He had been slowly shaking his head, reflectively. Suddenly he stopped. His face lit up. ''I know!" he said. ''I know! It was that vase!"

"A vase?"

"Yes. A vase. It used to belong to my mother. It's a very beautifully carved marble hand — a, woman's hand — holding a cornucopia. My old nurse used to give it to me to play with. I have it yet. It's on my library mantelpiece at home. It was my mother's, and, for a long time, I had the idea that it was really a copy of my mother's hand. She had died of tuberculosis when I was about a year old, and before she died she wrote a letter to me and asked them to give it to me as soon as I was able to read. And she told me good-by in it, and asked me not to forget her. Naturally, that letter meant a lot to me, and for a long time I used to think, ' That's the hand that wrote the letter' — and take it to bed with me when I was lonely — after I had been licked or anything — you know — tintil at last some one foimd me with it and told me it wasn't her hand at all ... I had forgotten all about it. . . . Funny thing! Even now, when I think of her letter I think of that marble hand as having written it."

Funny thing, indeed. He had been in fact married, unawares, by a marble hand. "It not only broke off his engagement to a girl with whom he might have been happy," Doctor X points out. ' ' It married him blindly to a girl with whom happiness, for him, was practically impossible, because he was demanding that she be a self-sacrificing, motherly, and devoted woman, and she

i8 never had been, and never could be, that sort of person. He fell in love with her at first sight — 'compulsively,' as we say. If anyone at the card table could have seen into his mind and warned him against being hypnotized by a pair of pretty hands, he would probably have replied: 'She's a beautiful character — I can tell it by her hands. I know it intuitively. IVe always been that way.'"

Intuitively ! That is the word. When we say^we know a thing "intuitively" we mean that we know it without knowing how we know it — ^by some mental faculty that is not reason, nor deduction, nor conscious thought at all. And by so saying we recognize the existence of what science now calls '*the subconscious mind." But if it is from this subconscious mind that we get our "intuitions," where does the subconscious mind get them? Where did the lawyer, the slave of the marble hand, get his "intuition" about hands?

When you fall asleep you lose consciousness. Your conscious mind ceases to work. It rests and is refreshed. But you dream. Some part of your mind continues to work busily, imagining scenes, inventing or recalling incidents, enjoying fantastic adventures. You may remember these when you wake up or you may not. That is to say, your conscious mind may have some knowledge of them or it may not. They are an affair of the subconscious mind, the dream mind.

It is from the study of dreams that Freud has worked out the knowledge of the subconscious mind that he has given us. We find that the subconscious mind has a record of memories that have been lost from the conscious mind or were never registered on it. We find that the subconscious mind even preserves a picture of events that occurred in infancy before the child had developed any reasoning intelligence whatever. And among those pictvires we find the "mother image," the indelible but imconscious picture of the person upon whom our first instinctive love was centered.

Anything astonishing about that? Surely not. It is perfectly natural that in the normal man's mind the image of his mother should persist as a loved ideal. But the curious thing is that the image is not an ideal of character and qualities and attributes. It is merely an image. It has merely physical characteristics of height and features, hands and eyes, this sort of nose and that color of hair. And just as, in the child, the sight of his mother started up the whole emotion of instinctive love, so, in later years, the sight of any physical characteristic of the mother may have the same effect on him.

That is why the lawyer was married by a marble hand. His '* mother image*' had been formed aroimd that one feature, a beautifiil hand. The sight of such a hand aroused in him all the emotion of instinctive affection. He was unaware of this, because it took place in his unconscious mind. He explained it to himself by argtiing that hands were an index to character. He had forgotten about the marble hand. He did not remember it until Doctor X*s questions recalled it to him and brought it back from his imconscious memory.

Does all this seem far-fetched ? Well, let us leave it for a moment and go with Doctor X. He has a patient who was married not by a marble hand, but by a red lamp.

*'He is rather imusual,'* Doctor X says, ''because he remembers quite clearly the mother image which he carried in his mind in his boyhood days. It was a picture of his mother as a beautiful young woman, slender and graceful, with smiling brown eyes and wavy hair. I wished to follow the replacement of that image in his mind by the image of the imaginary sweetheart, who usually succeeds the mother image in the adolescent daydream. And I asked him whether he had ever had a mental picture of an ideal girl in his youth.**

He could not recall any. No. He had been a penniless boy, with no prospect of marriage, and he had never attempted to picture to himself the sort of yovmg woman who would be his ideal.

He was sure of that, until Doctor X spoke of her not as an ideal girl, but as "a dream girl."

"Oh yes," he said. **0f course. Iremember! I remember the red lamp.**

"Red lamp?'*

"Yes. I used to see her standing under a hanging lamp, a sort of Turkish lamp, in a kind of Turkish room, with rugs and tapestries — all of it in a red glow from above.** He was describing it amusedly. "The light made her look like a perfect peach — shining on her hair — sort of wavy hair — and her eyes were brown, in the shadow, and she was — oh, gee, she was certainly a pippin! I remember, I used to say to myself: *No, you don*t! No such luck for you, boy ! * And say, when I saw — **

He stopped. He looked at the doctor queerly.

"Why, that's so!** he said. "I*d forgotten that! Well, I'll be jiggered.**

'' Forgotten what? *'

'*Why, the first time I took Alice home from a dance." (Alice is his wife.) *'I had never been in the house before, and they had one of those red lamps in the hall — a big entrance hall with Turkish rugs and hangings — and when she took off her evening cloak and stood with the red light shining on her hair that way, smiling as she said good night to me, it just went through me like — ^well, I think, if Td been able to find my voice, I'd have proposed to her on the spot. I know I went away convinced that she was the one woman in the world for me. And I was right. WeVe been as happy as any two people ever could be."

Apparently he had never before connected the lamp in the hall with the lamp in his dream; and he had never noticed the likeness between the real girl and the dream girl — ^much less related either of them to the ''mother image" with its "smiling brown eyes and wavy hair." When Doctor X asked him whether his wife reminded him of his mother at all he replied: '* No. Not at all. Not in any way."

Subsequently he spoke rather impatiently of one of his wife's characteristics; that she was always oversympathetic with

people "not her own sort of people,"

He said: ''She always goes out of her way to say 'Good morning' to the park policeman, and stops to talk to -hose neglected-looking kids you see on the street, and she used to take flower seeds up to an old flagman on a railroad crossing."

"And that irritates you?'' the doctor asked.

"No,** he said, "it doesn't irritate me exactly, but — I don't know. I feel sort of jealous, I think."

It seemed an odd groimd for jealousy. The doctor changed the subject, but a few moments later — when he was sure that his patient had forgotten the connection — he asked, "Were you ever jealous of your mother — as a boy?"

"Sure I was," he laughed. "I remember, once, when I saw her kiss a neighbor's boy I was so sore I laid for the kid and beat him up."

That would account for his feeling about his wife's interest in the children on the street. But what about the park policeman and the others?

"I mean older people," Doctor X said — "poor people and men in uniform."

"Well," he recollected, "I came home from school one day and found mother with a couple of policemen in the dining room, giviHig them coffee and sandwiches. There had been a fire up the street, and they were drip;^>ing water all over everything. I think that was what made me mad — the way they were mussing things up. And the fire was out, and I thought to myself, ' I guess they weren't such a pair of heroes, even if they did get wet, * and I didn't see why she was making such a fuss about them."

''It was characteristic of her, was It?*' the doctor asked, *'to do things for people, that way?*'

'*0h yes," he said. ''She was a good deal like my wife in that respect."

Here, then, was another subconscious mother image that had acted as a matchmaker. But you will notice that the young lover, in his daydreams, had added a red lamp, and that the lamp became the "symbol" by which the emotion of love was exploded in him. You will notice, too, that he was jealous of his wife whenever she duplicated an action that had made him jealous of his mother, although it was absurd for him to be jealous of such actions in his wife, and he knew it.

"An actual living parent is not necessary,"

Doctor X points out, "to form this parent

image. It may be formed from pictures, or

the reports of others; or it may take the

3 25 aspect of a nurse or a guardian. But, once formed, it becomes the starting signal for the emotion of love forever after; and if that emotion is complicated by other emotions in childhood, those emotions, too, will be started irresistibly. That is the reason why my patient of the red lamp was jealous of his wife whenever she did anything that made him jealous of his mother/'

The love image, as I have said, is carried as a picture, not as a thought. It is not consciously present in the mind. It has not the attributes of a character so much as the outward appearance of a person. Consequently all the emotions of love may be sprung on the conscious mind of a young man or woman by the appearance in reality of some fragment of the unconscious image — like the red lamp or the beautiful hand.

That is Doctor X*s explanation of love at first sight. The lawyer at the card table was instantly and irresistibly attracted by the beautiful hands. They started up in him the whole mighty emotion of instinctive love. Neither his engagement to another woman nor the obvious shortcomings of the new object of his affections could save him from the overpowering impulse of attraction. This is probably why we say, "Love is blind." It is the unconscious, unreasoning, instinctive mind that is operating, and the reasoning mind joins it only to explain, to make reasonable, to ''rationalize*' (as the psychologists say) the emotions by which reason is stampeded — ^just as the lawyer had rationalized the effect of fine hands on his affections by argtiing that hands are an index of character.

And the presence of this dream image in the subconscious mind accotmts also for some other common delusions of love.

It accotmts, for instance, for the romantic belief of the poet that he has met his beloved one in another life. ''When I was a king in Babylon and you were a Christian slave — '' That other life is the dream life of the subconscious mind, in which the poet has known the image that now appears before him in the person of his sweetheart.

It accounts for the poetical theory that

the lover is in search of the other half of his

incomplete personality, and that true love

consists in the imion of two halves of a

personality fitting as perfectly as the divided

coin of the lovers in the fairy tale. The two

halves that fit are the actual image of the

sweetheart and the dream image in the

lover's mind.

And it accounts for many of those ro- 27 mantic mysteries, and compulsions, and demoniac powers that have been attributed to the god of young love — the power to delude, to overwhelm reason, to nullify experience, and generally to make the lover behave like a victim of hypnosis, a blind puppet, a ridiculous marionette.

Doctor X says: ''I have a patient who has been ideally happy in her married life. She was also ideally happy with her father. She tells me: /He never criticized a woman in his life. I could always go to him and get anything I wanted. He never whipped me. He was always frank. I never had reason to hide anything from him.' *'

He died when she was sixteen. Doctor X wished to trace the transference of this father image to her husband. He asked how she had come to marry.

"I always had lots of admirers,'* she said, ^'but I never had any preference for any of them until I met Royce.'' Royce is her husband. ''I liked him the moment he stepped on the dancing floor. He was tall and dark and slender. He had the best face. And there was an air of absolute cleanliness about him that I learned later was true of his mind as well."

''How tall was he?'* the doctor asked.

''He's six feet two." 28

'*His clean-mindedness was like your father^s?"

"Yes. Exactly."

*'What was your father like, physically?"

"He was tall and dark and slender. He wore a beard, but he had clean-cut features."

"How do you know? Did you ever see him without the beard?"

"No, but mother had a picture of him as a young man, and he had the cleanest face."

"How tall was he?"

"Six feet three inches."

Here the role and make-up were all ready for the actor who could carry them off. The moment he stepped on the stage the heroine of the love drama began at once to play her part opposite him. Since he developed the necessary qualities of character to stabilize the instinctive attraction, the love has been permanent and the happiness enduring.

It is not always necessary, however, for the actor to have the necessary qualities of character. By some mechanism of projection, those qualities may be stripped from the dream man and foisted upon the lover. He may be dressed up in the borrowed garments of the heroine's mental image without the least discomfort to her. She will

be blind to his faults, without any sense of discrepancy. And she will impute to him lofty qualities of soul which everyone else will be skeptical about — even his own mother.

The girl will be quite imaware that she is carrying this property tnmk around with her. She will not know what she has put in it or why. She has' filled it with qualities that were originally her father's, and later were romantically made over and retrimmed in daydreams and fantasies. The matinee infatuations of yoimg girls usually serve in the latter process. And it is an extremely valuable process, for it adapts the father image to the new drama of adolescent love, and prepares the girl for a relation with her husband that has not been rehearsed in her relations with her father. This change in the image is called a "rejuvenation.'*

But suppose the rejuvenation does not occur or is incomplete. What then?

Doctor X has a patient, a married woman, who came to him to be treated for various physical ailments that need not concern us here. The point is that she considered herself very unhappy in her married life. "I felt this morning," she said, tragically, "that I simply couldn't live with my husband another day.'*

Why not?

It was not at all clear why not. The 30 grievances that she had against him seemed small enough. They amotmted to the fact that he was the sort of man he was, and not some other sort of man.

The doctor changed the conversation byasking her whether her father was still alive.

"No," she replied. "He died when I was only three years old.'*

"Tell me," he said, "what would be your ideal of a husband? Describe him to me — his physical characteristics."

She described him rather vividly, laughing.

He returned to the question of her husband again and his faults. Then he asked, "What did your father look like?"

She replied with an equally vivid description of her father, although he had died when she was so young that she could not possibly have remembered him. And, stranger still, her description of her father was, almost word for word, a repetition of her description of her ideal of a husband.

Doctor X pointed out this oddity to her. She seemed bewildered by it. She did not know where she had acquired the vivid picture of her father. "I thought I remembered him that way," she said, "but, of course, I don't. I couldn't. I was too yoimg."

"Evidently," he suggested, "you have invented in your childhood a * father image'

that represented your ideal of what a father ought to be/'

''Yes," she said. ''Evidently that's just what IVe done/'

"And in your later youth you have unconsciously accepted that ideal of a father as your ideal of a husband."

"I suppose I have," she agreed, more doubtfully. "It certainly seems that way."

"Well, then," the doctor said, "does it occtir to you that you are unhappy with yotir husband because he is not your ideal of a father?"

No. She would not admit that. She argued against it. It was as a husband that he had failed.

Doctor X left the matter with her.

The next time he saw her she said: "I have been thinking over what you suggested about my husband. I believe you were right. I've really been asking him to father me." She laughed. "As a matter of fact, I don't think he's half bad as a husband — as husbands go."

That is a very simple instance of one of the commonest causes of imhappiness in married life. Let us go a cut deeper in the matter.

"I have a patient," Doctor X says, "a woman who married an unrejuvenated father image. That was a mental regression on her part, due to the failure of a youthful love affair in which the image had been rejuvenated as an ideal lover. Unhappy because of the failure of this love affair, she had repressed the memory of it, and the ideal image had been carried down in the repression — as it often is. The father image had replaced it — as it often does. When she was about to marry her present husband her mother warned her, 'He is just like your father, and he has always been difficult."

Her father had, in fact, been shorttempered, critical, and unjust. Once, when she was about seven years old, he had accused her of something of which she had not been guilty, and in a rage, without letting her explain, he had spanked her in the presence of a boy friend. The indignity was almost unendurable. It had remained in her memory as the picture symbol of parental injustice. But she had all a young girFs instinctive love for her father. She had repressed her anger and resentment. It remained in her subconscious mind as a mass of undrained emotion — as an ''affect," as the psychologists say.

One evening, at the dinner table, her husband wrongly accused her of something that had been done by a servant, and he spoke angrily to her in the presence of a dinner guest. By so doing he accurately reproduced the scene that had occurred with her father. There followed a volcanic eruption out of all proportion to the cause of it. All the undrained emotions of her relations with her father were set free. And they remained free, thereafter, in her relations with her husband. Any sort of happiness with him became practically impossible, because, loving him as she had loved her father, she felt all the resentment and anger and dislike against him that she had stored up, unexpended, against her father.

** Moreover,'' the doctor says, ''her feelings against her father had accumulated in a sense of humiliation that showed in blushing in her girlhood, though the blushing was of a transitory character. As a consequence of her imhappy relations with her husband, she developed chronic blushing — a, so-called vasomotor reaction in which the congestion and painful beating of the blood vessels of face and neck led her physician to believe that she had a thyroid disturbance. It was on this diagnosis that she came to me.

"I found that she had no thyroid trouble. She was physically healthy. She was suffering only with the psychic conflict that had resulted from marrying an unrejuvenated father image. She was cured by bringing that conflict into her conscious mind and resolving it, with her husband's aid.'*

Let us put aside, for the present, the question of how such a conflict can be cured by '* bringing it into the conscious mind." Let us leave out of immediate consideration the whole matter of disease and its treatment by such methods. Let us confine ourselves to the question of how this subconscious love image and the emotions attached to it affect the happiness of married life.

The case that I have just described is evidently a somewhat abnormal example of what is a fairly common situation. We have all, I suppose, been puzzled by the amount of irritation that often develops between husband and wife over some apparently trivial matter. We call it "a tempest in a teapot." The most devoted love does not seem capable of saving them from moments of the most furious anger and resentment. The cause may be as small as a teapot, but the tempest can be a homewrecking tornado. The one whom we most love we seem to be capable of most hating. Why?