Getting what we want; how to apply psychoanalysis to your own problems

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. The Mind as a Machine i

II. "I Want" and "To Be Great" ... 13

II

SCIENCE has determined that minute cells of protoplasm, the lowest form of animal life, attract one another with a rapidity that is inversely as the square of the distance separating them. Elemental life, therefore, has its elemental longing and the faint foreshadowing of a mind machine.

What is this foreshadowing? A desire, a longing to meet, to cling together. Thus the infinitesimal mind of the earliest of creatures held the same impulse that dominates the mind machine of modern man — the basic biologic law of desire. As the body mechanism becomes more complicated by additions to the cellular content, desires also increase in number and form. Whereas the unicellular creature cried, "I want!" with a single faint voice, the mammal now shouts it in a thousand and one ways.

"I want!" and its opposite, "I don't want!" are the two demands that dominate the animal world. As his sole moving force, they also dominated man in his development up to the end of the Archaic stage.

The cry, "I want!" has its source in the five senses. Their demands have to be gratified and the reaction of the body to those demands has resulted, through evolution, in the storing up of a hereditary wisdom which we speak of as "instinctive desire."

The^ chick, on emerging from its shell, scratches for a living. The babe at birth turns naturally to suckling. Neither of these choices is based on personal experience. Neither are they a matter of experiment. Both the chick and the babe turn instinctively to that kind of nourishment which they require.

Doctor Cannon's famous experiment has demonstrated the force, both mental and physical, which has been exerted by the experience stored away in the bodily tissues during long ages of development.

A kitten which had been reared so carefully that it had never known pain, injury, or fear was tied just out of reach of a vicious dog. The little creature had never seen a dog before. Yet specimens of its blood taken before and after its experience showed that during the time it faced the snarling, barking animal, large quantities of a secretion a

I WANT' AND "TO BE GREAT"

from the adrenal gland had been poured into the kitten's veins.

Remember, there was nothing in the kitten's immediate experience to have made it acquainted with fear or a sense of approaching evil. Yet, under the stimulus of a spectacle it had never consciously seen before, the body responded to instinctive alarm. Immediately it drew upon its hereditary wisdom and prepared to combat the danger that threatened. The adrenal, poured into the blood, dilated the pupils of the eyes, giving a wider field of vision against flank attack, contracted the muscles of the body for the anticipated blow, bared the claws and the teeth for active defense, and by the same token gave a greater coagulability to the blood to fend against lacerations which otherwise might turn into fatal hemorrhage.

Thus, in the face of conditions wholly unknown to the conscious mind, the body reacts to an age-old experience stored up within itself, not alone in the brain — that single organ contained within the cranium — but scattered throughout the body in organs, sheathings, and in shape itself.

When the five senses of the beast are satisfied, when he has seen and eaten and drunk and smelled and felt enough, he lies down and sleeps. He has no further desire; no

"I want!" troubles him. So he slumbers until his mind machine, "cranked up" by one of his hungry senses, cries, "I want!" again.

And here we come upon the crossroads where the mind of man turns aside from that of the beast and struggles on uphill toward an ideal.

Man, when his senses are satisfied, does not stop. He goete on acquiring experience and storing it away in a mental savings bank against the time when he will need it. What is that impulse that lifts him above the level of the satiated and sleeping animal ?

Freud has said that it is the desire To Be Great. This he submits is the great mind quality that distinguishes the human from the brute. Its force, united with the five senses in endless complexity, is the power that drives man's mind machine.

This is the burden that man picked up at the parting of the ways when he went on and the beast remained behind. In the great variety of its combination with the five senses of the brutish mind, the psychomechanic finds, pragmatically, the motor force which lies behind all conscious or reasoning action.

To Be Great is a purely mental hunger

that man alone possesses — a great fighter, a

great pacifist, a great philanthropist, a great a villain, a great writer, a great fool, a great moralist, a great voluptuary, a great property owner, a great thief, even, but always a great something. It is a mental driving force, quite as demanding as the five physical senses, but, unlike them, requires a mental gratification.

Do we demand food? It is all about us. Water? It bubbles from every crack and cranny of the globe. Sight? Odor? Sound? Nature provides them with prodigal hand. At the cry of each of the senses, "I want!" she holds up the cup of repletion. But to the desire To Be Great man must find satisfaction through his own works.

And he must find it. He cannot safely starve this appetite any more than he can the appetites which he shares with the lower animals. His effort to find the food on which the To-Be-Great desire longs to feed and the effect of either gratification or disappointment explain his varying moods as clearly as his color and weight bespeak his success or failure in supplying the wants of his body.

Once the five physical senses have been gratified, all physical, all human action, turn instinctively to the To-Be-Great drive, which is no less intolerant in its demands than the physical appetites.

No human is so low, so depraved, so humble, or, on the other hand, so great, so allied with Deity or miracle, that this desire or appetite has been overwhelmed.

"Oh, it's miserable I am with the pain in my head," I overheard a man in my clinic remark to another waiting patient.

"Huh!" replied the other. "Now, if ye had the pain in your head I have in me knee—"

To Be Great!

Love, service, education, sacrifice are some of the more legitimate foods on which the desire flourishes. In addition to these there are mental "quick lunches" ready at the hand of the starving ego — fantasies, lies, exaggerations, alcohol, morphine, blows, and a gift to belittle. Ash-barrel foods these may be, but they serve as a provision to forestall the effects of the utter starvation which leads to crime, insanity, death.

An old and valued patient visited me to lay

bare a family difficulty that was fast getting

the better of his control. This is a very

common situation — the fact of there being

something within oneself which supersedes

logic and the reasoning mind; a basic hunger,

for the want of a particular food, putting

out of gear the whole mechanism itself.

My patient had been getting pale and thin, it

I WANT" AND "TO BE GREAT"

morose and uncongenial, though no physical trouble could be found. In a burst of confidence he said that his wife was constantly "picking on" him. She found fault, he said, with everything immediately upon his arrival at home after a hard day's work.

Under questioning, he said that it was not every night that she displayed this captious spirit. Some evenings, he admitted, she was all any man could desire as an agreeable companion.

I told him that I believed that his wife was suffering from starvation of the To-Be- Great desire; that in proportion to her starvation which arose from her failure to succeed that day she fell avidly upon the "quick-lunch" variety of psychic foods, chiefly upon the gift to belittle. Through minimizing all her husband did, she thus satisfied her longing To Be Great.

My suggestion was that my patient see to it that hereafter his wife was well fed psychically, that when he saw the clear signs of starvation of the To-Be-Great desire appearing he give her appreciation, recognition, encouragement, praise.

I told him that by his ability to do this he would remedy her impoverished condition and bring her back to normal again. At the same time — though I did not tell him this — he would be providing, through affording mental food for his wife, similar sustenance for himself. For through his unconscious confession to me it was plain that he, too, was starving. Because of his wife's irascibility he was being denied the same sort of food, the lack of which was the cause of her querulousness.

Two days later his wife came to me with the same story, except that the grievances were reversed. Her husband, she complained, came home at night sour-visaged, full of complaints and intolerable orders.

Again the question, "Every evening?' 5

"Oh no! Not every evening. Sometimes he is all that can be desired in agreeable companionship. "

Almost identical with the reply her husband had made to a similar query ! Her symptoms were the same as his — starvation of the To-Be-Great desire. My advice to her coincided with the remedy I had proposed to him.

"Feed him/' I said; "show him appreciation of his struggle; show that you recognize his difficulties; encourage and interest him, and do it quickly and efficiently so that he may not have to subsist on the husks served at the quick-lunch counter of psychic

life."

"/ WANT" AND "TO BE GREAT iS

"Doctor," said my friend several weeks later, "it works! It certainly works! It's raw stuff, for each knows the other is doing it and why it is being done, but it works !

"Each night when I return home she meets me at the door and rushes into my arms. I call her 'a beautiful creature' and she says Fm a 'wonderful man'! Raw! Awful raw! But it works."

Man of to-day is Adam of continuous growth. He is the heir, in a direct, undeviating line, to the impulse, desires, knowledge that have accompanied him in his upward climb from First Things. Spurred on by the To-Be-Great desire, he has become civilized. Thwart this but for a few minutes, let him become famished for it, and he flees from the terrible present down the corridor that stretches behind him.

The little boy of the last chapter desired To Be Great in the eyes of his mother. He longed for caresses and words of endearment. For an instant his desire was blocked. The present became unendurable and instantly his mind machine sped down the corridor of the past millions of years and — flash! — he was a savage of the Archaic period, bringing down his game with his good right arm.

A child has offended against some law of

the household. His mother orders him to go in the closet and "do nothing," as punishment. Do nothing! One might as well attempt to hold a vacuum in his two hands. There is no such thing as " nothing"! There in the darkness of the closet the present becomes at once unendurable. The child turns to the corridor of the past and retraces his steps through a million years. First in the order of retrogression he encounters his Auto-Erotic period. What trails are unfolded of that period of self-indulgence! He degenerates, temporarily or permanently, according to the strength of whatever To- Be-Great desire may try to thrust him back.

The morphine fiend, the confirmed alcoholic, the degenerate cannot stand the weariness of the present. Blocked in their desire To Be Great, they erase the present by means of drink, narcotics, or self-indulgence, and seek for the food denied them in the year 1920 in some undated period perpetuated in the life cells of their forbears down to the present day.

"The present is unendurable and the past is good!" is the cry of the degenerate, who, instead of following his To-Be-Great longing even in the face of obstacles, prefers to expend it on the easy descent into the corridor of the past.

These, then, are the pragmatic principles ii broadly sketched upon which the psychomechanic proceeds in readjusting the cogs and cams and pistons of the mind machine that is missing or back-firing or steering badly.

The chapters that follow deal with the theory and the practice of retuning the mind machine. Most of the stories I tell have come under my personal observation. A few are vouched for by near and trusted associates. The usual procedure of story-telling is reversed. The climax is presented first, but the theme of the story retraced back to the clamor of "I want!" and "To Be Great!" and perhaps far down the corridor through which we have all marched upward from darkness to the light.

Ill

THE new-born baby, still in the physician's hands, lifts up its voice in a feeble, wailing cry. Except to the exhausted woman who has borne him and the anxious man from whom he has sprung, it is a far from impressive sound — only a weak caterwaul, rising in protest against the world in general as it affects its newest citizen.

Yet a tremendous thing has taken place. The mind of a new man has spoken for the first time.

Down through the immemorial past the little body has come, through the million forms that stretch back to the tiny globule of protoplasm which was his beginning. All these aeons hereditary experience has been packed away in forbear after forbear, so that this little ultimate son may, through their suffering, be a little better fitted to cope with life.

And now, after the nine months of gestation, during which the embryo in its development has spanned with amazing swiftness the bridge that stretched from the protozoa to the human, across the flow of a billion years, the child is born. At once a new mind springs also into life. By the wail that the baby gives another voice is added to the chorus that has come swelling down the ages ever since life began.

"I want!" the new man shouts to the universe. "I don't want!"

"I want warmth and food and quiet. I don't want the rush of air into my lungs, the tremendous experience of first awakening. I want! I don't want!"

The mind has started. Death alone can stop it. From now on for scores of years that same cry will go resounding through the corners of the world from the new body which the new ego is destined to inhabit.

Man's first cry sounds the keynotes of the whole course of his existence and forms the basis of the framework upon which all of his future mental processes are to be hung. A little later a second desire To Be Great will arise inside him, which will determine the exterior covering of that framework.

Still holding to pragmatic reasoning as the

sextant which, whether true or false, will

enable him to travel these newly discovered

seas of the mind, the psychologist has divided 3 25 the human adult mind machine into three distinct parts.

First, the unconscious — to carry out the machine simile, the boiler of the apparatus where the power is generated. Second, the foreconscious — the transmission that carries the steam to the moving parts of the machine. Third, the conscious — the pistons and cams and wheels of the machine itself which move and do, with power from the foreconscious transmitted by it from the unconscious.

Remember, the mind of man to-day is as much a product of the first impulse of the senses, stirring in unicellular animals, as the mogul locomotive is the direct descendant of Watt's steaming teakettle. The steam machine and the mind machine are the product of an unbroken chain of evolution.

What was the beginning? What was the teakettle from which evolved the delicate, complicated mind machine that psychomechanics are striving to understand ?

The senses — touch, taste, sight, smell, and hearing — they were at the beginning. They served man's primeval ancestor for a mind and remain to-day the basis, the prime moving force of his mind machine.

The baby is born, after the gestation

period, to all intents and purposes a new

graduate of the Archaic. There is little in his early action to distinguish him and his mind machine from the kitten or the puppy. All three have the impulse of the five senses — the unconscious mind. Through them and their hereditary experience the foreconscious also cries: "I want! I don't want!"

The baby, the kitten, and the puppy stand at the parting of the ways. The great change is now to take place and the baby is to turn toward that pathway that leads him up and away from the brute. The kitten and the puppy will travel the other road, prompted and governed only by the unconscious and foreconscious mind.

"I want! I don't want!" — the earth cry — will be the greatest effort of their mind machines. They stand at birth in the Archaic. In the Archaic they will remain.

But the infant goes upward. At his feet is the threshold of the Narcissistic period and in a few months after birth he surges across this threshold with the battle cry of humanity, "To Be Great!" and has turned his back forever upon the beast from which he evolved.

So the conscious mind is born, and the first baby statement, "My doll is bigger than yours," "My father is stronger than yours," is the sign of its awakening.

First of all the unconscious mind — the

foundation upon which all mental processes rest, then the foreconscious with its earth cry, and finally the desire To Be Great which keeps man at work long after the "I want!" part of his mind has been satisfied, storing away material that he can use to build himself success.

The baby's first cry, in addition to the desire To Be Great, is the formula upon which rests the sum of all human expression.

But it must be remembered that the "I want!" cry is the basic drive. Until it is satisfied, until the senses have been satiated, the tether that holds man is no longer than that which binds the beast. Only through pacifying "I want!" can the To-Be-Great assume direction of our actions.

These, then, are the mechanical principles upon which the psychologist says pragmatically that the mind machine has been constructed. The machine awakens and stirs the instant the child is born. From then on it continues to move while life exists, driving the human it inhabits up from the darkness of the Archaic in which he still stands at birth to, perhaps, the height of the Social stage.

The mind emerges tethered to a body which it has dragged up through the ages from the lowest form of life to humanity.

For a time the shadow of the Archaic from which it is struggling still hangs over the little human.

At birth a series of tremendous events takes place for the baby. The five senses and the voice suddenly come into power. Some one has diagramed this condition, picturing the infant as the hub of a six-spoked wheel. Rushing down these spokes toward the hub are sensations — sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell, and the voice. Through the first five the child understands the outer world. Through the sixth — the voice — he announces to the world his approval or disapproval.

As yet, the conscious mind is at only the first glimmer of dawn, and therefore the foreconscious, with its age-old experience, dominates the child. Through the voice the knowledge won through the ages of evolution speaks, shouting, "I want!" or, "I don't want!" as the five senses submit shipment after shipment for the child's approval.

Touch the child with a bit of ice and straightway the body shrinks away and the voice is raised in protest. Cover it too warmly and it will thrash and kick against the blankets and thereby announce its discomfiture.

In its own brief experience the child has

not taught itself that the best way to avoid

discomfort from the touch of ice is to draw away. Neither has its conscious mind discovered that kicking off covers will bring relief from oppressive warmth. Yet within the child, on the threshold of the Narcissistic period, sits the grim creature of the foreconscious mind, wise with the knowledge of a thousand successive generations and guiding the child by that wisdom, rewarding obedience to the law, punishing disobedience, protecting when it may, but ruthlessly destroying when the offense has been too heavy.

The child at this stage is a co-operative protective organization with the foreconscious mind as a central directing office. Here are stored the proven experiences of thousands of years and by their laws the conduct of the child is directed.

Later, when the conscious mind comes into control, the old inhabitant of that central office (the unconscious mind) is not displaced. All through life his unceasing cry of, "I want! I don't want!" is dinned into our ears. Again and again, even among the most highly civilized people and particularly when their conscious mind has plunged them into error, the unconscious mind rushes back to the throttle of the mind machine, pushes aside the conscious mind, and forces the mechanism to do its will.

I stood in a saloon late one night where a dozen men were leaning idly against the bar. Presently a blond lad, evidently a German, came through the swinging doors, lugging a sack filled with something. He placed it carefully on the floor and ordered a glass of beer.

One man looked at the sack and then nudged his neighbor excitedly. The thing had moved! Others had their attention drawn to it and presently one of them spoke.

"Watcha got in the sack, buddy? A dog?"

"No," drawled its owner. "Snakes! Want to see 'em?"

Snakes. There was no definite reply to the query — only the noise of hurrying feet and the slap-slap of the swinging doors as man after man hurled himself out into the night. It is probable that some of the fugitives had never seen a snake. It is certain that their conscious minds had given them no definite picture of what might happen if the German opened his sack.

What really took place in each of them was that the conscious mind was half asleep at the throttle, drugged with alcohol and stifled with idleness. The word "snakes" had aroused the grim old inhabitant of the foreconscious central office, and he had charge of the situation in a flash. Therefore the men ran, as their ancestors in the dark Archaic times ran.

Through his five senses the child first awakens to life. He can therefore feel nothing but himself. It is not the sunlight that gives him pleasure, but his own body that receives the warmth. He does not attribute the tinkling of a bell to that instrument, but to his own ears. There is nothing in the world of reality for him but his own sensations.

Hence he ernerges from the last frontier of the Archaic into the Narcissistic through love of his own beautiful self. His is not the thought of service to the world or sacrifice for some one else. He lives for himself and does everything in his power to give himself a comfortable and happy time.

Here begins the domination of his conscious mind, collecting the results of experiments pleasant and disastrous, devising always fresh means of gratifying this self-love. Soon this love is affected by the desire To Be Great — to be great so that his own beautiful self may win admiration or love or applause. To himself the child is now the greatest thing in the world and he will go to almost any lengths to keep himself converted to this theory.

Joe and I were sent to dancing school, a loathsome ordeal inflicted upon me by stern parents. I went because I had to, and Joe because we never went anywhere separately when we could possibly avoid it. Joe and I were chums — the David and Jonathan in a group of kindred souls. Each found in the other the gratification of the Narcissistic desire To Be Great. The chief reason for my admiration of Joe was his ability to stand on his head long after the normal human would have succumbed to apoplexy. And Joe looked up to me because I could squirt water through my teeth farther than anyone else in our neighborhood.

Trussed up and beribboned in equal splendor, we went to the dancing school. Joe had difficulty in breathing; so had I. Mutual suffering standardized the matter to ordinary reality and we set forth with little complaint.

We arrived late the first day and were placed upon chairs against one side of the room, where we remained seated through a long lesson while mutiny smoldered in our bosom. The lesson concluded with an exhibition waltz by a dozen "young smarties," to the delight of their fond mothers and the hot resentment of Joe and me.

Resentment turned to scorn and scorn to jealousy while the waltz tinkled on and we fidgeted in our chairs. In Joe's and my ears the Narcissistic was whispering hotly. Some one else was getting applause while our beautiful selves were wholly neglected.

The waltz ended in a patter of handclapping. I nudged Joe and Joe nudged me. We had made no plan, but our minds traveled the same road and we knew.

"Go on, Joe. Show 'em! By golly! if I had a mouthful of water, I would!"

Little Joe slid off his chair and swaggered to the center of the room. There without pomp or ceremony he put his little bullet head to the floor and hoisted his sturdy legs in the air. Applause? We drank our fill of it then, for Joe just stayed there. His face turned purple, but he never wavered. If my mother had not rushed upon him and set him right side up he would probably be there yet.

That is the basic drive of the Narcissistic. In varied form it is repeated, over and over, through the life of every human. In the case of the child — often the man, if his mind fails to cross the Narcissistic border — action is inspired only to obtain admiration or Narcissistic satisfaction. The mechanism of things, their service in procuring the bodily necessities of life, their value to the herd, have no place whatever in the Narcissistic mind.

Joe may have been spanked for injecting a rowdy note into the aesthetic confines of the dancing class — I do not remember if he was — but if his self-inversion reaped that reward it is probable that he did not repeat the exhibition.

The next time he felt impelled to advertise his beautiful self by standing on his head the recollection of the vengeance the world had taken upon him following an earlier similar attempt would probably have deterred him. In other words, through his Narcissistic impulse and its painful result, Joe would have drawn nearer the Social stage — at present the highest development of the mind machine. He would have suppressed his desire to be great for his beautiful self's sake because experience told him that the herd would punish that form of self-exploitation.

A bully swaggers along the sidewalk, gratifying his desire To Be Great by pushing weaker persons off into the gutter. Sooner or later he meets some one with an equally strong hunger for greatness. This person resents the insult, and this resentment, purely Narcissistic, impels him to knock the bully down. Picking himself up, the assaulted one goes his way meekly and decorously.

Through the clash of Narcissistic desires he has been hurled, temporarily at least, into the Social stage. He shows regard for the feelings of the herd by pushing no more of its members off the sidewalk.

My first day of school found me as ardent and complete a Narcissist as ever existed. Accordingly, when at recess I was turned out into the yard with a hundred other boys the To-Be-Great hunger demanded immediate gratification. I began at once to lacerate the feelings of the herd by as objectionable a series of self-advertisements as my Narcissistic mind could devise.

I ran; I shouted; I pommeled boys; I pushed them over; I intruded upon games with the avowed purpose of breaking them up, and at length destiny led me to a circle of boys squatting about a marble ring.

One of them was crouching, about to shoot, and my "ego drive" shouted that it would be a splendid thing to leapfrog over his back. I misjudged distance and my own strength and tumbled over the boy into the marble ring.

In the debacle I scraped my knee so that the bleeding skin showed through my stocking. At home, where self-advertisement in this violent form was not heeded, I should probably have wailed aloud. By now the chagrin at my leapfrog failure was swallowed up in a new desire To Be Great. I would not cry! In this way I would call the attention of all beholders to the stalwart qualities of my beautiful self.

I laughed raucously and scornfully and immediately there fell upon me the unheardof thing! I was punched! I was kicked! My eye, my nose, my ringing ears sent forth frantic cries of, "I don't want," which completely obliterated the earlier protest of my injured knee. Finally the punishment administered by the other outraged Narcissists ceased and a dazed and bitterly sobbing small boy was allowed to stagger from the tumult.