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Baker Eddy, their own colleagues turned philosophical. It is no wonder that most of them
refused to examine the new ideas, or that most of those who looked into psychology
found it incomprehensible. A trained man is hard to retrain; a martyr--which the doctors
had been--all but impossible.
Again, Freud's basic discovery was rapidly amended, revised, debated, redefined,
enlarged, and variously altered. Scientists, like other mortals, are prone to hold their
careful opinions as pure, precious and permanent. Freud was no exception. Instead of
realizing that his law would be refined--as all good scientists should do--he argued back.
His first corollary to his statement of the unconscious mind--that infanthood sex
hostilities, aggressions, jealousies and frustrations shape the conflicts of the mature man-
was seized upon as a wrong or an inadequate description of human personality. Freud
later developed a magnificent description of the urge opposed to the life-wish--the death-
wish, that is, and did not claim for sex-cabala all that he is commonly supposed to have;
nevertheless he over-defended that child of his brain.
And when Adler developed the theory of inferiority-superiority, and Jung the
hypothesis of intraversion and extraversion, along with some others, the popular mind--
rather, the "educated" popular mind, for ignoramuses were not equipped to enter the
discussion at all--began to assert that what was only a branch of a branch of physical
chemistry at most was also, patently, in a condition of such equivocatiousness as to be
unworthy of serious study. Here was one more excuse for avoiding the painful possibility
that man's mind did not know itself--one more "argument" against psychoanalysis and all
that pertained thereto. These divisions among psychologists were used as "proof' that
their theorizings were insubstantial by three-quarters of the professors on earth and nearly
all priests and preachers.
Finally (to chip at a last specimen of the hard rind man has formed against
learning his own psychology), the sexual nature of much psychological discussion--and
especially of the early discussion--so colored the introduction to the general subject as to
render it opaque, blinding the novitiate to the immensity of the theme beyond--in filthy
blackness, if that was how he already looked at sex, or hues of lavender and scarlet,
rainbows, personal psychic possibilities unlimited, be that his bent, or a frosted barrier
with no color whatever, if that was his sexual conditioning to start with.
Sex, as it will be necessary to explain in some detail later, is the chief vested
interest of religion. It is a principal concern of government. When law and religion were
embodied together in tribal customs, the administration of sex, next to traffic in ghosts,
constituted the main means of continuum for those in authority. Machinations of tabu and
privilege, unconscious and traditional through they were and usually still are, capture the
libido (the psychic energies) of the many, and hold them subject to the authority of the
few. Thus to most people, tampering with sex concepts was equivalent to tampering with
the Laws of God, and to the more enlightened minority, it amounted to an interference
with Common Law and hence a violation of accumulated Common Sense.
I presume that the doctors of medicine found their first clue to the unconscious
mind in sex and began to unravel the great snarl of human aberration at the sexual end of
its infinite skein owing to the fact that the instincts of sex are at once the most powerful
and the most frustrated of any, in this civilization. The cases which came before their
eyes were most often the derelicts of conscious-unconscious sexual conflicts and those
cases were the most dramatic, which is to say, conspicuous. Had the doctors been dealing
with American Indians or with Hindus or Chinamen, their first clue to the total psyche of
man might have come from another direction: conflicts arising from an inability to accept
and assimilate the objective environment.
But their patients were Western men and the common symptom, when diagnosed,
proved to be a disease of the sex instinct--or a host of diseases; this circumstance, while it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]