XI. Will and the Psychoanalysts

XI

WILL AND THE PSYCHOANALYSTS

PRACTICALLY within the last few years there has grown up a body of doctrine, gradually becoming surrounded with a formidable literature, which its proponents call a “science”; and I shall not start an argument at the very beginning by denying its title to that word. This body of doctrine is called “psychoanalysis.” It is not quite clear whether its adherents consider it a branch of psychology or a competitor. But at all events, it has just now become ubiquitous. It is in the air. It is the fad. It has come out of the laboratories into the drawing rooms, out of the consulting rooms into the newspapers. It is discussed by doctors and book-reviewers and spinsters and school girls. It deals with human action, with the mind, the will, the desires, it lays down recommendations; and any modern book upon the will, though it may embrace or damn psychoanalysis, cannot afford to ignore it.

Now it is very difficult to pass fair judgment upon this body of doctrine. It is so young. It has already, to my mind, made not unimportant steps in the treatment and cure of insanity and nervous diseases, and bids fair to make greater. Its theories of multiple personalities and the meaning of dreams seem to me fruitful working hypotheses, determined to add to the achievements of psychiatry. Its explanations of Puritanism and of certain phases of war psychology, utterly apart from the question of whether or not they have scientific value, are delicious and effective bits of satire; and, as with Thorstein Veblen’s work in economics, the satire is heightened, not diminished, by the dry, scientific vocabulary in which it is wrapped and the impartial scientific attitude which it affects.

Psychoanalysis, doubtless, is proceeding on many wrong theories, and as time goes on the bad will cast upon the scrap-heap and new and better theories substituted. It is tapping and specializing upon a vein which the academic psychology had neglected. It has attracted wide popular interest. It has brought controversy into psychology; and controversy, with experiments to prove or disprove, always means life and growth and progress, and is the enemy of stagnation. It is true that the literature of psychoanalysis is morbid, gruesome, depressing; filled with sexual perversions, with incest, sadism, masochism, onanism, sodomy; but what would you? Medical books on physical diseases are also horrible—but necessary. Spiritual scabs and ravages and pus are more revolting than physical—but like the physical, if we are to combat them, we must study them with the cold detached impartiality of the physician. We must for the moment put aside our moral platitudes and denunciations and contempt and study the disease and its cure. The physician does not denounce his patient for becoming ill, though the patient may well deserve it. He seeks first to restore health. Admonition can only follow.

But when I have said all this in favor of psychoanalysis, I have said almost as much as I conscientiously can. Few of its practitioners are well-grounded in psychology, and fewer in biology and medicine. It utilizes orthodox medicine, biology, psychology, anatomy and physiology when they can be used to prove a special point, and rejects them when they can not. There is hardly a single analyst who could be called a cautious thinker. Most of them do not appear to know the difference between a substantiated theory and a guess. Presumptive evidence is set down as if it were conclusive evidence. Some of their deductions are highly fanciful. They would be extremely difficult to verify, and there is usually no attempt at verification. Whenever human nature is praised, proof is required, but apparently whenever it is satirized or insulted, proof is deemed superfluous. The most dubious conjecture, based on the frailest kind of evidence, is set down with the positive air of a fact. Explanations for which the best that can be said is that they are possible or plausible are treated as if they were the final and only ones; though alternative explanations, at least equally and possibly more plausible, and certainly nowhere near as far-fetched, may occur to a person not altogether hypnotized by the Freudian interpretation.

It is one of the foremost Freudian theories—if indeed, it is not the foremost—that every dream (not some dreams, mind you, but every one!) represents the gratification of some desire suppressed or repressed during the waking state. This desire, according to Freud, is practically always a sexual one; at least the predominance of the sexual element appears to be overwhelming.

Now such a theory in its bald state would not impose upon a half-witted person. So the psychoanalysts go on to show that most of our dreams are “symbolic.” And what ingenious symbolism! The unconscious mind asleep seems to me infinitely more clever than the couscous mind awake! It is also a theory of Freud’s that every act, every slip of the tongue, every bit of absent-mindedness or forgetfulness, means something. Forgetting a name, an event or a figure, is not merely failure to remember; it is a positive act. We forget because we have an unconscious desire to forget; the fact or name is associated with something unpleasant and the mind tends to eject it or the unconscious to suppress it. I wish I had time, for your edification, to quote a few typical examples of the “interpretations” which the psychoanalysts give of different dreams and trivial acts in the light of these theories. Their capacity for reading anything they choose into anything they want is utterly enormous. You would sometimes think from a few of these “interpretations” that the psychoanalysts were satirizing or burlesquing themselves. Really it is not so. But the reader who has sufficient psychologic curiosity to be interested in seeing how a theory can be ridden to death and then pulled to its feet and ridden again would find unsurpassed material by delving a little into psychoanalytic literature.

A large part of the interest in psychoanalysis is almost wholly prurient. It is to the fact that it deals so largely with “sex” I verily believe, that it owes the largely part of its popular vogues. It seems, too, to have a certain tendency to wallow in it and find a morbid fascination in it. Examples of sexual abnormalities are piled up with a relish not unlike that which gossiping people have in retailing scandal, and often apparently with the same object—to tell the tale for the sake of the tale. The examples are usually more than are needed to enforce a given conclusion, though the exact bearing of each upon the conclusion is not always indicated.

There can be little doubt that the reading of psychoanalytic literature tends to suggest and arouse sexual trains of thought in the minds of many readers, and I am here speaking of “normal” readers, and not of what the psychoanalysts would call a “sexually hypersensitive” or “hyperaesthetic” reader. The same, of course, may be true of a medical book. I am not condemning. I am merely stating a fact.

This statement has been made before, and one psychoanalyst has attempted to answer it in this wise: “The sexual material is present in every subject, normal or abnormal, and comes to the surface very easily. No suggestion is necessary to bring it forth.”

That is emphatically not an answer. We have seen before, in our inquiry into the nature of desire, that desires are not ever-present, but become active only when some train of though or some external observation or stimulus has aroused them; and we illustrated by a phonograph record, which, while it preserves a tune, is silent when it isn’t being played. The example of passing the fruit-stand was given as a case in point. The like is true of sexual desires. Whether a desire “comes to the surface” or stays below is a point of very great importance.

The psychoanalytic method is incomplete, insufficiently checked up by other methods, and rests upon some dubious assumptions. It seeks to interpret the normal mind through a study of the abnormal mind. This is a perfectly valid and useful method within proper limits, but it can be overdone and rashly handled. “The neurotic,” says one psychoanalyst, “only accentuates certain general human traits and tendencies and he makes them, thereby, easier to observe.” Such a statement needs qualification. Instead of “accentuating” a trait of a normal man, the neurotic may be a neurotic because he so greatly distorts it. Disease symptoms do not “accentuate” health symptoms.

Finally, to all these sins, psychoanalysis adds the unforgivable crime of pedantry. I do not know of a science that habitually wraps its thoughts in such awesome and jawcracking phraseology, with such a maze of newly coined words, above all, habitually tacking on the magic word “complex” after describing any train whatever in order to make it sound as if something very profound had been pointed out. When most of these psychoanalytic thoughts are disentangled from the verbiage in which they are snarled and concealed, and lie before you in all their nakedness, they are seen to be either very commonplace and obvious, or very absurd. Such a discovery might be suspected in advance, for poverty of thought habitually tries to conceal itself beneath a deluge of diction. This may be a case of the “unconscious” or the “inferiority complex,” forming a “self-protective neurosis!”

But this is digressing. My purpose is not to criticize psychoanalysis as a whole, but to examine one of its cardinal doctrines which seems to me to bear directly on the subject of will-power. But first I shall have to explain what that doctrine is.

The psychoanalysts lay a good deal of stress upon what is commonly called the subconscious, and what they call the unconscious. Their conception of the unconscious is vividly described by Mr. André Tridon, in a book on Psychoanalysis and Behavior, from which I shall take the liberty of quoting:

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 mind 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 the water, 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.

Now these two dogs may be made to represent two sorts of desires or cravings. The first of these are cravings of which we are aware, but which, because they are “immoral” or socially detrimental, or difficult or impossible to gratify for some other reason, remain unacted upon. These are called “suppressed” desires. The second are cravings which we not only fail to gratify, but of whose very existence we are unaware. If someone were to suggest that we had such cravings we might even vehemently, and perhaps honestly, deny it. These are called “repressed” desires.

Now, say the psychoanalysts, though we cannot suppress or repress our cravings, we cannot annihilate them. To use one of their similes: “Whether we remain in ignorance of the fact that a boiler is full of steam or simply disregard that fact, the steam is there, seeking an outlet and likely to create an abnormal one, unless a normal outlet is provided.”

What will this “abnormal outlet” be? According to the psychoanalysts, it may take several forms. “Between the compelling instinct and the opposing force of sexual denial,” for instance, “the way is prepared for some disturbance which does not solve the conflict but seeks to escape it by changing the libidinous cravings into symptoms of disease.” In other words, the suppression or repression of sexual cravings, they assert, will lead to anxiety dreams, nightmares, nervous disorders, intolerance, hallucinations, dual and multiple personalities, insanity, or burst out in abnormal sexual perversions of a revolting sort. They bring forth examples of perversions in great men. They point with a finger of warning at the ascetics and holy men and women who were fighting the flesh, and contend that these exchanged normal reality for hallucinations, and normal desires for perverse desires.

And what cure do they suggest? Here I must be cautious, and warn the reader that the psychoanalysts do not altogether agree upon this matter among themselves. I will try, however, as best I may, to do justice to the bulk of their opinion.

They believe, first, that we should be made conscious of our repressed cravings. To make the subject conscious of these, they interpret his acts, study his dreams, unravel the symbolism, and gradually inform the patient what his repressed cravings are. This is cutting the rope that holds the dead dog down. The first job is to bring him to the surface.

Critics have feared that causing these unconscious cravings to rise to consciousness may cause them to overpower the patient’s ethical strivings. The belief has also been expressed that this method may suggest a craving or put into the mind of the patient a harmful idea that was not there before. Freud, the originator and patron saint of psychoanalysis, has answered to the first criticism that a wish whose repression has failed is incomparably stronger when it remain unconscious than when it is made conscious. The unconscious wish cannot be influenced and is not hindered by strivings in the opposite direction, which the conscious wish is inhibited by other conscious wishes of an opposite nature. I shall not take sides on this particular argument, but shall merely content myself with presenting the two points of view, leaving the reader to judge of their merits for himself.

When the unconscious craving is brought to the surface, what becomes of it and what is to be done with it? Partly, say the psychoanalysts, it is “consumed” and overpowered in the very act of bringing it up. Instead of being repressed, it is condemned. The psychoanalyst may also suggest healthy and normal and socially beneficial or harmless ways of gratifying it.

But there is something further. It may, according to Freud, be “sublimated.” By sublimation, Freud understands a process which seeks to utilize the sexual energy, immobilized by repressions and set free by analysis, for higher purposes of a non-sexual nature. In other words, the components of the sexual energy can be made to exchange their sexual goal for one more remote and socially valuable.

To the utilization of the energy reclaimed in such a way, in the activities of our mental life, we probably owe the highest cultural achievements. As long as an impulse is repressed, it cannot be sublimated. After the removal of the repression, the way to sublimation is open.

All this is interesting and promising. But alas! The doctrine is violently criticized by many other psychoanalysts. “No normal craving,” says one, “can be normally repressed. Nor can it be normally sublimated.” And again: “The desirability of sublimation, except as a social convenience, remains to be proved.”

In fact, it is doubtful to just what extent Freud himself believed in this theory. In one of his lectures, he said: “If the repression of sexuality is pushed too far it amounts to a robbery committed against the organism.” He concluded this lecture with a story. A village community kept a horse which was capable of an enormous amount of work. But the wiseacres thought that it was proving too costly by consuming too much fodder. So they began to cut down its ration, day by day. It finally got so small that the horse was living on one stalk of hay a day, with apparently no ill effects. The next morning he was to be taken to work with no food at all. But on that morning he was found dead in his stall. The “sublimation” of his craving for food had been complete.

The suggestion is plain. Freud is putting the desire for sexual gratification in the same category as the desire for food. I cannot see the justice for that; and I am sorry, if, in pointing out his fallacy, I am obliged to utter a few platitudes. Food is absolutely essential to the life of the individual from the day of birth. There is no one to deny it. Sexuality, however essential to the continuation of the race, has no indispensable connection with the individual. No one has ever been known to live without food. How many have lived without sexual gratification no one can say; but I have no doubt that the number, in its totality, has been amazingly large.

The psychoanalysts point to monks and ordinary individuals who, attempting to deny the flesh, suffered from hallucinations or finally burst forth in abnormal perversions. Most of the examples they cite may be true. All of them may be true. But that would not prove their case. In order to do so, they would have to prove what the logicians call a universal negative. They would have to show that there has never been a case in which the flesh has been denied without physical injury or mental disturbance. Either that, or they would have to supply overwhelming evidence to show that on a priori grounds such a thing is impossible. They have not done so. They have not come near doing so. And though it is impossible to prove beyond question of any given individual that he has not indulged in any sexual practice of any kind, yet there is abundant presumptive evidence that thousands of prominent churchmen, scientists, philosophers and quite ordinary individuals have succeeded in absolute chastity and remained otherwise wholly “normal.”

And before going any further it would be well to call attention to a point of the highest importance. Altogether apart from the truth of one belief or the other, we must consider the moral effect of the belief. If you believe that you cannot get along without sexual or any other particular gratification, then assuredly you will not be able to. But if you believe that you can get along without it, you may have won half the victory. What you believe in this respect will have an overwhelming influence upon what you do. If you are convinced that “repression” or “suppression” will lead to mental torture or abnormal outlets, then this fear will be constantly before you. By thinking that you have to yield, you will yield. But if you are confident that the desire can be successfully fought, your confidence will vastly increase your strength to fight it. Whichever your belief, you will tend to make your belief true. One does not have to be a philosophic pragmatist to appreciate that. I hope I shall be forgiven for a liberal use of italics and repetition on this point; I think they are necessary.

There is another question in regard to this matter. What is a “normal” craving? The psychoanalysts (and perhaps they are not alone in this) apparently put the sexual desire on all fours with the desire for food. But the satisfaction of the desire for food does not result in any reaction. It does not weaken a man. It does not depress. It does not enervate. It does not exhaust. And here we should draw a sharp distinction between two words that up to now I have been using almost interchangeably. I refer to the distinction between a desire and a craving. We have a desire for food, but a craving for cigarettes, whiskey, morphine. The first fills a positive need and gives a positive satisfaction. The second is largely negative; it may give a positive satisfaction at the beginning, but in its later stages, especially if one becomes a cigarette or a morphine fiend or a dipsomaniac, it merely relieves a sense of discomfort, agony, or torture, from which one who is not an addict is wholly free.

Is the sexual craving a “normal” craving simply because it is inborn, while a craving for tobacco, alcohol or opium is abnormal because it is acquired? But if this distinction is valid, of what real practical importance is it so far as the individual is concerned? Surely the acquired craving may be fully as intense and overwhelming as the “normal” craving. People who do not believe this may ponder these examples quoted by Dr. Mussey:

A few years ago a tippler was put into an almshouse in this state (Ohio). Within a few days he had devised various expedients to procure rum but failed. At length, however he hit upon one which was successful. He went into the woodyard of the establishment, placed one hand upon the block and with an axe in the other struck it off at a single blow. With the stump raised and streaming he ran into the house and cried, “Get some rum! Get some rum! My had is off!” In the confusion and bustle of the occasion a bowl of rum was brought, into which he plunged the bleeding member of his body, then raising the bowl to his mouth, drank freely, and exultingly exclaimed, “Now I am satisfied.” Dr. J.E. Turner tells of a man who, while under treatment for inebriety, during four weeks secretly drank the alcohol from six jars containing morbid specimens. On asking him why he had committed this loathsome act, he replied: “Sir, it is as impossible for me to control this diseased appetite as it is for me to control the pulsations of my heart.”

Do the psychoanalysts, or does anyone else, believe that it is impossible to fight a craving of this sort, and that there is nothing to be done but give in to it? I do not think so. But if a craving of this intensity can be fought, why not the so-called “normal” craving? What would the psychoanalysts consider a “normal outlet” for a “normal” craving? Just how frequent would indulgence in a given “normal” appetite have to be in order to be a “normal outlet”? Will the psychoanalysts, or anyone else, deny that indulgence in itself develops and increases a craving? Surely the psychoanalysts are the first to declare that abnormal perversions of the sexual instinct are acquired, that they began and developed because the sexual instinct originally took a wrong turn, and were intensified because that was persisted in. But when one has admitted all this, one has come rather close to admitting the unquestionable truth that the sexual craving, as it appears in the adult human being, is itself, in the intensity and particular form it takes, very largely an “acquired” craving.

Let us grant the psychoanalysts’ contention that an attempt to fight the sexual craving, as it has become developed, may involve mental anxiety, and even, if the craving be powerful enough, mental torture for a time. Would not the struggle against the craving for drink, developed to the intensity in the dipsomaniacs just cited, or even in far less intensity, also involve mental anxiety and torture? Any conquest or act of will worth while involves that. If there were no price attached to will-power, it could be had for the asking.

One last argument may be urged in support of the “normality” of the sexual desire as opposed to other cravings. It may be alleged that, while in its developed and actual adult form, the sexual passion is largely or partly an acquired one (its form and intensity depending to a great extend upon early environment, imitation, decisions at critical times, frequency of indulgence, yet the organism is endowed with an instinctive propensity without which the sexual craving as developed would never have come into existence. This is true. I have not denied it. But if it is true of the sexual desire, it is true of every other desire. It is true of the developed craving for rum, for opium, for morphine, for overindulgence in cigarettes or even in candy, or for mere gluttony. The formation of these cravings is possible because the organism has certain instinctive propensities. Men do not usually form passions for ink-drinking, or for molten lead, or for eating gravel, because the organism has no instinctive propensity for these things. Every desire whatever, no matter how perverted or injurious, is the finished product made from the raw materials of instinctive propensities. There are no other finished products, because there are no other raw materials to make them with.

Reduced to its lowest terms, stripped of its scientific pretensions and its pseudo-scientific trappings and terminology, boiled down from a ponderous literature into a single sentence, the contention of the psychoanalysts was long ago expressed in the epigram of Oscar Wilde: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”

It would be unfair to intimate that this epigram accounted for Oscar Wilde’s own private character and sexual practice, and I will not do so. If he thought of his private character at all when he penned it, the epigram may possibly have been considered by him as a justification of his course; but this would not mean that it was a cause. The ethical philosophy of most men is a system of apologetics; it is a result of their own conduct rather than a cause and determinant of it. But all these considerations aside. Let us judge the epigram on its intrinsic merits.

Like all good epigrams, it is at least true in a special sense. And the sense in which the epigram is true is that if you yield to a temptation, you will get rid of it for the moment. That is all the truth there is in it. For the very fact that you have yielded to the temptation will make it return at a later time with increased power and urgency. Every time you yield to it, you do two things; you increase the intensity of the desire and lessen the power of resistance. You form a habit of yielding. You form a habit of yielding not only to that, but to all other cravings—and we have learned what habits are. You develop and strengthen the craving by use, just as you develop a muscle by use. The parallel is exact. In exercising your muscles, you temporarily fatigue them and wear them down. But this very breaking down of tissues calls nutrition into the worn muscles, and when the fatigue is past, and the processes of repair have been completed, the muscles are all the harder and stronger.

On the other hand, every time you resist a desire you strengthen your power to resist. Every desire grows by gratification. Feed the desire, it will fatten and grow great; starve it, it will greatly weaken. It may even die of inanition. This is the true application of Freud’s story of the horse. The common experience, not of neurotics and paranoiacs, but of mankind in general, proves this over and over again. It does not need laboratory experiments or elaborate psychiatry to demonstrate it.

It ought not be necessary, but to shield my remarks from misconstruction and misrepresentation, I want to defend myself against any taint of Puritanism in the invidious sense in which the psychoanalysts and Mr. H.L. Mencken use that word. I do not denounce the sexual act as immoral in itself. I do not declaim against the gratification of the sexual passions in what the psychoanalysts call a “normal married life,” provided that gratification is continent, and does not reach the point where it undermines or endangers physical and nervous and mental health and well-being. But I do contend that if, through economic or other circumstances, or disinclination, or inability to fall in love, a man either does not marry or delays marriage, it is perfectly possible for him to lead an absolutely chaste and normal life; and of two unmarried men having equal sexual propensities to begin with the man who voluntarily restrains them the more is the stronger and the better character.

I am merely making this one point; that the sexual craving can be fought, that it can be lived down, that it can be conquered, and that the conquest of it would immensely strengthen the character, and make most other moral victories comparatively easy. I hold to the ideal of Huxley, of a man “who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience.”

Perhaps there are psychoanalysts who will agree with all this. Perhaps there are psychoanalysts who will protest against my fulminations, saying they do not hold the views I attribute to them, that I either do not understand their views or that I willfully distort them. If I have been unfair, if I have through lack of discrimination blamed all psychoanalysts for the faults of a few, if I have unjustly damned the leaders for the views disseminated by ardent but muddle-headed and ignorant disciples, I am sorry. I have meant only to assault a particular idea. I have tried to be fair; and wherever possible I have taken the psychoanalysts own words to state their position. But whatever the psychoanalysts do or do not teach, there is no doubt at all about the popular impression of what they teach, and the popular impression (which is the all-important thing) is that they believe it not only impossible to conquer the sexual passion, but highly dangerous to try.

The vicious doctrine existed long before the psychoanalysts, but the present menace is that psychoanalysis may foster and encourage it, by seeming to lend it scientific foundation and support. The doctrine must be utterly demolished, and everything that appears to offer it respect worthy standing must be examined and exposed. This is all I have attempted to do.