VOLUME 2. Novelty, Excitement, and Growth

Part 2. Reality, Human Nature, and Society

V. Maturing, and the recollection of childhood

1: Past and Future in the Present Actuality

When we emphasize self-awareness, experiment, felt emergency, and creative adjustment, we are laying less stress on the recovery of past memory (“childhood recollection”) or anticipations and ambitions for the future (“life plan”). But memory and anticipation are acts in the present, and it is important for us to analyze their place in the structure of the actuality. You may experimentally get the context of this chapter if you say, “Now, here I am remembering so and so” and notice the difference from merely wandering off into memory; and so, “Now here I am planning or expecting so and so.”

Memories and prospects are present imaginations. The warm play of imagination is in general not dissociative but integrative. Why is it that persons given to reminiscences or projects are so Obviously in flight, and not refreshed afterward but empty and exhausted? It is that the events are not felt as their own, do not come home to them, are not re-created and assimilated; the telling always seems endless and becomes more and more dry and verbal. (Contrast for instance an art-work, where the memory becomes alive in the present handling of the medium.) Meantime the actuality is unsatisfactory, the past is lost, the future is not yet. What is the present sentiment of this garrulous person? It is not warm imagination, but regret, reproaches, self-reproach, or frustration, guilt of inadequacy, trying to exert the will; and these diminish self-esteem still further. For the sentiment of one’s worthiness cannot be given by exculpating explanations nor by comparison with an extrinsic standard: “It wasn’t my fault; I’m as good as anybody else. I’m not well, but soon I’ll make my mark.” The feeling of worthiness is given only by one’s adequacy in an activity that is going on or in the relaxation after a completed situation (so that there is no remorse when the “guilty” sexual play has been satisfying, but only when it has been poor). To explain or to compare is always felt as a he, either consoling or self-punishing. But to do something and be oneself is a proof; it is self-justifying for it completes the situation. So we lay stress on the patient’s self-awareness in an experiment that he himself is carrying on, and expect that he will create a more advantageous kind of whole.

2: The Importance of Past and Future in Therapy

But the bother is that the “self” that is available, that is there, is pretty thin in content as well as split six ways. It is something but not enough to give the patient the “feel of himself” (Alexander); we must also reach the “underlying basis” that the self is unaware of, to increase the power of the self. The question is how this underlying basis is in the present.

Trying to answer this question, Freud repeated categorically in the last years of his life that no method could be called psychoanalysis that did not recover the infantile memory. From our point of view he meant by this that a large part of the self is still acting out old unfinished situations. And this must be true, for we live by assimilating the novelty to what we have become, in the way that we have become it.

Some para-Freudian schools, on the contrary, insist that the infantile memory is not necessary at all, that what is necessary is to reach a mature attitude. This could mean (what is certainly true) that many powers of growth in a person are frustrated; he has failed to become himself.

We shall try to show that the distinction “infantile/mature” is a false split and a misleading use of language. And without this division, the recovery of childhood and the need for maturing appear in a different light. In this chapter we treat mostly of memory. (Problems of prospect are a kind of aggression—Chapter 8.)

3: Past Effects as Fixed Forms in the Present

Freud seems to have believed that past times do exist psychologically otherwise than in their present-effects. In the famous illustration of the superimposed buried cities, he implies that the various pasts and the present interpenetrate one another, occupying the same space, and having additional relations to those of temporal succession. This is a powerful speculation.¹⁷

For the purposes of therapy, however, only the present structure of sensation, introspection, behavior is available; and our question must be what role remembering plays in this structure. Formally considered, memories are one of the kinds of more fixed (unchangeable) forms in the on-going present process.

(We have already spoken of “abstractions” as such fixed forms, made relatively stationary in. order that something else may move more efficiently. Abstractions draw away from the more sensory and material particularity of the experience; memories, rather, are fixed imaginations of especially the sensory and material particulars, but they abstract from the motor response—then the past is unchangeable; it is what is experienced as unchangeable.¹⁸ Habits, for instance, techniques or knowledge, are other fixed forms: they are assimilations to the more conservative organic structure.)

Many such fixed forms are healthy, mobilizable for the on-going process, for instance a useful habit, an art, a particular memory that now serves for comparison with another particular to yield an abstraction. Some fixed forms are neurotic, such as “character,” compulsive repetition. But whether healthy or neurotic, the past and every other fixity persist by their present functioning: an abstraction persists when it proves itself in present speech, a technique when it is practiced, a neurotic characteristic when it reacts against a “dangerous” recurring urge.

As soon as they are no longer of present use, the organism by its self-regulation sloughs off the fixed effects of the past; useless knowledge is forgotten, character dissolves. The rule works both ways: it is not by inertia but by function that a form persists, and it is not by lapse of time but by lack of function that a form is forgotten.

4: The Compulsion to Repeat

The neurotic compulsion to repeat is a sign that a situation unfinished in the past is still unfinished in the present. Every time enough tension accumulates in the organism to make the task dominant, there is another try at a solution. From this point of view, the neurotic repetition is no different from any other repeated accumulated tension, such as hunger or sexual pulsation; and needless to say it is by these other repeated accumulations that the neurotic repetition is energized. The difference from what obtains in health is that each time the healthy repetition occurs the task is completed, equilibrium is restored, and the organism has maintained itself or grown by assimilating something new. The circumstances are always changing, the organism meets them unencumbered with fixed sensations of other particular circumstances (but only with the flexible tools of useful abstractions and conservative habits); and it is the novelty of the new1 circumstance that is interesting—not that this steak is like the one I ate last week (which would rouse disgust), but that it is steak (something I know I like in general, and that is giving off its own, novel, smell).

But the neurotic tension is not completed; yet it is dominant, it must be completed before anything else is attended to; so the organism that has not grown by success and assimilation assumes the same attitude to make the same effort again. Unfortunately, the fixed attitude, which failed before, has become necessarily more inept in the changed circumstances; so that the completion is less and less likely. There is here a miserable circularity: it is only by assimilation, completion, that one learns anything and is prepared for a new situation; but what has failed of completion is ignorant and out-of-touch and therefore becomes more and more incomplete.

Thus it is that a present need for a present satisfaction comes to seem “infantile.” It is not the instinct or the desire that is infantile no longer relevant to the adult, but that the fixed attitude, its abstract conceptions and images, are old-fashioned, unlikely, ineffectual. To give the classical example: the desire to be fondled knows only the image of mother as its language and guide—this image brightens as the desire is further frustrated—but mother is not to be seen anywhere—and any other possible fondler is a priori disappointing, or at least one does not look in that direction. Neither the desire nor the image is past because the situation is unfinished, but the image is inept and old-fashioned. Finally, when the prospect is hopeless and the pain is too intense, the attempt is made to inhibit and desensitize the whole complex.

5: The Structure of a Forgotten Scene and its Recall

Consider now a memory that is apparently forgotten—not simply forgotten (like useless knowledge), nor subject to recall because it is a mobile part of the background of the present (like useful knowledge)—but repressed.

In structure, this is best regarded as a bad habit, an ineffectual effort to annihilate, with the forgotten unannihilable complex as its center. The bad habit is the present deliberate constraint—a constraint that is always unitarily muscular, sensory, and feelingful (for instance, the eye-muscles keep one looking ahead and prevent free play of seeing; the withdrawal of desire prevents certain visions from brightening; and what is actually seen distracts feeling and behavior in a contrary direction). And what is constrained, the complex at the center, contains a particular scene that, being particular, cannot recur or be useful in that form—to be useful in the present it would have to be not annihilated, but destroyed (taken apart) and brought up to date. Obviously this is a very durable fixity: a forgetting continually renewed with present strength and safeguarded from recollection by the irrelevance of its contents.

How has it occurred? Suppose there was once a present-situation in which one was aware of a strong desire, in a scene with objects. (For simplicity’s sake let us think of a single dramatic moment, a “trauma.") The desire was frustrated: there was a danger in satisfaction: and the tension of frustration was unbearable. One then deliberately inhibited the desire and awareness of the desire, in order not to suffer and to keep out of danger. The whole complex of feeling, expression, gesture, and the sensory impression that is especially deep because importantly unfinished, is now out of use; and considerable energy is continually expended to keep it out of use in every present. (Considerable energy because the traumatic scene is importantly unfinished and must be strongly countered.)

Now how does the recall occur? Suppose that the present deliberate inhibition is relaxed, e.g., by exercising the eye-muscles and letting the vision play, by imagining desirable objects, by becoming dissatisfied with the distractions, etc. At once the ever-present underlying feeling and gesture express themselves, and with them comes the image of the old scene. It is not the old image that has released the feeling, but the relaxation of the present inhibition. The old scene is revived because that happened to be the last free exercise of the feeling and gesture in the sensory environment, trying to complete the unfinished situation. The old scene is, so to speak, the last symbol in which one had learned to express the feeling.

For if, contrariwise, the image occurs first, by chance, as when a man is struck by a passing face, or even at the end of a series of free- associations, then one may suddenly feel an “alien” emotion, a strange attraction, nameless grief. But it is meaningless, evanescent, at once stopped by the continuing present inhibition.

Thus in classical psychoanalysis, the forgotten scene must be “interpreted” in order to effectuate release, that is it must be related to the present attitude and experience. But the interpretation will work successfully only if it goes so far as to alter the structure of the present attitude, the bad habit.

6: The “Trauma” as Unfinished Situation

Probably there is never such a single traumatic moment as we have been describing, but rather a traumatic series of more or less like frustrated and dangerous moments, during which the tension of the feeling and the dangerous explosiveness of the response gradually heighten, and the inhibition of these habitually strengthens until, in the interest of economy, feeling and response are blotted out. Any one of this series may stand, as the later remembered scene, for what is inhibited. (“I remember papa beating me on a particular occasion.”) Note that this traumatic scene does not express the habitual inhibition, the character or self-conquest, which is in the present continually renewed, but precisely the free not-yet-inhibited feeling, more organic and ever-present, e.g., my desire to be close to papa or my hatred of him, or both.

The trauma does not attract the repetition, as Freud thought. It is the organism’s repeated effort to satisfy its need that brings on the repetition, but this effort is repeatedly inhibited by a present deliberate act. To the degree that the need gains expression, it uses old-fashioned techniques (“the return of the repressed”). If the feeling is released, it may or may not momentarily revive an old scene; but in any case it will at once seek a present satisfaction. Thus, the early scene is an expected by-product of the change of the bad habit and the release of feeling, but it is neither a sufficient nor a necessary cause of it.

Obviously the repressed trauma will tend to return, for it is in a way the most vital part of the organism, it draws on more organic power. To draw a strict analogy, a dream is obviously a “wish,” no matter how nightmarish, for with waking deliberateness in abeyance the underlying more organic situation asserts itself—and evaluation is nothing but the motion of the unfinished toward completion.

7: The Therapeutic Use of the Recovered Scene

The recovered scene does not produce the release, yet when it accompanies the renewed flooding of feeling it is very important in the self awareness. Just as it stands for the last time that the inhibited excitement was active, so now it is the first exercise of the excitement renewed. It at once provides a kind of “explanation” as to what the unaccustomed, long disused, feeling “means,” the kind of object it applies to; but of course the feeling does not, in the present, mean the archaic objects at all. It is at this point that interpretation is valuable, to explain the patient’s new feeling of himself to himself. He must learn to distinguish between the present need expressed in the feeling and this object that is merely a particular memory, and as particular lost and unchangeable. Such interpretation as this is not arcane; it is simply pointing out the obvious, though that may be hard to swallow.

8: The Erroneous Conception of “Infantile” versus “Mature”

The usual opinion, however, is that the need, the feeling, is “infantile,” a thing of the past. Freud, we have seen (and as we shall discuss in detail in Chapter 13), goes so far as to say that not only certain needs but a whole mode of thought, the “primary process,” is infantile and necessarily repressed. Most theorists regard certain sexual needs and certain interpersonal attitudes as childish and immature.

Our view is that no persisting desire can be regarded as infantile or illusory. Suppose, for instance, it is the “childish” need to be taken care of by a “self-sacrificing” nurse. It is pointless to say that this desire is a clinging to mother. Rather we must say that the desire affirms itself; it is the image and name of “mother” that is impossible, and indeed not meant.¹⁹ On the contrary the desire is now fairly safe and probably in some way fulfillable. (Perhaps, “Take care of yourself for a change; stop trying to help everybody else.”) It is not the goal of therapy to talk a man out of certain desires. Indeed, we must say further: that if, in the present, the need is not fulfillable, and actually not fulfilled, the whole process of tension and frustration will recommence, and the man will either again blot out the awareness and succumb to the neurosis or, as is now likely, he will know himself and suffer until he can make an environmental change.

We can now return to our question, the importance of childhood recovery, and sketch out a more rounded answer. We have said that the recollection of the old scene is unnecessary; it is at most an important clue to the meaning of the feeling, but even in that way it is dispensable. Does it follow that, as Horney, for instance, maintains, the recovery of child-life does not occupy a privileged position in psychotherapy? No. For our thought is that the content of the recovered scene is rather unimportant, but that the childish feeling and attitude that lived that scene are of the utmost importance. The childish feelings are important not as a past that must be undone but as some of the most beautiful powers of adult life that must be recovered', spontaneity, imagination, directness of awareness and manipulation. What is required, as Schachtel has said, is to recover the child’s way of experiencing the world; it is to free not the factual biography but the “primary process of thought.”

Nothing is more unfortunate than the current indiscriminate use of the words “infantile” and “mature.” Even when the “infantile attitude” is not considered evil in children themselves, its traits are frowned on in “maturity” simply en bloc, without discriminating what is naturally outgrown, what makes no difference cither wav, and what should be persistent but is blotted out of almost all adults. “Maturity,’” precisely among those who claim to be concerned with “free personality,” is conceived in the interest of an unnecessarily tight adjustment to a dubiously valuable workaday society, regimented to pay its debts and duties.

9: Discrimination Among Child Attitudes and their Objects

We saw that if we considered the infant as an integral part of a field in which grown-ups were another parr, the infant could not be called isolated or helpless. Now as he grows in strength, communication, knowledge and technique, certain functions belonging to the previous whole are altered in another kind of whole: e.g., more freestanding, there is a more locomotory self that could be called his own self, so that the function of fostering care in the previous whole can become, in many ways, self-fostering care. But let us look at the correlated feeling and motivation. It would be tragic if even in the altered whole, the previous sense of “dependency as a part in a social whole” would be simply blotted out and have to be “introduced” as part of a mature attitude, when it is really the warm continuation of an infantile attitude. Again, such typically infantile behavior as body-exploration and fascination with pregenital pleasures naturally becomes less interesting when they have been explored and the dominance of genital desire establishes itself; bur it would be tragic if body-satisfaction and the impulse to body-exploration were blotted out—certainly it makes an inept lover. When the so-called infantile traits of clinging or sucking recur after repression they answer a mature need, but their language and proportion are often comically archaic. But this is largely because of unfinished situations caused by the projections of adults who enforced premature growing-up. Or again, infants experiment with nonsense-syllables and play with the sounds and the vocal organs; and so, in continuation, do great poets, not because this is “infantile” but because it is part of the fullness of human speech. It is not exactly a sign of maturity when a patient is so embarrassed that he can make only “correct” sentences in a flat tone.

10: How Freud Discriminated Between “Infantile” and “Mature”; Childish Sexuality, Dependency

We can distinguish four main contexts in which Freud spoke of maturing: (1) the libidinous zones, (2) relation to the parents, (3) adaptation to “reality,” (4) assumption of parental responsibility. In all of these Freud made the split too absolute, each functionally reinforcing the split of the others; yet by and large Freud was not prone to use the distinction between “infantile” and “mature,” or even between “primary” and “secondary” process, to the child’s disadvantage.

(1) The “primacy” of the genitals over the pre-genital erotic stages. This work of organismic-self-regulation is accomplished in the earliest years. But the continuation of the childish practices is much too coldly regarded by most therapists. Sexual foreplay is net discouraged, but is not spoken of joyously. Art aimed at arousing sexual excitement is frowned on, against the evidence of primitive and the most vital high cultures; yet if one is not to be merry about this, about what is one supposed to be merry? Erotic curiosity is abhorred, yet it is near the heart of all novel writing and reading and of theater of every kind. And in manners in general there is not nearly enough kissing and petting among friends, and friendly exploration of strangers, against the evidence of other gregarious animals. And so again a kind of primary homosexuality, based on narcissistic exploration, is rather discouraged than encouraged, resulting, as Ferenczi has pointed out, in an obsessive heterosexuality that makes true community life impossible, for every man is jealously hostile to every other.

(2) The transcending of personal dependency on the parents. We can regard this work of organismic-self-regulation as the alteration and complication of the organism/social field by increasing the number of members involved and each member’s mobility and choices and ability to abstract to higher levels. Thus a child, learning to walk, talk, chew, and exert more strength, spontaneously ceases to cling as a suckling and make exclusive demands. Yet with other objects there persist the out-going filial attitudes of trust, docility, the sense of one’s dependency in a community, the claim to get nourishment and caresses as an undenied right and as a free-born heir of nature, to feel at home in the world. If the world and the communities we create in the world are not such as to be frankly embraced with trust and confidence of support, a man will find this out for himself without a physician’s telling him that his attitude is infantile. Likewise in education: it is very beautiful to “accept nothing that you do not find out for yourself,” yet a pare of this process is a faith in benevolent teachers and classic authorities, whose point of view we tentatively embrace beforehand, then test, chew up, make our own or reject. When there are no more individual teachers in this sense, we transfer the same attitude toward the natural world as a whole. The exclusive admiration of therapists for independence is a reflex (both by imitation and reaction) to our present societies that are so lonely and coerced. And what is remarkable is to see how their therapeutic procedure—instead of being that of a teacher who, accepting the authority that is freely given, trains the student to help himself—is that of first a bad and then a too good parent, to whom a neurotic attachment is transferred: and then he breaks it off and sends the child out to fend for himself.

11: Childish Emotions and Unreality: Impatience, Hallucination, Aggressiveness

(3) Freud spoke also of maturing as the adaptation to “reality” and the inhibition of the “pleasure-principle.” These, he felt, are accomplished by biding one’s time and making various resignations, and by finding “sublimations,”²⁰ socially acceptable releases of tension. It is fairly clear that Freud, who under a thick hide of paternalism often betrayed a childish heart, regarded this kind of maturation with a dim eye; he thought it made for the advance of society and civilization at the expense of every person’s growth and happiness; and he often urged that this kind of growing-up had already gone too far for safety. And looked at coldly, in the terms he stated it, the adaptation to “reality” is precisely neurosis: it is deliberate interference with organismic-self-regulation and the turning of spontaneous discharges into symptoms. Civilization so conceived is a disease. To the degree that all this is necessary, surely the reasonable attitude is not to praise maturity but for both therapist and patient to learn to cry stinking fish, as Bradley said, “This is the best of all possible worlds and the duty of every honest man is to cry stinking fish.” This would also have the virtue of letting out aggression in a justified gripe.

But we think the problem is wrongly posed. In the first place Freud was notoriously timid about entertaining the possibility of radical changes in the social reality that would make it more nearly conform to a (continuing) child-heart’s desire, for instance the possibility of a little more disorder, dirt, affection, absence of government, and so forth.²¹ He seems to have vacillated between the brazenness of his theory and the excruciating embarrassment of his feelings. But also he misinterpreted the behavior of children themselves by considering it out of context, from the point of view of a very deliberate adult.

Consider, for example, “biding one’s time.” The advocates of maturity agree that children cannot wait; they are impatient. What is the evidence for this? When temporarily frustrated of what he “knows” he will get, a small child screams and pounds. But then we see that when he gets the thing—or soon after—he is at once bafflingly sunny. There is no indication that the previous dramatic scene meant anything beyond itself, but it meant itself. What did it mean? Partly the scene was a calculated persuasion; partly it was a lurking fear of real deprivation due to not really knowing the circumstances that proved the thing must be given after all. Both these are simple ignorance and vanish with knowledge; they do not spring from an “infantile attitude.” But it is the residue that is interesting: the scene carried on for its own sake as a letting off of a petty tension. Is that bad? Far from proving that a child can’t wait, it proves precisely that he can wait, namely, by jumping with impatience: he has an organic equilibrating technique for the tension; and afterwards, therefore, his satisfaction is pure, full, unclouded. It is the adult who cannot wait—he has lost the technique; we do not make a scene, so our resentment and fear mount, and then we enjoy soured and insecure. What is the harm in the childish drama? It offends the adult audience because of their repression of the similar tantrum, not because of the sound and fury but because of the unconscious distraction. What is here called maturity is likely neurosis. But if we think of the adults of Greek epic or tragedy or of Biblical Genesis and Kings, we notice that they—not undistinguished for their intellect or sense of responsibility—do indeed carry on in a most infantile manner.

Consider, again, a child’s astonishing ability to hallucinate in his play, to treat the sticks as if they were ships, the sand as if it were food, the stones as if they were playmates. The “mature” adult faces up to the realities—when he breaks down he flees into reminiscing and planning, but never into frank hallucination unless he is far gone. Is that good? The question is, what is the important reality? So long as the felt activity is carried on well enough, the child will accept any props; the core of the real is the action in any case. The “mature” person is comparatively enslaved, not to the reality but to a neurotically fixed abstraction of it, namely “knowledge” that has lost its subservient relation to use, action, and happiness. (We do not mean pure knowledge, which is a difficult form of play.) When the fixity to the abstraction becomes acute, imagination is stifled, and with it all initiative, experiment, and perspective, and openness to anything new; all invention, trying out the actuality as if it were otherwise—and therefore all increased efficiency in the long run. Yet all adults except great artists and scientists are somewhat neurotic in this way. Their maturity is a fearful deliberateness with regard to the actuality; it is not a frank acceptance of it for what it is worth. And of course, at the same time as lie is sticking close to the actuality, the adult is projecting into it the worst madness and making the silliest rationalizations.

A child perfectly well distinguishes the dream and the actuality. Indeed he distinguishes four things, the actuality, the as-if, the make-believe, and let’s pretend (weakest at the last, for he has a poor sense of humor). He can be a real Indian using a stick as if it were a gun, yet dodge the actual automobile. We do not observe that children’s curiosity or ability- to learn is injured by their free fantasy. On the contrary, the fantasy functions as an essential medium between the pleasure-principle and the reality-principle: on the one hand, it is a drama to try out and become expert, on the other, a therapy to become friendly with the strange and bitter actuality (e.g., playing school). In brief, when a therapist bids his patient to grow up and face the reality, he often does not mean the concrete actuality in which a creative adjustment is possible, but some daily situation that is often better dealt with by not directly facing it.

Another infantile trait that is supposed to give way to maturity is the child’s free aggressiveness. We shall devote a chapter (Chapter 8) to the inhibition of aggression in our adult mores. Here we need only point out that a small child’s indiscriminate blows are dealt precisely when his strength is weakest—the inference that he means to annihilate is likely an adult projection. A boy’s hard punches are thrown only at enemies. So a dog in play bites, and yet he does not bite.

Finally, with regard to the adjustment of the mature person to reality, must we not ask—one is ashamed to have to mention it— whether the “reality” is not rather closely pictured after, and in the interests of, western urban industrial society, capitalist or state-socialist? Is it the case that other cultures, gaudier in dress, greedier in physical pleasures, dirtier in manners, more disorderly in governance, more brawling and adventurous in behavior, were or are thereby less mature?

12: Childish Irresponsibility

(4) Lastly, Freud considered maturing as becoming a responsible parent (father) instead of an irresponsible child. In Freud’s scheme this would occur after a normal evolution of object-choices, from the auto-erotic through the narcissistic-homosexual (ego-ideal and gang) to the heterosexual. He conceives of a healthy early introjection of (identification with) the father; and then maturity is co accept this introject as oneself and assume the parental role. (We shall later take exception to his language here, but he was evidently reading off his own character.)

Later para-Freudians have learned to be suspicious of paternal and other authority, and they lay stress rather on the contrast between the “irresponsible child” and the “responsible adult,” answerable for his actions and their consequences. Responsibility in this sense seems to mean a kind of contractual relation with other adults.

We can interpret this growth to responsibility again as organismic-self-regulation in a changing field. A child’s irresponsibility' follows from his dependency; to the extent that he is closely part of the parental field, he is not answerable to himself for his behavior. Given more mobility, meaningful speech, personal relationships, and choices, he begins to require of himself, to mean a closer accounting between promise and performance, intention and commitment, choice and consequences. And the relationship of contract is not so much taken on as a duty, as a development of the feeling for symmetry that is very strong in the youngest. With the stage of becoming an authority, a teacher, a parent, the field has altered again: for the independent person is now less on his own, since others spontaneously attach themselves to or depend on him simply because he has ability, and they give him in turn occasions for new out-going acts. It is a rare person who grows as mature as this: to advise, guide, and care for without embarrassment, domination, etc., but simply noblesse oblige, giving up his “independent” interests as really less interesting.

In these ways a child is not responsible. But there is an underlying basis of responsibility in which any child is superior to most adults. This is earnestness, entering into the task seriously, even if the task is play. A child leaves off capriciously, but while he is engaged he gives himself. The adult, partly because he is so preoccupied with being responsible for himself, gives himself less earnestly. Again it is only the gifted person who retains this ability of childhood; the average adult finds himself caught in responsibility toward things in which he is not deeply interested. In our times it is not the case that the average man is irresponsible, does not hold himself together; rather he is too responsible, keeps meeting the time- clock, will not give in to sickness or fatigue, pays his bills before he is sure he has food, too narrowly minds his own business, does not take a risk. Would it not be wiser, then, to bring to the fore, instead of responsibility and its mere negation, the childhood opposition of earnest and caprice, both positively valuable?

Earnest is the activity to which one is committed and cannot leave off, because the self as a closer whole is involved in completing n situation that involves the actuality; play is more capricious, because the actuality is hallucinated and one can leave off. If one says to a person, “This is irresponsible behavior,” the other person both feels guilty and, seeking to amend, constrains himself. But if one says, “You are not in earnest about this,” he may or may not decide that he means to be in earnest; he can admit that he is playing, or even that it is a mere caprice. If he means to be in earnest, then he attends to the actuality of the object and his relation to it, and this is a motion of growth. An irresponsible person is one who is not in earnest about what is necessary. A dilettante plays capriciously with an art, he is pleasing himself but has no responsibility for the results; an amateur plays earnestly with the art, he is responsible to the art (for instance, to its medium and structure) but he need not engage in it; an artist is earnest with the art, he is committed to it.

13: Conclusion

We conclude that it is a poor use of words to speak of a “childish attitude” as something to be transcended, and a “mature attitude” as a contrasting goal to be achieved.

With growth, the organism/environment field changes: this makes for changes in kinds of feeling and also for changes in the meaning, the relevant objects, of persistent feelings. Many traits and attitudes of children cease to be important; and there are adult traits that are new, for the increase in strength, knowledge, fertility, and technical ability does constitute progressively a new whole. At the same time, often it is only the relevant objects that are altered; we must not overlook the continuity of feeling, as is customary in a neurotic society that both projects a false estimation of childhood and considers many of the most beautiful and useful powers of adulthood, manifested in the most creative persons, to be merely childish.

Especially in psychotherapy: habitual deliberateness, factuality, non-commitment, and excessive responsibility, traits of most adults, are neurotic; whereas spontaneity, imagination, earnestness and playfulness, and direct expression of feeling, traits of children, are healthy.

14: Unblocking the Future

This is the “past” that is lost and must be recovered.

At the beginning of this chapter, however, we spoke of the past and the future, of those who reminisce and those who make projects, of the early scene and the life-plan. Why have we devoted all our space to the former? It is that the neurotic difficulties of those who reminisce and try with mere words to live out the unfinished situations of the past require the recovery’ of lost feelings and attitudes. With those who make projects and try with mere words to live out their frustrated powers, the trouble is better located not in what is lost but in what is falsely present, the introjections, false ideals, enforced identifications that block the way and must be destroyed if the person is to find himself. Therefore we prefer to discuss it in the chapter on Aggressions.

Verbal reminiscing tends to be dry and lifeless, for the past consists of unchangeable particulars. It becomes alive only when it is related to present needs that have some possibility of change.

Verbal anticipation, on the other hand, tends to be fatuous and empty, for the future consists of particulars that could change in every conceivable way, unless it is limited by some present felt need and existing power to make it be. In neurotic anticipations, there is a fixed form in the indefinite futures, that given by some introjected ideal or concept of the ego, a life-plan. The verbal anticipator is pathetically boring, because it is not he who is talking; he is like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and nothing one can say will make any difference.

In these terms, again, we can make a provisional definition of the present actuality. The present is the experience of the particular that one has become dissolving into several meaningful possibilities, and the reforming of these possibilities toward a single concrete new particular.