VOLUME 2. Novelty, Excitement, and Growth

Part 2. Reality, Human Nature, and Society

VI. Human nature and the anthropology of neurosis

1: The Subject-Matter of Anthropology

In the previous chapter we discussed the importance of the recovery of “lost,” that is inhibited, childhood powers in the mature individual. Now let us broaden the view and talk a little about what is “lost” in our grown-up culture and in the present use of the powers of man, for here too, in the altering fields given by new powers and new objects, many feelings and attitudes are by-passed or inhibited that should healthily be continuous and employed.

This is a chapter in abnormal anthropology. The subject-matter of anthropology is the relationship between man’s anatomy, physiology, and faculties and his activity and culture. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, anthropology was always so studied (climaxing, probably, in Kant’s Anthropology): for instance, what is laughter? how does it culturally manifest itself for man’s well-being? More recently, anthropologists lost sight of the relationship as their special study and their books display a quite astonishing split into two unrelated sections: Physical Anthropology, the evolution and races of man; and Cultural Anthropology, a kind of historical sociology. For instance, it is an important proposition of Cultural Anthropology that technical innovations (e.g., a new plow) diffuse rapidly to neighboring areas, but moral innovations diffuse slowly and with difficulty. But this proposition is left groundless, as if it were part of the nature of these cultural objects, rather than shown to be part of the nature or conditioning of the animals involved, the men carrying the culture, these men, in turn, being shaped by the culture they carry. Most recently, however, owing mainly to the impact of psychoanalysis, the classical animal/ cultural interrelationship is again being studied, in terms of early child-training, sexual practices, and so forth. And from the point of view of abnormal psychology, we here offer some biological/cultural speculations.

2: The Importance of This Subject for Psychotherapy

We can see the importance of the anthropological question: “What is Man?” if we consider that medical psychology owes a difficult double allegiance. As a branch of medicine it aims at “merely” biological health. This includes not only healthy functioning and absence of pain, but feeling and pleasure; not only sensation, but sharp awareness; not only absence of paralysis, but grace and vigor. Dealing with a psychosomatic unity, if psychotherapy could achieve this kind of health, its existence would be justified. And in medicine the criteria of health are fairly definite and scientifically established; we know when an organ is functioning well. This aspect of “human nature” is unambiguous.

But there is no such thing as “merely” biological functioning (for instance, there is no such drive as “mere” sex, without either love or the avoidance of love). So medical means are insufficient.

Once beyond medicine, however, the very aim of therapy, the norm of health and “nature,” becomes a matter of opinion. The patient is a sick man and man is not finally known for he is always changing himself and his conditions. His nature is surprisingly malleable. Yet at the same time it is not so completely malleable that the nature can be disregarded, as some democratic sociologists and fascist politicians seem to assume; it is also surprisingly resistant, so that suddenly there are neurotic reactions of individuals and a stupidity, torpor, and rigidity of the average.

In psychotherapy, moreover, these changes of condition are all- important, for they are what engage a patient’s interest; they involve his fears and guilts and his hope of what he will make of himself. They rouse his excitement—they are the only things that rouse excitement—they organize awareness and behavior. Without these peculiarly “human” interests there is no biological health and no way of achieving it by psychotherapy.

3: “Human Nature” and the Average

So the doctor beats about for models and theories of what is humanly enlivening. (In Chapter 4 we discussed several such theories.) This is why Freud insisted that not medical men, but, with medical collaboration, literary men, teachers, lawyers, social-workers make the best therapists, for they understand human nature, they mix with ideas and people and have not been content to waste their youth acquiring a specialty.

The task would, of course, be immensely easier if we enjoyed good social institutions, conventions that gave satisfaction and fostered growth, for then these could be taken as a rough norm of what it means to be a full man in the specific culture; the question would not then be one of principles but of casuistical application to each case. But if we had reasonable institutions, there would not be any neurotics either. As it is, our institutions are not even “merely” biologically healthy, and the forms of individual symptoms are reactions to rigid social errors. So, far from being able to take fitness to social institutions as a rough norm, a doctor has more hope of bringing about the self-developing integration of a patient if the patient learns to adjust his environment to himself than if he tries to learn to maladjust himself to society.

Instead of a dynamic unity of need and social convention, in which men discover themselves and one another and invent themselves and one another, we are forced to think of three warring abstractions. the mere animal, the harried individual self, and the social pressures. The normal person either keeps himself unaware of this raging war within his personality, does not notice its manifestations in his behavior, and keeps it fairly dormant, or he is aware of it and has concluded an uneasy truce, snatching at safe opportunities. In either case there is much energy spent in pacification and valuable human powers are sacrificed. In the neurotic person, the conflicts rage to the point of exhaustion, contradictions, and breakdown—nor can it be concluded that he was therefore in some way weaker than the normal, for often precisely stronger gifts are socially disastrous. There is an important difference between the normal and neurotic, but it is not such that when a neurotic comes as a patient and poses an earnest practical problem for the doctor, the doctor can set as his goal a normal adjustment, any more than he could give an arrested tuberculosis a clean bill of health, though he might have to discharge the patient. Rather he must hope that, as the patient begins to reintegrate himself, he will turn out to be more “human” than is expected, or than the doctor is.

(Further, we must remember that in the present run of patients of psychotherapy, the distinction between normal and neurotic has become less than irrelevant; it is positively misleading. For more and more of the patients are not “sick” at all; they make “adequate” adjustments; they have come because they want something more out of life and out of themselves and they believe that psychotherapy can help them. Perhaps this betrays an oversanguine disposition on their part, but it is also evidence that they are better than the average, rather than the reverse.²²)

4: Neurotic Mechanisms as Healthy Functions

Neurosis, too, is part of human nature and has its anthropology.

The split of personality—breakdown as a form of equilibrium—is probably a recently acquired power of human nature, only a few thousand years old. But it is one in a long line of evolutionary developments that are worth briefly reviewing in order to recognize where we are.

If we consider organismic-self-regulation, the process by which the dominant needs come to the forefront of awareness as they arise, we are struck not only by the wonderful system of specific adjustment, signals, co-ordination, and subtle judgment, that go to maintain the general equilibrium, but also by the devices that serve as cushions and safety valves to protect the contact-boundary. We have mentioned blotting-out and hallucinating and dreaming, and regarding as-if, and accepting instead-of; and there are also immobilizing (playing dead), isolating, mechanical trial and error (obsessive re-doing), panic flight, and so forth. Man is an organism of great power and efficiency, but also one that can take rough treatment and bad times. The two sides go together: ability leads to adventure and adventure to trouble. Man has to be malleable. These safety-functions ail, of course, play a chief role in mental disorders, but they are themselves healthy.

Indeed, without being paradoxical one could say that in the neuroses just these safety-functions—of blotting out, distorting, isolating, repeating—that seem so spectacularly “crazy,” are working fairly healthily. It is the more respectable functions of orientation and manipulation in the world, especially the social world, that are out of kilter and cannot work. In a finely-adjusted whole, the safety-devices are made for trouble and continue working while the more usual functions rest for repairs. Or to put it another way, when the orientation is lost and the manipulation is failing, the excitement, the vitality of the organism, expresses itself especially in autism and immobilizing. And so again, if we speak, as we must, of a social or epidemic neurosis, it is not the symptomatic social eccentricities (dictators, wars, incomprehensible art, and the like) that are pathologically important, but the normal knowledge and technique, the average way of life.

The problem of abnormal anthropology is to show how the average way of a culture, or even of the human state, is neurotic and has become so. It is to show what of human nature has been “lost” and, practically, to devise experiments for its recovery. (The therapeutic part of anthropology and sociology is politics; but we see that politics—perhaps fortunately—does not devote itself to this at all.)

In reviewing the steps of evolution leading to modern man and our civilization, therefore, we lay the stress contrary to where it is usually laid: not on the increased power and achievement gained by each step of human development, but on the dangers incurred and the vulnerable points exposed, that then have become pathological in the debacle. The new powers require more complicated integrations, and these have often broken down.

5: Erect Posture, Freedom of Hands and Head

(1) Erect posture developed along with differentiation of the limbs and ultimately the fingers. This had great advantages for both orientation and manipulation. A large upright animal gets a long view. Established on broad feet, it can use its hands to get food and tear it, while the head is free; and to handle objects and its own body.

But on the other hand, the head is removed from close-perception, and the “close” senses, smell and taste, atrophy some what. The mouth and teeth become less useful for manipulation; as such, in an intensely manipulating animal, they tend to pass from felt awareness and response (e.g., there can be a gap between disgust and spontaneous rejection). The jaws and muzzle degenerate—and later will become one of the chief places of rigidity.

In brief, the entire field of the organism and its environment is immensely increased, both in largeness and in minute intricacy; but the closeness of contact is more problematic. And with erect posture comes the need to balance and the danger, so momentous in later psychology, of falling. The back is less flexible, and the head is more isolated from the rest of the body and from the ground.

(2) When the head is freer and less engaged, a sharper stereoscopic vision develops, able to appreciate perspective. The eyes and fingers cooperate in drawing outlines, so that the animal learns to see more shapes and to differentiate objects in his field. By outlining one differentiates experience into objects. Perspective, discrimination of objects, ability to handle: these greatly increase the number of connections among impressions and the deliberate selectivity among them. The cerebrum grows larger and likely the brightness of consciousness increases. The ability to isolate objects from their situations improves memory and is the beginning of abstracting.

But conversely, there is now likely to be occasional loss of immediacy, of the sense of ready flow with the environment. Images of objects and abstractions about them intervene: the man pauses, with heightened consciousness, for a more deliberate discrimination, but then may forget or be distracted from the goal, and the situation is unfinished. A certain pastness that may or may not be relevant increasingly colors the present.

Finally, one’s own body too becomes an object—although later, for this is perceived very “closely.”

6: Tools, Language, Sexual Differentiation, and Society

(3) When things and other persons have once become outlined and abstracted objects, they can enter into useful deliberate fixed and habitual relations with the self. Permanent tools are developed, along with the ad boc objects that were spontaneous extensions of the limbs; and denotative language is developed along with instinctive situational outcries. Objects are controlled, tools applied to them, and the tools too are objects and may be improved and their use learned and taught. Language too is learned. Spontaneous imitation is deliberately intensified, and the social bond tightens.

But of course the social bond pre-existed; there was communication and the manipulation of the physical and social environment. It is not the use of tools and language that brings persons together or workmen and objects together; they have already been in felt organized contact—the tools and language are convenient differentiations of the contact that exists. The danger that is incurred is this: that if the original felt unity weakens, these high-order abstractions—object, person, tool, word—will begin to be taken as the original ground of contact, as if it required some deliberate high-order mental activity in order to get in touch. Thus interpersonal relations become primarily verbal; or without a suitable tool a workman feels helpless. The differentiation that existed “along with” the underlying organization now exists instead of it. Then contact diminishes, speech loses feeling, and behavior loses grace.

(4) Language and tools combine with the earlier pre-verbal bonds of sex, nourishment, and imitation, to broaden the scope of society. But such new intricacies may upset the delicately balanced activities that are crucial to the animal’s welfare. Consider, for example, how from remote phylogenetic antiquity we have inherited a sexual apparatus exquisitely complicated, involving the senses as excitants, and the motor responses of tumescence, embracing, and intromission, all nicely adjusted toward a mounting climax. (The so-called “adolescent sterility” [Ashley Montagu], the time between the first menstruation and fertility, seems to indicate a period of play and practice.) Besides its advantages of sexual selection and cross-breeding, all this complexity requires at least temporary partnerships: no animal is complete in its own skin. And the strong emotional bonds of lactation, suckling, and fostering care tighten the sociality. Also, in higher phyla, the young animal acquires much of its behavior from imitative learning. Then consider how much depends on what delicate adjustments! Consider that the function of the orgasm (Reich), the essential periodic release of tensions, is bound with the workings of the finely-adjusted genital apparatus. It is clear both how important is the social manner of reproduction, and how vulnerable it makes the well-being of the animal.

7: Differentiations of Sensory, Motoric, and Vegetative

(5) Another critical development of fairly remote antiquity has been the separation of the motoric-muscular and sensoric-thought nerve centers. In animals like the dog sensation and motion cannot be much disengaged; this was long ago pointed out by Aristotle when he said that a dog can reason but it makes only practical syllogisms. The advantages of the looser connection in man are, of course, enormous: the ability to survey, hold back, cogitate, in brief to be deliberate and muscularly hold back the body while letting the senses and thoughts play, along with immediately spontaneously moving in smaller motions of the eyes, hands, vocal cords, etc.

But in neurosis this same division is fateful, for it is seized on in order to prevent spontaneity; and the ultimate practical unity of sense and motion is lost. The deliberation occurs “instead of’ rather than “along with”: the neurotic loses awareness that the smaller motions are taking place and preparing the larger motions.

(6) Primitively, the ties of sex, nourishment, and imitation are social but pre-personal: that is, they likely do not require a sense of the partners as objects or persons, but merely as what is contacted. But at the stage of tool-making, language, and other acts of abstraction, the social functions constitute society in our special human sense: a bond among persons. The persons are formed by the social contacts they have, and they identify themselves with the social unity as a whole for their further activity. There is abstracted from the undifferentiated felt-self a notion, image, behavior, and feeling of the “self” that reflects the other persons. This is the society of the division of labor, in which persons deliberately use one another as tools. It is in this society that taboos and laws develop, bridling the organism in the interest of the superorganism, or better: keeping the persons as persons in interpersonal relationship as well as animals in contact. And this society is, of course, the bearer of what most anthropologists would consider the defining property of mankind, culture, the social inheritance surviving the generations.

The advantages of all this are obvious, and so are the disadvantages. (Here we can begin to speak not of “potential dangers” but of actual surviving troubles.) Controlled by taboos, the imitations become unassimilated introjections, society contained inside the self and ultimately invading the organism; the persons become merely persons instead of also animals in contact. The internalized authority lays open the way for institutional exploitation of man by man and of the many by the whole. The division of labor can be pursued in such a way that the work is senseless to the workers and is drudgery. The inherited culture can become a dead weight that one painfully learns, is forced to learn by the duteous elders, yet may never individually use.

8: Verbal Difficulties in this Exposition

It is instructive to notice how, in discussing this subject, verbal difficulties begin to arise: “man,” “person,” “self,” “individual,” “human animal,” “organism” are sometimes interchangeable, sometimes necessary to distinguish. For example, it is deceptive to think of the “individuals” as primitive and combined in social relations, for there is no doubt that the existence of “individuals” comes about as the result of a very complicated society. Again, since it is meaningful to say that it is by organismic-self-regulation that one imitates, sympathizes, becomes “independent,” and can learn arts and sciences, the expression “animal” contact cannot mean “merely” animal contact. Again, “persons” are reflections of an interpersonal whole, and “personality” is best taken as a formation of the self by a shared social attitude. Yet in an important sense the self, as the system of excitement, orientation, manipulation, and various identifications and alienations, is always original and creative.

These difficulties can, of course, be partly avoided by careful definition and consistent usage—and we try to be as consistent as we can. Yer partly they are inherent in the subject-matter, “Man.” making himself in different ways. For instance, the early philosophic anthropologists of modem times, in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, spoke usually of individuals compacting society, after Rousseau, the Nineteenth Century sociologists returned to society as primary; and it has been a great merit of psychoanalysis to restore these distinct concepts to a dynamic interaction. If the theory is often confusing and ambiguous, it may be that the nature too is confusing and ambiguous.

9: Symbols

We have now brought our history down to the last several thousand years, since the invention of writing and reading. Adapting himself to the vast accumulation of culture, both knowledge and technique, man is educated in very high abstractions. Abstractions of orientation, distant from concernful felt perception: sciences and systems of science. Abstractions of manipulation distant from muscular participation: systems of production and exchange and government. He lives in a world of symbols. He symbolically orients himself as a symbol to other symbols, and he symbolically manipulates other symbols. Where there were methods, now there is also methodology: everything is made the object of hypothesis and experiment, with a certain distance from engagement. This includes society, the taboos, the super-sensory, the religious hallucinations, and science and methodology itself, and Man himself. All this has given an enormous increase in scope and power, for the ability symbolically to fix what one used to be fully engaged in allows for a certain creative indifference.

The dangers in it are, unfortunately, not potential but realized. Symbolic structures—e.g., money or prestige, or the King’s peace, or the advancement of learning—become the exclusive end of all activity, in which there is no animal satisfaction and may not even be personal satisfaction; yet apart from animal or at least personal interest there can be no stable intrinsic measure, but only bewilderment and standards that one can never achieve. Thus, economically, a vast mechanism is in operation that does not necessarily produce enough subsistence goods and could indeed, as Percival and Paul Goodman have pointed out in Communitas, proceed in almost as high gear without producing any subsistence at all, except that the producers and consumers would all be dead. A worker is crudely or skillfully fitted into a place in this mechanical symbol of plenty, but his work in it does not spring from any pleasure of workmanship or vocation. He may not understand what he is making, nor how, nor for whom. Endless energy is exhausted in the manipulation of marks on paper; rewards are given in kinds of paper, and prestige follows the possession of papers. Politically, in symbolic constitutional structures symbolic representatives indicate the will of the people as expressed in symbolic votes; almost no-one, any more, understands what it means to exert political initiative or come to a communal agreement. Emotionally, a few artists catch from real experience symbols of passion and sensory excitement; these symbols are abstracted and stereotyped by commercial imitators; and people make love or adventure according to these norms of glamour. Medical scientists and social-workers provide other symbols of emotion and security, and people make love, enjoy recreation, and so forth according to prescription. In engineering, control over space, time, and power is symbolically achieved by making it easier to go to less interesting places and easier to get less desirable goods. In pure science, awareness is focussed on every detail except the psychosomatic fear and self-conquest of the activity itself, so that, for instance, when there is a question of making certain lethal weapons, the issue debated is whether the need of a country to get superiority over the enemy outweighs the duty of a scientist to publicize his findings; but the simpler reactions of compassion, flight, defiance are not operative at all.

In these conditions it is not surprising that persons toy with the sadomasochism of dictatorships and wars, where there is at least control of man by man instead of by symbols, and where there is suffering in the flesh.

10: Neurotic Split

So finally we come to a very recent acquisition of mankind, the neurotically split personality as a means of achieving equilibrium. Faced with a chronic threat to any functioning at all, the organism falls back on its safety-devices of blotting-out, hallucination, displacement, isolation, flight, regression; and man essays to make “living on his nerves” a new evolutionary achievement.

In the early stages there were developments that the healthy organism could each time merge into a new integrated whole. But now it is as if neurotics went back and singled out the vulnerable points of the past development of the race: the task is not to integrate erect posture into animal life, but to act on the one hand as if the head stood in the air by itself and on the other hand as if there were no erect posture or no head at all; and so with the other developments. The potential “dangers” have become factual symptoms: contact-lessness, isolation, fear of falling, impotence, inferiority, verbalizing, and affectless-ness.

It remains to be seen whether or not this neurotic turn is a viable destiny for our species.

11: Golden Age, Civilization, and Introjections

We have been generally defining the neurotic adjustments here as those which employ the new power “instead of’ the previous nature, which is repressed, rather than “along with” it, m a new integration. The repressed unused natures then tend to return as Images of the Golden Age, or Paradise; or as theories of the Happy Primitive. We can see how great poets, like Homer and Shakespeare, devoted themselves to glorifying precisely the virtues of the previous era, as if it were their chief function to keep people from forgetting what it used to be to be a man.

And at best, indeed, the conditions of advancing civilized life seem to make important powers of human nature not only neurotically unused but rationally unusable. Civil security and technical plenty, for instance, are not very appropriate to an animal that hunts and perhaps needs the excitement of hunting to enliven its full powers. It is not surprising if such an animal should often complicate quire irrelevant needs—e.g., sexuality—with danger and hunting, in order to rouse excitement.

Further, it is likely that there is at present an irreconcilable conflict between quite desirable social harmony and quite desirable individual expression. If we are in such a transitional stage toward a tighter sociality, then there will in individuals be many social traits that must appear as unassimilable introjections, neurotic and inferior to the rival individual claims. Our heroic ethical standards (that come from the inspiriting dreams of creative artists) certainly tend to look backward to the more animal, sexual, personal, valorous, honorable, etc.; our behavior is quite otherwise and lacks excitement.

On the other hand, it is also likely (even if the different likelihoods are contradictory) that these “irreconcilable” conflicts have always been, not only at present, the human condition; and that the attendant suffering and motion toward an unknown solution are the grounds of human excitement.

12: Conclusion

However it is, “human nature” is a potentiality. It can be known only as it has been actualized in achievement and history, and as it makes itself today.

The question may quite seriously be asked, by what criterion does one prefer to regard “human nature” as what is actual in the spontaneity of children, in the works of heroes, the culture of classic eras, the community of simple folk, the feeling of lovers, the sharp awareness and miraculous skill of some people in emergencies? Neurosis is also a response of human nature and is now epidemic and normal, and perhaps has a viable social future.

We cannot answer the question. But a medical psychologist proceeds according to three criteria: (1) the health of the body, known by a definite standard, (2) die progress of the patient toward helping himself, and (3) the elasticity of the figure/background formation.