VOLUME 2. Novelty, Excitement, and Growth

Part 2. Reality, Human Nature, and Society

IX. Conflict and self-conquest

1: Conflict and Creative Disinterestedness

We must now say something about the finales of the aggressions: victory (or defeat), conquest, and domination. For in the neuroses, the need for victory is central; and given this need, there is a readily available victim, the self. Neurosis may be regarded as self-conquest.

But the neurotic need for victory is not a need for the object fought for, exercising aggression in open conflict; it is a need to have won, to be a victor as such. The meaning of it is that one has already importantly lost and been humiliated and has not assimilated the loss, but repeatedly tries to save face with petty triumphs. So every inter-personal relation, and indeed every experience, is turned into a little battle with a chance to win and prove prowess.

Important conflict, however, struggling for an object that will make a difference and risking oneself in an initiative that may change the status quo—this is precisely avoided. Small symbolic conflicts and large false and therefore unending conflicts like “Mind versus Body,” “Love versus Aggression,” "Pleasure versus Reality," are means of avoiding the exciting conflicts that would have a solution. Instead people cling to security, here recognized as the fixation of the background, the underlying organic need and the past habit; the background must be kept background.

The opposite of the need for victory is “creative disinterest." We shall later attempt to describe this peculiar attitude of the spontaneous self (Chapter X). Accepting his concern and the object, and exercising the aggression, the creatively impartial man is excited by the conflict and grows by means of it, win or lose; he is not attached to what might be lost, for he knows he is changing and already identifies with what he will become. With this attitude goes an emotion that is the opposite of the sense of security, namely faith: absorbed in the actual activity he does not protectthe background but draws energy from it, he has faith that it will prove adequate.

2: Critique of the Theory of the “Removal of Inner Conflict”: Meaning of ‘“Inner”

Psychoanalysis has classically devoted itself to the uncovering of “inner conflicts” and their “removal.” Roughly speaking this is a fine conception (like the other conception: “re-education of the emotions”); but it is now time to scrutinize it more closely.

“Inner” here presumably means either inside the skin of the organism or within the psyche or in the unconscious; examples would be the conflict between sexual tension and pain, or between instinct and conscience, or between introjected father and mother. Opposed to these, and non-neurotic, would presumably be conscious conflicts with the environment nr with other persons. But put this way, the distinction between “inner conflicts” and other conflicts is not valuable, for clearly there are non-“inner” conflicts that may well be considered as neurotic. For example, to the extent that a child has not yet grown free-standing from the child/parent field—he is still suckling, learning to talk, economically dependent, etc.—it is pointless to speak of the neurotic disturbances (unaware starvation, hostility, deprivation of contact) as within any individual’s skin or psyche. The disturbances are in the field; true, they spring from the “inner conflicts” of the parents, and they will later result in introjected conflicts in the offspring as he becomes freestanding; but their essence in the disturbed felt-relation is irreducible to the parts. Thus child and parents must be treated together. Or again, the lapse of community in political societies is not reducible to the neuroses of individuals, who indeed have become “individuals” because of the lapse of community; nor is it reducible to the bad institutions, for these are maintained by the citizens; it is a disease of the field, and only a kind of group-therapy would help. As we have already said frequently, the distinction of “intrapersonal” and “interpersonal” is a poor one, for all individual personality and all organized society develop from functions of coherence that are essential to both person and society (love, learning, communication, identification, etc.); and indeed, the contrary functions of division are also essential to both: rejection, hate, alienation, etc. The concept of contact/boundary is more fundamental than intra or inter, or than inner and outer. And further, again, there are disturbances that may be called neurotic that occur in the organism/natural-environment field, for instance the magic rituals of primitives that develop, quite without personal neurosis, from starvation and thunder-fear; or our contemporary disease of “mastering” nature rather than living symbiotically, for quite apart from the personal and social neuroses (that are, to be sure, here working overtime), there is a dislocation in the interaction of sheer material quantities and dearths, caused by unaware abuses. The primitive says, “The earth is starving, therefore we are starving”; and we say, “We are starving, therefore let us wrest something more from the earth”: symbiotically both attitudes are bad dreams.

The classical wording “inner conflict” contains, however, a very important truth, stated characteristically upside-down. It is that the inner conflicts—those inside the skin, inside the psyche (the opposed tensions and checks and balances of the physiological system, the play, dreams, art, etc.)—all these are for the most part reliable and not neurotic; they can be trusted to be self-regulating; they have proved themselves for thousands of years and have not much changed. The inner conflicts in this sense are not the subject of psychotherapy; when they are unaware they can be left unaware. It is, on the contrary, the meddling inward of outside-the-skin social forces that deliberately upsets the spontaneous inner-system and calls for psychotherapy. These forces are new-comers and often ill-conceived. A large part of psychotherapy is a process of disengaging these properly outside-the-skin forces from meddling inside-the-skin and disturbing the organismic-self-regulation. And by the same token, it is a process of disengaging such more distant unreliable economic and political forces as competition, money, prestige, power, from meddling inside the primary personal system of love, grief, anger, community, parenthood, dependence and independence.

3: Meaning of “Conflict”

Obviously in the classical formula, “conflicts” are not the opposed internal tensions and checks and balances, the wisdom of the body; they are meant as bad conflicts, and hence the inner conflicts must be dissolved. Why is this necessary?

The badness of conflicts seems to mean one or all of the following: (1) All conflicts are bad because they waste energy and cause suffering. (2) All conflicts excite aggression and destruction, which are bad. (3) Some conflicts are bad because one of the contestants is unhealthy or anti-social, and rather than being allowed to conflict, it should be eliminated or sublimated, e.g., pre-genital sexuality or various aggressions. (4) Mistaken conflicts are bad, and the contents of the unconscious are mostly archaic and mistaken (displaced).

The point of view we are here developing, however (it is largely but not mainly a proposal for a better use of language), is that, fundamentally, no conflict should be dissolved by psychotherapy. Especially the “inner” conflicts are strongly energized and concernful and are the means of growth; the task of psychotherapy is to make them aware so that they may feed on new environmental material and come to a crisis. The least desirable conflicts are the aware petty battles and unending clinches based on semantical mistakes of which we spoke at the beginning of this chapter; we interpret these not in order to avoid conflict but precisely in order to bring forth the important conflicts for which they are signs.

Let us then consider conflict itself, aware and attended by suffering. The notion that conflict, whether social, interpersonal, or intra-psychic, is wasteful of energy, is plausible but superficial. Its plausibility is based on the assumption that the work to be done could be got at directly; then it would be wasteful for the contestant that will have to do the work to have to fight off or overcome the friction of an opponent; and perhaps both contestants can harmoniously join in the work. But this is superficial, for it assumes that one knows beforehand what the work is that is to be done, where and how the energy is to be expended. The assumption is that we know—and a part of the patient knows—just what good is to be aimed at; in that case the opposition is deceived or perverse. But where a conflict is deeply concernful, what to do, what belongs to oneself rather than to a stereotyped norm, is just what is being tested. Even more, the true work to be done, perhaps even the true vocation, is first being discovered in the conflict; it has not hitherto been known to anybody, and is certainly not adequately expressed in the contesting claims. The conflict is a collaboration going beyond what is intended, toward a new figure altogether.

Surely this is true of any creative collaboration among persons. The best efficiency is attained not by establishing an a priori harmony among their interests, or by compromising their individual interests to a pre-conceived goal. Rather (so long as they remain in contact and ate earnestly aiming at the best creative achievement), the more sharply they differ and have it out, the more likely they are to produce collectively an idea better than any of them had individually. So in games it is the competition that makes the players surpass themselves. (The bother with neurotic competitiveness is not the competition but the fact that the competitor is not interested in the game.) Now also in the creative act of a single person, for instance in a work of art or theory, it is the warring of disparate, irreconcilable elements that suddenly leaps to a creative solution. A poet does not reject an image that stubbornly but “accidentally” appears and mars his plan; he respects the intruder and suddenly discovers what “his” plan is, he discovers and creates himself. And so a scientist seeks out the disproving evidence.

The question is whether the same must not be true of intrapsychic emotional conflict. In ordinary unblocked situations there is no problem: by organismic-self-regulation an instinct-dominance flexibly establishes itself, e.g., a strong thirst puts other drives in abeyance until it is satisfied. And longer range orderings flexibly occur in the same way: through conflict, biting-chewing-drinking establish themselves over suckling, and the genitals establish themselves as the final aim in sexuality: genital orgasm becomes the terminus of sexual excitement. In the development of these orders there were conflicting tensions, but the conflicts worked themselves out—with disruption of habits, destruction, assimilation, and a new configuration. Now suppose the situation has been a blocked one: e.g., suppose the genital primacy was not strongly established because of oral unfinished situations, genital fears, so called “regressions,” and so forth. And suppose that all the contestants are brought into the open, into open contact and open conflict, with regard to object-choices, social behavior, moral guilt on the one hand and affirmation of pleasure on the other. Must not this conflict and its attendant suffering and hardship be the means of coming to a self-creative solution? Such a conflict is severe because there is much to be destroyed; but is the destructiveness to be inhibited? If the solution—the normal primacy—is pre-conceived and forwarded by the therapist (just as it has long been skilfully pre-conceived by the social self of the patient), much suffering and danger may be avoided; but the solution will be so much the more alien and therefore less energetic. That is, it is unwise to allay the conflict or suppress or interpret away any strong contestants, for the result must then be to prevent a thorough destruction and assimilation, and therefore to condemn the patient to a weak and never perfectly self-regulating system.

Above all we must remember that where the contestants are natural drives—aggressions, special gifts, sexual practices that in fact give pleasure, etc.—they cannot be reduced, but their manifestations only deliberately suppressed, bullied or shamed out. When all the contestants are in awareness and in contact, a man may make his own hard decisions; he is not a patient. The hope is that in such a case a difficult drive will spontaneously find its measure in a new configuration, by creative adjustment and convalescent organismic-self-regulation.

4: Suffering

Let us also consider the meaning of the suffering. The creative solution, we have said, is not known to the warring contestants; it first arises from the conflict. In the conflict, the contestants, their habits and interests, are in part destroyed; they lose and suffer. Thus, in the social collaboration, the partners quarrel and destroy one another, they hate the conflict. In making a poem, the poet is annoyed by the intruding image or the idea that goes off at a tangent; he gives himself a headache, he clings to his plan, becomes confused and sweats. Yet engaged in the conflict, these cannot avoid the pain, because to suppress it now would not give pleasure but un-pleasure, dullness, and uneasiness and nagging doubt. Besides, the conflict itself is painfully exciting. How in fact do they finally lessen the pain?

By finally “standing out of the way,” to quote the great formula of Tao. They disengage themselves from their preconceptions of how it “ought” to turn out. And into the “fertile void” thus formed, the solution comes flooding. That is, they engage themselves, put forward their interests and skills and let them clash, in order to sharpen the conflict, and in order to be destroyed and changed into the coming idea; and finally they do not cling to the interests as “theirs.” In the excitement of the creative process they come to a creative impartiality among the warring pans; and then, with great recklessness and gleeful savagery, each contestant is likely to exercise all his aggression both for and against his own part. But the self is no longer being destroyed, for it is first finding out what it is.

The question again is whether this same interpretation of the use and means of lessening pain and suffering applies to somatic and emotional pain and suffering. Let us speculate a moment on the function of pain.

Pain is primarily a signal; it calls attention to an immediate present danger, for instance the threat to an organ. The spontaneous response to it is to get out of the way or, failing that, to annihilate the threatener. Animal life does not dwell on pain and suffering; when injury persists and nothing deliberately can be done to help, the animal becomes numb to the pain or even faints. (The neurotic reaction of touching the injured part to elicit the pain is a desire for sensation in the de-sensitized; and this too is probably a useful signal, though it is difficult to interpret.)

What, then, is the function of prolonged suffering common among human beings? We hazard the guess that it is to get us to attend to the immediate present problem and then to stand out of the way, to give the threat all our powers, and then to stand out of the way, to relax useless deliberateness, to let the conflict rage and destroy what must be destroyed. Consider two simple illustrations: a man is ill, he tries to go about his business and he suffers; forced to realize he has quite other business, he attends to his illness, lies down and waits; the suffering lessens and he falls asleep. Or, a loved one dies; there is a sad conflict between intellectual acceptance on the one hand and desires and memories on the other; the average man tries to distract himself, but the superior man obeys the signal and engages himself in the suffering, calls up the past, sees his present hopelessly frustrated; he cannot imagine what to do now that the bottom has fallen out of everything; the grief, confusion, and suffering are prolonged, for there is much to be destroyed and annihilated and much to be assimilated, and during this time he must not go about his unimportant business, deliberately suppressing the conflict. Finally the mourning-labor is complete and the person is changed, he assumes a creative disinterest; at once new interests become dominant.

Emotional suffering is a means of preventing the isolation of the problem, in order that, working through the conflict, the self may grow in the field of the existent. The sooner one is willing to relax struggling against the destructive conflict, to relax to the pain and confusion, the sooner the suffering is over. (This interpretation of the suffering of mourning, as a means of letting go the old self to change, explains why mourning is attended by self-destructive behavior like scratching the skin, beating the breast, tearing the hair.)

To the physician, of course, the danger in emotional conflict and suffering is that its raging may destroy the patient, tear him to pieces. This is a true danger. But it is to be met not necessarily by weakening the conflict but by strengthening the self and the self- awareness. When one realizes that it is one’s own conflict, and that one is tearing oneself to pieces, there is a new dynamic factor in the situation, namely oneself. Then, as the conflict is attended to and sharpens, one sooner reaches the attitude of creative impartiality and identifies with the coming solution.

5: Self-Conquest: Premature Pacification

We are saying, then, that neurosis does not consist in any active conflict, inner or outer, of one desire against another, or of social standards against animal needs, or of personal needs (e.g., ambition) against both social standards and animal needs. All such conflicts are compatible with the integration of the self, and indeed are means of the integrating of the self. But neurosis is the premature pacification of conflicts; it is a clinch or truce or numbness to avoid further conflict; and it secondarily manifests itself as a need for victory in petty battles, as if to unmake the underlying humiliation. It is, briefly, self-conquest. Let us here distinguish two stages of satisfaction: (1) the satisfaction of the cessation of conflict and (2) the satisfaction of conquest.

Suppose that instead of being able to identify with a coming solution, the self despairs of a solution and has no prospect but continued suffering and a too crushing defeat. In our families and society this must often be the case, for a creative solution is often impossible. An adult, understanding the situation, may suffer on, bur a child necessarily gives up. Let us consider the meaning of resignation.

At the moment of extreme conflict and despair, the organism responds by blotting out, spectacularly by fainting, more usually by numb feeling, paralysis, or some other method of temporary repression. But when the immediate crisis is passed, if the circumstances are no more promising for a solution, the further conflict is avoided, the self no longer aggresses, and the more bearable situation of the repression is stabilized; one is resigned. But there is then an empty space in the figure, for the general context of need, opportunity, difficulty, etc. is the same; but the self-assertion that occupied the central place in the conflict is missing. This empty space is now filled by identifying -with another person, namely the person who made the conflict unbearable and who made one resign. This person is usually one who is feared and loved—the conflict is resigned both out of fear and in order not to risk disapproval— and now that person becomes “oneself.” That is, instead of pressing on to the new self one would become in the unknown solution of the conflict, one introjects this other self. Identifying with it, one lends it the force of one’s own aggressions now disengaged from the advancement of one’s own needs. These aggressions are now retroflectively turned against those needs, averting attention from them, tensing the muscles against their excitations, calling such needs silly or vicious, punishing them, and so forth. According to the norms of the introjected person, one alienates and aggresses against the conflicting self. This is easy to do, for the more filial and social part of oneself, which was one of the contestants, can ally with the introjected authority; useful aggressive and repressive attitudes are close at hand and easy to learn. It is easy to avoid occasions of temptation once one has agreed to be good; it is easy to consider a drive vicious and alien to oneself when one has identified with those who consider it so.

The opposite of the excitement of the conflict is the numbness of resignation. The opposite of the “fertile void" when one has attained a level of disinterest (and that void is the creativity of the self) is the empty space of resignation, where the self used to be.

And the opposite of identification with the coming new self is the introjection of an alien personality. There is thus a premature pacification. In the sequel, of course, the unfinished conflict is still unfinished, but it manifests itself as a need for victory in small battles instead of a willingness to consider difficult opposition with a certain disinterestedness; and it is a clinging to security instead of having faith.

The emotional conflict was hard to solve because another person, for example, the parent, was both loved and feared; yet unfortunately when the conflict, the self’s own complicated needs and struggling confusion, is resigned and the parent is introjected and the self’s aggression turned against the self, then this love also is lost: for there is no contact with what is clung to and no renewed love with outgoing aggression.

6: Self-Conquest: Satisfactions of Conquest

Let us now look at the peace that has been achieved. We must distinguish positive and negative peace. When the conflict has raged itself out and come to a creative solution with the change and assimilation of the warring factors, there is a relief of suffering and the completed excitement of the new created whole. This is positive. There is no sense of conquest and no object to dominate, for indeed the victims have vanished, they are destroyed and assimilated. In positive peace, paradoxically, there is the flush of victory without the sentiment of conquest; the chief sentiment is the liveliness of new possibilities, for there is a new configuration. So Victory is portrayed as winged, on her toes, facing onward.

There is a positive peace also in crushing defeat, if one has gone to one’s limits, exhausted every resource and not withheld the maximum of rage. For by tantrum and the labor of mourning the need for the impossible is annihilated. The new self is sombre but whole; that is, its animation is restricted in the new conditions but it has not internalized and identified with the conqueror. So Péguy, for instance, has beautifully described how the suppliants in Greek tragedies have more strength than the arrogant victors.

The peace of conquest, however, where the victim is still in existence and must be dominated, is, as peace, a negation: the suffering of the conflict has ceased but the figure of awareness is not alive with new possibilities, for nothing has been solved; victor and victim and their relations continue to fill the news. The victor is watchful, the victim resentful. In social wars we see that such negative peace is not stable; there are too many unfinished situations. How is it that, in self-conquest, the pacification proves to be stable at all and the conquering self can continue for decades to dominate the alienated part of itself? For indeed the vitality of any natural drive is strong; it can be alienated but not annihilated. We should expect it to be too strong to be long subdued by fear or the need for affection. Why does the conflict not recommence as soon as there is a favorable change in the situation?

It is that the self now gets an enormous positive satisfaction from its identification with the strong authority. As a whole the self has been defeated, for its conflict has not been allowed to mature and become some new positive thing; but the identifying self can now say “/ am the victor.” This powerful satisfaction is arrogance. What are the elements?

First, added to the relief of the cessation of suffering the conflict, is the expansive relief from the pressures of threatened defeat, shame, humiliation; by assuming another role, arrogance is expansive, brash, confident. Second, there is the blushing satisfaction of gloating, a species of vanity; in Freudian terms, the super-ego is smiling on the ego. Third, the proud self arrogates to itself the fancied virtues of the authorities, strength, rights, wisdom, guiltlessness. Last and most important, and by no means an illusion, the arrogant self can now wield its aggression and continually prove that it is a conqueror, for the victim is always available for domination. The stability of the resigned character does not come from having given up “once and for all,” but from the fact that the aggression is continually exercised. Unfortunately the chief victim of the aggression is just oneself, always available to be beaten, squelched, squeezed, bitten, and so forth. Thus the apparent increase of strength and aggressiveness is a crippling weakness. (At first there may often be a real bloom in health, one has made an adjustment; but the toll comes later.) Energy is bound in keeping down the alien drive. If the inner tension becomes too great, the threat from below is projected and one finds scapegoats: these are other persons who have, or to whom can be attributed, one’s own offensive and alien drive. They add to the roster of the victims and heighten the arrogance and pride.

Let us be careful to see just what is unfortunate in this process. The elements of expansiveness, ego-ideal, and the arrogation of virtues do not, as such, constitute an unattractive childlike attitude: this is blushing pride, basking in self-approval and social approval, and saying, “See what a big boy am I!” It is a species of exhibition, offensive probably only to those who are disappointed and envious. When the fourth clement, the unrestrained aggression. is added, the portrait becomes darker, terrible yet still not ugly. Where there is absolute pride in the self and unbridled outward aggression, we have the true conqueror, a mad spectacle like a torrent or other irrational force, destroying all and soon destroying itself; this is the combination of self-love, self-assurance, and power, without the self-regulation or interpersonal regulation of organic need or social purpose. Such dark madness is not without grandeur; we both wonder at it and try to annihilate it.

It is this grand image, of course, that the weak self-conqueror dreams of; his concept of himself is illusory through and through; it does not draw on his energy. The true conqueror is a distraught creator who appoints himself to the role and acts it out. The self-conqueror has resigned himself and been appointed to another role by someone else.

7: Self-Control and “Character”

Beneath the surface need for victory and clinging to security, then, is a remarkable arrogance and conceit; it is only underneath that one comes to the resignation. The conceit proves itself by being able to show that it can in fact produce the goods, be strong, for its victim is always available. The typical remark is: “I’m strong. I’m independent, I can take it or leave it (sex).” Every exercise of self-control, as it is called, is a proof of one’s superiority.

Again a difficulty arises, especially in our mores; the social grounds of self-esteem are ambiguous. It is necessary to prove not only that one is strong but that one is “potent,” sexually excitable. This contradictory requirement can be met only if the act of love can be made sado-masochistic enough to be able to use aggression as a releasing fore-feeling for sexuality, and sexuality in turn as a means of being punished, to allay anxiety.

Self-conquest is socially esteemed as “character.” A man of character does not succumb to “weakness” (this “weakness” actually is the spontaneous eros that accomplishes all creation). He can marshal his aggression to put over his “ideals” (ideals are the norms that one is resigned to). The anti-sexual society that bases its ethics on character—perhaps somewhat more in the immediately previous centuries than nowadays—attributes all achievement to repression and self-control. And certain aspects of our civilization are probably due to character: namely the vast empty facade, the mere quantity, the imposing front; for these constitute the ever-needed proofs of dominating men and nature, they are proofs of potency. But grace, warmth, strength, good sense, gayety, tragedy: these are impossible to persons of character.

Even so, given such major satisfactions of the self, and the freedom to wield aggression, and the highest social prestige, self-conquest is a viable partial integration: it results merely in diminished happiness, personal illness, the domination and misery of others, and the waste of social energy. All these can be put up with. But suddenly the repressions begin to fail because of the general spread of luxuries and temptations; the self-esteem is weakened by social insecurity and insignificance; character is not rewarded; and out-going aggression in civil enterprise is hampered, so that aggression is wielded only against the self; in this present-day situation self-conquest looms in the foreground as the center of neurosis

8: Relation of Theory and Method

What the theorist sees as the “center of neurosis” depends partly on such social conditions as we have been describing. But partly, of course, it depends on the method of therapy employed (and the method in turn depends on such social factors as the run of patients, the criterion of health, etc.).

In the method explained in this book, where the attempt is made to help the self-integrate itself, extending the areas of vitality to include wider areas, the chief resistance is found in the self’s unwillingness to grow. The self maintains a grip against its own on-going development.

In the early orthodox technique, where the patient passively, unthinkingly and irresponsibly, produced his id-contents, naturally what struck the therapist was the clash between these and the social norms; the task of integration was a more viable readjustment. Later this concept was felt to be insufficient; the resignation and character-deformation of the patient loomed in the center. But we must point out a remarkable and almost ridiculous contradiction in the usual terminology of theories of character analysis.

We have seen that, identifying with the authority, the self-wields its aggression against its alienated drives, e.g., its sexuality. It is the self that is the aggressor; it conquers and dominates. Yet strangely, when the character-analysts come to speak of the boundary between the self and the alien, they suddenly mention not the “weapons of the self” but the “defenses of the self,” its “defensive armor” (Wilhelm Reich). The self, controlling the motoric system and deliberately averting the attention and throttling the excitations, is thought of as defending itself against the threats from below! What is the reason for this odd blunder? It is that the self is not taken seriously by the therapist. He can speak of it in any way that suits his convenience, because practically it is nothing. To him only two forces exist, the authority and the instincts; and first the therapist, not the patient, assigns power to the first, and then rebelliously he assigns power to the second.

But there is another existing thing, the self of the patient, and this must be taken seriously by the therapist, for, to repeat, it is only the self that is really available for help. The social norms cannot be altered in psychotherapy, and the instincts cannot be altered at all.

9: What is Inhibited in Self-Conquest

The genesis, in reverse order, of the self-conquest is as follows:

Need for victory

Clinging to security

Conceit of the arrogated personality

Introjection

Resignation

Withdrawal of the self

Now what is primarily inhibited in self-conquest, what is the fundamental loss inflicted on itself by the self? It is the “coming solution” of the conflict that is inhibited. It is the excitement of growing that is driven underground. Sexual excitation, aggression, and grief may to a degree be released in a compartmented way; but unless one feels that he is risking himself in them, the fundamental dullness, boredom, and resignation must persist; the out-going acts are meaningless. Meaningfulness is the same as the excitement of the coming solution. The premature interruption of the conflict, through despair, fear of loss, or avoidance of suffering, inhibits the creativity of the self, its power to assimilate the conflict and form a new whole.

The therapy, conversely, must free the aggression from its fixed target, the organism; make the introjects aware in order that they may be destroyed; bring the compartmented interests, the sexual, the social, etc., back into contact and conflict; and rely on the integrative power of the self, its peculiar style, as expressed precisely in the vitality of the neurosis.

Many questions at once arise. Is not a “coming solution” something future and non-existent? I low can the non-existent be importantly inhibited and do much damage? How does the self- create itself anew: from what material? with what energy? in what form? Is not “relying on the integrative power” an attitude of therapeutic laissez-faire? And if the conflict is further stirred up and further disintegrates the self, how will the self-maintain itself at all, much less grow? What is the “Self”? We shall try to answer these questions in the next chapters. Here let us mention only the chief point.

The self is the system of contacts in the organism/environment field; and these contacts are the structured experience of the actual present situation. It is not the self of the organism as such, nor is it the passive recipient of the environment. Creativity is inventing a new solution; inventing it both as finding it and as devising it; but this new way could not rise in the organism or its “unconscious,” for there are only conservative ways; nor could it be in the novel environment as such, for even if one hit on it there, one would not recognize it as one’s own. Yet the existing field passing into the next moment is rich with potential novelty, and contact is the actualization. Invention is original; it is the organism growing, assimilating new matter and drawing on new sources of energy. The self does not know beforehand what it will invent, for knowledge is the form of what has already occurred; certainly a therapist does nor know it, for he cannot grow somebody else’s growth—he is simply part of the field. But growing, the self risks—risks it with suffering if it has long avoided risking it and therefore must destroy many prejudices, introjects, attachments to the fixed past, securities, plans and ambitions; risks it with excitement if it can accept living in the present.