VOLUME 2. Novelty, Excitement, and Growth

Part 3. Theory of the Self

XII. Creative adjustment: I. Fore-contact and contacting

1: Physiology and Psychology

Although there is no function of the organism that is not essentially an interacting in the organism/environment field, yet at any time the greater part of the great majority of animal functions are tending to complete themselves inside the skin, protected and unaware; they are not contact-functions. Contacts are at the “boundary” (but of course the boundary is shifting and may even, in pains, be deep “inside” the animal), and essentially they contact the novel. Organic adjustments are conservative; they have been built into the organism during long phylogenetic history. Presumably at some time every inside function was also a contact-function, adventuring in and suffering the environment (e.g., peristalsis-locomotion, osmotic digestion-touch, mitosis-sexuality, etc.); but now, even in emergencies, regulation occurs with little contact of the novel.

The system of conservative inherited adjustments is the physiology. It is, of course, integrated and regulates itself as a whole, it is not a collection of elementary reflexes: this wholeness of the physiology the ancients used to call the “soul,” and “psychology” (science of the soul) included also the discussion of the physiology. But we prefer to make the subject of psychology the special set of the physiological adjustments that are also in relation with what is not physiological: namely the contacts at the boundary in the organism/environment field. The defining difference between the physiology and the psychology is the self-regulating, relatively self-contained conservatism of the “soul” and the confronting and assimilation of novelty by the “self.” It will be seen from this that presentness in a situation and creative adjustment constitute the self-function.

In a certain sense, the self is nothing but a function of the physiology; but in another sense it is not part of the organism at all, but is a function of the field, it is the way the field includes the organism. Let us consider these interactions of the physiology and the self.

2: Fore-Contact: Periodic and Aperiodic

A physiological function completes itself internally, but ultimately no function can continue to do so (the organism cannot “preserve itself”) without assimilating something from the environment, without growing (or discharging something into the environment, and dying). Thus unfinished physiological situations periodically excite the contact-boundary because of some deficit or surfeit, and this periodicity applies to every function, whether metabolism, need for orgasm, need to divide, need to exercise or rest, etc.; and all these occur in the self as urges or appetites, hunger, urge to excrete, sexuality, fatigue, etc.

We may see from this why breathing plays such an interesting role in psychology and therapy. (“Psyche” or “animus” is breath.) Breathing is a physiological function, yet its period of requiring the environment is so frequent, and indeed continuous, that it is always on the verge of becoming aware, a kind of contact. And in breathing one sees par excellence that the animal is a field, the environment is “inside” or essentially pervading at every moment. And so anxiety, the disturbance of breathing, accompanies any disturbance of the self-function; thus the first step in therapy is contacting the breathing.

The conservative functions become contact, also, when a novel situation occurs because of aware malfunction. These are the aperiodic pains. Let us contrast the periodic urges and the aperiodic pains. In the urges and appetites, the figure of contact develops— for instance, thirst and possible water—and the body (disequilibrium) is background and more and more recedes. (This is true also with the urge to excrete, which healthily is an urge to “let go of.”) In pain the body is more and more attended to as the foreground figure. So the classic therapeutic maxim is: “The healthy man feels his emotions, the neurotic feels his body”—which is not to deny, of course, but rather to imply that in therapy one tries to extend the area of body-awareness, for it is because some areas cannot be felt that others are unduly tensed during excitement and are felt as painful.

Other novelties occur in the conservative physiology because of environmental stimuli, perceptions, poisons, etc. These are aperiodic. Either they meet with and are responded to by, some urge or appetite, in which case they become centers of the developing figure of contact, with the body more and more as background; or they are annoyances, irrelevant, and so forth, in which case they will become pains, with the body as foreground and the attempt to annihilate the novelty from the figure, in order again to become unaware.

Lastly, there are the novelties in the physiology that are especially fateful for neurosis: the disturbances of the conservative organismic-self-regulation. Suppose, for instance, that an urge or appetite is not satisfied from the environment and the emergency-functions (tantrum, dream, blacking out, etc.) cannot operate or are exhausted, then there will be a readjustment of the physiology, an attempt to establish a new unaware conservatism in the new conditions. The same will happen if there are chronic painful environmental demands or persistent foreign bodies in the body. Obviously all these ad boc physiological adjustments cannot easily cohere with the conservative inherited system; they malfunction, produce diseases and pains. Yet it is clear that they are a secondary physiology; for the novelty does not lead to awareness and creative adjustment, but itself becomes unaware and (poorly) organically-self-regulating. Deformed posture is an example. Being no longer novelties, these structures do not appear in the self, in contact, but they are evident, as we shall see, precisely in the defects and fixations of the self-functioning. The poor adjustment between the inherited and the new physiology occurs in the self, again, in periodic pain-tinged urges or symptoms.

It is with the occurrence of novelty, then, that the physiology becomes contactful. We have distinguished the following classes:

1. Periodic urges and appetites, the contact developing toward the environment.

2. Aperiodic pains, the contact developing toward the body.

3. Stimulations, cither developing as appetites (emotions), or as pains.

4. Readjustments of physiology because of environmental conditions, appearing as deficiencies in the structure of contact, or periodically as symptoms.

These excitations or fore-contacts initiate the excitement of the figure/background process.

3: First Stages of Contact

The excitations at the contact-boundary lend their energy to the formation of a sharper and simpler object-figure, approaching it, appreciating it, overcoming obstacles, manipulating and altering the reality, until the unfinished situation is complete and the novelty is assimilated. This process of contacting—touching the loved, interesting, or appetizing object; or expelling from the field, by avoidance or annihilation, the dangerous or painful object—is in general a continuous sequence of grounds and figures, each ground emptying out and lending its energy to the forming figure that in turn becomes ground for a sharper figure; the whole process is an aware mounting excitement. Note that the energy for the figure-formation comes from both poles of the field, both the organism and the environment. (In learning something, for instance, the energy comes from the need to learn it, and from the social milieu and the teaching, and also from the intrinsic power of the subject- matter: it is common, but we think misleading, to think of the “interest” of the subject-matter as being completely cathected to it from the learner and his social role.)

The process of contact is a single whole, but we may conveniently divide the sequence of grounds and figures as follows:

1. Fore-contact: the body is the ground, the appetite or environmental stimulus is the figure. This is what is aware as the “given” or Id of the situation, dissolving into its possibilities.

2. Contacting: (a) the excitement of appetite becomes the ground and some “object” or set of possibilities is the figure. The body diminishes. (Or contrariwise, in pain, the body becomes figure.) There is an emotion.

(b) there is choosing and rejecting of possibilities, aggression in approaching and in overcoming obstacles, and deliberate orientation and manipulation. These are the identifications and alienation of the Ego.

3. Final Contact: against a background of unconcernful environment and body, the lively goal is the figure and is in touch. All deliberateness is relaxed and there is a spontaneous unitary action of perception, motion, and feeling. The awareness is at its brightest, in the figure of the You.

4. Post-Contact: There is a flowing organism/environment interaction that is not a figure/background: the self diminishes.

In this chapter we discuss the first two of these, in the next chapter the remaining two.

Appetite seems either to be stimulated by something in the environment or to rise spontaneously from the organism. But of course the environment would not excite, it would not be a stimulus, unless the organism were set to respond; and further, it can often be shown that it was a dimly aware appetite that put one in the way of the stimulus at the appropriate time. The response reaches out to the stimulus.

The appetite is, however, usually vague until it finds some object to work on; it is the work of creative adjustment that heightens awareness of what one wants. But in cases of extreme need, extreme physiological deficit or surfeit, the spontaneous appetite may make itself definite, bright, and sharply delineated to the point of hallucination. In the defect of an object it makes an object, largely out of fragments of memory. (This occurs, of course, in the neurotic “repetition,” when the need is so overpowering in its influence and the means of approach are so archaic and irrelevant that an ordinary creative adjustment, assimilating a real novelty, is impossible.) Hallucination to the point of blacking out the environment is an emergency-function, but it calls our attention to what occurs in the ordinary case.

For in the more hopeful case of strong but vague appetite with possibilities in the environment, the self functions as follows: the tendency to hallucination, to make the object, enlivens something that is actually perceived: it spontaneously focusses, remembers, and anticipates it. What is confronted is not what a moment before was, but an object made of perception and imagination, against a background of mounting excitement. Such a figure is already a created reality. Meantime, motor behavior is adding other novelties to the rapidly altering whole: paying attention and approaching. There is aggressive initiation of new possibilities; if there are obstacles, anger and annihilating alter the reality. And in general, one’s technique or style, the learned possibilities of manipulation, add to and determine what is perceived as an “object.”

That is, from the beginning and throughout, on being excited by a novelty, the seif dissolves the given (of both the environment and the body and its habits) into possibilities and from them creates a reality. The reality is a passage from past to future: this is what exists, and this is what the self is aware of, discovers and invents.

4: Gratuitous Creativity

Often, indeed, the self seems hardly responsive at all to organic excitations and environmental stimuli, but acts as if, hallucinating a goal and flexing its technique, it were spontaneously making a problem for itself in order to force growth. This kind of “gratuitous act” is extremely interesting. Prima facie it appears to be neurotic because it lays so heavy a stress on the creative and so little on the adjusting; it seems to be a flight from the reality, a mere hallucination. Nevertheless, it is probably a normal function: for given a field so complicated and subtle as human beings have, it is plausible that spectacular success requires the ability to make occasional quite uncalled-for projects, to “make trouble for oneself,” and also to suspend utility and play. Certainly, although most wisdom is the fruit of solving obvious needs, the most characteristically human wisdom and folly have always seemed at first gratuitous. Further, in neurotic gratuitous action, flight from reality, we must distinguish two aspects: first is the safe expression of unaware unfinished situations—these are the garrulous plans, busy-making enterprises, substitute activities, etc.; but also there is the expression of dissatisfaction with one’s circumscribed self, the desire to change without “knowing” how, and thence the reckless adventure, which in fact is often perfectly reasonable and integrative, but felt as reckless only by the neurotic. And besides, as Yeats used to say, without a touch of recklessness there is no courtliness and poetry.

Consider again the enormous expenditure of human effort in creating a more desirable surface reality, either out of perceptions and images in the arts or out of essences and explanations in the speculative sciences. In one aspect this effort is entirely gratuitous; it is work of the contact-boundary alone. (The non-gratuitous aspect of the arts is. of course, cathartic abreaction, the beauty serving as fore-feeling to release a repressed unfinished situation; and the speculative sciences have the utility of pragmatic application.) Yet the naive judgment of beauty and truth—a usual judgment in antiquity and analyzed once and for all by Kant—has to do with the surface itself: it is not an adjustment of the organism to the environment, nor a satisfactory completion of an organic drive in the environment, but it is an adjustment of the whole field to the self, to the surface of contact: as Kant well said it, there is a sense of purpose, without a purpose. And the act is pure self, for the pleasure is disinterested and spontaneous; the organism is in abeyance. Is there perhaps a function for it? In a difficult and conflictful field, where almost nothing can exist without deliberateness and caution and effort, beauty is suddenly a symbol of Paradise, where all is spontaneous—“beasts without fangs, and without thorn the rose”; yes, or beasts with fangs, and heroes who can win or lose grandly; and where, as Kant said, happiness is the reward of good intentions. Then this gratuitous creativity of awareness is truly re-creative for an animal that requires recreation; it helps to relax our habitual prudence, in order that we may breathe.

5: Creativity/Adjustment

For the most part, however, we may consider the self’s creativity and the organism/environment adjustment as polar: one cannot exist without the other. Given the novelty and indefinite variety of the environment, no adjustment would be possible by the conservative inherited self-regulation alone; contact must be a creative transformation. On the other hand, creativity that is not continually destroying and assimilating an environment given in perception and resisting manipulation is useless to the organism and remains superficial and lacking in energy; it does not become deeply exciting, and it soon languishes. It is useless to the organism because there is no completion of unfinished physiological situations without, ultimately, new environmental material for assimilation.

This last point is obvious with regard, for instance, to metabolic deficit, hunger, and feeding, and so with the other appetites; but it is sometimes overlooked with regard to the (secondarily physiological) unfinished situations of neurosis. It is the truth in the orthodox insistence on “transference” in the cure, for the relation to the therapist is a real social situation. And the change of attitude of a patient, when he turns his aggression from himself toward his intro- jects in order to assimilate them or regurgitate them, is a change in the reality. Yet we must go even further and say the following: that relaxing deliberateness, learning correctly to interpret one’s case, and even feeling one's body and one’s emotions: these do not, in the end, solve any problems. They make a solution again possible; they transform the unaware secondary physiology again into a problem of creative contact; but then the solution must be lived out. If the social environment is still refractory to creative adjustment, if the patient cannot adjust it to himself, then he must again adjust himself to it and keep his neurosis.

Creativity without outgoing adjustment remains superficial, then, first because the excitement of the unfinished situation is not drawn on, and the mere interest in contact lapses. Secondly, it is in manipulating the resistant that the self becomes involved and engaged; knowledge and technique, more and more of the achieved past, are called into play and into question; and soon the “irrelevant” difficulties (the irrationality of reality) prove to be the means of exploring oneself and finding out what it is that one really intends. Frustrations, anger, partial satisfactions, feed the excitement—it is fed partly from the organism, partly from the resistant and destroyed and suggestive environment. To make the comparison again with the fine arts: the Crocean notion of the creative moment being the intuition of the whole, and the rest being mere execution, is true and yet profoundly false. The intuition does adumbrate the final product: it is projected from the beginning as a hallucination; but the artist does not understand the dream, he does not know what he intends; it is the handling of the medium that practically reveals his intention and forces him to realize it.

6: Emotions

To illustrate the transition from the excitations and stimuli of fore-contact to the creative figure-formation of contacting, let us consider the emotions.

An emotion is the integrative awareness of a relation between the organism and the environment. (It is the foreground figure of various combinations of proprioceptions and perceptions.) As such, it is a function of the field. In psychotherapy this can be shown experimentally: by concentration and muscular exercises, it is possible to mobilize particular combinations of body-behavior, and these rouse a kind of restless excitation—c.g., tightening and loosening the jaw, clenching the fists, beginning to gasp, and so forth, and the feeling of a frustrated anger. Now if to this proprioception is added the environmental awareness, cither fantasy or perception of some thing or person that one can be angry with, at once the emotion flares in full force and clarity. Conversely, in an emotional situation, the emotion is not felt until one accepts the corresponding bodily-behavior—it is when one clenches one’s fist that one begins to feel the anger.

(Thus the James-Lange theory of the emotions—that the emotion is a condition of the body, it is in running away that one becomes afraid—is partly true; what must be added to it is that the bodily condition be also a relevant orientation and potential manipulation of the environment; that is, it is not running, but running away, away from something, that is fearful.)

If we think of the functioning of an organism in its environment, the need for such integrative combinations is evident. The animal must know immediately and truly what the relations of the field are; and he must be impelled by the knowledge. Emotions are such motivating knowledge as allow the animal to experience the environment as his own, to grow, protect himself, and so forth. For instance, longing is the heightening of appetite confronted with a distant object, in order to overcome distance or other obstacles; grief is the tension of loss or lack in accepting the absence of the object from the field, in order to withdraw and recuperate; anger is the destroying of obstacles to appetite; spite is an attack on an unavoidable overpowering enemy in order not altogether to capitulate; compassion is the avoidance or undoing of one’s own loss by helping another; and so forth.

In the sequence of grounds and figures, the emotions take over the motivational force of the urges and appetites; but the motivation. made definite by its objective reference, is thereby stronger. But the emotions in turn, except in very simple adjustments, give up their motivational force to the still stronger and more definite feelings, the actualized virtues and vices (e.g., courageousness, sullenness, determination, etc.) that impel more complicated orientations and manipulations, especially when they are deliberate. In this transition, again, we can see that both more of the organism (the virtues and vices are habits) and more of the environment are drawn on.

Let us say a few more words about the emotions. It is clear that emotions are not confused or rudimentary impulses, but sharply differentiated functional structures. If a person has crude emotions, it is that his experience as a whole is crude. But of course the dictionary words for the emotions are crude and few; to express the emotions that are felt in sensitive experience requires nuance and reticence, and much objective reference. Works of plastic and musical art are pure language of the emotions, elaborated to statements of conviction.

The emotions are means of cognition. Far from being obstacles to thought, they are unique deliveries of the state of the organism/environment field and have no substitute; they are the way we become aware of the appropriateness of our concerns: the way the world is for us. As cognitions they are fallible, but are corrigible not by putting them out of court but by trying out whether they can develop into the more settled feelings accompanying deliberate orientation—e.g., to proceed from the enthusiasm of discovery to conviction, or lust to love.

Finally, in psychotherapy, the “training of the emotions,” we see that only a combined unitary method is of any avail: we must concentrate both on the world of “objects"—interpersonal relations, fantasy, memory, etc.—and on releasing bodily mobility and appetite, and also on the structure of the third thing, the emotion of the self.

7: Excitement and Anxiety

Excitement persists and increases through the sequence of creative adjustment, and is strongest at the final contact. This is so even if obstacles and lost conflicts prevent the finale; but in such a case the excitement becomes spectacularly disruptive of the organizing self itself. Rage turns into tantrum, there is grief and exhaustion, and perhaps hallucination (day-dream of victory, revenge, and gratification). These are emergency functions to release tension and enable one to start afresh the next time, for of course the physiological need and its excitation are still unfinished. This process, of total frustration and unlimited explosion, is not unhealthy but it is not, needless to say—despite the opinion of many parents—useful for learning anything, for the self is disrupted and there is nothing left to assimilate.

But suppose now that the excitement is interrupted. Let us attend to the stronger breathing that is a factor in all excitements: the excitement is interrupted, the breath is held. This is anxiety.

The most clear-cut case of healthy anxiety is fright, the choking off of the feeling and movement in which one is fully engaged in order to meet a sudden danger. This situation is especially likely to be traumatic, as can be seen by contrasting it with ordinary fear. In fear, the dangerous object is foreseen; one is deliberate and defensive with regard to it; therefore, when it is necessary to withdraw because the danger is too great, the approach to the environment is still open; and later, with increase of knowledge and power, it will be possible to confront the danger again and avoid or annihilate it. In fright the threatened pain and punishment loom suddenly and overwhelmingly large, and the response is to cut off the environment, that is, to play dead and withdraw within one’s skin. The anxiety, the excitement which was suddenly muscularly dammed up, continues to shake for a long time, till one can breathe freely again.

An anti-sexual society is designed to produce this traumatic situation with maximum frequency and efficiency among its children Because the sexuality is secretive (and they want, of course, to exhibit it), the children engage themselves where there is the most likelihood of being surprised; and when they are surprised, the punishment has no relation to anything in their experience of causes and effects, therefore it might well be capital. Such a society is a neatly calculated trap.

Breathing may, of course, be interrupted and cause anxiety, in other ways than by fright; generally fright and the other ways cooperate. Freud singled out coitus interruptus, interrupting the climax of contact, as a special cause of primary anxiety (actual-neurosis) with neurasthenic symptoms. Interruption by punishing the aggressive excitement of the stage of conflict or tantrum seems to be a likely cause of resignation and self-conquest, the avoidance of the previous struggle as “not worth the trouble.” Or the excitement may be cut off still earlier, at the state of noticing an object in the environment, and this would lead to projections. We shall discuss the various kinds of interruptions in Chapter 15.

At whatever stage of contacting the interruption, fright and anxiety occur, the effect is to become cautious about the original appetite itself, and to control it by averting the attention, distracting the interest with other things, holding the breath, gritting the teeth, tightening the abdominal muscles, retracting the pelvis, tightening the rectum, etc. The urge or appetite recurs anyway but now, muscularly restricted, it is painful—for urges and appetites tend to be expansive, outgoing. That is, there is now a change from the sequence in which the body served as the diminishing ground for the developing self; now the body is the figure; and the self, in its structure of the motorically active and deliberate ego, is the ground. This process is still fully aware; it is an attempt at a creative adjustment, working on the body instead of on the environment.

But if this deliberate suppression is persisted in, there is likely to be repression, unaware deliberateness. The nature of repression will be the subject of Chapter 14.

8: Identifying and Alienating

I: Conflict

In the work of contacting, we may now define the function of the ego, identifying and alienating and determining the boundaries or context. “Accepting an impulse as one’s own” means, in the sequence, to have it as part of the ground in which the next figure will develop. (This is what Freud meant to say by “the ego is part of the id.”) Such identifying is often deliberate; and the ego will function well—in its orientations and manipulations—if it is identified with grounds that in fact will develop good figures, provided the grounds have energy and likelihood. (So Freud says, “The ego as part of the id is strong, the ego cut off from the id is weak.”)

Let us run through the process again. In process, background and figure are polar. A figure can be experienced only against its ground, and without its figure a ground is simply part of a larger vague figure. But the relation between ground and figure, in creativity, is a dynamic and shifting one. The mounting excitement flows from the ground toward the more and more sharply defined figure. (This, to repeat it, does not mean merely “cathecting” the figure, for some of the energy comes from the environmental ground, as must be, since it is only new energy that can complete an unfinished situation.) Energy is released for figure-formation when the chaotic environmental parts “meet” an instinctual excitation, define and transform it, and are themselves destroyed and transformed. Mounting excitement is the progressive leaving behind of the ground. At the stage of emotion, the body-ground diminishes and the environmental possibilities loom; next the environment is delimited and deliberately appropriated as one’s own; finally the deliberateness is relaxed, the active ego-feeling vanishes, and there is, momentarily, only the figure and the feeling of spontaneity, with the ground empty.

But we speak of accepting something only when there is a tendency to reject it. When the identifying with an impulse, an object, or a means is spontaneous and obvious—as in fascination or in using an expert skill—and when everything else is out of the question, there is no point in distinguishing self, id, and ego. What is accepted by the ego is an aware conflict and the exercise of aggression.

Conflict is a disturbance of the homogeneity of the ground and prevents the emergence of a sharp and lively next figure. The conflicting excitements bring alternative figures into dominance. The attempt to unify a single figure when the ground is busy, in order to get on and come to an easy solution (that is, to choose one of the contestants and exclude the rest, or to choose a facile compromise, and make this choice the ground of the on-going activity)—such an attempt must result in a weak gestalt, lacking in energy. But on the contrary, if what is chosen is the conflict itself, then the figure will be exciting and energetic, but it will be full of destruction and suffering.

Every conflict is fundamentally a conflict in the grounds of action, a conflict of needs, desires, fascinations, pictures of oneself, goals hallucinated; and the function of the self is to live it through, to suffer loss and change and alter the given. When the grounds are harmonious, there is rarely a true conflict in the choice of foreground objects, expedients, or policies; rather, something is at once found or invented better than any of the alternatives. The case of Buridan’s ass who with a single appetite starved between two likely objects, is not much to be observed. (When there is a genuine indifference of objects—a number of similar cookies on a platter— appetite at once forms the gestalt of choosing a “sample of a class,” the very indifference being made a positive quality.) A strong conflict in the foreground is a sign that the true conflict in the background is alienated and concealed, as in obsessive doubt. (Concealed might be a desire not to get anything at all, or to be tom in two.)

From this point of view, let us consider again the meaning of the proposition, “To excite the conflict weakens the self,” and the therapeutic method of meeting such a danger. The source of the danger is that a large part of the self is already apparently invested in some weak figure, a facile choice having been previously made. If a new excitation is accepted from the alienated background, the conflict will destroy this weak “self”—the self will lose such organization as it has; therefore, it is said, play down the new excitation. But in fact the self is only apparently invested in the weak figure, for the self is not the figure it creates but the creating of the figure: that is, self is the dynamic relation of ground and figure. Therefore, the therapeutic method, which can only strengthen the self, is to insist on relating the foreground weak-figure (e.g., a man’s concept of himself) to its ground, to bring the ground more fully into awareness. Suppose, for instance, the foreground is a verbal rationalization that is clung to. The therapeutic question must be, not whether the proposition is true or false (thus setting up a conflict of objects), but what is the motive for this use of words? does one really care whether or not it is true? or is it a manipulation? of whom? is it an attack? against whom? is it an appeasement? a concealment, of what, from whom?

The necessity of this method is obvious if we consider that many rationalizations, especially of intelligent people, happen to be true propositions and yet are rationalizations. To attack any proposition leads to endless wrangling; and patients are like as not to be as generally informed as therapists.

But when the figure is related to its motive, new excitations suddenly appear, both from the organism and the past and from new things noticed in the environment. The weak figures lose interest and become confused, the self loses its “security” and suffers. Yet this suffering is not a weakening of the self, but a painful transitional excitement of creativity. It is the reverse of anxiety. This suffering is painful and involves the deeper breathing of labor. Anxiety is unpleasurable, static, breathless. A conflict of grounds is attended by destruction and suffering; a false conflict of objects, expedients, or ideas freezes in a dilemma attended by anxiety. The purpose of false conflict is to interrupt the excitement; anxiety as an emotion is the dread of one’s own daring.

9: Identifying and Alienating

II: “Security”

Timidity to be creative has two sources: the pain of the mounting excitement itself (originally, the “fear of instinct”), and the fear of rejecting or being rejected, destroying, making changes; these two mutually aggravate each other, and are at bottom the same. A sense of “security,” on the contrary, is given by clinging to the status quo, one’s past achieved adjustments. The new excitement threatens to shake this security to pieces.

What we must understand is that there is no such thing as a true security, for then the self would be a fixity. When there is no irrational fear, the problem does not arise whether or not one is secure, but one attends to the problem confronting. Sense of security is a sign of weakness: the person who feels it is always waiting for its disproof.

The energy of clinging with death-grip to the status quo comes from the unfinished situations still tending to complete themselves opposed by aggression turned against oneself by the alien identifications introjected after previous defeats: this clinch gives something of a feeling of solidity, stability, power, self-control, and “security.” Meantime, in fact, the self has little out-going power to draw on.

The secure person is using his powers in a safe and unsurprising struggle with his unassimilated identifications. The struggle continues and rouses feeling because the situation is unfinished and recurs; but it is a “safe" feeling, because nothing new will turn up, and one has already suffered the defeat. Such a struggle is also reliable; it cannot be terminated, for the organism keeps producing the need, but the aggression will not turn toward the environment where a solution might be found. Also—if it is a good “social” identification—it is often possible to find many speciously similar real problems that can be solved on the same pattern as the former defeat; one can apparently cope quite easily with the reality without learning anything, suffering anything new, or making any change: all that is necessary is to avoid any real situation that is interesting or venturesome, to avert attention from anything in one’s affairs that makes today different from yesterday; and this can be conveniently accomplished by calling the new the “unrealistic.” So by a beautiful economy, precisely an accepted defeat serves to give a sense of power and adequacy. In popular language this is called “making a good adjustment.” The only things lacking are excitement and growth and the sense of being alive.

But where the self has power to draw on, it has precisely no sense of security. It has perhaps a sense of readiness: the acceptance of excitement, a certain foolish optimism about the alterability of reality, and a habitual memory that the organism regulates itself and does not in the end wear out or explode. (This readiness is perhaps what the theologians call faith.) The answer to the question “Can you do it?” can be only, “It’s interesting.” A sense of adequacy and power grows as the particular problem is met and generates its own structure, and new possibilities are found in it, and things surprisingly fall into place.