VOLUME 2. Novelty, Excitement, and Growth

Part 3. Theory of the Self

XIII. Creative adjustment: II. Final contact and post-contact

1: Unity of Figure and Ground

Final contact is the goal of contacting (but not its functional “end,” which is assimilation and growth). In final contact the self is immediately and fully engaged in the figure it has discovered- and-invented; momentarily, there is practically no background. The figure embodies all the concern of the self, and the self is nothing but its present concern, so the self is the figure. The powers of the self are now actualized, so the self becomes something (but in so doing it ceases to be self).

Clearly such a point can be reached only under the following conditions: (1) The self has been selecting the reality toward its own reality—that is, it has been identifying with what activates or mobilizes the background, and alienating the rest. (2) It has been addressing the environmental reality and changing it, so that no relevant concern remains unchanged in the environment. (3) And it has accepted and completed the dominant unfinished situations of the organism, so that no appetite remains in the body-awareness. (4) And during this process, it has been not merely an active-artificer of the solution, nor a passive-artifact of it (for these are extrinsic), but it has more and more been assuming a middle mode and growing into the solution.

Let us consider the nature of an awareness that has no environmental or body background, for awareness is a figure against a ground. Such awareness is possible only of a whole-and-parts, where each part is immediately experienced as involving all the other parts and the whole, and the whole is just of these parts. The whole figure could be said to be the background for the parts, but it is more than ground for it; it is at the same time the figure of the parrs, and they are ground. To put this another way: the experience does not allow for any more possibilities because it is necessary and actual; the actual is necessary; these parts at this moment cannot mean anything else. Let us give some examples: in a moment of insight, there are no more hypotheses, for one sees how the parts work together (one has grasped the “middle term”); and thus, as a problem approaches the insightful moment, everything begins to fall into place; and after the insight, the application to further cases is immediate and habitual—the problem has been contacted once and for all. Likewise, when one loves there are no alternatives: one cannot oneself withdraw, look elsewhere, etc., and one feels that any further traits that might appear in the beloved will either be lovable or will be completely irrelevant and unimportant. Or more darkly, in a moment of final despair, there are no more resources; the figure in such a case is nothing but the empty ground with nothing to relieve it, and it is felt as necessary, for the impossible is a kind of necessary.

In such a whole-of-parts the figure provides its own boundary. Therefore there are no ego-functions: no boundaries are chosen, there are no identifications and alienations, and no further deliberateness. The experience is entirely intrinsic, one is in no way acting on it. The relaxation of deliberateness and the vanishing of boundaries is the reason for the extra brightness and vigor—e.g., the “flash of insight” or the “shock of recognition”—for the energy that went into withholding oneself or aggressively putting connections into the environment is now suddenly added to the final spontaneous experience. The spontaneity is most easily noticed in behaviors where there has been deliberate muscular movement—e.g., the spontaneous pelvic movement before orgasm, and the spasm, or the spontaneous swallowing of food that has been well liquefied and tasted.

In all contacting, there is an underlying unity of perceptual, motor, and feelingful functions: there is no grace, vigor, dexterity of movement without orientation and interest; no keen sight without focusing; no feeling of attraction without reaching, etc. But it is only in final contact, perhaps, with its spontaneity and absorption, that these functions are all foreground, they are the figure: one is aware of the unity. That is, the self (which is nothing but contact) comes to feel itself. What it is feeling is the interacting of the organ’ ism and environment.

2: Concern and its Object

Let us try to analyze the absorption of final contact as a feeling (though one must apologize for one’s poverty of language). In analyzing the sequence of contacting, we mentioned a sequence of motivations: first, urges, appetites, and responses to stimuli that set the organism to going out toward the environment (c.g., hunger, pinprick); secondly, emotions or the feeling of relationship between appetite, pain, etc. and some environmental situation (e.g., lust, anger), these eliciting aggressive approach; thirdly, the more settled activation of virtues or vices (e.g., determination, sullenness) that see one through complicated orientations, manipulations, and conflicts. It is clear that in the process of creative adjustment there must be such drives or motivations relating the organism’s sense of itself as an “I” (accepted ground) and the environmental novelty sensed as an “It,” an “object” to work on.

During the spontaneous absorption³⁵ of final contact, however, there is no need for such motivation, for there are no other possibilities; one cannot choose otherwise. The feeling of absorption is “self-forgetful”; it attends completely to its object; and since this object fills the entire field—anything else is experienced as to the interest of the object—the object becomes a “Thou,” it is what is addressed. The “I” lapses altogether into its attentive feeling: we speak of being “all cars, all eyes,” for instance in hearing the great music one “forgets himself and is all cars”; and any possible “It” becomes simply an interest of the “Thou.” Let us use the word “concern” for this kind of selfless feeling. Compared with the appetites or emotions, the concerns have a certain static or final quality, for they are not motivations. On the brighter side, compassion,³⁶ love, joy, serenity, esthetic appreciation, insight, etc. are such states rather than motions of feeling. (Triumph or Victory are interesting examples, because the “Thou” in these cases is likely to be just the Ego-ideal.) More darkly, despair, mourning, etc., and we can now see how terrible these are, for if there is neither Ego nor Thou, the feeling is as of an abyss.

In general, throughout this book we have assumed that every reality is concernful: it is real as the object of appetite, emotion, or concern. So both the ancients and medievals held that “being” and “good” were interchangeable (but see below, Section 3). This is in opposition, of course, to the contemporary positivism, whose reality is neutral, but also to the analytic conception of “cathexis,” that the excitement is attached to the object—a conception made plausible by the unusual charges of energy in fetishes, objects of reference, etc. Our view is that unconcernful-object and objectless- excitement are abstractions from the concernful figure of contact, which in the end and potentially from the beginning is the primary spontaneous awareness of reality. The abstractions seem to be primary in experience if one judges from a background of unaware deliberateness and vague pain, as we shall discuss in the next chapter.

3: Example of Sexual Touch, etc.

Love aims at proximity, that is, the closest contact possible while the other persists undestroyed. The contact of love occurs in seeing, speech, presence, etc. But the archetypal moment of contact is sexual embracing. Here the actual spatial closeness spectacularly illustrates the diminution and unconcernfulness of the background. There is little background because there isn’t room for one: the lively figure looms trying to dispense with background altogether, and all its parts are exciting. The figure is not an “object” of the “subject,” for the awareness crowds into the touch. The “distant” senses are made to fee! that they are touch (touching and touched), for a face fills the oval of vision and small sounds fill the hearing. It is not a moment for abstractions or images of other times and places; there are no alternatives. The speech is, so to speak, preverbal; what is important in it is the tone and the primitive concreteness of the terms. And the “close” senses, taste, smell, and touch make up much of the figure. Excitement and closeness of contact are felt as one and the same thing; more excitement is simply closer touch. And motion is finally spontaneous.

The vanishing of the body-background is even more remarkable. Toward the climax, the figure is composed of the two bodies; the sense of touching and being touched; but these “bodies” are now nothing but a system of contact-situations at the boundary; there ceases to be a sense of physiological organs underlying. Organic pains become unaware. Paradoxically, one's own body becomes part of the Thou, and finally the whole figure, as if the boundary were disattached and placed opposite.

This archetypal contact shows also the creativity of the self. At the height of awareness, the experience is novel, unique, and original. But when, at the orgasm, the boundary is “broken” and the self-diminishes, one has the sense of a conservative instinctual gratification of one’s own familiar body.

We see too that the contact is spontaneously transitory. The self-works for its completion but not its perpetuation. When the process of figure-forming is complete and the experience becomes self-contained and the background vanishes, it becomes immediately obvious that the contact-situation as a whole is just one moment of the interaction of the organism/environment field.

The same characteristics of final contact are evident in eating, a contact by destruction and incorporation. What is tasted and chewed is lively and unique; but spontaneously it is swallowed, the figure vanishes, and assimilation is unaware.

Again, during an intense experience of a work of art it is felt to be not only inevitable in its working but also, strangely, the only possible work or at least the highest kind, and the experience of it inestimably valuable; that is, the background in terms of which we make comparative judgments has vanished.

(We have chosen our examples of contacting and final contact mainly from the appetites. Yet much, although not exactly, the same holds of such a contacting as annihilating. The figure in annihilating is the absence of the expelled object from the ground; at its height, therefore, one is left with no object of excitement but only the heavy breathing of the effort and a cold feeling of the self-confronting the no longer interesting situation—unless there happens also to be a sense of triumph: with the glorification of the ego-ideal. In cold annihilation there is not, of course, any aftermath of growth.

Nevertheless, psychologically at least, annihilating is a positive behavior and feeling, and one must therefore disagree with the ancients and medievals in the formulation we mentioned above that the reality is “good” (desirable), and evil a negation of reality; for the absence of the expelled is psychologically a reality; it removes a dread. We prefer to say, “reality is exciting or concernful.”)

4: Post-Contact

The aftermath of contact (except annihilating) is accomplished growth. This process is unaware, and its details belong to physiology —to the extent that they are understood at all.

Depending on the kind of novelty that has been addressed and transformed, the growth has various names: increase in size, restoration, procreation, rejuvenation, recreation, assimilation, learning, memory, habit, imitation, identification. All these are the result of creative adjustment. The basic notion underlying them is a certain unification or made-identity in the organism/environment interaction; and this has been the work of the self. Food, where the “unlike” is made “like,” is literally assimilated, “made like to.” Learning, when it is digested and not swallowed whole, is said to be assimilated; it can then be used not otherwise than one’s muscularity. With regard to perceptions, the philosophic usage has been the reverse: it is the seeing that becomes the same as the seen-color. Habits are “picked up from” our behavior in company, we have imitated or identified-with the others, and formed our personalities on their model. But we must not be deceived by the apparent reversal in language, for in every ease there has been the destroyed, the rejected, the changed on the one hand, and going-out-to and being- formed-by on the other. Where the contact is by incorporation and the irrelevant part is practically disregarded, we speak of assimilation; yet of course the chemical elements persist, the waste is excreted and still exists, etc. Where the contact is by proximity or touch, and the irrelevant (rejected) part is still potentially interesting, as in perception and love, we speak of becoming the other or identifying-with. The aftermath of orgasm is procreation, and rejuvenation by a systemic release of tension. (Reich holds that there is also some biophysical nourishment.)

It is in considering the aftermaths of contact, the assimilations and identifications, that one can most appreciate the importance of the middle mode of spontaneity. For if the self had been merely active, it could not become also that other, it would merely project; if it were merely passive, it could not have grown, it would have suffered an introjection.

5: Passage from the Psychological to the Physiological

Psychologically, the passage from aware contact to unaware assimilation has a deep pathos. For the figure of contact filled the world, was excitement, all the excitement there was; but in the aftermath it is seen to be a small change in the field. This is the Faustian pathos, when one says, “Stay! thou art so fair!” but co effectuate this saying would be just to inhibit the orgasm, the swallowing, or the learning. But the self spontaneously goes on and extinguishes itself.

(It is at this point, as Rank has shown, that the basic neurotic mechanism of the artist comes into play. For the artist insists on the perpetuation, the “immortality,” of himself, and therefore he projects part of himself into the material enduring medium of the work. But in this behavior he forfeits the possibility of final completion and is never happy. He must repeat: not the same work, but the process of making an art-work. It is this interruption and its attendant anxiety, and not the “guilt” of daring, that is the source of what Rank calls the “guilt of creating.”)

The inhibition of the achieved climax is par excellence the figure of masochism: it is holding in the maximum excitement and wanting to be released from the pain of it by being forced, forced because the self is afraid to “die,” as if the self were anything but just this transient contact. Then the height of love comes to feel the same as an invitation to death. Love-death is praised, as if it were the best love. But in fact the love-dying organically live on; the excitement fades; they try to recapture the fair moment and necessarily fail, for the now possible fair moment is quite different.

But although the increment of physiological growth is small, it is absolutely sure; we may use it reliably forever. One cannot be deceived by a creative adjustment. (So, pleasure, the feeling of contact, is always, in whatever form and under whatever conditions, a prima facie evidence of vitality and growth. In ethics it is not the sole criterion—there is no sole criterion—but its occurrence is always positive evidence toward a behavior, and its absence always raises a question.) With regard to perception, the reliability of a creative identification is universally admitted: the sensation itself is irreducible evidence, though the interpretation may be in error. Yet the same holds with regard to learning, love, and other social identifications. But this is not appreciated; on the contrary, the love we once experienced is often later thought of as disgusting, the opinions we used to hold are considered absurd, the music we responded to as adolescents is dismissed as sentimental, the loyalties of local-patriotism are abhorred. As Morris Cohen used to say, “If falling in love is blind, falling out of love is dizzy.” But such reactions are a failure to accept the present actuality of our achieved pasts, as if we were given to ourselves in the present as anything but what we have become and will go on to be. Clearly in such cases the contact was never complete, the situation was not finished; some inhibiting force was introjected as part of the experience and is now part of the ego-concept against which we are measuring ourselves. And now when our past achievement, such as it was, is necessarily different from our present aim, instead of being able to use it as part of our present equipment, or to disregard it as irrelevant, we waste energy warding it off, being ashamed of it, attacking it (for it is still an unfinished situation).

6: Formation of Personality: Loyalty

The aftermath of creative social contact is the formation of personality: group-identifications and viable rhetorical and moral attitudes. The self seems to become part of the Thou that it has grown into. (When the creativity has been interrupted and the inhibiting force has been introjected, the personality seems to be aping its fellows, to be imitating a speech and attitudes really alien and unbecoming to it; and this is indeed the case.)

Group-identification that has fulfilled needs and powers and is a source of strength for further action is the habit of loyalty, what Santayana called acceptance of the “sources of our being.” Consider, for example, loyalty to a language. Every language adequately realizes elementary social needs, if one learns it in circumstances at all favorable. If it is a great language, like English, one’s personality is deeply formed by its genius and literature; a writer feels his loyalty in the pleasure of writing English sentences. An Italian peasant immigrant, loyal to his childhood, often refuses to learn English, though his ignorance hampers his present life: it is that he was too quickly and thoroughly uprooted and too many of the old situations were unfinished. On the other hand, a German refugee from Hitler learns English in a few weeks and completely forgets German: he needs to blot out the past and speedily make a new life to fill the void.

In therapy, the so-called “regressions” are aware loyalties, and it is pointless to deny or denigrate what the patient has really felt as his own; the task is to find out the unaware unfinished situations that are taking energy from the possibilities of the present. The classical instance is the impossibility of “changing” homosexuals who have once gotten important sexual satisfaction, especially since they have creatively overcome many social obstacles in order to get it. The method is clearly not to attack the homosexual adjustment, for that has been the result of the self’s integrative power, it is a proved felt contact and identification. The method must be to bring to light what the personality is unaware alienating, here the interest in the other sex, half the human beings in the world. That is, it is pointless to say, “Why do you act like an 11-year-old?” but it is reasonable to ask, “What is disgusting, immoral, dangerous in acting like a 12-year-old?” Whatever is acted has, in so far, been assimilated.

7: Formation of Personality: Morality

As aftermaths of contact, moral evaluations, judgments of proper behavior, combine two kinds of assimilation, (a) On the one hand, they are simply technical skills that one has learned, guesses as to what leads to success. As such they are flexible, subject to modification in changing circumstances. Every present problem is met on its merits. One’s crystallized prudence is part of the ground from which one addresses the problem, (b) On the other hand, they are group-loyalties such as we have been describing: one acts in a certain way because it is the social expectation, including the expectation of one’s formed personality. One’s technique in a particular present ease is modified by one’s abiding choice to remain a member of the group, to use the group’s technique. Usually the group’s technique is less flexible than the individual’s, and there is likely to be a certain conflict between these grounds of action. If this conflict becomes too marked too frequently, one has to decide that the group is irrational—is past-bound—and then either change the group’s technique or abandon one’s loyalty. Abandoning loyalty, one has to find a new loyalty, for sociality of some kind is always part of one’s needs. It is in the conflict itself that one finds one’s new allies.

So far there is no theoretical difficulty. But unfortunately in discussions of morals, these two conflicting grounds, the prudent and the loyal, are confused with two quite different kinds of evaluation, neither of which is an assimilation, (c) One of these is the new discoveries-and-inventions that occur during creation of anything. One finds that the old way, either what is sensible or what is customary, does not serve the creative function at all, rather one has to do this. Such evaluation is concernful and compelling; it goes beyond what one “wishes” according to one’s achieved personality. It is the emerging figure, and on its emerging one must risk being absurd or lonely. In the aftermath, again, the new figure will be technique and will either be one’s self-realization of loyalty to a new group or will lead and win itself a group. But at the moment of concern, the choice is daring, revolutionary, prophetic. And partly what confuses moral questions that could be simply the adjustment of individual and social techniques is the injection into them of a nostalgia for the prophetic and absolute, especially on the part of people who inhibit their creativeness. A moral choice that has long been learned and is a ground of ordinary behavior is discussed as if it were just now being invented by Ezekiel.

But (d) the chief cause of confusion is the usual morality of self-conquest: behavior is “esteemed” as “good” because of some introjected authority, or it is condemned as “bad” because one is attacking in oneself the impulse to similar behavior. Since Nietzsche this morality has been correctly analyzed as resentment; its effects are mostly annihilating and negative. One does not observe that a man who has been “good,” who has not been to jail for half a century’, is praised and given medals by his fellow-citizens for his virtue, shrewdness, and technique of living that have led to wonderful achievements; for the alien, introjected standards are creatively useless. But there is vindictive heat and force and punishment in the condemnation of the “bad.” Indeed, the weak self-conquering personality lives most of its reality in the projection of scapegoats, which permits it to turn some aggression outward and feel something.

In creating something, there are concernful judgments of good and evil, that which advances the coming achievement and that which must be annihilated from the field; but in the aftermath the rejections, the “evil,” are seen to be archaic, for in a new enterprise the rejected things are again likely possibilities. But in self-conquest, it is just the “bad,” the excluded, that persists, for the vital urges to it recur and the aggression against it must be wielded continually.

8: Formation of Personality: Rhetorical Attitudes

Another kind of learning that forms personality is rhetorical attitude, one’s way of manipulating interpersonal relationships, which can be observed by concentrating on one’s voice, syntax, and manners. (See Chapter 7.) Such attitudes are complaining, bullying, being helpless, shiftiness, or forthrightness, give and take, fairness, etc. These are all techniques of manipulation, rapidly acquired by children who have a limited and specific audience to work on and soon find which means succeed and which fail. The protocol and etiquette of societies are similar. And when these attitudes are regarded as assimilations (as with one’s loyalties or morals), the only issue is whether they are useful for a present problem, or whether they must be modified or discarded. If people strongly disesteem certain attitudes, e.g., shiftiness, it is because they are prone to be manipulated by them despite themselves; to other people the attitudes are simply ineffective and tiresome (although, of course, to be boring is also a powerful technique of punishing and distracting).

When a rhetorical technique is ineffective—when a therapist declines, for instance, to be moved by the patient’s boring voice or crocodile tears—then it may simply be dropped; so we see children often laugh at their fraud and try something else. In such cases the technique is a good assimilation. In other cases, however, the awareness of one’s technique rouses strong feelings or anxiety. Strong feelings when the “technique” is not really a technique at all, but a direct but imperfect expression (a “sublimation”) of an important unfinished need: one chooses to bully because one needs to win, and is now again frustrated and angry; one chooses helplessness because one is helpless and is now again abandoned; or one is boring because one wants to be left alone.

But anxiety is roused when the voice one hears is not, after all, one’s own voice, but the other speakers one has introjected: it is mother or father complaining, shouting, or being fair. This is again, as in false loyalty or resentful morality, the situation of self-conquest; and one is anxious because one again throttles, at the present moment, one’s true identity, appetite, and voice.

9: Conclusion

In ideal circumstances the self does not have much personality. It is the sage of Tao that is “like water,” assuming the form of the receptacle. The increment of growth and learning, after good contact, is certain, but it is small. The self has found and made its reality, but recognizing what it has assimilated it sees it again as part of a vast field. In the heat of creative contact, one says, “It is this, not that,” and now, “It is only this, let us open our minds to that.” That is, the pulsation of contact and its aftermath is the succession of the philosophic feelings that one has grasped the essential good, but that after all, as Bishop Butler said, “Everything is what it is and not another thing,” including oneself. Whether such a process is “meaningful” or “worthwhile,” or what it means, is not a psychological question.

Where the self has much personality, we have seen, it is because either it carries with it many unfinished situations, recurring inflexible attitudes, disastrous loyalties; or it has abdicated altogether and feels itself in the attitudes toward itself that it has introjected.

Finally, let us return to the relation of the psychological and the physiological. Assimilation, digested learning, technique, group- identifications constitute proper habits, in the sense that “habit is second nature.” They seem to become a part of the non-conscious physiological self-regulation. With regard to assimilated nourishment, no-one would raise any question of this. With regard to obvious motor-habits, the “organic” nature of the learning is almost as evident. Learning to walk, for instance, would be considered first- nature and not habit at all; yet swimming, skating, cycling seem almost as organic and cannot be forgotten. Catching a ball, again, seems hardly less so. To speak is organic; to speak the mother-tongue is hardly less so; and reading and writing again hardly less so. Therefore, it seems reasonable to define the physiological as the conservative, the non-aware, self-regulation, whether inherent or learned. The psychological is the shifting, transitory contact with novelty. The physiological “first nature," including non-aware neurotic interference with “first nature,” has periodic recourse to contact, need for novelty. The physiological “second nature” is contacted aperiodically—e.g., available memory is drawn on as a result of external stimulation.

It is the organism and not the self that grows. Let us speculatively describe growth as follows: (1) After contact there is a flow of energy, adding to the energy of the organism the new elements assimilated from the environment. (2) The contact-boundary that has been “broken” now reforms, including the new energy and the “organ of second nature.” (3) What has been assimilated is now part of the physiological self-regulation. (4) The boundary of contact is now “outside” the assimilated learning, habit, conditioned reflex, etc.—e.g., what is like what one has learned does not touch one, it raises no problem.