VOLUME 2. Novelty, Excitement, and Growth

Part 3. Theory of the Self

XV. Loss of ego-functions: II. Typical structures and boundaries

1: Stratagem of Therapy of “Neurotic Characters”

In this final chapter, let us try to explain the most important neurotic mechanisms and “characters” as ways of contacting the actual on-going situation, whatever it happens to be during the therapy session. Neurotic behaviors are creative adjustments of a field in which there are repressions. This creativity will spontaneously operate in any on-going present; the therapist does not have to get under the “ordinary” behavior or trick it out of the way in order to reveal the mechanism. His task is simply to pose a problem which the patient is not adequately solving and where he is dissatisfied with his failure; then the need of the patient will, with help, destroy and assimilate the obstacles and create more viable habits, just as with any other learning.

We have located the neuroses as loss of ego-functions. In the ego-stage of creative adjustment, the self identifies parts of the field as its own and alienates other parts as not its own. It feels itself as an active process, a deliberateness, of certain wants, interests, and powers that have a definite but shifting boundary. Progressively engaged the self is as if asking: “What do I need? Shall I act it? How am I aroused? . . . What is my feeling toward that out there? . . . Shall I try for that? Where am I in relation to that? How far does my power extend? What means do I dispose of? Shall I press on now or hold back? What technique have I learned that I can use?” Such deliberate functions are spontaneously exercised by the self and are carried on with all the strength of the self, awareness and excitement and the creation of new figures. And ultimately, during close and final contact, the deliberateness, the sense of “I,” spontaneously vanishes into the concern, and then boundaries are unimportant, for one contacts not a boundary but the touched, the known, the enjoyed, the made.

But during this process the neurotic loses his boundaries, his sense of where he is and what and how he is doing, and he can no longer cope; or he feels his boundaries as inflexibly fixed, he does not get on, and he can no longer cope. Therapeutically, this problem of the self is the obstacle to solving other problems, and is the object of deliberate attention. The questions now are: “At what point do I begin not to solve this simple problem? How do I go about preventing myself? What is the anxiety I am feeling?”

2: Mechanisms and “Characters” as Stages of Interruption of Creativity

The anxiety is the interruption of creative excitement. We now want to present the idea that the various mechanisms and “characters” of neurotic behavior may be observed as the stages of creative adjustment at which the excitement is interrupted. That is to say, we want to elaborate a typology from the experiencing of the actual situation. Let us discuss the advantages of such an approach and the properties of a typology that can be useful in therapy (for of course it is a unique person and not a type of disease that is being treated).

Every typology depends on a theory of human nature, a method of therapy, a criterion of health, a selected run of patients (see above, 4, 6). The scheme we shall offer here is no exception. The therapist needs his conception in order to keep his bearings, to know in what direction to look. It is the acquired habit that is the background for this art as in any other art. But the problem is the same as in any art: how to use this abstraction (and therefore fixation) so as not to lose the present actuality and especially the ongoingness of the actuality? and how—a special problem that therapy shares with pedagogy and politics—not to impose a standard rather than help develop the potentialities of the other?

(a) If it is possible to find our concepts in the process of contacting, then at least it will be the actual patient that is there, not the past history or the propositions of a biological or social theory. On the other hand, of course, in order to be the means by which the therapist can mobilize the learning and experience of his art, these concepts must recognizably belong to his knowledge of human upbringing and his somatic and social theory.

(b) The actual situation is always, we must remember, an example of all the reality that there ever was or will be. It contains an organism and its environment and an on-going need. Therefore, we can ask the usual questions concerning the structure of the behavior: how does it cope with the organism? How does it cope with the environment? How does it fulfill a need?

(c) Again, if we draw our concepts from moments in a present process (namely its interruptions), we can expect that, with awareness, these interruptions will develop into other interruptions; the on-goingness of the process will not be lost. The patient will be found not to have a “type” of mechanism, but indeed a sequence of “types,” and indeed all the “types” in explicable scries. Now the case is that in applying any typology, rather than finding it in the actuality, one experiences the absurdity that none of the types fits any particular person, or conversely that the person has incompatible traits or even all the traits. Yet what does one expect? It is the nature of the creative—and so far as the patient has any vitality he is creative—to make its own concrete uniqueness by reconciling apparent incompatibilities and altering their meaning.⁴² Then instead of attacking or reducing the contradictory traits in order to get at the “real” underlying character that the therapist guesses at (character-analysis), or of trying to uncover the missing connections to what must be the “real” drive (anamnesis), we need only help the patient develop his creative identity by his ordered passage from “character” to “character.” The diagnosis and the therapy are the same process.

(d) For the ordered passage is nothing but the remobilizing of fixations into wholes of experience. The most important thing to remember is that every mechanism and characteristic is a valuable means to live if it can only go on and do its work. Now the patient’s behavior, in therapy and elsewhere, is a creative adjusting that continues to solve a problem of chronic frustration and fear. The task is to provide him a problem in circumstances in which his customary (unfinished) solutions are no longer the most adequate possible solutions. If he needs to use his eyes, and does not because it is not interesting and safe to use them, now he will alienate his blindness and identify with his seeing; if he needs to reach out, he will now become aware of his muscular aggression against reaching out and relax it, etc.; but this is not because blindness and paralysis are “neurotic,” but because they no longer achieve anything: their meaning has changed from technique to obstacle.

To sum up, we offer the following sketches of “character” as a kind of bridge between the therapy of the actual situation and the therapist’s concepts. These characters and their mechanisms are not types of persons, but taken as a whole they are a description of the neurotic “ego” in process. So we try in each case to (1) start from a moment of actual interruption, (2) indicate the normal functioning of the interruption, (3) show how, against the background of repressions, it copes with the organism and the environment and gives a positive satisfaction, (4) relate it to the cultural and somatic history. Finally (5) we discuss the sequence of characters when mobilized.

3: The Moments of Interruption

The question in the loss of ego-functions is, we saw, “At what moment do / begin not to solve this simple problem? How do I prevent myself?”

Let us return again to our schematized sequence of grounds-and- figures in excitement and the reverse sequence in inhibition (14, 1). In the neurotic inhibition the sequence was reversed and the body became a final object of aggression: the background is occupied by a repression, a chronic inhibiting that has been forgotten and is kept forgotten.⁴³ Against this ground, the present interruption (loss of ego-functions) occurs. The difference in types consists in whether the interruption occurs

(1) Before the new primary excitation. Confluence.

(2) During the excitation. Introjection.

(3) Confronting the environment. Projection.

(4) During the conflict and destroying. Retroflection.

(5) At final contact. Egotism.

4: Confluence

Confluence is the condition of no-contact (no self-boundary) although other important interacting is going on, for instance physiological functioning, environmental stimulation, etc. We saw that normally the aftermath of contact, assimilation, occurs with diminishing self, and all habits and learning are confluent. The distinction between the healthy and the neurotic confluences is that the former are potentially contactful (e.g., available memory) and the latter cannot be contacted because of the repression. Yet obviously immense areas of relatively permanent confluence are indispensable as the underlying unaware background of the aware backgrounds of experience. We are in confluence with everything we are fundamentally, unproblematically or irremediably, dependent on: where there is no need or possibility of a change. A child is in confluence with his family, an adult with his community, a man with the universe. If one is forced to become aware of these grounds of ultimate security, the “bottom drops out,” and the anxiety that one feels is metaphysical.

Neurotically, the present attitude—not recognizing the new task at all—is a clinging to unawareness, as if clinging for satisfaction to some achieved behavior, and as if the new excitation would snatch it away; but of course since that other behavior has been achieved and is habitual, there is no aware satisfaction in it, but only a sense of security. The patient secs to it that nothing new will occur, but in the old there is no interest or discrimination. The archetypal instances are unaware suckling or clinging to warmth and body-contact that are not felt but whose absence makes one freeze.

Toward the environment the attitude is to prevent the achieved behavior from being snatched away (by weaning). The jaw is set in the hanging-on bite of the suckling with teeth, who could go on to other food but won’t; or one has a bear-hug in copulation; or maintains a death-grip in interpersonal relations. This muscular paralysis prevents any sensation.

So he meets the frustration and the fear. What is the satisfaction? In the framework of muscular paralysis and desensitization satisfaction is possible only in random spontaneity independent of the ego-surveillance altogether (hysteria). Much so-called regression serves as an out-going attitude in which the random impulses can find a language and a behavior; this involves a displacement of feelings and reinterpretation of the meanings of the satisfaction to make them appropriate. The regressive behavior is nor neurotic in itself; it is simply prior to or outside the confluence. But the scattered satisfaction in it does not add up. And the bother is, of course, that in the “out-going” behavior similar difficulties arise—something demands to be contacted—and then he begins to cling again.

Culturally, the confluent responses will be on the most rudimentary baby-like or disjointed level. The aim is to get the other to make all the effort.

5: Introjection

The interruption may occur during the excitation, and the self then introjects, displaces its own potential drive or appetite with some one else’s. Normally this is our attitude toward all the vast range of things and persons we are aware of but that do not make much difference one way or the other: conventions of speech, dress, city-plan, institution. The neurotic situation is that in which the convention is coercive anu incompatible with a lively excitation, and where in order to avoid the offense of not belonging (not to speak of further conflicts), the desire itself is inhibited—and the hateful environment is both annihilated and accepted by swallowing it whole and blotting it out. Yet unless human beings could imitate and assume a public uniform without much lively engagement, the great agglomerations of culture and cities of men that seem to belong to us would be unthinkable. Every natural (uncoercive) convention was at one time a spectacularly creative achievement; but we use most of them neither really assimilating them nor being crushed by them. For instance, it is only after years that a poet assimilates English; yet other persons speak it un-neurotically enough. (The misfortune is that the common usage is taken for the essence.)

Neurotically the introjector comes to terms with his own frustrated appetite by reversing its affect before he can recognize it. This reversal is accomplished simply by the inhibiting itself. What one wants is felt as immature, disgusting, etc. Or conversely, if it is an impulse to reject something that is inhibited (an opposition to forced feeding), he persuades himself that the unwanted is good for him, is what he indeed wants, etc. But he bites it off without tasting or chewing it.

The attitude toward the environment is resigned (pelvis strongly retracted), and then childish and accepting. For it is necessary to have some personality, some technique, some desires. If he cannot identify himself and alienate what is not himself in terms of his own needs, he confronts a void. The social environment contains all the reality there is, and he constitutes himself by identifying with its standards, and alienating what are potentially his own standards. But the culture acquired with this attitude is always superficial, though it may be far-ranging. He will accept any authoritative position, even though it is the opposite of what he thinks he believes; there is even a secondary satisfaction in annihilating his previous authority; he is masochistically eager to be refuted. His own proper opinions are touchingly childlike, but because of the borrowed trappings they wear they seem affected and silly.

The out-going satisfaction of introjecting is masochism—nausea inhibited, jaws forced open in a smile, pelvis retracted, breath drawn in. Masochistic behavior is the possibility of creatively adjusting the environment in a framework of inflicting pain on oneself with the approval of one’s false identifications. Intensifying the identification and turning further against the self, he indulges in sadistic biting, complaining, etc.

6: Projection

When the excitation is accepted and the environment confronted, there is emotion—the relating of appetite or other drive with a vaguely conceived object. If the interruption occurs at this stage, the result is projection: he feels the emotion but it is free-floating, unrelated to the active sense of the self that comes in further outgoing behavior. Since the emotion does not spring from himself, it is attributed to the other possible reality, the environment—he feels it “in the air” or directed against himself by the other. For example, the patient is embarrassed by what the therapist is thinking of him. Yet normally, projection is indispensable. Projection into “thin air” is the beginning of gratuitous creativity (12, 4), that then goes on to make an objective correlative for the floating emotion or intuition; in ordinary creative adjustment, it is the factor of hallucination necessary in the first approaches. By intuition or prescience we are warned of or invited by the meaning not yet apparent. The neurotic projector, however, does not go on to identify the floating feeling as his own; rather he makes it definite by attaching it to somebody else, and this can result in ludicrous and tragic errors.

The typical instance of neurotic projection is that A has designs on B (erotic or hostile), but A inhibits his approaching; therefore he feels that B has designs on him. He avoids the frustration of the emotion by disowning that it is his.

Toward the environment, however, he presents (and exercises) an unmistakable attitude of provocation. What he deeply wishes is the approach and contact, and since he cannot take the steps, he tries to bring it about that the other does. So, not moving, he does not sit quiet, but he communicates by lying “in wait,” in silence, sulking, brooding. Yet if the other reads the signal and does approach, intense anxiety is aroused.

What real satisfaction does he get? It is the acting out of the dreaded dramatic scene as in a dream. He chews it over. The brooding is full of highly colored thoughts. This is the activity possible to the self in the rigid framework of shutting out the environment, inhibiting the motor powers, and lying passively basking in free emotions. It is almost the figure of relaxation that induces hypnagogic images, except that instead of relaxation there is a framework of rigid muscles, so that the more feelingful and attractive the images become the more they become colored with pain and menace.

Culturally, the areas in which projections occur will be stupid, wrong-headed, suspicious—for at the point where the fantasies and feelings could begin to inform themselves with the environment and learn something, the excitement is throttled; and the anxiety, the menace, is likely to be attributed precisely to those who are most “objective,” matter-of-fact. Much is made of abstract morality and sin. The more positive thinking abounds in far-fetched plans and future projects.

7: Retroflection

Suppose now the outgoing energies, of orientation and manipulation, are fully engaged in the environmental situation, whether in love, anger, pity, grief, etc.; but he cannot cope and must interrupt, he is afraid to hurt (destroy), or be hurt; he will necessarily be frustrated: then the engaged energies are turned against the only available safe objects in the field, his own personality and body. These are retroflections. Normally, retroflection is the process of reforming oneself, for instance correcting the impractical approach or reconsidering the possibilities of the emotion, making a readjustment as the grounds for further action. So we suffer remorse, regret; we remember, reconsider, etc. Recreating in fantasy the unattainable object, the desire may again rise and one satisfies it by masturbating. And more generally, any act of deliberate self-control during a difficult engagement is retroflection.

Neurotically, the retroflector avoids frustration by trying not to have been engaged at all; that is, he tries to undo the past, his mistake, his dirtying himself, his words. He regrets having encroached on the environment (excreting). This undoing is obsessive and repetitious in the nature of the case; for a reformation, like anything else, can be assimilated only if it comes to include new environmental material; undoing the past, he goes over the same material again and again.

The tangible environment of the retroflector consists of only himself, and on this he wreaks the energies he has mobilized. If it is a fear of destroying that has roused his anxiety, he now systematically tortures his body and produces psychosomatic ailments. If he is engaged in an enterprise, he works unaware for its failure. This process is often shrewdly managed to give secondary results that achieve the original inhibited intention: e.g., in order not to hurt his family and friends, he turns on himself and produces illness and failure that involve his family and friends. But he gets no satisfaction from it, but only further remorse.

The direct satisfaction of the retroflector is his sense of active control, and of being busy with concernful matters—for he is obsessively busy and he feels the impact in his skin. His ideas and plans are often well-informed, well-considered, and felt with extraordinary earnestness—but one is all the more baffled and finally undeceived by the timidity and hesitation with which they stop short of action. The orientation—the sense of where he is in the situation —seems to be remarkable; until it becomes clear that the simple practical possibility is being overlooked. There is considerable reminiscence and clouding of the actuality by this means.

The direct satisfaction of retroflection may be observed when the drive is erotic, as in masturbating; the masturbation is a kind of rape—for the body is likely to be no more responsive to it than any other tangible body in the environment; but the satisfaction belongs to the aggressive hand, the sexual pleasure is irrelevant. (We may easily distinguish between this sadistic-anal phase and the earlier introjective sadism grounded in a felt masochism.)

8: Egotism

Lastly, when all the grounds for final contact are adequately prepared, there is interruption of letting go the control or the surveillance, of giving in to the behavior that would lead to growth, e.g., performing the action that he can do and that the situation calls for, or finishing off what he is making and leaving it. This is a slowing-down of spontaneity by further deliberate introspection and circumspection, to make sure that the ground possibilities are indeed exhausted—there is no threat of danger or surprise—before he commits himself. (For want of a better term, we call this attitude “egotism,” since it is a final concern for one’s boundaries and identity rather than for what is contacted.) Normally, egotism is indispensable in any process of elaborate complication and long maturation; otherwise there is premature commitment and the need for discouraging undoing. Normal egotism is diffident, skeptical, aloof, slow, but not non-committal.

Neurotically, egotism is a kind of confluence with the deliberate awareness and an attempted annihilation of the uncontrollable and surprising. The mechanism for avoiding frustration is fixation, the abstraction of the controlled behavior from the on-going process. The typical example is the attempt to maintain erection and prevent the spontaneous development of the orgasm. By this means he proves his potency, that he “can,” and gets a satisfaction of conceit. But what he is warding off is confusion, being abandoned.

He wards off the surprises of the environment (fear of competition) by seeking to isolate himself as the only reality: this he does by “taking over” the environment and making it his own. His problem ceases to be one of contacting some Thou for which he is concerned, but of multiplying sciences and acquaintances and bringing more and more of the environment into his scope and power in order to be himself irrefutable. Such an “environment” ceases to be environment, it does not nourish, and he does not grow or change. So eventually, since he prevents experience from being novel, he becomes bored and lonely.

His method of getting direct satisfaction is to compartment: by bracketing off an attitude that is achieved and safe, he can regulate the quantity of spontaneity. Every exercise of such deliberate control feeds his conceit (and contempt of the world). Given a certain amount of shrewdness and enough self-awareness not to make impossible demands on his physiology, the egotist easily transforms himself into the well-adjusted, modest, and helpful “free personality.” This metamorphosis is the neurosis of the psychoanalyzed: the patient perfectly understands his character and finds his “problems” absorbing beyond everything else—and there will endlessly be such problems to absorb him, for without spontaneity and risk of the unknown he will not assimilate the analysis any more than anything else.

9: Summary

We may summarize these moments of interruption and their “characters” in the following scheme. (O is the aggression toward the organism, E toward the environment, and S the direct satisfaction possible in the fixation.)

Confluence: no contact with excitation or stimulus

O: clinging, hanging-on bite

E: paralysis and de-sensitized hostility

S: hysteria, regression

Introjection: not accepting the excitation

O: reversal of affect

E: resignation (annihilation by identification)

S: masochism

Projection: not confronting or approaching

O: disowning the emotion

E: passive provocation

S: fantasy (chewing it over)

Retroflection: avoiding conflict and destroying

O: obsessive undoing

E: self-destructiveness, secondary gain of illness

S: active sadism, busyness

Egotism: delaying spontaneity

O: fixation (abstraction)

E: exclusion, isolation of self

S: compartmcnting, self-conceit

Repression

Reaction-Formation

Sublimation

(The above scheme may be proliferated indefinitely by combinations of the classes with one another, as “confluence of introjects,” “projection of retroflects,” etc. Of these combinations we may perhaps mention the set of attitudes toward the introjects—the superego: (1) the confluence with one’s introjects is guiltiness, (2) the projection of introjects is sinfulness, (3) the retroflection of introjects is rebelliousness, (4) the egotism of introjects is the ego-concept; (5) the spontaneous expression of introjects is the ego-ideal.)

10: The Above Is Not a Typology of Neurotic Persons

To repeat it, the above scheme is not a classification of neurotic persons, but a method of spelling out the structure of a single neurotic behavior.

This is obvious on the face of it, for every neurotic mechanism is a fixation and every mechanism contains a confluence, something unaware. Likewise every behavior is resigned to some false-identification, disowns an emotion, turns aggression against the self, and is conceited! What the scheme means to show is the order in which, against the background of a threatened repression, the fixation spreads throughout the entire process of contact, and the un-awareness comes to meet it from the other direction.

That there must be a sequence of fixation in the actual experience is evident, if we consider that at a certain moment one is in fairly good contact, is exercising one’s powers and adjusting the situation, and yet a little later is paralyzed. The sequence may in fact be directly observed. The person walks in, smiles or frowns, says something, etc.: in so far he is vital, he has not lost his ego-functions and they are fully engaged. Then he becomes anxious— no matter what it is that is too exciting, it may be the other, a memory, the exercise, whatever. Instead then of proceeding to orient himself further (it is the further-ness, the on-goingness that is essential), he at once isolates himself and fixates the situation: he fixates the single achieved orientation. This is the “ego cut off from the self.” But this “self-consciousness” at once makes him awkward; he upsets the ash-tray. He becomes muscularly rigid (turns on himself), and then he thinks that the other must take him for a consummate ass. lie adopts this standard for his own and is ashamed, and the next moment he is dizzy and paralyzed. Here we interpret the experience as created by the spreading of the fixation.

But of course it could be regarded in the opposite way, as the spreading of the confluence. At the anxious moment, he is out of contact with the on-going situation—for whatever reason; he may want to be elsewhere, reject a hostile impulse against the other, etc. But it is his standard to be all there and attentive. What right do they have to judge him anyway! So he angrily upsets the ash-tray on purpose. Next moment he excludes the environment altogether and is sufficient unto himself.

Regarding the experience as the spread of the unawareness, it would be hysteria; regarding it as the spread of the fixation, it would be compulsive. The hysteric has “too much spontaneity and too little control”; he says, “I cannot control the impulses that arise”: the body looms in the foreground, he is swept by emotions, his ideas and inventions are capricious, everything is sexualized, etc. The compulsive over-controls; there is no fantasy, warm feeling or sensation, action is strong but desire is weak, etc. Yet these two extremes come always to the same thing. It is just because there is too little self, too superficial desire and too little spontaneity, that the hysteric organizes the experience apparently desired: the feelings are not dominant enough to energize the functions of orientation and manipulation—and thus these are pointless and seem to be “too little.’’ But conversely, it is because the functions of control, orientation and manipulation, are too fixated and inflexible that the compulsive is inadequate to cope with his exciting situations; therefore, he cannot control his impulses and turns against them, and then his feelings seem to be “too little.” The split of self and ego is mutually disastrous.

This must be so, for neurosis is a condition of both chronic fear and chronic frustration. Because frustration is chronic, desire does not learn to activate important practical functions, for a man bound for disappointment and grief will not engage with the environment seriously. Nevertheless, the frustrated desire recurs and sets going fantasies and finally impulsive acts that are practically ineffective; and so he is again unsuccessful, hurt, and subject to chronic fear. On the other hand, a man who is chronically fearful controls himself and directly frustrates himself. Nevertheless, the drive is not annihilated, but it is merely isolated from the ego; it reappears as hysterical impulse. The frustration, the impulsiveness, the fear, and the self-control all aggravate one another.

In any single experience, all of the powers of the self are mobilized to complete the situation as well as possible, either in a final contact or a fixation. The accumulation of such experiences during a life-history results in well-marked personalities, characters, and types. But still in every single experience, regarded as the peculiar act of self, all the powers are mobilized. And since in therapy it is the self that must destroy and integrate the fixations, we must consider a “typology” not as a method of distinguishing among persons, but as a structure of the single neurotic experience.

11: Example of Reversing the Sequence of Fixations

Let us invent an example⁴⁴ to illustrate a therapeutic sequence:

(1) Fixation: The patient is “potent”; he can do the exercise to his own satisfaction. The bother is that when it comes to the finale, of getting something out of it for himself, or thereby giving something to the therapist, he cannot let go. He becomes anxious. When his attention is called to the fact that he interrupts at this stage, he becomes aware of his conceit and exhibitionism.

(2) Retroflection: He reproaches himself for his personal failings. He adduces examples to show how his love for himself and showing off have stood in his way. He has no one to blame but himself. The question is asked: “Instead of reproaching yourself, whom would you like to reproach?” Yes; he wants to tell the therapist a thing or two.

(3) Projection: The sessions have been failing because the therapist does not really want to get on. He is using the patient; if the fee were higher, one would think his intention was to get money out of him. As it is, the situation is uncomfortable; no-one likes to lie there and be stared at. Probably the orthodox method is better, when the therapist is out of the way. The question is asked, “What is your feeling when you are stared at?”

(4) Introjection: He is embarrassed. The reason he shows off is that he wants the therapist to admire him; he considers him as a kind of ideal—in fact he had a fantasy about him (the opposite of the dream that was discussed). Question: “Am I really attractive to you?” No; but naturally one has to love, or at least be well- disposed to, a person who is trying to help you. This said with some anger.

(5) Confluence: He is angry because the experiments (see Part I of this book) are boring, senseless, and sometimes painful, and he is tired of doing them; he is getting disgusted with the therapy ... At this he falls silent; he is not interested in making any further effort. The other must do it.

The therapist declines to cooperate and holds his peace. The patient suddenly feels that his rigid jaw is painful and he recalls, in the stillness, that his voice had come between his teeth. He closes his teeth.

Let us assume now that the energy bound in this confluent characteristic is available. During his silence he had been alternately guilty at not cooperating and resentful that the therapist did nothing to help him out (just like his wife). Now' perhaps he sees that he has been imposing his own dependency unnecessarily; and he smiles at the picture it calls up. Nevertheless, the energy freed from the confluence will again be contacted and fixated according to the other characters. Thus:

Introjection: A man ought to be independent and do what he wants. Why shouldn’t he look for other women? Question: “Is there anybody in particular you’re interested in?”

Projection: He never had such thoughts before the therapy. He feels almost as though they were being put into his mind. “Really?”

Retroflection: It’s the fault of his upbringing. He recognizes that censorious face on middle-class mothers, just like his own mother’s. He embarks on a lengthy reminiscence. Question: “What about her now?”

Egotism: He understands everything perfectly. What people don’t know won’t hurt them. Just do it within the rules of the game. “Who’s playing a game? ”

Contacting the Situation: He’ll try the experiment again now and see if he gets anything out of it.

12: Sense of Boundaries

The functioning of the ego, we have seen, can be described as a setting of boundaries of the self’s interest, power, etc.; identifying with and alienating are the two sides of the boundary; and in any live contacting the boundary is definite but always shifting. Now in the therapeutic situation of deliberately contacting the character, what is the sense of the boundary?

Engaged in an interesting activity, the self contacts its lost ego-functions as blocks, resistances, sudden failures. One identifies with the interesting engagement, that is on one side of the boundary; but what is alienated is not—as in normal functioning—uninteresting and irrelevant, but precisely alien, oppressive, uncanny, immoral, numb; not a boundary, but a limitation. The sense is not indifference, but unpleasure. The boundary does not shift with will or need, as one tries to see, remember, move; but remains fixed.

Regarded topologically, as fixed boundaries in the shifting organism/environment field, the neurotic characters we have been describing are as follows:

Confluence: identity of organism and environment.

Introjection: something of the environment in the organism.

Projection: something of the organism in the environment.

Retroflection: part of the organism made the environment of another part of the organism.

Egotism: isolation from both id and environment, or: organism largely isolated from environment.

There is an exact opposition in the way these situations are sensed by the neurotic need of keeping them fixed and by the creative self-concentrating on them:

In confluence, the neurotic is aware of nothing and has nothing to say. The concentrating self feels hemmed in by an oppressive darkness.

In introjection, the neurotic justifies as normal what the concentrating self feels as an alien body it wants to disgorge.

In projection, the neurotic is convinced as by sensory evidence, where the concentrating self feels a gap in experience.

In retroflection, the neurotic is busily engaged where the concentrating self feels left out, excluded from the environment.

In egotism, the neurotic is aware and has something to say about everything, but the concentrating self feels empty, without need or interest.

It can be seen from this that the treatments of an area of confluence and of an area of egotistic fixation present opposite difficulties. The confluent darkness is too embracing; the self is routine; no novel proposal is accepted as relevant—just as in the hysterical behavior anything is likely to be momentarily relevant (there is no dearth of symptoms for the therapist to interpret to his own satisfaction).

Now in the history of psychoanalysis the extreme opposite of this condition has been taken as the health of the self, namely the stage of all ego that feels a boundary of possible contact everywhere. The essential self is defined as the system of its ego-boundaries; it is not seen that this is an on-going stage of the self. The temptation to such a theoretical conception is irresistible because in therapy the awareness of boundaries dissolves the neurotic structures, and the physician defines according to what works in therapy; further, any particular “problem” that arises in therapy can finally be met and “solved” in egotism by compartmenting it and employing all the ego-functions within this safe framework, without engaging the feelings at all. This is a condition of too heightened consciousness, that will never have brilliant creative flashes, but is quite adequate for therapeutic sessions. To the self, everything is potentially relevant and novel—there is a boundary everywhere and no limit to action —but nothing is interesting. He is psychologically “emptied out.” This is. as we have said, the “analysis-neurosis”; it is likely that any method of therapy continued too long must give this result, which in antiquity was praised as the Stoic apathy, and among the modems is taken for a “free personality”—but such freedom of the individual, without animal or social nature, or in perfect hygienic and juridical control of the animal and social nature, such freedom is, as Kafka said, a lonely and senseless business.

13: Therapy of Boundaries

For a concentration-therapy, the problem of contacting the lost ego-functions is no different from any other problem of creative orientation and manipulation, for the unawareness, or the unsatisfactory kind of awareness, is felt simply as another obstacle in the organism/environment field. It is necessary to need, approach, destroy, in order to identify, contact, and assimilate. It is not a question of recovering something from the past nor of rescuing it from behind an armor, but of making a creative adjustment in the given present situation. To complete the gestalt in the present situation it is necessary to destroy and assimilate the unawareness as an obstacle. The therapeutic exercises consist of sharp delineation and precise verbal description of the felt block or void, and experiment on it to mobilize the fixed boundaries.

From this point of view there is no mystery in the psychoanalytical miracle, that simple awareness is somehow cathartic, for the effort of concentrated awareness and mobilizing of the block entails destroying, suffering, feeling, and excitement. (The therapist, correspondingly, is a vastly important part of the present situation, but it is not necessary to speak of “transference,” the attachment of repressed Oedipal energies, for the actuality contains both the confluence of dependency and the rebellion against it.)

Let us return then to the question of the patient that we started with: “At what point do I begin not to solve the problem? How do I prevent myself?” And now let us lay the stress not on the moment of interruption, but on the begin and on the how. Let us contrast the non-therapeutic and the therapeutic situation. Ordinarily, the self, trying to contact some interesting present actuality, becomes aware of the boundaries of its lost functions—something of the environment or body is missing, there is not enough strength or clarity. It nevertheless presses on and tries to unify the foreground, even though the neurotic structure looms in the background as an unfinished situation, unknowable, a threat of confusion and a threat to the body. The mounting excitement is throttled, there is anxiety. Nevertheless, the self persists in the original task and allays the anxiety by further blotting out the background with reaction-formations and proceeding with less and less of its powers. In the therapy, on the contrary, it is just the point of the interruption that is now made the interesting problem, the object of concentration: the questions are: “What hinders? What does it look like? How do I feel it muscularly? Where is it in the environment? etc.” The mounting anxiety is allayed by continuing the excitement in this new problem; what is felt is some quite different emotion, of grief, anger, disgust, fear, longing.

14: The Criterion

It is not the presence of “inner” obstacles that constitutes the neurosis: they are simply obstacles. To the extent that a situation is alive, when the obstacles to creativity appear, the excitement does not diminish, the gestalt does not stop forming, but spontaneously one feels new aggressive emotions and mobilizes new ego-functions of caution, deliberateness, paying attention, relevant to the obstacles. One does not lose the sense of oneself, of one’s synthetic unity, but it continues to sharpen, to identify itself further and alienate what is not itself. In neurosis, on the contrary, at this point the excitement falters, the aggression is not felt, one loses the sense of the self, becomes confused, divided, insensitive.

This factual difference, of continuing creativity, is the crucial criterion of vitality and neurosis. It is an independent criterion, generally observable and also introspectable. It does not require norms of health for comparison. The test is given by the self.

The neurotic begins to lose contact with the actuality; he knows it but he does not have techniques for continuing the contact; he persists in a course that gets him further from the actuality, and he is lost. What he must learn is to recognize sharply when he is no longer in contact, how he is not, and where and what the actuality now is, so he can continue contacting it; an “inner" problem is now the actuality, or probably the relation of an “inner” problem to the previous experiencing. If he learns a technique of awareness, to follow up, to keep in contact with the shifting situation, so the interest, excitement, and growth continue, he is no longer neurotic, no matter whether his problems are “inner” or “outer.” For the creative meaning of the situation is not what one thinks beforehand, but it emerges in bringing to the foreground the unfinished situations, whatever they are, and discovering-and-inventing their relevance to the apparent present lifeless situation. When in the emergency the self can keep in contact and keep going, the therapy is terminated.

In the emergency, the neurotic loses himself. To live on a little, with diminished self, he identifies with reactive feelings, a fixated interest, a fiction, a rationalization; but these in fact do not work, they do not alter the situation, release new energy and interest. He has lost something of actual life. Rut the patient comes to recognize that his own functioning is part of the actuality. If he has alienated some of his powers, he comes to identify with his own alienation of them as a deliberate act; he can say, “It is I who am doing this or preventing this.” The final stage of experience, however, is not a subject of therapy: it is for a man to identify with his concern for the concernful and to be able to alienate what is unconcernful.

In its trials and conflicts the self is coming to be in a way that did not exist before. In contactful experience the “I”, alienating its safe structures, risks this leap and identifies with the growing self, gives it its services and knowledge, and at the moment of achievement stands out of the way.