Chapter III “Mind,” “Body,” and “External World”

1: The Situation in Good Contact

From the point of view of psychotherapy, when there is good contact, e.g., a clear bright figure freely energized from an empty background, then there is no peculiar problem concerning the relations of “mind” and “body” or “self” and “external world.” There are, of course, any number of particular problems and observations concerning particular functioning, such as how flushing and tensing of the jaws and hands is functionally related to a certain feeling of anger, and this feeling and this behavior are functionally related to destroying a frustrating obstacle; but in some cases the total context is easily accepted and it is a question of clarifying the relations of the parts; and as the clarification proceeds in details, the bonds of relation are again felt and easily accepted.

The separation implying a peculiar “psychosomatic problem” or “problem of the external world” was not the rule in antiquity. Aristotle speaks of vegetative functions, sensation, and motivity as the chief classes of acts of the soul and goes on to relate them as “identical in act” with the nature of food, the objects of sensation, etc.[1] In modern psychology, Köhler says, “The whole-process is determined by intrinsic properties of a whole situation; meaningful behavior may be considered as a case of organization; and this applies also to certain perceptions. For the process consciousness is only of secondary importance.”[2] Or, to quote another gestalt-psychologist, Wertheimer says, “Imagine a dance full of grace and joy. What is the situation in such a dance? Do we have a summation of physical limb movements and psychical consciousness? No. One finds many processes which in their dynamical form are identical regardless of variations in the material character of their elements.” [3]

To a psychotherapist, however, the recognition that these peculiar problems are non-existent immediately raises another related question: how, for so long and among so many bona fide and intelligent persons, did it come about that such a non-existent problem was felt as an important problem? For, as we have said, basic splits of this kind are never simple errors that may be corrected by adducing new evidence, but they are themselves given in the evidence of experience.

2: Freud and These “Problems”

Freud’s psychoanalytic theory stands midway between the earlier misconception of these problems as peculiarly thorny and the dissolution of these problems by various modern unitary psychologies.

Freud wrote in a long tradition — which he uneasily accepted by ignoring it — of the split between “mind” and “body,” and “self” and “reality.” The tradition produced various devices to unify the split, such as psychophysical parallelism and preestablished harmony, or the reduction of consciousness to an epiphenomenon, or of matter to an illusion, or of constructing both from a neutral stuff, or (among the laboratory-psychologists) of refusing to consider introspection at all as either a method or an object of science.

To this discussion Freud made the famous addition that the mind, like an iceberg, is only a small part above the surface and conscious, but is eight-ninths submerged or unconscious. This addition at first only increases the difficulty, for we now have to relate not two things but three, the conscious-mental, the unconscious-mental, and the body. If “mind” is defined in terms of introspection, then “unconscious-mental” is puzzling; but if, as Freud surely felt, the unconscious was logically independent of or prior to the conscious, then we have a third element incapable by its nature of any direct observation. Yet here, as is always the case, the introduction of further complexity because of practical urgency (the urgency of medicine in this case) has ultimately simplified the problem by bringing out the essential functional relationships.

Why did Freud insist on calling the unconscious mental at all, and not simply relegate the not-conscious to the physical, as was customary in previous psychiatry? (And indeed, to satisfy the neurologists he had to add the concept of “somatic-compliance,” a state of the body predisposing the mind to lose some of its contents into the unconscious — so that now instead of three elements he had four!) It was that the effects of the “unconscious” on mind and body both had all the properties usually assigned to the mental: they were purposive, meaningful, intentional, symbolic organizations of experience, they were everything but conscious. Even further, when the unconscious contents were recovered to consciousness, the conscious experience was altered quite as when ordinarily unnoticed but obviously mental contents were attended to, for instance, memory and habits. So Freud finally had five classes: conscious-mental, preconscious-mental (memories, etc.), unconscious-mental, somatic-compliant, and somatic. The conscious were intentions that could be introspected; the preconscious were intentions that were unattended to but could be conscious if attended to, and the turning of attention was a conscious power; the unconscious were intentions that could not become conscious by any conscious act of the self (this was where the psychotherapist came in, armed with the peculiar power of making known in fact what was unknowable in principle); the soma-tic-compliant and somatic were not intentions.

3: Contrast of Psychoanalysis and Gestalt-Psychology on These “Problems”

Yet throughout this illogically expanding series, psychoanalysis was able and has become increasingly able to produce a unitary functioning, good contact, and this provides a felt context in which the parts cohere.

From a formal point of view, Freud’s calling the unconscious “mental” was not necessary. In the physical and psychological theory of the Gestaltists, we see that meaningful wholes exist throughout nature, in physical and conscious behavior both, in the body and the mind. They are meaningful in the sense that the whole explains the parts; they are purposive in that a tendency can be shown in the parts to complete the wholes. Quite apart from consciousness, such intentional wholes occur with formal similarity in perception and behavior in any event, and this is all that is required to speak of “symbols.” (Fundamentally, Freud called the unconscious mental in order to combat the prejudice of the contemporary neurology that was associationist and mechanical.)

But the actual psychosomatic problem and the problem of the external world are not met by these formal considerations; they have to do with such given evidence as “I will to hold out my hand and I hold it out and there it is,” or “I open my eyes and the scene either presses in on me, or it stands there,” and so forth; these are questions not of what kind of wholes but of the relation of wholes of consciousness to other wholes. And these questions are avoided by the gestalt theorists who indeed — despite their continual recourse to the preeminently conscious function of “insight” — tend to regard consciousness, and mind in general, as an embarrassing epiphenomenon, “secondary” or insignificant. It is as if they are so embarrassed by their own attack on the mechanistic prejudice that they continually have to exculpate themselves from the charge of being “idealists” or “vitalists.”

What makes the peculiarity of the problematic relations is the given feeling of disconnection and “not myself” in experiencing body and world. And it is just this matter that psychotherapy has attacked with great power. Let us explore the genesis of this feeling and show how it finally gives the erroneous conceptions.

4: Contact-Boundary and Consciousness

Every contacting act is a whole of awareness, motor response, and feeling — a cooperation of the sensory, muscular, and vegetative systems — and contacting occurs at the surface-boundary in the field of the organism/environment.

We say it in this odd way, rather than “at the boundary between the organism and the environment,” because, as previously discussed, the definition of an animal involves its environment: it is meaningless to define a breather without air, a walker without gravity and ground, an irascible without obstacles, and so on for every animal function. The definition of an organism is the definition of an organism/environment field; and the contact-boundary is, so to speak, the specific organ of awareness of the novel situation of the field, as contrasted, for instance, with the more internal “organic” organs of metabolism or circulation that function conservatively without the need of awareness, deliberateness, selection or avoidance of novelty. In the case of a stationary plant, a field of organism/soil, air, etc., this in-ness of the contact-boundary is fairly simple to conceive: the osmotic membrane is the organ of the interaction of organism and environment, both parts being obviously active. In the case of a mobile complicated animal it is the same, but certain illusions of perception make it more difficult to conceive.[4]

(The verbal embarrassments here are deep in our language. Consider the confusion of usual philosophic speech in this context, when we say “inner” and “outer.” “Inner” means “inside the skin,” “outer” means “outside the skin.” Yet those who speak of the “external world” mean to include the body as part of the external world, and then “internal” means “inside the mind,” inside the mind but not inside the body.)

Now again, as Freud and especially William James pointed out, consciousness is the result of a delaying of the interaction at the boundary. (James meant, of course, the interrupted reflex-arc, but let us here move in a gestalt theory.) And we can see at once that consciousness is functional. For if the interaction at the contact-boundary is relatively simple, there is little awareness, reflection, motor adjustment, and deliberateness; but where it is difficult and complicated, there is heightened consciousness. Increasing complexity of sensory organs means that there is need of more selectivity, as an animal becomes more mobile and adventures among more novelties. Thus, with increasing complexity we may conceive of the series: phototropism becomes conscious seeing, and this becomes deliberate attending; or osmosis becomes eating and this becomes deliberate food-taking.

5: Tendency toward Simplification of the Field

All this is, ultimately, to simplify the organization of the organism/environment field, to complete its unfinished situations. Let us now look more closely at this interesting contact-boundary.

As a boundary of interaction, its sensitivity, motor response, and feeling are turned both toward the environment-part and the organ-ism-part. Neurologically, it has receptors and proprioceptors. But in act, in contact, there is given a single whole of perception-initiating movement tinged with feeling. It is not that the self-feeling, for instance of being thirsty, serves as a signal that is noted, referred to the water-perception department, etc, but that in the same act the water is given as bright-desirable-moved toward, or the absence of water is absent-irksome-problematic.

If you concentrate on a “close” perception such as tasting, it is evident that the taste of the food and your mouth tasting it are the same, and therefore this perception is never neutral in feeling, but always pleasant or unpleasant, dullness being a kind of unpleasantness. Or consider the genitals in copulation: awareness, motor response, and feeling are given as the same. But when we consider vision, where there is distance and the scene is uninteresting, the unity is less obvious; nevertheless, as soon as we concentrate on the oval field-of-vision in which the things are seen as “my vision,” then the seeing becomes closely myself-seeing (often noticing that we have been staring), and the scene begins to have aesthetic value.

Tending toward the simplest structure of the field is the interacting at the contact-boundary of the tensions of the organism and environment until a relative equilibrium is established. (Delay — consciousness — is the difficulty in finishing the process.) Note that in this process the so-called afferent nerves are far from being merely receptive; they reach out — the water is seen as bright and lively if one is thirsty; rather than merely responding to a stimulus, they respond, so to speak, even before the stimulus.

6: Possibilities at the Contact-Boundary

Let us consider various possibilities at the contact-boundary as the interaction variously works out:

(1) If the equilibrium is easily established, awareness, motor adjustment, and deliberateness are relaxed: the animal lives well and is as if asleep.

(2) If the tensions on both sides of the boundary have been difficult to equilibrate, and therefore there has been much deliberateness and adjustment, but now there is a relaxation: then there is the beautiful experience of aesthetic-erotic absorption, when the spontaneous awareness and muscularity drinks in and dances in the environment as if self-oblivious, but in fact feeling the deeper parts of the self responding to heightened meaning of the object. The beauty of the moment comes from relaxing deliberateness and expanding in a harmonious interaction. The moment is recreative and again ends in loss of interest and sleep.

(3) The situation of danger: if the boundary becomes intolerably overworked because of environmental forces that must be rejected by extraordinary selectivity and avoidance; and

(4) The situation of frustration, starvation, and illness: if the boundary becomes intolerably tense because of proprioceptive demands that cannot be equilibrated from the environment.[5]

In both these cases, of excess of danger and frustration, there are temporary functions that healthily meet the emergency with the function of protecting the sensitive surface. These reactions may be observed throughout the animal kingdom, and are of two kinds, subnormal or supernormal. On the one hand, panic mindless flight, shock, anesthesis, fainting, playing dead, blotting out a part, amnesia: these protect the boundary by temporarily desensitizing it or motorically paralyzing it, waiting for the emergency to pass. On the other hand, there are devices to cushion the tension by exhausting some of the energy of tension in the agitation of the boundary itself, e.g., hallucination and dream, lively imagination, obsessive thought, brooding, and with these, motor restlessness. The subactive devices seem to be adapted to protecting the boundary from environmental excess, shutting out the danger; the superactive have to do rather with proprioceptive excess, exhausting the energy — except that when, in starvation or illness, the danger-point is reached, fainting occurs.

7: The Emergency-Function of Consciousness

We have thus come to another function of consciousness: to exhaust energy that cannot reach equilibrium. But note that this is again, as in the primary function, a kind of delaying: previously the delay consisted of heightened awareness, experimentation, and deliberateness in order to solve the problem; here it is delay for the sake of rest and withdrawal, when the problem cannot otherwise be solved.

The exhaustive function of consciousness is, in essence, Freud’s theory of dreams; let us recapitulate the elements of that theory: In sleep, (a) the exploration and manipulation of the environment is in abeyance, and therefore there is frustration of any “physical” solution; (b) certain proprioceptive impulses continue to create tension — “the dream is the fulfillment of a wish”; this is the latent-dream;

© but the apparent contents are largely the agitation of the sensory surface itself, the tag-ends of the day’s events. This is very important to notice. Freud’s beautiful distinction between the “manifest” and the “latent” dream means precisely that the dreaming consciousness is isolated from both the environment and the organism; the “self” that the dreamer is aware of is largely merely the surface-boundary. This is necessarily so, for if more than the mere boundary were admitted into the forming whole, it would involve practical adjustments, and therefore the motor muscles, and the animal would awake. Paradoxically, the dream is completely conscious; this is why it has its flat cinematic quality. The deeper the dream is, the more it lacks the obscure body-feeling of waking perception. The dreamer is spectacularly unaware of the proprioceptive contents whose meaning he is dreaming; when these begin to invade his dream, e.g., the thirst becoming very strong, the dreamer tends to awake; and finally (d) the function of the dream is to keep the animal asleep.

The same function of consciousness as an attempt to exhaust energy may be simply observed, as Wilhelm Reich has emphasized, in the bright sexual images that occur in temporary sexual frustration. Indeed, in this example we may see the entire picture of the simple functioning of the conscious-surface: at the organic need, the innervation brightens, reaching out to its goal; with delay there is deliberate withholding and an increased tempo of seeking expedients; with satisfaction, the image at once becomes dull; but with frustration, it brightens still more, trying to exhaust the energy.

There are thus at the boundary of contact these two processes to meet emergencies: blotting out and hallucination. They are, let us emphasize, healthy temporary functions in a complicated organism/environment field.

8: Scientific Adequacy of the Above Unitary Conception

Now at last we are in a position to explain the astonishing notion of “Mind” as against both “Body” and “External World,” in place of the rather prima facie conception that we have been developing, of consciousness as a contact-function in a difficult organism/environment field.

This prima facie conception which, in modern but not greatly superior trappings, is like Aristotle’s sensitive and rational soul, offers no peculiar scientific difficulties. There are definite observable and experimentable functional relations between this entity and others. There are, for example, criteria for “good contact,” such as the singleness, clarity, and closure of the figure/background; grace and force of movement; spontaneity and intensity of feeling. Also the formal similarity of the observed structures of awareness, motion, and feeling in the whole; and the lack of contradiction of the several meanings or purposes. And variations from the norm of “good contact” can be shown, analytically and experimentally, to involve both effectual and causal relations with environmental and somatic abnormalities.

Nevertheless, we must now show that the notion of “mind” as a unique isolated entity sui generis is not only genetically explicable but is in a sense an unavoidable illusion, empirically given in average experience.

9: The Neurotic Possibility at the Contact-Boundary

For let us consider still another possibility at the contact-boundary. Conceive that (5) instead of either the reestablishment of equilibrium or blotting-out and hallucination in a temporary emergency excess of danger and frustration,[6] there exists a chronic low-tension disequilibrium, a continual irk of danger and frustration, interspersed with occasional acute crises, and never fully relaxed.

This is a dismal hypothesis, but it is unfortunately historical fact for most of us. Note that we speak of the double low-grade excess, of danger and frustration, creating a chronic overcharge of both receptor and proprioceptor. For it is extremely unlikely, though conceivable, that either chronic danger or chronic frustration would long continue separated from each other. Consider simply that danger diminishes the opportunity of satisfaction in a field rather finely adjusted to begin with; then frustration is heightened. But frustration increases the urgency of exploration and decreases the opportunity for scrupulous selection; it breeds illusions and overrides deliberateness, and thereby increases danger. (That is, whether one lays primary stress on insecurity or instinct-anxiety, all therapists would concur that these derangements mutually aggravate each other to a neurotic result.)

In the chronic low-grade emergency that we have been describing, what dispositions of the contact-boundary tend to the possible simplicity of the field? Both of the emergency functions, deliberate blotting-out and undeliberate hyperactivity are called into play, as follows: in a reaction which is different from that in the acute emergency, the attention is turned away from the proprioceptive demands and the sense of the body-as-part-of-the-self is diminished. The reason for this is that the proprioceptive excitations are the more controllable threat in the mutually aggravating troubles. Toward the more direct environmental threat, on the other hand, the attention is heightened to meet the danger, even when there is no danger. But what is given by such attentiveness is “alien,” it is irrelevant to any felt awareness of oneself, for the proprioceptive has been diminished. And in the attentiveness, the senses (receptors) do not reach out expansively, but rather shrink from the expected blow; so, if the process is long continued, the state of deliberate alertness to danger becomes rather a state of muscular readiness than of sensory acceptance: a man stares, but does not thereby see any better, indeed soon he sees worse. And with all this, again, goes a habitual readiness to take flight, but without actually taking flight and releasing the muscular tension.

To sum up, we have here the typical picture of neurosis: under-aware proprioception and finally perception, and hypertonia of deliberateness and muscularity. (Yet let us insist again that this condition is not unfunctional, in the given chronic low-grade emergency, for what is seen and felt is uninteresting because alien, and provocative of danger because a temptation to desire; and the danger is imminent.)

Meantime, however, the safe function of consciousness, to attempt to exhaust the inner tensions by activity of the boundary in isolation, increases to its possible maximum — there are dreams, futile wishes, illusions (projections, prejudices, obsessive thoughts, etc.). But note that the safety of this function depends precisely on keeping it in isolation from the rest of the system. Dreaming is spontaneous and undeliberate, but the safeguarding of daydreaming from passing into movement is deliberate.

10: “Mind”

In the situation of chronic low-grade emergency that we have been describing, sense, the initiation of movement, and feeling are inevitably presented as “Mind,” a unique isolated system. Let us review the situation from this point of view:

(1) Proprioception is diminished or selectively blotted out (for instance, by clenching the jaw, tightening the chest or the belly, etc.). Thus the functional relation of the organs and consciousness is not immediately felt, but the excitations that come through must be “referred” (and then abstract theories, like this present one, are invented).

(2) The unity “desired-perceived” is split; the sensation does not reach out either beforehand or responsively, the figure loses liveliness. Thus the functional unity of organism and environment is not immediately aware and motoric. Then the External World is perceived as alien, “neutral” and therefore tinged with hostility, for “every stranger is an enemy.” (This accounts for a certain obsessional and paranoid “sterilizing” behavior of positivist science.)

(3) The habitual deliberateness and unrelaxed self-constriction color the whole foreground of awareness and produce an exaggerated feeling of the exercise of “Will,” and this is taken to be the pervasive property of the self. When “I will to move my hand,” I feel the willing but I do not feel my hand; but the hand moves, therefore the willing is something somewhere, it is in the mind.

(4) The safe play of dream and speculation are maximized and play a disproportionate role in the self-awareness of the organism. Then the delaying, calculative, and restorative functions of the boundary are taken as the chief and final activities of mind.

What we are arguing, then, is not that these conceptions, Body, Mind, World, Will, Ideas are ordinary errors that may be corrected by rival hypotheses and verification; nor, again, that they are semantical misnomers. Rather, they are given in immediate experience of a certain kind and can lose their urgency and evidential weight only if the conditions of that experience are changed.

Let us stress the logical importance of the psychology. If a certain unrelaxed deliberateness is creating a discontinuity and thereby altering the kind of figure habitually presented in perception, it is from these perceptions as basic observations that one logically proceeds. Recourse to new “protocols” will not easily or quickly alter the picture, for these again are perceived with the same habit. Thus the sociopsychological character of the observer must, in matters of this kind, be considered as part of the context in which the observation is made. To say this is to espouse a form of the “genetic fallacy” and, what is worse, a particularly offensive form of the argument ad hominem: yet that is how it is.

(It will be evident from all this why psychotherapy is not the learning of a true theory about oneself — for how to learn this against the evidence of one’s senses? But it is a process of experimental life-situations that are venturesome as explorations of the dark and disconnected, yet are at the same time safe, so that the deliberate attitude may be relaxed.)

11: Abstraction and Verbalizing as Acts of “Mind”

So far we have been speaking of a rudimentary consciousness, shared by us with the brute beasts of the field and forest. Let us brighten the scene a little and seek a loftier illustration, the process of abstracting and verbalizing (and even writing for the learned journals).

Psychologically, to abstract is to make relatively stationary certain activities for the sake of more efficiently mobilizing other activities. There can be sensory, postural, attitudinal, imaginative, verbal, ideal, institutional, and other kinds of abstraction. The abstractions are relatively fixed parts in a whole activity; the internal structure of such parts is unattended to and becomes habitual — the stationary is background for the moving — whereas the whole is more interesting and is larger than would otherwise be manageable; and of course it is the whole that selects, immobilizes, and organizes the parts. Consider, for example, the literally thousands of fixed forms that go into the process of a reader’s gathering (we hope) meaning (we hope) from these sentences: the abstractions of childish verbalizing and attitudes of communication, of school-attendance, orthography, and homework; of typography and bookmaking; of genre of style and expectation of the audience; of the architecture and posture of reading-rooms; of the knowledge taken academically for granted and the assumptions taken for granted for this particular argument. All these are quite unattended to as we attend to the argument. One could attend to them but does not, unless there is a hitch, a bad typographical error or a purple passage or joke out of place, or a bad light, or a crick in the neck. All this is commonplace. (Abstraction is by definition efficient and “normal”; yet it cannot be denied that in fact the “literally thousands of abstractions” (the quantity makes a difference) invariably betoken a rigidity of training and functioning, a verbalizing-character that indeed cannot attend to the whole series, except in theory.)

Supposing now that well toward the bottom of the levels of verbal abstraction, in the early parts where symbolic speech is close to non-verbal imaging, feeling, and outcries — suppose that at that elementary level there has been and persists a blotting-out of awareness and paralysis of motion. Then there will be connections that one cannot attend to. For instance (to choose an example from the work of the Washington School of Psychiatry), a child learning to speak has an angry mother, finds that certain words or certain subjects, or even babbling itself, are dangerous; he distorts, conceals, or inhibits his expression; eventually he stammers and then, because this is too embarrassing, represses the stammering and learns to speak again with other emergency mouth parts. It is generally agreed that such a history of speech-habits importantly constitutes the split-personality of a person; but we here want to call attention not to the fate of the personality but to the fate of the speech. As his experience widens in society, the arts and sciences, our speaker makes wider and higher verbal abstractions. Must it not be the case that, since he is still blotting out the awareness and paralyzing the expression of the lower preverbal connections, he will have defective contact with the actual functioning of the higher abstractions, both of their meaning to himself and also of what they really are? They do have a meaning, yet they do exist, ultimately, in a void. They are “mental.”

A general proposition is offered; its importance to him, for instance the weight that makes certain evidence stand out in a field and be observed or overlooked by him, is never reducible to any behavior or observation that is noticeable by him. Other observers can notice things that he does not, but unfortunately they, as the case is, are engaged in a general conspiracy against him to pooh-pooh his “private” deliveries as not part of the system of nature. He is academically trained to agree with the consensus, yet he cannot grant that the residue of meaning is nothing at all; he knows that it is something. Prima facie, these literally baseless but not empty abstractions are felt to exist, then, in the “mind” — perhaps “private” mind. Along with Will, the baseless but not empty abstractions are proof of Mind par excellence.

Depending on his character he makes various adjustments of the abstractions to his other experience and the consensus. (Note that this Mind is necessarily very busy exhausting the energy of its tensions in speculation.) Noticing the incommensurability of his abstractions and the External World he may have recourse to different expedients: if he has the rather dry and affectless syndrome of the positivist-disease, he finds they are nonsense and despises himself still further. If he has the euphoric poetic mania, he considers the discrepancy a black mark against the External World and gives his Ideas a world by rhyming them. The man with Gestalt pachydermatitis flounders in a morass of sludgy terminology. And so on.

12: Psychosomatic Ailments

The “unavoidable misconception,” in a chronic low-grade emergency, that there is such a thing as “Mind” becomes more frightening when one begins to suffer from psychosomatic ailments.

Firmly planted in his loved or despised mind, our man is unaware that he is deliberately controlling his body. It is his body, with which he has certain external contacts, but it is not he; he does not feel himself. Assume, now, that he has many things to cry about. Every time he is stirred to the point of tears, he nevertheless does not “feel like crying,” and he does not cry: this is because he has long habituated himself not to be aware of how he is muscularly inhibiting this function and cutting off the feeling — for long ago it led to being shamed and even beaten. Instead, he now suffers headaches, shortness of breath, even sinusitis. (These are now more things to cry about.) The eye muscles, the throat, the diaphragm are immobilized to prevent the expression and awareness of the coming crying. But this self-twisting and self-choking in turn arouse excitations (of pain, irritation, or flight) that must in turn be blotted out, for a man has more important arts and sciences for his mind to be busy with than the art of life and the Delphic self-knowledge.

Finally, when he begins to be very ill, with severe headaches, asthma, and dizzy spells, the blows come to him from an absolutely alien world, his body. He suffers from headache, from asthma, and so forth; he does not say, “I am making my head ache and holding my breath, though I am unaware how I am doing it or why I am doing it.”

Good. His body is hurting him so he goes to a doctor. And supposing the affection is as yet “merely functional,” that is, there are not yet any gross anatomical or physiological ravages: the doctor decides there is nothing wrong with him and gives him aspirin. For the doctor too believes that the body is an affectless physiological system. Great institutions of learning are founded on the proposition that there are a body and a mind. It is estimated that more than 60 percent of visitors to medical offices have nothing the matter with them; but they obviously have something the matter with them.

Luckily, however, sickness rates high among the things that must be attended to, and our man now has a new lively interest. The rest of his personality becomes more and more the background for a consuming interest in his body. The mind and body become at least acquaintances, and he speaks of “my headaches, my asthma, etc.” Sickness is the unfinished situation par excellence, it can be finished only by death or cure.

13: Freud’s Theory of Reality

To conclude this chapter, let us make a few further remarks about the genesis of the concept of the External World.

If we return to the psychoanalytic theory of Freud, we find that along with the body and the various kinds of the “mental,” he spoke of Reality, and then of the “reality-principle,” which he contrasted with the “pleasure-principle” as the principle of painful self-adjustment to safe functioning.

It can be shown, we think, that he conceived of reality in two different ways (and did not understand the relation between them). In one way, the mind and the body are parts of the pleasure-system, and reality is primarily the social External World of other minds and bodies painfully constraining one’s pleasures by deprivation or punishment. In the other way, he meant the “External World” given in perception, including one’s own body, and opposed to the imaginary elements of hallucination and dream.

The social External World he thought of especially in connection with the so-called helplessness and delusional omnipotence of the human infant. The infant lies there isolated, has ideas of its own omnipotence, and yet is dependent for everything except the satisfactions of its own body.

But let us consider this picture in its total social context and it will be seen to be the projection of an adult situation: the repressed feelings of the adult are attributed to the child. For how is the infant essentially helpless or isolated? It is part of a field in which the mother is another part. The child’s anguished cry is an adequate communication; the mother must respond to it; the infant needs fondling, she needs to fondle; and so with other functions. The delusions of omnipotence (to the extent that they exist and are not adult projections), and the rages and tantrums of infinite abandonment, are useful exhaustions of the surface-tension in periods of delay, in order that inter-functioning can proceed without past unfinished situations. And ideally considered, the growing apart of the infant and the mother, the disruption of this field into separate persons, is the same as the increase of the child in size and strength, his growing teeth and learning to chew (and the drying up of the milk and the turning of the mother to other interests), and his learning to walk, talk, etc. That is, the child does not learn an alien reality, but discovers-and-invents his own increasing reality.

The bother, of course, is that the ideal condition does not obtain. But then we must say, not that the child is essentially isolated and helpless, but that he is soon made so, thrown into a chronic emergency, and eventually he conceives of an external social world. And what is the situation of the adult? In our societies, which have no fraternal community, one exists in and grows deeper into this same isolation. Adults treat one another as enemies and their children as alternately slaves or tyrants. Then, by projection, the infant is inevitably seen to be isolated and helpless and omnipotent. The safest condition is then seen, truly, to be a breaking, a disconnection, from the continuity with the original unitary field.

(The passional attributes of the External World of science reveal the same projections. The world of “facts” is at least neutral: does this not reflect the sigh of relief at getting out of the family home and coming into contact with reasonable beings, even if they are only things? But of course it is also indifferent; and try as one will, one cannot milk out of “naturalism” an ethics, except the stoic apathy. Natural resources are “exploited”: that is, we do not participate with them in an ecology, rather we use them, a safe attitude that leads to much inefficient behavior. We “conquer” nature, we are the master of nature. And persistently, conversely, there is the strain that it is “Mother Nature.”)

14: Freud’s “External World” of Perception

When we scrutinize Freud’s other way of regarding the External World, however, as that which is given in perception as opposed to dreams — and this is the way that sits easily with common and scientific preconceptions — we find suddenly that he is very uneasy. This is not the place to discuss his difficulties in detail (see Chapter 12 below). But let us sketch the problem by quoting some passages.

Exploring the world of dreams, Freud found that, in isolation from the motor-manipulation and the environment which were assumed to give the categories of meaning, nevertheless the dreamworld made sense. It was a world not of fixed entities but of plastic handling, according too creative process of getting beneath verbalizing to the image and the speech-act, of symbolizing, of destroying and distorting the given, condensing it, etc. This plastic handling Freud calls the “primary process” and observed that it was the characteristic mental functioning of the early years of life.

The primary process strives for discharge of the excitation to establish with the quantity of excitation thus collected an identity of perception. The secondary process has abandoned this intention and has adopted instead the aim of an identity of thought.

The primary processes are present in the apparatus from the beginning, while the secondary processes take shape only gradually through the course of life, inhibiting and overlaying the primary, gaining complete control over them probably only in the prime of life. [7]

Now the question for Freud was whether the primary process, so considered, was merely subjective or gave some delivery of reality. And from time to time he boldly affirmed that they give reality, e.g.,

The processes described as ‘incorrect’ are not really falsifications of our normal procedure, or defective thinking, but the modes of operation of the psychic apparatus when freed from inhibition. (Italics ours)[8]

And the converse would be what we have here been saying, that the kind of world that seems real to ordinary conceptions is a delivery of chronic low-grade emergency, neurotic inhibition; it is only the infantile or dream-world that is real!

This is not very satisfactory either, and Freud understandably tended to shy away from it. From the formal point of view, however, the source of his troubles is simple. He is arrested not by his psychology of dreams (which he himself knew to be an immortal insight), but by the trivial psychology of “normal” waking consciousness that he shared with his contemporaries. For to a correct normal psychology it is clear that everywhere experience is given in plastic structures and the dreams are a special case. (It is touching to consider Freud’s bafflement and abnegation when confronted with the psychology of art and invention.)

A more important clue to his difficulty, however, is given by juxtaposing his two theories of “reality”: because he believed that the social “external world” into which the infant grows was inflexible, it was necessary for him to believe that the world of the “primary process,” with its spontaneity, plasticity, polymorphous sexuality, etc., was repressed by maturation and put out of operation.

[1] The ancient Platonic problem of the soul in the body and the world is not the modern problem, though not unrelated to it neurotically. The same may be said of the theological dilemmas of body and spirit, etc.

[2] We doubt that the “consciousness is only of secondary importance” in analyzing any such whole, but we give the quotation for its attitude.

[3] Quotations from Willis D. Ellis, Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner&Co., Ltd., London.

[4] The illusions, to repeat them, are simply that the mobile wins attention against the stationary background, and the more tightly complicated wins attention against the relatively simpler. But at the boundary, the interaction is proceeding from both parts.

[5] These two contrasting situations occasion the disagreement between the two most strongly opposed para-Freudian schools: those who trace the neurosis to insecurity and those who trace it to instinct-anxiety.

[6] A long emergency would destroy the structure, i.e., simplify it to a structure of a lower order. A medical example of simplifying on a lower level is lobotomy or any other excision. The question is whether the various “shock treatments” do not work similarly by creating a limited fatal emergency.

[7] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. by A. A. Brill, Macmillan Co., New York, 1933, pp. 553 and 555.

[8] Ibid., p. 556.