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THE OMNIPOTENT SELF

A Study in Self-Deception and Self-Cure


BY
PAUL BOUSFIELD
M.R.C.S. (ENG.), L.R.C.P. (LOND.)

_Physician to the London Neurological Clinic (Ministry of Pensions),
Late Demonstrator of Morbid Anatomy, St. George’s Hospital, Late
M.O. American Women’s Hospital for Officers, etc., etc._

Author of _The Elements of Practical Psycho-Analysis_.


LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.,
BROADWAY HOUSE, 68-74 CARTER LANE, E.C.
1923


PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE DEVONSHIRE PRESS, TORQUAY.




PREFACE

“_Nature has granted to all to be happy if we but knew how to use her
gifts._”--CLAUDIUS.


Many people, while not considering themselves as suffering from any
nervous ailment, nor desiring the services of a physician, are yet far
from being perfectly happy in their mental outlook and temperament.
Either their feelings are too easily roused, or they are inclined to
worry, to be depressed, irritable, nervous, or over-sensitive. Trifles
which to them seem no trifles interfere with the smooth course of their
daily lives, or this slight abnormality may manifest itself in an
over-sensitiveness to physical pain or to mental or moral difficulties
and conflicts. It is with the hope of helping a few such individuals
to a better understanding of themselves, and through this to a more
equable temperament and greater happiness, that this little book is
written.

There is no hard and fast line between the normal and the abnormal
person, and indeed a very real difficulty exists in even defining a
normal person. If we take our definition of normal as being “average
or conforming to type or standard,” then the majority of people
are normal. If, on the other hand, we take its other meaning, that
of “performing the proper functions,” then there are few people
approaching the normal under modern civilized conditions. A tendency
to undue irritability or depression is a mild and very common form of
abnormality. Hysterias, obsessions, and unreasonable fears are greater
abnormalities, and fortunately of less frequent occurrence, while
certain forms of insanity are still greater deviations from the normal.
A similar combination of causes, however, may form the basis of all
these abnormalities, and these various deviations from the normal are
more of degree than of kind. But whereas in cases of obsessions and
unreasonable fears or in such other abnormalities as homo-sexuality or
sexual impotence, etc., the causes are deeply hidden and the forces at
work somewhat complicated, in the lesser abnormalities there are causes
frequently lying less deeply.

In the case of obsessions, phobias, hysterias, sexual abnormalities,
and so forth, we can only hope to effect an improvement by a thorough
analysis of the unconscious causes and conflicts by a competent
psycho-analyst. In the lesser troubles of the mind, however,
considerable improvement can often be effected by means of a somewhat
superficial self-analysis. This will be directed towards investigating
one in particular of the primary causes which play an important part in
all the minor unpleasant temperamental faults.

In order to teach the patient to help himself, it will first of all be
necessary to enlighten him to a considerable extent as to the general
evolution of his character; at any rate in as far as one important
mental complex known as “Narcissism” is concerned. In doing this, many
other mental complexes will have to be superficially touched upon; but
in order to simplify the work for the uninitiated, they will not be
specifically named when they appear; for, although this would make the
work more technically accurate, it would, at the same time, make it
less clear, and in a book of this type this would be very undesirable.
The first object I have in mind is that the work shall be lucid,
concise, and readily understood by any person of ordinary education,
so that he may gain an insight into the essential causes and growth
of some of his abnormal characteristics without undue complication
of ideas. It is further hoped that this small work may be of some
assistance in suggesting to parents a few of the many things to be
avoided in the early training of the child.

PAUL BOUSFIELD

_7, Harley Street, W._




CONTENTS

PART I: THE OMNIPOTENT SELF

CHAP.                               PAGE
   I THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND              3

  II REPRESSION                       19

 III THE FORCES SHAPING CHARACTER     27

  IV DETERMINISM AND WILL POWER       41

   V NARCISSISM                       49

  VI FACT AND PHANTASY                64

 VII IDENTIFICATION                   74

VIII THE IRRITABLE TEMPERAMENT        87

  IX RATIONALIZATION                  98


PART II: PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

    X  SELF ANALYSIS                 111

   XI  READJUSTMENT OF OBJECTIVES    121

  XII READJUSTMENT OF THOUGHT        138

XIII AUTO-SUGGESTION                 157

 XIV CONCLUSION                      165




PART I

THE OMNIPOTENT SELF




CHAPTER I

THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND


§1

In considering the question of character, with its various
irregularities and idiosyncracies, we shall have to accustom ourselves
to dealing with factors which do not exist in consciousness at all.
Strange as it may seem to the uninitiated, many of our thoughts, ideas,
and motives are quite outside our normal consciousness, and of them
only the resulting emotions and actions appear on the surface. This
may be taken as an absolute and indisputable fact, and one which the
reader should try to appreciate at the outset, although it is somewhat
difficult to realise, for we always find it hard to apprehend and
understand something which we can neither see nor touch.

If one were to tell the ordinary labourer that water is composed of
two gases which when combined form a liquid, he would probably be
quite incredulous, and possibly in his ignorance might even deny
emphatically any such possibility, on the grounds that it was against
all common-sense and experience; he failing to realise, of course, how
very limited were both his sense and his experience. In spite of his
feelings of absolute certainty, and in spite of complete faith in the
unshakable logic behind his belief, he would be wrong.

While it is not to be expected that many readers of this book will deny
the existence of the unconscious part of the mind, it may well be that
many will fail to realise that it is of more than theoretical value.
It therefore becomes necessary for us to examine the matter somewhat
carefully, and to familiarise ourselves with the ideas of the working
of this unconscious mind.

Without going into the further sub-divisions recognised in psychology,
we will confine ourselves to dividing the mind into two parts--the
conscious and the unconscious. _And of these, at any given moment, the
conscious is by far the smaller part._ We are actually conscious at
any moment of but very few things, such as the book we are reading,
the chair we are sitting on, and dimly of our immediate surroundings.
A thousand memories which we might conjure up of our childhood and
our past are, for the time being, far from consciousness. Yet these
matters exist somewhere in the mind, for we are able, if we choose,
to search about in it, and bring them into consciousness, even though
we may not have thought of them for many years. This leads us at once
to a striking fact, namely, that while many things can be remembered
at will, others which we feel we ought to remember, cannot be brought
to mind at all. It is an extremely common experience to find that one
has forgotten a name completely, and that no effort will bring it into
consciousness, yet later on, apparently without effort, the name will
“come back to us,” as we say. In fact, the very phrase we use--“come
back to us”--implies that it has been somewhere away from us, that it
has been lodged in some place that is foreign and unknown to us, yet
which we are aware is somewhere within us.

It is also common knowledge that a great many events and scenes of
considerable importance to us at the time of action are forgotten, and
that they can only be recollected if some sort of stimulus or reminder
be given. For instance, a person may have forgotten completely where
and how he spent a holiday ten years ago. No amount of racking his
brain brings anything to light. But having been reminded of a single
incident that occurred during that holiday, the whole of the rest may
come up from the unconscious in full detail.

There is a third kind of memory more important still, if one may
be permitted to call it memory, and that is the memory of facts
which no _ordinary_ stimulus of this sort will ever bring up into
consciousness again. The term “memory” is used here because we have
every reason to believe that somewhere in the unconscious all facts
have been registered, and in many cases may be partially brought into
consciousness again by suitable means, such for instance, as hypnotism
or psycho-analysis, (two very different methods, by the way). Yet,
though these impressions have been made on the mind, and though there
is this unconscious memory still in existence, in the ordinary course
of events we should never again be conscious of them.

_We may, however, be very conscious of actions and emotions emanating
from the unconscious memory._ Thus, suppose that as a child one had
lived in the country, and on several very happy occasions a bonfire
had been lighted at a picnic, and that later on one lived in a town,
and that this picnic which happened at the age of three or four years
had become completely forgotten, so much so that even photographs of
the scenes or conversations on the subject carried on by other people
brought no memory to light and seemed to touch no chord; it would still
be quite likely that the mere smell of a bon-fire in the distance or
any smell resembling this would be enough to cause a considerable
feeling of elation and happiness in the person, a feeling that
something pleasant was taking place, an idea that if only one could
remember, a pleasant picture could be called up. This is because it is
associated in the unconscious mind with these previous happy occasions.

Or again, suppose a child at the age of two or three years has been
dropped into a pond and nearly drowned. Although the incident may
in later years be completely forgotten, the horror of deep water
and all its associations may vividly persist. It seems probable,
and a considerable amount of work has been done on this subject in
psycho-analysis, that every action, thought, or idea that has ever
been registered in the mind, even to some extent before birth, is
permanently fixed; and that although much of this cannot be brought
into consciousness by present methods, yet all the feelings and
emotions, however slight, which attended these thoughts, ideas, and
actions are perpetually being called forth by slight stimuli of which
we are unaware, and these are playing their part in moulding our
thoughts, feelings and actions in the present time.

I had an interesting patient a short time ago who, owing to certain
experiences in the war, was suffering from complete loss of memory; so
complete that he did not know his own wife nor even his parents. Under
hypnosis, the whole of his memory was rapidly brought back; and when it
appeared to be normal and both he and his parents were quite confident
that it was as good as it had ever been, I suggested that we might try
an experiment to see if we could improve it still further. I asked him,
amongst other things, if he could voluntarily remember the first time
he wore knickerbockers. He had not the faintest recollection of the
matter. I then hypnotised him, and told him to give me the details. He
described the knickerbockers minutely, the number of buttons on them,
the fact that he wore them on his third birthday, that his father had
given him a penny, and told him that “now he was a little man, he must
have money in his pocket,” together with a very large number of other
details. I enquired of his father and mother and sisters, and they
corroborated the details in every particular.

I have tried several similar experiments with him and with one or two
other patients under hypnosis with considerable success, and have even
tried to take them back to the memory of their own birth. They have
frequently produced many memories of events that occurred before the
age of one year, but previous to that could only give reproductions of
movements and pleasant and unpleasant emotions. Whether these latter
are memories or not one has unfortunately no means of proving. But the
fact that under hypnosis both educated and uneducated people alike
exhibit extremely similar ideas as to types of movements, expressions,
and feelings at the various stages of their very early life, inclines
one to think that these reproductions may be memories. One has,
however, to beware of the fact that observation and knowledge acquired
in later periods of their lives might be the real factor underlying
their apparent reproductions. Further evidence of a different nature
will be given on this point, however, at a later stage in the book.


§2

So far, we have shown that there is an unconscious part of the mind
which acts as a store-house for memories, ideas, and emotions of the
past. We have not, however, shown that it is anything more than a
store-house. But if we look into it from other points of view, we
shall see that it is a great deal more than a mere store-house, for
it thinks, reasons, comes to conclusions, and in fact assists in
controlling our acts at every turn; indeed this unconscious part of our
mind wields driving forces of the utmost potency in moulding our lives.

Let us examine first the _reasoning_ faculty of the unconscious mind.

Maeder gives a good example of this. A house-surgeon at a hospital
wished particularly to keep a certain appointment, but he was not
allowed to leave the hospital until his chief, who was out, should
return later in the evening. As his appointment was of considerable
importance, he decided to brave the anger of his chief. He therefore
kept his appointment, but when he returned later, he found to his
astonishment that he had left a light in his room, a thing he had
never done before, although he had occupied that room for two years.
He thought the matter over, and soon realised why he had done this.
The chief, on going to his own house, would pass the window and would
see the light burning within, and imagine that his house-surgeon was
at home. The unconscious mind had rapidly reasoned this out and had
determined that the conscious mind should forget to turn off the light.

Another illustration of the persistent way in which the unconscious
mind will reason and act can be given from my own experience. I had to
attend a lecture given by a man, with whose views I totally disagreed.
I had no wish to attend the lecture, but felt compelled to do so in
an official capacity. Consciously, I determined to go; unconsciously
when I made the note of the lecture, I wrote down the time of it in
my engagement-book a week late. On discovering this, I consciously
endeavoured to rectify the matter, but my unconscious mind wrote
Tuesday instead of Thursday in my engagement-book, so it went down
wrong once again. Later, having been forced to see my mistake by a
friend mentioning the matter, I omitted for a short time to rectify it
in my engagement-book, feeling sure that I should remember to do so a
little later. But alas! for the determination of my conscious mind. I
forthwith made an appointment for a patient at the real time appointed
for the lecture, and so could not in the end attend it. Now, these
lectures were held regularly on a particular day of the week, and I
had generally looked forward to them, and attended them without any
difficulty. It was only in this one case that I did not wish to go. My
conscious mind decided to attend; but my unconscious mind played trick
after trick in order that my real desires should be satisfied. Such
examples could be multiplied indefinitely. It is possible that many
would say that they do not actually prove unconscious reasoning nor
power of thought. Let me, therefore, give one or two simple examples of
a different nature.

A friend of mine once told me that he had spent several days in trying
to work out a chess problem without success. One morning, he woke
up with a picture in his mind of the exact moves that he must make.
The problem had been solved in his sleep unconsciously, and with no
recollection on waking of any conscious effort at reaching the solution.

In my own experience, as a school-boy, I failed to solve a problem in
Euclid during an examination. On the morning afterwards, the solution
flashed through my brain suddenly, as I lay in bed. Whether I had
solved it in my sleep, or whether it was solved in bed as I lay awake,
I am not prepared to say. Of this much, however, I am certain. I made
no conscious effort; my mind merely wandered lazily in the direction
of the previous day’s failure, and almost instantaneously the right
solution appeared without effort.

Let us now take another example of work which the unconscious mind is
called upon to perform; an example which we are accustomed to view
without question or thought, which is comparatively commonplace,
and which we dismiss summarily by referring to it as “habit.” The
accomplished pianist reads the music in front of him consciously, but
he is not conscious of the extremely rapid translation which takes
place from the brain to the fingers, so as to produce complicated
movements on the key-board. And if we examine it carefully, we shall
find that something very wonderful has actually taken place outside
his consciousness. When he was first learning to play, he looked at
the note on his music, and said to himself “That is C.” He looked at
the key on the piano, and repeated “That is C.” He was taught that a
particular finger must be placed on that particular note when playing
in a certain key. He was taught that it had to be hit in a particular
way and held down for a particular time, according to the size and
shape of the note he was reading on the sheet of music in front of him.
He was further taught that in order to modify any sound in a particular
manner, he could use his feet on one or other of the pedals, and must
be extremely careful to put his feet down and lift his feet up again
at exactly the right moment. He was taught that when certain symbols,
known as sharps and flats, preceded the notes at the beginning of his
piece of music, the whole scheme of fingering would be different. And,
at first, he had laboriously to go through the process of watching
first the music and then the key-board, and of _thinking_ at each
point what he should do with his fingers and with his feet, and how he
should do it, and for what period he should keep on doing it. Now, the
whole process is gone through with half-a-million notes which he has
never seen before, many of them played simultaneously, and with an
exactitude which he never attained when he was consciously thinking.
Whatever may be the nature of the unconscious action which is taking
place, all he has in consciousness is the music in front of him, and
the final sound that he is producing, together with the emotions which
these called forth in him as a result of the whole.

Can there be any doubt left that a complicated unconscious process of
the same kind is taking place?

Or again, let us examine our own personal likes and dislikes.
Frequently one can assign no reason whatsoever for these. They may
exist, in fact, against what we call our better judgment. We may
love a person in spite of certain faults, or dislike him in spite
of his virtues. If the matter be examined further, however, we not
infrequently find the reasons for our emotions towards him. Either
his manner, dress, or tone of voice, or some other trivial feature
may resemble someone we have liked before, or on the contrary, some
mannerism may call to mind a similar mannerism which we associate
either in ourselves or in some other person, with unpleasant
characteristics. Our unconscious mind has rapidly sized up all these
points, appraised them, and presented our conscious mind with the
resulting emotions alone.

So-called intuition is, to a large extent, merely rapid unconscious
reasoning, in which minute details are taken into consideration by the
unconscious, and only the final opinion presented to consciousness.
One should beware of trusting intuition too much, however, in spite of
popular prejudice to the contrary, for unconscious reasoning is just
as liable to be wrong in its conclusions as is conscious reasoning;
and it is just as liable to reach the conclusion which best serves its
immediate purpose, and to suppress truth where it is unpleasant.[1]

Some psychologists think that the unconscious mind is _infallible_
in purely _deductive_ reasoning from the _premises_ from which it
starts. But it provides its own premises from a secret store and also
accepts any suggested premises which are not repugnant. The premises
may therefore be wrong but the deductive reasoning is accurate. In this
case the conclusions will only be wrong because the premises are wrong.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Unconscious reasoning or intuition is found chiefly in those who
have not been trained in subjects which induce and train logical
conscious reasoning. It is not a prerogative of sex, but on the whole
is found more amongst women, merely because of their method of training
from childhood upwards. In children and savages intuition is found
equally present in both sexes. The loss of intuition merely means
that the training of the conscious mind has caused us to mistrust
conclusions for which we cannot consciously see the reasons.




CHAPTER II

REPRESSION


§1

One other faculty of the unconscious mind requires special mention, and
that is its power of obliterating memories from the conscious mind,
or as it is better termed, of _repressing_, since this word not only
implies pushing out of consciousness, but also preventing from coming
into consciousness. It is found that all persons have formed a regular
habit of forgetting or partially forgetting, (and so disguising),
things which are unpleasant to them. This especially refers to those
things which are unpleasant to their self-respect, their moral beliefs
and ideas, and their general pride in themselves. The primitive
immoralities and thoughts and actions of early childhood which would
now offend their æsthetic and moral susceptibilities, are, more or
less, completely put out of sight, together with a host of unpleasant
ideas and thoughts which have cropped up from childhood onwards.
Indeed, there is a general tendency for anything of an unpleasant
nature to be pushed out of sight.

Darwin, in his autobiography, states, “I had, during many years,
followed a golden rule, namely that whenever a published fact, a new
observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general
results, to make a memorandum of it without fail, and at once, for I
had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt
to escape from the memory than favourable ones.”

We had a further example in the case of the house-surgeon who “forgot”
to put out his light, and examples are extremely common in everyday
life. We forget to post letters entrusted to us against our will, but
we do not forget to post our own love-letters. We mislay bills very
readily, but rarely do we mislay a cheque.

Amongst my patients suffering from shell-shock, I have had very many
hundreds who have completely forgotten some of the most unpleasant
and terrifying experiences which occurred to them out at the front.
Others unconsciously had found the easiest method of dealing with
the unpleasant past to be that of blotting the whole of it out,
dissociating it completely from their conscious mind, and then stating
that they remembered nothing of their lives until they woke up in
hospital. It is not only memories, however, which are repressed and
remain dormant in the unconscious mind. Most of our primitive instincts
handed on from our savage forefathers before even the evolution of man
in his present form, lie similarly buried in this unconscious part of
the mind, and we are wont to deny emphatically that we possess these
unpleasant instincts. Nevertheless, just as _in utero_ we repeat more
or less in detail the history of our physical evolution, so do we at
that period and in childhood repeat to a great extent the history of
our psychic evolution; and just as during this early period we possess
the physical attributes of many of our ancestors, such as the gills
of the fish or the tail of the lower vertebrates, so psychically do
we at a somewhat later period, possess the instincts and desires of
our progenitors, and utilise them as the hidden foundation stones
in building our adult mental constitution. These various primitive
instincts include all kinds of desires which would consciously be
regarded as sexual perversions and moral crimes of different kinds, and
they are present in all of us without exception. Our upbringing and
conscious outlook upon them, however, causes them to be so abhorrent to
us, that we successfully keep the majority of such ideas and feelings
_from ever coming out of the unconscious in their primitive form_.
In other words, we repress them. Occasionally, however, there is a
tendency for these ancestral instincts to become conscious, and in
our further efforts to prevent this we may develop instead hysterias,
obsessions and unreasonable fears, together with many other nervous
and abnormal signs and symptoms, into the nature of which it is not
my intention to inquire further in this present volume. Those who
are interested in pursuing this line of investigation will find an
elementary account of it in a previous work of mine, “The Elements
of Practical Psycho-Analysis.” All that I wish to emphasise here
is that we do push out from the conscious mind unpleasant thoughts
and memories, that we do repress and keep in the unconscious mind
unpleasant desires and instincts, and that we do, as a result of this,
have many unconscious or semi-conscious conflicts within ourselves,
which may lead to unpleasant feelings of depression, irritability,
fear, or in more pronounced cases hysterias, obsessions, and even
permanent mental derangement.


§2

A further and somewhat important result of our possessing so much
which is unconscious and of having so many feelings and ideas in
consciousness of which we do not know the origin, or of whose
origins we have but the vaguest and haziest notion is known as
_rationalization_. This word signifies that we find reasons for doing
or believing things which are of a pleasant nature and agreeable to us,
and _vice versa_.

Following on this rationalisation comes also a certain conservatism,
which tends to retard progress of any sort, which dislikes looking at
new ideas, and this for a very obvious reason. Looking at new ideas,
examining ourselves or our work very closely, has a tendency to bring
to light, from time to time, the very primitive instincts and feelings
which we have been at so much pains to repress. And rather than submit
to the indignity of discovering how really imperfect we are, and having
our pride in our divinely constituted natures shaken, we have acquired
a habit of denying and fighting strenuously against discovering truths
connected with either our moral or physical evolution which would be
unpleasant to us. In the light of our upbringing, such new truths are
often unpleasant, therefore we rationalise that they must be untrue.
For having been educated to venerate logic and reason, we can only
be satisfied with any given conclusion we come to when we feel that
it is justifiable in the light of logic and reason. But the logic of
rationalisation is false logic.

For many years, scientific and popular thought denied strenuously the
possibility of the now universally accepted theory of human evolution;
and on scientific grounds it was urged, with much plausible reasoning,
that it was not possible to develop a high type like man from any low
form of animal. On religious grounds it was argued equally passionately
that if evolution were true, the Bible was wrong, God disappeared, and
therefore the theory of evolution was untrue. The real reasons lying
behind those reasons advanced by both the scientist and the general
public, however, were not the reasons so carefully thought out by
them, but consisted largely in the fact that they did not wish to find
that the body, which they had hitherto thought a special and divine
creation partaking of the miraculous, to be merely a stage in the
evolution of life on this planet, and possibly not a final stage at
that. For in that case, no longer would man be able to flatter himself
that he was almost divine, he would have to relegate himself to the
possibility of being in a stage of semi-barbarism; he would no longer
be a final perfect product, but merely a half-finished article. It was
this blow to his pride that he could not stand. And it is the same
to-day. Whenever there is a likelihood that examination, particularly
through research work, has thrown light on his psychic evolution,
on the imperfections of his moral laws, or on the crudity of some
conventional custom, the process which takes place in him is much the
same.

Firstly, dislike of the idea. Secondly, on further examination of it,
hatred of the idea. Thirdly, rationalisation directed against the idea.
Fourthly, contentment, in that he has proved by logic and reason that
the idea is wrong. Hence, it is that the truth takes long to emerge,
and that obsessions and hysterias, and even trivial abnormalities are
difficult to cure, for the cure involves seeing our own imperfections
naked and undisguised.

In all these cases, we are trying to keep out of consciousness those
things which will distress us or cause us to have conflicts, or to have
to readjust our views of ourselves, or in fact cause us unpleasantness
in any form. It will be noticed that I have mentioned pride in the
belief that we have reached a condition of final development, and in
our superiority over the rest of nature, as being one of the important
factors in preventing our advance. It is to the development of this
pride, and its ramifications that I am devoting the major portion of
this book.




CHAPTER III

THE FORCES SHAPING CHARACTER


It will be seen from the foregoing that evolution of the individual
character may be the result of a very large number of forces at
work, of which many are quite unconscious; and that any considerable
disturbance or variation of the unconscious factors will considerably
modify the character of the individual, in spite of conscious desires
in some other direction. The character of an individual is the sum of
his thoughts, ideas, capacities, desires, feelings and actions, and the
general forces moulding it may be briefly summarised as follows:


     1. The primitive instincts inherited from his ancestors, and held
     back in the unconscious mind.

     2. Environment and education.

     3. That pride in his own greatness, to which we referred in
     the last chapter, which modifies all the other forces at work,
     according to the direction of its development. This force will
     henceforth be called by the name of Narcissism, for a reason
     shortly to be explained.


§2

Of the inherited instincts we have already said as much as is necessary
here. It suffices for us to recognise that they are for the most part
of a primitive erotic type, and that they are so repressed and modified
as to be unrecognisable in the normal adult. When they have been
ineffectually converted by environment and education, we have present
the basis of many neurotic and functional conditions, and this again is
a matter which is outside the scope of the present work.


§3

Environment and education are extremely comprehensive terms as used
in psychology. Environment does not merely refer to the home with its
visible surroundings, nor does education merely refer to the scholastic
side of it. Environment and education include the treatment of the
child by the nurse during the first week of life; for instance,
whether she leaves it alone when it cries, or whether she soothes it
and rocks it to sleep again. A trivial fact, the reader will think,
especially in the first week of the child’s life, yet experience
shows us that this environment and education of the first week is an
extremely important factor in its after-life. The thousand little
actions, the trivial chance words of anger or contempt, not merely
of the parent but of strangers or of other children, all make their
impressions on the infantile unconscious mind. They all belong, in the
strictest sense, to what we term its environment and education. Any
stimulus, in fact, however small, which is capable of reaching the
brain forms part of this environment and education which is reacting
on the child. Psychologists are now generally of the opinion that
the essential elements of the individual character have all been
definitely formed by the age of five, and that, important as training
in successive years may be, the environment and education during those
first five years are more important still.

_It is the object of education and environment to modify and utilise
the force of the primitive instincts with which the child comes into
the world in the best possible way._

_Three things may happen to any particular instinct._ Firstly, it may
remain unchanged and unrepressed, in which case the individual will
be said, on reaching adult life, to be perverted in some way. Let us
take as an example that instinct which exists in some animals, and
which urges them at the mating season to exhibit their genital organs
to their fellows of the opposite sex, with the perfectly natural and
proper end in view of propagating the species. We occasionally find
adult human beings in whom this instinct has remained unchanged and
uncontrolled, and they generally find their way, sooner or later,
into prison. The psychological term for the offence they commit is
“exhibitionism.” In the small child, however, we have often seen this
instinct at work, without regarding it as objectionable in any way.
We have laughed at the little child who delights in running about
naked, or asks us to come and see it being bathed, or on occasion calls
even more obvious attention to its state of nakedness. It is quite
unconscious of the primitive instinct which it is displaying, and since
it is a child and cannot in any way fulfil the sexual objects of the
instinct, we pass the matter over, without further thought.

Secondly, our primitive instincts may be _displaced_, and the
displacement must be such as to conceal them from our conscious
thoughts, in order that they may be tolerated by the conscious mind.
For instance, the normal adult will not be guilty of exhibiting his
nakedness in the way above referred to, nor will he display desires of
sexual exhibitionism in a conscious manner. But he, or more frequently
she, will _displace_ these ideas, and will only call attention to the
sex of her body indirectly by exhibiting the neck or arms, or more
indirectly still through the medium of clothes, designed to suggest,
(for the most part unconsciously) erotic ideas.

Thirdly, a much higher state may be reached by some people in which the
primitive instinct has now lost entirely its erotic meaning, instead
of being merely disguised and displaced as in the last case. The force
and energy of it has all gone from the personal physical plane to
serve a useful social purpose of a non-sexual nature. This is known as
_sublimation_, and instead of the desire of our exhibitionist to show
himself or herself physically, the person may attain the desire by
showing a fine character, by designing a fine building, achieving some
high position, or anything in fact of an ideal or non-erotic nature.

Exactly the same process takes place in the opposite of exhibitionism,
which in its primitive form we term observationism. “Peeping Tom” is a
celebrated example of this. We have a _displacement_ of observationism
in the fairly average young man, who likes to observe all that he can
of the charms of every woman he comes into contact with, who takes
an eager interest in her shoulders, breasts, underclothing, and any
part she may exhibit. And we have the third or _sublimated_ stage in
the scientist, who has turned most of his primitive sexual instinct
of “looking” in the sexual sense into looking down the microscope, or
searching for the secrets of Nature, and delving amidst her hidden
laws, instead of using the same primitive desire to look in an
unsublimated and rather more infantile manner.

It is exactly the same with a large number of other primitive
instincts, which even did I mention them here would not be grasped
or understood at all by many without very much further explanation.
Suffice it to say, that many of our higher activities and desires
are sublimations of lower and more primitive instincts, which we are
learning to develop and control; _and that education and environment
have, as their object, the training of the child by turning the forces
at work in his primitive instincts through the stage of displacement
into the final one of sublimation_.

It should be clearly grasped that the energy lying behind our primitive
instincts, whether it be repressed, displaced or sublimated, is a
very real force, comparable with the physical energy which we are
accustomed to deal with in everyday life. _And this energy must find
some outlet for its discharge._ Thus,[2]“We know as regards physical
energy that there are not several kinds of energy, but merely several
manifestations of it, and that it may be changed from one form of
manifestation to another, but that still the sum total of the original
energy remains without addition or loss.”

Thus there is a given amount of energy stored in a ton of coal. This
energy can manifest itself as _heat_ in the furnace and boiler. By
means of an engine we can change the manifestation into that of
_motion_, then with a dynamo to _electricity_; the electricity we can
again change into _light_, or back again into _heat_ or _motion_. There
is _one_ energy, but by suitable means we can turn it to different
uses, and give different manifestations of it. Owing, however, to the
imperfection of the boiler, machinery, etc., we never transform the
_whole_ of our energy into another form. In transforming heat into
electricity, there is always some heat wasted; it is not destroyed, but
it remains as heat for a time, and is absorbed by surrounding objects.
A complete transference of energy does not take place, and the less
efficient the machinery the less is the transference.

Now evidence tends to show a considerable similarity between psychic
and physical energy. In all probability there is only one ultimate
psychic energy which, like physical energy, can be directed into
different channels. Thus, the energy of erotic desire can be directed
to a large extent into the energy of desire for music, religion,
science, or sport; or the energy of the desire for sport may be changed
into the energy of the desire for mental exercise, such as chess,
mathematics, or science. For example, an individual feels “restless,”
he then desires to play tennis; the afternoon is wet: he plays chess
instead. His psychic energy has been diverted from one channel into
another with its accompanying excitement and satisfaction of desire:
with its final feeling of fatigue and repletion.

Psychic energy, like physical energy, can never be entirely diverted
from one channel to another. There is always some, often a large
quantity, which is not altered in character. The amount of this depends
largely on the person concerned, just as the amount of physical energy,
changed from one form to another depends on the efficiency of the
engine or machinery.

This possibility of transference of energy of desire from one form
to another is of the utmost importance to the psycho-analyst. By the
technique of psycho-analysis the energy of repressed desires is first
freed from deleterious objectives, and then transferred to legitimate
ones. The energy behind the conflicts which lead to alcoholism or
drug-taking may, under suitable conditions, be transferred to energy of
higher types of desire with more suitable outlets. These processes are
known as _transference_ and _sublimation_ respectively.

It may be taken that every mind has a given amount of psychic energy
which _must_ find somewhere its suitable outlet in satisfying desire,
whether for accomplishment or for enjoyment.

We may here again take the opportunity of stating that the efficiency
or lack of efficiency demonstrated in different individuals in their
attempts to transfer the energy of desire from a lower to a higher
channel depends not only on heredity and constitutional circumstances
but to an extraordinary degree on the individual’s environment and the
actions of the parents in the first three or four years of his life.
The reason why seemingly excellent parents produce sometimes execrable
progeny becomes clearer under psycho-analysis. The over-strict parent
produces one type of inefficient children, the parent who spoils
produces other inefficient types. The nurse, the nursery, the casual
visitor, the trivial conversations, the unconsidered sights and
experiences, all have a terrific influence in the first few years
of the child’s life. Parents do not realise that conventional or
arbitrary methods of education, whether in one direction or another,
are not going to effect the results they expected. The primitive
unconscious mind of the child understands and absorbs in a manner
that civilised man does not recognise. The bad father may by accident
or _neglect_ produce an excellent child--the good father with all
his designs may produce a bad one. This is not an attempt to show
that as the child grows up _all_ its actions are dependent on the
early environment; merely that we can never compare the good or bad
in individuals; that an apparent failure, owing to his inefficiency
of powers of sublimation, may yet be devoting more energy to ascent
than the successful saint whose early environment made for efficient
transference of energy of desire. Some of the commonest of errors made
by well-meaning parents will come to light at a later period. “_They
teach their children to repress erotic and other desires but they omit
at the same time to assist the development of that sublimation of them
which is absolutely essential._”


§4

We now come to the third great factor in character formation, and as
this particular factor is going to occupy the major portion of this
book, I will not do more here than indicate briefly the symbolic
meaning of the term Narcissism; the reason why this term is used in
connection with our primitive feelings of pride will then gradually
unfold itself.

Narcissus was the son of the river god, Cephissus. In his mother’s
eyes he was extremely beautiful, and later in the eyes of all others,
including himself. It was his wont to walk abroad in solitary places
lost in admiration of the graceful form which he thought no eyes
worthy to behold, save his own. On one occasion, he wanted to drink
from a cool spring and catching sight of his face in the water for
the first time in his life, at once fell in love with it, not knowing
it to be his own likeness. On his knees at the edge of the pool, he
stretched himself, and looked down upon a face and form so entrancingly
beautiful, that he was ready to leap into the water beside it.

“Who art thou, who hast been made so fair?” cried Narcissus. And the
lips of the image moved, yet there came no answer. He stretched out his
hand towards it, and the beautiful form beckoned to him. But when his
hand touched and broke the surface, it vanished like a dream, only to
return in all its enchantment when he was content to gaze motionless,
even then, again, growing dim beneath the tears of vexation he shed
into the water. Repeatedly, he tried to gather the lovely image in his
arms, but it always eluded him, but when he entreated and implored, it
imitated his gestures with unfeeling silence.

Maddened by the strong allurement of his own likeness, he could not
tear himself away from the mirror which ever mocked his fancy. Hour
after hour, day after day, he leant over the pool’s brink, crying in
vain for that imaginary object of adoration. But at last from despair
his heart ceased to throb, and he lay still among the water-lilies that
made his shroud.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Before proceeding further and examining the development of Narcissism,
and those factors which come to preserve it, and make it forceful in
our unconscious mind, we must first briefly consider the subject of
determinism.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] “Elements of Practical Psycho-Analysis,” by Paul Bousfield.




CHAPTER IV

DETERMINISM AND WILL POWER


Determinism is the doctrine that all things, including the will, are
determined by causes. It is the antithesis of the doctrine of free
will. In its complete form, it holds that the individual has no direct
and voluntary control over his thoughts and actions but that every
thought and action is inevitably the result of a large number of
previous thoughts and actions which have gone before.

There is a very large amount of evidence, and indeed, whether we admit
it or not, the evidence is quite irrefutable, that in regard to the
majority of our actions the doctrine of determinism holds good. But the
evidence is by no means sufficient to enable us to conclude that we
have no free will.

[3]Freud in his book on the “Psychopathology of Everyday Life” and in
other works gives many convincing examples that much in our character,
that many of our actions, evil and good, are quite beyond our control
at any given moment. But there is one thing that appears to have been
overlooked, and that is, _that in all the examples given one could
not conceivably utilise free will in any case_. If I ask you to think
of a number what opportunity do you get of using your will power?
If you put the wrong latch-key into the door by accident, have you
made any effort to use will power? When a patient is suffering from
hysteria due to repressions of various kinds, in that particular matter
_the will power has already been lost_. When a chronic alcoholic is
unable to cease from drinking his will power in reference to this has
disappeared, therefore determinism holds the field completely. The
will has no opportunity of working then. In all the examples which
Freud gives one discovers on careful investigation that for some reason
or another there is no opportunity for the use of free will. Such
evidence as we have certainly does not prove the nonexistence of free
will, but merely shows that in a very large number of our thoughts and
actions we do not use any will at all, and that in other cases we are
unable to use our will effectively.[4] When determinism does rule we
may liken it physically to this: a patient sits down and crosses one
leg over the other and leaves the one leg hanging free. On tapping
it smartly beneath the patella the foot will kick; the knee jerk has
been elicited. If this be done fifty times the result will be the
same fifty times. There is movement of the leg, but this movement is
predetermined. On the other hand this does not prove that no other
movement of the leg is possible. Under the conditions just given the
man’s will, or the freedom of the leg, is merely _eliminated during
that period_. Or again, we may liken it to a locomotive standing at the
top of a hill; if the brake be taken off, the locomotive will run down
the hill, and will do it every time; but this will not prove that did
somebody happen to put the brake on half-way down the hill the engine
would still go on running. However, all actions which we may ascribe to
our will are no doubt strictly limited by other determined conditions.
The man on the engine may run it backwards or forwards, but only within
_the very much prescribed limits which the rails allow_. We may safely
accept this much determinism, that although the will exists, its
capabilities are strictly circumscribed by determinism.

It is rather in his general direction than in any specific act that
a man has most control. We certainly have not the amount of free
will which we like to believe we have. For example, the reader of
this chapter may have returned home to-night and have said, “I will
not have a meal to-night, it is too hot.” What are the factors (or
determinants, as they are called) in this case? Perhaps external heat,
producing langour by various physiological processes, combined with
lack of appetite, in its turn produced by several causes, and added to
this, depression, produced by a bad business deal, and in its turn the
result of many other determinants outside the reader’s control. There
is no desire to eat, and these various determinants, added together,
prove stronger than the habit of eating the evening meal. Having,
however, read this chapter as far as this point, the reader desiring to
disprove my unpleasant suggestion, immediately says, “Ah! I will prove
that I have free will. I will eat my meal in spite of not wanting it.”

Alas! this does not _prove_ free will, new determinants have merely
been added on the other side, and desire to prove strength of mind has
now out-weighed accumulated efforts which prevented you from eating.

Since it has been shown that a man’s control is constantly being
limited by other determinants, it follows that the criminal whose
environment and determinants, conscious and unconscious, have been
manufactured for him from evil sources, yet who, on the whole, is
progressing upwards in spite of these, may be forming a far better
character than the arch-bishop whose environment from the beginning has
been such as never to give him criminal characteristics, yet whose
growth has been, on the whole, towards a more selfish position, even
though this be not noticeable to the eyes of others.

_Now many of the determinants forming our characters lie in the
unconscious. They are unknown to us and only the results of their
activities are visible. Herein lies the difficulty of controlling
ourselves. How can we efficiently control that of which we do not know
the existence? Herein, also, lies the value of psycho-analysis, for it
brings many of these determinants to light, and we are thus able to
control them consciously._ Only a part of all this can be accomplished
by such self-analysis as may be indicated in this book. Yet even so, a
much greater degree of self-control may be obtained.


§2

Let us now consider briefly why persons who have not previously been
irritable, should suddenly become irritable; who have not previously
been hysterical, should suddenly become hysterical; who have not
previously been in the habit of weeping, should at some time after
reaching adult life, revert to that infantile habit.

The explanation of mental troubles of various kinds involves two
factors. In the first place, any individual is capable of bearing a
certain amount of conflict and a certain amount of repression. It is
only when the accumulated force is more than he can control, _that is
when new determinants are added_, that the symptoms begin to appear. He
is like a steam engine in which as long as the steam is being used up
in doing work, or as long as the safety valve is working efficiently
when work is not being done, the boiler stands a pressure of 100lbs.
very comfortably. If the safety valve gets jammed, and the energy
cannot be transferred from the steam to the work, the pressure in the
boiler rises higher and higher until it bursts from the joints and
rivet-holes.

The second factor which determines the mode of expression of this
out-burst of repressed energy is known as the _law of regression_.
This means that if the adult outlet of energy becomes dammed up or is
insufficient, _the energy will flow through an earlier channel which
has once been used_. The individual will, in fact, revert to some
method which he was wont to use in earlier years, or in infancy. It
is true that this may be disguised and not recognised as an infantile
mode of expression until it is looked into more closely. This question
of regression, however, need not be more than touched upon here. It
will be much more fully dealt with when we come to actual examples at a
later stage.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] “The Elements of Practical Psycho-Analysis,” by Paul Bousfield.

[4] The doctrines of determinism and free-will respectively can be
brought entirely into line with one another if we include freewill
itself as one of the determinants. Thus, if in the formula

    S = a + b + c + d + etc.

where S is the resultant action, and a, b, c, d, etc., are the several
determinants, it happens that d = 0. The presence of d does not
invalidate the formula. _But if_ d _does not happen to be zero, the
absence of_ d _would invalidate the formula_. If d represents the
“will” component there may be plenty, even a majority of cases in which
d = 0, but there may be cases in which the omission of d will render
the result erroneous.




CHAPTER V

NARCISSISM


The term Narcissism has already been mentioned and some slight
indication of its importance in character development has been given.
We have also examined the derivation of the term, and found that it
implies self-interest, self-importance, self-worship; all of which
characteristics are in modified degrees possessed by everybody. There
are, however, many other manifestations of Narcissism, many tricks by
which it gets past our conscious intentions, many ways in which it
associates itself with other instincts, and unknown to us works our
undoing. We shall therefore, in this chapter, examine the development
of Narcissism from its very earliest stages, and trace out in some
detail whither it may lead.

Most people were they asked at what moment the child’s mind first
began to register feelings, thoughts, and emotions, would probably at
once and without hesitation say, “At the moment of birth.” It seems
the obvious thing to say, but like many other obvious things such a
statement appears to have but little evidence in support of it and much
against it.

The act of birth has performed no sudden or miraculous change upon the
growth and tissues of the body. It is true that oxygen is now absorbed
through the lungs instead of as originally through the mother’s blood,
but the essential tissues, the brain, the muscles and the bones have
undergone no sudden change. Before birth, they were living tissues,
and we know that the muscles were at work, for we had felt the baby’s
movements _in utero_; we know that the heart was at work, driving
the blood through the child’s arteries. We had learnt this also by
means of the stethoscope many weeks before the child was born. Why
then should we assume that the brain had registered nothing at birth?
We do indeed know that it must have been at work in part, for it was
learning to regulate the action of the child’s heart and the child’s
secretions, the blood pressure, and the motions of its limbs. We are
therefore justified in assuming that it must be capable of registering
impressions, even though it were incapable of reason or thought.

It is true that at birth it commences to undergo many vivid new
experiences, but that is no reason for assuming that it has not
undergone any experiences _in utero_, and that these experiences have
not made some impressions on the brain. Let us see for a moment what
impressions it is likely to have received and registered. First of
all, it would most certainly hear sounds, the sounds of the blood
rushing through the mother’s arteries and the sounds from the outer
world, muffled and indistinct when they had penetrated the mother’s
body. All these sounds would be of a soft crooning nature, and those
caused by the blood in the mother’s arteries would be of a rhythmic,
humming, rising and falling nature, a kind of rhythmic lullaby very
similar in many respects to the lullaby the mother will hum to the
child when she wishes to put it to sleep at a later period. We should
expect these sounds to be registered on the child’s brain so that if
it ever heard their like again, some chord of _feeling-memory_ would
be struck, and some emotional association brought to mind. In the
second place, external movements would be registered on the child’s
mind as the mother walked about. There would be a swaying or swinging
movement. Again we should expect that when, in after life, the child
experienced a swaying or swinging movement, a chord of memory would be
touched again, and these earlier associations would be revived; not as
a conscious memory or fact, of course, but as a feeling.

Again, conscious movements of its own limbs might be impressed upon it.
It would find, when it tried to move, that its movements were limited,
and that it attained more perfect peace by refraining from attempting
to struggle and change its position. It would be impressed by the
pleasantness of inertia as opposed to the unpleasantness of making
an effort. And finally, its general position with the knees drawn up
and the chin bent down would be firmly registered, so that when in
after-life it again assumed this position, once more the chord of
memory would be struck, and the old feeling of repose would be likely
to return.

Now, we cannot assume that the child has any active mental state before
its birth, but we know that its condition (taken in conjunction with
its extremely limited experience) is one as near omnipotence (from its
standpoint) as may be. It breathes, or rather absorbs oxygen without
any effort of breathing. It is fed, it is kept warm and comfortable
without any effort whatsoever. It lives in a world entirely its own,
where everything works together for its comfort and well-being. It has
to make no struggle for existence. It has to deal with nothing _real_,
save perhaps that its voluntary movements are limited, and this perhaps
is bad for its education, since at that period of its life it learns
that it can be most comfortable by making least effort! And here we see
the beginning of that which we all possess in after-life, _inertia_,
the difficulty of making a beginning at anything, the objection which
we have to making efforts.

Now let us see what happens to this omnipotent little creature at
birth. It goes through the probably painful process of having its
position roughly changed and being thrust into an atmosphere which is
cold and unusual to it. Moreover it has to make its first struggle for
breath, its first effort to sustain existence. And in its struggle for
breath it utters cries, which by experience it very soon finds to be
magic sounds which enable it to fulfil its wishes. But of this, more
later.

After its first rude awakening, let us once more see what happens. It
is wrapped up in something warm; that is, it is returned to a semblance
of the womb, by having something round it which keeps out the cold. It
is gently rocked to and fro by the nurse or other attendant, and again
the semblance of the previous rocking in the womb is returned to it.
Crooning sounds are murmured over it, and the semblance is still more
complete. It frequently draws its knees up somewhat if it is placed in
such a position that it can do so with ease, and falls asleep. It has
attained as nearly as possible once more the semblance of its pre-birth
condition, where it has no cares, and is warm and comfortable again.
And though it has become acquainted with effort, it is quite obvious
that its feeling of omnipotence, if we may so term it for the moment,
is hardly yet disturbed, and the world it has come into differs but
slightly from the world which it has left; it is still a world in which
the infant is the centre and ruler, in which its every want is attended
to without an effort on its part, save that it may sometimes have to
call attention to its wants by means of that magical cry which it soon
learns how and when to use, and which acts in a truly magical manner in
accomplishing the fulfilment of all its desires.

During the first few weeks of the infant’s life this delusion on the
part of the child is largely kept up. Few people think there is any
harm in attending to all a baby’s wants in the first month of its
life. They do not think it could possibly be wrong to spoil it at that
age, because its intellect has not developed. They forget entirely
that its mental condition and attitude towards life, apart from actual
thought, may inevitably be affected at this period. Hence, whenever
the baby cries, it is not uncommonly rocked to sleep, or fed, or if
it holds out its hand and shows its desire to possess anything, it is
immediately allowed to possess it, and to play with it. It has to make
but the faintest attempts to adjust itself to its environment, it has
to face but the slightest reality; all its desires are immediately
fulfilled, and kept in a condition of almost continual fulfilment. And
it may remain for a considerable period as near being an omnipotent
creature as it is possible for any living thing to be. Its omnipotence,
however, is really a fallacy, or as I prefer to term it at a slightly
later stage, a phantasy, for the world in which it lived before birth,
which seemed to it as a world, was not really a world at all, but a
very small and a very temporary abode, and the world in which it is
living for the first few months after birth is again not really a world
but a combination of extremely limited and carefully selected portions
of the world, in which every attempt is made to disguise from it the
realities of the actual world.

Again let us emphasise the fact that the chief effort that the infant
has to make is the effort of crying. And it may learn very quickly
that this is so all-powerful as to practically efface the unpleasant
task of having to adjust itself to the realities of life. This process
is carried on with slight modifications for many months. The infant has
but to wave a magic wand, as it were, has but to emit a little magic
noise from its mouth, and all the world it knows is set in motion to
give it satisfaction and some semblance of its pre-birth omnipotence.

_This cry which brings it gratification, if it has been really
effective over a too-prolonged period, will tend to fix permanently
in the child’s mind the fact that either weeping or making a magic
noise with the mouth will always attain for it gratification. And
although at a later stage the conscious mind will be obliged to accept
a considerable amount of reality and to reject the idea of omnipotence,
yet the unconscious mind will persist in the struggle and will make
futile efforts to forget reality, to change reality into phantasy, and
to regain its omnipotent state._

When a man uses expletives because some task of his has failed to
result in success, he is really repeating the infant’s cry. He is
really uttering a magic sound which his unconscious mind hopes may
somehow remedy the failure. He has not definitely accepted the reality
of failure as a commonplace hard fact of life at the moment at which he
utters his expletive.

When a person weeps at some unpleasant happening or in anger at
something which has touched his pride, exactly the same is taking
place. He, or she, has failed to make a complete adaptation of
himself to the facts and realities of life. _He has obeyed the law
of regression_, to which I referred in a previous chapter, and has
returned to the infantile method of expression, namely weeping, with
the unconscious hope that a magic compensation will result; that
instead of his having to adapt himself to the facts of life, the facts
of life will somehow adapt themselves to his phantasy.

Hence, the first piece of advice that one must give to parents is
that they should, from the earliest possible moment, train the
infant to understand that the magic cries will not at once produce
their expected result; and the first week in the infant’s life is
all-important in this matter. The choosing of the nurse who has charge
during that period should be done with great care, and what is required
of her should be insisted on. Too great emphasis cannot be laid upon
these points.

The child should be fed at regular and proper intervals, and should
be kept warm. But if it cries, as it will do naturally, it should be
left to itself to cry. It should not be picked up, rocked to sleep,
given another meal nor petted. If it is left to cry, it will learn very
rapidly and at the right period of its life that the sounds which it
emits are not magical, and it will begin to adapt itself to the fact
that it lives in a real world which has not been built solely and only
for its own delight.

It is curious to note how regression, this instinct to return to the
earlier mode of expression, to return apparently even to the pre-birth
state, persists in the unconscious mind.

During the war, I knew a youth who was intensely agitated by the
air-raids. He felt perfectly safe, however, if he could crawl under
the bed or table, where he would curl himself into practically the same
position as that of a normal baby before birth. When questioned, he had
not, of course, the slightest conscious knowledge of why he felt safe
in such curious circumstances. But it does not seem improbable that
the association of ideas produced by his position and by the confined
space created a feeling akin to that feeling of safety which has been
his in his pre-birth omnipotent position where nothing could harm him.
A similar feeling of security was experienced by many normal persons in
cellars and other confined spaces and was probably of the same origin;
for there is no doubt that this safety was felt even though their
reason told them that a bomb was as likely to reach their confined
space as any other place in the neighbourhood.

Again, I know of innumerable cases in which soldiers felt very much
safer from bombs which fell at night when they were under cover of a
canvas tent. Logically, of course, the thing was absurd; emotionally,
it was a fact. And all were equally unconscious of any possible
reasons for the feeling of security produced. An example of this same
tendency at an earlier age is seen in children who cover their heads
with the bedclothes when they are frightened.

To return to our Narcissistic infant, we are now impressed with the
fact that one thing of the utmost importance in the first years of its
life is that it shall gradually come into contact with reality, shall
discover that all things do not belong to it, that its omnipotent
feelings are based purely upon phantasy and not upon reality; and upon
the method of its disillusionment and the age at which this begins
largely depend the future powers of adaptation of the child to its
surroundings. It has now become obvious that the new-born infant lives
in a world of phantasy, in which, the relative importance of itself to
things outside itself is not merely distorted but is entirely absent.
And if we can suppose a child kept artificially in this condition till
it reached adult life, every wish satisfied instantaneously, every
force it knows directed entirely towards gratifying its immediate
desires, we do not require much imagination to understand how
absolutely helpless and lost this omnipotent creature would be if
suddenly turned into the world to face life and reality. His one desire
would be to return to his omnipotent state, his one effort to keep at
bay reality and turn it into the pleasant phantasy of the previous
twenty years. For he would surely, before his disillusionment, have
really come to believe himself omnipotent, the only real thing in a
phantasy world of his own fashioning and dreaming.

An extreme case of this kind is, of course, an impossibility. But there
are many and various degrees in which it is approached. Probably the
nearest approach to it may be found in cases where some sort of moral
or mental conflict has been too much for an extremely Narcissistic
mind, which has then completely regressed, refused to recognise the
outer world, and developed a certain form of insanity; and from this
stage of complete Narcissistic regression all degrees and kinds of
manifestations of it may be found, until we reach at the other end of
our list a person who expects everyone around to consult his wishes
and peculiarities or who is merely somewhat impatient, or inclined to
irritability, or merely over-sensitive to either mental or physical
pain.

There is no more certain fact than that if an infant be allowed to
postpone its acquaintance with reality too long it becomes fixed in a
more or less degree in conditions in which phantasy plays too prominent
a part, and regression of some kind takes place as it meets with real
difficulties.




CHAPTER VI

FACT AND PHANTASY


In the last chapter we emphasised the fact that one of the first
products of Narcissism was the infantile difficulty of distinguishing
between fact and phantasy, of realising the world outside oneself. This
tendency to mix up fact with phantasy is by no means only to be found
in an abnormal mind. It is present in some degree in all persons; each
one feels himself to be the most real thing present, and in feeling
this he has a tendency to believe that others round him are in some way
less real, though, fortunately, very few carry it far enough to imagine
that all the others are merely part of a dream in which the dreamer is
the only real figure, as the Red King in “Alice Through the Looking
Glass” is supposed to have done, when the remark is made to Alice,
“You’re only a sort of thing in his dream! If that there king was to
wake you would go out bang--just like a candle!”

And yet quite a large number of people find it difficult to realise
firstly, that they must die, and secondly that the rest of the world
will not die also when they die. They know, of course, that this
latter is not the case, yet they cannot look upon it as a commonplace
fact. Their Narcissism refuses to contemplate their own mortality. It
represses the fact and leaves the idea vague and unreal to them.

In children, the difficulty of distinguishing between phantasy and
reality is quite normally much more accentuated than in adults.
And since they start in a world of phantasy and their training is
to lead them to a world of reality, it is obvious that the halfway
stages will be obscured by a strange mixture of the two. All children
go through the stage in which phantasy and reality are by no means
clearly differentiated, and most young children succeed, day by day, in
fulfilling impossible wishes in phantasies in a manner which a properly
developed adult can never do.

A little boy desires to possess a pony; if this be impossible his
imagination gives life to a rocking-horse, and failing that he may
tie a piece of string to a chair, and with great pleasure and much
emotion urge on his fiery untamed steed across mountain and desert.
He fulfils his wishes immediately by means of a phantasy, which, for
the time being, successfully replaces reality. If this child grows up
normally, this possibility of phantastic fulfilment should gradually
disappear. How many adults, for instance, could take a bath-tub into
their dining-room, sit in it, and with the aid of a vivid imagination
thoroughly enjoy a pleasant sail at sea? We trust no one, at any
rate of our readers, for they would be of that type which has no
perspective, and they would most certainly fail in their vocation as
practical men and women. Yet remnants of phantasy thinking remain with
everyone, and in a moderate degree, so far as we know, such remnants do
but little harm if they are present in small measure only, and kept in
water-tight compartments.

Adult phantasy thinking very largely consists in what is known as
identification, which may be either conscious or unconscious. Of this,
we shall have more to say shortly. At the moment let us trace out what
should happen to the normal child as it grows older. Education and
environment should be gradually convincing the child of the unreality
of its phantastic thoughts and of its early world, should be inducing
it to think in terms of facts and to adjust himself to these facts,
instead of attempting the impossible task of adjusting these facts to
suit his own phantastic conceptions of them. The method of thought
which he should develop in order thus to fit himself to meet the
world adequately has been conveniently termed “directive thinking.”
Directive thinking is controlled thought based upon facts seen in their
true perspective, and with a purpose in view which is both definite
and possible. It is the very opposite of phantasy thinking, which is
generally indefinite, based upon a lack of perspective, and attempts
continually to obtain the fulfilment of wishes impossible of fulfilment.

In directive thinking, the purpose in view must be purposive to the
thinker, a change to be produced in the world, either in its happiness,
its morals, its commercial prosperity or in other forms of progress
or even of deterioration; or the purpose may be to effect changes in
the individual’s own happiness or prosperity, or it may be directed
towards a mental change in the thinker himself with no immediate idea
of changes in his external surroundings.

Thus a man may wish to improve his own character by eradicating a bad
habit. He may do this by thinking carefully about it, by analysing the
causes of the habit, by giving himself auto-suggestion in opposition to
the habit. All this, even if the habit may not in the end be eradicated
must be classed as directive thinking. _Directive thinking is thus
obviously, controlled thinking requiring an effort of attention and
concentration as opposed to phantasy thinking which knows but little
control save that of desire, and little effort or concentration._

In all the business of everyday life, directive thinking must be
employed; whether we are merely using our minds to decide the most
trivial problem, such as the best way of eradicating weeds from the
garden, or whether we are deciding upon a policy to be pursued in some
great commercial or political enterprise. Every time we use our brains
in directive thinking we are establishing a habit which gradually gives
us power to produce changes in our environment and in the world in
general. Every time we indulge in phantasy thinking we encourage the
habit of living in a world of our own ideas, and we are destroying the
habit which enables us to create in reality.

The two forms of thinking may, of course, overlap considerably. The
novelist or playwright, for instance, is very largely a phantasy
thinker. He may feel the emotions of the various phantasy characters
which he evolves, but in order to arrange the words and sentences,
and furthermore in having an idea to portray or in drawing attention
to evils which he thinks should be remedied, he is using considerable
energy in directive thought. So that it becomes obvious that directive
thought need not merely apply to the things of the immediate present
nor even the near future, and in trying to draw distinction between
the two, one is often confronted with a superficial criticism, that
certain ideas must pertain to phantasy thinking, because they can never
come to pass. That, however, is quite incorrect. The possibility that
an idea may come to fruition in two or three hundred years time, and
that the thoughts which have been given to the idea must assist its
growth and ripening, is sufficient to constitute these thoughts as
directive.

We must now look at the second important element in the child’s early
education, which would follow logically upon the first one that it
should be made to face the facts around it; and that is, that in its
games and occupations it should be encouraged, as far as possible, to
take lines of directive thought, and not obtain its pleasures through
phantasies only.

Thus, it would be much better to give him bricks to play with, so that
he may use directive thought in designing and building a house, than
to give him a ready-made toy, such as an engine wherewith he will
merely carry out the phantasy of being a driver or a passenger and of
travelling wheresoever he wishes. A toy wheel-barrow which he can take
into the garden and fill with real stones and earth is far better than
a doll which he will merely imagine to be something to be brought up
like himself, which he will endow with phantastic life and feelings
which are quite unreal. In fact, as far as possible, the child’s games
and occupations should involve his _doing_ something, rather than
merely imagining something. Of course, imagination and phantasy will
come into its games, and are bound to do so, but as much directive
thought as possible should be added.

The ordinary fairy-tale should be swept from the nursery; here the
child does nothing but identify himself with the hero or heroine in
the most impossible of situations of a purely phantastic type. There
is plenty of scope for giving a child an interest in stories from the
fairy-land of science, or from the lives of famous persons in the
centuries that have passed; all of which, if properly selected and
dressed up, will assist the child’s directive thought. For though
the facts with which the stories may deal are as wonderful as any of
Grimm’s fairy-tales, _they are facts of which the child will never
have to be undeceived, and he will never have to have his faith shaken
in the stories which he has learnt_; thus the child will learn from the
outset to think directively.

I know that many mothers, when they read this, will be inclined to
shake their heads and say to themselves, “Poor little darling, I could
never treat it so.” And that they will be inclined, as is shown very
early in this book, to say “These things cannot be true,” for they are
not the ideas they are accustomed to. Yet I can assure them that by
means of carrying out many of those actions and teachings which they
think are pleasant and harmless, they are really damning the child,
while many of these ideas which they might term cruel are really of
the greatest value and kindness to it. Moreover, experience has shown
that if diplomacy be used, the child will be as equally interested in
wonderful facts as in wonderful phantasies. The only difference is
that it is more trouble to the parent or educator to search out and
deal with facts himself. It is quite true that the child’s imagination
requires training, as part of its intellectual education. But there
is vast difference between encouraging it to imagine the possibility
of impossible things, and encouraging it to exercise its imagination
in realisation of facts, however far they may be removed from the
experience of everyday life. Many people have the idea that a child
should be encouraged to use its imagination; whereas in fact the
child’s imagination requires curbing, training, sublimating. Such
people do not realise that the early life of a child is lived almost
entirely in imagination, that it has no difficulty whatsoever in using
its imagination, and that the real difficulty is in preventing it from
using too much imagination directed into false channels and by-paths of
permanent unreality.




CHAPTER VII

IDENTIFICATION


We must now traverse another path through which Narcissism wanders. We
have emphasised the fact that when a child comes into the world, he is
to himself the only real thing; the rest of the world is merely seen
from his phantastic view point, and at this stage he accepts himself as
the one all-powerful centre of everything. Another important fact which
arises from this, however, we have not dealt with, and that is, that he
does not separate the outer world from himself as a separate entity.
His unconscious view point is that the world is subordinate to himself,
beneath his omnipotent control, if you like, that it is a dream of his
own imagining, that it is something which belongs to him in every sense
of the word. This, summed up, means that it is part of himself, that
his identity and the identity of the dream-world around him are part of
the same thing.

Thus, the infant does not at first distinguish between himself and his
mother. When he is hungry, he cries, and he probably has almost as
ready access to his mother’s breasts as if they were part of his own
body. And such imagination is more than encouraged when he is allowed
the use of a rubber teat to suck in the intervals between his meals.

It is generally a comparatively slow process through which the infant
passes, this one of separating himself in thought and feeling from
objects surrounding him. It is one which is hardly ever completely
accomplished. We have already mentioned the fairy-tale which encourages
the child’s phantasy thought. Let us now see how he really obtains
pleasure from that fairy-tale. It is by identification. In imagination
he is a fairy prince or princess, as the case may be; his pleasure in
the triumphs and progress of the central figure of the story is that
of performing his prodigious deeds by proxy; and if he thus identifies
himself with the hero of the story, he is also encouraged to believe
that he possesses the power and qualities of that hero. He is less able
to realise that he, unlike the hero, cannot perform magic deeds with a
mere wave of a wand. Indeed, when the story is over, he will probably
play at being a fairy, and in phantasy perform the magic deeds again.

This demonstrates the force of his identification with the hero of the
story. _And it must be remembered that sooner or later the child will
have to wake up, will have to realise that it possesses no magic power,
and the struggle within it will be great._ It is obviously a mistaken
form of kindness to enhance such pleasures of the moment, when you are
merely accentuating the struggle which the child will have to make at
a later period to overcome his Narcissism. In passing, I may mention
that you have probably already done the child considerable damage by
allowing him to have his rubber teat at the beginning of this period of
identification, since he identifies it with the mother’s breast, and is
thus encouraged to think that the breast is always with him.

Let us now see where this Narcissistic identification may come out
later in life.

First of all, it is this which enables us to enjoy novels, just as
we enjoyed fairy-tales as children. We identify ourselves with the
hero or heroine of the book, and in phantasy perform their various
wonderful feats. Thus we satisfy our Narcissistic desire to be great
and powerful. If we lack cleverness, and the hero is clever, by
identification and imputation we may attain the pleasures of feeling
clever and superior. If the heroine is beautiful and everyone falls in
love with her, we may by proxy be the same. If the hero is a sailor,
and we have always desired to sail, yet have never been on the sea,
our ambition is now attained--and see how easily attained--in a truly
omnipotent fashion, without effort on our part, just by reading
about it. Exactly the same thing takes place at theatres, where the
Narcissist identifies himself with the actors on the stage. So far
so good; if a person can content himself with an occasional theatre
or occasional novel, wherewith to take a restful regression to an
infantile outlet of energy, no harm is done. There are times when we
must rest, and there are times when we must sleep, which also appears
to be Narcissistic regression to a condition somewhat resembling
our pre-birth state. But there are many who cannot control their
identification in this way, who cannot confine it to the stage and the
novel, who bring it into the affairs of life continuously. They may
unconsciously identify themselves with their father or mother, their
relations or friends, or even their enemies, and perhaps, in turn, with
everyone with whom they come into contact. Like a looking-glass, they
reflect everything that goes on around them. They feel the pleasures of
their friends, they also feel their pains. They are called sympathetic,
they are often ultra-sympathetic--they are a nuisance.

I remember on one occasion I had asked a woman of strong Narcissistic
temperament to take a fly out of the corner of my eye. She absolutely
refused to do so under any consideration, as she was sure she would
hurt me too much. Inquiry showed that Narcissism had exaggerated her
own feelings, so that a speck of dust in her own eye was torture. Yet
her eye was so tender and important to herself that she could not bear
anyone to touch it even in order to get something out. _And she could
not imagine that anybody else could have feelings that differed from
hers_; and since she identified herself so much with other people, I
have no doubt it would have been a real agony to her, had she attempted
to extract the fly from my eye.

Such people are by no means uncommon. We all know the person who cannot
bear to hurt us, even for our good. For instance, some cannot bear to
bandage a wound for us since they cannot bear to see pain in any form.
They state that it is almost as if they felt it themselves, and they
call themselves “sympathetic.” But in spite of popular belief to the
contrary, such sympathy is not a virtue, there is nothing altruistic
about it; it is an inconvenient fault of an entirely selfish kind. In
order to help one’s friend, one does not need to feel his feelings and
suffer his pains, one wants to understand them; the more one enters
into his feelings, the more one’s judgment is biased, and the less one
is able, as a rule, to be of assistance. Worse still, in connection
with these people, they not only pour out sympathy in this way,
but attribute it to themselves as a virtue, and they cannot bring
themselves to believe their friends to be really good, unless their
friends also can react in a similar way towards them. They call a
normal person unsympathetic, perhaps exaggerate the term and call him
brutal, wishing indeed that their friends who have climbed higher from
Narcissism should regress to their lower stand-point.

I have given here but one type of Narcissistic identification with
other persons; it seems to me unnecessary to carry it further since
any reader who chooses to think the matter out for himself will find
endless modifications of such identifications. We all possess it in
part, and on the whole women are more Narcissistic than men. Let it
not be thought, however, that this is a reflection on women; it is a
reflection on the way they have been brought up, for from the earliest
times environment impresses them with the idea that “little boys are
made of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails, and little girls are
made of sugar and spice and all things nice!” And hence on such lines
as these, their Narcissism is encouraged, and their capabilities of
facing fact and reality discouraged from the very outset, until
differences of temperament are produced in the adults of the two sexes,
which in no way belong to Nature, but purely to our conventional and
somewhat barbaric stand-point.

There are yet more important results of Narcissistic identification
than those already mentioned; Narcissism leads, in many instances, to
the choice of a particular love-object. Narcissism is, of course, by no
means the only or chief factor in the choice of love-objects, as anyone
who has studied psycho-analysis will at once realise. It is, however,
the only one I intend to touch on in this particular work.

Just as the mythical Narcissus himself fell in love with his
reflection, so does his prototype of to-day. An infant is not only
the omnipotent centre of all, he is also the only interesting portion
of the universe in his early days. His interests are entirely
self-centred, and his joys and pleasures belong to himself alone; and
as he grows older, everything that is like him is identified with
himself. In the worst form of Narcissism in the adult, the individual
remains entirely selfish, and is incapable of loving anybody outside
himself at all.

_By identification, however, he can love in a sense those attributes of
his own personality which he sees in other persons._ Thus, he may love
somebody for a facial similarity, for a voice which is like his, or for
tastes which are like his own, but most commonly he loves them for a
body like his own. And from this we see that he may fall in love with
somebody of his own sex. Hence, homo-sexuality,[5] as it is called,
is frequently one of the distressing results of an early Narcissistic
upbringing. But it need not be necessary for such homo-sexuality to
be of a grossly erotic type; such desires may be for the most part
repressed in the unconscious, or appear only in minor ways such as
the desire to kiss, fondle or touch favoured persons of the same sex.
On the other hand, frequently the early education and environment of
the Narcissistic person has been such as to leave him quite incapable
of complete repression; and we then have expressed more or less
open erotic desires and actions for persons of the same sex. Such
persons, however, should not be treated as criminals in this particular
matter; they are by this time as hopelessly incompetent to deal with
themselves, as is the kleptomaniac or a person having any other form
of so-called degenerate mentality. Here again, we see the reason why
homo-sexuality is so much more rife amongst women than amongst men. The
minor details of their early environment tend so much more to confirm
them in Narcissism. It is partially repressed and partially displaced
homo-sexuality which causes some women to kiss one another, to call one
another by affectionate names and so forth, to delight in taking hold
of one another’s hands on occasion; actions which normally, between
persons of opposite sex, would at once be taken to indicate some sort
of erotic affection, but which we are so used to seeing amongst women
that we do not realise their repressed and unconscious significance.

Let it not be thought, however, that this subject of homo-sexuality is
based on this one simple problem; there are many other early infantile
fixations, which play a very large part in causing persons to become
homo-sexual. I only mention this one Narcissistic complex as being
another example of how identification takes place as one of the chief
results of the Narcissistic temperament, and to what lengths such
identification may, on occasion, lead. Of course, all degrees of such
identifications may be met with, and it is quite common to find persons
who can love hetero-sexually as well as homo-sexually; that is to say,
who can love persons of the opposite sex in the usual way, as well as
persons of their own sex. But such people, even in their hetero-sexual
love, tend to choose a love-object which resembles themselves in some
manner or the other. However, a certain amount of Narcissism (which
fortunately everyone still possesses), may be of value in this way,
for it is certainly good for a man and woman to have similar interests
when they marry; it is excessive Narcissism, excessive identification,
excessive sympathy, which is deleterious, just as in other
manifestations of Narcissism, with which we are going to deal shortly,
it is excessive impatience, excessive anger, excessive tears which are
really harmful, and lead to the greatest unhappiness. Although perhaps
in these latter instances, to be without impatience, anger, or tears
would be better still.

Thirdly, there is yet another method of Narcissistic identification.
Just as a child identifies itself with its living surroundings, so
does it identify itself with its inanimate surroundings. As its mother
and nurse are treated as part of it in the early stages, so also are
its rubber teat, feeding bottle and toys treated. If you take away
the baby’s rattle, it will cry or stamp or weep with as much vigour
and display of emotion as if you had caused it bodily pain by means
of rigorous physical punishment. You have in fact taken away part
of itself from the little omnipotent person. In later stages in his
career, if his Narcissism has been allowed to remain, the adult will
still identify himself with his belongings. He will be absurdly upset
at the breaking of a tea-cup which belongs to him, at the theft of
some jewelry, at damage done to his clothing or property in some way,
however trifling. He cannot realise that these things which belong to
him are more or less unimportant trifles, which can be replaced, or
if they cannot be replaced, can be equally well done without, if he
has attained that philosophical attitude of mind which belongs to the
person who has thrown off this uncomfortable spirit of Narcissistic
identification. Moreover, the Narcissist who thinks himself to be the
best and most important of beings, will attach similar importance to
his property. If he drives an inferior motor-car, which breaks down on
every journey he makes, he will excuse it in all sorts of irrational
ways, he will praise it on every possible occasion as “the best car
on the market,” and what seems more absurd still, he will very likely
think it the best car on the market. It is the same with his house,
his books, with his relations, with everything that is even distantly
connected with him. He will speak in high praise of them all, and be
anxious, at all times, to show them off, and to uphold their virtues
to all comers. The Narcissist, indeed, rationalises about things in
general considerably more than most people. The fuller meaning of
rationalization and its methods of working, however, we shall leave
till later on.

FOOTNOTE:

[5] Homo-sexuality--sensual love for a person of the same sex as
oneself.




CHAPTER VIII

THE IRRITABLE TEMPERAMENT


Irritability is not merely that quality in a person which makes his
friends carefully guard their every word, lest inadvertently they
should cause an outburst of temper, in its fullest sense it means
over-sensitiveness to unpleasant stimuli, followed by over-reaction of
any kind whatsoever. Thus, if a person by accident damage his clothing,
his over-sensitiveness and over-reaction might result in an oath, in
abusing the nail which tore his clothing or in abusing the workman who
put the nail in place originally. It might again result in a feeling of
depression, with anger displaced on to anyone who was present during
the next hour, on the smallest pretext; or in an over-sensitive woman,
it might result in an outburst of tears, or perhaps merely in volubly
deploring the accident for half-an-hour with the next visitor who
called; or she might merely “worry” about it, and keep turning the
memory of it over and over in her mind, refusing to allow the fact to
separate itself from her fancy.

All these various results, with many others which may be imagined,
can be gathered together under the one term “irritability,” or the
term “over-sensitiveness” would do equally well. This irritability or
over-sensitiveness may apply to material things or to purely mental
ones. Narcissism may lead to an irritability of the body, and again it
may lead to irritability merely of the mind. When Narcissism leads to
an extremely sensitive body, it reacts to pain of every sort, however
mild, as though it were acute. The omnipotent mind cannot bear to have
its body disturbed. I gave an example a short while back of the lady
who could not take a fly out of my eye, because her own eyes were so
sensitive. Not only was this particular lady sensitive as regards her
eyes, but at that period she was as afraid of the dentist touching a
tooth as if it had been a serious abdominal operation. Pain of any sort
or even slight accidents involving practically no pain, were reacted
to as though they had been overwhelming misfortunes. Here we had
an excellent example of one in whom Narcissism had produced extreme
irritability of a physical nature.[6]

On the other hand, one finds a mental sensitivity equally pronounced.
People who are always in fear lest somebody should find fault with
them, with their mode of behaviour, with their manner of dress, even
with their habit of thought. Unconsciously, to themselves they are the
acme of perfection, they are the centre of importance, and they are
inclined to think that people are paying very much more attention to
them than is actually the case. They may consciously realise that they
are not important at all, that other people do not give them a thought;
but their unconscious Narcissism will not accept this slight upon their
importance, and they remain miserably self-conscious in all their acts,
reacting with exaggerated feeling whenever some slight criticism of
their thoughts and actions appear even to be implied.

Pride, vanity, and self importance are other manifestations of this
temperament. The person who feels slighted, or whose feelings are hurt
when other persons think too little of his opinions, or pay too little
attention to his actions, or, in fact, whose feelings are hurt easily
by anything whatsoever, is for the most part a Narcissist, in whom once
again the infantile omnipotence has been disturbed.

Jealousy very often represents the Narcissistic idea. The
“dog-in-the-manger” attitude, which finding it cannot possess for
itself, cannot bear anybody else to possess, is largely the attitude
of unconscious phantasy, in which the individual cannot relinquish the
idea that somehow he will succeed by means of his omnipotent mind in
possessing the desired object, and his unconscious mind retains this
idea so long as the object has not become the property of somebody else
in such a definite and irrefutable manner as to prove in spite of his
unconscious phantasy that he cannot possibly possess it himself.

The “dog-in-the-manger” attitude is one which simply refuses to
recognise the impossibility of possessing something, although the
desire for possession in any particular case may unconsciously mean
nothing except the desire to prove to oneself one’s own omnipotence.
And many a case of jealousy in love-affairs is nothing but this
unconscious desire to prove to oneself the possession of power; it is
the hatred of acknowledging the fact that one has not control where
one desires to have it most. Curious as it may seem jealousy is bred
mostly out of self-love rather than out of love for the other person,
although, of course, except in extreme cases, love for the other person
may also exist.

The reaction which takes place whenever the Narcissistic element
is hurt, almost always takes the form of a regression. It will be
remembered that a regression implies a return to an infantile method
of expression. The Narcissist unfailingly hopes, in his unconscious
that his omnipotence will enable him to avoid an unpleasant fact, and
to controvert it magically. He therefore falls back on those acts of
infancy, which he found useful at that early period of his life as
magical means of attaining his ends. Let us assume, for example, that
our Narcissist has entered quietly into an argument with a friend, with
full faith in himself and his argument that he will convert his friend
to his own point of view. He finds, however, that he is getting the
worst of the argument. This is unbelievable to him, he cannot realise
it; his friend must be pig-headed. Rapidly his unconscious mind says to
itself, “What methods did I employ in my childhood, what magic formula
did I use then to obtain what I wished?” “Ah!” says the unconscious, “I
remember; I used abusive terms to my nurse, and the dear thing did what
I wanted at once.” Very soon he is using abusive terms to his friend,
who, however does not later on remark, “Oh! that man is a Narcissist.”
He merely says, “You know, So-and-So never can keep his temper in an
argument.” And the poor Narcissist all the time feels and thinks that
he has been hardly dealt with, that people do not understand him, that
they deliberately will not follow his arguments.

Of course, the last is very likely to be right, for in argument there
is generally more rationalization than there is about most things in
life. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is not really important
that his friend should understand either him or his argument as a
rule, and if he were not Narcissistic he would not over-react to this
stimulus.

Other methods of reaction in a like manner are all regressions to
infancy. Some Narcissists, when they ask their unconscious memory,
“What magic did I employ as a child?” find that it was the magic of
words, and they use expletives of various kinds, which correspond
in every way to the magic words which a conjuror whispers over his
tricks when he performs the apparently impossible. Others remember in
their unconscious mind that they wept copiously, that when they wept
the feeding bottle was returned to their lips, or the toy to their
hands. Others go back a stage further. They withdraw in to themselves,
they refuse to speak, or they say, “I am so upset, I must go and lie
down.” They attempt to return, in fact, to the condition of isolation
and rest, if not of pre-birth, at least of that period immediately
following birth, when if they cried, they were rocked and crooned over
and put to sleep.

Another form of regression largely due to Narcissism is that of
alcoholism. Here again, there are other causes at work in the
unconscious, but Narcissism is one of the most important of them.
The Narcissist does not like real responsibility; he certainly
thinks that he is always desiring responsible posts and positions,
but this is merely because to hold a responsible position or to have
responsibility signifies importance and power. As a matter of fact,
when responsibility is thrust upon him, he often has a strong tendency
to avoid it, because responsibility entails dealing with facts as
they are, and not with phantasies; and the responsibility which the
Narcissist seeks is largely that of phantasy. In spite, therefore, of
his statements to the contrary, we know that he wishes to run away from
responsible positions, and alcohol has a peculiar power of enabling
one to forget the responsibilities of the moment, and at the same time
to give one a feeling of potency and well-being. Consequently, when
the Narcissist comes up against an unpleasant fact, a responsibility
which he does not wish to take, anything in fact which disturbs his
sense of well-being, alcohol serves the purpose of allowing regression
to infancy. It returns him very swiftly to that early period when he
had no responsibility, when he need take no thought of the facts around
him, when he had a sense of well-being and omnipotence. This potency
is increased by the fact that it also removes, simultaneously, other
repressions, that is, it allows other forms of infantile energy to be
expressed without conscious criticism or hindrance.

Exactly the same thing may be said of drug-taking. The drug-taker is
simply habitually seeking something to remove his responsibilities, to
lead him away from his conflicts which he does not wish to face, away
from the world of reality into an infantile world, where whatever his
surroundings, whatever the facts that exist, he is able to ignore them,
and feel himself in phantasy their master.

But the curious thing about all these regressions is that, in a sense,
they serve to satisfy the individual. They comfort him with the
unconscious assurance at the moment they are performed, that all will,
somehow, be well, that these reactions will somehow bring about the
desired end, that the abuse will succeed where the argument did not,
that the tears will somehow perform their magic act, that a rest in bed
will bring about new life, and that the new life will succeed where the
old life failed.

Never does the Narcissist realise facts as they are, deal with them as
facts, see them in their proper proportions, and leave them alone when
he cannot use them.

Impatience of a different kind is also one of the common reactions. A
man may go into a restaurant; he finds it is full, and quite naturally
he is kept waiting a few minutes before the busy waiter can bring him
the menu. He refuses to recognise the fact that he is only one of a
hundred persons present, that the restaurant has to be run at a profit
to the proprietor, that innumerable waiters cannot therefore be kept
to serve his high omnipotence; he frets with impatience and he cannot
resign himself to the inevitable waiting. He will not understand that
_time_ is one of the factors over which he has no power. In fact,
this difficulty to realise the _factor of time_ is an extremely common
one with Narcissists. No sooner has a project entered their heads than
they expect to see it fulfilled. Such fulfilment can only take place in
phantasy, just as they did indeed attain their wishes in childhood. As
children they could instantaneously create a chariot and horses from an
arm-chair with complete neglect of the time-factor, and now as adults,
they hope instantaneously to create an omelet without waiting for it to
be cooked, to create a business or a character, or fame or happiness
in the same instantaneous way, without reference to time. They are
quite unable to see, completely and wholly, any difference between the
phantasy of childhood and facts of adult life; and one of the most
essential differences between the two is this _time factor_.

It takes minutes for an omelet to be cooked, it takes years for a
business to be created, it takes a lifetime for a character to be
formed, fame they may never attain, but happiness lies within their
grasp at once, if only they could relinquish their Narcissism.

FOOTNOTE:

[6] It may be of interest to readers to know that this physical
over-sensitiveness has very largely disappeared from this particular
lady as the result of partial psycho-analysis.




CHAPTER IX

RATIONALIZATION


Having now briefly sketched the birth and some of the possible
developments of Narcissism, it may be well to revert to the subject
of rationalization, on which I have already touched briefly, before I
deal with some of the methods with which we may combat our Narcissistic
tendencies. The reason for reverting here to rationalization is this.
Already I know that there are few readers who will not have discovered
some material in this book which will have touched a tender spot in
themselves. And since we know that the great effort of Narcissism is
to cover up those tender spots, and to deceive ourselves in thinking
that either they are not there, or better still, that they are virtues
and really particularly healthy spots, it is as well to examine these
tendencies and observe one of the chief methods by which we do produce
such disguises successfully. Of these methods of disguise, our greatest
comforter, yet our worst enemy, is rationalization. The term means
“_finding apparently adequate reasons for things_.”

One of the qualities which we highly cultured animals possess is that
of reason. We have discovered that logic is one of the essential
factors of law and order, and that the highest form of intellect
possesses reason in a large measure. Among our gods, the god of reason
and logic stands high, and our very Narcissism will not permit us to
do and accept things which are contrary to logical reasoning. For that
means in the first place, that they are contrary to what we have been
taught to revere highly as a good quality, and yet more still it means
that they are contrary to the magic of WORDS, for logic means words;
logic is words which follow one another in irrefutable sequence. And
we have already learnt that _the infant has early associated words and
sounds with magic, since by the persistent use of these he has got what
he wanted_. So that doubly are logic and reason revered.

Now, the unhappy thing about life is that we are continually wishing
to do things or feel things or believe things which do not follow
logically upon other things which we have also had to feel or think or
believe at some time. Some of our wishes are logically incompatible
with other of our wishes. More over, we very often do not wish to
believe or think things which do follow logically on actual facts which
have gone before. How are we then, as reasonable people, to deal with
the situation? By rationalization, by finding a reason which suits our
purpose; and this can only be done, as a rule, by leaving out some
important factor, by ignoring some truth, and by arguing from false
premises. We do not do this consciously, that would be unworthy. Our
unconscious censor manages to delete from consciousness the unpleasant
truth, as we have already pointed out, and brings forth an array of
facts which appear irrefutable, and he succeeds in giving us most
plausible reasons so that we may believe that which is most convenient
to us.

Let us consider for a moment such a subject as religion. The Roman
Catholic will adduce evidences of various kinds to show that his is
the only right and proper form of religion to be accepted by any
intellectual person. The Baptist will likewise do the same, and will
probably hold that Papal institutions, in many instances, spring not
from Heaven but from Hell. If you discuss it with either of them, you
may be flooded with reasons, logical evidences of the correctness of
their views. Obviously, they cannot both be right in so exclusive a
manner, and a very little insight will show that the reasons they
adduce have really very little to do with their beliefs, although they
think they have. Reverence for their parents, early environment, and
other factors of this kind, have really induced their present beliefs,
but these would not appear to them as logical reasons and so they
select others.

So it is with any unpleasant theory which comes into being. At the
time of Darwin, a large number of facts were discovered which led
unbiassed persons to believe in the theory of evolution. This appeared
contrary to many religious beliefs, and the general public did not
want to accept such a theory. They could not, however, shut their
eyes to facts; what were they to do? By carefully leaving out some of
the facts, and introducing speculative material, which they called
facts, but which were not facts, they succeeded in producing excellent
reasons, or what seemed excellent reasons to them, for refuting the
theory of evolution and retaining their old beliefs. In other words,
they went through a process of rationalization.

The same thing was taking place a few years ago with reference to
psycho-analysis. People did not like their omnipotent feelings
disturbed, did not like to find that the superior bricks of which
their edifice had been built were originally made from clay, and they
found excellent reasons for not believing it. This, fortunately for
progress, is gradually passing away, just as the opposition to the idea
of the evolution of the body passed away. But rationalization is a
process which has been and is still going on continuously. When Harvey
discovered the circulation of the blood, when Galileo discovered that
the earth went round the sun, when psycho-analysts discovered that
much which mothers thought kind was really cruel, and when you read a
book which tends to point out that some of your cherished virtues may
possibly be faults, the same tendency is at work. Your mind sorts out
some of the reasons, refuses to look at others of them, and by such
careful selection, by this unconscious process of rationalization,
supports your belief in yourself, holds fast to that which has been,
and attempts continuously to prevent further changes and disturbances.
This rationalization, however, is much more widely distributed than
I have so far indicated; in order that one fact may be justified by
reason, all the lesser facts which come before it must be similarly
justified, until even into the trivial details of everyday life the
leaven of rationalization has penetrated. Examples of it may be seen
every day in the newspapers, in politics, in even trifling arguments.
Take for instance the subject of woman’s suffrage. One half of the
country produced irrefutable arguments to prove how bad it was, the
other half to prove how good it was. In both cases, the arguments were
but straws in the wind, they were quite unnecessary, they were only
rationalization. Long before the argument on either side came into
being, the feelings were there, the desires were there; and desires
must somehow be proved right with the magic of words, before we feel at
liberty to fulfil them. In neither case in this argument was the root
of the matter touched. If some philosopher had come forward and said,
“The first question we have to ask before thinking about suffrage,
is should a woman wear a skirt?” or some such similar fundamental
question, it would probably have been said that it had nothing to
do with matter, and yet this question of _artificial_ difference
between the sexes is really fundamental to the whole subject. But the
rationalist will find that he will not meet me in this statement. The
woman who wishes to retain certain privileges, and yet accept certain
other privileges, will at once find reasons why she should wear a skirt
and yet have the vote. She will tell me all sorts of things about her
physical disabilities, things which she believes to be fundamental
truths, many of which, in fact, are fundamentally wrong, but accepted
as truths because they lead to rationalization being able to support
her wishes.

In a similar way, on the much discussed subject of “prohibition” the
prohibitionist will rationalise on a certain few facts, in order to
support his emotions and desires. A moderate drinker will do exactly
the same, in the opposite direction. Neither of them will have the
courage to ignore his personal feelings, nor may he have the power
to do so, and to take all the facts into consideration and come to a
conclusion, irrespective of his wishes on the subject.[7]

Of course, one of the other difficulties in the way of coming to
correct conclusions in all these things is that people will insist on
arguing upon subjects, when the amount of real scientific knowledge
they have on the subjects is extremely small. The newspaper editor will
quote a few popular facts, in order to support some theory of his own,
having but a limited knowledge of psychology, physiology, anatomy, or
of some other science which has considerable bearing on the subject,
he will end by producing a series of conclusions probably entirely
wrong. This, of course, is inevitable in our limited circumstances;
but it should not be equally inevitable that we should hold firmly
to our beliefs, when we realise how limited is our knowledge of
any one subject. And in order to examine facts and to get rid of
rationalization as far as possible, we must try, with the utmost power
at our command to refuse that reaction of self-defence and self-pride,
which prevents us from looking at ourselves and from realising that
most of our opinions about ourselves may be completely erroneous. We
must be prepared to accept temporary, not fixed, judgments, based
upon the evidence which we have. We must be prepared to reverse those
judgments in the light of new evidence. We must be careful not to
reject this evidence merely because we do not like it.

It will now be seen how very necessary it is, in dealing with
Narcissism in particular, to understand something of rationalization,
so that we may be on our guard in examining ourselves, against
allowing this to play too great a part in our conclusions. Otherwise,
with all the goodwill in the world, we may never succeed in making
any improvement whatsoever, in ourselves. The greatest scientists
themselves have been amongst those who realised this.

It was Darwin who wrote, as we have quoted in the earlier part of this
book, “I had, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that
whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across
me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of
it without fail and at once, for I had found by experience that such
facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than
favourable ones.”

And it was the great scientist, Helmholtz, who said, “It is better to
be in actual doubt, than to rock oneself in dogmatic ignorance.”

FOOTNOTE:

[7] Of course this does not imply that no one is ever capable of
putting his conscious feelings on one side, and examining a subject
in spite of pre-conceived ideas and desires, but that this is the
exception rather than the rule.



PART II

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS




CHAPTER X

SELF ANALYSIS


In attempting to cure ourselves of hyper-Narcissistic characteristics,
there are several lines of treatment which may be followed, some of
which depend upon the particular manifestation of Narcissism with
which we have to deal. One, however, which should be followed in
every case, we borrow from the methods of psycho-analysis. We cannot
call it psycho-analysis because the technique employed by an amateur
in examining himself must be vastly different from the technique
employed by a psycho-analyst in dealing with his patient. But it is a
modification of one detail of the technique of psycho-analysis which,
if properly applied, may have far-reaching results. It is on the lines
of that phenomenon which is known generally as ab-reaction, and is as
follows.

When an individual has come to the conclusion that he is suffering from
some characteristic of Narcissistic nature, which he would rather
be without, he should, first of all, carefully call to mind, and if
possible make historical notes of the situations which stimulate the
particular temperamental reaction to which he objects. If he can, he
should go further than this, and recall as many as possible of the
actual situations of recent date, when this particular reaction has
been called forth.

If he have an ungovernable temper, for example, he should, in detail,
go first into the type of situations which call forth that temper, and
secondly, he should revise in detail the recent occasions upon which he
has lost his temper, and thirdly, _he should attempt to find out the
particular moment, the particular words, the particular occasion which
first began to stir feelings of temper within him before he actually
began to show violent manifestations of it_.

Having all these things set forth satisfactorily, it would be well
if he spent half-an-hour every day, for a considerable period, in
performing the next part of the treatment. He should go into a room
by himself, where he will not be disturbed, recline on a couch or
a comfortable chair, and allow his mind to drift backwards, year by
year, remembering as far as possible, every instance on which the
unfavourable symptom has been called forth. He will find that if he
does not concentrate too hard, but merely keeps in mind the various
causes of his temper and recent manifestations of it, other times
and instances will come into his mind unbidden. He will, in fact, be
surprised at the amount of detail which he can remember concerning
the matter. Things which he had not thought of for years, happenings
which he had passed over as trivial, will come into his mind, and be
found to have stimulated, in some way or the other, the ill-temper (or
other Narcissistic trouble) which he is endeavouring to get rid of. He
must take himself, as far as possible, right into childhood. He will
not necessarily of course, go back as far as this on the first few
occasions, but after he has been at work on himself in this way for
some days, he should have no trouble whatever in beginning to recall
some of the infantile occasions upon which his Narcissism called forth
temper.

In all the instances which he brings up into his conscious mind, he
should write down and study not only the facts remembered, but also the
emotions which he felt. These he should examine from every possible
point of view, and see what Narcissistic element appears to be present
in them. Many memories will come into his mind of an infantile nature
which do not express the particular symptom from which he now suffers,
but will obviously have some bearing on it. These he should examine in
the same way, because it is important for him to get into his conscious
mind as much as possible of the various occasions in his life on which
Narcissism acted, when he was not conscious of it. Not only must he
see how these various occasions were exhibitions of Narcissism, but he
must try and trace them back, and must compare them with his typical
infantile methods of expression. These may be represented by shouting,
crying, stamping, weeping or any other infantile manifestations
of those omnipotent phantasies which now seem to him to be the
starting-point of his more recent expression of them. He has, in fact,
to lay bare before himself, as much as possible of his previously
unconscious Narcissistic life; its beginnings, its evolution, and its
ultimate form. This making conscious of what was previously unconscious
or but partly conscious, is, in itself, a most potent factor in
improvement, if he will have the patience to steadily persevere and to
go over daily, for a considerable period, the material he has brought
to the surface. If he does not do this regularly, it is liable to sink
back, and become once again an unconscious factor and a determinant to
his actions over which he has no control.

This bringing into consciousness the unconscious causes and motives
under-lying behaviour is, in psycho-analysis, one of the powerful
factors at work producing cures of neurotic obsessions and so forth,
and it is equally potent with the minor temperamental abnormalities
with which we are dealing here. For it means that previous mental
conflicts which were either wholly or partially unconscious, are now
rendered conscious habitually; and a conscious conflict, or rather a
conflict in which the forces at work become conscious, is far easier
to direct than one in which the very forces themselves are hidden and
unknown. Let us take a more material example for comparison. Suppose an
officer to be in command of a company of soldiers out in the desert,
and attacked on a dark night by savages. It might very well be that he
was well armed, that his machine guns were efficient, but that he would
be quite overwhelmed because he could neither see the savages nor know
their numbers, their whereabouts nor their armaments. But supposing
that the War Office had thoughtfully equipped him with one or two good
search-lights, which he could direct upon the savages so that the
number of savages, their armaments, position, and so forth, could be
brought into his consciousness, he would be in a far better position,
for he could direct his machine-guns at the threatened points, instead
of being forced to fire them wildly and as likely as not miss his
targets altogether.

Exactly the same happens with these manifold feelings to which I
have just been referring. The more one can see of them, their
histories, their evolution, their beginnings, the more one holds them
in consciousness, the easier does the conflict between good and evil
become in the individual. Again, this method of self-help which I have
given here, differs considerably from that pursued in psycho-analysis,
in that it is following up only one unconscious factor, albeit, one
of the most important factors; but in psycho-analysis we follow up in
turn all the unconscious forces at work, great and small, and in any
temperamental abnormality there are certainly many more unconscious
factors than Narcissism concerned, although Narcissism may be the
predominant one. Thus, for instance, alcoholism, though always
possessing a Narcissistic element, frequently has other determinants
present of an exceptionally strong[8] nature. So that while an
analysis of Narcissism only, may be of the greatest value in some
cases, in others, where Narcissism does not occupy so great a field,
the other unconscious factors are too potent to allow much benefit to
accrue from a partial self-analysis of this kind.

In drug-taking, however, there is a slight difference from alcoholism,
for, as a rule, Narcissism is nearly always the essential factor. It
will be understood that Narcissism links itself to almost any other
characteristic, influencing it for the worse by fixing it more deeply,
and holding it back from becoming conscious more strongly than would
otherwise be the case.

The patient will find himself, during this self-examination, repeatedly
trying to excuse himself. He will find himself saying, “I remember on
such an such an occasion losing my temper, but on that occasion I was
perfectly justified.” Or in another instance, he may say, “I remember
weeping (or I remember being depressed or angry, or impatient), but
circumstances then existed which seem to me proper occasions for such a
manifestation to have taken place.”

Let me emphasise at the outset, that any such excuses will be
rationalizing; that he must say to himself, “Whether they appear normal
or abnormal, according to accepted standards, those occurrences most
certainly had their Narcissistic factor.” For it must be understood
that although there are many occasions when impatience or weeping may
be looked upon, conventionally, as normal occurrences, that is only
because everybody possesses certain imperfections due to Narcissism;
and if one is going to attempt to improve one’s temperament in this
way, every occasion must be examined without excuse or rationalization,
otherwise the individual who is thus at work upon himself will only
succeed in defeating himself to his own detriment, by putting up
a resistance to his cure or improvement. And, indeed, one of the
important factors in this work, just as in psycho-analysis itself, is
the factor which comes into play in overcoming these resistances of
seeing ourselves as we are, of seeing the evolution and beginnings of
our temperament as it really was.

This is bound to reveal in all of us without exception much that is
unpleasant, and that we would rather not see. Resistance to seeing such
material is inevitable, if the examination is sufficiently thorough. If
no resistance has to be overcome, the individual may be certain that he
is shirking the facts.

FOOTNOTE:

[8] Alcoholism is further complicated by the fact that a habit of
_physical_ craving is formed, which as a rule cannot be overcome
by mental treatment alone. This craving, fortunately, can now be
eradicated by medicinal means. Indeed, patients of mine have been cured
of all desire for alcohol in about one week as a rule. The patient
is then in somewhat the same condition as a man who has never tasted
alcohol, and he will have no craving for alcohol thereafter, unless he
deliberately drinks it again. Herein, however, we see the importance of
the psychic factor, for should the cured alcoholic begin again to take
alcohol, either because he thinks that he has attained self control
and can do so, or because he finds abstinence difficult on social
grounds, he will almost inevitably regress to his old condition of
uncontrolled desire, no matter how long has elapsed since he was cured
of it. _The same causes which originally led him to excess, viz., his
mental complexes, are still present and again produce similar results._
Of course, a very large proportion of those who have been cured by
medicinal treatment do not relapse, because they have sufficient common
sense not to experiment with themselves. In the other cases, however,
the only hope of a permanent cure consists in following up the physical
treatment with mental treatment, i.e., analysis.

On the other hand, in most cases of drug taking a medicinal cure is
generally sufficient, for there is no “social urge” to taking drugs as
there is in the case of alcohol, and once the craving has been cured,
the tendency to experiment again is the exception rather than the rule.
But even here it is found that any indulgence in the drug, however
slight, will again produce in the individual his old craving. _He has
found a previous path of narcissistic regression and will inevitably
follow it, for though the craving had been eradicated the complexes
remain._ There are many potential alcoholics and potential drug-takers
in the world, but they will never know it unless unfortunate chance
induces them to open that particular channel of regression.




CHAPTER XI

READJUSTMENT OF OBJECTIVES


In the last chapter we described a process of self-assistance of
the kind which should be applied by any person, to any Narcissistic
manifestation he may desire to improve. In the present chapter we are
going to deal with a method of treatment which is by no means necessary
in all cases, but is very necessary in a large proportion of them.

We must bear in mind that the Narcissist’s inability to realise
distinctly the difference between phantasy and fact will often lead
him to suppose possible that which is impossible in the ordinary
affairs of everyday life, and to ignore difficulties which may really
be insuperable, which stand in the way of his aims and projects. He
will thus be continually finding himself at a disadvantage, continually
failing, from apparently trivial reasons, to accomplish an end, and
as a result he may become depressed, nervous, worried, and subject
to that lassitude accompanied by headaches, which so frequently comes
to the Narcissist when he struggles unavailingly with the ordinary
aims and tasks of everyday life. Moreover, not only does he fail to
recognise the difficulties in the way of any particular task, but he
fails to recognise the fact that two projects which he has in his mind
may be incompatible with one another; or he fails to recognise that
great “_Time-factor_,” which I have mentioned before, and tries to
condense more work and more visible results into a given period than is
humanly possible.

This type of Narcissist is always considerably addicted to day-dreams,
with which, however, we shall deal in a further chapter. For the
present, we are going to restrict ourselves to the question of
arranging his aims and wishes on a sound and possible basis. In the
first place, let it be understood that although the method of treatment
so far carried out may have made clear to the patient the origin and
development of his phantasy thought and phantastic aims, there yet
remains the breaking of the habit, and this is rendered far more easy
if we attempt to substitute another habit of a different nature. Let
us further impress upon him the fact that a frequent examination of
his aims in a directive manner by the method about to be discussed is
in itself an exercise in directive thinking, helping to form a habit
opposed to a former habit of phantasy thinking. And, lastly, let it be
remembered that Narcissists are generally very averse from making real
personal sacrifices which have no glamour attached to them; that they
object to adapting themselves to reality which may be unpleasant, and
that by the method I am about to describe, they will have to deal in
trivial things, and the conscious adjustment which they will thus make
towards reality will gradually become habitual.

What we are attempting to do now is to substitute directive thought
and directive aims, aims possible of attainment, for phantasy thoughts
and impossible aims. Most people will find on self-examination that
their aims are by no means clearly defined; they have an object in
life, but it is vague in outline, and ill-defined; it is often only
a question of getting somehow through life, with enough food to eat,
and sufficient phantasy thought to keep them from boredom. This again,
is especially the case with some women, whose household duties require
but little directive thought, since they are daily repetitions of the
same thing. Dusting a room is a habit which becomes pleasanter if
accompanied by phantasy thinking; whereas, had that woman some definite
aim, apart from the habit of house-cleaning, it would be possible to
accompany the room-dusting with directive thought which revolved round
the aim in question, and this would very much add to the pleasure and
efficiency of the individual’s life. If a person, on self-examination,
finds that his aims are not clearly defined, or are in conflict with
one another, or, on the other hand, that his aims or thoughts are in
part phantasy and impossible of fulfilment, that person should at once
deliberately remould and re-state his aims, so that they become:

(a) clearly defined,

(b) clearly possible.

Moreover, the aims should be of two kinds:

(1) immediate,

(2) remote.

The remote aim is the ideal for which he is striving; and however high
that ideal be, it should be of a kind possible of fulfilment, not
necessarily in the lifetime of the individual, in all cases, for he may
be working for something of which he does not expect fulfilment for
even hundreds of years, yet it may be perfectly legitimately termed a
real aim, as opposed to a phantastic one.

_Now, the first thing which the individual should bear in mind is that
an immediate aim should always be in harmony with the remote aim._ Let
it also be borne in mind that when we state that the aim should be
clearly possible, we do not only mean that the aims should be possible
from a point of view of external environment and circumstances, but
also having regard to the patient’s own intelligence, will-power,
education, and physical health--in other words possible in the case of
this particular individual.

Now let us consider in detail the further course to be pursued by the
person who proposes to treat himself on these lines. Let him take
pencil and paper and write out in the fullest of details a list of
his aims, great and small, in the first place, without any reference
to their bearing upon one another, or any attempt at classification,
keeping in mind that by aims in life, we mean wishes which he hopes
will be fulfilled. Let him think of every conceivable wish in his mind,
and write it down, whether phantastic in nature, or trivial, or whether
both possible and important.

In the next place, let him see that this list is written so clearly
and accurately, that each of the aims is well defined and without
ambiguity. Now let him run through the list again, and see whether
any of the aims are in conflict with one another, and whether any of
them are inconsistent from the view point of his, and are therefore
impossible of fulfilment. Let him put his pencil definitely through
such impossible aims, and cut them out of his life, with as full a
realisation as possible of the fact that they are nothing but dreams,
that he need never consider them again, that he must not regret them,
for that is mere infantile crying after the impossible. He must
replace them in due course with others possible of fulfilment.

Now let him take the revised list and separate it into two divisions,
writing the aims down again under the two headings, (1) immediate aims,
and (2) remote aims. Here, he will have to bear in mind one of his
chief faults, if he be strongly Narcissistic. Such persons in their
phantasy carry their aims to completion long before reality can permit
of it. The time-factor is not realised, and hence they have a great
tendency to confuse remote aims with the immediate aims, in their
desire to see immediate results; hence, also, because they cannot soon
see such results, they give way to despair, become depressed, and have
the tendency to regress to the infantile characteristics to which I
have already referred. Here lies the importance of dividing the aims
into immediate and remote. For as soon as the individual’s mind has
grasped the fact that an aim is necessarily remote, and therefore
impossible of immediate fulfilment, he is much more able to adjust
himself to these facts, and to pay real and undivided attention to
the immediate present. Apart from the fact that sorting and adjusting
of the aims relieves the mind of many previous conflicts, it acts as
a stimulus to a considerable amount of directive thinking. And the
patient will be surprised at first to find the amount of time it is
possible to spend in a really useful recasting of his life interests.

It was not until the author, himself, took pencil and paper, and
classified his own aims, and put down the points for and against each,
and attempted to see the disharmonies existing amongst them, that he
realised the full value of this procedure. It might be thought that in
a very short period any person could put down all his aims, and that
but little modification would take place in them from day to day. This,
however, is very far from being true, as will be seen by anyone who
carries out this method fully.

Perhaps at this point the details taken from a case of a woman
suffering from a “nervous breakdown” in which I used this method as a
subsidiary form of treatment, may not only be of interest, but will
also throw some light on the practical working of the method. I may
mention that her chief troubles were insomnia, constant worrying, great
depression, and inability to settle down to work of any kind.

In the first place, this patient commenced by stating that she had no
aim in life at all. She had to admit, however, immediately after, that
she had at least the aim of wishing to get well, or otherwise she would
not have come to me. On being asked why she wished to get well, several
subsidiary aims appeared. For the most part, they were rationalization,
and I knew these aims would be thrown over in due course, but that, for
the purpose in view, did not matter. I told her to go home, and write
down her aims, in the manner I have just indicated.

The following was the list brought to me on the next day.


     (1) To be well.

     (2) To be married.

     (3) To become a doctor.

     (4) And if I cannot do that, to become a masseuse.

     (5) Or a psycho-analyst.

     (6) Or a private secretary.

     (7) And I should like to have two children.


With this rather pathetic list in front of me, I asked her to give as
far as possible the reasons she had for these various wishes, and to
examine these on the lines I had indicated, with the following results.

(1) _To get well._ “The reason for this aim is obvious; it is necessary
in order to obtain the others,” said she.

(2) _To get married._ “This aim has three subsidiary immediate aims,”
she replied, “and there may be others. (a) I want a comfortable home of
my own, (b) I want satisfaction of my natural instincts in accordance
with the custom of ordinary adult life, (c) I could attain the later
aim of having two children.” She immediately added, “In that case, the
aim of having two children is a remote aim, and if I follow your advice
I must no longer have day-dreams about them, I must put them out of my
thoughts, I must not waste time on anything connected with them, until
I am married.”

(3) _To become a doctor._ “Concerning this,” she added, “I have
always liked studying Zoology, and microscopic work, and diseases.
Moreover, it is the only way in which one can make money in a really
interesting manner.” She then stated that she realised this to be
a double aim, and to consist, firstly, of the aim of earning a
livelihood, and secondly, of that of having an interesting occupation.
This aim was soon discovered to be phantastic, however, for she had to
admit that her financial position would not permit of the necessary
study, and that there was no prospect of any improvement in this. She
therefore realised that although she had had it at the back of her
mind for several months that somehow such an aim might be possible of
fulfilment, she now clearly saw that it was not. She at once removed
it from the list, and realised that neither regrets nor phantasy in
connection with it would be of any avail, and again, that she must bear
in mind possibilities and realities.

(4) _To become a masseuse._ She at once stated her thoughts on this
subject. “I have known one or two masseuses, who seem to make money,
and who are very happy. Moreover, it is an occupation that a lady can
take up.” She then discovered that this involved three aims: (a) to
make money, (b) to be happy, (c) to remain genteel. On the opposite
side, however, she added that she was not sufficiently physically
strong for the work, and was afraid she would soon tire of it, because
as an occupation itself, it did not appeal to her. This aim, also,
immediately disappeared from the list.

(5) _To become a psycho-analyst._ This, said she, was a very
interesting subject, and she thought she could do much good by means of
it. Moreover, she thought she would like psychology though she had not
studied it much as yet. “Moreover,” said she, “psycho-analysts probably
make a lot of money. And further, it would be very nice to sit at
home in an arm-chair to do one’s work, and to let other people do the
talking.” She at once recognised this latter idea to be a thoroughly
Narcissistic regression. And then she found that all the other ideas
contained multiple aims in themselves, each of which had to be thought
out and classified, and into the details of which I need not go. Except
to say that when she considered the matter from a practical point of
view, the difficulties of training, the time it would take, and more
especially the fact that she feared that psycho-analysis might not be
popular by the time she was ready, she determined that it was only a
phantasy aim, upon which she had been wasting phantasy thought, and she
ruled it out.

(6) _To become a private secretary._ On this point, she considered that
her personal appearance and general education would help her, and was
quite compatible with the aim. But she knew no shorthand, book-keeping,
nor typewriting. She, however, realised at once that the immediate aim
in this case should be the shorthand, book-keeping, and typewriting,
and she said, “I will go to-morrow and see where I can learn these
things.” I pointed out to her that she might very possibly change
her mind, when she considered things further, but that even if she
did so, the mastery of shorthand, typewriting and book-keeping might
stand her in good stead, and in any case that she would be working for
an immediate object, in turning some of her phantasy into directive
thought. And on the morrow, she actually did commence her studies on
these subjects.

(7) _The desire to have two children._ This was at once classified, as
I have already said, as a remote aim; though, as a matter of fact, she
got married shortly afterwards, and the remote aim is now on the way to
being fulfilled, as she has one child.

I have shown by this example the ill-considered, phantastic, and
conflicting aims, which some persons may at first produce when they
attempt deliberately to classify them. But it must be remembered that
each of the subsidiary aims which she had discovered her primary aims
to be divided into were, in turn, again capable of being divided into
further subsidiary aims. And the next stage of this form of technique
is to discover these. Day by day, the pencil and paper must be
brought out, and a list of aims and wishes for that day compiled and
considered. They must be in turn examined to show (1) whether they are
compatible with one another, (2) whether they are compatible with other
immediate aims, (3) whether they are compatible with the remote aims.

A strong attempt must then be made to eradicate any aims or wishes
which are antagonistic to one another, or to the primary aims of the
individual, which have already been passed as real. As progress is
made, definite and personal aims will be developed day by day, many of
these, no doubt, apparently trivial, others at least important for the
day in question, all important from the point of view of developing the
habit of thinking in terms of reality.

For instance, on one occasion, the lady above mentioned wrote on her
list in the morning that she wished to work hard at her shorthand
in the early part of the day, to go to a matinée in the afternoon,
and to a dance in the evening. On consideration, however, she came
to the conclusion that the dance in the evening, following after
the day’s work and entertainment, would probably interfere with her
next morning’s work, and it was not, moreover, compatible with that
immediate aim of regaining complete health at the earliest possible
moment. It was, therefore, rejected; the lesser aim was recast, and
a quiet dinner with a friend substituted. Only by such rigorous and
possibly painful self-treatment can the Narcissist’s conflicts be
regulated and viewed in a proper perspective.

Every daily aim has a further subsidiary aim appertaining to it. For
instance, a man may have made up his mind to devote a certain part
of the day to studying; the lesser aim includes the subject to be
studied, the amount to be done, and the time to be occupied. It is
important that he should not over-estimate the amount he can get done
in a given time. One reason why so much detail should be considered,
is that it is astounding how excessively a person, with a tendency to
phantasy thought, over-estimates the amount of work it is possible
to get through in a given time. No sooner is a task commenced than
he expects it to be almost finished. The daily programme frequently
includes far more than is possible, and he forms a habit of being late
for everything; all this being merely the ordinary omnipotent idea of
childhood, which fulfils a wish in phantasy as readily as it is formed.

I must now give a warning, that those who follow this method are, at
first, nearly always extremely impatient for results, for this very
reason that they do not realise the time-factor; and they must realise,
and consciously and patiently accept inevitable delay, with the
assurance that if they can overcome their Narcissism sufficiently to
persist in the method they will steadily and gradually develop a habit,
an attitude of mind which devotes its energy to directive thought, to
real aims, and to displacing from themselves the phantastic medley
which was there before.




CHAPTER XII

READJUSTMENT OF THOUGHT


We have seen in an earlier chapter how one of the ways in which
Narcissism manifests itself is in day-dreams. We saw how a child would
substitute a phantasy or day-dream for a reality, and so fulfil its
wishes and desires in this unreal manner. And we saw how, if this were
persisted in to excess, the same or a modified method of fulfilling
one’s wishes in realms of phantasy would remain even in adult life.
I may here remark that even _very little_ day-dreaming constitutes
excess, and is bound to have a deleterious effect upon the efficiency
and happiness of the individual’s life; unless, perhaps, that
individual is mixing sufficient directive thought with his phantasies
as in the case of a novelist or artist, for instance. In realising
this, it must be borne in mind, that time and energy spent in phantasy
thinking are time and energy lost to reality and fact; that the
encouragement of the habit of phantasy thinking destroys the ability
to think directively, or rather renders the full development of it
impossible. Moreover, by encouraging day-dreams, we are simultaneously
holding on to our Narcissism, and making it more likely that it
will also find outlets in other deleterious ways. For instance, the
“worrying nature” which is constantly thinking of possible troubles to
come, and of how past troubles might have been avoided is indulging in
a form of phantasy thinking. If the habit of phantasy thinking has been
cultivated for pleasurable purposes, a channel has been opened which
will be used without conscious intention for other kinds of phantasy
as well. The habit of worrying to which we have just referred, is an
example of this.

Worry consists in weaving phantasies about something which cannot at
the moment be influenced directively. It may be about something which
_has_ happened and therefore cannot be influenced at all by thinking
about it, or about something which _may_ happen but over which the
thinker has no immediate control; and it consists in going over all
the “mays” and “mights” connected with the case, and experiencing
the unpleasant emotions belonging to each phantasied situation. In
order to get rid of this worrying habit, to close the channel which
permits of it, a person must simultaneously cut out pleasurable
day-dreams also, and thus close the channel entirely. Therefore, let
us recommend the individual who indulges largely in day-dreams, to get
rid of the habit as soon as possible. Those who have other abnormal
characteristics which they wish to eradicate, should understand that
they must, simultaneously, get rid of their day-dreams. And this means
pulling oneself up, not merely when one discovers oneself imagining
some glorious vista in which one occupies a principle but impossible
part, it means similarly pulling oneself up in a thousand little ways;
it means catching oneself whenever one wanders from a type of directive
thought to a type of phantastic thought.

For instance, in the examination of one’s aims, one is thinking
directively, and one comes to the conclusion that, say, a course
of shorthand and typewriting shall be taken at once, that the aim
of being a secretary is one suitable and compatible with one’s
attainments. At this point, it is very easy for the individual to
suddenly find that he or she has become, in day-dreams, the secretary
of a duke or American millionaire. And if he does not pull himself up
at this stage, he will find that the duke’s money has been left him,
or she will find that she has married the American millionaire. And
so the phantasy goes on. It starts in reality, but the Narcissistic
temperament takes it right away from this. It must be nipped in the
bud at the very beginning, if the habit of directive thought is to be
established. As soon as the individual finds himself drifting in this
way, wasting energy, fulfilling wishes by mere dreams, he must pull
himself up short, and say to himself, “Here the real ends, there the
phantasy begins. This is the point I must come back to, I must deal
with this matter from the real point of view only, without allowing
this phantasy to intrude itself.”

And here again, much patience will be needed, for if the habit has
already been cultivated, he will soon be back in phantasy again,
probably in less than five minutes. But phantasy thought does not only
mean day-dreams in the sense in which we have spoken of them here. It
may take all sort of disguises, and what would be phantasy thought in
one person, would be directive thought in another. In one case, the
environment and education and inherent ability would not be of that
order which could make the thoughts come to be facts; in the other case
the abilities of the person might be sufficient to do so. Thus, were an
ordinary person to sit in his arm-chair, and phantasy a wonderful plan
for the conquest of Europe, without having either the will or the means
of carrying out his ambition, that would constitute phantasy thinking
pure and simple. If, however, a Napoleon did the same, with the will
and the possible means, with the near aim at hand in the conquest of
a small country, and the subsequent conquest of Europe as an ultimate
one, his method of thought would have to be described as directive
thinking. So that similar thinking in two different individuals may
really be classified as two different principles of thinking.

I have no doubt that many readers will be saying to themselves now,
“But my greatest pleasure is to be found in day-dreams. I find in
directive thinking nothing but hard work.”

In such a case, if the individual cannot enjoy his directive
thinking, and he gets no emotional discharge by means of it, it is
possible that his aims in life are unsuited to him, or that he has
not sufficient aims in life, that his time is not as fully occupied
with interesting _acts_ as it should be. In such a case, subsidiary
aims should be formed deliberately, wherein he could take an interest
in directive thinking. _For it may be accepted as a fact that, with
proper cultivation and education, more real pleasure can be found in
suitable directive thinking than in any amount of day-dreams._ It is
also a further fact that the individual’s energy is not then wasted,
but is more or less efficiently utilised. Moreover, instead of losing
strength of character, he is now gaining it. Let it be borne in mind,
always, that continual indulgence of phantasy thought, from its very
ease, breeds the habit of inertia, for the individual’s aims and wishes
attain fulfilment without any need for activity on his part; and here
a vicious circle is produced, because the inertia, which he has thus
encouraged, now in its turn tends to make him resort to phantasy the
more.

It is easy, of course, to say, “I will cut myself off from phantasy
thought, I will pull myself up whenever this occurs, and leave it
alone.” But it is by no means easy to act up to this resolution. If,
however, another kind of directive thought is deliberately substituted
for the phantasy, the task is made very much easier. If the water in
the bath is too hot, and we want it to cool rapidly, we do not merely
turn off the hot tap, we simultaneously turn on the cold.

The task will be rendered more easy still, if the individual selects
his subject of directive thought to replace phantasy beforehand, not
waiting until the time comes. For instance, we will suppose that,
as one subsidiary aim with which to fill in his time, a person has
selected the collection of postage stamps. He will each day have in
front of him some page which he wishes to arrange in chronological
order, to consider from the point of view of water-marks and
perforations; and he may make up his mind that as soon as he finds
himself dealing in phantasy thought he will not only cut out the
phantasy thought but will at once start arranging, in his mind, the
stamps which he was shortly going to arrange in his book. It matters
not in the least what form the substitute thought takes, so long as it
possesses two qualities, (1) it is directive, _i.e._, it is going to
lead to some sort of actual change or action, and (2) that it bears
a pleasurable interest. And for that reason, I have selected a very
trivial form of directive thought as an example. The point is that
the individual should select some subject in which he has a personal
and active interest, as a subject with which he may replace phantasy
thought, whenever the latter comes into his mind.

Phantasy thought may, further, not be of necessity thoughts impossible
of fulfilment, except in the immediate present. Thoughts of erotic
or other desires which intrude themselves at untimely moments, are
phantasy thoughts, and some people frequently complain that they are
annoyed by them, especially when they have no intention of actually
fulfilling them in fact, or when the means of fulfilling them are
not present. Here again, to have a subject ready at hand, or to
have a substitute thought for the undesired thoughts is a very real
assistance. Even a sentence thought out beforehand or a good maxim
which can be repeated several times and considered, forms an excellent
substitute thought with which to replace the unwanted phantasy.

Let us now consider a few other examples. The majority of educated
people, of a so-called normal type, when they have completed their
day’s work, and are fatigued, require some sort of mental rest, and as
a rule some kind of phantasy thought is resorted to in the evening.
Also, when this fatigue is cumulative, they say, “We have worked
eleven months, and now require one month’s holiday.” This is really an
unconscious phantasy requiring a regressive reward. They are not really
tired out, physically or mentally, but they have accumulated, after
a series of postponements, a large number of Narcissistic efforts at
phantasy; and the holiday which they now require is really to satisfy
this. It is a return to childhood and the time of irresponsibility,
and their occupations on the holiday may very likely be, to a large
extent, similar to those with which they occupied themselves in
childhood. They throw off their adult status and responsibility, and
deliberately take this regressive reward. Even with normal people
the idea of _rest_ in the form of a holiday, often means nothing but
phantasy thought, time disregarded, no effort of any sort to be made.

But in the less Narcissistic type of person who still retains directive
thought even on a holiday--a holiday means merely change in immediate
aim, change in occupation, rather than rest from aim and occupation.

Phantasy thinking may take many quite surreptitious forms. In old age,
for instance, we know that type of person, who is quietly slipping
into helpless imbecility. He is the same man, who, at an earlier age,
lacked the habit of directive thought. On the other hand, there is
our intellectual old man or woman, still full of the day’s problems
or politics, who indulged, in early life, but little in phantasies.
Experience shows us that the influence of directive or undirective
thought in youth may not only determine our happiness in declining
years, but may even determine the actual age to which we live. For,
paradoxically, it is the Narcissist, who of all people desires a long
life, and who is, of all people, the least likely to attain old age. He
frequently “worries himself into the grave.”

We have not yet exhausted the forms of phantasy thought. A casual
conversation between acquaintances in which no information of value
is imparted, in which merely some emotional material is brought to
the surface and thrown out, is undirective thought. The first person,
interested in some emotional experience, recounts to the second the
facts of that experience, often without arousing any emotional feeling
in the second person. Such is the type of conversation which takes
place over a vast majority of tea-tables. It is wasted energy.

Another example is that of conventional letter-writing, in certain
cases. The duty letter which one person writes to another person is
of the same type. The writer who deals with his or her experiences
on a shopping expedition, who states a series of things which have
happened, merely in order to enjoy them once again in phantasy, is
performing the same waste of energy. There is no return for this
expended energy, the rush of ideas produces no result. Perhaps the
time is due for a letter to be written, and it is the turn of this
person to write a letter. As a result of this conventional attitude,
the writer has to resort to phantasy thought to satisfy the needs of
the moment. We have pointed out that reading a novel is a form of
phantasy thinking, in which we identify ourselves with the hero. The
same occurs in our cinemas. Here, the pleasure of phantasy thinking is
enhanced by the fact that the visual impression is produced direct,
whereas in reading a novel the visual impression is by words only,
and a certain amount of effort is needed to translate it in the mind
into its pictorial form; and thus the cinematograph induces a form of
phantasy thinking which needs the least effort of all to realise. It
is within the reach of anyone possessing a few pence, and although the
average person may regard it as educative and useful to the community,
the magistrate who is dealing with the youthful delinquent knows the
cinematograph to be very harmful to the child’s mind. And there is no
doubt that the unconscious effect of such mental stimuli is excessively
deleterious to the race in general. The indulgence in it encourages
the habit of phantasy thinking at a small cost, and such a habit soon
becomes established as part of the individual’s make-up. Nor does the
evil stay itself here. For the phantasy in the cinematograph consists
usually in the fulfilment of impossible wishes, and in this, as in
other cases, the emotional output is increased out of all proportion
to the real exciting causes. This results in a misplacement in the
emotional output in the unconscious mind, which in its turn is the
basis of many neurotic conditions which may even require a physician’s
aid to eradicate. And one must remember that a neurotic condition need
not merely be the illness of an individual, it may be, and often is,
the disease of a nation. Hence, like the fairy-tale, the cinema, as it
is at present, should not be used as a child’s pastime.


§2

In other forms of Narcissism also, we shall find it easier to break
away from phantasy if we substitute a reality; that is, if we turn our
flow of energy into a real, instead of an imaginary channel, instead of
merely trying to dam the flow in the original channel. In cases where
this Narcissism involves a bad habit, such as irritability, impatience,
weeping, etc., the line that should be followed differs rather from
that suggested in the case of day-dreams. In the first place, not only
should we pull ourselves up short, but we should also bear in mind,
immediately, the first part of the technique which we suggested in
a previous chapter. That is to say, we should call to mind what our
abnormal act really means, and having done this, having realised it in
consciousness, _we should then endeavour to use the same energy which
we should have used for this abnormal act in an immediate and useful
manner_. Now, in all these cases, our abnormal reaction takes place
because our omnipotence or sense of perfection is disturbed; and since
this sense of perfection is not real, the easiest and most convenient
channel for us to turn our energy into is one which still satisfies the
sense of perfection, that is to say, one in which we may feel that _we
are, by our act, becoming more perfect in reality, instead of clinging
to our perfection in phantasy_. It is impossible to give examples to
cover the very many reactions which may take place, but one actual
example, given in detail, should be sufficient to enable the individual
to invent others to suit his own case. Let us again take the case
of the impatient man, in which the Time-factor has never been fully
realised.

Let us say that he has entered a restaurant for lunch, and that
having glanced down the menu, he then has to wait ten minutes before
the waiter attends to him. Probably, after the first minute of that
time, he has begun to get impatient; at the end of ten minutes he is
either making up his mind to go without his lunch, so great is his
irritability, or else he is, with great emotion, explaining to his
neighbour how extremely inefficient this restaurant is, as regards
management, service, and, in fact, everything connected with it. He is
utterly unable to realise the facts of the case. Let us again refer
to the facts for a moment. The restaurant is a business, and must make
a profit; in order to do this, only a limited number of waiters can
possibly be kept, and the number of these has to be regulated by the
_average_ number of customers, by the profit which it is possible to
make in the neighbourhood, and other factors. In the second place, the
luncheon hour is one at which the number of customers is well above
the average, and therefore in which the service is bound to be the
slowest; however good the management, however skilful the waiters, they
are obliged to devote a certain number of minutes to each customer;
and the probability is that our Narcissistic individual is being as
well attended to as anybody else. He does not realise this however, he
is not dealing with the facts at all. He merely knows that he wishes
for an immediate meal, that his sense of perfection is thoroughly
disturbed, and his unconscious idea is that if he is sufficiently
impatient, what he wants will come to him immediately, just as it did
in childhood.

Now let us see how he may deal with himself. We will suppose that
he has read this chapter before his next visit to the restaurant in
question. Once again he sits down, once again he finds he is kept
waiting. His impatience begins to manifest itself in its early stages.
He pulls himself up, and the first thing that he does is to realise the
causes of his impatience, as set out in the last paragraph. He must go
quickly over the original causes of his Narcissism in infancy, and of
how he obtained means of satisfaction, and so developed his present
habit of thought. He must run over the facts concerning the restaurant,
and realise that it is a business place, and that it is at its busiest
hour. In other words, he must get into full consciousness the various
factors associated with this Narcissistic outburst of impatience. Then,
let him realise as a kind of summary, “What I am actually objecting
to is the disturbance of my unconscious feeling of omnipotence and
perfection. Let me, however, turn this energy, utilise this time
during which I am waiting in attaining a step nearer real perfection
instead of bemoaning the loss of my imaginary perfection. Now, a step
towards real perfection will be attained, if I overcome this habit
of impatience. Let me, therefore, utilise this time in sitting here
patiently, in worrying no longer about the time the waiter is taking,
in being actually pleased with the fact that I am becoming more
patient, and that my time is being usefully filled with a directive
aim, which has as its object the same ultimate idea as the original
phantastic one, namely, that of perfection.”

Critics may here suggest that this long monologue on the part of the
impatient individual might have been cut short by allowing him to say,
“Obviously, the waiters are busy, it is no use being impatient, let me
be patient.” I must point out, however, that the result would probably
not have been the same. The longer method has its value in the fact
that he brings into consciousness the two ideas of perfection, the
Narcissistic idea which is being hurt, and the real idea which he is
desiring consciously to obtain. _And it is very much easier to turn
energy from one channel to another, if there are lines of similarity
between the two channels._

Hence, when one’s sense of perfection is assailed, let one turn
one’s energy into some form of thought which still satisfies the idea
of perfection attained or attainable. A similar process can be gone
through with any other Narcissistic form of trouble, and consists in
recapitulating the causes, and in reaching a determined effort to
deflect consciously the energy from the phantastic into the real. The
same principle holds good for all temperamental troubles of this sort,
but the individual will have to devise for himself a suitable formula
to use to suit the needs of his own case.




CHAPTER XIII

AUTO-SUGGESTION


Suggestion, in one form or another, plays an extremely important
part in the life of everyone. Suggestion consists in impressing upon
the unconscious mind some idea or thought in such a way that the
unconscious mind will take it and absorb it as part of itself, and
utilise it unconsciously and instinctively. Quite unconsciously,
throughout childhood and adult life, we are receiving suggestions from
the actions of those around us.

For example, I remember as a boy going repeatedly with a relative
to a friend’s house. At the time, I did not notice that my relative
invariably used the knocker, and never rang the bell, or rather I did
not consciously notice it. On one occasion I, myself, was sent with
a message to this house, and although I was in the habit of ringing
bells whenever I went to other houses, at this particular one, I
instinctively knocked only. The suggestion that I should knock upon
that particular door had been implanted in me by the fact that I had
repeatedly seen the same action take place, although I had paid no
conscious attention to it. It had impressed itself upon my mind as
the right action to take place, under the particular circumstances
attending a visit to this house, so that I performed the action itself
automatically, without any further thought in the matter.

The example impressed itself upon my mind, because while I was in the
house, on this occasion, a man came to mend the bell, which had been
out of order for many months. Hence, the reason my relative invariably
knocked.

Suggestion of various kinds is a very powerful factor, and as in
the example given above, it is for the most part an unconscious
factor in determining our actions. But it is possible for us to give
ourselves _conscious_ suggestions which will afterwards cause us to
act automatically, in accordance with the suggestion. A great deal too
much, however, has been claimed for suggestion in recent months. There
are many circumstances in which suggestion is not likely to be any
good at all, there are also circumstances when it may arouse an actual
opposition in the unconscious mind, where a counter-suggestion is set
at work immediately, and the condition of the individual may actually
be worse than before he started giving himself suggestions.

Apart from other things, one factor may be mentioned which is very
antagonistic to suggestion, and that is _fear_, possibly fear which
is for the most part unconscious. Thus, supposing that the alcoholic
gives himself the suggestion that he shall pass a public-house without
going into it, and he has a definite fear of the wish to go in; he
will probably find that in suggesting that he shall not have the wish,
he is actually re-enforcing the strength of the wish which is there.
His unconscious counter-will is at work, and turning the force of the
suggestion in the wrong direction, and he will very likely succumb
to temptation more readily than before. Hence, in a subject where we
have acute fear of failure, suggestion must be very carefully dealt
with. Moreover, suggestion, to be efficient, must have other things in
its favour, some knowledge, in fact, of the underlying causes of the
deleterious action which we wish to eradicate. It is not impossible to
improve oneself by suggestion, even though one may be ignorant of the
cause of one’s trouble, but I have found that it is infinitely more
easy to obtain this improvement if one has previously brought into
consciousness the underlying cause, and can therefore direct one’s
suggestion to this rather than merely to the effect or symptom. I have
myself devised a method for the use of certain of my patients by means
of which suggestion may be directed to both the cause and result,
as indicated shortly. Ordinary methods of suggestion are frequently
merely directed to the cure of the symptom rather than the disease; in
fact, such auto-suggestion, popular as it has become, may frequently
be likened to a doctor who treats small-pox by putting ointment on the
spots, or appendicitis by giving morphia. It will be successful in
those cases where the manifestations of the disease are worse than the
disease itself; but when the causes are strong and virile, suggestion
directed towards the symptom will not avail.

In an earlier chapter, we described how the individual suffering
from deleterious abnormalities of temperament could, to some extent,
trace the cause of this back to infancy. We told how this, in itself,
would, if repeatedly brought to mind on succeeding occasions, produce
considerable improvement. We have further discussed how he could
consciously turn the energy from one form of reaction into another
and more suitable form. All these methods, however, may be made
considerably more efficient by the active use of auto-suggestion, as I
have indicated, directed partially to the cause and partially to the
result desired. Thus, the form which suggestion should take in the case
of the man, whom we quoted in the last chapter as being over-impatient
in the restaurant, would be somewhat as follows:

He would have to impress upon himself several suggestions; and in the
case of each of these suggestions he would be required to form a mental
picture of himself in the conditions to which the suggestions referred.
Firstly, “In circumstances in which I have been accustomed to react
with impatience, I will no longer act as I did when I was a little
child.” (In repeating this to himself in the manner to be referred to
shortly, he should hold a picture of himself reacting impatiently when
a child, and contrast it with the manner in which he ought to have
acted.) Secondly, “Under conditions which have previously caused me to
react with impatience, I will in future, at once think out the _real_
circumstances of the case.” (And another suitable mental picture should
be visualised here, as also in each of the following suggestions.)
Thirdly, “Under conditions which previously caused me to react with
impatience, I will no longer be impatient.” Fourthly, “Under conditions
to which I have been accustomed to react with impatience, I shall now
devote my energy to perfecting myself, in reality.” Thus, he is taking
himself through the stages from childhood onward, and re-educating
himself in each stage by means of a forced education in which the
individual “grows up” in reality from the point at which he stopped in
childhood.

Not one, but all these thoughts, and possibly even intermediate ones
that may develop, should be impressed upon the unconscious mind, so
that they may act automatically. As to the method which should be
adopted by the patient in giving himself suggestions, I recommend the
following. That he first of all write down briefly the results of his
self-examination, that he should take those results in chronological
order, and write down from them suitable suggestions dealing with
the various stages, such as I have just written with regard to the
impatient man. That every night and morning, or at any other time
during the day, he should for five or ten minutes lie down, relax
himself, and close his eyes; that he should then repeat to himself
fifteen or twenty times each of the suggestions, taking the earliest
first, then the next, and so on. They need not be repeated out loud,
but if repeated under the breath and accompanied by a suitable movement
of the lips, it will suffice. Effort should be avoided; suggestion
is not an effort of will so much as an impression effected by the
imagination. When an individual is giving himself suggestion, he is not
fighting an active battle, he is merely allowing ideas to sink into his
mind; and if they are repeated often enough, like drops of water which
in time wear a channel in the stone, they will make their mark and
produce their effects in due course.

Suggestion, in fact, minimises the need for the use of will-power,
at any given moment in a difficult situation. If the battle has been
fought out beforehand in imagination, it will automatically succeed
when the time comes. The will has played its part previously when
adopting the method of suggestion.

This is not a text-book on suggestion, and I do not propose to go
further into the method here. I merely wish to point out the practical
efficiency of the use of a certain amount of auto-suggestion when
applied in conjunction with the other methods of combating Narcissism
already outlined, and when applied in an intelligent manner, so that
not merely the symptoms, but the original causes themselves shall be
affected by it.




CHAPTER XIV

CONCLUSION


The previous portion of this book has been devoted to showing how
Narcissism may be harmful, and how in its endeavour to obtain
satisfaction it may render the individual unhappy in the utmost
degree. It is possible that the reader will have gathered that the
author regards Narcissism as wholly and completely a useless and
detrimental element in life; the more so, since at various points
we have had to emphasise that in one form or another very little of
it persisting in adult life may be a great deal too much. It should
be realised, however, that Narcissism to a slight extent, and at
certain periods, plays an important and also necessary part in the
individual’s life. We mentioned at one place that a certain amount of
identification was beneficial in choosing one’s life partner. Whereas
too much identification might lead to one’s choosing a sexual partner
of the same sex, a small amount of identification might lead to one’s
choosing a partner with the same tastes, and would further lead to a
tendency to enjoy whatsoever the other one enjoyed, and to dislike what
the other one disliked, and this similarity would lead to a certain
harmony in life. _Narcissism is a normal thing in the new-born infant,
and Narcissism is the root of many virtues; but its final adult form
must be sublimated and very much attenuated._ It is like the salt in
cooking; a little is essential to bring out the flavour, but a very
little more spoils the whole dish.

A certain amount of self-love, self-appreciation, self-importance, and
self-consciousness of one’s own capacities is necessary in every one;
without it he would be ill prepared to cope with men and circumstances.
But this necessary self-importance and self-appreciation is not, as
many might think, due to Narcissism alone. It has a slight Narcissistic
element, but it is largely a resultant of other unconscious instincts,
which we have not attempted to deal with here; and we only mention
it, lest the reader should draw the conclusion that these necessary
elements in our character are drawn purely from a Narcissistic
basis, and that he should therefore be left puzzled as to how, if he
should eradicate Narcissism, he would be able to retain necessary
characteristics which apparently belong to this same instinct. It is
also very necessary for the reader to bear in mind that much which
may be developed from Narcissism is useful; even though the original
from which it came may be dangerous and harmful. Moreover, a certain
amount of enjoyment of phantasy such as is obtained from novels or
theatres may be in many people quite a useful and adequate form of
relaxation. With them it may be strictly cut off from real life, may
be strictly limited as regards time and place, and, in fact, entirely
under their control. In such persons it forms a useful element in their
lives. I do not say that if their early education and environment had
been different they might not possibly possess an even better form of
recreation, but merely that, taking facts as they are, in certain cases
it forms a useful factor in the working scheme of life.

In others, however, in those where it has exceeded the limits of
absolute control, it is necessary, for the time being at least, to
attempt to cut it out as completely as possible, because where it is
allowed slight free play, it is liable to get out of hand, unless it
can be dealt with absolutely at the will of the individual. Hence the
necessity for such stringent treatment as I have laid down in the
previous chapters of this book.

I have attempted to show that happiness is, for the most part,
within the individual’s own grasp. Happiness comes from within the
individual and not from without. Unhappiness must not be confused
with pain, either mental or physical, for pain is a normal reaction,
to a harmful stimulus which all are liable to feel; it is for the
most part beyond the individual’s control so long as the stimulus
persists; but the peace of mind, the absence of worry, of irritability,
of perpetual uneasiness, which we call unhappiness, lies within the
control of everybody. It largely consists in continually recognising
what facts are unchangeable, and ceasing to bemoan or phantasy about
these unchangeable facts. It is true that the road to happiness may
be difficult if we have long been accustomed to tread the path of
Narcissism, but it is equally true that if the advice laid down in this
book be followed patiently and systematically, a very much happier
frame of mind will be attained as a result. In a few cases, Narcissism
is not a predominant factor causing the temperamental disturbance
although superficially it may appear to be so. In such cases (where
other primitive instincts are really of paramount importance) the same
degree of improvement will not be attained by this method of self
treatment and only a more prolonged course of regular psycho-analysis
is likely to produce the desired result.

Happiness is not to be found by seeking happiness in the direct sense.
This, I am aware, sounds very much like a mere high-sounding thought
of a writer. It is the sort of phrase that people dismiss with the
remark, “That is all very well in theory.” This statement, however,
is not made from any moral or sentimental point of view, nor on any
purely theoretical grounds, but as a scientific fact, which has been
demonstrated as the result of psychological research. It may be
interesting to note here how much the psychology of happiness is in
agreement with many of the teachings of the New Testament, although a
different terminology and mode of expression may be used.

It was pointed out earlier how the individual who employed too much
phantasy thought in youth might worry himself into an early grave,
although he was the same individual who most desired a long life. It
has now been shown that happiness does not come to those who seek
happiness, but to those who can adapt themselves to realities, that
is, to those who can control their Narcissism. Narcissism is not so
very different from the word “self,” as used in Christian teachings,
and any who are interested enough to compare them will find that there
is considerable parallelism between Christian teaching and certain
psychological observations.

I must emphasise the fact once more that patience, that is a
realization of the time factor, is very necessary for those who attempt
self-treatment on the lines indicated in this book. For since lack of
this is often one of their faults to start with, they may otherwise
involve themselves in a vicious circle, from which they do not
escape. Patience and attention to detail will, however, enable them to
accomplish that improvement which they have set out to achieve. In the
words of Horace, “Happiness is here, happiness is everywhere, if only a
well-regulated mind does not fail you.”


THE END