An Introduction to Social Psychology

Chapter 13: Pathological Forms of Consciousness

Luther Lee Bernard

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THE UNCONSCIOUS —  The older writers on psychology, even until nearly the end of the nineteenth century, spoke and wrote of all human behavior as if it were highly conscious and the product of an active and self-conscious will. Recent analyses of behavior have shown us that such a view is erroneous. The studies made by the social psychologists of the group and suggestion-imitation schools, and the investigations of the French students of hysteria and hypnotism, and more recently the work of the psychoanalysts, have done most to dispense with an overintellectualistic interpretation of behavior. These and other studies have shown us that stimulus-response processes occur and that complete and apparently logical sequences of behavior are carried through in individuals without their having retained any conscious memory of the things they did. This unconscious behavior may be very complicated and long continued, or it may constitute only parts or fragments of a continuous series of behavior processes which is in the main definitely conscious and is later subject to recall. Every one has had the experience of going some place and arriving without remembering the process of getting there. Old and familiar landmarks evidently gave our unconsciousness the cue and we proceeded "mechanically," as we say, while our focally conscious processes were occupied with something else. The arrival at our destination stopped the mechanical process by making it necessary for us to orient ourselves anew to other objects. Other instances are the reading of a page of a book without understanding it, doing the housework or driving a car on a quiet street, or running the fingers through the hair while conversing with a friend or thinking about something else quite different from what he is saying.

(188) What is it that takes care of our behavior in this mechanical way when our attention, at least our focally conscious attention, is elsewhere ? It has been variously called the unconscious, the subconscious, the co-conscious, the peripheral and the subliminal consciousness by different writers. Any one of these terms would perhaps be reasonably adequate for our needs, for all of them mean much the same thing. Each term is accepted by some one of standing in the field of psychology and each is equally condemned on some ground or other. The two terms which have the greatest currency at the present time are the subconscious and the unconscious. The latter is perhaps the more inclusive term, because it embraces all behavior which does not come into focal consciousness. The former term, however, applies only to that behavior which, although definitely mediated by neural mechanisms of the higher brain centers, is kept out of focal consciousness by some method of displacement, as in the case of habits which have become practically automatic, or by means of the "censorship" emphasized by the psychoanalysts.

There are those, of course, who deny that there is any such thing as an unconscious psychic process, although they probably would not deny the existence of unconscious behavior. Wohlgemuth, for example, defines the psychic process as a conscious process and then proceeds to show that it is impossible for a conscious process to be unconscious. Many neuro-psychic mechanisms, however, are not conscious, and many others which are but dimly conscious are not focally conscious. These latter, or non-focal conscious neuro-psychic processes, do not become focal in the attention. They are, consequently, to all intents and purposes unconscious processes and are usually classified as such. Later on one may with effort occasionally bring such a dimly conscious process of behavior into focal consciousness through memory recall by means of introspection, showing that it really was in consciousness or at least in the neuro-psychic organization, although at the time not in the focus of attention. It is of course possible that all unconscious neuro-psychic behavior processes are really of this dimly conscious or non-focal character. Without quarreling over these distinctions we may adopt the usual terminology for

( 189) behavior which does not occupy the attention and pass briefly in review the various types of unconscious and subconscious behavior and estimate their significance for the adjustment of the organism to its social or other environments.

TYPES OF UNCONSCIOUS BEHAVIOR— Reflexes and instincts, of course, belong in the category of unconscious behavior. The neural processes involved operate mainly at sub-cortical levels and are fixed in the organic mechanisms before birth, and apparently are determined by the hereditary character of the protoplasm. They come into consciousness only through their transformation or modification into habit patterns which are controlled through cortical extensions. They have vast significance for both individual and social behavior; but this significance is greatest for a relatively fixed adjustment to environmental conditions which have persisted in pretty much the same form from very early, perhaps in most cases from pre-human, times. Consequently they are of minor significance for adjustments to recent and strictly social types of environments, in some cases even antagonistic to them. The instincts and other inherited unconscious behavior mechanisms do not adjust us to the psycho-social or the institutionalized derivative control environments, because these environments are constantly changing.

Initial adjustments to a definitely new type of social environment, or even to a natural environment, are usually conscious. The radically different type of behavior required for such an adjustment brings the neural mechanisms under cortical supervision. But not all new environmental situations are radically different from the old. They usually have much of their content in common with the old, or they operate in closely analogous ways. Consequently, many acquired behavior patterns, developed in adjustment to new environmental situations, apparently come into existence with a minimum of consciousness. Only when the new situation is sufficiently different from the old that we recognize it as new may it be said that the new behavior pattern is adopted consciously. In many other cases we make an adjustment to a new or a partially new situation consciously, and after it has become standardized and relatively automatic it drops out of consciousness or becomes a

( 190) part of the unconscious in behavior. A very large amount, perhaps the larger portion, of our behavior in definitely social situations, that is, in adjustment to the psycho-social and derivative control environments, is of this character. Consequently this phase of the unconscious is of great importance socially. It enables the higher (conscious or cortical) types of behavior control to initiate an adjustment to the changing and maturing environment and then to pass it on to the supervision of a lower (unconscious) type of adjustment control.

REPRESSION— Another form of the unconscious or of the subconsciousness is that sometimes called repression. Repressed consciousness is unlike the instinctive behavior which fails to rise into consciousness or that in which the modification of the old behavior is so slight that it never quite enters into the focus of attention. Also it is unlike the habitual behavior which recedes from conscious attention as soon as the neural mechanism has been reduced to an economical and automatic pattern. The inner mechanism of this type of behavior is on a conscious level, but because it disturbs the functional organization of our dominant consciousness or behavior we refuse to admit it to the focus of attention. Usually we prevent the repressed inner behavior mechanisms from going over into overt behavior. But if this cannot be done we are likely to forget this behavior or to minimize its importance, just as we exclude or attempt to exclude from our consciousness the desire for such behavior. The neurological explanation of this exclusion or censorship of the unwelcome or unpleasant from consciousness and overt behavior, or at least from memory, is apparently that blocking of behavior processes which earlier we found accompanies, or causes, unpleasant feeling tones in consciousness. The unpleasant behavior is unsuccessful behavior or that behavior which occurs with difficulty. It is not the unpleasantness which blocks or censors it, as popular language has it, but the blocking or conflict itself causes the unpleasantness, and likewise puts a stop to the behavior itself, either as it occurs in the first instance or as it seeks to reproduce itself in memory. Behavior which was not originally unpleasant may easily become so in the recall because its unpleasant consequences or associations may become much more

( 191) patent as increasing perspective allows of more comparison of behavior values. As a consequence it sometimes occurs that the memory of an act may be blocked when the act itself was facilitated and pleasant.

THE SO-CALLED CENSORSHIP— In the words of the psychoanalysts, however, our dominant consciousness censors the idea or desire and the memory of the deed, if it occurs. This phraseology, although in common use, is merely an anthropomorphism based upon the old metaphysics of a free will. The explanation must be made in neurological and behavioristic instead of in fiatistic terms. This so-called censorship or refusal of our dominant conscious organization to attend to the variant or interrupting consciousness may be so complete and successful that the dominantly conscious self does not recognize the existence of the unassimilated behavior impulses and processes. Not infrequently it requires the artificial synthesis of hypnosis or psychoanalysis to bring the two phases of conscious behavior within the purview of each other.

Instances of this sort are familiar enough. We forget the names of people we dislike or that dislike us. We do not remember without an effort, if at all, circumstances or events in which we have appeared to a disadvantage. And if we do suddenly come upon such an event in the random exercise of our memories we meet it with a start and dismiss it from consciousness as soon as we are able. For most of us, our memories represent a fairly consistent selection of those events which enhance our positive self-feeling and encourage us to further attempts at successful adjustment. The mistakes and discreditable events are crowded out or minimized or explained away for the sake of the picture, which we make as nearly perfect as possible.

RATIONALIZATION— This process of building up an ideal reconstruction of past behavior we call rationalization. If our memories are not thus selective it is an indication that there is something pathological or ineffective in our personalities and in their rower to make future adjustments. Our lives may have mistakes, but there is no reason why our ideals of ourselves— which project into the past as well as into the future — should be defective. They may be as completely rounded

( 192) out and as perfect as we choose to make them. And if we are not mere sentimentalists, that is, desirers instead of doers, if we actually try to put our rationalized ideals of self into practice and face the difficulties of adjustment instead of taking refuge in daydreams or phantasy regarding self, the more perfect the ideals the better for our conduct. Thus rationalization, which is capable of being a potent instrument of self-deception, may also be a great aid to a constructive orientation of character. It is destructive to any one's morale to see himself in the worst possible light, except for temporary therapeutic purposes, which in religious terminology we characterize as repentance or remorse. But, also in religious terminology, repentance should lead to conversion or the determination to behave differently.

DISTORTION OF VIEWS OF PERSONALITIES AND NATIONALITIES— The same sort of selective and idealizing process which we apply to ourselves we also apply to others who command our favor. Thus our chosen heroes of history are gradually stripped of their unworthy or anti-social qualities and of their inadequacies of character and achievement, and in place of these imperfections we clothe them in a selection of those qualities which we approve. In early times, before the more accurate written records of history had supplanted easily molded and distorted traditions, the great men were deified by this process of creating a folk tradition about their characters and achievements. Now that the written records prevent us from manufacturing history to suit our desires we merely select and gild those events in the lives of our heroes which are most pleasing to us. However, myth-making is not entirely dead even in our day, as stories similar to that of Washington and the cherry tree will bear witness.

What we do in this positive way of creating good characters for ourselves and others we also accomplish in a negative manner by creating disreputable personalities for those of whom history has disapproved. Having set the adverse folk evaluation upon them we fail to recall their good qualities until they may actually be lost to record. We create as much of a devil in the one case as of a saint or hero in the other.

Sometimes we apply these two processes of selection of 

(193) traits to whole nations. This occurs more frequently, or at least with greater emphasis, in war time, when we conceive of the allied peoples as generous and brave and as motivated by only the highest considerations, while the enemy peoples are looked upon as cowardly, despicable, grasping and cruel. Much the same psychology of selection applies also with reference to classes, especially if class lines are closely drawn over some highly conscious interest. We are sufficiently familiar with the distortions of the capitalists in the cartoons published in the socialist journals and the widely current belief of many of the well to do that those who are poor are either feebleminded, criminal, or otherwise defective in character.

The disadvantages of such distortions of personality, individually or collectively considered, are perhaps obvious enough. In the case of self-distortion the chief danger is that it so often prevents us from facing reality. We bring ourselves to live in a highly selected dream world. We imagine ourselves to be motivated by considerations which are much more lofty and acceptable to the public than the ones which actually do move us. By such distortion we may lose that intimacy of touch with ourselves which would enable us to forestall failure or disaster by recognizing our weaknesses and the environmental circumstances which are peculiarly liable to offer too great temptations to us. Thus the novice in the use of alcoholics or of drugs is rarely aware of his own weakness in overcoming the growing habit until he is hopelessly lost. The young man who allows social pleasures to interfere with a career ordinarily does not do so deliberately, but constantly underestimates the drain which his pleasures make upon his time and energies and overestimates his professional success and prospects, until his clients or patients or other supporters have lost confidence in his poise and judgment. Perhaps most cases in which young women drift into prostitution are of much the same character. In their pursuit of expensive clothes, or of entertainment, or of other pleasures, they minimize the dangers or their weaknesses and overemphasize their powers of self-control. Very few people possess the faculty of looking at themselves dispassionately and objectively and of recognizing frankly their actual motives in behavior. Even when they

( 194) do understand themselves, only too often the result is that they suffer from deterioration of character instead of building up compensatory safeguards. The strong personality is one which can not only face self but can correct self by modifying character traits in the direction of strength.

The difficulties of personality distortion in the wider or collective relationships are that we tend to distort the meaning of history and the true worth of historic personalities, on the one hand, and that we deprive ourselves of the most effective instruments of orientation with reference to our contemporaries, on the other hand. In connection with the second case, it is often apparent that international peace or interclass adjustments are hindered by a failure to see our rivals as they are. One of the most commonly cited causes of war is the adverse public opinion, the fears, and the hatreds, which grow up between peoples and are not infrequently fanned by interested persons who understand well this tendency of people, when subject to fear or other strong emotions, to distort the traits and motives of their antagonists. The favorite psychological method of adjusting class disputes is to bring the class leaders together in conference, not only to agree upon administrative details, but also to acquaint them with the essential humanness of their opponents or rivals.

COMPENSATORY MECHANISMS —  Alfred Adler, the psychoanalyst, has given striking emphasis to a fact which has long been known, that people who suffer from some defect tend normally to throw their developmental energies in the direction of repairing the difficulty or of overcoming the defect, until it disappears. In many cases the defective organ or process or trait or complex of traits is rendered superior to those which were not originally regarded as inferior. This principle is well known to the surgeons who ordinarily expect to see the tissues of a surgical wound heal and knit together until the healed tissues are as strong or stronger than they were before the operation. We are told that Demosthenes was originally a stammerer and could not express himself clearly in public, but that he practiced speaking to audiences until he became a great orator. It is a common experience for very timid people, who feel that they are unable to do this thing or that, to force them-

( 195) -selves to go through with tasks until they overcome their timidity and acquire facility in the dreaded activities. Perhaps most of us have made more progress in overcoming our weaknesses and in going forward to build up positive skills in the direction of these compensations than we have in developing our natural gifts and capacities. The psychology of this compensatory process is relatively simple. Our social contacts render us highly conscious of our defects and inadequacies. This strong fixing of the attention upon the defect either produces in us a strong feeling of inferiority which prevents us from trying to overcome its cause, the defect, or it produces by contra-suggestion a strong impulse to remedy the situation. Since the fixing of attention upon a problem is the necessary prerequisite to its solution, the stimulus of public disapproval or commiseration is usually necessary to secure such active compensatory behavior as will remedy the defect.

THE ABNORMAL ASPECT OF COMPENSATION— Normally the remedial compensatory behavior aims at and succeeds in removing the cause of the defect or the defect itself. If this cannot be done, it attempts to build up substitute powers and technique, which is truly remedial compensation. But there is also a pathological side to compensation of very great individual and social significance. The minor aspect of this is to be found in those cases where real defects are compensated for by means of sham technique or accomplishments. Thus the public speaker or the social leader often substitutes tricks of language, adroit and perhaps unconscious appeals to prejudice, inflection of voice or tone, or showy dress and lavishness of expenditure for genuine worth. Ignorance has proverbially been hidden by profuseness of verbiage. The person who lacks ability or training sufficient to be productive himself often seeks to associate with others who have this ability, not really that he may acquire it, but that he may appear to others to possess it, or feel as if he possessed it because he identifies himself vicariously with the group of capables. The charlatan succeed-, by the use of fine sounding phrases anal by the display of "personality." Personality itself is only too often made up of mannerisms and "correct" clothes or verbiage, which are easily seen or heard.

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Another very frequent method of compensating for an inferiority feeling is to indulge in invidious criticisms of others. Such criticism may succeed in raising one's relative standard by lowering that of others, or it may result merely in a sort of subjective heightening of one's own ego by causing him to feel that he is superior to the one criticized. Such compensations are negative rather than constructive. Truly valuable compensation for defect should be positive and constructive.

OVERCOMPENSATION FOR INFERIORITY FEELING— One particular form of the attempt at compensation is most interesting and on the whole rather pathetic. Many individuals who have developed inferiority complexes, either because they were defective in some physical or mental attribute, or because they belong to some proscribed race, creed, or faction, often attempt to compensate their repressed personalities by adopting an attitude of strong self— assertion or the show of greater wisdom or goodness, or of more wealth or power, than they possess. Thus the newly rich are needlessly lavish with their wealth, while they feel ill at ease even in the eyes of domestics and porters. The ignorant often use large words ridiculously, pronounce them ludicrously, and discuss topics out of their depth with an empty bombastic phraseology. which betrays their lack of genuine knowledge. Women have often been blamed for their unwillingness to abide by the rules of the game as they come into a new world of freedom— clinging to privileges along with their acquired rights. Negroes with some education are often said by some southern people to be spoiled and "mean" because their intellectual achievements and associations have made their inferior position seem unbearable to them, and they develop resentment and unconventional self-assertion as a consequence. Jews, especially the self-made type, have in common with many non-Jews of a similar type, a degree of self-assertiveness which appears to many to be a biological quality. As a matter of fact it is merely overcompensation for an inferiority feeling which their social position makes it practically impossible for them to escape. In the course of time this attempt of traditionally inferior classes and peoples to compensate for their depressed social position develops in them a technique and alertness by means of which they may become

(197) dominant in a civilization. If we wait long enough the last may become first.

PHANTASY— But the more seriously abnormal distortions of personality which are developed as compensations for inadequacy are purely subjective and are to be found in the subject's own consciousness. Unable to compensate for weakness by achievement of objective adjustments or by improvement of his subjective qualities and capacities, he builds up an internal world of phantasy. These phantasies misrepresent the situation to him, in somewhat the same way as that described earlier in the chapter, except that in those cases the individual selects the favorable traits of his personality and disregards the unfavorable ones. He lives in a world which is real as far as it goes; it is merely incomplete. In the type of cases we are presenting here the unadjusted or unadjustable subject goes beyond the stage of distorting his world merely by selection and distorts it by creating unrealities. He imagines things, creates as phantasies things which do not exist. The two types of distortions are not absolutely dissimilar, nor are they unconnected, but their results may be very different. In its milder phases this distortion of self and of environment takes the form of daydreaming, which is practically universal. Those things and powers which we long for and do not possess we compensate for in a small way, especially when the strenuous work of the day is over, by making believe or playing "as if." Even the child, who indulges this mild form of phantasy more than the adult, because as yet the world of reality has not so completely ossified about him, is not often deceived as to the distinction between fact and fancy here. Some children to be sure cannot be perfectly certain whether the thing they imagine is real or only make-believe, and sometimes the apparent falsehoods they tell are the result of a semibelief in the reality of their daydreams. But, at its best, this type of distortion is merely compensatory selection of our best traits and a forgetting of the worst, with the result that they may aid us materially in bringing our character to an idealistic plane of values.

THE FORMS OF PHANTASY— Various devices are used to give form or body to this compensatory distortion through

(198) phantasy. Daydreaming is a form which can be carried on by the compensator alone, and it has the advantage that it can be indulged in practically anywhere and under all circumstances, and there are no limitations to the imaginary achievements or good fortune of the subject. Story-telling is another form closely related to dreaming. In fact it differs mainly from the latter in that it requires listeners— an actual as well as an imaginary social situation. And because it does involve listeners it ordinarily must pay more attention to probability. It is said that Samuel Richardson and Walter Scott learned to write novels and romances from early practice in successful story-telling with playmates as auditors. The production of written fiction is probably in most cases in part a compensatory distortion of reality for the writer as well as for the reader. But in most cases, at least in our day, fiction is written for the market, that is, it provides daydreaming material in packages for those who lack the skill or other qualifications to produce as good a product for themselves. The production of poetry and painting, and perhaps some of the other fine arts, is carried on quite as much for the purpose of compensating the self for hard reality as for the similar satisfaction of others. Artists of all types are always in some sense dreamers. Our interest in the theater and the movies, and likewise to a considerable extent in ordinary social intercourse of the superficial and artificial sort called "society," has this same function of compensatory distortion of reality. Lying is a more serious form of compensatory distortion, although any form of such distortion may have its serious consequences. Lying varies in its form from deliberate distortion for personal advantage to scarcely recognized distortion for the sake of producing harmony in an ideal situation created in the imagination apart from objective reality.

SCHIZOPHRENIC DISTORTIONS— The most pathological of all compensatory distortions of reality are those we ordinarily speak of as schizophrenic distortions. Radical distortions more or less of this character arc dementia praecox and paranoia. Originally these psychoses were regarded as the products of physiological disorders, and it is possible that physiological causes not infrequently are contributing factors. But they are

(199) more likely to be indirectly operating factors. The consciousness of organ inferiority or of functional incapacity may so discourage the subject that he resorts to the creation of phantasies as a means of compensating for his failures in adjustment to the demands of his environment. In the case of dementia praecox the individual, either because of mental or physical incapacity or because of some emotional distortion or blocking due to any cause whatever, or possibly merely because of the lack of sufficient positive motivation, gives up the struggle for real and objective compensation by building up substitute powers, and turns to phantasy or self-deception as a means of escape from the world of reality which makes greater demands upon him than he is able to meet. In the milder cases it is little more than exaggerated daydreaming. But in the highly developed instances the subject may lose practically all powers of apprehending the meaning and significance of the external world, even to the point of having to be fed and cared for like a child. He may not understand the words which are spoken to him, or at least he may be unable to react to them in any normal way. Ile may continue indefinitely in silence or repeat constantly some autistic phrase or perform some act which has symbolic significance for him. In such extreme cases there appears to be a truly schizophrenic condition, for tests seem to show that what goes on in the external world is recorded in internal behavior mechanisms, but that these mechanisms are not sufficiently focal to dominate the behavior of the organism. Stimuli which connect up with the compensatory or distorted complexes will, however, produce responses. And in some cases the normal or original mechanisms of behavior can be reached by adequate meaning stimuli and for the time being be rendered dominant. But in extreme cases this dominance of the normal can rarely if ever be rendered permanent. The retreat into a world of compensatory unreality has gone too far and the compensatory mechanisms have become too highly symbolic to be effectively analyzed acid discharged by the patient. Fur this reason dementia praecox when extreme is regarded as incurable.

DEMENTIA PRAECOX AND PARANOIA COMPARED— Dementia praecox is compensatory distortion through inversion or

( 200) subjective adjustment. It creates phantasies to take the place of measurable objective realities. The subject imagines that he is some one or something, or that he is doing something which is not true in, fact. He distorts the external world, to be sure, but above all he distorts his relationship to the external world. Many of his adjustments to environment are symbolical. That is, a phrase or a movement or a gesture may come to mean to him and to be substituted for a whole complex or series of activities or satisfactions. This symbolic gesture or phrase may be repeated indefinitely as the means of establishing the relationship or of securing the satisfaction which he desires and which the real objective world has denied to him.

Paranoia is also a compensatory adjustment mechanism. The emphasis in the compensatory adjustment in this psychosis is upon external objects, which are looked upon as preventing the desired satisfactions or achievements. In dementia praecox the adjustment is achieved, but wholly in the imagination. In paranoia its achievement is recognized as lacking and the explanation offered for the failure is not the inadequacy or defect of the subject, but the ill will of persons or of the gods or of the general order of things, fate, society, our institutions, etc. Both involve in some degree the exercise of phantasy, but the former directs the phantasy inward and the latter directs it outward. In both cases the distortion of reality seems to aim at ignoring the inadequacy of the subject's personality and an escape from the sense of inferiority. Sometimes it is necessary, in order to escape effectively from the galling sense of inferiority, to destroy the unfriendly persons or objects which prevent adjustment. For this reason paranoia is regarded as a decidedly homicidal psychosis, while dementia praecox is much more recessive and negative.

CONFLICT AND THE DISTORTION OF PERSONALITY— THE FREUDIAN HYPOTHESIS— Any sort of social inhibition or repression of events in consciousness tends to give rise to conflicts with consequent attempts to overcome the difficulty or at compensatory distortion of consciousness and personality. Some of the minor and more serious instances of such conflicts and their results have already been treated in this chapter. It is difficult to conceive of more striking or pathological

( 201) types of cases than those called dementia praecox and paranoia. Various attempts have been made to explain the causes and mechanisms of conflict. The Freudians, who have had a considerable vogue during the past decade or two, originally attributed practically all conflicts to sex repressions. They said that the sex impulse is the strongest and most universal of all organic drives and that it is at the same time the one most universally censored and regulated by society and our own consciences, which are a reflection of social pressures. Consequently every child and every adult has smothered down into his subconsciousness or his unconscious mechanisms those desires and impulses for sex satisfaction to which society and his own conscience will not permit him to give expression. At times of strain, or when the resistance is for some other reason of health or environmental pressure inadequate, or when the inhibitions are weakened, these repressed tendencies evade their censors and escape into effective behavior. Sometimes the escape is into direct and normal, that is, the ordinary or conventional modes of overt expression. According to this theory, marriage gives a normal opportunity for the removal of repression and escape from the censor.

THE "ESCAPE FROM THE CENSOR"— But in many cases, where a normal escape is not possible, the restiveness of the impulses or drives becomes so great that they escape by the censor in disguise. That is, they come forth as a symbolic form of behavior. One of the most harmless of these symbolic escapes is in dreams. Here the dreamer may do what he likes without fear of censure because he knows that it is not a real situation, or because he has clothed himself and other violators of the social conventions with masks which effectually hide their identity from the censor and frequently from himself. As it were, he stands on the side observing himself in disguise performing the forbidden behavior and thus escapes the reprimand of his conscience or social mentor. But many other escapes from the vigilance of the censor are not so harmless as those in dreams. There may be a development of symptoms which are symbolic of the behavior he desires, although they may have no visual resemblance to that behavior. The subject may become ill in order to have the attention of a loved one of the

( 202) opposite sex or to go to the hospital and be under the care of a doctor or a nurse. Fainting may, apparently, under certain circumstances come under this classification of symbolic symptoms or neuroses and serve as an escape from reality. Or one may develop or ape those personality traits which belong to a loved one or which will attract that person's attention. Thus schoolgirls and schoolboys who have "crushes" on their teachers often develop the most ridiculous mannerisms as attempts at the imitation of behavior traits in the objects of their adoration. The neurotic symptoms may also function negatively, as where some one develops incapacity to walk or speak or even total functional paralysis to prevent detested contacts with a person of the opposite sex or to escape from some hated task. These substitute or symbolic symptoms are called neuroses. Of the reality of their existence there can be no doubt. They are of extremely frequent occurrence, at least as milder forms of social indispositions and disabilities, and they represent attempts at escapes from conflicts and repressions which have become intolerable.

CONFLICTS AND REPRESSIONS OF VARIOUS ORIGINS— The principle of conflict between the unconscious impulses (which should include acquired impulses as well as the unconventional instinctive ones) and the conscious values obtained from our social adjustment, or between two unconscious dispositions aiming at the mastery of the personality, with consequent repression and censorship, appears to be sound. But to attribute all conflicts and resulting neurotic escapes from social supervision to sex repression is sheer nonsense. Repressions and inhibitions may occur in any field of interest. Many people become ill and make themselves burdens to others throughout life, or as long as they will bear the burden, because of the wish to avoid work. The mother of one of my students retired gracefully from the art of housekeeping by means of paralysis when her daughter entered the university, to which she was opposed, and regained complete health when her daughter went to work in a department store, There was no indication that the mother's neurosis was a case of conscious deception. Habitual inattention frequently arises and reaches the degree of functional deafness among children of nervous and nagging par-

( 203) -ents. Pseudo feeble-mindedness may arise as the result of a marked distaste for school studies in the lower grades. Cases of neuroses of a non-sexual origin might be multiplied without limit.

DIVISION OF PERSONALITY— In very extreme cases, where the conflict cannot be resolved by any of the devices of constructive compensation, of compensation by distortion of reality, or by that process of distortion which is ordinarily called simply neurosis, the personality may seek an escape from the situation by an actual division of the personality or schizophrenia proper. The several warring interests develop behavior sets of considerable complexity, each capable of independent conscious existence, and struggle for the control or domination of the organism as a whole. Apparently, the split in personality ordinarily occurs in the more extreme cases by the organization of the repressed consciousness into an independently functioning consciousness. Since this subsidiary consciousness is censored or repressed by the dominant consciousness the latter is apparently unaware of the existence of the newly arising personality. But the new personality, which has struggled for recognition and has striven to avoid detection, is itself aware of the dominant personality. Dr. Alorton Prince's case of Miss Beauchamp and Sally illustrates these facts well. In the course of time the subordinate personality may come to be dominant or it may be content with acquiring functional control of the organism from time to time. But perhaps in the vast majority of cases it never becomes the master of the organism for more than a fleeting instant, as in absent-mindedness or temporary forgetfulness, if at all.

Extreme cases of divided personality, where one clear-cut personality alternates with the other in the control of the organism, are apparently quite rare. However, we may well be convinced that in its milder forms division of personality is very frequent. Inability to turn readily from one train of thought to another, differences in moral attitudes of the same people in different circumstances, the releases which we observe the behavior of people to undergo when they escape from the routine of their work or of family or institutional obligations, all of those multitudes of evidences of the existence of

( 204) ethical dualism and of so-called hypocrisy and lack of good faith, would appear to offer strong evidence in support of this contention.

SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF PATHOLOGICAL TYPES OF CONSCIOUSNESS — Although all of the types of consciousness which have been discussed in this chapter are in greater or less degree pathological, they nevertheless have great social significance. This significance is little if at all constructive, but it is nevertheless profound in its negative aspects. With the poor control which we at present have developed, and will for a long period of time continue to have, over environmental factors there is bound to be a great deal of social and individual maladjustment in our society. These pathological types of consciousness or of conscious behavior are, of course, not inherited, although inherited defects may in some cases help to predispose towards such forms of maladjustment of personality. They are environmentally induced in the main and to cure or control them it is necessary to look to the control of the environmental pressures as the means.

We have just begun to develop the principles of mental and social hygiene and to apply them to the problems of an intelligent social control. The result is that we still have a vast volume of neuroses and psychoses of all sorts which interfere with the efficient functioning of our institutions. Thus the significance of the pathological types of consciousness is seen to be a negative one and it will diminish only as we learn to understand and detect neuroses and psychoses in individuals, and further learn how to locate and remove those environmental conditions which give rise to repressions and conflicts and the inevitable attempts at distorted compensations. Many of the worst cases of individual maladjustment are cases of induced neuroses resulting from unnecessary repressions, which could have been avoided by means of wise guidance of impulses through substitution or sublimation. Also many of the most serious mistakes in social policy have arisen from the dominance of those with neurotic or psychotic &positions in positions of crucial importance in our social organization. Equally urgent with the need for intelligence tests is that for tests of emotional and moral-social normality and stability.

( 205) Gradually we are developing the sciences of mental and social hygiene on the one hand and the sciences of environmental organization and control on the other hand to meet these needs. In the three chapters which follow we shall discuss in detail the organization of personality.

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