The Integration of the Personality.[1]
Kimball Young
I
It would be a reiterated commonplace to say we are living in a distraught world. However we may state the present crises, we must agree that the problem is one of adjusting the human being to the world about it. What we so frequently fail to recognize, unless we view the matter objectively, is the curious fact that it is the very environment that man has created for himself which gives him his chiefest concern. Our present environment is a kind of machine-made juggernaut striding up and down the earth in seven-league boots crushing everything before it, because we do not realize that our own product here fails to appreciate all our deep-laid trends.
There are two phases to our modern problem, one of which may be thought of as sociological, using that term in a broad sense as covering the institutional organizations of society, the play of economic, political, social and religious forces in society; the other may be conceived as psychological and deals with the individual in reference to his environment-his reactions to it and especially his ideas, images, attitudes and methods of dealing with it. In the present paper we shall be occupied principally with the aspect of human nature in reference to itself, to other human beings and to the world in which it moves and has its being. The sociological will only be mentioned as it throws light on man's personality. One should not forget, however, that we can not write either the theory of social causation or the theory of human personality without taking into account both factors: the sociological, often called the cultural, and the psychological.
II
Turning our attention to the foundations of personality, we must look into its biological roots, for man is first and always an animal. The full significance of this biological basis of man is not yet realized outside the technical circles. As a working hypothesis in economics, politics, religion and ethics it is seldom, even yet, given a place along with the cultural aspects. A greatly different orientation toward the
(265) older formulae of behavior will necessarily take place when this view in accepted. It is part of our purpose to indicate a phase of this new standpoint.
The older anatomy and physiology dealt with the structure and function of the separate organs of the plant or animal. It is only recently that biologists turned their attention to the study of the organism as a whole. Under the lead of such men as Jennings (5), Ritter (13), Herrick (3), and others who found that many phases of animal life could not be stated in terms of bio-chemistry and physics alone, a large number of studies have been made upon the animal as a behaving organism, as a complex whole. Men were forced to recognize, in short, that the mere investigation of the action of parts of the organism left them with an inadequate picture of how the entire animal got on in reference to the specific nature of its environment. All that this meant, of course, was that in the life activities of animals the complete mechanism is bound up together in the process of survival. The separate units, muscle groups, glands, etc., seem to coalesce in the behavior toward some stimulus outside the organism. The study of comparative neurology and comparative behavior showed that the principle called integration ran throughout the entire organic world, but especially in the higher forms of animals.
When an animal, bi-symmetrical in form, is studied, it is found that sets of antagonistic muscles operate on either side of the body to bring about movement. These may react either alone or in synchronization with those of the opposite side. It is found further that these muscles are under the control of a central nervous system which, no matter how elementary, controls the behavior of this animal in reference to stimuli, so that it may respond as a whole, harmoniously. For example, a two-eyed free-swimming organism is stimulated by a light which strikes both eyes with equal intensity. The nerves conduct an impulse to the muscles in such a fashion that they co-ordinate to cause the animal to move in a straight line. If the light be stronger on one side than the other, it may move in a circle toward or away from the light, depending upon whether it is positively or negatively heliotropic, that is, attracted toward or away from a light stimulus. In this second case one =et of muscles is operating almost entirely alone and the other antagonistic muscles are for the time being shunted out of action,-may be said to be inhibited. Thus integration, the working together of the parts in a whole, is seen on the level of simple co-ordination. Likewise, even here, inhibition, the checking or blocking of one set of
(266) muscles, is also possible when the occasion demands. To use the phraseology of an older psychology, in the first instance the two groups of muscles might be said to be associated in action together; in the second, one group of muscles may be thought of as dissociated in action from the whole functioning.
What is true at the simpler stages of biological life exists on a higher plane with more complex animals. Sherrington, working with mammals, principally dogs, has shown the tremendous importance of the integrative action of the nervous system in the control of the organism (15). The skill in walking, in food-getting, etc., the alternating balance of nervous impulses in the same, the chain stimuli-response relationship involved in such activities as eating, swallowing and digesting, all illustrate the neat balance of the organism in biological survival. Nevertheless, even in the animals, inhibition plays a tremendous place. The development of the cerebral cortex, which we know is so important in the development of the higher mental powers, is concerned in part, if not in whole, with blocking the reflex activities of the lower brain centers, allowing the nervous impulses to co-operate together to bring about more complicated behavior (16). In the case of man it is illustrated in the field of skill. At first, the progress in running a maze, tossing balls, playing games is slow and deliberate. There is cramping of the muscles, there is loss of a play because attention is focused too long on one process alone, letting other simultaneous processes, e. g., muscle activities, lapse. Finally, often to our surprise, we find that we are able to make the entire movement, being, however, only aware of it afterwards. Somehow, suddenly the antagonistic muscles, say, of the arm and hands and fingers, operated together in correct alternation so that you made a clean-cut stroke down the alley of the maze, a thing one frequently sees in the psychological laboratory, or one finds that the hand-eye co-ordination one has so long sought in handball seems, of itself, to spring, like Minerva, full-fledged into existence. We know, of course, from careful studies of learning, that a long, preliminary process of weaving the separate elements of the muscular movements under the guiding control of the eye has preceded this perfection. Thus, too, we find that after a period of rest from practice we return to the game or act of skill and surprise ourselves at our decided improvement. James meant just this progress in integration, of knitting into finally balanced wholes the units of behavior, when he remarked that "we learn to skate in summer and to swim in winter."
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We recognize, therefore, at the biological levels, tendencies for the organism to be completely oriented to whatever it is doing, as the animal in feeding seems to be absorbed in the task before him. We also find, however, that separate elements in the organism, muscle groups and sense organs, may be involved while the other sets or senses are shunted out. We find, even, that the use of one set of muscles may inhibit another-one cannot at the same time run and play possum in hiding, one cannot at the same time chew and swallow. But the important thing to recall is that, although these separate trends may operate alone, or at separate times, so far as the entire organism is concerned its principal survival possibility is its capacity to attend in toto to the situation and, using all its powers, get food, escape danger, catch its prey, seek its mate, fight for its own or its mate's existence, or perform whatever other act the moment demands and its powers make possible.
III
The problem of adaptation of the whole organism, in terms of its entire range of mechanisms, to specific situations is as much a problem of the human being as of the animal. Man, in our own cultural stream during the Christian era, taking his orientation so largely not from Christ and Socrates, but from a neurotic Paul and a psychasthenic Neo-Platonist, St. Augustine, has denied the need of integration of all one's powers and wishes. This is especially true in regard to the sex drives. More recently the industrial age has tended, very decidedly in some instances, to thwart, in the same manner, the full expression of the total organization of man's capacities for responding to the environment (10, 18). The total effect of this has been that man has tried to climb the hill of progress on three cylinders, as it were. Now, just as in a four-cylinder gas engine, there is not only loss of one-fourth of the power when but three cylinders are working, there is actually a retardation upon the other units, an inhibition effect, a drag upon the engine from the dead cylinder. This analogy holds good for man. Not only have we loss of power from incomplete response and use of all capacities, we also have a brake, a check on the power remaining, by the absence of a section of our dynamic forces which is at the time out of commission. There are some who are convinced that this waste of energy is one of the most significant features of our present hectic life, high-strung and over-wrought (11).
In the process of evolution the higher animals and man have developed a series of trends which make for more ade-
(268) -quate survival with less cost of energy per unit. In this adaptation which has gone on pari passu with evolution, the first noticeable items, aside from the purely vegetative reflexes common to all animals, are the instinctive-emotional reaction patterns which are found serviceable in primitive situations. Man, however, is not dependent upon untrained instincts; he has also developed a potentiality for learning skilled acts, for imagining an action before it occurs and thereby getting set for it, preparing against it. This latter capacity we speak of as intelligence. Intelligence, it must be remembered, operates in the service primarily of the adaptive needs, while the impulse for this adjustment lies in the emotional-instinctive life. Without the drive in life, intellect is listless-one might even say useless.
Moreover, in the evolution of man certain crises, critical moments, have arisen which had to be met and met quickly. Now we are protected against those, but then man had to meet danger from falling, from fire, enemies and natural forces by fighting, fleeing, avoiding or, if possible, pre-arranging for. Also man had to secure food by chasing, by laying trapsone of the early uses of intelligence-and by preparing food for consumption. He felt in himself tremendous impulses toward the opposite sex. This instinct apparently has always mystified man and has given him much material for imagination and dreams, as well as the intensest pleasure and excitement in pursuit and enjoyment of the sexual partner. Man is, furthermore, interested in dominating his fellows and thus possessing power. He has always been interested in looking into objects, prying around in his universe, and in creating things, too, of a physical kind for survival-weapons and tools, and also in relating and creating stories of his adventures, and devising explanations of how he came to be and about his relation to the world outside himself. Modern man, viewing himself deliberately, must realize that these trends persist even today.
Nevertheless it is interesting to know that in early society we find that none of these trends were allowed absolutely free play. Man soon learned that to survive he must control himself in the interests of the social group. A whole gamut of customs, rigid and severe, directed his acts to that end. We find, in addition, that these deep impulses are often in opposition to each other, and, interestingly enough, they do seem to go in pairs. Love, which furnishes the motive to race preservation, also becomes an important element in love of god, in patriotism of country and in loyalty to fellow men. Hatred finds its integration with this by direction toward
(269) the enemy. Thus we love our neighbor, but to follow the precept of Jesus and love our enemy is hard, indeed, and involves a considerable re-vamping of our social personalities. In savage man the personality found its unification between love and hate, through the antagonism toward members of the out-group (17). Our own attitudes are on the same level. Just lately we have had entire nations reveling in an orgy of loving themselves and hating the Hun. The two tendencies go together even in their violence. We also have inclinations to flight from danger, alternating with tendencies to stand our ground and if necessary to fight. We have desires to take the lead, coupled with the ambivalent wishes to sit by, to follow docilely, or to "let George do it." We have tendencies to strike out for ourselves, to be creative, to seek new experience, in travel, science, art, business methods, what not, yet we also have the voice of the herd ever in our ears, bidding us to beware, to conform to the old and well known.
E. B. Holt has formulated the newer view of studying human personality most significantly. He points out that the integration of the organism is always toward some specific object or fact in the environment.. The trends which lie in the inherited nature of man as an animal find their expression very largely in a series of wishes. A wish is " a course of action which some mechanism" of the body is set to carry out, whether it actually does so or not . . . . "The wish is any purpose or project for a course of action, whether it is being merely entertained by the mind or is being actually executed"
(4). W. I. Thomas, who used the concept of the wish earlier than Holt (both got the notion from Freud), conceives of the wish in a somewhat larger sense as trend which got organized into general mental set in reference to certain survival purposes of life. His schema of wishes for the adult is: (1) the desire for security, for safety, for conservatism; (2) the desire or wish for novelty, for new experience, for breaking away from the ennui of the old and staid; (3) the desire for intimate response from others, love life, deep comradeship, and the like; (4) the desire for recognition from the group, the will to power in other words, the desire to dominate the herd [2] (19).
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In all of us the wishes we have are organized into attitudes These attitudes are sets or motor tendencies toward some object. The important attitudes arise at points of maladjustment, crises, and because crises involve emotions the objects in the situation come to carry emotional significance. That is, objects come to possess value; they set up an emotional response in the person. However, not all attitudes carry emotional freight, although a great many of those concerned in social behavior do. The wish in the concrete form of social attitude is organized around values. To the man who worships a fetish, the object, be it rabbit's foot or cross, is a powerful stimulus in setting off specific responses. These wishes with their concrete attitudes form the background of personality. In fact we may tentatively define personality as just that combination of attitudes, ideas and physical features which we recognize either in ourselves or others as the dominant force in our behavior. Character may be thought of as a static side to personality and to include a number of traits which others mark in us, structurally. Personality is the more dynamic concept. When, therefore, we write of an integrated personality, we mean one which is organized around some set of facts or specific aspects of the environment, around some values, if you will, which enlist the entire series of mechanisms. All the trends, wishes or attitudes move together toward the end laid down, be it high or low, be it determined alone by the merest exigencies of the environment or be it self-determined by the individual. When we speak of the integrity of a person we mean this synthesis of trends. The elaboration of this notion is the purpose of the balance of the present paper. Let us turn to the manner in which these trends get organized and the manner of their functioning.
The fundamental thing about a baby is that its wishes are rudimentary and rather completely fulfilled. Gradually its dawning consciousness realizes that there are many things in the world which it can not have by crying for them. It comes to distinguish between the animate and inanimate world. Crying at crib or chair brings no results; crying at mother or nurse does, even if the result is a good spanking. The child learns to control his muscles and, on the basis of visual, auditory and kinesthetic sensations, largely, comes to realize that he has a body of his own. Later, with the development of imagination and language, his sense of SELF and individuality become complete.
The trends we have mentioned above are the driving forces of his wants. But not always are these wants satisfied, that is,
(271) not always is the individual adapted to his environment. The child soon begins a process, all important for his later life, of substitution in securing satisfactions. Certain acts and images come to intervene between the wishes and the response. One of the earliest of these is the sucking of the thumb in compensation for nursing. The pacifier is nothing else, of course, than an artificial thumb and is apt to be quite as significant in the individual's development. Along with this growing sense of the use of substitutes in the world, the child learns by the method of conditioned response the meaning of actions and objects. He comes to realize that things and actions stand for other things and other acts. Thus the bell rung promptly at a stated time may mean feeding by the nurse, the presence of a bathtub may set up vigorous efforts toward it, or, later, images of taking a bath. As imagination grows and with it language, the child comes to have names for objects and things, and actions not present to sense may be talked about, imagined and re-lived. So, too, the dream of the child is a means of wish-fulfillment. Thus a trend which is denied complete satiety, like hunger, is satisfied when the dream leads the child in imagination to the jam pot. Or the child may have been denied companions by over-anxious and snobbish parents, or denied normal affection by cold and hard ones, and the child dreams of playmates or of fondling a parent. Or he may in his play compensate for lack of playmates by talking to himself, and for lack of affection by loving his doll.
Now these substitutes for direct response to stimuli are all-important. Certainly playing the rôle of others in makebelieve play is very significant in making the child sympathetic and human in his social relations.
However, as the child grows up he comes more and more into conflict with society. He finds that his group of elders have laid down rules which he must follow. These are often irksome, as in the boy who, raised in the freedom of a pioneer country, cannot at first understand the "Verboten "signs which decorate the city parks and the private grounds of thickly settled centers, and may come into conflict with the police by his over-stepping them.
The difficulties of adjustment, therefore, which society puts up to us must be met in several ways. The situation and the reaction to it not being immediate and reflex, imagination and language have come in to stand in the middle ground between environment and organism's response to it. We have consequently the growing importance of the mind, of the thinking aspect of the organism. To define the different ways in which we get ready to meet this external world, the psychoanalysts
(272) have invented the terms: realistic, directed thinking as contrasted with artistic, unreal, fanciful thinking. Both of these lie in the realm of the imagination, one is constructive, useful, and ends in adjustment that is satisfactory; the other is wasteful, and ends in mal-adjustment. The former allows us to sublimate our raw desires, to find outlets in socially acceptable ways, as witnessed in the woman's interest in child-study or orphanages, where she herself has been denied the privilege of motherhood. Here, too, we find the creative activity of poet or artist who produces a piece of work for all mankind to enjoy; Here, too, we find the scientist or engineer who, faced by the problem of solving an experiment or of building a bridge, conceives of plans and principles of mechanics which allow him to solve his difficulty.
On the other side, we find the person who daydreams his solutions but never accomplishes anything. The castles in Spain remain just that and, though satisfying to him, they are socially useless and end perhaps in making the person quite unprepared to meet the real world. Much of this unreal thinking is concerned with the imagining of words and symbols which in normal life may have meaning in reference to realities, but which here take on significance for themselves alone. There persists a deal of this sort of thing in modern magic--card reading, palmistry, astrology and the mumbo jumbo of our present-day medicine men.
Society provides, through the terms SINFUL, WICKED, NASTY, IMMORAL, categories in which the individual may place those actions and thoughts not socially acceptable. These may, and do, break out again in dreams, fantasies, in wit, in smutty narratives, in all kinds of symbolism. In connection with these categories we have an elaborate set of codes and principles as to what is RIGHT, VIRTUOUS, GOOD, ACCEPTABLE. In the treatment of persons thought divergent from the codes of the group, gossip plays an important part. The present interest in divorce cases, bootlegging, sexual crimes, and the host of personal indiscretions to which the newspaper panders are expressions of this. The newspaper is nothing but a form of organized gossip. In this field, too, we have the Mrs. Bogarts of Main Street satisfying their own unconscious wishes by the ambivalent trends: accusing others and mouthing the clandestine behavior of others.
Very frequently the deep-seated impulses which are socially not acceptable in their raw form are suppressed, instead of integrated by sublimation and use on higher planes, and we compensate for their suppression by inflicting punishments on others who may normally be able to indulge these impulses
(273) without damage to themselves. Thus, the prohibitionist who insists upon abolishing all liquor because he himself is terribly tempted by it or because he cannot control himself in the use of it. Or in reference to tobacco, the following stanza illustrates the point:
"I'll never use tobacco, it is a filthy weed.
I'll never put it in my mouth," said little Robert Reed.
It is clear, as Martin says, that Robert is obsessed with the temptation to use tobacco and would universalize his own moral dilemma for everyone by tabooing its use (7). After the code has been put together (actually during the making of it) rationalization in the name of virtue, religion, patriotism, good health or other socially acceptable formulae is given out as the motive.
Again, the suppressed wishes are dissociated from the normal life, or else indulged in surreptitiously, and the individual, in the latter case, is torn between two poles and his energy is wasted and his life even morbid. The phenomenon of lack of integration is so closely bound up with dissociation that we must mention this latter mechanism in its relation to the individual's development.
Dissociation is a method by which the personality utilizes one part of the organism independently of the antagonistic trends of personality. It is frankly, at times, invaluable for survival. It is only a question as to how adequate the personality is that "gets by" through recourse to such means. Ordinarily it implies a division of our powers (trends) and hence wastage and inefficiency.
It is obvious that, although the organism operates as a whole in food getting, mate seeking, playing, creating and all types of action which demand full attention and complete power, the units of behavior involved are plural. For instance, in food getting, separate sets of muscles, legs, arms, torso, hand, mouth, etc., all come into play, not all at once, true enough, but either simultaneously or in sequence as the act is completed. We also noted above that some actions, like chewing, actually inhibit others, like swallowing. So, too, one cannot at the same time hide and fight, submit and master. We also discover that when the whole attention and muscle power of the system is not demanded, certain acts may take place alongside of, discrete from, the main trend of attention. Thus most of us have found ourselves, during a lull in a conversation, twisting our watch chain, or handkerchief, or, if pencil be at hand, scribbling apparently nonsense
(274) words or pictures on paper, backs of books or other surface. For the most part we are not conscious of doing these things. Nevertheless the actions may have significance in the take-up of unused nervous energy or in the habituation to a type of automatic side-response which keeps up for the moment balanced, just as a pacifier keeps a baby at temporary adjustment to his world.[3] These automatic actions are, by and large, actually outside any conscious controls. You recall the familiar story of the two schoolboys, intense rivals for first honors in spelling. One boy always nosed out ahead of the other in a tight contest, which irritated the second boy, making him restless- and increasingly desirous of victory. One day in a close spelling match in which all others but these contestants had been eliminated, boy number two noticed that his rival always took hold of the top button on his waistcoat whenever he was confronted with the spelling of a difficult word. Acting on the idea which arose at the time, the second youngster, just before the occasion of the next match, snipped the said button from the other's coat, and, true to prediction, when the hard word, which was to decide supremacy, came, the first boy, not finding, habitually, his button to twist while the image of the word to be spelled developed, became confused and lost the contest.
This phenomenon of dissociation runs the gamut from such simple forms through true automatic writing where alleged messages from spirits, the dead, and the devil are supposed to be given, through mild types of hysteric paralysis, amnesias, somnambulism, fugues and multiple personalities. The most famous case of the latter is Morton Prince's case of Miss Beauchamp, described in the book, "The Dissociation of a Personality."
The classic case of Irene, the hysteric girl studied by Janet, the French psychiatrist, is also of interest. Here we have complete dissociation, loss of memory for the death of the another, but the return of the whole incident in a dissociated state, when the girl lived over again the horrible details of her mother's death. Following this trance-like condition, Irene would return to normal personality with absolutely no memory of her mother's death, no emotion at all about her mother and no capacity for telling anything about her dissociated states.
Too often we do not appreciate the importance of these extreme cases from abnormal psychology which reveal to us mechanisms occurring in milder forms in many conflicts (20).
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IV
The thing to be emphasized is that the mechanism of dissociation takes a common form, especially in a society where the divergent trends of interests and values are very marked. Literature and philosophy have long recognized, as has common sense, that people react differently under varying situations. The man at play is not the same as the man at his professional work; the man in his intimate contacts with friends reveals himself and conducts himself differently than among strangers. Thus the stimuli, the situations, family, business, pleasure, church or state, set, in part, the pattern for your behavior. By analogy we may say that one cannot at the same time attend to his worship and perform his functions as a part of the economic order, any more than one can chew and swallow at the same time, or the free-swimming organism of our first example can at the same time move to the right and to the left of the bright light. In terms of the social organization, the institutions and their techniques, man has had to develop specialization and arrange in his habits divergent ways of meeting the demands made upon him for survival. In a crude way, then, dissociation, in the form of specialization in behavior is necessary.
The common situations to which a man has to respond are roughly classified: the family, the state with its important adjunct, education, the church, the business-industrial order, cultural contributions of the past, leisure time occupations and the whole gamut of social standards. Under these rubrics are dozens of subdivisions and great overlapping. So long as the personality tendencies involved may keep house together, even though there are special times and places for the behavior in reference to these separate situations, all is well and good. It is when the individual finds himself in conflict with himself over his behavior in these different directions that trouble ensues. It is exactly the fact that these interests lead men in such decidedly divergent ways, appeal to such one-sided phases of the deeper trends in man, that conflict arises. Here, then, is the crux of our problem!
Man's trends are organized in terms of institutions into attitudes and methods of reaction, but we find the individual ill at ease, in worry, in conflict because those trends demanded by some of codes are not those demanded by others. Man today finds himself forced into a sort of compartmentalized life, and this disintegrates him from the complete response which is essential to full living. Although the behavior of a man in reference to the church is different from his action in business or in reference to the teachings of science, nevertheless
(276) it is his whole organism that reacts to the separate situations, be they business deals, religious principles and rites, or intellectual assent to evolution. The trouble arises in that the conflict, conscious or unconscious, is between the attitudes, the trends behind the business ethics and the trends brought into play in religious experience and Christian ethics, which are not lost when the individual is reacting to former.
Let me take an example from the family. There is, no doubt, a serious problem involved in the question of moral standards in sex. Our Western family life has been built around monogamy, and this system of marriage is considered a value. Around it the church and state have thrown not only legalistic protection but an enormous amount of emotional weighting. Yet, modern industrial life and loss of religion are said to be destroying the family. Certainly divorce is on the increase, and mere laws to stop the frequency of divorce are granted quite inconsequential in remedying the underlying problem of the sexes. Moreover, the existence of prostitution, either formally legalized as heretofore, or clandestine and under cover as today has continued all through the monogamous period. This raises a very serious question as to the possible sex differences and differences in trends of men and women which make the male polygamous and the female monogamous. Certainly there is no more difficult social problem than the conflict between the codes of society which demand monogamy, and these trends and habits in the male section of our population which find release from the same by clandestine love, perversions, or, resisting these, end in neuroses. It is not here a question, really, of trying to settle out of hand the problem as to whether men and women are here fundamentally different; it is really a matter of looking carefully at the facts, observing the type of social taboo that is put upon the sexes and the inefficient way in which the individual member of society has to adjust to the social code.
One does not need to confine himself, as the Freudians do, to the sexual field for pertinent examples of conflict. Wide acquaintance with human nature and modern social problems ought to dispel the fantasy that the sexual is the entire basis of personality difficulties (8).
There is clearly a decided difference between the ethics taught in Christianity and the folk ways and mores of modern commercialism. There is no place where rationalization is better illustrated than here. One has but to read a book like "Babbitt" for an excellent picture of the type of narrow-gauged business man of the day with his petty defense mechanisms and unsuccessful escapes from reality. Tons of books
(277) have been written upon the kinship of religion and business. Yet our Christian ethics teaches us honesty, love, charity, to live and let live, to do unto others as we would be done by. Still most of us accept the homely dictum of David Harum in reference to the Golden Rule and "do them fust." We can hardly expect to operate on true Christian principles and at the same time indulge in the cutthroat competition, the grab-and-hold methods of our present system, without coming into conflict with ourselves. The only way we escape this dilemma is by shutting off our minds into water-tight sections, one for business, one for religion. We escape by living lives split wide open, consciously or unconsciously, because compartmentalized living is only a myth of the conscious mind. We twist the Biblical phrase, to not let the right hand know what the left hand does by using our right hand to filch our brother's pocket in business for six days a week, while on Sunday, with the left hand, we dole out charity on the church plate. Rich men sometimes build beautiful churches or found orphanages as compensations for their consciences, i.e., their conflicts.
Furthermore, resort is had to given out rationalized codes of conduct or abstract principles to explain our motives. This is exampled in the employer's cry of Bolshevism against the legitimate demands of a labor union on strike, or the cry of capitalism on the part of the socialist when the economic system demands a revision of labor costs, as in periods of depression.
Likewise the contest between the conservatives and the liberals in the modern church over science, especially over the theory of evolution, illustrates the same problem. Taught the story of Adam and Eve, the story of Creation, of reverence for the Bible as a divine book, the whole gamut of beliefs about man's place and destiny, one coming into knowledge of modern science, especially biology, anthropology, psychology and sociology can scarcely escape a conflict. It is in recognition of this trouble that the timid souls like Mr. Bryan and his ilk, the country over, clamor for suppression of science teaching in the schools, lest it destroy the faith, the old ways of thinking about life and its meaning, in the rising generation.
One common thing for prominent business men, statesmen and scientists to do is to assert and re-assert that science and religion are not in conflict. They are in the common sense of the term, and the warfare of science and what the popular man conceives of as religion will go on for many generations. It is probably true that a scientific philosophy will also find a place for the religious experiences of man; it is hard to see
(278) how it can ignore doing so. Still, as religion is understood and officially constituted today, science constitutes a radically different outlook. It is meaningless to the layman to draw distinctions between theology and religion, as the expert may and should. Therefore, to the man who feels this struggle in himself, the statement of a prominent statesman or scientist that science does not conflict with religion sounds absurd.
Space forbids going into the question of this sort of break-up of personality. We have all seen it. The innocent, faithful boy from home, thrown into the maelstrom of science teaching in college, wrecking himself and dissipating his energy in an attempt to solve the unsolvable, the fight between the religious superstitions of his past and the facts and theories of modern science. What is needed, of course, is re-orientation, but it is seldom forthcoming.
The same sort of dissociation exists between those ideas and attitudes in us which make for world-wide sympathy and understanding and the early teaching which holds us bound to the nationalistic state. Internationalism as an attitude is demanded of us from the fields of banking, trade, commerce, industry, travel, science and art. Yet our attachments are held by tradition to the geographical unit called the nation. We surround ourselves with patriotic shibboleths, codes, rituals-stereotyped and unreal, but important to protect us from the conflict we ourselves feel. These escapes from reality would be ridiculous if they were not so pathetic. Much of our rabid treatment of the 1. W. W. and the syndicalist is because we feel in ourselves the force of their ideas and doctrines, and to protect ourselves we resort to the primitive, unconscious method of punishment, injury, imprisonment, banishment. Of course, we realize that never will this method solve our problem, that internationalism, of some form, is in the air and in forces outside our control. Instead of meeting the I. W. W. with facts, cold arguments, investigation and co-operation, we grow angry, throw them into jail and wreak our vengeance, the vengeance against ourselves incidentally, on their bodies. In this treatment, moreover, we feel ourselves virtuous, Christian and pure. Man has always satisfied his own behavior to himself in just that way. Somehow the persons who burned the witches at Salem felt called of God to do, so, too, the mob that tears a Negro or an 1. W. W. to pieces, or the police officers who inflict the inquisition and horror of the third degree, feel peculiarly righteous.
One could go on, the examples suffice. One could add the conflict between creative desires and the curse of the machine age, of the conflict between drinking habits and the pose of
(279) belief in the Volstead Act, the conflict between tendencies to be unique and free and the tendency to listen to the group demands in matters of art, methods of education and even one's leisure time occupations.
V
The work of Ritter, Herrick, Jennings, Sherrington and their colleagues has indicated the place of integration as a principle in animal behavior. The recent studies in learning by Peterson (12) and others have shown the importance of much the same principle in habit formation, even those of the highest sort. We have seen that man has divergent trends and that these come into collision with each other, ending in daydreaming, wasted effort, cruelty, compartmentalized lives, and other escapes from reality-stereotyped thinking, rationalizations and anxiety. For the educator, the sociologist, the publicist, for all those interested in the solution of this inefficient living, the difficulty lies in the remedy for it all. The principle at hand is one of using the full scope of our trends and powers to our best advantage. We may lay down certain features, at least tentatively, which should guide us:
(1) We must bear in mind man's capacity for reconstructing his world in imagination. The ability for substitute response, for language and symbol help him to adjust. Certainly he must not let this carry him away into realms of fantasy, away from the external reality-stern and unyielding-which must be met. In fact, the reality must at all times be given the first place as setting our problem of adjustment and in great measure stipulating the method of solving the difficulty, for behavior is always in reference to, toward, some specific feature of the situation.
We have, therefore, an objective world and to meet it an organism that can back up, wait, turn about, and follow leads in imagination before actually indulging in the full motor acts. By playing the rôle of an actor in various parts, he comes, through his intelligence, to select and discriminate which feature of the object or fact to follow and which to avoid. The very principle which Mead has shown so important in rise of the self is of use in adulthood in the foresight, in the looking ahead in imagination, which the adult may use in solving a dilemma (9). For brevity we may say there are three phases to the problem of human adjustment:
| OBJECT (Situation) ... | SUBJECT (Organism) ... | ACT (Response) | ||
| (Stimulus) | (Idea, Attitude, Affection) | |||
| (Behavior-conduct) | ||||
(280) In a crude way this tri-partite division corresponds to the sensory, the central and motor sides of the reflex arc. The situation sets the problem; the organism, through idea, attitude and affective-coloring, re-orients itself to the situation and finally solves its problem by behavior. The importance of the central-the re-organizing-feature of the organism is apt to be neglected. Herein lies the significance of intelligence in conduct. And if the intellect is unable to cope with the reality, the adjustment is apt to be incomplete.
(2) Professor Burnham, in discussing the essentials of a schema of education, stipulates three necessary factors: (a) that every pupil or student have a task, an objective, a project, a target to aim at; (b) that there must be a plan, a technique for attaining this end; and (c) that there must be freedom, initiative, to carry this plan to completion (1). This formula is akin to the one which we are formulating here. We require, as Holt says, "a course of action (behavior) which enlists all of the capacities of the organism... (and)... . The more integrated behavior is harmonious and consistent behavior toward a larger and more comprehensive situation, . . ." (Moreover) "freedom, like virtue, comes through discrimination, i.e., wisdom. The person in whom there are no suppressions, in whom the process of discrimination and integration has gone on successfully, throws his whole force into whatever he does; he does it without constraint" (4).
We noted above the conflict of various personality tendencies and couched them in sociological terms. We saw that too frequently today those attitudes which revolve around business and religion are in conflict (unconscious to many people, but all the more severely so). Also that the trends developed by early theological training come into conflict with those taught in modern biological and sociological sciences. That there are deep-seated conflicts in the sphere of the sex life. Further that between the trends which lead us to a place in an international schema of the social-economic-political world and those trends which, looking to immediate security, incline us to narrow nationalism exists a serious handicap to facing the realities in our modern world problems. The difficulties are evident. The remedy is more obscure.
One frequent method of escaping the need of bringing the divergent trends together is to seek ever new stimuli in the external, material universe. Thus we attempt to still the voice of the Self which calls us to take account of our conflict and to end it. In the human being, the unconscious as well as the conscious life strives for completeness of response. We ignore this call and seek in the ever-expanding world about us our
(281) compensations, our solutions. These do not come. Man's environment-industrial and political and educational especially-which he has made for himself is constantly expanding. There are novel stimuli and tastes to be satisfied on all sides. We rush from one pleasure to another, from one science to another, from one religion to another. We go in for travel, which Emerson called a "fool's paradise." Communication and education bring us the whole world of the past and present to our feet, but we do not better control ourselves or learn the use of our powers in harmony. We are caught in a centrifugal swirl, as Professor Patrick puts it, and the constant beating of violent stimuli upon us makes us dizzy and discontented (11). We fail to find complete response or calm, wholehearted endeavor. We need not a world made perfect where an angelic chorus would lull us into a Nirvanaian unconsciousness. What we do need is a stock taking, personality-inventory, a turning inward for a little while to get our bearings and then driving ahead, taking into account our conflict by integrating our life to an objective through a sensible plan involving freedom of initiative on our own part.
This over-externalization of the modern life is, then, nothing but a type of escape from ourselves. As Jung puts it, the world today is too much extra-verted and he would have us consider the importance of a balance between his intra-verted types and their opposites (G). This escape from one's self is illustrated, furthermore, in the frequent case where sorrow, a financial blow, a lost love comes to one. Instead of facing the reality of such a situation and re-orienting one's life on a new level, there is an attempt to put the images and feelings "out of the mind," through an appeal to a round of parties, dances, drinking bouts, drugs, sexual indiscretions, even suicide, anything immediately at hand. This is no adequate manner, as every psychiatrist knows. One simply imagines that he escapes himself. The repressed or avoided images and trends persist, rob us of energy and break out in serious maladies later, or else lead to living upon a very inefficient, dissociated, impulsive plane. In such cases one must come, with Kipling, to be able to see the things one cared for "broken" and yet not care "too much." Above all else one must learn to get one's orientation from the inside. That is the pole around which the personality must revolve.
"To thine own self be true,
And it will follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
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The Greek civilization in many, many ways had a distinct advantage over our own in its emphasis upon temperance, calm and a frank recognition of the use of all the desires in moderation. Professor Sherman has recently expressed an appreciation of this principle of integration. He realizes that the fundamental malady of the American personality is its lack of integration, its repression and consequent disestablishment. He writes:
What they (the younger generation today) crave is a binding generalization of philosophy, or religion, or morals, which will give direction and purpose, which will give channel and speed, to the languid, diffusive drift of their lives. The suppressed desire which causes their unhappiness is a suppressed desire for a good life, for the perfection of their human possibilities. The average unreflective man does not always know that this is, in fact, his malady. . . . But what the innermost law of his being demands, what his human nature craves, is something good and great that he can do with his heart and mind and body. He craves the active peace of surrender and devotion to some things greater than himself. Surrender to anything less means the degradation and humiliation of his spirit (14).
Professor Sherman makes religion, broadly interpreted as that which, in the depths of his heart, a man really believes desirable and praiseworthy," the key to his integrative principle. Whether we agree to call this "religion" is beside the point. The essential point is that we need a core around which the entire personality may grow.
The place which education must play in this integration is large. It must take account of the need for well-rounded lives and personally satisfying effort. The educational objectives most commonly held may be thought of under three categories:
(1) The oldest and most persistent, which looks at education as the transmission of traditions and codes of conduct of the past to the rising generation. This also would include instruction in the techniques of the past for food-getting and survival generally.
(2) That which views education as a method of training the student to think for himself, to master the new realms of science and art, from the standpoint of specialization in some field where he may be technical expert or a scientist advancing the field of knowledge. Too often this aim is put forth by those completely wrapped up in the material culture of the day and over-impressed by the significance of the industrial revolution. The idea is related in its history to the rise of the idea of progress in the Western mind.
(3) That aim which makes the above two subordinate to the development of personality. This means making it free, self-initiative and growing. The values here are not
(283) those often narrowly conceived as "moral education." Much of the education under this third rubric would be amoral or super-moral. The principal purpose would be a consideration of human capacities finding satisfactions in social contacts, individualized functions and creativeness. The social standards would operate to prevent undue injury to other social beings, in fact, an educative process which looked to the integration of personality would, after all, be highly social. It would not mean the expression of the raw trends in man; it would recognize the place of the strictly biological pleasures of the human body, true enough, but it would find its highest fruitage where the trends and their wishes found expression in art and science, food-getting techniques, religion,-all cooperating together toward a common goal.
This educational objective would avoid all tendencies to make man mediocre beyond that demanded for social control, which is not much. It would put the social premium upon divergence and novelty, not for their own sakes, but because they offer infinite variety of aims for the personalities in a social group. The moral standards would be determined by the objects and facts sought out and men would be measured by other men by the relative height of their attainments when compared to the height of their aspirations. The objective reality would keep the person oriented to his realities, but this would not mean the realities found alone in the material civilization of today. The world of idea, image, and their expression in creative art and science and technique are also important. The danger lies when we come to believe that reality exists only in the one dimension of material goods.
One perceives that the principles laid down of old by Confucius, in part by Buddha, certainly by Socrates and Christ, were these which we are demanding. It is the GOOD LIFE, the ideal, the aim which we emphasize. Only we must guard ourselves against letting this ideal become detached from the real (the very word "ideal" is unfortunate for the sense meant here). Morals become, for one so oriented, a stage in a process of human evolution, not immutable principles (secondary rationalizations). Conduct is controlled by intelligence, backed by deep-seated drives, which finds in wisdom the important factor for right adjustment (2).
So long as education is concerned with instilling moralistic codes and mere techniques into people, it will fail to develop the highest personalities, for here the orientation is not one's own but another's. So, too, if the objective emphasizes alone the training "to think," it is apt to be divorced from the
(284) social milieu and to end in high specialization with a sort of disruption because one feels no responsibility to another.[4] We are caught too much in the matrix of this second aim with our scientific specialization and the craving for commercial success.
It is only when the first two become a part of a larger scheme, which attempts to relate the entire series of trends of the person into a whole, that integration takes place. We must recall that man is egotistic, desires fellowship with others, is creative, has trends to reverence, desires new experience, is pugnacious as well as docile, likes power over others, yet enjoys domination too. The organization of the divergent trends is possible when one has wisdom, when one's ethical attitudes in the church and business harmonize, when pugnacity finds its outlet in a struggle against ignorance, disease and death, when power over others is the power of a Socrates or a Christ over his fellows, not the power of a Borgia or a Catherine de Medici.
In conclusion, one notes how we constantly return to the ancient. This third principle, as we have indicated, was old even in Socrates' day, yet it springs eternal in the breast of the best thinkers of today. It only shows our debt to the past; it signifies the common patterns of man's life everywhere; above all else it indicates how human nature's ruminations about its self reveal the eternal verities of the importance of complete response, of wholeness in action, but in increasingly more significant forms.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Note: The appended list of books is merely suggestive. There is a tremendous number of works bearing on this topic.)
1. Burnham, W. H.: "The Normal Mind," PED. SEM., 1922, v. 29, p. 383ff.
2. Dewey, J.: " Human Nature and Conduct," New York, 1922.
3. Herrick, C. J.: "Introduction to Neurology," Philadelphia, 1918. 4. Holt, E. B.: "The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics," New York, 1915.
5. Jennings, H. S.: "Behavior of the Lower Organisms," New York, 1906.
6. Jung, C. G.: "Psychological Types," London, 1921.
7. Martin, E. D.: "The Behavior of Crowds," New York, 1920.
8. MacCurdy, J. T.: "Problems in Dynamic Psychology," New York, 1922.
9. Mead, G. H.: "A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol," J. of Phil., 1922, v. 19, p. 157ff.
10. Parker, C. H.: "The Casual Laborer and other Essays," New York, 1920.
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11. Patrick, G. T. W.: "The Psychology of Social Reconstruction," Boston, 1920.
12. Peterson, J.: " Completeness of Response as an Explanation Principle in Learning," Psychol. Rev., 1916, v. 23, p. 153ff.
13. Ritter, W. E.: ' The Unity of the Organism," Boston, 1919.
14. Sherman, S.: "The Genius of America," New York, 1923.
15. Sherrington, C. S.: "The Integrative Action of the Nervous System," New York, 1906.
16. Stiles, P. G.: The Nervous System and its Conservation," Philadelphia, 1914.
17. Sumner, W. G.: "Folkways," Boston, 1906.
18. Tead, O.: "Instincts in Industry," 1918.
19. Thomas, W. 1. and Znaniecki, F.: "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America," v. i. (Methodological Note), Boston, 1918.
20. Wells, F. L.: "Mental Adjustments," New York, 1917.
