FOOTNOTE:
[13] I use the term “suggested hallucination” to indicate the character and origin of the latter. The term seems to me convenient and may prove acceptable.
[CHAPTER XXVI]
THE HYPNOIDAL STATE AND SUPERSTITIONS
The hypnoidal state into which man is apt to fall so easily, is well adapted to fear suggestions, since the fear instinct and the impulse of self-preservation are present in the subconsciousness, exposed during trance states to all sorts of fear suggestions and superstitions. It is during these brief periods of primitive hypnoidal states that the animal is exposed to attacks of enemies whose senses become sharpened to detect the weak spots in the armor of their victims, immersed in the momentary rest of the hypnoidal state.
During these periods of repose and passivity or of sleep stage, the animal can only protect itself by all kinds of subterfuges, such as hiding in various inaccessible places, or taking its rest-periods in shady nooks and corners, or in the darkness of the night. Each hypnoidal period closely corresponds to the larval stage of the insect, reposing in its cocoon,—the most critical time of the insect organism, most exposed to the depredations of its enemies. And still the hypnoidal state is requisite to the animal in order to restitute its living matter and energy which have been wasted during the active moments of its life activities. Hence the weakness of the animal depends on the very constitution of its organism.
The hypnoidal state, although absolutely necessary in the process of metabolism, is also the moment of its greatest danger, and the fear instinct is specially intense at the onset of that hypnoidal moment, the lowest point of the weakness of the organism. The animal, after taking all precautions, is finally paralyzed into temporary immobility at the risk of its own existence.
The fear instinct determines the nature and character of rest and sleep. The lower the animal, the scantier are its means of defense in the ceaseless struggle for its preservation. The simpler the animal, the greater and more numerous are the dangers menacing it with total extinction,—hence it must be constantly on its guard. A state of sleep such as found in the higher animals is rendered impossible. The sleep must be light, and in snatches, rapidly passing from rest into waking,—the characteristic of the hypnoidal state. The fear instinct is the controlling factor of sleep and rest. When we are in danger the sleep is light and in snatches, and we thus once more revert to an ancient form of rest and sleep.
The insomnia found in cases of neurosis is a reversion to primitive rest-states, found in the lower animals. The insomnia is due to the fear instinct which keeps dominating the conscious and subconscious mental activities, a state which has prevailed in the early stages of animal life. That is why the sleep of neurotics is unrefreshing and full of dreams of dangers and accidents, and peopled with visions of a terrorizing nature. Hence the neurotic fear of insomnia which is itself the consequence of the obsession, conscious and subconscious, of the fear instinct.
In my work on sleep I was greatly impressed with the place fear holds in animal life existence. From the lowest representative, such as the insect to the highest, such as man, fear rules with an iron hand. Every animal is subject to cataplexy of fear and to the hypnoidal state itself, the consequence of fear-adaptations to the external conditions of a hostile environment. Cataplexy and the consequent hypnoidal state which paralyze the animal, depriving it of all defense, are grounded in the imperfections of living protoplasm.
Man is subject to the hypnoidal periods of primitive life. It is during those periods that the shafts of suggestion are most apt to strike his subconsciousness, divorced as it is during those moments from the nodding self consciousness. During these nodding moments of his life he is exposed to harmful suggestions, since they are apt to arouse the fear instinct, the most sensitive of all human instincts. It seems as if the fear instinct is never fully asleep, and is the easiest to arouse. It seems to be watchful or semi-watchful during the most critical moments of man’s helplessness.
Fear of darkness and fear of invisible foes are specially strong in man, because of the deeply rooted fear instinct, but also because of his memories of accidents and dangers that have befallen him, and which may befall him. Man’s fears hang round dark places, gloomy corners and nooks, caves and forests, and more especially during the darkness and shades of night, appearing as treacherous visions and specters of lurking dangers. And still from the very nature of his being man must rest and sleep, hence the association of terrors with night time. He can only overcome his night terrors by living and sleeping in more or less secure corners, in the neighborhood of his fellow-beings who by the mere fact of numbers multiply not only the means of defense, but actually increase susceptibility for the scent of danger and possible speedy defense. In the society of his fellows the sense organs of the individual are increased by the presence of others who are in various stages of vigilance, and hence there is greater protection against dangers and invisible foes that lurk in the darkness of night, foes of which primitive man is in terror of his life.
The fear of the unknown, the mysterious, and the dark, peoples the mind of primitive man with all sorts of terrible spectres, ghosts, spirits, goblins, ghouls, shades, witches, and evil powers, all bent on mischief, destruction and death. Primitive man suffers from chronic demonophobia. Fear states are specially emphasized at night when the “demons” have the full power for evil, and man is helpless on account of darkness and sleep which paralyze him. Hence the terrors of the night, especially when man is alone, and defenseless.
The fear of solitude comes out strongly in the intense fear that obsesses man in the gloomy darkness of the night horrors. Fire and fellow-beings can alone relieve his night terrors. The fear of foes, of demons, of evil powers does not abate in the day, only it is relieved by reason of light, of association, and of wakefulness. Man, more than any other animal, is the victim of the fear instinct. Many tribes, many races of men perished, due to superstitions and fear obsessions.
The Homo sapiens is rare. We may agree with Tarde that Homo somnambulis would be a proper definition of the true mental condition of most specimens of the human race. For the human race is still actuated by the principle of “Credo, quia absurdum est.” I need not go far to substantiate the fact that this principle still guides the life of the average specimen of civilized humanity. Spiritualism, theosophy, telepathy, ghost hunting, astrology, oneiromancy, cheiromancy, Christian Science, psychoanalytic oneiroscopy employed in events and situations of individual and social life, and many other magical practices whose name is legion, based on the mysteries of communication with ghosts, spirits, demons, and unknown fearsome powers, still haunt the credulous mind, obsessed with conscious and subconscious horrors of the terrible, invisible spirit world.
Against the fears of diseases, the scares of the day and terrors of night, civilized man still uses the magic arts and mysterious, miraculous powers of the magician, the wizard, the witch, the mental healer, the shaman, the medicine man, the miracle man, and the psychoanalyst. Just at present under my own eyes I witness the pitiful credulity of man, driven by the terrors and horrors of the fear instinct. In San Jose, San Diego, in Los Angeles, and in many other Western “culture” centers mystic cults hold high carnival, swaying the minds of fear-crazed, deluded humanity. As typical specimens of superstitious fears and absurd beliefs, due to the fear instinct, we may take as illustrations the following occurrences in the centers of the far West, obsessed by the aberrations of the fear instinct (I quote from Los Angeles papers):
“Faith Healer at Los Angeles, Venice, California, after several wonder cures, orders sun’s rays to be darkened. ‘Brother Isaiah,’ called by thousands the ‘Miracle Man,’ claimed to have repeated the marvel of dimming the sun at Venice yesterday evening.
“At 6 o’clock the disciple of healing by faith raised his hands and announced that as evidence of his power he would blot out the brilliant solar rays. He gazed at the dazzling red ball above the waters of the Pacific, and his lips moved in low murmurs.
“‘It is done,’ he said. ‘I have clouded the sun. All those who have seen this miracle raise your hands.’ Hundreds of hands waved in the air.
“The first time ‘Brother Isaiah’ claimed to have dimmed the sun’s rays was at Miracle Hill, when he had been in Los Angeles but a few days.
“Brother Isaiah stepped to one side of his wooden platform on the Venice Beach yesterday. He placed a silver police whistle to his lips and blew. The piercing crescendo sent a shiver through the tense mass of humanity which stretched from the sand back to the ocean walk.” Similar miracles and cures were carried on by Mrs. Amy McPherson in San Diego, San Jose, and all along the Pacific coast.
The self-impulse and the fear instinct, in their intensified forms, are the bane of deluded, neurotic humanity.
[CHAPTER XXVII]
NEUROSIS AND HEREDITY
The following discussion in the form of questions and answers may prove of interest to the physician and to the intelligent layman. The discussion occurred in the course of correspondence. A friend of mine thought the subject of sufficient importance to have it brought to the attention of the cultured public.
The questions are as follows:
“Are not all neuropathic conditions the results of a morbid, unstable nervous organism, the basis of which lies in a faulty heredity?
“Are not weak nerves the cause of hysterical, neurasthenic and neuropathic affections in general?
“Is not all neurosis due to defective parent stock?
“If the occasions for fear, as some psychopathologists claim, were more frequent in primitive times than now, then the cave men must have had more psychopathic affections than civilized man.”
To these questions the following answers are given:
Psychopathic diseases are not hereditary—they are acquired characteristics, having their origin in the abnormal, hypertrophied growth of the fear instinct which is at the root of the primal impulse of self-preservation. This is proved by psychopathological studies of clinical cases; and it can be further demonstrated by experimental work in the laboratory even in the case of animals. “Weak nerves,” “a run down, exhausted nervous system,” whatever the terms may mean, may overlap psychopathic conditions, but the two are by no means equivalent, much less identical. Psychopathic, psychoneurotic states are not “weak nerves” or “fatigued nerves.” Above all, there is no need to obscure the matter and resort to the much abused, mystical and mystifying factor of heredity. It is easy to shift all blame on former generations, when, in most cases, the fault is close at hand, namely, a debased environment, a defective training, and a vicious education.
There is good reason to believe that primitive man had a far greater tendency to dissociation, to subconscious psychopathic states than modern man. Even the Middle Ages teem with psychopathic mental epidemics of the most puerile type. In the course of evolution, social and individual, this neurotic, psychopathic tendency has gradually diminished, but has never been completely eliminated. Increase of knowledge, better education, the increase of social safeguards, sanitary and hygienic conditions with consequent increase of safety from dangers, have all helped materially in decreasing the occasions for the cultivation of the fear instinct.
Under the rigorous conditions of primitive life individuals who have been unfortunate and have become affected with mental troubles and emotional afflictions of the fear instinct are mercilessly exterminated by the process of tribal and social selection. Each generation weeds out the individuals who have been unfortunate enough to fall under unfavorable circumstances and have become mentally sick, suffering from acquired psychopathic disturbances. In primitive life the crippled, the maimed, the wounded, the sick fall by the way, and are left to perish a miserable death. In fact, the less fortunate, the wounded and the stricken in the battle of life, are attacked by their own companions,—they are destroyed by the ruthless, social brute. The gregarious brute has no sympathy with the pains and sufferings of the injured and the wounded. The faint and the ailing are destroyed by the herd.
Civilization, on the other hand, tends more and more towards the preservation of psychopathic individuals. We no longer kill our sick and our weak, nor do we abandon them to a miserable, painful death,—we take care of them, and cure them. Moreover, we prevent pathogenic factors from exercising a harmful, malign social selection of the “fit.” We do our best to free ourselves from the blind, merciless, purposeless selection, produced by pathogenic micro-organisms and by other noxious agencies. We learn to improve the external environment.
We do not condemn people to death because they are infected with smallpox, typhus, typhoid bacilli, or because of an infected appendix. We no longer regard them as sinful, unclean, accursed, and tabooed. We vaccinate, inoculate, operate, and attempt to cure them. By sanitary and prophylactic measures we attempt to prevent the very occurrence of epidemics. Our valuation of individuals is along lines widely different from those of the stone age and cave man. We value a Pascal, a Galileo, a Newton, a Darwin, a Pasteur, and a Helmholtz far above a Milo of Croton or an African Johnson.
Civilization is in need of refined, delicate and sensitive organizations, just as it is in need of galvanometers, chronometers, telephones, wireless apparatuses, and various chemical reagents of a highly delicate character. We are beginning to appreciate delicate mechanisms and sensitive organizations. We shall also learn to train and guard our sensitive natures until they are strong and resistant to the incident forces of an unfavorable environment. The recognition, the diagnosis, and the preservation of psychopathic individuals account for the apparent increase of neurotics in civilized communities.
It may be well to add that, although occasions for sudden, intense, overwhelming fears are not so prevalent in civilized societies as they are in primitive savage communities, the worries, the anxieties, the various forms of slow grinding fears of a vague, marginal, subconscious character present in commercial and industrial nations, are even more effective in the production of psychopathic states than are the isolated occasions of intense frights in the primitive man of the paleolithic or neolithic periods.
[CHAPTER XXVIII]
NEUROSIS AND EUGENICS
In my work on Psychopathology I lay special stress on the fact that the psychopathic individual has a predisposition to dissociative states. Early experiences and training in childhood enter largely into the formation of such a predisposition. Still, there is no doubt that a sensitive nervous system is required—a brain susceptible to special stimuli of the external environment. This, of course, does not mean that the individual must suffer from stigmata of degeneration. On the contrary, it is quite possible, and in many patients we actually find it to be so, that the psychopathic individual may be even of a superior organization. It is the sensitivity and the delicacy of nervous organization that make the system susceptible to injurious stimulations, to which a lower form of organization could be subjected with impunity.
An ordinary clock can be handled roughly without disturbance of its internal workings, but the delicate and complicated mechanism of a chronometer requires careful handling and special, favorable conditions for its normal functioning. Unfavorable conditions are more apt to affect a highly complex mechanism than a roughly made instrument. It is quite probable that it is the superior minds and more highly complex mental and nervous organizations that are subject to psychopathic states or states of dissociation. Of course, unstable minds are also subject to dissociative states, but we must never forget the fact that highly organized brains, on account of their very complexity, are apt to become unstable under unfavorable conditions. A predisposition to dissociation may occur either in degenerative minds or in minds superior to the average. Functional psychosis requires a long history of dissociated, subconscious shocks, suffered by a highly or lowly organized nervous system, a long history dating back to early childhood.
As Mosso puts it: “The vivid impression of a strong emotion may produce the same effect as a blow on the head or some physical shock.” We may, however, say that no functional psychosis, whether somatopsychosis or psychoneurosis, can ever be produced simply by physical shocks. In all functional psychoses there must be a mental background, and it is the mental background alone that produces the psychosis and determines the character of the psychopathic state.
Fear is an important factor in the etiology of psychopathic affections which include somatopsychoses and psychoneuroses.
To regard fear as “error,” as do some sectarians, is absurd, and is certainly unscientific. Abnormal fear which is the basis of all functional nervous or psychopathic maladies, is essentially a pathological process affecting the organs in general and the nervous system in particular in as definite a way as the invasion and infection of the organism by various species of bacteria, bacilli, and other micro-organisms which attack the individual during his lifetime.
Like infectious diseases, the deviations, abnormalities, and excesses of the fear instinct are acquired by the individual in the course of his relations with the external environment, and are as real and substantial as are syphilis, smallpox, diphtheria, cholera, and the bubonic plague. To regard them as imaginary or to relegate them to the action of Providence or to heredity is theoretically a misconception, and practically a great danger to humanity.
There is nowadays a veritable craze for heredity and eugenics. Biology is misconceived, misinterpreted, and misapplied to social problems, and to individual needs and ailments. Everything is ascribed to heredity, from folly and crime to scratches and sneezes. The goddess Heredity is invoked at each flea-bite—in morsu pulicis Deum invocare.
Even war is supposed to be due to the omnipotent deity of Heredity. Superior races by their patriotism and loyalty destroy the weak and the helpless, and relentlessly exterminate all peaceful tribes. Such warlike stock comes of superior clay. The dominant races have some miraculous germ-plasm, special “unit characters,” wonderful dominant “units” which, like a precious heritage, these races transmit unsullied and untarnished to their descendants.
Wars, carnage, butcheries make for progress, culture, and evolution. Our boasted civilization with its “scientific” business thoroughness and its ideal of “efficiency” attempts to carry into effect this quasi-evolutionary doctrine—this apotheosis of brute force under the aegis of science. The eugenic belief is really a recrudescence of the ancient savage superstition of the magic virtues of noble blood and of divine king stock.
All nervous, mental, neuropathic, and psychopathic maladies are supposed to be a matter of heredity. If people are poor, ignorant, superstitious, stupid, degraded, brutal, and sick, the eugenists unhesitatingly put it all down to poor stock.
The eugenic remedy is as simple as it is believed to be efficacious: Introduce by legislation “efficient” laws favoring “eugenic” marriage, and teach the masses control of births. The select and chosen stock alone should multiply—the millennium is then bound to come. Such is the doctrine of our medico-biological sages.
“Scientific” farmers and breeders of vegetables, fruits, and cattle are regarded as competent judges of human “breeders.” Agriculturists and horticulturists set themselves up as advisers in “the business of raising good crops of efficient children.” Bachelors, spinsters, and the childless generally, are specially versed in eugenic wisdom and pedagogics.
All social ills and individual complaints are referred to one main source—heredity. With the introduction of eugenic legislation, with the sterilization of the socially unfit, among whom the greatest men and women may be included, with the breeding of good “orthodox, common stock,” and with eugenic Malthusian control of births, all evil and diseases on earth will cease, while the Philistine “superman” will reign supreme forevermore.
In the Middle Ages all diseases and epidemics, all wars, all social and private misfortunes were considered as visitations of Divine wrath. The fear instinct held sway, terrorizing poor, deluded humanity. In modern times our would-be eugenic science refers all ills of the flesh and woes of the mind to an outraged Heredity. The dark ages had resort to prayers, fasts, and penitence, while our age childishly pins its faith to the miraculous virtues and rejuvenating, regenerative powers of legislative eugenic measures, and to the eugenic Malthusian control of births.
Our scientists in eugenics gather hosts of facts, showing by elaborate statistical figures that the family history of neurotics reveals stigmata of degeneration in the various members of the family. The eugenic inquirers do not stop for a moment to think over the fact that the same sort of evidence can be easily brought in the case of most people. In fact, the eugenists themselves, when inquiring into the pedigree of talent and genius, invariably find somewhere in the family some form of disease or degeneration. This sort of “scientific” evidence leads some eugenic speculators, without their noticing the reductio ad absurdum, to the curious conclusion or generalization that degeneration is present in the family history of the best and the worst representatives of the human race.
The so-called scientific method of the eugenists is faulty, in spite of the rich display of colored plates, stained tablets, glittering biological speculations, brilliant mathematical formulae, and complicated statistical calculations. The eugenists pile Ossa on Pelion of facts by the simple method of enumeration which Bacon and the thinkers coming after him have long ago condemned as puerile and futile. From the savage’s belief in sympathetic, imitative magic with its consequent superstitions, omens, and taboos down to the articles of faith and dogmas of the eugenists, we find the same faulty, primitive thought, guided by the puerile, imbecile method of simple enumeration, and controlled by the wisdom of the logical post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
What would we say of the medical man who should claim that measles, mumps, cholera, typhoid fever, yellow fever, malaria, tetanus, and various other infectious diseases are hereditary by quoting learnedly long tables of statistics to the effect that for several generations members of the same family suffered from the same infectious diseases? What would we say of the medical advice forbidding marriage to individuals whose family history reveals the presence of exanthemata? We stamp out epidemics not by eugenic measures, but by the cleansing of infectious filth, and by the extermination of pathogenic micro-organisms.
Every human being has a predisposition to smallpox, cholera, tetanus, bubonic plague, typhus fever, malaria, and to like infectious diseases, but there is no inherent necessity for everyone to fall a victim to the action of pathogenic organisms, if the preventive and sanitary conditions are good and proper. No one is immune against the action of bullets, cannon balls, shells, and torpedoes, or to the action of various poisons, organic and inorganic, but one is not doomed by fate to be killed by them, if one does not expose himself to their deadly action.
Every living organism is, by the very nature of its cellular tissues, predisposed to wounding by sharp instruments, or to the burning action of fire, but this does not mean an inherent organic weakness to which the organism must necessarily submit and perish. We are all of us predisposed to get injured and possibly killed, when we fall down from a high place, or when we are run over by an automobile or by a locomotive, but there is no fatalistic necessity about such accidents, if care is taken that they should not occur.
We may be predisposed to neurosis by the very nature of complexity, delicacy, and sensitivity inherent in the structure of a highly organized nervous system, and still we may remain healthy and strong all our life long, provided we know how to keep away from noxious agencies. The creed of the inevitable fatality of neurosis is as much of a superstition as the Oriental belief in the fatalism of infectious diseases, plagues, and accidents of all kinds. Such fatalistic superstitions are dangerous, fatal, because they distract the attention from the actual cause and from the requisite prophylactic measures.
We go far afield in search for the remote source of our troubles, when the cause is close at hand. We need only open our eyes to see the filth of our towns, the foul, loathsome slums of our cities, the miserable training, the wretched education given to our children, in order to realize at a glance the source of our ills and ailments. We should lay the guilt at the door of our social order. We starve our young. We starve our children physically and mentally. We piously sacrifice our tender children and the flower of our youth to the greedy, industrial Moloch of a military, despotic, rapacious plutocracy.
Witness semi-civilized Europe with its lauded culture brutally shedding the blood of its youth and manhood on the altar of commercial patriotism! It is not heredity, it is the vicious conditions of life that stunt the physical, nervous, and mental growth of our young generation. When we are confronted with the miserable, degraded, crippled forms of our life, we fall back cheerfully on some remote grandparent, and credulously take refuge in the magic panacea of eugenics.
The practical aspect is clear. Psychopathic neurosis in its two varieties, somatopsychosis and psychoneurosis, is not hereditary, but acquired. We should not shift the blame on former generations and have resort to eugenics, but we must look to the improvement of mental hygienic conditions of early childhood, and to the proper education of the individual.
It is easy to put the blame on grandparents,—they are dead and cannot defend themselves. Could they arise from their graves, they could tell some bitter truths to their descendants who are ready to shift responsibility to other people’s shoulders. It is about time to face the truth fairly and squarely, a truth which is brought out by recent investigations in psychopathology, that no matter where the fons et origo of neurosis be, whether in self-preservation and its accompanying fear instinct, the condition of life primordial, or in the other forms of self-preservation, the formation of psychopathic neurosis with all its characteristic protean symptoms is not hereditary, but acquired. Neurosis arises within the life cycle of the individual; it is due to faulty training and harmful experience of early child life.
Future medicine will be largely prophylactic, preventive, sanitary, hygienic, dietetic. What holds true of medicine in general holds true of that particular branch of it that deals with neurosis. The treatment will become largely prophylactic, preventive, educational, or pedagogic. It is time that the medical and teaching profession should realize that functional neurosis is not congenital, not inborn, not hereditary, but is the result of a defective, fear-inspiring education in early child life.
The psychopathic diathesis can be overcome by dispelling the darkness of ignorance and credulity with their false fears and deceptive hopes, above all, by fortifying the critical, controlling, guiding consciousness. Let in sun and air into the obscure cobwebbed regions of the child and man. The gloom and the ghosts of the fear instinct are dispersed by the light of reason.
As the great Roman poet, Lucretius, well puts it:
“Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
Non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
Discutiant, sed naturæ species ratioque.”[14]