IV SEX BIOLOGY AND SEX PSYCHOLOGY
SEX: THREE WAYS
That body has for soul an air-balloon
Which drifts with every spiritual blast,
Doomed, swollen thing! to leak or burst at last
Though overmuch aspiring toward the moon.
This other soul, below the animal,
Bloating and coating body’s baser parts
With the manure of its desires and arts,
Helps flesh to grow still more corporeal.
I pray that I may still inhabit earth,
Where grass invites the foot, and roses smell;
Yet shall I lead my body on to dwell
In the eternal land of second birth,
If, nought contemned, each part of being’s whole
Is taken up in my transmuting soul.
SEX BIOLOGY AND SEX PSYCHOLOGY[27]
“And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine.”
—W. Wordsworth.
“There is reason to believe that the processes which underlie all great work in art, literature, or science take place unconsciously, or at least unwittingly. It is an interesting question to ask whence comes the energy of which this work is the expression. There are two chief possibilities: one, that it is derived from the instinctive tendencies which, through the action of controlling forces, fail to find their natural outlet; the other, that the energy so arising is increased in amount through the conflict between controlled and controlling forces.”—W. H. Rivers.
The biology of sex is a vast subject. Not only are there questions of sex-determination, but the whole sexual selection problem has to be considered, together with the evolutionary function of sex, and its first origin. I can only attempt, in the short space at my disposal, to deal with one or two of the chief points, and only in so far as they bear on questions of human sex psychology.
In the first place, then, we have to consider the evolutionary history of sex. Of its origin we can say only that it is veiled in complete obscurity. Once present, however, it appears to have a definite function by making possible, through sexual reproduction, all the various combinations of any heritable variations that may arise in different individuals of a species, and so conferring greater evolutionary plasticity on the species as a whole.[28]
Primarily, sex implies only the fusion of nuclei from two separate individuals; there is no need for sex differences to exist at all. Sex differences, however, are almost universal in sexually-reproducing organisms, and represent a division of labour between the active male cell and the passive female cell, the former taking over the task of uniting the two, the latter storing up nutriment for the new individual that will result from that union.
The subsequent history of sex is, roughly speaking, the history of its invasion of more and more of the organization of its possessors. First the male as a whole, and not merely its reproductive cells, tends to become organized for finding the female. The female’s whole type of metabolism is altered to produce the most efficient storage of reserve material in her ova, and later she almost invariably protects and nourishes the young during the first part of their development, either within or without her own body. Appropriate instincts are of course developed in both male and female.
At the outset there is enormous waste incurred in the liberation of sperms and ova into the water, there to unite as best they may. Congress of the sexes eliminates the major part of this waste, and is universal above a certain level. This is in itself the basis for other changes. As the mind, or shall we say the psycho-neural organization, becomes more complex, the sexual instinct becomes more interwoven with the general emotional state; and a large number of animals appear not to mate unless their emotional state has been raised to a certain level. The result of this is that special actions, associated generally with bright colours or striking structures, with song or with scent, come into being.
The exact mechanism of the appearance of these courtship-displays is a much-vexed point; but it is undoubted that they only occur in animals with congress of the sexes and with minds above a certain level of complexity, and that they are employed in ceremonies between the two sexes at mating-time. There can subsist no reasonable doubt that there exists some causal connection between the associated facts.
An important point, which has been commonly overlooked, is that such characters and actions may be either developed in one sex only, or in both. In a large number of birds, such as egrets, grebes, cranes, and many others, the courtship-displays are mutual, and the characters used in them developed to a similar extent in both sexes. Such characters are therefore often not secondary sexual differences, and we had best use Poulton’s term epigamic for them, whether they are developed in one or in both sexes.[29]
The human species, in accordance with its complexity and flexibility of brain, has epigamic characters of both kinds. Some, like voice and moustache, are different in the two sexes, others, such as colour of eyes and lips, the hairlessness of the body and grace of limbs and carriage, are common to both.
In the vertebrate stock, two main lines of evolution as regards sexual relationships may be traced. The first is predominant in mammals: here, in most species, the female will not receive the male except at fixed times, which are determined by a purely physiological mechanism, the internal secretion of the gonad (reproductive organ). Here we consequently find that the rule is for the males to fight for the possession of the females, not to display before them. In the monkeys, presumably as a result of a lessened dependence of mental upon physiological processes, bright colours and special adornments of various parts of the body are frequently developed.[30]
In the birds, on the other hand, although here too the internal secretion of the gonad delimits a period in which alone congress of the sexes can occur, it does not act for such a sharply-limited time as in the mammal, nor is it so intense as completely to override other components of the mind. As a result, general emotional stimulus may play an important part in inducing readiness to pair, and we accordingly find display of some sort, either by the male alone or by both sexes, present in the great majority of species. It is at least partly in correlation with this that beauty of voice and brilliant appearance is far commoner in birds than in mammals.
The monkeys represent in some way a transitional stage towards that seen in man, in whom the conditions have come to resemble those found in birds, with consequent great development of epigamic characters and actions of one sort and another, both physical and mental. Thus we see that sex, after invading and altering the conformation of the body, finally invades and alters the conformation of the mind.
As regards the other great biological question, of the determination of sex, a very few words will suffice. In the first place I have no time to consider plants or lower animals. In almost all higher animals that have been investigated, however, there has been found some hereditary mechanism for ensuring a rough constancy of sex-ratio. This mechanism resides in the so-called chromosomes of the nucleus. These exist for the most part in similar pairs in both sexes: but one pair is dissimilar in one sex. In mammals and man this sex is the male. Man possesses one chromosome less than woman. He possesses only one member of this pair of special sex-chromosomes, whereas she possesses two. All her ova are alike in possessing one, whereas half his sperms possess one, half possess none. Therefore, when the former kind of sperms fertilize an ovum, two sex-chromosomes are present in the fertilized egg and a female results; when the latter, only one, and the offspring is male.[31]
Putting the matter in the broadest terms, we can say that there is a different balance of hereditary factors in male and female, and that this difference of balance dates from the moment of fertilization, and normally determines sex.
Various agencies may alter the balance. The chromosomes themselves may vary in what we must vaguely call their potency; or external agencies may affect it. As a result, we sometimes obtain strange abnormal individuals, in which the balance has been upset; in them development results sometimes in organisms permanently intermediate between male and female, sometimes in a change of sex at some period of development.
In insects the chromosomes appear to be predominant throughout life. In vertebrates, however, they seem to play their chief rôle in early development, ending by building up either a male or a female gonad in the early embryo. This, once produced, takes over what remains of the task of sex-determination. It secretes a specific internal secretion which in a male acts so as to encourage the growth of male organs and instincts, to suppress those of females; and vice versa in a female.
As a result of this difference we find that castration in insects, even followed by engrafting of a gonad of opposite sex, produces no effect upon other sexual characters; whereas it exerts a profound effect upon mammals or birds.
As a second result, we find that in vertebrates the gonads form part of what has been called the chemical directorate of the body—the interlocking system of endocrine glands, each of which is exerting an effect upon the rest. The importance of this is seen in the experiments of Steinach, Sand, Voronoff, and others, who have been able to obtain a rejuvenating effect in senile mammals by increasing, by various methods, the amount of secreting reproductive organ in the body.[32]
To what then has our rapid survey led us? The actual origin of sex is lost to us in the mists of a time inconceivably remote. Its preservation once in existence, and its present all-but-universal distribution seem to be definitely associated with the biological advantage of the plasticity which it confers. Later, the primary difference between male and female—their power of producing different sorts of reproductive cells—leads on to secondary differences. These differences may be biologically speaking non-significant, mere accidents of the primary difference. Or they may be in the nature of a division of labour between the sexes, this division of labour usually concerning the protection of the embryo or the care of the young, or more rarely the preservation of the individual itself. Or, finally, they may concern the more efficient union of the gametes; such differences may merely affect the ducts and apertures of the reproductive system, and be more or less mechanical; or they may concern the use of these systems, in the form of still mechanical instincts, or they may be concerned in some way or other with the emotional side of the animals, and consist in characters and actions which stimulate the emotions of the other sex, characters which we have termed epigamic.
It is only in higher groups that these emotion-stimulating sexual characters arise, for only in them has mind reached a sufficient degree of perfection. But even though detailed study reveals in a bird or a mammal a mental life of a complexity far more considerable than the average man would imagine, yet on the whole it is straightforward and its currents run fairly direct from stimulus to fulfilment.
When we reach man, however, the whole aspect of the matter changes. The change is most marked, naturally, in his mental organization. Through his powers of rapid and unlimited association, any one part of his experience can be combined with any other; through his powers of generalizing and of giving names to things, his experience is far more highly organized than that of any animal; through speech and writing he is inheritor of a continuous tradition which enormously enlarges his range of experience. Again, he can frame a purpose and thus put the objective of his actions far further into the future than can lower organisms.
There are, however, also changes of considerable biological importance on the physical side. Man brings with him from his animal ancestors the endocrine secretory mechanism of the reproductive organs: but his life is not subordinated to it in such an iron-bound way. To start with he has gradually lost all semblance of a breeding-season. Traces of it survive in some primitive races, but in civilized communities all one can say is that the number of births may show a slight seasonal variation; and the reproductive organs are capable of function in all twelve months of the year—a state of affairs known, I believe, in no other vertebrate, or at least in no wild species.[33]
In the second place, there has been in the female a further emancipation of the sexual life. In all other mammals the female will only receive the male at certain well-defined periods, which in their turn depend on cyclical changes in the ovaries. In man this restriction has been overcome, and, in spite of the survival of a certain degree of cyclical change in feeling, neither sex is restricted any longer to certain physically-determined periods for the consummation of its sexual life. This is, we may say, a triumph of mind over matter in the human organism, of the mental elements of the sexual life over the purely physical elements.
This is not to deny that the sexual life of man is dependent upon the reproductive hormones. It is apparently necessary for proper activation of the sexual centres in the brain that there should occur a continuous liberation of secretion from the reproductive organs into the blood. Again, the mental activities of man are so much more important than those of other forms that even the cessation of activity of the reproductive organs, for instance in the female at the change of life, or even their total removal, need not prevent the continuation, albeit in a modified form, of the sexual life in its varied indirect manifestations.
Before attempting to probe the intricacies of the mental side of the subject, we had better see what we can learn of the physical. Let us first remind ourselves of one or two facts gained from animal experimentation. In the first place, in mammals the activation of the sexual instincts of one or the other sex appears to be completely or almost completely under the control of the internal secretions of the reproductive organs. Steinach and others have taken new-born male guinea-pigs and have removed their testes and grafted ovaries in their place. The result has been an animal almost completely feminized both as regards body and mind. In some of the animals milk was secreted, and when this occurred they would act as foster-mothers to new-born guinea-pigs of other parents. The reverse operation, the masculinization of females, was equally successful, the animals growing large and showing all the instincts of a normal male and none of those of a normal female.
A similar dependence of behaviour on gonad is seen in fowls. Here nature makes a number of experiments, which have recently been studied by Dr. Crew of Edinburgh. When the ovaries of a hen are affected by a certain type of tumour, the bird stops laying, her comb and wattles enlarge to the size of a cock’s, her spurs grow, she begins to crow, her plumage changes at the moult and becomes cock-like, and finally she becomes indistinguishable from a male. Indistinguishable, even in behaviour: her years of feminine routine in laying and brooding are forgotten: the secretion of the altered ovary now apparently resembles that of a testis and stimulates centres of the brain which would otherwise have remained permanently dormant. She struts and crows, fights and mates, and the memory of the previous part of her life is for all practical purposes lost, since the centres for female activity are no longer stimulated at all.
Various workers have even experimentally produced a state of hermaphroditism in mammals by simultaneous grafting of portions of testes and ovary: the behaviour here oscillates between male and female.[34]
It is quite clear from these and other facts that in higher vertebrates there are present in every individual of either sex the nervous connections which give the possibility of either male or female behaviour; but that normally only one of these two possibilities is realized, since for the potentiality of action given by the nervous connections to become actual as behaviour it is necessary for the nervous system to be activated by the secretion of one or other of the reproductive organs. Castrated animals fail to realize either possibility of normal sex-behaviour, although their nervous machinery is untouched.
There are, further, some facts of observation which, even if they have not yet been fully analysed by experiment, still throw light on the matter. Although many of the most familiar birds—fowls, pheasant, peacock, duck, finches, and so forth—have bright-coloured males and drab females, with marked difference of behaviour between the sexes, there are, as we have seen, many others, such as herons, divers, swans, grebes, moorhens, and auks, in which the sexes are alike in plumage and furthermore show what may be called a “mutual” courtship in which both male and female play similar rôles. In this latter class it seems clear that the secretions of the male and female reproductive organs must be more alike than in the markedly dimorphic species: and this is borne out by some strange facts regarding not merely the courtship but the actions concerned with pairing itself. In the crested grebe and the little grebe, for example, close observation has shown that either member of the pair may assume the passive “female” attitude or the active “male” attitude in pairing: and in the moorhen we meet with the still more extraordinary phenomenon of double pairing, in which an act of pairing with male and female in normal position is immediately followed by a second act in which the normal position is reversed.[35] It would appear in such cases that the similarity of male and female internal secretion is so great that quite slight changes in nervous or metabolic activity can cause the nervous centres for the opposite sex’s mode of behaviour to become activated.
In human beings we are confronted with various grades of sexual organization and behaviour besides the typically feminine and the typically masculine. In the first place it is matter of common knowledge that many women, who so far as their physical reproductive capacity goes are perfectly normal, show various mental traits which are more characteristic of men, and vice versa. What is more, the “masculinoid” woman (to use the current jargon) tends physically also to be less feminine, to have the feminine secondary sexual characteristics in stature, form of skeleton, distribution of fat, breasts, etc.—less strongly developed than normal, while the “feminoid” man shows the reverse tendency.[36]
In trying to analyse these facts further, we are brought up against new depths of complication. It is becoming ever clearer that the gonads do not operate as independent organs, but in conjunction with the whole of the rest of the endocrine system—thyroid, pituitary, adrenal, and the rest. In the first place, it seems to be established that the reproductive organs must be in some way activated by other ductless glands before they become normal, just as they in their turn must activate the sexual centres in the brain. This phase of the matter is being investigated by many workers to-day; provisionally we may say that pituitary and adrenal cortex are especially concerned. In the second place the gonads, once activated and in normal working order, react upon the other ductless glands. It thus comes about that the relative proportion or relative activity of the parts of the whole ductless gland system is different in male and female. Blair Bell is the protagonist of this view. A woman is a woman, he says, not merely because of her ovaries, but because of all her internal secretions, of her endocrine balance as a whole.
It cannot be said that we have any certainty on the details of this subject. It is clear, however, that some such fundamental difference does exist, and it is therefore further probable that if a woman has a thyroid, say, or an adrenal which for some reason (and there are many possible reasons) is producing an amount of secretion abnormal for a woman but more like that which is produced by a man, she will, in spite of her ovaries, be more masculine in tendency.
I will content myself with one example. The cortex of the adrenal gland, if active beyond a certain measure, assists the development of male, prevents the development of female, characters. Women with adrenal tumours frequently develop moustache and beard and other appanages of the male. One presumes that a slight preponderance of the adrenal cortex in the normal endocrine make-up will lead to a less feminine type of woman than normal. I repeat that we are but on the verge of the matter and that premature speculation is certainly risky and probably fallacious. But all the same, there is very little doubt that we are on the right track, and that we shall have to search for the finer shades of temperamental difference between man and woman not so much in differences in the quality of the secretion of testis or ovary as in differences of balance in what the Americans call the “endocrine make-up.”[37]
There is, however, also the possibility of difference in the quality of gonad secretion, and of recent years Steinach and his followers have been claiming that this may be at the bottom of many cases of so-called “perversion of sexual instinct.” The latest claim of this school is that homosexual men may be rendered heterosexual in instinct by removal of their testes and implantation of a testis from a sexually normal person—from a man, for example, who is being operated on for cryptorchidism. It is frankly impossible as yet to say whether their conclusions are well founded: a very much larger series of cases will be necessary, and the possibility of suggestion’s action must be eliminated. It is well to remember, however, that there is no theoretical objection to the possibility. We know that in various lower animals, such as moths and flies, the balance between the male- and female-determining factors in the chromosomes may be altered in certain crosses, and that this altered balance in the constitution is reflected in some cases in a state permanently intermediate between male and female, in others by a reversal of sex at some point during development. For various reasons we should not usually expect reversal in mammals; but if such abnormal balance should exist in the constitution, as it well might, we should expect a gonad secreting an abnormal, intermediate secretion. This we might also expect as the result of certain accidents of embryonic life, as actually happens in the abnormal female cattle known to farmers as free-martins. These animals are always born co-twin to a male, and their abnormality is due to the blood-systems of the embryonic membranes of the twins having fused, so that the secretion of the developing male’s gonad acts upon the developing female.
Further light on abnormally-directed sex-instinct is thrown by recent analysis of abnormal domestic animals by Crew.[38] In both goats and swine he finds that by far the commonest form of sexual abnormality is one in which the external appearance, at least in youth, is so nearly female as to raise no question in the mind of the casual observer; about the time of maturity, however, male secondary sex characters begin to develop, including male instincts; and dissection reveals the presence of a double set of ducts—the female uterus and vagina, the male epididymis and vas deferens, but only a single uniform reproductive organ, and that always a testis. The simplest explanation (although it is admittedly tentative) appears to be that the testis has not been activated during embryonic and juvenile life, and that therefore until puberty the animal, though really male, has been physiologically in a neutral state, which permits the growth of the internal apparatus proper to both sexes. Externally, the “neutral” condition approximates more closely to the female type, and the animal is thus first classed as a female. Some other gland is then responsible for the second activation at puberty, and this occurs in a normal manner.
This is of considerable interest, since it appears that in man too the largest class of sexually abnormal individuals are those whose external appearance is almost or quite feminine, but who possess male instincts. It is at least probable that examination will show that they, too, or many of them, will be of the type described above—males with delayed activation of testis, a consequent classification as female at birth, and a girl’s upbringing, with male instincts arising in the unhappy creature at puberty.
It is the fashion nowadays to write down abnormal sexual psychology wholly to the account of the mind, to an abnormal development with causes entirely psychological. It is clear, however, that if some abnormal individuals can be cured by implantation, and others are abnormal owing to an early failure of activation, this conception falls to the ground, and the Freudian is robbed of some of his most cherished examples.
In any case, the work on animals definitely shows that, unless the mechanism of activation of instinct by gonad secretion has altered between animal and man more than we have any right to postulate a priori, the quality of gonad secretion and the balance of all the endocrines has to be taken into account far more than is done by the average psycho-analyst.
This, however, is not to say that the genesis of our attitude towards sex, our sexual behaviour, and our general mental organization in so far as modified by sex, is not normally determined for the most part by purely psychological causes. If there is a physical abnormality, this will react upon the mental; but in the vast majority of cases the physical variation will not take the individual beyond the limits of normality, and when the normal physical limits are not exceeded, the wide range of mental variation still observable is to be ascribed to psychological causes. In other words, abnormal sexual behaviour and instinct may be due either to physiological or psychological abnormality, and the latter is probably the commoner cause.
I am not competent to attempt to treat of the vast and complex psychological aspect of the sex-problem which the analytical psychologists have opened up to such an extent within the last few years; I can only deal with it in the broadest way, and content myself rather with stating than with solving problems.
As regards the place of sex in our mental organization, there are two contradictory extremes possible. Either all ideas connected with the physical side of sex may be repressed with great vehemence, and the sexual contribution to various emotions ignored or dismissed, while a constant attempt is made at sublimation; or else there is little or no repression beyond that necessitated by convention and custom, sexual matters are taken at their physical face value, and sublimation is not consciously attempted and exists only to a negligible amount.
There is no doubt that the first alternative represents one of the commonest neuroses of modern life, and one in which an interpretation on principles made familiar by psycho-analysis is the most satisfactory. Repression, through whatever cause initiated (and psychologists, I understand, are coming more and more to recognize that chronic misuse of the mind as well as single violent shocks may be effective), leads to a more or less complete dissociation of two parts of the mind, of which one only is in the main connected with the conscious personal life. As a result, curious phenomena are met with. There is, it is true, a constant effort necessary to keep life a-going with the aid of an incomplete mental organization; but when satisfaction is attained, its very rarity brings with it a certain glow, an irradiation of peculiarly pleasurable nature. Furthermore, dissociation in most cases is not complete; now and again, and especially when there is successful sublimation—in some people when in love, in others with religious ecstasy, in others again with some form of art—now and again re-association of the parts occurs, and there is an extraordinary sense of the irruption of some vast beneficent force, some great extra-personal flood of soul, into the meagre stream of everyday life. The lives of a certain number of saints and ascetics, mystics and poets, abound with phenomena of this sort; and apparently the sense of value attaching to the occasional complete attainment of such satisfactory states of the soul, combined with the conscious daily quest for sublimation which is inevitable when the most important part of the primitive emotions are repressed, is such a vivid experience that it satisfies the mind and enables such persons to carry on, and to do work sometimes of the highest value.
On the other hand, men and women with this type of mental development naturally tend to be unstable; they cannot be sure of their capacity, whether for routine work or creative thought or spiritual experience, from day to day. Their mental life has a tendency to wear thin, their sense of effort and struggle to increase and lead to breakdown. It is in the long run an unsatisfactory way of organizing the psyche, because the conscious mind has less than it ought to have upon which to fall back.
The opposite extreme is equally unsatisfactory. If individuals of the first type are trying to build high without adequate foundations, those of the second are mistaking the foundations for a complete building. A dissociation of a different type occurs in them—a dissociation due to lack of use, to a mere failure to connect up that part of the mind concerned with sexual emotion with a great many of the mind’s other activities. Thus the sexual side has few and lower values associated with it than it might, and other possibilities of thought and feeling and action remain as mere possibilities, never realized in actuality. The result is a definitely incomplete personality of a more or less arrested or rudimentary type.
Those are the extremes: of course there are all intermediates between them. They may crop up with apparent spontaneity, determined more by the hereditary constitution of the man or woman than by external happenings: or they may be mainly or at least largely determined by the accidents of the environment during the period before maturity. One of the most potent factors in the environment will be the attitude of the parents towards sexual matters. On the one hand they may adopt the common, horror-stricken attitude towards sex, hushing it up, making it clear to the sensitive mind of childhood that there is something thoroughly bad about it, and so laying the best possible foundations for future repression. Or, on the other hand, they may openly adopt the psycho-analytic view as to the rôle of sex in the development of mind, may further believe that the fullest analysis and self-knowledge is always desirable, and may accordingly be pointing out to the child interpretations of its actions and sayings in terms of sex, familiarizing it with sex from the outset, not merely not discouraging but actually encouraging reference to sexual matters. This will tend, ceteris paribus, to the development of a mind in which many of the more complex mental operations will not usually persist because the subject will be continually unbuilding them into their constituent parts, of which sex will be the most unvarying and important.
Both these types are to my judgment obviously unsatisfactory. The ideal organization of the mind must be one in which first there is a minimum of waste of energy, secondly a maximum realization of potentiality. The operations of mind may further be thought of from two different angles—a subserving the biological needs of the organism, or as ends in themselves. From the first point of view, thought is action in posse: efficiency and full utilization of energy are here the requirements, and it is obvious that any method which even partially separates one part of the mental organization from the rest must be a poor one, that a refusal to face any portion of reality, such as, in our special case, the physical side of sex, must put the organism at a disadvantage in a world in which that portion of reality plays, as it obviously does, an important rôle.
The correct type of organization is one of the type which has been developed over and over again in the course of evolution, for different functions: it is the hierarchical one, in which some parts are dominant, others subordinate, the dominant parts helpless without the subordinate, the subordinate different, through the fact of their subordination, from what they would otherwise have been, doing most of the hard work, but under the guidance of the dominant. Only in this way is a unitary organization arrived at in which there is the minimum of waste, of antagonism between the parts.
The psycho-analysts have, by analysing the pathology of mind, shown us how waste of energy may arise in particular cases, and so make it easier for us to avoid it in general.
One may recognize the merits of Freud as an investigator without accepting all or even the majority of his conclusions. As the late W. H. Rivers pointed out, Freud will always be remembered in the history of psychology because he introduced new ideas and new methods into the science. Previous workers had discovered the realm of the subconscious; but they had not discovered the real nature of its relation to the rest of the mental organization. Freud pointed out that there was often a biological value attached to the power of forgetting as well as to that of remembering, and that in any case in most of us a large amount of experience is rendered unconscious by suppression, or an attempt made to force it into the unconscious by repression. He and his followers and other schools of psychologists have pointed out the importance of unresolved conflicts in determining thought and behaviour, and have made it clear that in the ordinary civilized community of to-day a large proportion of those conflicts arise out of difficulties connected with the sex-instinct. And, even if we reject the extreme claims made by many Freudians, we must admit that psycho-analysis has shown that many cases of actual perversion of instinct may be cured by analytic methods, and that sex occupies a very much larger space in the mind than was previously supposed. It had not been previously supposed, because of the fact that it tends to appear in consciousness in disguised form—either sublimated and thus intertwined with other emotions and instincts or with unusual objects, or else rationalized as something else, or kept below the surface of consciousness as an unfulfilled wish; and because there is a resistance in most of us to recognizing its importance.
This revolution in our thought has proved very unpalatable to many. In just the same way as a large proportion of Darwin’s opponents opposed him because they believed that to accept man’s simian origin was a repulsive degradation, so many of the opponents of psycho-analysis oppose it because they believe that to ascribe this huge rôle to sex in the genesis of our psyche is a repulsive degradation.
To my mind there are two very general questions which the student of human sex psychology now has to face, if he takes not necessarily the whole but the central theses of psycho-analysis, however much pruned, as proven. The first is this: granted that sex does play such a large part, especially in early years, in the genesis of our mental organization, is it desirable that the average adult or adolescent should, by analysis, be given full self-knowledge on the subject?
The second is this: granted that sex does penetrate into more corners of mind in man than in lower organisms, is this really a regrettable thing, or can we find any grounds for believing it to be desirable or biologically progressive?
To answer this we shall have to go back a little to first principles, and consider, however briefly, certain facts as to the march of evolution.
Evolution is essentially progressive. It proceeds on the whole in a certain direction, and that direction is on the whole towards a realization of what seems to us to have positive value. The direction, however, as a matter of fact, is most striking when we consider the maximum level attained, much less so when we consider the average, not at all when we look at the minimum.
The method or mechanism of progress may differ in different types, and it does differ in man from that which is found in other mammals. In most higher animals progress is brought about chiefly by natural selection operating upon individuals, although in a few forms selection operates chiefly upon groups of communities: in both cases the changes in the inherited constitution of the species are the important changes. In man, however, in all except the very early stages of his development, changes in inherited constitution have been small and unimportant, and the chief changes of evolutionary significance have been those in tradition; selection among individuals has been of relatively little importance, and selection has fallen mainly upon groups and, to an ever-increasing extent, upon their ideas and traditions.
In spite of differences in method as between different types of organism, the tendency has been in the same direction—towards a possibility of greater control, greater independence, greater complexity, and greater regulation or harmony.
Looked at from the evolutionary point of view, the moving, dynamic point of view, we have to think of human sex-psychology in yet another way. So far we have been treating it as what it is; now we must think of what it may become.
The general rule in evolution—the natural and obvious rule—is that acquisitions are not thrown away when change occurs, but built upon, utilized for some new function. The endostyle of the lowest chordates, part of a very primitive type of feeding mechanism, was converted, when they changed their mode of life, into the thyroid gland: the parathyroids develop from the remains of the gill-apparatus when gills are discarded for lungs: the secondary sexual differences which originate as accidental consequence of the primary difference between the sexes are, over and over again, elaborated into special characters employed in courtship.
So the sex-instinct and its associated emotion, at first simply one among a number of separate and scarcely-correlated instincts, has in man become the basis for numerous new mental functions. It can enter into the composition of various emotions, though its character is often disguised and its presence often undetected. It contributes to some of the most exalted states of mind which we can experience. The sexual relationship, which in lower animals involves neither contact nor even propinquity, but simply simultaneous discharge of reproductive cells, and in most animals is a purely temporary affair, is very different in man. Even in those birds and non-human mammals in which the sexes remain associated for long periods or permanently, the different departments of life are more in water-tight compartments, the psychical activity is subordinate to the physiological: in man the physiological side, though of course still basic and necessary, is more—and can be much more—subordinate to the psychological, and all parts of the mental life interpenetrate to a much greater extent; so that the sex-instinct may become transformed by a psychological process roughly analogous to the transformation of physical energy, and reappear in altered guise in various other activities of mind.
If we look at the matter broadly, we see that man is in a period of evolutionary transition as regards sex. We found previously that the greatest change connected with sex which has been made in the evolution of higher animals was the change by which there was evolved a brain and mind with associated sense-organs in which accurate perception of objects at a distance could occur, a mechanism which really dominated the working of the organism as a whole, and in which memory and emotion seemed to play an important part. Once this happened, the sex-instinct could be linked up with general emotional reactions and connected with external objects capable of inducing emotion.
What was the result? That in every group possessing such a type of mind, epigamic characters of a beautiful or striking or bizarre nature were evolved. This first linking-up of sex with mind produced, eventually, a large proportion of the beauty of the organic world. It coloured and adorned not only many a bird, but even newts and fish and spiders; it helped elicit song and music from mere sounds and noises; it moulded our own bodies, coloured our lips and eyes, and everywhere helped in adding grace to mere serviceableness; it saw to it that, as St. Paul puts it, “even our uncomely parts have an abundant comeliness.” But, as we have just pointed out, its connection with the mind’s higher centres was in all pre-human forms still temporary, under the control of cyclical physiological changes, and the mind as a whole was still constructed in compartments, so that different instincts and different experiences did not necessarily or even usually come in contact with each other.
The next great change is being made now; it concerns a further development of mind and a consequent fresh mode of connection of sex with mental life. As we have outlined above, this change in mind consists in the tendency towards uniting the different parts of the psyche, both those portions given by heredity and the modification due to experience, into a single organic whole, and in making this whole more dominant over the other aspects of the organism; the consequent tendency as regards the relationship of sex to the organism is towards taking it out of its single groove, its water-tight compartment, and bringing it into more complete and more permanent union with the rest of the mind. Furthermore, the main change and the consequent change as regards sex are both of a biologically progressive nature.
We are now, I think, owing to our taking this broad biological view, in a better position to make up our minds as to some at least of the difficulties which beset us to-day in any attempt to deal squarely with the relation of sex to human life. It is true that some of these difficulties are permanent. The synthesis of a unitary and comprehensive mental organization can never be an easy task. The child is endowed with a number of instinctive tendencies which, as in animals, each tend whenever aroused to occupy the whole mental field to the exclusion of all others, producing divergence and lack of co-ordination instead of unity and organization. Then again, the experience of any one individual may be highly unusual. For the child to co-ordinate his various tendencies with each other and with his own experience and with the tradition and experience of the race must always be difficult, and there will always be some failures.
There is another permanent difficulty, a biological disharmony, in the fact that sexual maturity in man comes several years before general maturity, and that again, at least in any state of civilization which we can at present imagine as practicable, several years before the economic possibility of marriage. There will always be crises of adolescence; there will always be suffering and difficulty due to this disharmony in time between the origin of the full sexual instinct and the possibility of its proper satisfaction.
However, granted these permanent difficulties, there are others which may be reduced or made to disappear. Granted that we have to organize our minds into a whole, we can see the general plan on which we should aim at organizing it. We must aim first at having no barriers between different parts of the mind. Every attempt must be made in the education of children to prevent there being a stigma attached to one whole section of mental life, and so to avoid its partial or total dissociation from the rest. On the other hand, the absence of barriers does not imply the absence of any relation of subordination or dominance of one part to another. One of the most important biological generalizations is that progressive evolution is accompanied by the rise of one part to dominance and, whenever there are many parts to be considered, by the arrangement of the rest in some form of hierarchy, each part being subordinate to one above, dominant to one below. It is such a hierarchy which we must try to construct in our mental organization.
It is obviously impossible here to go into the whole question of values and ideals, but it is clear to any one who has given the briefest reflection to the subject that there are certain values, æsthetic, intellectual, and moral, which are ultimate for the mind of man, certain ideals—of truth and honesty, intellectual satisfaction, righteousness or at least freedom from the sense of sin or guilt, completeness and self-realization, unselfishness and serviceableness and so forth—which (though perhaps in varying proportions) are by common consent accepted as the highest: and further that the greater the attempt to deepen and broaden these, to increase their mental intensity and to widen their range and association, the more they tend to emerge into something increasingly unitary, in which it is seen that honesty is also beautiful and useful, that intellectual satisfaction is in the long run serviceable to the community, that unselfishness to be effective requires thought and will besides mere altruistic emotion, that one of the greatest aids to any genuine righteousness is an æsthetic love of beautiful things that prevents our doing ugly things, and so ad infinitum.
The proper way, then, to build the sex instinct into the mental system is not to have its stimulation cause a merely physiological and uninhibited desire for its gratification, nor to bring about a forcible repression and an attempt to break connection between it and the other parts of the mind.
The desirable method is to have free connection between it and the dominant ideas, so that its stimulation brings about a stimulation of them too. This leads, as a matter of experience, to the incorporation of the sexual emotion in the dominant ideas, or we had better say an interpenetration of one with the other, so that the sexual emotion is no longer simply sexual emotion, but is become part of something very much larger and very much better. Let the great writers say in their few words what I should say much worse in many.
Wordsworth’s “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused” opens a window on to the general process of sublimation: and Blake’s description of the physical union of the sexes as “that ... on which the soul expands her wing” is an epitome of a particular aspect of our particular problem. Or again, when St. Paul says “Am I not free?” or “All things are lawful unto me,” he means that by subordinating all sides of himself to his highest ideals, he has reached that state in which what he does is right to him because he only wants to do what is right. (True that, as he himself confesses, he is not always able to keep in that state: but when he is in it, he attains that complete freedom which is the subordination of lower to higher desire.)
Physiologically speaking, the activation of the sex instinct, when the connection is made in this way, arouses the higher centres, and these react upon the centres connected with the sex instinct, modifying their mode of action. The nett result is thus that both act simultaneously to produce a single whole of a new type. Processes of this nature are common in the nervous system, as has been shown for instance by Hughlings Jackson, Head, and Rivers.[39]
Thus the higher, dominant parts of the mind are strengthened by their connection with such lower parts as the simple sex instinct, and the sex instinct is able to play a rôle in any operation of the mind, however exalted, in which emotion is in any way concerned. Rivers believes that the actual conflict between controlled and controlling parts of the mind is a potent generator of mental “energy”; and adds, “whatever be the source of the energy, however, we can be confident that by the process of sublimation the lives upon which it is expended take a special course, and in such case it is not easy to place any limit to its activity. We do not know how high the goal that it may reach.”[40]
The change is thus on the one side from the relative independence of the sex instinct towards its subordination to a position in a hierarchy of mental process, but on the other from a rigid limitation of its scope towards a greater universality by establishing connections with all other parts of the mind. Further, there is also a change towards greater dominance and “self-determination” of the mental as against the physical.
A great many of the difficulties which beset us, both as individuals and as communities, come from the fact that both these changes are only in process of being made, and are (even approximately) complete only in a very small number of persons.
Lack of restraint is failure to construct a properly-working hierarchy. That is a very simple example. Less easy to analyse but equally vicious, are the innumerable cases in which some sort of equilibrium is only attained not by a free interaction of dominant and subordinate parts, but by repression. Conflicts arise, which persist, either in an open form or in the subterranean regions of the unconscious. In either case they tend to be projected by the subject into his ideas of other people. This projection, or interpretation of external reality in terms of one’s self, is a curious and almost universal attribute of the human mind. The most familiar example is perhaps the anthropomorphism which in religion after religion has invested the powers of the universe with human form, human mental process, human personality—or at least with form, mind, and personality similar to those of man; while a very simple case is that in which certain neurotic types project their depression so as to colour everything that comes into their cognizance a gloomy black.
In the sphere of sex this process is, alas, most potently at work. The man in whom the sexual instinct still lives a more or less independent, uninhibited life of its own, tends—unless he has special evidence to the contrary, and often even then—to interpret the behaviour and the minds of others in the terms familiar to himself, and to suppose that they too must be stopped by the fear of punishment or of loss of caste if they are not to commit excesses.
On the other hand, those in whom there is a constant conflict with a sexual origin project it here, there, and everywhere into the breasts of those they know, and interpret others’ motives in terms of their own repressed wishes.
Furthermore, most of our existing laws and customs are based on a state of society in which the changes to which we have referred had not progressed as far as they have to-day, and man’s psychology was a little less removed from that of other mammals.
The result is that those who attempt the complete emancipation possible to a properly-organized mind are confronted first by the lag of our institutions and traditions, and secondly by the unconcealed suspicion of all those—and they are as yet the large majority—in which the conflicts arising out of sex are unresolved. It is from the sum of those conflicts that the spirit prevalent with regard to sex to-day derives its character—shocked and shamefaced as regards one’s own sexual life, vindictive and grudging as regards the difficulties of others. The bulk of men and women cannot treat sexual problems in a scientific spirit, because of the store of bottled-up emotion in the wrong place that they have laid up for themselves by their failure to come to proper terms with their sexual instincts. The soul should grow to deserve the words Crashaw wrote of St. Theresa—“O thou undaunted daughter of desires!” But this the soul of such disharmonic beings can never do.
This brings us to our other pressing question. Should the results of psycho-analytic methods, the knowledge that the sex instinct is fundamental and is interwoven into the roots of the highest spiritual activities—should the inculcation and demonstration of this be part of education? Some would say yes, and would argue that to know oneself is essential to a proper realization of one’s capacities. Personally I am extremely doubtful of the correctness of this answer. Knowledge of the processes of digestion is not necessary to digest well—so long as we go on digesting well: it is only necessary when we digest badly. In that case the processes involved are automatic: but even in processes which require a great deal of learning, we find a similar state of affairs. A man can become expert at, say, a game requiring the most delicate adjustments of hand and eye without analysing the processes he employs, but by practising them as finished articles, so to speak; and it is equally obvious that Shakespeare and Shelley and Blake and other great writers produced their works without the least analytical knowledge of the obscure and rather unpleasant processes which, if we are to believe the critics who psycho-analyse dead authors in the pages of Freudian journals, were “really” at work below the surface. Analysis constitutes a serious surgical operation for the mind, and, as one of the leading Austrian psycho-analysts has recently said, we do not want to perform this operation on healthy people any more than we want to open their abdomens merely for the sake of seeing that their viscera are normal.
If matters concerning sex are treated properly during a child’s development and education, the necessity for psycho-analysis and any extension of analytic knowledge of the foundations of one’s own mind that it may bring is done away with. If it can be ensured that there is no obvious avoidance of the subject leading to repression in the child’s mind, and on the other hand no undue prominence given to it so that a morbid curiosity is aroused, a large proportion of the conflicts that now arise could be avoided. The other necessity is that there should be provision for sublimation—in art or music, in social service or in one’s own work, in religion, or, in modified form, in sport or romance.
It is perfectly possible, in such case, for mental development to proceed naturally and comparatively smoothly towards a unified organization of the type of which we have spoken. Psycho-analysis would not help a boy or girl developing in such a way, any more than would a study of all the characters we have inherited from our simian forefathers help us to realize our specifically human possibilities. On the other hand, when the intellectual desire to know things for their own sake is aroused, as it is in most boys and girls between the ages of about fourteen and twenty, then just as it is good, in order to get a true picture of the universe, for them to know and be presented with the evidence for man’s evolution from lower forms, so it is good for the same reason to give them an account of their psychological organization, including evidence for the rôle which sex plays in the genesis of higher mental activities—without, however, any necessity for psychological experiments in burrowing into their own foundations. In this case such knowledge would have the additional value of putting them on their guard against allowing themselves to be prejudiced by their own incompletely-adjusted conflicts.
We are all of us too prone to think that a phenomenon is somehow “explained,” or interpreted better, by analysing it into its component parts or discovering its origin than by studying it in and for itself.
The new type of mental organization acquired by man permits of wholly new types of mental process, of a complexity as far exceeding those that we deduce in brutes as does the physical organism of a dog or an ant that of a polyp or a protozoan: and it is part of our business to realize those possibilities to the fullest extent.
To sum up, then, biological investigation in the first place shows us how certain abnormalities of sexual psychology may be more easily interpreted as caused by comparatively simple physical abnormalities than by the more complex distortions of psychological origin dealt with by psycho-analysis. In the second place, by giving us a broader aperçu than can otherwise be gained over the evolution of sex and the direction visible in biological history, it clears up to a certain extent some of the difficulties which the discoveries of the psycho-analytic school have rendered acute.
If the changes in the relation of the sex instinct to the rest of the mind, which I have spoken of above as being in operation at present, should one day progress so far as to be more or less carried through in a majority, or in a dominant section of the population, the whole outlook of society towards the sex problem would be changed, and the laws and institutions and customs connected with it completely remodelled.
The most pressing task of those who are thinking over the problem of sex in human life will often be the relief of suffering and the removal of abuses: but the broader view should never be forgotten, and every attempt should be made to think constructively with a view to realizing the enormous possibilities that such a change would bring about.