Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

Let him get down from his chair and go to play, and in less than a minute you will probably find him exerting vain efforts to move a huge stone or a massive log from one place to another. The purpose of the transposition of this solid and inert mass will be clear neither to you nor to him; but that is immaterial. His body wants to spend its energy, and the little boy, therefore, likes moving a large stone or a large log about. And he will cry or protest violently if you tell him he is not to do it. He does not know in the least why he wants to do it; he only knows, for the moment, that moving big stones is good.

From all this it is clear, not only that the brain’s interpretation of a bodily state is unreliable as a sign of what is actually proceeding in that body, but also that it does not always require to be reliable in order to lead its owner to do the right thing, or to adopt the proper course of action.

Now let us suppose the same child peevish and irritable. What actually happens?

Let us look inside his body for a moment! The large intestine is congested; his bowels have not been properly opened for thirty-six hours. Last night, owing to this condition, his sleep was restless and feverish. This morning he has eaten a good breakfast, but he is not so lively as he was yesterday. Messages are going up to his brain every second from every tissue in his body. And all these messages say one and the same thing: “We are not happy: we are not in our usual clean, healthy condition.” The brain itself, owing perhaps to disordered circulation, is also a little surcharged with blood; so that, in addition to the messages of distress that incessantly rise from the body, it has its own distress.

Now let us turn to the child’s consciousness! What is happening there? The child is not conscious of all the alarms and signals of distress coming up from his body; he is not conscious of the pressure of blood on his brain. All he knows is that he is feeling thoroughly and utterly discontented. And since his human intelligence tells him that discontent must have a cause, this cause must be found. An incident at breakfast soon provides the whole scheme of a convincing cause for his feeling of distress. His little sister picks up a crumb of his bread and eats it—an innocent action which, if it had happened yesterday, or the day before, would only have provoked laughter.

It is, however, sufficient to provide the badly informed brain with material for a false interpretation. The sister’s action is immediately posited as the cause of his feeling ill at ease, and in a moment all his body’s angry discontent about its bad condition is vented against the unfortunate little sister, who is as staggered as she is hurt by his sudden unaccountable outburst of tears and bitter words.

In the two examples given, what has been the unconscious motive of the little boy’s behaviour? In Example 1 it was a reserve of physical energy that was seeking an outlet—interpreted by the little boy’s consciousness as a desire to roll a stone or a log as an end in itself.

In Example 2 it was a state of physical depression which, reaching the lad’s consciousness as a vague discontent, led him to seek its cause. Thanks to a false interpretation, and still acting quite unconsciously of the real cause, he flies into a passion with his little sister, because her taking of his crumb of bread seems to him a sufficient cause for his discontentedness.

This part of my disquisition on the unconscious, together with what follows, will do excellent service, if understood, in helping the reader to see more clearly into the complicated train of consequences which, as I shall point out later on, in Chapter VIII, lead to most conjugal differences, and ultimately to Divorce. Irrelevant as the above examples may seem, therefore, I would ask the reader to endeavour to make quite sure that he understands the principle they involve; because much of the lucidity of Chapter VIII will depend upon a thorough grasp of this principle.

When I speak of people acting in a certain way, or doing otherwise unaccountable and apparently immoral deeds as the result of a bodily impulse that they misinterpret, I shall speak of an unconscious motive on their parts. Only in this sense shall I speak of unconscious motives.