The doctor looks at literature

by Joseph Collins

The result is that the working of these instincts on the experience presented to the mind has brought about innumerable complications. These are known in the New Psychology as mental complexes. They have been to some modern novelists what the miraculous food given to Israel in the Wilderness was—their sole nutriment. Complexes, or conflicts resulting from adaptation of the primitive mental machinery to more intricate and varied processes than those with which it was originally intended to cope, determine much of man's mental life.

To understand the workings of a mind is like trying to unravel a tangled skein of thread. The two main difficulties are: (1) That up to this time our mental training, our perceptions, our consciousness, our reason, have been exercised for the specific purpose of maintaining ourselves in the world. They have not been concerned with helping us to understand ourselves; (2) That there are parts of our minds whose existence we do not recognise, either because we will not or because we cannot, for the reason that they have come to be regarded as being in conflict with other parts which we have long admitted as having the first claim to recognition. In other words, not having known how to adapt certain parts of our mental machinery to the newer purposes for which we needed them, we have tried to suppress them or ignore them. In doing so we have only deceived ourselves, because they are still connected up with the main engine and influence all of the latter's output, harmoniously or jarringly—sometimes to the extent of interfering seriously with its working.

The work of the practical psychologist is to learn how to overcome these two difficulties and to teach others how to use the knowledge. This is the task novelists frequently set themselves, and some, Willa Cather in “Paul's Case” and Booth Tarkington in “Alice Adams,” accomplish it admirably. Like the teacher and the priest, they have learned that surplus energy of the mind may be diverted from the biologically necessary activities into other fields of useful and elevating effort. They have learned that the second difficulty can be best overcome by facing the truth about our minds, however unpleasant and unflattering it may at first sight appear to be. Recognition of the existence of the two primitive urges, the instincts of self-preservation and of the preservation of the race, is the first step toward appreciation of their reasonable limitations and the extent to which they may be brought into harmony with the requirements of a well-balanced life.

This leads us to refer for a moment to a tremendous force which, in any discussion of the working of the instincts, cannot be ignored. It is a constant effort or tendency, lying behind all instincts, to attain and maintain mental, emotional, and spiritual equilibrium. The tendency is expressed by the interaction, usually automatic and unconscious, which goes on between complexes and tends to establish the equilibrium. At the same time the working of individual instincts tends to upset it. Whenever the automatic process is suspended to any great degree, as by the cutting off from the rest of the mind of one complex, the result is a one-sided development which causes mental disturbances and often eventually mental derangement. As the instincts and complexes incline to war among themselves, there is a stabilising influence at work tending to hold us in mental equilibrium and thus to keep us balanced or sane. No one in the domain of letters has understood this force and its potentialities like Dostoievsky. “The Possessed” is a chart of that sea so subject to storm and agitation. The effort toward integration is perhaps a true instinct, and rests on a sound physiological basis, so well described by Sherrington. It furnishes a genuine theme for description of life's activities, and well-wrought studies of integration and disintegration take highest rank in fiction.

With all their prolixity, the Victorian novelists managed to depict progress in one direction or another. This is more than can be said of most modern novelists, who are exhausted when they have succeeded in a single analysis, and commit the crass literary error of seeking to explain, when all that the most acute psychologist could possibly do would be to catch at a pattern, a direction, and an outcome, as mere description—problem rather than explanation being the dramatic motive.

While the novelist's business is to see life and his aspiration is to understand what he sees, many novelists of today are, by their work, claiming to understand life in a sense that is not humanly possible. Human conduct affords the best raw material for the novelist. If he represents this in such a way that it seems to reflect life faithfully he is an artist; but the psychological novelist goes further and feels bound to account for what he represents. Ordinarily he accounts for it in one of three ways: (1) by the inscrutability of Providence—as many of the older novelists did; (2) by theories of his own; (3) by the theories of those whose profession to understand life and conduct he accepts. In short, he must have a philosophy of life. The mistake many novelists are making is to confuse such a philosophy of life with an explanation of mental processes and a formula for regulating them. Neither philosophy nor psychology is an exact science. If a novelist wishes to describe an operation for appendicitis or a death from a gastric ulcer, he can easily get the data necessary for making the description true to fact. But if he aspires to depict the conduct, under stress, of a person who has for years been a prey to conflicting fear and aspiration, or jealousy and remorse, or hatred and conscience, what psychologist can give him a formula for the correct procedure? Who can predict the reactions of his closest friend under unusual conditions?

With our earnest realistic novelist ready to sit at the feet of science and avail himself of its investigations—prepared, as Shaw would say, to base his work on a genuinely scientific natural history—there is danger of his basing it, too, upon psychology which is not “genuinely scientific,” because its claims cannot be substantiated by experience. While the novelist is in such a receptive state along comes a scientist, hedged also with that special authority which physicians possess in the eyes of many laymen, and offers the complete outfit of knowledge and (as he assures the novelist) inductively derived theory that the novelist has been sighing for. This is Freud. He or his disciples can explain anything in the character and conduct line while you wait. If you want to know why a given person is what he is, or why he acts as he does, Freud can tell you. His outfit is not, ostensibly, “metaphysical,” like much of the older psychology that our novelist encountered in college days. It is human, concrete, and surprisingly easy to understand. A child can grasp the main principles. Our novelist tests out a few of them on life as he has known it and finds that they seem to work. If he is not completely carried off his feet, he may grin at some of the formulas as he might at a smutty joke, but his own observations concerning the excessively mothered boy and his reading of some of the great dramas of the world are to him sufficient evidence of their soundness; and he bases the behaviour of his characters upon them with the same assurance of their accuracy that he would have in basing the account of a surgical operation and its results upon the data supplied him by a surgeon who had successfully performed hundreds of exactly similar operations and watched their after effects.

One of the rudimentary instincts of human nature is curiosity, an urge to investigate the unknown, the mysterious. It is mystery that constitutes romance. It is the unknown that makes romance of one's future, fate, fortune, mind—at least that part of the mind which we do not understand and which is always taking us by surprise and playing us tricks. Curiosity is forced movement developed along the lines of interest. It is quite likely to follow the line of least resistance, and just now there is little resistance to sex curiosity. Those who find fascination in the New Psychology today found the old psychology of a quarter of a century ago a stupid bore. The old psychology dealt exclusively with what is now called the “conscious mind:” with analysing the concept of directed thought, with measuring the processes of the mind which we harnessed, or believed we harnessed, and drove subject to our wills to do our work. The old psychology was academic, dry, as proper and conventional as the C Major scale, without mystery, without thrills, and therefore without interest, except to the psychologist.

The New Psychology is different. And this “difference” is exactly why it has proved to be almost as effective bait to the feminine angler after romance which may serve her as caviar to the prosaic diet of every-day existence as are spiritualism and the many other cults and new religions whose attraction and apparent potency are now explainable by what we understand of this very psychology—or the science of the mind. There is no reason to suppose that the current doctrines of the subconscious will do more for civilisation or art than the older doctrines of consciousness. The fact that they seize the popular fancy and are espoused with enthusiasm is of no particular significance, since the very same attitude was an accompaniment of the older doctrines.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the prevalent interest in psychology. I shall cite three indications of it: The pastor of one of the large and influential churches in New York asked me a short time ago if I would give a talk on Psychology before the Girls' Club of his church. When I suggested that some other subject might be more fitting and helpful, he replied that all the girls were reading books on psychology, that he was sure none or few of them understood what they read, and that he was convinced that their indulgence was unhealthy. Should one go into any large general book-shop in New York or elsewhere and survey the display, he will find that a conspicuous department is devoted to “Books on Advanced Thinking,” and upon inquiry he will find that it is the most popular department of the store. The most uniform information that a psychiatrist elicits from the families of youths whose minds have undergone dissolution is that for some time previous to the onset of symptoms they displayed a great interest in books on philosophy and psychology, and many of them had taken up psychoanalysis, or whatever passes under that name; joined some League of the Higher Illumination; or gone in for “mental fancy work” of some kind.