Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

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.