It is one of the great services Freud rendered to psychology (and one, by the way, largely responsible for the acceptance of his doctrines by the disinterested intelligence) that he showed that a species of forgetting is nothing casual, but active and purposeful, a manifestation of the life of the unconscious. However, though his description of the process was correct, he left it to occur in a vacuum. As a matter of fact this forgetting consists in the inhibition of associative memory by a process in the vegetative apparatus, so as to maintain the equilibrium within itself which is reflected in consciousness as comfort.
The unconscious, in short, consists of the buried associations among the parts of the vegetative apparatus and the brain cells. We seem to be much nearer to grasping the nature of the unconscious, when we look upon it as a historical continuum, a compound or emulsion of different and various states of intravisceral pressure and tone, in the vegetative apparatus, dependent upon the balance between the endocrines, as well as upon past experiences of the viscera in the way of stimulation or depression. We forget that which is held down, literally, in the vegetative apparatus. This explanation of forgetting tells, too, why the forgotten (stored in the sub-brain, the endocrine-vegetative system) continually projects itself into and interferes with the regular flow of consciousness, e.g., in slips of the tongue, mistakes of spelling, and so on: because the energy bottled in the vegetative system tends to erupt into the consciousness into which it would ordinarily flow.
In the evolution of the mind, there have been elaborated devices to protect it against the vegetative apparatus. Consciousness, or awareness, must be accepted as a fundamental, primal fact, like protoplasm. Consciousness and protoplasm may be the complementary sides of the same coin. Whatever the truth, the fact stands out that the oldest, deepest, most potent consciousness is that of the traditionally despised lowest organs, the vegetative organs, the heart and lungs, stomach and intestines, the kidneys and the liver, and so on, their nerves, e.g., the solar plexus, and the glands of internal secretion. They invented and elaborated muscle, bone and brain to carry out their will. Evolution has been in the direction of a greater perfection of the methods of carrying out their will. Their consciousness, working upon the growing and multiplying brain cells, has created what we call self-conscious mind.
Mind, reacting upon its creator, has, in a sense, come to dominate them, because it has become the meeting ground of all the energy-influences seething and bubbling in the organism, and so developed into the organ of handling them as a whole, their Integrating-Executive. But just the same and all the time, the underlying consciousness of the viscera and their accessories stand as the powers behind the throne, but as what we have now learned to speak of, in relation to the Mind, as the Unconscious.
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
To sum up these relations of the viscera, the endocrines, the unconscious and the mind, it may be stated as a far-reaching generality for the understanding of human life: that character and conduct are expressions of the streams of energy arising in the vegetative apparatus, primarily endocrine determined at birth, and secondarily experience determined after the organism has learned to react as a whole, as consciousness. The result of such a reaction as a whole tends to balance the disturbance of energy, so as to maintain or restore the equilibrium, or sense of harmony and comfort, when consciousness again disappears. This law is an attempt at synthesis of the labors of the psychanalysts, the behaviourists, and the students of the internal secretions (Freud, Jung, Adler, Sherrington, Watson, Von Bechterew, Kempf, Crile, Cannon, Cushing, Fraenkel are the great names of the movement). Most of the details, and all of the quantitative applications of the law still remain to be worked out. But a statement like the following of Cushing, the eminent surgeon-student of the endocrines, that "it is quite probable that the psychopathology of everyday life hinges largely upon the effect of ductless gland discharges upon the nervous system," shows which way the wind is blowing.
In the face of these conceptions the position of the psychanalyst as a practical therapeutist becomes clearer, and the causes of his failure when he fails. In the first place, he deals with psychic results as processes, and ignores the physiology of their production. Since a true cure of the neurosis, what he is after, is impossible without a removal of the cause, a disturbance in the vegetative apparatus, he cannot succeed where an automatic adjustment among the viscera does not follow his probings and ferretings of the unconscious. In the second place, he disregards the existence of a soil for the planting of the malign complexes in the individual in whom they grow and flourish. That soil is composed in part of the endocrine relations within the vegetative apparatus. And as we can often attack that soil more effectively and radically from the endocrine end than from the experience end (e.g., repressed episodes) we may transform the soil and make it barren rock for morbid complexes, at any rate. The concept of the endocrine-vegetative apparatus as the determinant of normal and abnormal behaviour, emotional reactions and disturbances of power should in time cause even the most fanatic of the psychanalysts to recognize the functional basis of the mental acrostics they are so fond of dissecting.
NATURAL ABILITY
Another achievement of the psychanalysts is the recognition of the influence of organic and functional inferiorities of the individual upon the history of his personality. Gross organ inferiorities are those which are definite handicaps in the struggle for success in society, such as heart disease. Such handicaps, however, are limited to relatively few of a population. The raison d'être of the greater number of minor mental inefficiencies the psychanalyst puts down to handicaps in the unconscious. Again he mistakes figurative imagery for explanations. The conception of endocrine diversity in the make-up supplies us with the rationale of the vast majority of organic and functional defects and inferiorities, in short, subnormalities of any group, large or small.
Moreover, how would the psychanalyst explain the occurrence and influence of organic and functional superiorities and their tremendous influence upon the individual and society? We live in a generation which has acquired a flair for the pathologic. Undoubtedly it is a soul-sick generation, and its interest in sickness of the mind is only natural. Just the same, whatever advances, improvements, progress, have been made (and certainly a number of the changes in his environment, external and internal, must be admitted to be changes for the better) have been made, not by natural disability, but by natural ability. What is the physiology of natural ability?