Darwin, in his autobiography, states, “I had, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail, and at once, for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.”
We had a further example in the case of the house-surgeon who “forgot” to put out his light, and examples are extremely common in everyday life. We forget to post letters entrusted to us against our will, but we do not forget to post our own love-letters. We mislay bills very readily, but rarely do we mislay a cheque.
Amongst my patients suffering from shell-shock, I have had very many hundreds who have completely forgotten some of the most unpleasant and terrifying experiences which occurred to them out at the front. Others unconsciously had found the easiest method of dealing with the unpleasant past to be that of blotting the whole of it out, dissociating it completely from their conscious mind, and then stating that they remembered nothing of their lives until they woke up in hospital. It is not only memories, however, which are repressed and remain dormant in the unconscious mind. Most of our primitive instincts handed on from our savage forefathers before even the evolution of man in his present form, lie similarly buried in this unconscious part of the mind, and we are wont to deny emphatically that we possess these unpleasant instincts. Nevertheless, just as in utero we repeat more or less in detail the history of our physical evolution, so do we at that period and in childhood repeat to a great extent the history of our psychic evolution; and just as during this early period we possess the physical attributes of many of our ancestors, such as the gills of the fish or the tail of the lower vertebrates, so psychically do we at a somewhat later period, possess the instincts and desires of our progenitors, and utilise them as the hidden foundation stones in building our adult mental constitution. These various primitive instincts include all kinds of desires which would consciously be regarded as sexual perversions and moral crimes of different kinds, and they are present in all of us without exception. Our upbringing and conscious outlook upon them, however, causes them to be so abhorrent to us, that we successfully keep the majority of such ideas and feelings from ever coming out of the unconscious in their primitive form. In other words, we repress them. Occasionally, however, there is a tendency for these ancestral instincts to become conscious, and in our further efforts to prevent this we may develop instead hysterias, obsessions and unreasonable fears, together with many other nervous and abnormal signs and symptoms, into the nature of which it is not my intention to inquire further in this present volume. Those who are interested in pursuing this line of investigation will find an elementary account of it in a previous work of mine, “The Elements of Practical Psycho-Analysis.” All that I wish to emphasise here is that we do push out from the conscious mind unpleasant thoughts and memories, that we do repress and keep in the unconscious mind unpleasant desires and instincts, and that we do, as a result of this, have many unconscious or semi-conscious conflicts within ourselves, which may lead to unpleasant feelings of depression, irritability, fear, or in more pronounced cases hysterias, obsessions, and even permanent mental derangement.
§2
A further and somewhat important result of our possessing so much which is unconscious and of having so many feelings and ideas in consciousness of which we do not know the origin, or of whose origins we have but the vaguest and haziest notion is known as rationalization. This word signifies that we find reasons for doing or believing things which are of a pleasant nature and agreeable to us, and vice versa.
Following on this rationalisation comes also a certain conservatism, which tends to retard progress of any sort, which dislikes looking at new ideas, and this for a very obvious reason. Looking at new ideas, examining ourselves or our work very closely, has a tendency to bring to light, from time to time, the very primitive instincts and feelings which we have been at so much pains to repress. And rather than submit to the indignity of discovering how really imperfect we are, and having our pride in our divinely constituted natures shaken, we have acquired a habit of denying and fighting strenuously against discovering truths connected with either our moral or physical evolution which would be unpleasant to us. In the light of our upbringing, such new truths are often unpleasant, therefore we rationalise that they must be untrue. For having been educated to venerate logic and reason, we can only be satisfied with any given conclusion we come to when we feel that it is justifiable in the light of logic and reason. But the logic of rationalisation is false logic.
For many years, scientific and popular thought denied strenuously the possibility of the now universally accepted theory of human evolution; and on scientific grounds it was urged, with much plausible reasoning, that it was not possible to develop a high type like man from any low form of animal. On religious grounds it was argued equally passionately that if evolution were true, the Bible was wrong, God disappeared, and therefore the theory of evolution was untrue. The real reasons lying behind those reasons advanced by both the scientist and the general public, however, were not the reasons so carefully thought out by them, but consisted largely in the fact that they did not wish to find that the body, which they had hitherto thought a special and divine creation partaking of the miraculous, to be merely a stage in the evolution of life on this planet, and possibly not a final stage at that. For in that case, no longer would man be able to flatter himself that he was almost divine, he would have to relegate himself to the possibility of being in a stage of semi-barbarism; he would no longer be a final perfect product, but merely a half-finished article. It was this blow to his pride that he could not stand. And it is the same to-day. Whenever there is a likelihood that examination, particularly through research work, has thrown light on his psychic evolution, on the imperfections of his moral laws, or on the crudity of some conventional custom, the process which takes place in him is much the same.
Firstly, dislike of the idea. Secondly, on further examination of it, hatred of the idea. Thirdly, rationalisation directed against the idea. Fourthly, contentment, in that he has proved by logic and reason that the idea is wrong. Hence, it is that the truth takes long to emerge, and that obsessions and hysterias, and even trivial abnormalities are difficult to cure, for the cure involves seeing our own imperfections naked and undisguised.
In all these cases, we are trying to keep out of consciousness those things which will distress us or cause us to have conflicts, or to have to readjust our views of ourselves, or in fact cause us unpleasantness in any form. It will be noticed that I have mentioned pride in the belief that we have reached a condition of final development, and in our superiority over the rest of nature, as being one of the important factors in preventing our advance. It is to the development of this pride, and its ramifications that I am devoting the major portion of this book.