An obvious objection will at once be made, but it is only an apparent one. Many men will say they know they are physically weak, or weak-willed, are lacking in control. They know it because they have never controlled their love emotions, and have little control over any of their emotions.
To that excuse, the answer is: just because you have not is no proof that you cannot. If that were the case no progress would ever have been made by humanity.
That you have not controlled yourself is proof only that you have not yet vividly imagined a pattern according to which your actions might be carried out. The only hypersomatic pattern existing in your personality is that according to which you are now acting.
Countless biographies of men, great and less great, demonstrate that there have been revolutionary, cataclysmic changes in their actions resulting from alterations in the patterns, i.e., changes in the hypersomatic end of their personality.
The man who says he cannot change his actions is simply saying he cannot change his ideas. That would be somewhat analogous to saying he cannot learn a foreign language. But we know that everyone going to a foreign country and being environed month after month by a foreign language will learn to speak it, whether he tries or not. How easily and quickly he does is a matter only of his hypersomatic elasticity. Some are more elastic than others, but almost anyone who can walk can learn to change his hypersomatic patterns, can in other words become conscious of a new hypersomatic pattern, see its superiority to an old one, and regulate and control his actions accordingly.
§ 31
Psychoanalysis has among other striking paradoxes this one most applicable here. The person who says he cannot do a thing is consciously saying, “I cannot,” but unconsciously saying, “I do not wish to.”
Any reply that can be made by any man who says he cannot learn to control his own erotic emotions and therefore is unable to control his wife’s is excusing himself, on the ground that he will not be censured by others if he is really unable. He may be laughed at, or commiserated for his incapacities, but he cannot, so he thinks, be held responsible for them.
But if there is one important and valuable advance made by modern psychology it is that the unconscious, which says, “I do not wish to,” causing the conscious man to say, “I cannot”—this unconscious can be trained, reëducated, reshaped, repatterned. It may take more than a month. The final emergence of action, based on the re-patterned unconscious, may be sudden. But it can be done.
Those who say, “I cannot do it” are in their ignorance simply saying, “I do not wish to do it.”