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THERE is something in the human consciousness which may very appropriately be defined as the reality feeling. Whatever it is, no matter what its component factors may be, it serves the purpose of causing one's ego to be aware of the presence of reality.
When our special senses report to the brain centers that they have made contact with certain real sights, sounds, odors, objects, etc., this reality feeling becomes attached, as it were, to these sensory recognitions, and the individual immediately chooses to affirm that these sensations are evidences of the presence and existence of the realities which gave them origin. And so, in the case of the various neuroses, no matter whether the individual's fears, sensations, feelings, and experiences be of outward and bona fide origin or of inner and imaginary origin, the ego, in the presence of this reality feeling, immediately recognizes them as genuine, regardless of how foolish and fictitious may be the bases for such belief. The association with the reality feeling is a passport to the recognition of any sensation as real on the part of our consciousness.
In the case of certain peculiar types and temperaments the "reality feeling" works very well in connection with the clairaudient state - automatic hearing. And it is easy to suppose that in a spiritualistic séance many individuals whose minds are attuned - "en rapport", as the professionals call it - will be able to see and hear the same things the mediums see and hear. It is a sort of collective sensation or collective illusion - some one has called it "collective hypnotism".
Every now and then some one arises who attempts to make other people believe in the things which he sees and hears in his own mind. Self-styled "prophets" attempt to convince us of the reality of their visions. Odd geniuses appear who tell us of the voices they hear or the visions they see, and if they appear fairly sane and socially conventional in every other way, they are sometimes able to build up vast followings, to create cults and establish churches; whereas, if they are too bold in their imaginings, if they see a little too far or hear a little too much, they are promptly seized and lodged within the confines of an insane asylum. That is the penalty of allowing the "feeling of reality" to gain possession of the intellect, of failing to discriminate between the creatures of consciousness and those of the material world.
If we ardently will to believe a certain thing, it greatly helps us in transferring our memory images and our imaginative creations from one psychic association to another; that is, to transfer the "feeling of reality" which comes of an external visual sense to an association that is purely and properly a visual image of consciousness; or to transfer a "feeling of reality" connected with the reception of sound waves through the external ear, to a concept or sensation of sound which is internal in origin, but which is made real to consciousness by such transfer.
Much of the disagreement between the spiritualist and the scientist of to-day hinges upon the proper definition and understanding of this "reality feeling". Mediums insist that the images which they see in their minds are real - that there is a corresponding spirit entity, separate and apart from their minds, which gives origin to these images and their associated emotions. The scientist grants that the medium has seen these things in her own mind, that they really do exist in her consciousness, but he believes that the "reality feeling" which she attaches to them is a form of "transference" which she has unconsciously indulged, a feat of psychic legerdemain; that her subconscious has juggled the associations - transferred, shifted, and substituted on her; that she is honest when she says she "saw it", but that the beginning and end of the whole experience are confined to the medium's own inner consciousness.
It must be evident, then, that the phenomena evoked at the average spiritualistic séance have to do with the operation of natural law. Not only are the sitters deceived, but the mediums themselves are deceived. The physiologist and the psychologist, in attendance on these occasions, are able to explain what happens as natural phenomena. Our knowledge, limited tho it is, of the psychology of the unconscious enables us to understand many of these things. And to the extent that the laws of psychology are applicable to them, we may continue, in a scientific way, our study and investigation of so-called spirit phenomena.
The séance is in every way favorable to transferring the reality feeling on the part of the expectant sitters to the suggested phenomena of the séance room. It is a simple matter for the "sitter" to transfer this feeling of reality from an actual experience of external sensation to the mental image of the immediate occasion. Says one writer: "The psychical researchers have set a trap for a spirit, and their expectations would be sadly disappointed if no spirit appeared. The spirit does indeed appear - Man's Unconscious Spirit, or the `spirit' of one's own unconscious".
Owing to the widespread prevalence of spiritualistic teachings, there is a tendency on the part of many people to confuse their psychic experiences or "inner voice", with their beliefs about ghosts and apparitions, all the while forgetting how tricky the subconscious mind is in palming off on its owner the creatures of its own conjuring. It is failure to recognize this fact that leads the insane and the near-insane to become victims of hallucinations and delusions. It must be remembered that the average human mind cannot be trusted to tell exactly, precisely, and truthfully what is going on in its own depths.
In general, belief is but the conscious recognition or expression of an unconscious desire or wish. One of the dominant human wishes is for glory, power, self-aggrandizement. All down through the ages, outside of the military hero and the sovereign of the realm, a seer was the most honored of all men. We looked with reverence and awe upon the men and women who were supposed to be in touch with unseen power. We are inclined to worship those of our fellows who have been able to push aside the veil and peer into the realms beyond. In modern times, the medium has become the would-be successor of the ancient seer.
The ordinary clergyman, it is true, reads his Bible, and prays, and then orates his message from the pulpit; but the medium leans over the threshold of another world, and there - so he claim s - actually hears the voices and sees the forms of spirit beings, angelic hosts, departed souls. And so the medium is adored as a seer by the faithful believers in spiritualism - until such time as the deception is disclosed; and even then many of the faithful are slow to abandon their belief in the powers of their chosen medium.
Scientists, psychologists, and physiologists, have been forced to explore the subconscious in their study of spiritualism, for it must be in the realm of the unconscious that the spirit of man reigns and operates; how can we hope to know aught of the spirit after death if we do not make a sincere effort to study it during life? And, indeed, our greatest rewards in the study of spiritualism have come to us - from a psychological viewpoint - in our study of the spirit of man as it operates in the subconscious realms, where we find it to be anything but an infinite intelligence and a high-minded spiritual guide. We find it to be wholly human and faltering, entirely selfish, seeking all the while to fulfil the wishes of the mind; and withal a crafty, cunning, and subtle deceiver, and sometimes guilty of conduct devoid of either conscience or moral scruples.
I have been much impressed, in the study of mediums and clairvoyants, by the observation that a very large number of them are of a highly neurotic temperament, and many of them of such mental instability that they closely border on the hysteric and even the insane realms. In fact, it is not uncommon to have a clairvoyant, medium, or trance-talker come of her own accord to the physician, seeking a diagnosis, frankly explaining her own misgivings concerning her mental state.
In olden days many of the witches must have belonged to this group of nervously unstable individuals. Some of the signs of witchery would now be regarded as signs of hysteria. This is especially true of the notorious "Devil's claw", which seems to have been a patch of insensitive skin somewhere upon the body of the alleged witch; to-day, this would be regarded as a symptom of hysteria and would be recorded among the physical findings - at the time the patient was examined - as "hysterical anesthesia".
There can be little doubt that many of these spiritualistic medium s are deluded and more or less unable to understand their own performances. They are often greatly influenced by suggestion; as, for instance, in the case of a person who asks for communication with a dead sister when he has no dead sister, and yet receives from the medium long messages, supposed to come from the sister.
There can be no doubt that the minds of many so-called medium s are striking illustrations of dissociation among groups of conscious mental processes; they verge on actual hysteria and double personality. In so far as this is the case, one must in fairness admit that such a medium is not fundamentally (I mean morally) a fraud, but rather the subject of an elusive, functional nervous disorder, and at the same time clever enough to capitalize the disorder and make it provide the necessaries of life. In whatever instances this is the case, the so-called messages from the dead are made up of the more or less coherent trains of ideas that troop in from the marginal consciousness in response to those suggested ideas which come into the medium's attention when he or she is in a state of partial or complete trance. To whatever extent this represents the nature of mediumship, it, together with the so-called spirit messages, admits of scientific and psychological investigation.
It must be said at this juncture, however, that there are many men of science in good repute who believe that the whole problem of spiritualistic phenomena cannot be fought out on this line; that there is a residue that cannot be approached by means of scientific experiment4. It seems highly probable that the ultimate solution of the problems involved in the phenomena of spiritualism (of this sort) will have to be referred to the theological courts.
No doubt much of the psychology of clairvoyants and spirit mediums takes place out in the dim consciousness of the marginal state or in the subconscious. That is, these spirit manifestations originate in the subconscious mind much as the fantasms of the dream -world originate there during the night season, when the analytical and conscious centers of the brain are asleep - dead to the world.
Man has only a single mind, but he has a dual consciousness. This dual consciousness is never separated by hard and fast lines. The conditions of health, of the nervous system, of the psychical centers, are all concerned in constantly moving back and forth the lines of demarcation between the central and the marginal consciousness.
We know that certain individuals are highly susceptible to being hypnotized - that is, to having their consciousness thrown clear over into the marginal state. We likewise know that other individuals are subjected to enormous and sudden fluctuations - sudden shifting of the boundary line between the conscious and the subconscious - and that they bring up from the depths of this marginal state of their psychic life certain ideas and images which impress them vividly. So new and strange do these ideas appear, that they seem to the recipients to have been whispered by intelligences or spirits outside of their own minds and foreign to their own personalities.
As a child grows up, it formulates and deposits in the mind a group of ideas, feelings, and emotions, which become centered around a certain individual, say its mother or its father. Later in life, we may imagine situations in which this group of ideas and emotions might be transferred to another individual, as upon the death of one or both of the parents. We are all of us, no doubt, more or less transitory transferring our accumulated mental states from one individual to another, but only in a partial way and on a minor scale. It should be borne in mind that when such "transference" takes place, the process involves a whole group of complexes and a host of mental images and records of inner sensations. By way of illustration:
I had a young man seriously ill in the hospital. He had recently lost his father, and it was very evident, not only to me but also to his mother and other members of the family, that the lad was transferring bodily most of the thoughts and feelings which had been grouped about the thought of his father, to me as his physician.
We recognize that a similar sort of transference takes place between the sincere spiritualistic believer and the medium. And there is an added element - that of belief in the supernatural. The sitter in the séance circle comes to regard the medium as one who - like his father or his minister - is to be ardently loved and highly respected; but, on top of all of this, the very idea of spiritism suggests to the human mind that the medium be regarded with the awe and reverence that belong to one who has been selected by Divine agency as a consecrated channel of communication between the living and the dead - the oracle of one world to another.
In childhood we look upon the parent, at least in our earlier years, as being well-nigh all-powerful and all-wise. We build up a group of feelings permeated with this reverential awe, this worshipful attitude of trust and confidence; and then, as we grow older, this associated group of ideas, feelings, and emotions becomes buried in the unconscious mind, whence, in later years, it may be recalled by this technique of "transference", and applied to a physician, minister, medium or other type of leader or teacher. Thus we can understand something of the psychology of that childlike credulity, that pathetic trustfulness, with which spiritualists come to regard the high priests of their cult and to follow them blindly through devious paths of deception and delusion.
Of course, the mediums do their full part to help the average mortal attain this extraordinary confidence. They claim to be above natural law - to do things which scientists cannot do. They allege that they can take the spiritual and materialize it so that it can be seen, heard, felt, and even photographed. All this, if it is believed even in the slightest degree, must serve, in the mind of the average individual, to exalt the medium high above ordinary mortals, and to facilitate the transference to the medium of that confidence and respect which we have had for our parents.
We should remember that our own minds are constantly seeing things which we do not see, hearing things which we do not hear; and that these memory-images and their accompanying emotions are filed away in the subconscious mind, whence we can later draw them forth and become guilty of remembering things that we do not remember. These spurious memory-images can also be conjured up at any time as a part of the spirit manifestation of medium -ship, or as a part of the symptoms and suffering of the neurotic ailer.
Mediums, at least those of the more genuine type, have extraordinarily free access to, and contact with, their subconscious centers. This becomes a source of great danger if it is carried too far, as in the case of the insanities, where the conscious contact is widened to the point of flooding the conscious mind with the incoherent images, sounds, feelings, and impulses of the subconscious reservoir, absolutely destroying the normal flow of the stream of consciousness.
Observation makes it certain that many of the messages perpetrated by mediums, and purporting to be of spirit origin, are nothing more nor less than the insidious flow into the medium's consciousness of messages from the unconscious memory centers of that great lower stratum of the medium's mind - the subconscious intellect. That this is really true will be shown by certain scientific observations more fully discussed in chapters to follow.
The psychic development of childhood, youth, and the earlier post-adolescent periods, is much the same in different individuals. We all have a great deal in common. Indeed, this is also true of subsequent periods of life; those of us who belong to the same race and are of the same sex, at least, have much in our psychology that is more or less in common. Now, if the medium succeeds in bringing forth from his or her unconscious memory-storehouse things which are really the residue and record of the experiences of former years, it is not unlikely that many of the sitters in the séance room will recognize ideas more or less identical with their own experience - much that seems to be familiar. Thus a great deal that can be recalled as having occurred in the lives of departed souls may be reproduced at the séance and receive recognition on the part of some of the spectators.
Many instances in our lives would fit the medium, the sitter, or the departed dead, or they would fit equally well if expressed by the alleged spirit of some one who departed this world a thousand years ago. The spiritualists tell us that in a given case there would not be one chance in a thousand that the medium could guess rightly; but this is not true. Granting mediums that degree of indefiniteness which they practice, that ambiguity which is characteristic of their statements, I am of the opinion that they have about an equal chance of making a passing guess in more than 50 per cent. of the matters with which they deal in the séance room.
"Projection" is the process of reversing the physiology of the conduction of sensory impulses from the body to the brain, there to form ideas, images, memories. In "projection", ideas and images are aroused in the mind, and from there travel outward and are recognized through the sense organs as having had origin outside the body. Ordinarily our visual images and our auditory sounds go with the feelings and emotions which they arouse and which accompany them, for registration and attention in the archives of memory; ordinarily these sights and sounds, as well as other sensory impressions, originate outside the body as the result of its contact with the external and material world.
Now, if we imagine a reversal of this process - that instead of these symbols of material things, these sights and sounds originating without the mind and external to it, and passing in as sensory impressions over the nervous system to the brain, to be there recognized by the mind and therein to be recorded and retained as memories - if we can imagine a reversal of this process so that we would have arising, down in the unconscious centers of the mind, various memory images and sounds which would travel outward over the nerves to the centers of hearing and vision, there to be recognized, there in reality to appear just as if they had come from without in the normal manner (and as they no doubt originally did arise before they were buried in the forgotten regions of the unconscious), then you will have a picture in your mind of the technique of projection.
Your imagination needs to go but one step farther: throw these sounds and images from the seeing and hearing centers of the mind, out of the body into the external world, and you have the foundation all laid for perfect hallucinations. In this way an hysterical individual, a spiritualistic medium, or an insane person, will be able to hear and see things that do not exist - that is, that do not exist in the external world - things which are not discoverable except to those people who, from whatever cause, are "seeing things" and "hearing things".
This sort of "projection" is, to a certain extent, normal to all of us, and is no doubt unconsciously practiced - to a limited degree - by most of us. Occasionally we run across an individual who has become a victim of "projection" in one particular phase of his life. He is thoroughly sane and rational in every other avenue of thought, but on some one thing he has become a monomaniac. He sees and hears things that are not real; his mind is not controlled by reason, and is not dominated by logic in this particular realm of thought, as in all others; when this is well marked and classic, we say that such a person has paranoia.
We are quite likely to "project" some of our own fears and feelings upon other people - it is notorious that we have a tendency to judge other people by ourselves. We judge many of our own acts by the way in which we think our friends and neighbors would judge us. Our standards of morality are largely those that are "projected" from the consciences of other people upon us. We are influenced by tribal standards; we are governed largely by fashion; we regulate our lives in accordance with convention; we are constantly interchanging ideas and feelings, emotions and reactions between ourselves and other people.
For instance, as children we were subject to much criticism. It is common to hear parents speak to the children of some act as being "naughty" or "not nice". Later on, as this child reaches maturity, the parent may not be there to criticize some trivial act, and yet the child will, as it were, subconsciously, as the memory of the act is put on record, place there alongside, and with it, the thought of parental disapproval. Therefore, in subsequently recalling this mental registry, the memory will attribute to the parent a specific disapproval of the act. This is projecting to the parent something of internal origin, and seeing the parent as having expressed a criticism which he did not express, but which the individual in memory recalls as expressed disapproval, and attributes to the parent in all his subsequent thinking.
Another illustration of projection: One of my associates expressed surprise that I did not know of a consultation which had been arranged with a certain patient, saying, "Why, Doctor, you told me Saturday that you would see this patient with me on Monday", and I replied, "But, Doctor, I did not make this promise and did not know that I was to see this patient until I reached the office a few moments ago and found the appointment on my book". What had happened? Simply this: On Saturday my colleague spoke to me regarding this patient, and in connection with the hurried mention of the matter undoubtedly inferred that I would go into a further discussion of the case subsequently; and, knowing that the patient would be leaving the city Monday evening, set down in his mind alongside the memory-registry of this episode the notation - "Dr. Sadler will see this patient with me on Monday". And, naturally, when the case came up for consideration on Monday, this parenthetical memory-registration was projected forward with the real material into consciousness, and, with the "reality feeling" duly attached, was accepted as a bona fide memory-registration. This was told to me as a fact - as a recalling of an actual statement which I had made. But I had made no such statement - in fact, the situation was such on Saturday that I could not possibly have consistently made such a promise. And it is in just this manner that serious misunderstandings and grave altercations arise between real friends and associates.
This sort of illusive projection is very often due to long-continued emotional suppression. Thus, a person may ascribe to others what is characteristic of his own unconscious self, and may condemn it in others all the more strongly because it is part of his nature that he thinks undesirable. This may partially account for the prevailing attitude in society toward the criminal.
Projection is also illustrated by the universal tendency to believe that the person we hate, hates us; that the person we love, loves us; that the person we have broken faith with, is unfaithful to us. Such beliefs are satisfying and often enable the individual to avoid self-reproach. Projection also accounts in part for the pleasure people take in gossip and scandal mongering. In this way they get a vicarious expression of their own desires. Many other things in every-day life may be regarded as indirect expressions of repressed trends or desires, or as symbolical representations of mental conflict. Some of these are: mannerisms, slips of the tongue, forgetting important engagements, some forms of wit, dreams, and many nervous symptoms.
It would seem that primitive people - savages - were wont to project their ideas and emotional reactions on a great variety of things, both animate and inanimate, and so these simple children of Nature came to endow rocks, clouds, and rivers, not to mention the sun, moon, and stars, with spirits and various supernatural attributes, as shown by the superstitious beliefs of ancient peoples, as well as by the highly organized mythology of the Greeks and Romans.
It was observed that animals breathed, and then the savage saw the mist arise from the waterfall, looking not unlike the condensation of his own breath on a frosty morning. How easy for the primitive mind to reason that the waterfall had a spirit as shown in the mist floating from the plunging waters! And so, later on, the trees were endowed with spirits, and the whole primitive psychology of a spirit world was built up, which still clings to the human mind and infests the human consciousness, predisposing the men and women even of a civilized generation to the sophistries of spiritualism.
The practical working of the technique of projection is well stated by Hart, who says:
"Projection" may be defined as a peculiar reaction of the mind to the presence of a repressed complex, in which the complex or its effect is regarded by the personality as belonging no longer to itself but as the production of some other real or imaginary individual. The meaning of this definition will be made clear by the consideration of some simple examples. People who possess some fault or deficiency of which they are ashamed, are notoriously intolerant of that same fault or deficiency in others. Thus the parvenu who is secretly conscious of his own social deficiencies talks much of the "bounders" and "outsiders" whom he observes around him, while the one thing which the muddle-headed man cannot tolerate is a lack of clear thinking in other people. In general, it may be said that whenever one encounters an intense prejudice one may with some probability suspect that the individual himself exhibits the fault in question or some closely similar fault. We may express the psychological processes seen in these cases as follows: the fault constitutes a complex which is repugnant to the personality as a whole, and its presence would therefore naturally lead to that particular form of conflict which is known as self-reproach. The personality avoids this conflict, however, by "projecting" the offending complex on to some other person, where it can be efficiently rebuked without that painful emotion which inevitably accompanies the recognition of deficiencies in ourselves. That is to say, the personality reacts to the repugnant complex by exaggeratedly reproaching the same facts in other people, thereby concealing the skeleton in its own cupboard. The more comfortable expedient of rebuking one's neighbor is substituted for the unpleasant experience of self-reproach. The biological function served by projection is, therefore, the same as in all other varieties of repression, the avoidance of conflict and the attainment of a superficial peace of mind.
So this psychological practice of projection, so well understood as pertaining to the every-day life of the average individual and so well known in the case of the neuroses and the insanities, is undoubtedly the explanation of much of that which comes to be real in the mind of the medium. The medium has mentally built up certain things, believes certain things, ardently wishes for certain things - we are talking now of honest medium s, those who are sincere tho self-deceived; and these things which are aroused or created in the reservoirs of the medium's unconscious mind are projected, not upon another individual, as in the case where we seek to blame another for our own faults, but out into imaginary spirit beings, and then are received back into the mind of the medium as having had origin in a world external to the body - the world of spooks.
Sometimes, when the appendix is telephoning distress messages, the stomach bell rings, and we get the message twisted, so that we think we have stomach trouble when the trouble is really in the appendix; and so sometimes we have mutterings and groanings in some corner of the subconscious mind, and these disturbances, in their effort to get out, likewise become entangled in transit, and when they reach our consciousness we think we are in receipt of spirit messages from ghostland.
We have noted that most people desire to live after death. In our desires and wishes, we are unconsciously engaged, all the while, in projecting ourselves into the future and invisible world as some sort of spirit entity. We are encouraged in this sort of thinking by the teachings of most widely accepted religions. Thus the present-day basis for belief in spirits goes back to a very remote time in the history of our racial ancestors.
Hallucinations do not always represent the vagaries of a maniac. They may be very orderly in origin, and their psychology can sometimes be accurately traced. No doubt many mediums suffer from a mild form of hallucination, more or less systematized and controlled. That many of the things which mediums think they see or hear are transitory hallucinations, more or less regulated by the technique of suggestion, is indicated by the following experience related by Prince:
I may mention one more example of conservation of a forgotten experience of every-day life, as it is an example of mode or reproduction which differs in certain important respects both from that of ordinary memory and that observed under the artificial methods thus far described. This mode is that of a visual or an auditory hallucination which may be an exact reproduction in vividness and detail of the original experience. It is a type of a certain class of memory phenomena. One of my subjects, while in a condition of considerable stress of mind owing to the recurrence of the anniversary of her wedding day, had a vision of her deceased husband who addressed to her a certain consoling message. It afterwards transpired that this message was an actual reproduction of the words which a friend, in the course of a conversation some months previously, had quoted to her as the words of her own husband just before his death. In the vision the words were put into the mouth of another person, the subject's husband, and were actually heard as an hallucination. Under the peculiar circumstances of their occurrence, however, these words awakened no sense of familiarity; nor did she recognize the source of the words until the automatic writing, which I later obtained, described the circumstances and details of the original episode. Then the original experience came back vividly to memory.
On the other hand, the "automatic writing" not only remembered the experience but recognized the connection between it and the hallucination. The truth of the writing was corroborated by the written testimony of the other party to the conversation.
Hallucinations are nothing more nor less than false sense impressions. The medium - like hysterical patients and sufferers from certain forms of insanity - sees and hears things which have no real existence: hears imaginary voices and sees fantastic spirit forms floating about the room. I remember very well that, in the days when I was a medical student, we were taught that patients who had delusions and hallucinations were definitely insane. We hardly take that view at the present day. We regard many such patients as victims of hysterical dissociation. In one case the hysterical patient hears a constant voice which speaks in reproach for the individual's sins and brings about a mental state of religious melancholy. In another, the patient hears a voice which represents itself as the spirit of a departed friend or relative, and he rapidly develops into a first-class spirit medium.
An interesting part of the study of hallucinations has to do with the consideration of the influence of drugs in producing this form of abnormal mental behavior. Alcohol seems to work along the line of canceling the inhibiting complexes, so that the individual is released from his sense of responsibility and from all tendency toward over-conscientiousness. Under the influence of alcohol he markedly regresses toward the moral level and sexual conduct of his primitive ancestors. Delirium tremens is a good illustration of hallucinations artificially produced, and the illusions of this state of intoxication are, while characteristic, nevertheless after the general order of the hallucinations of the insane.
In the case of chronic and periodic drinkers there seems to be developed an alcohol complex. There is some inexplicable charm in this drug, and it probably consists in the fact that it enables the individual for the time being to retreat from the real world to one of dreams and fantasy. Later on, as the result of habitual drinking, there may be established a chronic alcoholic drug habit.
No doubt much drinking is due also to the desire for relaxation from the stress and strain of modern civilization. It is in reality an effort on the part of the drinker to dodge the trials and tribulations of the moment, and to seek solace and transient relief in intoxication. As we so often hear, many a man drinks in an effort to "drown his troubles in alcohol".
Tobacco undoubtedly operates in the same direction in a minor way. It is no doubt possible to develop a smoking complex - a certain association of ideas which contributes to the belief or consciousness that tobacco is stimulating or quieting, and thus, with the appearance of the smoke, these associated reactions are experienced in consciousness. I am firmly convinced that many of the effects of tobacco are purely psychic. In other cases, smoking, especially on the part of young people, may be connected with an effort to exalt the ego, to assert individuality. It is a part of the phenomena of the power complex - merely one of the steps in the process of trying to grow up, trying to appear big. Tea and coffee may perhaps operate in a similar way along these lines, but certainly in a very minor capacity as compared with alcohol and tobacco.
No doubt the use of alcohol, tobacco, and even other drugs is sometimes only a manifestation of that innate tendency on the part of many individuals to rebel against authority, to be "against the government"; but in most of these cases where drugs are used there will be found a family history of neurotic tendency. Many of the ancestors of the drug addicts will be found not only to present a marked neurotic history but also to yield the fact that they were drug users.
A constellation of complexes such as the sex urge, power urge, etc., may become fixed at some point in its evolution through the years, and so, instead of progressing normally, feelings and emotions connected with this complex have an undue tendency to gravitate toward the point of fixation.
The Freudians speak of the love life as being developed after the following scheme:
Thus we have the cases of men who never marry, but stay home to take care of their mothers, and so on. Or we may have the cases of so-called acquired homosexuality. In this connection we should pause to differentiate between inherited (congenital) and acquired homosexual tendencies. In the case of the inherited form a man seems to be born with a male body but with a female brain, as far as reactions to sex impulses are concerned; and so, in the opposite sex, we may have an individual with a woman's body but with the brain reactions after the fashion of a male.
Now, acquired homosexuality is entirely different, and is quite readily curable. I recently had a case of a young man who, while he seemed to be a splendid specimen of manhood physically, was more or less effeminate in his tastes; but the striking feature of his psychology was that he possessed an undue admiration for his own sex. An analysis proved that it all came about through an association of ideas in his early childhood, as the result of a habit he formed of riding about, when a little chap, on the foot of his father, who was a robust man, six feet in height. This little fellow was subject to considerable sexual irritation from not having been circumcised, and he early experienced certain sex emotions in connection with this habit of riding about astride his father's foot, and in this way he came to associate sex feelings and the sex urge with his own sex; later he transferred this association from his father to others, more particularly to acrobats and athletes. He was twenty-two years of age when he undertook the subjugation of this unfortunate complex, and it required between two and three years really to bring about a state of mind that enabled him to acquire a normal attitude toward the sexes.
As an illustration of the fixation of the evolving sex urge, the Freudians have made a great deal out of the OEdipus and Electra complexes - more, I think, than is warranted. The OEdipus complex, as will be recalled, has to do with the son falling in love with his own mother and seeking to get his father out of the way so he can have unopposed sex relations with his mother. The Electra complex is based upon another legend in which the daughter seeks to dispose of the mother in order to have the undivided attention and devotion of the father. As I say, I think these ideas are greatly overworked, but in a mild manner this is true in all families. The daughter naturally has a peculiar attraction for the father and the son for the mother. Mothers take special interest in their sons and fathers exercise particular care over their daughters. There is a sex element, subconsciously, even in the ordinary family life, as there is in school life, especially in the adolescent years when youths are in attendance at coeducational schools and colleges.
The fixation of the affection at some point early in childhood, no doubt serves partly to explain the development of the cruel tendencies so often seen in children. Who has not seen a child one moment affectionately fondle a pet and the next moment actually torture it? The initiation ceremonies among civilized as well as savage people into the various societies and lodges are no doubt mild reversions to this form of cruelty.
It is highly probable that the popular interest in the gruesome details of murders, seductions, prize fights, further indicates that there is something of a "hang-over" in this feeling of pleasure at the sight of actual suffering even among our more highly civilized races.
It is also likely that certain sadistic tendencies should be classified in this group - those frequently-discovered proclivities that cause suffering in connection with the manifestation of love. In a minor manner, perhaps, we could similarly class the tendency to tease inordinately those we love.
In connection with this doctrine of fixation of the emotions, we should also remember its corollary, the displacement hypothesis. To displace emotion is to shift its center of gravity from the originally significant to some originally insignificant portion of the same complex. I presume our behavioristic psychologists would call this a reconditioning reaction, and in this connection it must be remembered that the Freudian school of psychology always envisions a complex as a thing dynamic, as a sort of psychic individuality in some way connected with one of the fundamental human drives. Displacement is mentioned in this connection because in modern literature it is sometimes used in a very confusing manner, more or less synonymously with transference.
Condensation is the Freudian term that refers to the putting of several suppressed ideas into one group, and is illustrated in those cases where some apparently trifling feeling becomes definitely attached to one of the great emotional drives and therefore comes to play an inconsistently conspicuous part in the individual's psychic life.
It may be well in this connection to make clear the terms introversion and extraversion. In introversion we try to flee away from reality by withdrawing within our consciousness. In extraversion we try to get away from reality by taking up more intensively some other form of reality-activity.
In Freud's definition of transference, attention should be called to the fact that he believes that patients, in the process of psychoanalysis, first transfer their troubles and relay their affections to the doctor. This is theoretically only a transient process in the cure, and the psychoanalyst is supposed to manipulate matters so that eventually these feelings shall be properly transferred to their legitimate destinies.
Likewise the more strictly Freudian definition of projection has to do with the patient's disowning something which has originated in his mind and attributing it to some external source. A typical illustration, often met with, is the tendency of certain hysterical women who accuse innocent men of misconduct. The counterpart of projection is called introjection, and is the phenomenon we see in paranoia, where a patient ascribes personal meaning to every little thing that happens in his environment.