The Growth of Mind

Neville Symington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138327818
• eBook ISBN: 9780429829604
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Growth of Mind is the product of a series of ten lectures by Neville Symington. It offers an understanding of the mind and its capacity to discover truth, establishing this as the foundation stone for our judgment and critique of the human world. Although the book's field of exploration lies in psychological processes met in the consulting-room, grounded in the general principles of psycho-analysis, the book's mode of enquiry is to elucidate a knowledge of individual people.

Exploring the mind's active role in understanding, the book suggests that the act of understanding has a transformative function, and that to be a person is to be a part of a community. It suggests that the super-ego is a sign of some undeveloped function within the personality. If the ego and all its functions are fully evolved, then the super-ego will only be minimally present in the personality. Symington posits that the unconscious represents an agglomerative mass in an undifferentiated and indistinguishable state, rather than a realm of distinguishable thoughts or feelings that are not currently present to consciousness. The book attempts to understand better what this unconscious state is like and how we can think about it, underpinned by the belief that the better we understand it, the more its structure changes.

The Growth of Mind is aimed at professionals and researchers who have a basic understanding of the mind and its mode of operating. It will help readers become aware of this knowledge, strengthening it in the process and allowing it to become a foundational source of inspiration.

Chapter 1

The core of the personality

The core of the personality is a creator. This is a simple statement but it goes counter to the way this core is presented both in psycho-analytic discourse and within the social sciences more generally. This core of the personality is frequently referred to as a bunch of instinctual drives with the ego or self ‘managing’ them. I give this quote from Arnold Toynbee because he is warning against the scientific attitude that turns living things into inanimate objects. Consider this statement of Freud:

the ego is especially under the influence of perception, and that, speaking broadly, perceptions may be said to have the same significance for the ego as instincts have for the id. At the same time the ego is subject to the influence of the instincts, too, like the id, of which it is, as we know, only a specially modified part.¹

The ego, in this formulation is slave-like to sensations coming from without and from the instincts that come from within. Instincts are central in Freud’s conception of the personality and they, these instincts, are in the service of survival. The struggle for survival, according to this view, is the prime motivating principle in human beings. There is no notion here of some other motive that might compete against this push for survival. It is often thought that rigid belief systems are the preserve of religion but this is wrong. Science is riddled with belief systems and because it is widely believed that this is not so it makes it more difficult to see these systems and the outline that circumscribes them. This notion that Science is free of delusional belief systems is one of the greatest fallacies that courses through scientific discourse like a raging epidemic.

Drives, according to Freud’s metapsychology and nearly all thinkers within the Social Sciences, are the foundation of the personality but this is because there is a failure to conceptualize what life is; what defines life. G.K. Chesterton said that it is only the obvious things that are never seen.² It is also this tendency to categorize something under a particular system of thinking that distorts what is there. When Science, with its truly enormous advances in the last hundred years, became so dominant that the principles governing the behaviour of matter became applied to everything in the universe including that which was not material. What differentiates something living from something that is inanimate is that in the latter any movement or action that occurs is due to the impact upon it from an outer agent whereas in a living being there is a source of action which comes entirely from within. The percentage of activity that comes from this interior source and what comes from outer impact varies. What comes from within the organism may only be one percent of the total movement or much greater than one percent but what makes it a living being is that at least some of the active movement finds its source entirely within the organism. Inanimate matter has no such source of action from within.

One such belief is that the struggle for survival is what primarily motivates human beings. A characteristic of any belief system is that although there is evidence of instances that belie that system yet these are not seen. A belief always blinds the believer to truths which are inconsistent with the belief. Beliefs are always over simplistic; there is a refusal in them to embrace the complexity of life and its contradictions. In the introduction I quoted Isaiah Berlin who emphasized this.³ A person who commits suicide is not motivated for his or her survival. Also people giving their lives for an ideological belief and patriotism for instance, especially in the case of a war, is a motive that governs myriads of people rather than the thrust for survival. It is also so that people with a great passion for music, for poetry, for ornithology often place these affections of the heart more highly than the conservation of their life. Pasteur, for instance, dedicated his life to the investigation and study of bacteria. Of course he needed to be alive; he had to eat and drink and have shelter. This was necessary just as gravity is necessary to prevent me floating off into the air. Gravity and the thrust for survival are the planetary conditions for the different modes of existence upon Planet Earth. They are not the guide posts for the individual’s personal direction in life. Pasteur created his vocational direction.

I stress this survival motive because it is the underlying assumption in nearly all thinking within the Social Sciences and thus the instincts are thought to be the ground rocks within the personality. Yet we know that we would not see the world as it is if there had been no Buddha, no Socrates, no Aristotle, no Moses, no Jesus, no Augustine, no Muhammad, no Moses Maimonides, no Aquinas, no Leonardo de Vinci, no Descartes, no Spinoza, no Tolstoy and so on. Yet with what was it that these individuals endowed our world? Something entirely unbidden moved inside of each of these human beings; something that came entirely from within them. They were not pressured in any way to go in a direction which they had been ordered to follow. An inner something rose up inside of them that was stimulated from nowhere. It came entirely from within them and it was not governed by the need to survive. The passion to give an explanation, the idea that this has caused that, is that the mind cannot face the shocking truth that something has arisen entirely from within with no external stimulus to explain it. Just as God had to be produced to explain the world so also ‘explanation’ is produced to hide from us that scandal of the mind: that something has no source outside of itself.

Humans are animals and, in our animality, there is a thrust for survival. This survival-push is a characteristic of all objects in the universe: it is a something that demands the integrity of the object. A stone of a particular size and shape has a principle of conservation within it. When a stone-maker takes an axe and hacks a huge granite rock into small cubic shapes to make his pavé road he is going counter to the original rock’s quiddity of substance. It is the same with an organism. It has in it a principle of conservation but in the case of an organism it requires particular elements to be ingested from outside its circumference to sustain it. This need for elements from outside to be taken within, in order to sustain it, is what differentiates a living organism from entities that are inanimate. There are two different modes of taking in. One is the minute to minute taking in of oxygen and the expulsion of carbon dioxide and the other is the taking in of food and water, some of which is expelled in faeces and urine. All living things, except human beings, are ruled by this principle of conservation. In a human being there is a central principle that is able to and does, in certain circumstances, defy this principle. What I am referring to here is that a human being can choose to kill him- or herself, can choose to put his or her passion for art as a guiding principle rather than be governed by the principle of conservation, can decide to do something for the sake of another instead of being governed by the principle of conservation or can decide, as the monk, to renounce his sexual desires in favour of a dedication to God. Someone may decide to go to war and put his or her life at risk. It is this capacity of the human being to release him- or herself from the generalized instinct governing his or her animality that differentiates him or her from the lower animals. The Russian thinker, Vladimir Soloviev, characterized that which was specifically human according to three principles: shame, pity and reverence. What lies behind shame is a presence within the personality of an entity that is able to observe the activity of the personality. The product of this inner entity is awareness or consciousness. What is this entity, this presence, that produces this awareness? There is in human beings, in their animality, this thrust for survival but also a creator that is free of this struggle for survival and, not only free, but capable of a strength that is greater than the survival struggle. The philosopher, John Macmurray, a much underappreciated recent thinker, emphasizes that there are occasions when someone will over-ride the impulse for survival and be prepared even to sacrifice his or her life. I quoted Macmurray in the introduction but will, for the sake of emphasis, quote it again:

Freedom is, I am assured, the pearl of great price for which, if we are wise, we shall be prepared to sell all our possessions, to buy it. The ancient and widespread belief that the supreme good of human life is happiness – for all its persuasiveness – is false. Freedom has a higher value than happiness; and this is what we recognize when we honour those who have been ready to sacrifice happiness, and even life itself, for freedom’s sake.⁴

What Macmurray implies is that a person may and sometimes does sacrifice his or her very life for the sake of freedom. It means that freedom has a value that transcends the thrust for survival; and freedom is possible because the core of the personality is a creator. If the ego is not a creator there is no freedom. Psycho-analysis is rooted in the belief that the struggle for survival is the dominant motivational principle and the servants of this are the instincts or the drives. That the struggle for survival is a motivational principle is definitely so but that it is the prime and only purpose in people’s lives is false.

There is a game that used to be played when I was a child. I, or another child, was blindfolded and then led up to a table upon which were twenty different objects. I was told to feel each of the objects and then say what they were. A typical array of objects chosen might be: a potato, a screwdriver, a cigarette lighter, an orange, a crucifix, a diary, a camera, a paint brush, a potato peeler, a cork, an ashtray, a puzzle-box, a Yale key, the model of a ship, an acorn, a kitchen weighing machine, a film for a camera, a hardboiled egg and a thimble. It might be thought that it would be easy for the blindfolded person to guess correctly what these different objects were when they could be felt by touch but not seen. In fact it was difficult and many incorrect guesses occurred which would always evoke laughter. What is happening here? I take it that I know through vision those objects just mentioned. How do I know that what I see there is a hardboiled egg? In fact sight alone will not tell me this. If, however, I see a salad being served up for lunch and next to it are some eggs I assume that they are hard boiled and not raw and uncooked. I assume it from the context. If however I knew that this person serving up the lunch is a well-known practical joker I might be more cautious and not make this assumption. What I am doing when using my imagination in this game is to categorize each object. Here is a single object that I am feeling by touch with my hands and I am being asked to put it into the right folder in the filing cabinet. Screwdrivers, cigarette lighters, oranges, crucifixes and diaries are all generalities. Feeling by touch is of an individual object. Vision is, together with hearing, the most generalized of the senses. Vision merges into a concept. So I am being asked in this game to place what is individual into a generalized category. It might be thought that this is easy but in fact a difficult transformation is occurring. I am being asked to put an individual object of a particular shape and size that I can feel with my fingers into a class that includes this single object that I am feeling into an unfelt category. If I feel this oval object and then proclaim that it is an egg I am moving it out of its individual existence that I have been feeling into a concept that is constructed not by the imagination but by an act of intellect. This requires a further elaboration of the mind. Central to this book is the statement that the core of the mind is a creator but just as in the external world there are different products issuing from this creator like paintings, sculpture, poetry and music so also this creator is able to fashion mental realities that are detached from the senses, or at least detached from the tactile senses. As already stated vision is the sense that is furthest removed from the tactile. If I see a creature walking across the lawn and ask what it is I am told that it is a tortoise. ‘Oh I see’ I reply. I had already seen the animal visually so when I say ‘Oh I see’ I am using a visual analogy for a mental concept that I have created. So imagination here is servant to conceptual demand. This is one mode in which imagination functions but it is the lowest. It is here servant to reasoning. The base of reasoning is the intellect placing visual objects into generalized categories and imagination is being used to assist in the enterprise.

Imagination is the creator’s instrument so it can be used in the service of categorizing just explained but it can also be used to give communication to itself. I give this quote from Collingwood:

Some people have thought that a poet who wishes to express a great variety of subtly differentiated emotions might be hampered by the lack of a vocabulary rich in words referring to the distinctions between them; and that psychology by working out such a vocabulary, might render a valuable service to poetry. This is the opposite of the truth. The poet needs no such words at all; the existence or non-existence of a scientific terminology describing the emotions he wishes to express is to him a matter of perfect indifference. If such a terminology, where it exists, is allowed to affect his own use of language, it affects it for the worse.

The reason why description, so far from helping expression, actually damages it, is that description generalizes. To describe a thing is to call it a thing of such and such a kind; to bring it under a conception, to classify it. Expression, on the contrary, individualizes. The anger which I feel here and now, with a certain person, for a certain cause, is no doubt an instance of anger, and in describing it as anger one is telling the truth about it; but it is much more than mere anger: it is a peculiar anger, not quite like any anger that I ever felt before, and probably not quite like any anger I shall ever feel again. To become fully conscious of it means becoming conscious of it not merely as an instance of anger, but as this quite peculiar anger. Expressing it, we saw, has something to do with becoming conscious of it; therefore, if being fully conscious of it means being conscious of all its peculiarities, fully expressing it means expressing all its peculiarities. The poet, therefore, in proportion as he understands his business, gets as far away as possible from merely labelling his emotions as instances of this or that general kind, and takes enormous pains to individualize them by expressing them in terms which reveal their difference from any other emotion of the same sort.⁵

A good example of this can be seen by studying Shelley’s poem The Skylark. The lark flies higher and higher and the unpoetical generalizer says ‘until the bird is out of sight’ but let us listen to the poet. He says

The pale purple even

Melts around thy flight.

The sheer beauty of Shelley’s image is breathtaking. As Collingwood says no constructor of verbiage, psychological or social, could offer Shelley a helping hand; in fact he would be throwing a hand grenade into the poet’s assembly of fancy. The creator assigns here to imagination its most precious gem: the making of beauty.

* * *

I have emphasized that actions that flow from the core of the mind, the creative centre, expand and deepen the mind but there is an implication here th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: on overview
• 1 The core of the personality
• 2 The unformed ego
• 3 Foundation for growth of mind
• 4 Consequences of mother’s contemplation
• 5 Hypnotic power
• 6 Unfocussed stare
• 7 The knowledge of being
• 8 Creative intercourse between analyst and patient, between mother and child, between teacher and student
• 9 What is it that is unconscious?
• Index