A Neglected Complex And Its Relation To Freudian Psychology

W R Bousfield, Bousfield, W R

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136338847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Atención sanitaria

First Published in 1999. This is Volume VII of a twenty-eight volume library of psychology on Psychoanalysis. This book is an essay on a neglected complex and its relation to Freudian Psychology. Thanks to Freud we know that many of our most important mental activities proceed entirely outside our consciousness in the hidden caverns of the mind that are power-houses of motivation. This essay looks at the hypothesis that all psychic phenomena are based on illusion and is less scientific than the hypothesis of the dual constitution of man.

A Neglected Complex

Chapter I

Introduction

THE work of Freud in unravelling the mysteries of the unconscious mind is a psychological achievement of the highest import. Thanks to him we know that many of our most important mental activities proceed entirely outside our consciousness in the hidden caverns of the mind. These dark caves of the unconscious are revealed to us not merely as store-houses but as power-houses, where the springs of action are hidden from ourselves. We have learned that a large part of our active life is motivated from this unconscious power-house.

Day by day in life there occur in our consciousness conflicts between duty and inclination, between the thoughts of pleasure and of the consequences which may ensue, in fact any kind of pull between opposing motives for and against any given action. All these conflicts leave their hidden traces in the unconscious mind and there become involved in a mental mechanism on which Freud has thrown the searchlight of analysis. All this and more is of great value and capable of being used in ways which Freud has not explored.

Were it not for the high value of the structure of knowledge which Freud has built, it would not be worth while to seek for and examine the defects in the building. The valuable part of Freud’s discoveries is independent of and separable from the rest. The ore which he has worked is rich, but the baser metal must be eliminated if the fine gold is to be utilized.

It may be said at once that the chief defects of Freud’s psychology arise from a complex of which he is unconscious and which leads him to interpret all psychic phenomena in terms of materialism. The notions of God, of human survival and of free-will are for him myths or illusions. Mind is a function of the material brain and perishes with it. These things he holds not merely as philosophic speculations, but he has attempted to prove them by a specious psychological camouflage which we shall examine in due course. The age-long distinction between the σῶμα which perishes and the ψυχή which survives, going back far beyond the Greeks to the most primitive races, and still for mankind at large a vital belief, is for him non-existent. The distinction is of importance not only for a sound psychology but also for psycho-therapy. A psychology which fails in its appreciation of the highest qualities of the psyche, and recognizes only those attributes which spring from the constitution of the soma, should rather be called somatology than psychology. Thus, for instance, love in its highest form—the love which “seeketh not its own” and whose end is giving rather than getting—is an attribute of the psyche and not of the soma. But, according to Freud, it is a sort of sublimation or diversion of sexual impulses. So also is the psychic energy which has led the pioneers of the human race to the achievement of great and noble ends in the service of mankind. This love and this energy are psychological facts which are not to be degraded from their true place by analogies drawn from analytical researches made upon abnormal patients who are the very last persons we should take as representatives of human nature at its best.

But this confusion of the psyche and the soma is as destructive for psycho-therapy as it is for pure psychological science. With an engineer or even a surgeon materialism would not necessarily affect his professional work. But in the realm of psycho-therapy it cannot but make much difference, whether the physician works on the hypothesis that the pysche has or has not a real existence independent of the body. If the psyche survives then the character of the surviving personality is of the highest importance; for character, in its broad sense, including the capacities and the springs which regulate thought and action, will be the one and only thing which the psyche carries over into the next life, and is therefore the thing that is of permanent value. If the psyche does not survive then health and happiness for the remaining years of the patient’s life are all that the physician need envisage. What matter if these can be gained at the expense of character! No one would suggest that the materialist physician would unnecessarily sacrifice character, but if it came to the question of saving the mother or the child, he would unhesitatingly sacrifice the child—character. That Freud’s materialism does enter into his therapy no one who reads his lectures can deny. But it is possible to get all the therapeutic advantage of Freud’s discoveries without incurring the consequences of his materialism. To help to separate the chaff from the wheat is the main object of these criticisms. It is for the practitioner to utilize the wheat. Our chief object is to show that some of the chaff may be eliminated, and that without the chaff Freud’s discoveries may lead to greater and more useful results.

It is strange that Freud’s psychology should lead him to materialism, for it contains principles which should have warned him against this development. It will be shown that he suffers from a materialistic complex which disables him from useful thought in the realm of speculative philosophy. This complex is generated and gives rise to “compulsion ideas” in the precise way which he has expounded in reference to those complexes which are the subject of his discoveries. This neglected complex is entirely unknown to him, and, on the principles which we owe to his analytic genius, it cannot be discovered by self-analysis, nor by the analysis of his strict followers who are afflicted with the same complex. He suffers from it in common with some physical scientists who, unknown to themselves, also display the symptoms which arise from the materialistic complex. The unfortunate thing about it is that, not only is the force and operation of this complex entirely unknown to the sufferers, but that there is no real chance of bringing it to light so that they may become conscious of it. They suffer from it and in the absence of some unlikely mental upheaval they must continue to suffer from it. These criticisms will therefore be of no use to them, but it is hoped that they may be useful to those in whom the complex is not fully developed. It is possible that analysis by a therapist who does not suffer from the complex might bring it into consciousness, but the resistances would probably be too great to make the analysis useful, and indeed the materialistic complex, when fully developed, would prevent the patient from submitting himself to such analysis. But for those who are not yet caught in its meshes these criticisms will be useful.

It should be observed that the matters which are involved in the materialistic complex are those matters of belief and opinion in which Freud and his followers, and indeed all psychologists, tell us that a complex is of special potency. Matters of opinion and belief, where no absolute proof is available, are determined by one’s mental constellation. Logic is powerless. The content of the unconscious mind determines the opinion.

The questions involved in the doctrines of materialism are incapable of logical proof one way or another, and the scientist who goes out of his way, that is the way of pure science, to preach materialism, is dogmatising about matters of opinion and belief in which his conclusions are determined not by scientific facts but by the content of his unconscious mind, of which in such matters the materialistic complex is the most potent, and of which he is necessarily ignorant. Freud professes to have arrived at his materialism by psychological deductions, but these deductions, being in the realm of opinion, are not the less governed by his materialistic complex because he is a psychologist. When he says¹:—

“As a matter of fact, I believe that a large part of the mythological conception of the world which reaches far into the most modern religions is nothing but psychology projected into the outer world.”

he is expressing a mere opinion which, in accordance with the principles of his psychology, is solely the result of his mental constellation, and has no basis in fact or in logic. And when referring to the analogy of paranoia he continues:

“We venture to explain in this way the myths of paradise and the fall of man, of God, of good and evil, of immortality and the like.”

it is his materialistic complex, all unknown to himself, which dictates this analogy and the sweeping and destructive deductions which he bases upon it. And this materialism and its consequences he carries into his psycho-therapy.

We propose to deal somewhat fully with the psychological camouflage by which Freud attempts to support his materialism. Our discussion of the materialistic complex will also throw light on the materialism of some physical scientists. Their attitude becomes less and less excusable as science advances.

Physiology has furnished many materialists who have concluded that mind is a mere function of brain. But the recent work of Dr Head² in relation to injuries of the brain which result in aphasia, indicates the reverse conclusion, viz., that the brain is a mere organ of the mind, and that though the brain is injured, the mind may remain intact. He has described cases of aphasia in which, whilst the brain is so injured that it is incapable of initiating spoken words for ideas in the mind, so that some other symbol has to be used for conveying the ideas, yet the general intelligence is unaffected. Thus an aphasic may be able to play chess although he cannot name the pieces on the board. The organ of the mind is injured, but the mind itself is uninjured. Thus we have noteworthy scientific evidence that although the mind is dependent on the brain as its organ for operating on matter, yet the mind itself has existence apart from the material brain, since injuries to the brain do not injure the mind of which the brain is the organ.

Moreover until recent years science rarely looked beyond material phenomena. But matter itself is now shown to be an ethereal phenomenon. We know that the material universe (including our own bodies) is built up of protons and electrons, bathed in and doubtless elaborated from the all-pervading ether. The very simplicity of the basis of the material universe is fatal to the idea that the “fortuitous concourse”of electrons and protons has given birth to all things, including man and his mind.

The mystery of the ether has been so far penetrated that we can conceive of a substance more ethereal than gross matter also elaborated from the ether which, though (like the ether itself), it cannot be detected by our materially-evolved senses, yet may serve as the substratum or vehicle of mind. The immaterial ether has become a concept necessary to our understanding of various phenomena of matter. An ethereal substance which may serve as the vehicle of mind has also become a concept necessary to our comprehension of psychical phenomena.

We know furthermore that the molecules of which our bodies are composed are aggregations of atoms in which the electrons and protons are spaced so widely apart that the whole body is but an open network in which the constituent protons and electrons occupy but a small fraction of the space which the body appears to occupy. On the hypothesis that the psyche is separated from the soma at death, there is ample room for a psyche interpenetrating the soma composed of ethereal constituents which are no more detectable by our senses than is the ether itself. To postulate the ether in order to account for physical phenomena and to refuse to postulate the ether to account for psychic phenomena is unscientific, and it may be said without fear of contradiction that science reveals nothing which is inconsistent with the separate existence of the psyche and furnishes no grounds for scientific materialism. Indeed the progress of physical science has brought us to a point where it actually suggests that the hypothesis of an ethereal psyche is the only scientific way of accounting for the sporadic yet continually recurring outcrop of psychic phenomena the references to which run all through the course of human history. The hypothesis that all such phenomena are based on illusion is less scientific than the hypothesis of the clual constitution of man—psyche as well as soma, temporarily united, but finally separable—which gives a good account of them.

Further reference will be made to this matter in considering Freud’s “Totem and Taboo,” in which he endeavours to support his materialistic philosophy by a review of primitive customs and observances on the basis of analogies derived from the mentality of neurotics as disclosed by psycho-analysis. Anyone who is predisposed to materialism by the irksomeness of moral restrictions, is apt to seize upon the doctrines of the professors of materialism, authoritatively propounded by them in the guise of scientific deductions, as affording an easy (but fatal) solution of the moral conflict. For this reason, too, it is important to show that the psychology of Freud and his pupils furnishes no real basis for materialism, which is in fact an illusion which results from a complex of which they are unaware and of which their own psychology rightly applied, furnishes a clear explanation. All that is valuable in Freud’s psychology can be utilised without the baneful effects which the materialistic hypothesis brings in its train.

¹ Psycho-pathology of Everyday Life p. 309. T. Fislier Unwin Ltd.

² Speech and Cerebral Localization, by Henry Head: Brain, vol. xlvi., Part IV. 1923 (Macmillan & Co. Ltd.).

Chapter II

Some Features of Freud’s Psychology

ACCORDING to Freud’s theory the foundation of a neurosis is to be sought in the unconscious mind.¹ Symptoms are not produced by conscious processes. Every time we meet with a symptom we may conclude that definite unconscious activities which contain the meaning of the symptom are present in the patient’s mind.

A symptom shows that some mental process has not been carried through to an end in a normal manner so that it could become conscious. The symptom is a substitute for that which has been repressed. Repression is the essential preliminary condition for the development of symptoms.²

To illustrate the relation between the conscious and the unconscious mind Freud³ compares the unconscious system “to a large ante-room in which the various mental excitations are crowding one upon another like individual beings. Adjoining this is a second smaller apartment, a sort of reception room, in which, consciousness resides. But on the threshold of the two there stands a personage with the office of doorkeeper, who examines the various mental excitations, censo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Chapter I. Introduction
• Chapter II. Some Features of Freud’s Psychology
• Chapter III. The Materialistic Complex
• Chapter IV. Free-Will and Determinism
• Chapter V. Totem and Taboo
• Chapter VI. Love, ’Aγáπη Amor
• Chapter VII. Energy
• Chapter VIII. Will Power
• Chapter IX. The Will as a Determinant
• Chapter X. Suggestion
• Chapter XI. Conclusions