The Neurosis Of Man

An Introduction to a Science of Human Behaviour

Trigant Burrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136319815
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Written in 1949, this study is an effort to apply the methods of science to a study of the basic causes of human conflict. Using a research from over thirty years and addressed to the layman as well as the scientist it reports findings and formulations that emerged from investigations into man's inter-rational behaviour. Describing the inception and development of objective methods for evaluating and controlling human conflict. This study is based on the history of the author's and Clarence Shield's association with the The Lifwynn Foundation and work on the history of phylobiology. It discusses the investigations around: what man is overtly is not what man is basically; that the externals of man are not man and exploring human relations as psychosocial and not biological. Looking at the issue basic to human motivation and behaviour, the problem of self, the investigation comes to the conclusion that phylobiology is the application of scientific method to the field of human relations and this report presents an account of the enquiry into disorders of human behaviour.

PART I INTERRELATIONAL MAN or THE SYMPTOMATOLOGY OF HUMAN BEHAVIOUR

DOI: 10.4324/9781315009759-1

A Phyloanalysis

The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart …

Psalm LV, verse 21.

History does not prove the inevitability of war, but it does prove that customs and institutions which organize native powers into certain patterns in politics and economics will also generate the war-pattern.

John Dewey.

CHAPTER 1 MEDICINE TO THE RESCUE!

DOI: 10.4324/9781315009759-2

Introduction

In writing this essay in regard to the springs of human behaviour I cannot pretend to express the conventional personal view—either my own or that of anyone else. The material with which these pages deal has not been gathered from the usual sources of individual opinion or belief. In the realm of human behaviour, unfortunately everyone, by dint of his pre-established beliefs, already knows all there is to know about his own behaviour and everybody else’s. The present thesis, however, has been the outcome of a study of the motives of behaviour in which the criteria of evaluation, as tentatively adopted by a small group of investigators, rested upon a wholly altered basis.¹

¹ Burrow, Trigant, “ The Group Method of Analysis ”, The Psychoanalytic Review, 1927, Vol. XIV, pp. 268–80.

——, “ The Basis of Group Analysis ”, The British Journal of Medical Psychology, 1928, Vol. VIII, pp. 198–206.

——, “ So-called ‘ Normal ’ Social Relationships Expressed in the Individual and the Group, and their Bearing on the Problem of Neurotic Disharmonies ”, The American Journal of Psychiatry, 1930, Vol. X, pp. 101–16.

Syz, Hans, “ Remarks on Group Analysis ”, The American Journal of Psychiatry, 1928, Vol. VIII, pp. 141–8.

Thought is synonymous with communication or speech. Such phrases as “ they say ”, “ people tell me ”, “ rumour has it ” ; or “ listen to me ”, “ get this ”, “ have you heard ? ”, are repeated on every hand and attest our interest in communication through thought. But these current modes of address betoken only a superficial, symbolic form of interchange. They bespeak a contact that is implemented merely by means of words. These vocal signs or gestures afford the individuals of the species only a pseudo-articulation. In this book we shall attempt to reach, or rather recover, a level of understanding and communication that is more fundamental. We shall try to attain a deeper level of contact and articulation. We shall be interested not so much in man’s acquired forms of verbal thought and interchange as in an internal communication among people based upon the continuity that primarily knits them into a common and unitary race or species. In our researches we were not concerned with what the intellectualized and sophisticated individual thinks about the genus man but with what the genus man thinks about the intellectualized and sophisticated individual. It was the avowed purpose of our investigations to discover and, if possible, restore those biological principles of behaviour that are intrinsic to us and that insure man’s basic relation to the external universe and to his kind. Abrogating personal opinions and beliefs, we regarded only internal feelings and reactions directly observable within and by the observers themselves as data pertinent to our inquiry. I mention this circumstance at the outset not only in the interest of reportorial accuracy but also because the recognition of it will be of help to the reader as the course of this thesis unfolds.

In his list of the world’s one hundred worst books Oscar Wilde assigned a prominent place to “ all books which attempt to prove anything I find myself heartily in sympathy with this facetious dictum of Wilde’s. Only, as a student of behaviour I wish he might have said, all books or all preoccupations of whatsoever sort that attempt to prove anything to other people. It is this very prevalent urge to prove things to other people, as it is people’s urge to have others prove things to them, that too often accounts for their attitude of abject complacence towards the lecturer or writer on human behaviour who places himself opposite a defenceless audience and, assuming the rôle of parent, undertakes to say what he feels especially appointed to tell them about their own adaptation. This tendency to bring people to one’s own way of thinking by telling them how they should think and feel and do is characteristic of our interrelational ideologies generally. Telling other people what one presumes to believe they ought to know is the very keelson of our religious, political, educational and psychiatric systems.

This situation is one which should possess a very special interest for students of behaviour. But as yet, unfortunately, it possesses for them precisely no interest whatsoever. The reason is that this arbitrary disposition of an individual to exercise projective control over others, coupled with a reciprocal subservience on the part of his listeners, is but one of many behaviour-reactions that owe their explanation to the reflex operation of a quite generally unrecognized social neurosis.¹

¹ Burrow, Trigant, The Social Basis of Consciousness—A Study in Organic Psychology, The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method, New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc. ; London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1927, pp. xviii -f 256.

——, “ Our Mass Neurosis ”, The Psychological Bulletin, 1926, Vol. 23, pp. 305–12.

——, “ Neurosis and War : A Problem in Human Behaviour ”, The Journal of Psychology, 1941, Vol. 12, pp. 235–49.

By virtue of this authoritarian give-and-take that now characterizes man’s interrelational level of behaviour, there is to-day early imbued in him—in us all—a dichotomous attitude of servile dependence upon other people on the one hand, and of vindictive repudiation of them on the other. The social fabric of human relations is now shot through with this dualistic factor of personal attraction and repulsion. This bipolar reaction is universal. Our mental world is divided between those towards whom we feel kindly disposed, and those towards whom we feel unkindly disposed. People with whom we agree, or who agree with us, are those for whom we feel affection, while people with whom we do not agree, or who do not agree with us, are those with whom we do not share our affections. So that some people please us and others displease us. This one finds certain persons interesting, while another finds these same persons an utter bore. Again, the person towards whom one is friendly to-day, one is unfriendly towards to-morrow ; and the person who was on his black list yesterday is to-day restored to favour once more. It would appear, then, that our interpersonal feelings are quite undependable. The choices to which our affections and disaffections incline us would seem everywhere helter-skelter and unpredictable. Dependent as they are upon the arbitrary and variable interpretation of each individual, there would appear to be no stable or dependable criterion within the domain of human relations.

Because of this early defect in human behaviour, people are at all times psychologically disposed to enact either the rôle of the parent or that of the child. They approve and are approved of ; they disapprove and are disapproved of. In the field of behaviour one alternately persuades or is persuaded ; he enjoins or he obeys ; he counsels or invites counsel. We shall find that society is composed exclusively of these two complemental phases of reaction. Because of this dichotomy extending throughout the domain of behaviour, people the world over alternately feel either that they must be ever teaching others to feel and think as they themselves were once taught to feel and think ; or else that they must be constantly receptive to the teaching of others as to what to feel and think. And, needless to say, their preceptors were, in turn, once equally susceptible to the same teaching on the part of their antecedents. Thus people’s habitual feeling and thinking is passed down to them from generation to generation, and their behaviour is at all times arbitrarily divided between these two reaction-alternatives.

On the basis of observations pointing to the existence of a social neurosis, I should like to consider this habit of behaviour-adaptation according to which people commonly assume a position opposite others, and from this position attempt to prove things to them or try to influence their behaviour on grounds of what they naively believe to be their superior knowledge, qualification or authority. This dependent reciprocity entails a far-reaching confusion within man’s behaviour-processes generally. To understand this social maelstrom in which the world is to-day universally embroiled, and to appreciate how completely man fails to recognize this confusion affecting his own subjective processes, let us consider the special feature that characterizes man’s approach to his own motivation or behaviour in contrast to his approach to the motivation or behaviour he observes in other forms of animal life.

Owing to his adoption of controlled scientific methods in his relation to the outer environment, man has learned increasingly to maintain a clear-cut precision, a streamlined objectivity in respect to data that lie to his hand in the field of his external adaptation. What man has accomplished in respect to the outer world through his practised accuracy of adjustment between head and hand, between his seeing and his manipulation of the external phenomena that come within the compass of his senses, is quite extraordinary. This facility with which man co-ordinates his seeing and his manual dexterity he has attained through his increasing appreciation of the delicate internal adjustment of his subjective senses in relation to the object or incident presented before him—an adjustment whose fruits we recognize in the fields of chemistry, mathematics, physics, biology, electrical and mechanical engineering, in experimental psychology and in the various branches of medicine. To take bacteriology alone, the achievements which through the refinement of the scientific method in this field so sensitively relate the eye and hand of man to the outer environment have in the last brief eighty or ninety years enhanced his capacity of accomplishment to a degree that surpasses the measure of his performance during all the ages preceding this short span. So too in our dealings with the reactions of animals and their motivation, our procedure is unfailingly objective and experimental. We observe and test the behaviour of a given animal in relation to its environment and to other animals of its kind.

But with regard to processes that are internal to man himself the story is a very different one. With regard to processes that motivate and control the behaviour of man’s own organism as a species or phylum—processes that primarily influence his interrelational behaviour—man has failed to apply these same objective measures of observation. Thus in the course of man’s evolution, the field of his development that undoubtedly has shown by far the greatest lag is the field of man’s relation to man. Indeed, where it is a question of man’s knowledge of himself and his underlying motivation as a community or species—where it is a question of man’s relation to man—it would appear not only that he doesn’t know anything, but, to use the proverbial Frenchman’s laconic phrase, that he doesn’t even suspect anything. The fact is that in the sphere of man’s own reactions—in regard to those habits and motivations that prompt our own behaviour—the more people “ know ”, the less they tend to suspect !

It has been aptly said that in any scientific inquiry, if one is to find the right answer he must first ask the right question. This means adopting a direct approach to the material under consideration. We have only to recall man’s consistent achievements in the sphere of biology, agriculture or geology, and note his recourse to scientific controls in the domains of physics, engineering, cytology, chemistry, etc., to recognize how direct has been the application of man’s processes to these various fields. And of course this same direct relation of man to his outer circumstance or environment exists no less in the attitude of medicine towards man himself when it is a question of somatic disorders objectively observable within the organism. Again, we need only consider the wide field of infective diseases and the efficient experimental measures we owe to the bacteriologists for the marked decrease in the incidence of these disease-processes in both men and animals. And where there has occurred disease or disorganization within the various external domains of man’s community life, he has been no less direct and effective in his effort to provide the proper remedy. Consider, for example, such work as that of the Red Cross or the Quakers and the immediate and effective response of these organizations to sudden calamity as it occurs anywhere throughout the world, whether in peace or in war ; or the work of The Rockefeller Foundation in promoting medical research, regardless of nation or locality. In short, where distressing conditions occur in the life of man as a result of disturbance or disease caused by external disaster, man has learned increasingly to apply immediate objective controls to their alleviation or adjustment.

But where disorder occurs in the relationship of men inter-individually, we have a very different picture. Where there occurs inept behaviour or disbehaviour in man’s relation to man, the needed adjustment has not been forthcoming.¹ In every behavioural phase of man’s relation to man there has been the failure to apply the suitable objective remedy in accordance with the objective need. This, of course, is not a new situation. It has existed for thousands of years. The only modification through the centuries has been the slow, consistent extension of man’s external expressions of disbehaviour to their present world-wide proportions. There was the time, for instance, when war was an isolated phenomenon. To-day it is inescapably global. There have been periods in the past when man seemed to experience something he dared call peace. Now clearly there is no peace. Not only do peace conferences fail of their objective, but everywhere civil strife breaks out afresh like the rash of a contagious disease. Of course the acknowledgment of this condition is on the lips of everyone. On the lips of everyone throughout the world—soldier or civilian, young or old, rich or poor, educated or uneducated—there are the words, “ There is no peace ” ; and some few even dare to say there can be no peace.

¹ The word disbehaviour should not be confused with the commonly used word misbehaviour. In order to indicate the specific type of behaviour-defect I have in mind, I found it necessary to coin the term disbehaviour to signify behaviour that deviates from a biological norm, without reference to the moral connotation inherent in the word misbehaviour.

But still man does nothing. Essentially he is capable of studying his own behavioural confusion, but obviously he has not yet recognized this confusion as a problem within himself. And now after these many thousands of years he has become inured to the condition as a fish to water. His behavioural confusion has actually become his standard of living. This inadvertence in man’s feeling and thinking is now his norm, the universally accepted norm by which he measures all things. So that, in failing to observe and correct this ineptness of behaviour internal to himself, man is not merely blind to his own confusion but actually enslaved to it. Throughout the species or phylum, man is enslaved to his own habitually subjective, wishful reactions.

Is it any wonder, then, that even members of the highest judiciary courts betray this rigid authoritarianism, that instead of presenting a co-ordinated effort to reach an objective agreement, each contends for what he has been taught by others to think and feel and do ? Is it any wonder that in face of a vital international behaviour-problem involving the fate of civilization, the delegates from the various nations of the earth should sit around a “ peace ” table and fight one another ! It is evident that in response to such subjective, interrelational situations people are not primarily interested in regarding their own behaviour—their own thinking and feeling in relation to an objective situation or circumstance—but that they are ever under the alternating behaviour-compulsion either to teach others or be taught by them how they ought to behave—in what manner it behoves them to think and feel and do.

Through the force of this subjective habit—through the domination of mere wishful preferences—oppositeness now everywhere prevails over man’s mental and social processes, and disbehaviour, in supplanting his basic behaviour-reactions, has become the order of the day. The evidence of this widespread disharmony in human relations is seen in the prevalence of crime, war, industrial dissension, domestic infelicities, political, economic and religious discord. To-day some of us begin to realize that man’s effort towards interindividual co-operation rests upon motives which only promote opposition and antagonism among us. It would appear, then, that through some ineptitude in his development man’s behaviour bears the stamp of a form of maladaptation or disbehaviour in respect to himself and others that has superseded the primary reaction of his organism in relation to the immediate environment.

Let me emphasize again that this condition of disbehaviour, albeit an expression of man’s habitual wish, is not a condition that man basically desires. The wonders of discovery and invention that man has achieved in his relation to the physical world about him are also an index of his potential capacity for healthy balanced behaviour in his interrelational life. But with all his knowledge, man is still in the dark in this vital interrelational sphere of his own behaviour. With all his science, and his poetry too, man’s insight, his...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• The International Library of Psychology
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Author’s Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Interrelational Man or The Symptomatology of Human Behaviour a Phyloanalysis
• Part II Organismic Man or The Biology of Human Behaviour a Phylosynthesis
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Name Index
• Subject Index