The Plan of this Book

This book concentrates on and seeks to interpret a series of such basic neurotic dichotomies of theory, leading up to a theory of the self and its creative action. We proceed from problems of primary perception and reality through considerations of human development and speech to problems of society, morals, and personality. Successively, we draw attention to the following neurotic dichotomies, some of which are universally prevalent, some of which have been dissolved in the history of psychotherapy but are still otherwise assumed, and some of which (of course) are prejudices of psychotherapy itself.

Body and Mind: this split is still popularly current,

although among the best physicians the psychosomatic unity is taken for granted. We shall show that it is the exercise of a habitual and finally unaware deliberateness in the face of chronic emergency, especially the threat to organic functioning, that has made this crippling division inevitable and almost endemic, resulting in the joylessness and gracelessness of our culture. (Chapter 3)

Self and External World: this division is an article of

faith uniformly throughout modern western science. It goes along with the previous split, but perhaps with more emphasis on threats of a political and interpersonal nature. Unfortunately those who in the history of recent philosophy have shown the absurdity of this division have mostly themselves been infected with either a kind of mentalism or materialism. (Chapters 3 and 4)

Emotional (subjective) and Real (objective): this split

is again a general scientific article of faith, unitarily involved with the preceding. It is the result of the avoidance of

contact and involvement and the deliberate isolation of the sensoric and motoric functions from each other. (The recent history of statistical sociology is a study in these avoidances raised to a fine art.) We shall try to show that the real is intrinsically an involvement or “engagement.” (Chapter 4)

Infantile and Mature: this split is an occupational

disease of psychotherapy itself, springing from the personalities of the therapists and from the social role of the “cure”: on the one hand a tantalizing preoccupation with the distant past, on the other the attempt to adjust to a standard of adult reality that is not worth adjusting to. Traits of childhood are disesteemed, the very lack of which devitalizes the adults; and other traits are called infantile that are the introjections of adult neuroses. (Chapter 5)

Biological and Cultural: this dichotomy, which is the

essential subject-matter of anthropology to eliminate, has in recent decades become entrenched precisely in anthropology; so that (not to mention the idiotic racialisms of one side) human nature becomes completely relative and nothing at all, as if it were indefinitely malleable. We shall try to show that this is the result of a neurotic fascination with artifacts and symbols, and the politics and culture of these, as if they moved themselves. (Chapter 6)

Poetry and Prose: this split, unitarily involved with all

the preceding, is the result of neurotic verbalizing (and other vicarious experience) and the nausea of verbalizing as a reaction against it; and it leads some recent semanticists and inventors of languages of science and “basic” languages to disesteem human speech as though we had enough other media of communication. We do not, and there is a failure of communication. Universal terms, again, are taken as mechanical abstractions rather than

expressions of insight. And correspondingly, poetry (and plastic art) becomes increasingly isolated and obscure. (Chapter 7)

Spontaneous and Deliberate: more generally, it is

believed that the unsought and inspired belongs to special individuals in peculiar emotional states; or again to people at parties under the influence of alcohol or hasheesh; rather than being a quality of all experience. And correspondingly, calculated behavior aims at goods that are not uniquely appropriated according to one’s fancy, but are in turn only good for something else (so that pleasure itself is endured as a means to health and efficiency). “Being oneself” means acting imprudently, as if desire could not make sense; and “acting sensibly” means holding back and being bored.

Personal and Social: this common separation

continues to be the ruination of community life. It is both the effect and cause of the kind of technology and economy we have, with its division of “job” and “hobby,” but no work or vocation; and of timid bureaucracies and vicarious “front” politics. It is to the credit of the therapists of interpersonal relations to try to heal this split, yet even this school, anxiously controlling the animal and sexual factors in the field, likewise usually comes to formal and symbolic rather than real communal satisfactions. (Chapters 8 and 9)

Love and Aggression: this split has always been the

result of instinctual frustration and self-conquest, turning the hostility against the self and esteeming a reactive passionless mildness, when only a release of aggression and willingness to destroy the old situations can restore erotic contact. But in recent decades this condition has been complicated by a new high esteem given to sexual love at the same time as the various aggressive drives are

especially disesteemed as anti-social. The quality of the sexual satisfaction may perhaps be measured by the fact that the wars we acquiesce in are continually more destructive and less angry. (Chapters 8 and 9)

Unconscious and Conscious: if taken absolutely, this

remarkable division, perfected by psychoanalysis, would make all psychotherapy impossible in principle, for a patient cannot learn about himself what is unknowable to him. (He is aware, or can be made aware, of the distortions in the structure of his actual experience.) This theoretical split goes with an underestimation of the reality of dream, hallucination, play, and art, and an overestimation of the reality of deliberate speech, thought, and introspection; and in general, with the Freudian absolute division between “primary” (very early) thought-processes and “secondary” processes. Correspondingly, the “id” and the “ego” are not seen as alternate structures of the self differing in degree — the one an extreme of relaxation and loose association, the other an extreme of deliberate organization for the purpose of identification — yet this picture is given at every moment of psychotherapy. (Chapters 10-14)