CHAPTER XLVIII

THE EGO AND THE WORLD

(Discusses the beginning of consciousness, in the infant and in primitive man, and the problem of its adjustment to life.)

We have now to consider the relationship of man to his fellows, with whom he lives in social groups. Upon this problem floods of light have been thrown by the new science of psycho-analysis. I will try to give, briefly and in simple language, an idea of these discoveries.

One of the laws of biology is that every individual, in his development, reproduces the history of the race; so that impulses and mental states of a child reveal to us what our far-off ancestors loved and feared. The same thing is discovered to be true of neurotics, people who have failed in adjusting themselves to civilized life, and have gone back, in some or all of their mental traits, to infantile states. If we analyze the unconscious minds of "nervous patients," and compare them with what we find in the minds of infants, and in savages, we discover the same dreams, the same longings and the same fears.

The mental life of man begins in the womb. We cannot observe that life directly, but we know that it is there, because there cannot be organic life without mind to direct it, and just as there is an unconscious mind that regulates the bodily processes in adults, so in the embryo there must be an unconscious mind to direct the flow of blood, the building of bones, muscle, eyes and brain. The mental life of that unborn creature is of course purely egotistical; it knows nothing outside itself, and it finds this universe an agreeable place-everything being supplied to it, promptly and perfectly, without effort of its own.

But suddenly it gets its first shock; pain begins, and severe discomfort, and the creature is shoved out into a cold world, yelling in protest against the unsought change. And from that moment on, the new-born infant labors to adjust itself to an entirely new set of conditions. Discomforts trouble it, and it cries. Quickly it learns that these cries are

answered, and satisfaction of its needs is furnished. Somehow, magically, things appear; warm and dry covering, a trickle of delicious hot milk into its mouth. At first the infant mind has no idea how all this happens; but gradually it comes to realize objects outside itself, and it forms the idea that these objects exist to serve its wants. Later on it learns that there are particular sounds which attach to particular objects, and cause them to function. The sound "Mama," for example, produces a goddess clothed in beauty and power, performing miracles. So the infant mind arrives at the "period of magic gestures" and the "period of magic words"; corresponding to a certain type of myth and belief which we find in every race and tribe of human being that now exists or ever has existed on earth. All these stories about magic wishes and magic rings and magic spells of a thousand sorts; and nowhere on earth a child which does not listen greedily to such fancies! The reason is simply that the child has passed through this stage of mental life, and so recently that the feelings are close to the surface of his consciousness.

But gradually the infant makes the painful discovery that not everything in existence can be got to serve him; there are forces which are proof against his magic spells; there are some which are hostile, and these the infant learns to regard with hatred and fear. Sometimes hatred and fear are strangely mixed with admiration and love. For example, there is a powerful being known as "father," who is sometimes good and useful, but at other times takes the attention of the supremely useful "mother," the source of food and warmth and life. So "father" is hated, and in fancy he is wished out of the way-which to the infant is the same thing as killing. Out of this grows a whole universe of fascinating mental life, which Freud calls by the name "the Edipus complex"-after the legend of the Greek hero who murdered his father and committed incest with his mother, and then, when he discovered what he had done, put out his own eyes. There is a mass of legends, old as human thought, repeating this story; we cannot be sure whether they have grown out of the greeds and jealousies of this early wish-life of the infant, or whether they had their base in the fact that there was a stage in human progress in which the father really was killed off by the sons.

This latter idea is discussed by Freud, in his book, "Totem

and Taboo." It appears that primitive man lived in hordes, which were dominated by one old male, who kept all the women to himself, and either killed the young males, or drove them out to shift for themselves; so the young men would combine and murder their father. The forming of human society, of marriage and the family, depended upon one factor, the decision of the young victors to live and let live. The only way they could do this was to agree not to quarrel over the women of their own group, but to seek other women from other groups. This may account for what is known as "exogamy," an almost universal marriage custom of primitive man, whereby a man named Jones is barred by frightful taboos from the women named Jones, but is permitted relations with all the women named Smith.

To return to our infant: he is in the midst of a painful process of adjusting himself to the outside world; discovering that sometimes all his magic words and gestures fail, his wishes no longer come true. There are beings outside him, with wills of their own, and power to enforce them; he has to learn to get along with these beings, and give up his pleasures to theirs. These processes which go on in the infant soul, the hopes and the terrors, the griefs and the angers, are of the profoundest significance for the later adult life. For nothing gets out of the mind that has once got into it; the infantile cravings which are repressed and forgotten stay in the unconscious, and work there, and strive still for expression. The conscious mind will not tolerate them, but they escape in the form of fairy-tales and stories, of dreams and delusions, slips of the tongue, and many other mental events which it is fascinating to examine. Also, if we are weakened by ill health or nervous strain, these infantile wishes may take the form of "neuroses," and fully grown people may take to stammering, or become impotent, or hysterical, or even insane, because of failures of adjustment to life that happened when they were a year or two old. These things are known, not merely as a matter of theory, but because, as soon as by analysis these infant secrets are brought into consciousness and adjusted there, the trouble instantly ceases.

So it appears that the whole process of human life, from the very hour of birth, consists of the correct adjustment of men and women in relation to their fellows. Not merely is man a social being, but all the prehuman ancestors of men,

for ages upon geologic ages, have been social beings; they have lived in groups, and their survival has depended upon their success in fitting themselves snugly into group relationships. Failure to make correct adjustments means punishment by the group, or by enemies outside the group; if the failure is serious enough, it means death. We may assert that the task of understanding one's fellow men, and making one's self understood by them, is the most important task that confronts every individual.

And if we look about the world at present, the most superficial of us cannot fail to realize that the task is far from being correctly performed. So many people unhappy, so many striving for what they cannot get! So many having to be locked behind bars, like savage beasts, because they demand something which the world is resolved not to let them have! So many having to be killed, by rifles and machine-guns, by high explosive shells and poison gas-because they misunderstood the social facts about them, and thought they could fulfill some wishes which the rest of mankind wanted them to repress! As I read the psycho-analyst's picture of the newly born infant with its primitive ego, its magic cries and magic gestures, I cannot be sure how much of it is sober science and how much is mordant irony-a sketch of the mental states of the men and women I see about me-whole classes of men and women, yes, even whole nations!

The effort of the following chapters will be to interpret to men and women the world which they have made, and to which they are trying to adjust themselves. More especially we shall try to show how, by better adjustments, men may change both themselves and the world, and make both into something less cruel and less painful, more serene and more certain and more free.