0. In the name of the Lord of Initiation, Amen.

1. I fly and I alight as an hawk: of mother-of-emerald are my mighty-sweeping wings.

2. I swoop down upon the black earth; and it gladdens into green at my coming.

3. Children of Earth! rejoice! rejoice exceedingly; for your salvation is at hand.

4. The end of sorrow is come; I will ravish you away into mine unutterable joy.

5. I will kiss you, and bring you to the bridal: I will spread a feast before you in the house of happiness.

6. I am not come to rebuke you, or to enslave you.

7. I bid you not turn from your voluptuous ways, from your idleness, from your follies.

8. But I bring you joy to your pleasure, peace to your languor, wisdom to your folly.

9. All that ye do is right, if so be that ye enjoy it.

10. I am come against sorrow, against weariness, against them that seek to enslave you.

11. I pour you lustral wine, that giveth you delight both at the sunset and the dawn.

12. Come with me, and I will give you all that is desirable upon the earth.

13. Because I give you that of which Earth and its joys are but as shadows.

14. They flee away, but my joy abideth even unto the end.

15. I have hidden myself beneath a mask: I am a black and terrible God.

16. With courage conquering fear shall ye approach me: ye shall lay down your heads upon mine altar, expecting the sweep of the sword.

17. But the first kiss of love shall be radiant on your lips; and all my darkness and terror shall turn to light and joy.

18. Only those who fear shall fail. Those who have bent their backs to the yoke of slavery until they can no longer stand upright; them will I despise.

19. But you who have defied the law; you who have conquered by subtlety or force; you will I take unto me, even I will take you unto me.

20. I ask you to sacrifice nothing at mine altar; I am the God who giveth all.

21. Light, Life, Love; Force, Fantasy, Fire; these do I bring you: mine hands are full of these.

22. There is joy in the setting-out; there is joy in the journey; there is joy in the goal.

23. Only if ye are sorrowful, or weary, or angry, or discomforted; then ye may know that ye have lost the golden thread, the thread wherewith I guide you to the heart of the groves of Eleusis.

24. My disciples are proud and beautiful; they are strong and swift; they rule their way like mighty conquerors.

25. The weak, the timid, the imperfect, the cowardly, the poor, the tearful — these are mine enemies, and I am come to destroy them.

26. This also is compassion: an end to the sickness of earth. A rooting-out of the weeds: a watering of the flowers.

27. O my children, ye are more beautiful than the flowers: ye must not fade in your season.

28. I love you; I would sprinkle you with the divine dew of immortality.

29. This immortality is no vain hope beyond the grave: I offer you the certain consciousness of bliss.

30. I offer it at once, on earth; before an hour hath struck upon the bell, ye shall be with Me in the Abodes that are beyond Decay.

31. Also I give you power earthly and joy earthly; wealth, and health, and length of days. Adoration and love shall cling to your feet, and twine around your heart.

32. Only your mouths shall drink of a delicious wine — the wine of Iacchus; they shall reach ever to the heavenly kiss of the Beautiful God.

33. I reveal unto you a great mystery. Ye stand between the abyss of height and the abyss of depth.

34. In either awaits you a Companion; and that Companion is Yourself.

35. Ye can have no other Companion.

36. Many have arisen, being wise. They have said “Seek out the glittering Image in the place ever golden, and unite yourselves with It.”

37. Many have arisen, being foolish. They have said, “Stoop down unto the darkly splendid world, and be wedded to that Blind Creature of the Slime.”

38. I who am beyond Wisdom and Folly, arise and say unto you: achieve both weddings! Unite yourselves with both!

39. Beware, beware, I say, lest ye seek after the one and lose the other!

40. My adepts stand upright; their head above the heavens, their feet below the hells.

41. But since one is naturally attracted to the Angel, another to the Demon, let the first strengthen the lower link, the last attach more firmly to the higher.

42. Thus shall equilibrium become perfect. I will aid my disciples; as fast as they acquire this balanced power and joy so faster will I push them.

43. They shall in their turn speak from this Invisible Throne; their words shall illumine the worlds.

44. They shall be masters of majesty and might; they shall be beautiful and joyous; they shall be clothed with victory and splendour; they shall stand upon the firm foundation; the kingdom shall be theirs; yea, the kingdom shall be theirs.

In the name of the Lord of Initiation. Amen.

Chapter 18: Symbolization

We may picture the dissociated complex, with the pressure of an instinct behind it, constantly seeking to evade the censor and return to consciousness, where its wishes can be translated into action; and see how the censor, reinforced by the whole weight of the character, resolutely refuses to permit its escape.

We have seen that the dissociated complex, following the ordinary laws of association, forms alliances with ideas which have a symbolical or fanciful connection with itself. These ideas, not being in themselves objectionable to the character, are permitted by the censor to enter consciousness; then the dissociated complex, taking advantage of its alliance with them, pours its bottled-up emotion along the association channels thus formed, and so obtains an outlet into consciousness, giving rise, however, to very different results from those which were its original intention, and producing those irrational likes, dislikes, and eccentricities which are characteristic of the person whose mind is not working smoothly.

An example of this is shown in the case of a woman who noticed that the brass plates on doctors’ doors had a peculiar fascination for her; when inquiry was made into her history, it was found that, in her youth, she had fallen in love with the family physician, who was a married man; feeling this affection to be wrong, she had firmly put it out of her life (i.e., put it into her subconscious). The association between the doctor and the brass plate was obvious enough, but as brass plates were unobjectionable, the censor offered no resistance to them, and the emotion which centered round the doctor whose image was buried in her subconscious was permitted to reach consciousness transferred to the innocent brass plate.

The subconscious makes use of symbolism in precisely the same way that the poet does, but it employs a device which the poet does not, it remembers that a pair of opposites have a connecting-link in their very polarity, and uses a negative to express a positive, if the positive is repugnant to the character. Thus an unmarried woman, whose healthy sex instinct has been denied fulfillment through husband and children, may become morbid, and read literature concerning the repression of the White Slave traffic ad nauseam ; and becoming worse, may develop what is called old maids’ insanity, and imagine that perfectly innocent men are pestering her with immoral attentions (which in her heart she secretly desires), and go to the police for protection.

Chapter 19: Fantasies, Dreams, and Delusions

We have already seen that emotion is intimately allied with instinct, and that it is the thrust of the urging instincts that drives us to action, making us seek to appease the needs of our nature and incidentally fulfill certain racial and evolutionary ends.

Our first attempt, urged on by these promptings, is to bring about the realization of our desires in the external world by means of bodily effort; but should this effort fail to achieve its purpose, or should circumstances deny us the opportunity to make this effort with any hope of success, then the mind often falls back upon a secondary achievement, and images its success in the realms of fantasy and make-believe, where there are no laws of cause and effect to check its operations, and Cinderella in her kitchen constructs a fantasy of the Prince’s ball. She sees her wish acted out to its fulfillment in the theater of her mind. This factor in our nature influences a large proportion of our mental processes, and is considered to be the chief factor in determining the nature, not only of our dreams, but also of the symptoms of nervous and mental diseases, as will be seen later.

During sleep the avenues of the physical senses, whereby impressions reach the mind, are more or less closed, and the ego, which never ceases its activities, is thrown back upon the resources of its memories. Unguided by the reason and judgment, it reviews these, following along the chains of associated ideas according to the laws of memory, which we considered in an earlier chapter.

These wanderings, however, though carried out with the illogicality which distinguishes the lower levels of our mind, are not entirely purposeless, being determined by various factors. It may be that physical or sensory impressions, dimly discerned during sleep through the partially closed doors of the senses, will give rise to a train of thought, or the matters upon which the mind has been busied during the day may continue to occupy it in an undirected fashion during sleep; but the dream-determining element to which most attention has been directed in modern psychology is the upsurging of the instinctive wishes which have been denied fulfillment in waking life, so that in our dreams we see realized, as in fantasy, the wishes which have failed to gain realization in reality, or may even have failed to gain access to our consciousness owing to the operation of the censor which strives to exclude from consciousness all distressing or repulsive matters; for in sleep all our painfully acquired civilization falls away from us, the higher centers of our being are in abeyance, and our primitive, natural self, controlled but never abolished, expresses its fundamental, untutored desires in their elemental form.

These wishes, however, are seldom expressed directly. So foreign are they to our civilized selves that even in sleep our habits of thinking assert themselves and exercise some check upon what shall be expressed; but they are generally distorted almost beyond recognition by the substitutions of more acceptable ideas for crude images of instinctive needs, and as the subconscious mind links ideas together according to their superficial or accidental associations, it will be seen that strange and tangled dramas will be acted out upon the stage of the mind in an effort to represent the fulfillment of some primitive instinctive wish.

Modern methods of psychological research make much use of dreams in the effort to investigate the levels of the mind to which we have no direct access, and psychotherapy uses the same method in order to trace the disorders of the mind to their cause. For if the train of thought which the mind has followed in its progression from a crude instinctive, often physical, wish to the completed dream-drama be traced back again from the images of the dream to the underlying ideas which gave rise to them, we can lay bare the hidden springs of motive and character; hence the great use that has been made of the method of dream analysis in modern psychotherapy.

It is interesting to note that the delusions of lunatics are constructed upon exactly the same principles as the fantasies of our castles in the air; they also represent the fulfillment of wishes that have been denied their realization, and have achieved their ultimate form through the same primitive methods of thinking that are responsible for our dreams; in fact, they may be looked upon as a fantasy which has progressed a step nearer realization than the day-dream.

The symptoms of the hysteric have a similar origin, but represent the wishes of dissociated complexes instead of the wishes of the whole personality as happens in insanity.

Thus we may see that, should our desires be denied expression in our lives, they will construct dream castles for themselves during sleep in which we may temporarily dwell as monarch of all we survey; and should these desires be very imperative, should a large part of our nature be involved in them, then the dream may overflow into waking consciousness, and we shall live among our own subjective mind pictures, instead of among objective realities, and act out the part we have assigned ourselves in the dream-drama, to the consternation of onlookers who pronounce us insane.

The lunatic, however, is not irrational, he is absolutely rational if once his premises be granted, for he carries the logical deductions from these premises to their ultimate conclusion. And once it be realized that some fundamental and essentially natural wish lies at the root of these fantasies which we see him acting out, then we shall see that the clue to the treatment of insanity lies in these wishes and the region of the mind that gives rise to them.

Chapter 20: Psychotherapy

While many forms of mental disease have a physical origin in the brain, nervous system, and state of the blood, many others are purely mental from beginning to end, although the body may be chosen as the scene of some of their manifestations. Modern medicine is learning to deal with mental diseases by mental methods, and of these the principal types may be of interest. It must be remembered, however, that psychotherapy is the youngest of the sciences, and is still in its experimental stage; and that though magnificent work has been done by the pioneers, they cannot claim to have said the last word upon the structure of the human mind, for even if they knew all that was to be known, leaving nothing to be discovered by future investigation, which they would be the last to claim on their own behalf, though their disciples are not always blessed with the same modesty of genius, evolution is moving on, with the human mind at its apex, so that statements which were true of human nature before the Great War may have to be modified and supplemented when the Great Peace becomes an established fact.

Our knowledge of the mind, its diseases and therapy, is far from complete. The investigation of each human mind is in the nature of a voyage of discovery; though the coastline of the mental landscape may be known to us, the hinterland is unmapped. We do not know what lies behind the human personality; we are equally ignorant of the exact nature of its relations with its environment, and while our knowledge is in this state we cannot speak upon any point with finality.

Chapter 21: Psychoanalysis

The foundations of this method and theory were laid by Sigmund Freud of Vienna, and set forth by him in his epoch-making book, The Interpretation of Dreams , published in 1900. Two schools of psychoanalysis exist at the present time: the Vienna school, which adheres strictly to the doctrines of Freud; and the Zürich school, which subscribes to a modification of these doctrines as taught by Dr. Jung. While both schools agree upon general principles as to the anatomy of the mind, they differ in their teaching as to the modus operandi of mental disease. Freud holds that functional nervous disorders are due to the retention by the subconscious mind of an infantile attitude towards life, and especially towards sex, and that this attitude, which should have been outgrown and left behind, sets up stresses and strains in the mind which lead to the manifestations of mental disease. He gives us the concept of the accumulation of emotion in this wound in the mind, just as pus accumulates in an abscess, giving rise to tenderness and pain. He conceives the function of the psychoanalyst to be to lance this abscess by bringing the subject of distress into consciousness, whereby the repressed emotion is realized and fully experienced, and thereby got rid of. This process is technically known as ABREACTION.

The psychologist who conducts the analysis is very likely to be the recipient of this repressed emotion because, at the moment of its arrival in consciousness, he is apt to be standing in the line of fire. This acceptance of the repressed emotion by the operator is conceived to be a most important phase of the cure, and is known as the TRANSFERENCE.

That this factor of the transference opens a door to most serious difficulties and dangers cannot be denied. The via media between undue influence and callous indifference is hard to find. It is maintained that more analysis will work off the emotion which much analysis has succeeded in lying bare, but in actual practice the process is not so simple and often leads to complications.

This transference of emotion to the analyst, together with the deleterious effects of continual and prolonged dwelling upon the unsavory aspects of life which takes place in a psychoanalysis, constitute serious objections to this method of therapy.

Jung holds that mental disease is due to a failure of adaptation in the present, leading to regression to an infantile mode of thinking. It will thus be seen that the two theories, while based upon the same data, are fundamentally different, and must lead to differences in practical application.

Both schools explore the subconscious mind by means of dream analysis, and to this method the Zürich school also adds the method known as word reaction. The process of dream analysis is extremely complicated. Briefly, the patient is instructed to recount a dream, and this dream is then taken point by point, and the “free associations” traced out in the following manner. He is instructed to take an image in his dream as a starting-point, turn his mind loose, and watch where it goes, the theory being that it will retrace the association train of ideas by which the dream image was derived from the underlying wish. An elaborate technique exists for interpreting these dream images; so elaborate as to be beyond the scope of the present volume. How much of this technique is sound and how much is arbitrary is still a matter of opinion among psychologists; we have little data as yet as to the part played by unintentional suggestion on the part of the psychoanalyst, no doubt a considerable factor in some cases, and an exceedingly falsifying and misleading one.

The word association method of Jung is less open to objection on the ground of arbitrariness, and its operation is simpler. A list of anything from a dozen to a hundred or more words is made out. The first half-dozen words have usually no particular significance, but then follow a series of words believed to be specially associated with the different types of complex which may become split off from consciousness; lists of these have been worked out by different students of this school, but although one of these lists is usually used as a basis, the analyst generally inserts words which he believes will especially bear upon the patient’s particular problems. These words are called out to the patient, one at a time, and he is instructed to utter the first word that comes into his head in connection with each. The time he takes to do this is taken by a stop-watch usually working to one-fifth of a second. The first half-dozen of unimportant words will show the patient’s average reaction time, but if any words among the subsequent ones have special significance for him, there will be a perceptible lengthening of the time he takes to reply; moreover the replies may be curious, and either show special bearing upon his problems, or, by their irrelevancy, show that the original idea was discarded as unspeakable and a substitute hastily extemporized. If the list be read over again it will be found that, whereas those words which have no special significance are usually responded to by the same reaction word, those which bear upon the patient’s emotions produce a change in the reaction word. Free association is then resorted to, as in the case of dream symbols, to discover the underlying train of ideas and the factors in the subconscious from which they derive their emotion.

Many Freudians make use of this method also, and indeed the two methods of dream analysis and word association are generally regarded as supplementary. The chief value of the latter lies in the fact that it can be used in cases where the patient is either unable or reluctant to cooperate. The difference in the view-point of the two schools of psychoanalysis leads to a difference in the method of handling the patient; the Freudian who believes that all nerve trouble is due to the retention of infantile habits of thinking, confines himself to analysis and nothing but analysis, offering the patient little or nothing in the way of explanation or instruction, but simply aiding him to lay bare the depths of his subconscious mind, believing that by so doing pent-up emotions will be worked off and split-off complexes re-associated to the personality. The disciple of Jung, on the other hand, believing that the trouble is due to a present failure of adaptation, though using the psychoanalytic method to reveal and bring into consciousness the dissociated complexes, uses a considerable amount of teaching and explanation in an endeavor to enable the patient to assimilate the fruits of experience and adapt himself to his environment. The Freudian complains that the follower of Jung beclouds the issue by unintentional suggestion, and the latter accuses the former of unnecessarily prolonging the process by leaving the patient to find his own way unaided by a wider experience.

The teaching and explanatory method, generally known as re-education, is chiefly associated with the name of du Bois, who was its original exponent, but as, in his day, the psychoanalytic method of investigating the causes of mental disease was unknown, he was often groping in the dark, and dealing with secondary symptoms and effects, so that his method fell into disrepute in the eyes of the new school; but that this method, wisely handled, can be of great benefit in expediting a cure and lessening the painfulness of the process is beyond gainsay.

Chapter 22: Hypnosis, Suggestion, and Autosuggestion

Much popular misapprehension exists with regard to the phenomenon known as hypnosis. It may briefly be described as a condition in which the reason and judgment of the subject are in temporary abeyance, and any idea presented to him will be accepted without reflection, and take so strong a hold upon the mind that it will act itself out almost automatically. This condition of passive receptivity graduates from slight abstraction, almost indistinguishable from normal consciousness, to a condition resembling sleep, or the cataleptic rigidity of deep trance. Its manifestations and characteristics are manifold and most curious and instructive, but beyond the scope of the present work.

Different hypnotists use different methods of inducing this condition, but the main factor in all of them is the fixation and arrestation of the attention and the use of suggestion. It is generally held that it is autosuggestion on the part of the subject, induced by the hypnotist, that is the crux of the whole problem, and that without this internal cooperation, which is often of an unconscious and involuntary nature, the work of the operator would be unavailing.

Hypnosis is the oldest known method of psychotherapy, and, in conjunction with psychoanalysis, is coming to the front again in the treatment of nervous cases and especially of shell shock. The term suggestion is apt to be used somewhat loosely to denote any concept offered by one person to another, but in its psychological sense it is used to denote those ideas which are slipped into the mind of a person without being submitted to his judgment; in its psychotherapeutic sense, however, it is reserved for the process of inserting ideas in the mind while the patient is in a state of artificially induced drowsiness, but not unconscious under deep hypnosis. Autosuggestion, or the insertion of ideas in the subconscious by the conscious mind of the person concerned, has been reduced to a therapeutic system by the New Nancy School of psychology, and is associated with the name of Emile Coué. It is held by this school that suggestibility, or the faculty of permitting ideas to so possess the mind that they express themselves in action, is a normal human faculty; and although it is the cause of many, or even most of the ills that both mind and body are heir to, it is not in itself a morbid condition, but is a necessary factor in educability, evil only arising when wrong ideas exploit this faculty. We can, however, equally well make use of it for the expression of good ideas, with great benefit to our character and health. Suggestion, and, in intractable cases, hypnosis is made use of by the New Nancy School, not as a direct remedial method, but to teach the use of autosuggestion whereby the patient cures himself and is able to prevent any recrudescence of his malady. It is claimed that this method increases a person’s self-reliance instead of undermining it, and is of the greatest value, not only as a therapeutic agent, but as an educational method, and its use in this aspect is urged. But although it is of acknowledged value in the cure of disease, it is questionable whether it might not lead to artificiality and warping of the nature if applied to the growing mind that was developing along normal lines. Only the most judicious guidance could avoid this pitfall.

It is impossible in a book of this nature to give a knowledge of the psychotherapeutic methods that can be of any practical use; the reader must refer to the many text-books upon the subject if such is desired. It must, however, be realized that the modern methods of dealing with the mind are extremely potent, and that it is possible to completely wreck a nature by their injudicious use. A knowledge, however, of the principles of mental hygiene can be nothing but beneficial, though the actual treatment of mental or nervous disease should be avoided by the amateur, for, whatever his theoretical knowledge, the practical experience of hospital and asylum work can alone give accuracy of diagnosis. The beginnings of certain forms of insanity are very hard to distinguish from nerve trouble, even by the expert, and the amateur who tries his prentice hand upon such a case by mistake is likely to have his error painfully and forcibly impressed upon his mind. Psychotherapy is the youngest of the sciences and in a state of vigorous and healthy growth, but there is as yet no orthodox body of doctrine which is regarded as being thoroughly established and accepted by all schools of thought. The lay reader, for whom this book is designed, would do well to be on his guard against dogmatic expressions of opinion which may be presented to him, either in lecture or in print, for our knowledge is not in a state to warrant them. We have learned much, but we do not know all, and until we know much more than we do now, we must keep an open mind and judge tentatively. The popular vogue of applied psychology among those who are not in a position to form firsthand opinions makes this warning necessary. There is no “truth once and for all delivered” by a prophet on a mountain, but an earnest band of men and women adding stone by stone to the temple of human knowledge.

The various methods of psychotherapy outlined here have each and all their value, but no one of them is a panacea for all the ills that flesh is heir to; the science is in its infancy, and the percentage of cure is by no means satisfactory. There is no standard of training for either medical men or lay analysts and owing to the great emphasis laid upon sex by the modern schools, the method is open to grave abuses in inexpert or unclean hands.

Chapter 23: The Practical Application of Psychology

Those who have read the foregoing pages will see that there are certain broad divisions into which they fall. Let us now review these divisions in their relation to the practical art of living.

The first great division we studied was concerned with the levels into which the mind was divided and the types of thinking which were carried on in each of them. The problems of memory and concentration are closely concerned with these levels and the interrelations between them. If an idea, after entering the mind, disappears into the subconscious, we say it is forgotten and regard it as lost. This, we have seen, is not the case, however. It is stored in the subconscious, and we can make use of it even if we cannot gain direct access to it. There is an old story concerning the advice that was given to a judge newly raised to the bench, “Give your decision, it is probably right; but do not give your reasons, they are very likely to be wrong.” Which is merely a pithy way of saying: “Let your subconscious work out your decision in the light of the enormous masses of data it possesses, including the exact reproduction of every law-book you have ever read, every remark, however casual, you have ever heard, together with the accumulated experience of your race, all of which you are heir to, and it will probably be right; but if you try to rationalize this decision, to explain it in terms of your conscious knowledge, you may make mistakes, because your conscious mind does not know nearly as much as your subconscious.” If we would learn to trust our subconscious methods of thinking, we should be astonished to find what they are capable of. Genius might be defined as the power of utilizing the subconscious mind, and inspiration as a subliminal uprush.

Memory also can be greatly improved by taking advantage of the faculty of association of ideas, a faculty upon which the different memory systems are founded. If we take any idea we wish to remember and clearly image it in association with some idea of the same class that is so familiar to us that it is a permanent part of our mental furniture, then the two concepts will get stuck together, and we can always use the second to summon the first.

The instincts and their development and method of functioning form a second great division of our subject. It will be seen that we must view our life in relation to the instincts and not to the reason, but it must not be forgotten that the instincts themselves are evolving or rather perhaps becoming modified in their expressions by the pressure of new conditions, and in the course of their evolution are being steadily socialized and civilized, so although we must realize that, in their primitive form, they lie at the base of our being, yet in their evolved form they also function at its apex, and that if we are to live well, we must harmonize their manifestation upon every level of our being. The third and most important division, from the standpoint of practical living, is that which deals with the mechanisms by means of which the mind adapts itself to its environment. We should make it our aim to achieve adaptation in the conscious mind by absorbing and assimilating all experience, realizing that we can learn our lessons from that which is evil as well as from that which is good, and that any experience, however evil, from which we learn a lesson is converted from poison into food.

While it is necessary that certain types of ideas should be repressed lest they should translate themselves into action, let us never forget that repression need not necessarily imply dissociation, which is an unmixed evil. Dissociation would never occur if we were honest with ourselves. When we refuse to admit, even to ourselves, that our nature possesses certain primitive aspects, we prevent the ideas connected with these aspects from being affiliated to our personality and taking their place in our mental life; they therefore become foreign bodies in the mind, technically termed dissociated complexes, which function independently of the main ego complex.

Instead of taking this attitude, let us recognize the existence of these primitive impulses in ourselves; and when we find their manifestations obtruding themselves, let us gently but firmly put them in their place, and see to it that they do not obtain the upper hand.

Let us never forget the enormous power of autosuggestion, for the subconscious mind will tend to translate into action any image that is presented to it sufficiently vividly, especially if that image be charged with emotion. Let us therefore be very careful what mental pictures we permit ourselves to dwell upon persistently, whether with fear or desire, for they will mold our lives and even our circumstances to an extent we little realize.

Our whole aim should be to maintain the integrity of the personality, to prevent any splitting off of complexes of ideas, and to see that the instincts, welling up in the deeper levels of our nature, should find their channels clear and unobstructed, so that they may flow out into action on the higher levels of our life.

Chapter 24: Conclusion

It has been said that there is no scrap of knowledge concerning the remotest star which will not, sooner or later, be found to have its bearing upon the problems of human life, and we may well ask what the science of human nature itself has to contribute to the solution of our daily problems.

The practical application of psychology has certain well-defined spheres. Its bearing upon education has long been recognized, and much valuable work done in relation to the study of the child mind. The psychology of fatigue, in relation to industrial efficiency, has also found recognition as a branch of applied science not without its practical value. The field of social problems is still largely awaiting exploration, and there can be little doubt that the study of the psychology of the criminal and unemployable would yield results of the greatest social value. At the present moment, it is the field of abnormal psychology that holds the focus of attention. That inestimably valuable results are being obtained in this field of study no one can dispute, but its value is not confined to the relief of disease alone, but, as the research is progressing deeper, to the revelation of the conditions that give rise to disease. Just as the study of pathology gave us the science of hygiene, so the study of mental diseases is showing us the way to healthier thinking. It is teaching us that any abnormal attitude towards life will produce mental discomfort, if not actual disease, and it is showing us, just as physiological hygiene has shown us, that if the developing intelligence of man leads him to depart from primitive conditions wherein the instincts are sufficient guides, then he must also apply his reason to the new problems to which the new conditions give rise, and not leave the solution of these to instincts which are only fitted for the simplest form of functioning. The instinct of combativeness, or the instinct of flight, will not conduct the evolutions of a modern army, and neither will the primitive impulses enable man to live well and happily in conditions which elaborate mental processes have built up—as witness the terrible prevalence of unsolved sex problems beneath the fair show of our civilization. Two-thirds, if not more, of nerve trouble have their origin in the efforts of a primitive instinct to function under civilized conditions and its failure to make the adaptation. We need to take our instincts out of the region of the subconscious and apply our reason to them if we are to solve the problems that press upon us.

Throughout this book it will have been seen that stress has been laid upon the functioning and activity of those levels of the mind that are below the threshold of consciousness, and that it has been pointed out that the instincts, and not the reason, are the key to the human mind. But it has also been shown that the mind is in a state of evolution, and that reason, as its latest development, has an equal biological significance with the instincts of sex and self-preservation, and that we can no more afford to ignore the higher attributes of the human mind than we can afford to deny their true place to the primitive.

Briefly, the primitive man lies at the base of our being, but the divine man stands at its apex, and we, in our ascent, are in a transition stage, with subconscious and superconscious not yet correlated in the conscious mind. We do not see our past and future save in the dim pictures of dream and vision, by the uncertain gleam of intuition rather than the clear light of reason, and no solution of any human problem, either social or psychological, can be valid which does not look to the future as well as the past. Hitherto psychology has sought its standards of normality in the primitive and subhuman, forgetting that the flower of humanity is a natural product as well as its weeds; that religion, charity and idealism are as much a part of human nature as those primitive instincts which give rise to unnameable crimes. A psychology which looks to the past can show us causes, but it is only a psychology which looks to the future which can find us cures. Evolution did not cease its progress when it produced the cave man guarding his family, but evolved the “Save the Children Fund,” which before the echoes of the last shot had died away was sending succor to the helpless young of an enemy herd.

A psychology which bases its philosophy upon a return to the primitive, especially if that psychology undertakes the solution of human problems, individual or collective, is ignoring the data of evolution. We know that all life originated in the sea, and that the young of many species still pass the first phase of their life in the water. When, however, they have come ashore, and the gills have given place to lungs, they cease to be water creatures, and the structural traces of their origin are vestigial and not functional, and a frog can be drowned as easily as any other air-breathing creature, despite his tadpole past. So it is with the human psyche, unquestionably it has passed through a primitive phase in the course of its development, but if, in an effort to remedy some faulty development, it be thrust back to that phase after evolving to a higher one, it will perish as surely as the frog thrust under water. It should be the aim of psychotherapy, not to reduce the mind to its primitive elements and point of view, but rather to help humanity to make that transition from the lower to the higher which evolution is forcing upon us, whether we will or no. Adaptation to environment is the key to life, and the environment to which an individual must be aided to adjust himself, if such aid be sought, is not that environment which, generation by generation, is receding further into the past, but that future which hour by hour is becoming the present, and from which there is no escape.

It should be the aim of psychotherapy to work out the arc which evolution is describing, and to set the feet of racial wanderers upon its path. It is a futile and dangerous philosophy which proposes a return to the past as an escape from the present.

Geology, zoology, sociology, and comparative psychology, all show us the evolution of that which is simple into that which is complex, from the cave man, with his few needs and problems, to the complications of a modern industrial society. And we see in the little segment of the evolutionary arc with which we are most closely concerned that the chief factor is the herd instinct which is pressing us all the time towards a more complete socialization of humanity, and that any adaptation which an individual makes must be in relation to his integration as a social unit and not to his needs as a solitary individual.

Diagnostic and descriptive psychology must be distinguished from remedial psychology of which we have had all too little. Research on the abnormal mind alone will not give us the key to a healthy life, we must study social psychology as well as individual psychology, because man is a social animal, and his mental processes are determined by this fact; any adaptation he makes, and adaptation is the basis of psychotherapy, must be in relation to his social group as well as to his own subconscious wishes; it is not enough to bring these wishes into the light of consciousness, they must be synthesized with the rest of the personality, to the social organization of which that personality is a unit, and to the great evolutionary drift of which even the race itself is but a partial expression. Psychotherapy may begin with the primitive, but it must end with the divine, for both are integral factors in the human mind.

finis

Chapter 4: The Organization of the Upper Levels of the Mind

Those untrained in psychology generally conceive of the mind as a homogeneous whole; our first systematic examination reveals to us, however, that the mind is just as organic as the body.

The organisation of the mind may best be realised by thinking of it as a tank across which, at different heights, are placed sieves of varying coarseness of mesh. We must conceive of the mind as being composed of certain layers, and the layer in which our conscious life has its most permanent focus we will consider to be the outermost layer and name THE FOCUS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Immediately behind the Focus of Consciousness lies the level which psychologists call THE FRINGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, and the two are divided from one another by a sievelike mechanism which is technically called a CENSOR.

The understanding of these two levels of the mind may be rendered clearer if we next consider the uses to which they are put. Supposing a person is sitting in a room listening to a lecture, of what will he be aware? Firstly, his attention will be concentrated upon the lecture, and, secondly, he will be dimly conscious of the sounds made by the traffic in the street outside. By an effort of will he will pay attention to those ideas only which are connected with the lecture, and exclude from consciousness those which are connected with the street traffic; or, to express the process in psychological terms, we may say that all the ideas connected with the lecture are admitted to the focus of consciousness, and all ideas connected with the street noises are kept in the fringe of consciousness, and that the censor-sieve is so adjusted that ideas in the fringe may not intrude upon the focus. Its meshes may be conceived as being of such a size that only the compact little ideas appertaining to the lecture can pass through them, and the undefined ideas connected with the street traffic are held back.

It will readily be seen that our powers of concentration depend upon the satisfactory functioning of this psychic sieve. The more we can bring the adjustment of its meshes under voluntary control, the better will be our powers of concentration; whereas, if its mesh be loose or faulty, and we have acquired little or no control over it, we shall find that we are unable to hold our mind to any consecutive train of thought, and that our focus of consciousness is constantly liable to be invaded by ideas alien to the matter to which we wish to pay attention.

These two levels, the FOCUS and FRINGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, together comprise what is known as THE CONSCIOUS MIND. This is the part of the mind which most truly seems to be “our-self.” It is the section of the mind in which we carry on all our conscious mental activities, but it is by no means the whole of the mental house.

Immediately behind the fringe of consciousness comes the level of the mind which is known as the FORECONSCIOUS, PRECONSCIOUS, and many other things according to the school of psychology whose doctrines are adhered to. If, however, its function be understood, it will be readily enough recognised through the disguise of the varied nomenclature which, unfortunately, complicates the study of psychology. In this level of the mind are stored all the ideas which we hold in memory, but are not actually thinking about. It may, in fact, be defined as the level of conscious memory, and just as the focus is separated from the fringe of consciousness by an adjustable censor-sieve, so an exactly similar sieve interposes between the fringe of consciousness and the foreconscious, and works upon exactly the same principles.

Thus, the student listening to the lecture could adjust this second sieve so as to allow everything he had ever learned that had any bearing upon the subject in hand, to rise into the focus of consciousness and help him to understand the lecture. It is this faculty which is of such great importance in determining the critical powers of the mind, for the previously determined ideas, ranging themselves alongside the fresh concepts offered for assimilation, serve as standards of value, and form a running commentary upon the lecture.

These three levels together, the focus, the fringe, and the foreconscious, form the level of the mind to which we have access and of which we can make use; but we must note this point in connection with these levels, that any idea which we may wish to consider must be placed in the strong light of the focus of consciousness before we can see it clearly; we cannot consider an idea while it is still in the foreconscious, but we can, at will, take it out of the foreconscious and place it in the focus of consciousness for our consideration.

Indeed, these three levels of the mind may be likened to a kitchen, the foreconscious being the cupboard, the fringe of consciousness the table, and the focus of consciousness the mixing basin; and the ideas upon the three levels may be represented by the ingredients of the pudding, some of which are put away in the cupboard, some lie ready to the hand upon the table, and others are actually in the mixing basin being stirred. Those on the table, like the ideas in the fringe of consciousness, lie ready to the cook’s hand, but she is not dealing with them at the moment; those in the cupboard (the foreconscious) are out of sight, but she knows they are there and can get them if she wants them; but it is only those that are in the basin, the focus of consciousness, that she is actually at work upon.

To the average man these three levels constitute all there is of his mind, he has no conception of the strange hinterland lying behind the narrow strip of civilised coast, yet it is here that the springs of his being take their rise, and it is the discovery and exploration of this hinterland which has been the great contribution of modern psychology to the sum of human knowledge.

Chapter 5: The Organization of the Lower Levels of the Mind

In the level of the mind known as the subconscious or unconscious are stored all the ideas to which we have no direct access.

Some psychologists say that the memory of every impression which has ever been received by a sense organ is registered here as on a photographic plate, but this opinion is not universally accepted. We shall be quite safe in saying, however, that the memory of anything which has ever made a distinct impression on the mind is stored here and plays its part in the mental life.

Between the subconscious and the foreconscious is placed the great main censor-sieve of the mind, and it is this which is meant when the “censor” is referred to in psychoanalytical literature. This censor-sieve is of the greatest importance in the mental economy, for upon its function the health of the mind is largely dependent. If its meshes are too loose, we get an uprush into consciousness of ideas which should never be there; and if too tight, the conscious mind is cut off from the source of its energy, the subconscious.

This sieve is constructed upon the same principles as the two others which we have already considered, but it has one fundamental difference, it is not under the control of the will; the dimension of its mesh is regulated, not by what I, at the moment, may happen to wish, but by what the main tenor of my character may determine.

The foreconscious, then, may be likened to a reference library, but the great storehouse of the subconscious is a vault in which the archives are kept; and although the bulk of them never touch the conscious mind, it is their indirect influence which determines the tone of the character. The remotest level of the mind, whose functioning is purely automatic, has the control of all the vital functions of the body. Its thought processes direct the activities of the spinal level of the nervous system, whereas the other levels of the mind have the brain as their physical organ of manifestation, as is proved by the fact that a disease of the brain can throw the reasoning faculties out of gear and leave the purely physiological nervous functions intact, whereas a disease of the spinal cord may render inoperative the nervous processes of the bodily functions, though the mental processes are unimpaired.

The psychic processes of the automatic mind govern all the biochemical processes of the body; it is this level which controls the involuntary muscles, regulates the blood supply to any part of the body, controls the output of the ductless glands, and hence the chemical composition of the blood. It is these facts which may throw light upon the origin of many functional disturbances and upon the phenomena of mental healing. Although the automatic level is not normally in touch with the conscious mind, it is enormously affected by the general feeling-tone of the mentality, and especially by the emotional states of the subconscious, hence the alterations of physiological function which take place in nervous disease.

This level of the mind was the first to be organised in the history of biological development. The dim mentation of the rudimentary beginnings of life was of the automatic order, being entirely concerned with physiological processes.

As organisms became more evolved, a higher type of intelligence was necessary for the carrying out of their life activities, and we get mentation of the type that is carried on in the subconscious level, the impulsive mentation of the instincts.

Level by level the mind builds itself up, in the race and in the individual; and level by level, under the influence of old age, disease or drugs, the planes of consciousness break down in the inverse order to that in which they developed, the more recently organised higher centres going first, and the automatic mind, the oldest and most stable, with æons of habit behind it, working on to the last, keeping the bodily mechanism running long after all that made the organism a man has withdrawn from its dishonoured vehicle.

Chapter 6: Complexes

Having studied the levels into which the mind is divided, we must next consider the nature of the material that is stored in them, and to do this we must study the workings of MEMORY.

When an idea enters the mind it does not remain an independent unit for very long. It seems to be a fundamental characteristic of ideas that they form alliances among themselves, and these groups of ideas are technically known as COMPLEXES.

A complex may be compared to the branching growth of a pond-weed; it has a central starting-point from which ramify threads that divide and subdivide, and branch in every direction, and connect it with other systems of ideas that have similar branching threads. Thus it is that if an idea on any subject enters our consciousness, we find that it is not an isolated unit, but one end of a chain which branches into all sorts of side issues; we have not touched a single line of thought, but a whole railway system.

These systems of ideas spread and ramify through all the levels of the mind, but if we trace them far enough, we shall invariably find that they have their roots in one of the great primal instincts, deep down in the subconscious. It is from this that they derive the vitality that binds them together, for all complexes have a core of emotion, and it is from the instincts that the emotions spring.

Let us take an example from actual life, and see how these principles work. A man may, for example, be a grocer; he will therefore have a Grocery Complex, that is to say, all his ideas connected with the buying and selling of household commodities will be linked together, so that if a train of thought be started in connection with any one aspect of his business, by an easy transition many other aspects may drift into his mind.

Now, grocery is not in itself an absorbing subject, like literature or science, yet the man is interested in it; and why? because his grocery complex has its root in his self-preservation instinct, for it is the means by which he keeps himself alive. If his grocery business prospers, he feels pleasure, because it means a fuller and pleasanter life for him; if it diminishes, he feels pain and fear, because his means of keeping himself alive are threatened.

In addition to being a grocer, however, he may be an elder of the local chapel, and have a far-reaching complex of religious interests, ramifying, interlacing, and having their instinctive roots in his subconscious, just as his grocery complex has. Then, one day, he may be looking up the current price of pepper in his trade list, and from pepper his thoughts pass to spices in general; their pungent odour suggests incense, and he asks himself whether ritualism is ever allowable. It will here be seen that a trailing branch of his grocery complex has made contact with his religious complex and brought it into consciousness.

Again, our grocer may be thinking of getting married, and immediately his grocery complex throws out a side shoot which strikes root in his reproductive instinct, and his interest in grocery is reinforced by much of the interest which gathers round sex in his life, for it is upon the prosperity of his business that his prospect of marriage depends. Thus it will be seen that the mind is filled with a ramifying mass of complexes which throw out branches in every direction, and that if the end of any thread be caught hold of, by gently pulling upon it we can draw all the complexes with which it is connected into consciousness.

This is how memory works, and even if an idea has been “forgotten,” that is, passed from the conscious into the subconscious, it is still possible to recover it by taking advantage of this tendency of ideas to stick together; for by gently pulling upon the parts of the complex to which it is affiliated which are in consciousness, the branchings which are in the subconscious can be coaxed into light. It is upon this factor that psychoanalysis bases much of its work.

Ideas tend to group themselves in complexes according to certain welldefined principles.

• • I. All ideas connected with the same subject tend to become associated together.
• • II. Ideas which enter the mind at the same time tend to become associated together. For instance, if I have a nasty fall on a piece of banana skin while going to the pillar-box, when I see bananas I shall think of falls and pillar-boxes, and when I see pillar-boxes, I may think of bananas and falls.
• • III. Ideas of cause and effect become associated together.
• • IV. Ideas which have any sort of resemblance, fundamental or superficial, tend to recall one another. Thus, if I think of sausages, I may be put in mind of Zeppelins, and if I think of the fall on the banana skin, my mind may leap to the Niagara Falls or fallen women.

This irrational method of thought is of enormous importance in applied psychology, for much of the thinking carried on by the subconscious mind is done in this way, and it gives rise to that peculiar method of thought which will be dealt with in the chapter on symbolism.