THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
By 
JULIA TURNER, b.a. (LOND.) 
President of the Psychological Aid Society 
founded Sept. 26th, 1921 
“ Rejoice we are allied 
To that which doth provide 
And not partake, effect and not receive ! 
A spark disturbs our clod ; 
Nearer we hold of God 
Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I 
must believe." 
ROBERT BROWNING, 
Rabbi Ben Ezra. 
NEW YORK 
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY 
31, Union Square West 
1933 Printed in Great Britain by F. Robinson & Co. at The Library Press Lowestoft TO 
JESSIE MARGARET MURRAY, 
M.D , B.S. (Durham) 
from whose inspired teaching and example 
is derived anything of value 
therein, this little hook 
is dedicated PREFACE 
In this little book I present my ideas of the con- 
ceptual life, the fruit of many years of experience 
in dream psychology. These ideas are presented 
here from the point of view of general thought and 
general psychology, a more technical exposition of 
the Anxiety Hypothesis being reserved. 
The little treatise, it is hoped, will appeal to the 
circle whose function in the community is more 
particularly that of teaching, to ministers of religion 
and to the educational world. 
I wish to express my deep sense of indebtedness to 
Professor Freud and to those who have followed 
him in the study of the subliminal mind ; at the 
same time I do not forget how great a debt is owing 
also to the effort and patience of the older school 
of psychologists. 
Thanks are due to Messrs. George Allen & Unwin, 
Messrs. Bailliere Tindall & Cox, M. Ernest Flam- 
marion, Messrs. Longmans Green & Co., Messrs. 
Moffat Yard & Co., Messrs. Methuen & Co., The 
International Psycho-analytical Press, Mr. John 
Lane, Messrs. J. Murray & Sons, Mr. Martin 
Seeker, and to The University Tutorial Press, for 
permission to use material quoted from books 
published by them. 
J. TURNER. 
VII CONTENTS 
PAGE 
CHAPTER I: GENERAL FACTS ABOUT SELF- 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE SELF- 
CONSCIOUS SUBJECT . . 1 
Section i: The importance of the distinction 
between consciousness and self- 
consciousness . . 1 
,, 2: Human beings unlike the animals are 
self-conscious . . .2 
,, 3: Differences between the self-con- 
scious or conceptual subject and 
the conscious or perceptual subject. 
Man is both ... 5 
,, 4: The material and organic are symbols 
for conceptual values ; symbolism 
extends the conceptual subject’s 
interest indefinitely . . 8 
,, 5: The difference between the way in 
which the perceptual life and the 
conceptual life respectively dawn . 11 
„ 6: Inception of the self-conscious life 
sees the emergence of two major 
determinants, life-hunger and fear ; 
anxiety results . . .14 
„ 7: Expansion of the anxiety life is first 
by active dramatisation of anxiety 
situations : to this is added later 
interest in anxiety situations pre- 
sented in story and drama . .19 
„ 8: In the absence of self-knowledge the 
balance in the anxiety life is main- 
tained mechanically. . 21 
IX Contenis 
page 
CHAPTER II: SYMBOLISM . 26 
Section i: The problem for the human mind . 26 
„ 2: Discussion of the term REALITY. 
Reality for the perceptual subject 
is not the same thing as reality for 
the conceptual subject . . 29 
„ 3: Symbolism: what it is . .31 
„ 4: For progress in both directions per- 
ceptual and conceptual experience 
are dependent on one another . 34 
„ 5: Sexuality the first, last, and greatest 
symbol for the conceptual or self- 
conscious subject . . .41 
CHAPTER HI : THE LIFE FORCE, AT THE 
PERCEPTUAL AND CONCEP- 
TUAL LEVELS . . 47 
Section 1: The life force at the perceptual level 47 
„ 2: At the conceptual level a portion of 
the life force becomes self-con- 
scious ; it first seeks to express 
itself in terms of power . . 52 
„ 3: The analogy of the Eye . . 57 
,, 4: The introspective habit of the con- 
ceptual subject . . .59 
,, 5: The analogy of the Ear . . 63 
„ 6: The conceptual life is one expressing 
anxiety, because in the first instance 
the subject is called upon to re- 
linquish the principle of power and 
to accept the principle of expiation 65 
,, 7: Expiation: the genesis of the soul . 67 
X Contents 
PAGE 
CHAPTER IV: THE MECHANISMS OF SELF- 
CONSCIOUSNESS ARE THE 
DREAM MECHANISMS WHICH 
HAVE BEEN DESCRIBED BY 
PROF. FREUD . . -76 
Section i: The word “ Mechanism ” explained . 76 
„ 2: The mechanisms which are concerned 
in producing the dream : the Un- 
conscious and the Preconscious . 78 
,, 3: Between the Unconscious and the 
Preconscious a third system, the 
Pseudo-unconscious, must be inter- 
polated . . . .82 
,, 4: The relation between the Uncon- 
scious and the Preconscious . 84 
„ 5: There is danger in the wrong handling 
of unconscious anxiety . . 86 
CHAPTER V: THE ANXIETY EIFE . . 90 
Section 1: Anxiety not only creates, it also 
dominates human life. Two aspects 
of anxiety : tragedy and comedy . 90 
,, 2: The two levels of anxiety . . 92 
„ 3: Symbolism of the deeper level . 96 
„ 4: The dream, although it recalls actual 
experience, is a presentation of the 
subject’s own Anxiety Drama . 103 
,, 5: The anxiety problem projected: 
referred anxiety . . .109 
„ 6: The witness of literature to the 
Anxiety Hypothesis . .115 
XI Contents 
PAGE 
CHAPTER VI: THE PERFECTING LIFE . .119 
Section i: All anxiety tends to work itself 
through. Where shall the subject 
find relief ? . . . .119 
„ 2: Reflection : a great mechanism of the 
Perfecting Life . . .127 
,, 3: What the subjective interpretation 
of the dream may do . .132 
„ 4: The demons of the threshold . . 138 
„ 5: The revolt against anxiety . .144 
CHAPTER VII: THE CONCEPTUAL SUBJECT, 
HIS OUTLOOK AND HIS 
RIGHTS . . . -160 
Section 1: A final glance at the conceptual life : 
its genesis, content, organisation 
and purpose . . .160 
,, 2: The concepts ETHICAL and FAITH 170 
„ 3: The Post-expiation life: the VITA 
NUOVA . . . .176 
„ 4: The charter of the conceptual subject 182 
APPENDICES 
Appendix I: The Main Principles of the Anxiety 
Hypothesis . . . .198 
„ II: Illustrative Exercise (by Theresa 
Gosse) ; “ The Gates of Damascus,” 
by J. E. Flecker . . . 205 
GLOSSARIAL INDICES 
No. I : Of terms employed in the Anxiety 
Hypothesis .... 209 
„ II : General .... 229 
XII THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
CHAPTER I 
GENERAL FACTS ABOUT 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE 
SELF-CONSCIOUS SUBJECT 
i. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DISTINCTION 
BETWEEN CONSCIOUSNESS AND SELF-CON- 
SCIOUSNESS. The most unfortunate errors in 
psychology have proceeded from not under- 
standing the nature of the difference between 
animals and man. The mistake was definitely 
made by Descartes the great philosopher 
of the 17th century. He confuses thought 
and consciousness; man he affirms, is 
conscious, animals are not ; animals therefore 
he concludes are machines, hence do not 
experience pain or pleasure. 
One terrible consequence of this confusion 
of terms was that wholesale vivisection was 
practised by philosophers of the Cartesian 
School. The cries of the unhappy victims 
were compared to the cracking of china when 
1 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
thrown down and broken, and one disciple 
of Descartes said that the bleating of a goat 
when beaten meant no more than the sound 
given out by a drum. 
This distinction has again been overlooked 
in an important new development of psy- 
chology. Professor Freud’s theory and 
practice of dream analysis involves the same 
confusion of terms as I shall hope to explain 
in due course in this little book. 
Professor Freud has launched psychology 
on a wonderful new career, but unfortunately 
he has overlooked the seemingly trifling 
distinction between consciousness and self- 
consciousness. As a matter of fact it is the 
key to the whole situation. When we apply 
this key, dream analysis becomes a means 
of unlocking many of the problems which 
have long defied human speculation ; when 
we leave it on one side we make confusion 
worse confounded. This time the sufferer 
may be the human subject. 
2. HUMAN BEINGS UNLIKE THE ANIMALS 
ARE self-conscious. Self-consciousness is the 
important particular in which human 
beings are different from the animals. Some 
2 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
domesticated animals that live with us in 
our homes seem to get a certain amount of 
self-consciousness, but it does not go very 
deep. Dogs appear to be capable of acquiring 
it in the highest degree, but probably the 
dog individually and collectively, if left to 
himself, would soon lose it all. There is a 
class of story written for children that 
represents animals as self-conscious. I 
remember one that delighted me when I was 
a child, it represented the experiences of a 
kitten born in a stable in a barrel and des- 
cribed the mixed desire and fear the kitten 
felt when wondering what the world might 
be like outside the barn doors. Having 
ventured through them the poor little hero 
got into all kinds of trouble I remember, and 
was glad to beat a retreat to mother-cat. 
Such stories are interesting and amusing and 
generally have a moral attached to them like 
the old fables. The writer is always thinking 
of the human self-conscious life when he 
makes up these tales. 
Speaking quite generally it is self-con- 
sciousness which explains where and how 
human beings are more highly endowed than 
3 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
animals. Animals are conscious but not 
self-conscious, they are driven by motives 
supplied by something immediately present; 
attracted to, or frightened by something 
outside them, or urged by a condition of their 
own economy e.g. hunger, they react in a 
more or less mechanical way. But human 
beings are able to think of themselves in 
relation to motives and what they involve, 
and to form judgments as to various courses 
of action. They do not always follow the 
motive which an animal might think the 
most urgent; certainly if a dog could form 
judgments about our conduct he would often 
be much surprised. It is in consequence of 
self-consciousness that for human beings there 
exist a great many more motives than for 
the most intelligent animal. The appreci- 
ation of all that is interesting or important, 
joyful or pathetic, ridiculous or sublime, 
originates in self-consciousness. 
Someone may object, if he has not thought 
about it before, that to be self-conscious is 
neither agreeable nor desirable. What he 
really means however when he objects to 
being “ self-conscious,” is that morbid or 
4 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
pathological self-consciousness is objectionable 
to meet with in other people, and painful to 
experience oneself. In these cases we say 
“ self-conscious ” for brevity, just as medical 
people when they mean that a patient has 
a morbid heart condition say he “ has a 
heart." As a matter of fact, we must be self- 
conscious, or we should suffer from a form of 
idiocy. We definitely expect people to be 
self-conscious ; it is as necessary for us as 
human beings to be self-conscious as to have 
a heart in order to be alive. 
Just as not to be self-conscious would imply, 
as I have said, to be an idiot, so any degree 
of morbid self-consciousness implies being 
something else we do not wish to be. 
Insanity and criminality are high degrees of 
disturbance in the self-conscious sphere of 
our psychology. To be an efficient self- 
conscious subject means therefore to have 
self-consciousness sufficient in amount and of 
a quality not too far removed from the average. 
3. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE SELF-CON- 
SCIOUS OR CONCEPTUAL SUBJECT AND THE 
CONSCIOUS OR PERCEPTUAL SUBJECT : MAN IS 
both. Let us consider a minute what we 
5 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
mean by being self-conscious. Self-conscious- 
ness includes the idea of the self as existing. 
Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) 
was Descartes’ fundamental proposition. We 
know we are here, now at the present moment 
of time; we can also talk of what we did 
last week and of what we expect to do next 
week. Last week is past time and next 
week future time, so we can think of ourselves 
in relation to past, present, and future time. 
We can also think of ourselves as doing 
things—working, eating, sleeping, etc. We 
also think of ourselves in relation to other 
people and things, some of which we know 
to be helpful to us and others injurious, and 
as having to find our way and get on by help 
of the useful things and people and in spite 
of the harmful ones. This leads us on to 
thinking of ourselves as projecting plans for 
the future—plans for work and play and for 
the conduct of life generally. 
An animal has no thought about all these 
things ; when a situation arrives he is aware 
of only a part of all that it implies for the 
human subject. He reacts in a much more 
machine - like manner to the immediate 
6 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
stimulus in a situation, to the thing he wants 
to dominate for his own pleasure or the thing 
he wants to get away from because it might 
injure him. Some of the stimuli are inside 
his own body, e.g. hunger. 
Awareness in the subject of what he himself 
is and does forms part of what psychologists 
call “ the self-concept.” Self-consciousness 
first frames the self-concept and then proceeds 
to form other concepts. Hence another name 
for the self-conscious subject is “ conceptual 
subject.” 
On the other hand an animal may be 
termed a “ perceptual subject,” because he 
can form percepts. 
An immediate sensory stimulus, e.g. sound 
of dinner-bell, awakens in the animal subject, 
cat or dog, associations connected with other 
sensory experience, with let us suppose a 
certain room and the partaking of food. 
This correlated sensory experience is termed 
a precept. For a human being inasmuch as 
he is also an animal the sound of the bell is 
also a precept but it is much more besides. 
For him as conceptual subject this sensory 
stimulus also links up with many ideas or 
7 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
concepts belonging to the self-conscious life, 
e.g. ideas as to being in a suitable condition 
as regards dress, etc., and as to whether his 
family will consequently be pleased or not : 
ideas as to eating and drinking and sitting 
correctly, together possibly with ideas about 
the food, as, for instance, whether it will be 
sufficient and suitable. As regards those 
associations which affect him as a conceptual 
subject, his mind is set upon making a success 
of the occasion from the point of view of 
health in conjunction with the opinion enter- 
tained of him by other people. In other 
words while for the perceptual subject the 
food only is the ultimate, or real value, for 
the conceptual subject the values are abstract: 
health, life, happiness, success, fellowship. 
4. THE MATERIAL AND ORGANIC ARE 
SYMBOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL VALUES; the 
symbol extends the conceptual subject’s 
interest indefinitely. 
We note a most important point. It is 
that in relation to the self-conscious life, 
everything outside, everything we can see 
and handle—even our own bodies and their 
activities—are symbols of the things we want 
8 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
or fear, conceived abstractly i.e. of happiness 
or failure. Our plans for getting on, for 
attaining happiness and avoiding failure are 
sometimes quite fantastic without our being 
aware of the fact and when this is the case 
we become morbidly self-conscious for we 
find that our values for the things about us, 
including as I have said our own bodies and 
their functions, are unlike those of other 
people. While as an animal subject, man 
lives like any other animal in terms of material 
things, as a conceptual subject he lives in 
terms of their symbolic meaning. Hence for 
the mature conceptual subject neither poverty 
is incompatible with happiness nor wealth 
and prosperity with unhappiness. 
In consequence of the symbolic use of 
perceptual experience the range of the con- 
ceptual subject’s interest is extended almost 
indefinitely. A little paper read before the 
Psychological Aid Society described the 
interesting observations made by a member 
of the Society of the doings of birds in an 
Indian creeper growing just outside her 
bungalow window. The whole conception of 
this paper gives admirably the difference 
9 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
between the conceptual and perceptual sub- 
jects. We can so well picture the self-con- 
scious or conceptual subject, standing hidden 
behind the purdah or wire screen, intent 
on watching her little fellow-participators 
in the great life-principle which are only at 
the perceptual level of consciousness. She 
is interested in them apart from any question 
of loss or gain to herself—perhaps her own 
breakfast is cooling on the table meanwhile ! 
They presumably know nothing of her or 
what she is. Were they aware of this 
relatively gigantic presence they would prob- 
ably experience fear, and, if not too far com- 
mitted to the care of their family, might 
remove to some more retired spot. But if 
circumstances obliged them to remain, 
familiarity would doubtless breed—not con- 
tempt—but satisfied contentment from the 
presence of some more powerful and more 
“ grown up ” sentient being. 
The bird’s mind is an expression of 
the life-principle at the stage of instinct 
and intelligence. By instinct activities are 
mapped out through the coming into operation 
of impulses within the economy which make 
10 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
insistent the need to seek certain things: 
food, mate, nest building material, a building 
site, etc., and on the other hand to keep out 
of the way of other animals which are likely 
to be a source of danger, or to fight off those 
not too dangerously large. Intelligence 
enables them to vary their performances 
by using material which comes to hand. 
The little bird subjects described used the 
string and scraps of wool from the textile 
properties of their unknown hostess for nest 
building. 
Man is both a conceptual and perceptual 
subject. His perceptual interests are almost 
entirely dominated by his interests as a 
conceptual subject. 
5. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE WAY IN 
WHICH THE PERCEPTUAL LIFE AND THE 
CONCEPTUAL LIFE RESPECTIVELY DAWN. For 
all life order and organisation are necessary. 
The perceptual life comes gradually and having 
reached its maximum pursues a level course. 
Range of interest increases with every new 
species of animal. Among all the objects in his 
neighbourhood there are only a definite number 
to which any given animal subject responds 
11 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
in a definite manner, he goes after the things 
he wants to have, either things to eat or the 
sexual mate, or he flees from or shows fight 
towards those which he fears. In regard to 
all other objects he is either curious or leaves 
them severely alone. To take a favourite 
perceptual subject of mine, a drake ; this 
bird spends much of his time poking his bill 
into the grass and soil searching for various 
kinds of small living things which he is 
intent on finding and eating ; he makes his 
way to the water and has a swim ; at other 
times he takes a nap and lives an ordered life 
with the ladies of his little harem. The 
drake’s life is mapped out for him practically 
entirely by instinct. Every perceptual 
subject is a creature of instinct and likes or 
dislikes the same things that his ancestors 
of the same species did before him. Such 
objects are called “ specific objects ” of 
instinct. The drake takes no notice of noises 
that go on beyond his field wall, shouting 
tennis players or the screeching lawn mower, 
but he cocks his head and shows signs of being 
disturbed if a hawk or heron is flying far far up 
above, looking to me like a dim speck in the sky. 
12 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Like the dawn in the temperate zones the 
daylight of perceptual consciousness unfolds 
progressively. 
Probably the conceptual life begins suddenly. 
The human baby for a long time after birth 
is unable to make his arms and legs work 
together properly and he used to be made even 
more helpless than he need have been by the 
custom of “ swaddling.” The unfortunate 
babies were tied up like little bundles bound 
round and round with cloth ! The baby 
subject sees and hears everything but cannot 
react by moving away if he is frightened. 
He must drink in all the fear and excitement 
for he cannot work it off. This may or may 
not wake the conceptual life but it will 
certainly prepare the mind for it for we see 
how disturbed our dogs and cats sometimes 
become if anything unusual happens, if there 
is singing or pianoforte playing, if the young 
people pretend to fight or if anyone dresses 
up. What doubtless does awaken the con- 
ceptual life is when someone on whom he is 
dependent is angry with the baby, as the 
mother is bound to be in course of time when 
she thinks he is careless or naughty and 
13 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
ought to know better. Perhaps we are 
justified in concluding that in these circum- 
stances, the baby from being a perceptual 
subject, often excited by the emotional life 
around him, suddenly becomes a conceptual 
subject. The apparatus of self-consciousness 
has been “ sparked.” In his weakness and 
littleness he finds himself confronted by others 
of immensely superior power and size, and we 
may suppose that he feels a gripping terror at 
the revelation.1 
Like dawn in the tropics the conceptual 
life awakens with dramatic suddenness. 
Is the Creation Story in Genesis I the story 
of the dawning of the conceptual life ? First 
chaos is described—formless and void—ex- 
pressed in the Hebrew by two most unusual 
words which sound something like tohu and 
bohu. Then God says “ Let there be light.” 
6. INCEPTION OF THE SELF-CONSCIOUS LIFE 
SEES THE EMERGENCE OF TWO MAJOR DETER- 
MINANTS, LIFE-HUNGER AND FEAR ; ANXIETY 
results. The conceptual or self-conscious 
1 At the moment, since the experience is subjective, he refers 
it within ; in the end, through projection, the experience will 
guide him to a realisation of the I and the Not-I. 
14 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
life, unlike the perceptual consciousness of 
the animal, awakens more or less suddenly. 
Probably, as already said, it is in part pre- 
pared for by emotional crises in the baby’s little 
world, but the immediate stimulus, it cannot 
be doubted, is the exhibition of parental 
(generally the mother’s) disapproval. This 
must be an experience of momentous import 
and must leave behind it an indelible im- 
pression, comparable to that left on a sens- 
itised photographic surface exposed to a 
sudden flash of light from a rapidly burning 
magnesium wire. The impression left on 
the baby’s mind is two-fold consisting of 
(i) self realisation,—consciousness of his 
own existence—coupled with the desire 
to remain at the blissful animal level of mere 
consciousness for ever and ever : a veritable 
life-hunger, and (2) fear of the awe- 
some Not-I which has suddenly emerged 
and confronted him. 
life-hunger and fear, so blended, give 
what is known as anxiety, anxiety being 
characteristic of the subject’s feeling when 
he is at the moment safe but is threatened 
by danger from which there is little hope 
15 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
of escaping. In proportion as there is promise 
of finding a way of escape the anxiety is 
lessened. Anxiety attaches to situations 
about which we say : “if only such and 
such a thing would happen ! ” 
Probably some time elapses before the baby 
becomes continuously self-conscious. He 
lapses, let us suppose, into the little animal 
again, until a point of development is reached 
when nothing short of the deep sleep state 
relieves him from the immediate onus of 
self-consciousness. 
After this sparking of the apparatus of 
self-consciousness the infant probably goes 
through a period of initiation into its use. 
Professor McDougall has remarked on the 
need for exhibitions of superior physical force 
in the training of a child, and it is just these 
at an extremely early period which call out 
on the one hand the conscious thirst for life 
and for one’s own way, and at the same time 
drive in the consciousness of the necessity, 
which the helpless little subject is under, 
of submission to or acquiescence in the will 
of the stronger person. 
Experience of early childhood has so little 
16 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
relation to actual facts that later it becomes 
mythical and remote ; it is charged strongly 
with emotion, with anxiety. As such it is 
forgotten—covered by the Amnesia to use 
Professor Freud’s term. No one remembers 
his experience as a continuous whole before 
about three years of age, and few can go back 
so far in spite of the freshness and plasticity 
of the organic structures at the time. The 
material belonging to this period, repressed 
from memory, is the source of nuclear or 
naked anxiety. 
Out of the darkness of the period covered 
by the Amnesia a few little situations loom. 
They stand out like dream pictures, the 
subject sees himself in a particular setting 
but fails to find any explanation of the 
circumstances. 
The writer for instance has such a memory 
picture of being carried in someone’s arms 
into a room where the grandmother was. 
What happened or why this isolated experi- 
ence is so vividly remembered is obscure. 
The grandmother was a kindly but formidable 
old lady who was associated with certain 
later emotional experiences. That is all, no 
17 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
memories bearing on the particular occurrence 
remained. But something must have pene- 
trated the infant’s emotional sensorium on 
the particular occasion pictured, by which 
the self-conscious apparatus came violently 
into action. 
Subsequent to the Amnesia the conceptual 
subject may develop normally, in which case 
the two determinants of self-consciousness, 
the conscious will to live (the power 
SENSE), and the conscious fear of and desire 
to propitiate superior agencies presumably 
exercising powers of life and death (the 
expiation tendency), will act reciprocally 
and harmoniously in his external react- 
ions to life. The little subject will desire to 
have his own way and enjoy the good things 
of this life, at the same time he will experience 
a reasonable wish to share with others, to 
give up to them on occasion, and even to do 
things which, did he consult his immediate 
inclination, he would feel a distaste for. 
The “ good ” child puts away his toys with 
promptitude and addresses himself to a task 
when bidden, and gets the toys out again with 
alacrity at the proper time. 
18 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
7. EXPANSION OF THE ANXIETY LIFE IS 
FIRST BY ACTIVE DRAMATISATION OF ANXIETY 
SITUATIONS : TO THIS IS ADDED LATER INTEREST 
IN ANXIETY SITUATIONS PRESENTED IN STORY 
and drama. Fortunately the Mother does 
not prove so formidable as she seemed when 
the first shock of self-consciousness took place. 
Conceptual experience, that is preoccupation 
with the I and the Not-I and their relation 
to each other, normally acquires attractive- 
ness. It is the secret of human play. The 
baby’s interest in objects follows anxiety 
experience. More remote objects, like human 
beings, dogs and cats, represent the Not-I; 
objects which the child can handle freely 
like the doll, the teddy bear, or the toy horse 
represent the I. The latter, the I-class of 
objects, the little child will deal with by a 
method of dramatisation. He puts his doll 
or toy horse into situations suggested by his 
own anxiety experiences ; situations in which 
they are commended or have favour shown 
them, or situations in which they are treated 
with disfavour and possibly subjected to 
ill-treatment. Objects of the Not-I-class the 
subject will on the other hand either attempt 
19 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
to dominate or they in their turn will inspire 
him with fear. Gradually objects of the 
Not-I-elass, like the pet dog or pet cat, pass 
into the I-class and receive treatment such 
as was first directed to the toy. 
When the simplest anxiety situations are 
understood, the child will like to hear stories 
and to look at pictures. These present 
anxiety situations in the way most economical 
of trouble, and when tired of play he will 
turn to these ; Jack climbs the bean stalk 
and slays the giant for him, or as Robinson 
Crusoe cast away in the wreck he makes 
himself monarch of all he surveys. These 
are satisfying recitals of domination. The 
sad fate of the “ Babes in the Wood ” or of 
“ Red Riding Hood ” strikes a genuine note 
of fear. “ Cinderella ” occupies an inter- 
mediate place. Every story has its partic- 
ular anxiety flavour. 
Actual everyday experience rarely proceeds 
uneventfully even for the most carefully 
nurtured child. Emotional crises are en- 
countered ; these be classified under two 
heads: terror situations and temptation 
situations. 
20 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
(1) Terror situations occur when the child 
is seriously ill, or has an operation performed 
on him, or sees friends in grief or hears of 
sickness and death, or when he or another 
child is punished. 
(2) Temptation situations are those in 
which the child is unduly praised or flattered 
or when he learns about things which he 
knows are unsuitable for him, for instance 
facts of sexuality, or how pleasurable ex- 
perience of any kind may be contrived without 
the knowledge of his guardians. Temptation 
situations tend to transform themselves into 
terror situations, because of the sense of 
guilt attaching to them. 
All terror and temptation situations awaken 
anxiety and make the subject more self- 
conscious. They probably do no harm if they 
are really understood by the subject, and can 
be seen in the light of previous experience. 
To mediate anxiety knowledge to the child’s 
mind, i.e. to make him understand it, is the 
supreme task of his parents and teachers. 
8. IN THE ABSENCE OF SELF KNOWLEDGE 
THE BALANCE IN THE ANXIETY LIFE IS 
MAINTAINED MECHANICALLY. For sanity and 
21 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
health the two major determinants of the 
conceptual life, the power sense and the 
expiation tendency, must balance. This 
balance must be maintained both at the self- 
conscious level and at the dream level. 
In order that the balance be maintained 
healthfully the child’s parents and teachers 
require to mediate to him experience acquired 
in terror and temptation situations, for it 
is the ill-assimilated knowledge which these 
bring which turns the self-conscious subject 
into the conscious anxiety subject. If the 
child trusts his guardians he will put questions 
to them or make remarks, the answers to 
which should illuminate experience for him. 
When for instance a child develops a pro- 
pensity to be untruthful or boastful, or is 
afraid of the dark, or asks where babies come 
from, the time is ripe for the parents to find 
out what he means and to give him genuine 
knowledge according to his need. 
It is a mistake to give more information 
than is asked for, as that creates a new 
situation, and it is probably much better not 
to encourage precocity in a child. But it 
is a worse mistake to reprove a child or to 
22 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
ridicule him, or to turn his questions aside. 
In treating temptation situations a child 
should be taught to be humbly thankful for 
any gift of Nature which he may possess, 
good looks, strength and activity of body, 
or intellectual capacity ; in regard to his 
fears he should be assisted to understand 
whatever can be made intelligible. In the 
absence of assistance from the grown-ups, 
depression and exultation will tend to a bal- 
ance on mechanical lines, i.e. the temptation 
subject will be devoured by fears of detection 
and shame, the terror subject will seek 
compensatory satisfaction probably in phan- 
tasy. Both subjects may become unduly 
self-conscious. The racial habit is to forget 
what is painful, but anxiety experience is 
never forgotten, it is only repressed. 
In adolescence a further development of 
the anxiety life occurs. We see in the lower 
animals, especially at the breeding season, 
conspicuous changes in colouring and form, 
together with corresponding mental changes 
such as increased courage and exhibitions 
of solicitude for young and mate. In the 
animal subject these vital changes remain 
23 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
dependent on physiological states. In man 
the secondary sex characters reveal themselves 
in due course as in animals. The maturing 
of the generative organs which supplies new 
physical energy brings a fresh influx of 
energy no less into the conceptual life. For 
the adolescent new worlds of activity lie 
open because of the new power sense. But 
power must be balanced by expiation, and our 
adolescent generally becomes not only more 
capable but also generally more earnest if 
not serious. In this situation of strain it is 
not uncommon for a psycho-neurosis to be 
organised. The balance is secured by the 
automatic resuscitation in the conceptual 
apparatus of bye-gone terror situations. 
Hence whipping and other cruelty and suffer- 
ing phantasies arise in the anxiety subject.1 
The words of the Wise Man are apposite : 
“ Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth ; and 
let thine heart cheer thee in the days of thy 
youth but know thou, that for all these 
things God will bring thee into judgment.” * 
By resuscitating terror situations, the God- 
1These are known as sadistic and masochistic phantasies. 
iEccl. XI., 9. 
24 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
principle within brings the conceptual subject 
into judgment. Resuscitated terror-situ- 
ations perform for the adolescent the same 
service as was rendered to the triumphing 
Roman general by the slave standing by his 
side in the triumphal car, who whispered at 
intervals in his ear : “ Memento mori ! ” 
In primitive races initiation rites provide the 
terror element which balances the rising tide 
of power in savage youth. 
25 CHAPTER II 
SYMBOLISM 
i. THE PROBLEM FOR THE HUMAN MIND. 
The problem for the human subject is to 
harmonise reality as it presents itself to him 
as conceptual subject and reality as it presents 
itself to him as perceptual subject.1 
It must never be forgotten that reality for 
the perceptual subject is a symbol of reality 
for the conceptual subject. Paul, a 
supremely great conceptual subject, gives a 
forcible warning against confusing the two 
classes of reality when he says : The letter 
killeth but the spirit giveth life? 
A letter is obviously a symbol. Letters 
when first invented must have seemed mys- 
1 *' Through conscious evolution, having clearly before us 
and above us the Best towards which we tend, we must har- 
monise as far as in us lies the Actual with the Best, only thus 
is there any hope for the success of conscious evolution . . 
for progress.” 
Harmonism and Conscious Evolution : Sir Charles Walston. 
a 2 Cor., Ill, 6. 
26 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
terious and sacred. The Jews, when finally 
deciding which sacred books should con- 
stitute their canon, counted not only the 
words but the very letters which they con- 
tained ; they would admit no more and 
would allow no less even if the sense was 
obscure. A valuable practical end was 
served, for hereby the text was kept intact; 
but the attitude of mind easily degenerated 
into worship of the letter to the neglect of 
the meaning (spirit). To express conceptual 
reality which is capable of being more and 
more fully understood as the human race 
advances, symbols must be sufficiently flexible. 
Spirit outgrows the symbol.—Tennyson speaks 
of the “ one good custom ” which may 
“ corrupt the world.” 
There is very much to be said about symbols 
and symbolism, but first we must realise how 
prone we are to neglect the things which are 
reality for the conceptual subject, in favour 
of those which are reality for the perceptual 
subject. In school for instance children are 
taught to read and write, to count and draw, 
to observe natural facts and to inform them- 
selves about the doings of individuals and 
27 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
nations. Everything that can be known 
about phenomena is taught, and it is taught 
as an end in itself. The higher class of reality 
is left out or taught only in relation to religion 
which makes it remote. If we want to make 
a child happy we give him something concrete. 
We have contrived few methods for teaching 
him that the purpose of the gift is, not that 
he should possess a certain object, but that 
he should experience joy. Hence he con- 
ceives that possession is an end in itself and 
covets the property of others while he resents 
the spoiling or withdrawing of his own. 
Mainly we teach children about conceptual 
realities negatively ; we teach nothing about 
truth but punish for disregard of truth. 
It is small wonder that the average child 
grows up to regard perceptual reality as an 
end in itself and reads only materialistic 
values into such words as success and 
knowledge; words which are applicable 
to advance both as regards conceptual and 
perceptual realities. What the exact place 
and meaning of conceptual realities may be 
remains for him a matter vague and 
speculative. 
28 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
2. DISCUSSION OF THE TERM REALITY : 
REALITY FOR THE PERCEPTUAL SUBJECT IS 
NOT THE SAME THING AS REALITY FOR THE 
CONCEPTUAL SUBJECT. Confusion arises as 
to what are the most desirable objects 
of interest. The subject hears different 
opinions expressed and sees different people 
aiming at many different purposes. One of 
his school friends may have entered business 
and apparently be about to do all he possibly 
can to amass wealth, another may have 
entered one of the learned professions, a 
third may have no wish to “ get on ” as it 
is called, and may have become a slum 
missioner or be content with a small salary 
and a suburban garden. 
We have to ask ourselves what we mean 
by reality. The word reality is from the 
Latin res which means thing ; when therefore 
we ask ; what is reality ? we mean, what is 
the thing ? 
Now realities for the perceptual subject 
are in the first place food, sex-object, shelter, 
harmful agent. Such things are perceived ; 
knowledge of them comes through the 
channels of sense; sight, touch, hearing, 
29 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
smell, etc. They produce in the subject’s 
organism states of satisfaction or dissatis- 
faction. Pain, hunger, and physical satis- 
faction are therefore also realities for the 
perceptual subject. But these things are not 
realities for the conceptual subject. Realities 
for him are love, joy, beauty, etc., things 
which are not tangible or visible and which 
to a mature conceptual subject do not vanish 
if the body is unsatisfied as regards food or 
sleep or even if racked with pain. These 
realities are conceived. The little child, how- 
ever well provided with food and other 
material good things, cannot dispense with 
that something else which enters into the 
solicitous care of the human parent. Love, 
mutual understanding, self-expression, being 
forgiven, must enter into a child’s experience 
or he will grow up impoverished as a con- 
ceptual subject. 
The multiplicity of human needs explains 
how it comes about that the word reality 
is used in two almost opposite senses as 
any dictionary will show. The practical 
person says of a thing that it is real when he 
can see and handle it. He means that it is 
30 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
not a figment of the imagination but has 
objective existence. Again, persons speaking 
as conceptual subjects will say of goodness 
and beauty that they are realities, and 
philosophy institutes enquiries as to what 
ultimate or absolute reality may be. Objects 
of sense it is observed are perishable ; they 
are phenomena, i.e. appearances (from Greek 
phaino, to appear) ; they come and go and 
others like them take their place. What, 
it is asked, is the reality behind this 
multiplicity of detail, the reality which sur- 
vives ? 
It must never be forgotten that every 
human being is both a perceptual and a 
conceptual subject and in both capacities 
requires to be satisfied. 
3. SYMBOLISM: WHAT IT is. A habit of 
human life is to take objects of sense 
which the perceptual subject craves and to 
make them into vehicles for realities for the 
conceptual life. There is a whole range of 
human experience to which there will be at 
first no names properly belonging ; behind 
the child’s active little hands, feet, and tongue 
is a self which acts and speaks—a thinking, 
31 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
feeling, self, a self made up of thoughts and 
purposes. This is the conceptual subject. 
The conceptual subject expresses his love 
purpose by offering gifts and rendering free 
service. Fear in him dictates a similar 
procedure. 
Perceptual vehicles of the thought-life 
are called symbols. The word symbol means 
putting together. Of the two things which 
a symbol puts together, one is known through 
the senses and the other is in the first place 
an experience of the inner self-life, in which 
the subject feels and thinks. Symbolism, in fact, 
is a habit of the conceptual life originating in 
the pre-language period for the purposes of 
anxiety. Dr. Jung’s theory of symbolism 
supports this point of view. He says “ Symbol- 
ism is the language of the dream.” (The 
italics are introduced). 
Perceptual experience is relatively familiar 
to man. He is the descendant of a long line 
of animal ancestors which have inhabited 
this globe before him. Through long ages 
of organic experience living creatures have 
become adapted to their environment. They 
have made themselves at home and have 
32 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
contrived to arrange a modus vivendi with 
other species in their neighbourhood. As 
every higher species has evolved this modus 
vivendi has been on the whole more and more 
profitable for the newcomer. 
As a conceptual subject man has had to 
create a new world. New urgent needs require 
a new channel of expression and this is found 
in the employment of gestures and sounds. 
Anxiety experience is still expressed in this 
way by the helpless infant—infant meaning 
one who cannot speak. Gesture produces 
art, gesture and sound produce language. 
Both art and language are the outcome of 
that dramatisation of anxiety experience with 
which we are familiar in the play of little 
children, and in the drama itself which is 
the primitive anxiety play of grown-ups. 
Pictorial art by transferring gesture to a 
surface renders it more permanent. The 
leading principle in all is that which we still 
witness regulating the conceptual habits of 
children, for whom the turkey (formidable 
beast !) is the gobble-gobble and riding on 
Daddy’s knee (delicious experience !) is to go 
galloppy-galloppy. Of such gestures and 
33 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
sounds, some represent objects familiar to 
perceptual experience masquerading either 
as the I or the Not-I, and others again 
give the idea of what these do or suffer. 
Joy dictates the achievements of power, 
grief and fear dictate expression of the 
demands of expiation. It is always his 
own dominance and his own defeat which 
are ultimately in the mind of the concep- 
tual subject. At first the baby subject 
speaks alike of himself and others in the 
third person. 
4. FOR PROGRESS IN BOTH DIRECTIONS 
PERCEPTUAL AND CONCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE 
ARE DEPENDENT ON ONE ANOTHER. It is 
obvious that conceptual experience up to 
a point depends on perceptual experience, 
beyond that point conceptual experience to 
have increasing educative value requires con- 
tact between minds rich in conceptual 
insight. Otherwise the subject of all ages 
unless unusually endowed wastes himself in 
the repetition of primitive anxiety situations. 
He reads only sensational literature and 
makes a poor ally or adversary in the great 
game of life as well as in the employment of 
34 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
his leisure. Interest for him passes contin- 
ually from power to expiation and back again 
to power, machine-wise, like the shuttle in 
the primitive loom. 
Perceptual life in the meanwhile gains 
unlimitedly through the human anxiety habit. 
On reflection we see how this comes about. 
Let us compare the interest in a doll of a 
baby-subject and a puppy-subject. For the 
puppy the doll is always an object; he seizes 
it, shakes it, and tears it, reacting to it as his 
canine ancestors have, from time immemorial, 
reacted to rats and similar small quadrupeds. 
Here his interest ceases. For the child on 
the other hand the doll is the self; his 
attitude towards it is what is called subjective 
and by the fact of this subjective attitude 
the child’s interest in, and knowledge of the 
doll will not remain stationary. He will 
observe the details of the doll’s appearance ; 
he will take notice of the colour of its hair 
eyes and cheeks. He may institute a com- 
parison between fair and dark-haired dolls 
and perhaps prefer one kind to the other. 
His aesthetic judgment or as we say his taste, 
which will be formed in the process, will in 
35 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
all likelihood involve a moral idea. An 
analysis subject confided to me how for 
years she laboured under the idea that all 
dark people must be wicked, or at least were 
thought to be so and what pain this caused 
her as her own complexion was brunette. 
From observing these particulars which con- 
cern the doll immediately, the child’s interest 
passes on to the washing dressing and feeding 
of his doll, and thence to the articles of 
clothing and diet themselves and the methods 
of preparing these for use, such as sewing 
and cooking. 
We often hear people talk of a supposed 
opposition existing between the life of Reason 
and the life of Feeling, but this arbitrary 
distinction arises from a lack of knowledge 
of the fundamental facts of the psychology 
of self-consciousness. It is self-consciousness 
which initiates the interest out of which 
Reason springs, together with all the logical 
mechanisms. They grow out of the child’s 
dramatic interest in his environment as I 
have in the above slight sketch attempted 
to show. The subjective attitude leads the 
subject to acquaint himself with all the 
36 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
fundamentals of logic ; knowledge of terms, 
of subject and predicate, of proposition or 
judgment-forming and of the difference 
between universals and particulars. 
There is one most important topic in logic 
which must not be overlooked and that is an 
understanding of what is meant by cause and 
effect. “ Here,” thinks the advocate of the 
argument Reason v. Feeling, “ there is no 
common ground, no point of union.” He is 
mistaken however ; knowledge of cause and 
effect, like every higher endowment of the 
human mind, is a contribution from the 
anxiety preoccupation. We have considered 
the shuttle-like interplay of power situations 
and expiation-situations. It is a common- 
place in the fairy tale, where it is always the 
youngest, poorest, and humblest who turns 
out to be the fairy prince, and contrariwise 
it is always the oldest, most highly favoured 
by fortune and proudest—like the proud sisters 
in the Cinderella story—who comes to grief. 
The perpetual shuttle-like change from power 
to expiation and from expiation to power 
has impressed on the human mind the great 
fact of the causal nexus. Only by degrees 
37 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
and with dawning perception of finer differ- 
ences did phenomena, supposed by primitive 
man to be related as cause and effect, come 
to be understood as related by sequence only. 
The great philosopher Hume has tried to 
shake the theory of causation altogether. 
It was Professor Freud in his wonderful 
analysis of the dream work who first pointed 
out that the logical relation expressed by the 
word because is observable in the dream.1 
Now let us look at the other side of the 
shield. It was noticed that aesthetic and 
moral predilections tend to creep into the 
primitive man’s conception of perceptual 
facts. The poor young lady, the analysis- 
subject referred to on page 36, was harassed 
because her complexion was dark. She must 
therefore be bad. Similarly in the fairy tale 
the favoured sisters must be bad; the poor 
and despised must be good. But the lessons 
of perceptual experience return and help the 
unfolding of conceptual experience. The 
child may observe that the fair-complexioned 
are not always good nor the dark-complex- 
ioned bad ; the rich may be humble, the poor 
1 Interpretation of Dreams, 3rd Edition, p. 292. 
38 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
proud. For the conceptual series of values 
a fresh standard of comparison must therefore 
be sought in perceptual experience. 
A standard of comparison between per- 
ceptual and conceptual values is called 
analogy ; it is upon analogy that con- 
ceptual knowledge is dependent. Observa- 
tion supplies a whole series of values for each 
of the words good and bad ; bad animals 
aie the sly fox, the thieving jackdaw, the 
vain peacock ; good animals are the gentle 
sheep, the faithful dog. 
As knowledge of the physical world enlarges, 
so in general does the knowledge of the inner 
life. The races for whom the starry heavens 
were a hollow sphere, on which were fixed 
the constellations, revolving round the earth 
we inhabit, had the idea that the gods were 
petty emotional beings like man: but 
oriental races who inhabit the desert solitudes 
have formed another idea of God ; while the 
telescope bringing new knowledge of vast 
interstellar spaces has just as surely modified 
the concept of deity for the Westerner 
of to-day- 
Above a certain level of superstition con- 
39 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
ceptual values spread themselves over every 
object encountered in physical experience, 
and these having once arrested the attention 
lend themselves to exploitation by man as the 
perceptual subject. 
Through the analogical habit of mind and 
through knowledge of the causal nexus which 
dawns through the mechanical shuttle-like 
interplay of power and expiation, man, the 
supreme perceptual subject, has constructed 
a most valuable mind function which he calls 
REASON and which has from the perceptual 
point of view secured for him mastery of this 
globe. 
The mature conceptual subject will not 
undervalue Reason as a discipline in the 
conceptual life. Applicable in a high degree 
to the conceptual life Reason provides a 
mechanism by which Man passes from a 
stage of the conceptual life in which he is 
alone, to one in which other conceptual beings 
are accessible to him, and form part of a 
conceptual universe. In psychology the pro- 
cess of going out from a conceptual solitude 
which we call phantasy to a group conceptual 
life is known as projection. Projection 
40 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
together with the reciprocal process of intro- 
jection will be considered later. 
Every conceivable object and process known 
to the perceptual subject is capable of being 
impressed for service in the dream. There 
it is used to express some aspect of the hopes 
and fears and problems of the conceptual 
subject. None the less the obviously genuine 
interpretation of the dream is the subjective 
one, there is no projection at this level. Of 
all perceptual interests that one which seems 
most significant is sexuality male and 
female. Sexual knowledge and sexual experi- 
ence have the highest degree of symbolic 
efficacy. The other great bodily function, 
nutrition—with its complement elimination— 
is a close rival, but sexuality supplies most of 
the imagery for the two great objects ever 
before the conceptual subject; Life and Death 
or Love and Hate. Hence ancient symbols 
for sexuality itself are the cross and the cross 
roads, the meaning being that in the sexual 
life the ways of Life and of Death part. 
5. SEXUALITY THE FIRST, LAST, AND 
GREATEST SYMBOL FOR THE CONCEPTUAL 
OR SELF-CONSCIOUS SUBJECT. Professor Freud 
41 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
is undoubtedly right in assigning a most 
important place to sexuality in all dream 
psychology. A very large proportion of 
the imagery of the dream can be analysed 
into some aspect of this biologic function, 
and symbolism expressed in symptoms and 
automatic actions follows the same lines. 
Again Professor Freud points out that the 
sex-life of the psycho-neurotic is invariably 
disturbed and this again is no less true. 
The limitation of the Freudian hypothesis is 
that it stops short here and assumes that 
sexuality per se is what the dream subject 
is preoccupied with. That it is not in sexu- 
ality itself but in sexuality as a symbol that the 
dream subject is interested is the true inter- 
pretation of this preoccupation. This is the 
cardinal error of Freudian psychology and 
it arises from the confusion between con- 
sciousness and self-consciousness. 
The human subject being both a perceptual 
and a conceptual subject a common mean is 
required to bring his interests into focus ; 
this is supplied by the developing sex instinct. 
The sex instinct is always the mechanism for 
the overflow of individual energy into racial 
42 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
serviceability. It is the starting point of 
discontinuous growth, of which the first 
example is the offspring. Through milk glands 
and other structures, psychology manipulates 
this mechanism (sexuality) even at the stage of 
animal life for the furtherance of cultural 
interests directed in the first instance to 
the nurture of the offspring, as Dr Jung1 has 
pointed out. Below man interest rises little 
above the biologic, but in man a special 
psychological mechanism—the dream mechan- 
ism — has been evolved to achieve an 
appreciation of values far removed from the 
biological, and one of its chief symbols or 
conceptual vehicles is the sexual function. 
This is not surprising as the energy is probably 
to a large extent supplied by hormones of 
testicular and ovarian origin. 
Sex-preoccupation—or, as it is commonly 
expressed, sexuality, (see sexuality in Glossarial 
Index No. i.)—so desirable as such at the 
proper season to the perceptual subject, is 
always, and in a high degree, feared by the 
conceptual subject. Against sexuality there is 
erected a psychological compensating coun- 
x Psychology of the Unconscious (Kegan Paul), p. 149. 
43 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
terforce supplied from some other source. 
Can this source, physiologically speaking, 
be those elements in the Endocrine System 
which are associated with the emotion of 
fear ? Psychologically, the mechanisms of 
self-consciousness provide the emergence of 
two determinants. In this little treatise 
these two are called respectively the power 
sense and the expiation tendency ; these 
are normally in a state of unstable equi- 
librium. On the one hand the dream 
subject appears as the conscious possessor 
of physical life which is infinitely precious 
to him, and on the other hand he is intensely 
alive to the contingency of death and mishap 
in a thousand shapes, and seems haunted by 
the notion that there are other and higher 
life values besides physical ones for which 
he is willing to surrender the latter. 
It is impossible to believe that this intricate 
mechanism has been constructed by repressed 
sexuality for its own purposes ! Sexuality 
technically does not exist in infancy, though 
it does in the wider sense of self-indulgence, 
and that is how Professor Freud rightly 
interprets infantile sexuality. Self-indulgence 
44 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
in my opinion is the power sense, i.e. the will 
to live, the will to power, to have one’s own 
way and one's own desires satisfied. 
The theory here put forward is that sexu- 
ality, a most insistent natural appetite, is 
adapted psychologically for the raising of 
energy from the perceptual to the conceptual 
level, and for the sustaining of the preoccu- 
pation of the subject with the higher psychic 
values. 
Sexuality lends itself readily as a symbol 
to conceptual values of the positive kind. 
Those virtues which nourish the spiritual 
life ; love, mutual interest, and understanding, 
are obviously the benefits which family life 
is capable of conferring. Evolution, which 
has built up family life, has imported into 
sexuality as symbolism the opposite set of 
values, the negative ones, those namely of 
spiritual death ; hate, and fear in a new 
guise called shame. 
In the self-conscious or conceptual life 
self-love is everywhere set over against love 
projected. Self-love is the way of self des- 
truction ; it is indulgence without accompani- 
ment of responsibility. It includes prostitution 
45 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
and misuse of the sexual function of every kind. 
On the other hand legitimate sexuality 
implies a giving up of the self, of the rights 
over one’s own body for procreation, and of 
one’s powers generally for social service. 
It therefore also stirs fear, though spiritual 
satisfaction attends its consummation. 
Sexuality therefore is feared in every form 
and guise even when legitimate. For modern 
man all sexual preoccupation except for 
the pui poses of procreation is taboo at the 
dream level. The recent movement in the 
direction of breaking down this sweeping 
prohibition in self-consciousness is a very 
dubious one. 
It is easy to see how these varying values of 
different sexual relations have been stamped 
in in the course of human history. Legitimate 
marital union is enjoined as a necessary part 
of a religious and social duty, and in some 
cultures happiness in a future state depends 
on a son performing his part in the funeral 
ceremonial. On the other hand in illegitimate 
unions for one or both of the guilty partners 
the penalty is death. 
46 CHAPTER III 
THE LIFE FORCE AT THE PERCEPTUAL 
AND CONCEPTUAL LEVELS 
i. THE LIFE FORCE AT THE PERCEPTUAL 
level. The greatest of all matters of specu- 
lation is Life itself. Life obviously obeys 
law, and to such an extent is this true that 
some observers are content with the ex- 
planation that living organisms are machines— 
whatever they mean by that, for it seems an 
explanation which in closer examination 
hardly hits the mark ; it is so obvious as far 
as it goes and at the same time is only a 
half-truth. 
Language which is only able to express 
conceptual realities by symbols borrowed 
from perceptual experience first embodies 
the idea that the life-principle is wind ; wind 
is the root meaning of words which are 
generally used to express the idea of mind ; 
spiritus in Latin and ruach in Hebrew. 
Wind it may be observed is for primitive 
47 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
man an important force. In his first engineer- 
ing efforts he employs wind and water to turn 
his primitive machinery. As water is alto- 
gether too ponderous to express the idea of 
mind, wind is adopted to symbolise this 
fundamental conceptual reality. 
Mind or life is certainly more like a force 
than anything else that we know. like wind 
it does work, but on the other hand it has no 
weight, it is an imponderable. Therefore 
at the outset the analogy of wind breaks down, 
for the atmosphere has weight. 
As human experience advances other 
analogies suggest themselves. The one which 
language favours, the perceptual reality being 
striking and easy of study for every human 
subject, is light. Very many of our words 
which express ideas about mind are borrowed 
from the language of light and vision. We 
talk of seeing, of having insight, of being 
blind or purblind, of introspection, of 
imagination, of reflection. The word intuition 
is also derived from a Latin wTord meaning 
to see. 
Life is comparable to more than one kind 
of force. And for the moment I am going to 
48 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
compare it with electricity. Electricity has 
only been studied seriously within the last 
few generations. Until this was done man’s 
knowledge of electricity was restricted to its 
manifestations in atmospheric disturbances, 
and these he interpreted on animistic lines, i.e. 
he attributed them to an immediate Will- 
principle such as he knows in himself. 
Let us for a moment think of the life-force 
as comparable with the force we now know 
as electricity. The life-force is present and 
active in every living organism however small 
and humble, or however large and dominant, 
in every blade of grass as in every forest tree, 
and in the tiniest insect as well as in the 
lion or the elephant. So electricity is every- 
where ; every particle of matter has its 
charge. 
Comparatively recently man has studied 
electricity and by mastering its laws has 
learnt to control it; for this purpose he has 
discovered that certain apparatus is necessary. 
Electricity is “ generated ” by disposing 
particular objects in a particular relation to 
one another ; by providing special apparatus 
the force is induced to pass current-wise 
49 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
along a prescribed channel, without getting 
" earthed,” i.e. escaping back to the great 
pool of force outside control. When the 
student of physical law first began to put 
apparatus together, this apparatus was of 
so trifling a nature that his friends must have 
been amused. His experiments were like 
parlour tricks. He rubbed rods of glass and 
ebony and small pieces of amber, (whence the 
name of electricity derived from the word 
electron wrhich is the Greek for amber), with 
cat’s fur and woollen cloth. Gradually more 
apparatus was invented, and to-day we see 
what the electrician can do through the right 
application of the force he has learnt to 
control. Electricity is used to light towns 
and heat buildings ; to send messages, to 
reproduce sounds and to provide power on 
a large scale. 
The life-force too is presumably every- 
where, but, for the application of its energy, 
at any rate on this globe, it too requires 
apparatus. But the life-force knows what 
it is about to the extent of making its own 
apparatus. Its unit apparatus is the pro- 
toplasmic cell. It takes atoms of carbon, 
50 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
hydrogen, etc., and works them up, we know 
not how, into well-distinguishable forms ex- 
hibiting all the main characteristics of organic 
life: food-taking, elimination of waste, 
self reproduction, movement, memory, dis- 
crimination. Examples of this little unit 
apparatus exist as independent organisms in 
their millions, and can be studied by any one 
who will secure a little drop of pond water 
and who can make use of a microscope. 
Some of them are singularly beautiful and 
flowerlike. But these organisms are like the 
parlour tricks of the electrician ; the life- 
force does not stop at them, it goes on building 
more elaborate apparatus. First it puts 
the cells together, and makes colonial forms ; 
then follow “ higher ” multicellular organ- 
isms, still composed of multitudes of cells 
related not only by cohesion but by functional 
interdependence accompanied by structural 
differentiation. Bones, muscles, eyes and 
ears are all apparatus of the life-force and 
while every living cell of an animal’s body 
may be considered an independent organism, 
with its own life-history and its special 
function, the animal has over and above a 
51 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
personality which controls the whole. This 
is the perceptual subject and there are 
perceptual subjects of every level of develop- 
ment from a jelly fish upwards. 
Everyone should be taught something about 
the wonderful apparatus which the life- 
force has successively built. The study of 
biology, regarded from the higher levels of 
thought, must furnish valuable contributions 
to our knowledge of the mysteries of the 
life-force. 
2. AT THE CONCEPTUAL LEVEL A PORTION 
OF THE LIFE FORCE BECOMES SELF-CONSCIOUS. 
IT FIRST SEEKS TO EXPRESS ITSELF IN TERMS 
OF power. At a certain stage in its self- 
manifestation the life - force as we have 
already seen becomes self-conscious. This 
is an immense fact the full implications of 
which we are still far from understanding. 
It is only experience and impartial recording 
and collating of experience by the logical 
methods which reason furnishes, which 
will enable us to come to any satisfactory 
decisions on all the important problems 
involved. 
52 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Every force is an agent for achieving 
something. It is synonymous with power. 
Man therefore being more at home on this 
globe as a perceptual subject than as a con- 
ceptual subject owing to his long line of 
animal forebears, with the dawning of self- 
consciousness expects confidently to function 
as a power subject in respect to the immediate 
situations. Force majeure is his ideal. He 
desires to apply this force himself. Develop- 
ing self-consciousness brings many attitudes 
of mind which appear like illusions to succeed- 
ing observers. At different stages opinion 
sways backwards and forwards in regard to 
some of these attitudes of mind. In the first 
place there is the attitude of mind which we 
express in the word will. That the first 
conception of the will was that of free- 
will is implied, it would seem, in primitive 
man’s animistic attitude of mind. 
Primitive man attributes to all things in 
which force manifests a will principle such as 
he believes he finds in himself. A train would 
be still to such people an insoluble mystery 
presumably. It runs itself. I still recall my 
first impression of a brightly lighted electric 
53 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
tramcar ; for all my elementary knowledge 
of mechanics and of the genesis of such 
machines, the primitive in me was impressed 
and named it forthwith “ Shining Monster." 
It is not difficult to see how the primitive 
conceptual subject may become a believer 
in free-will. For self-consciousness, awareness 
of the self as an agent easily gives the illusion. 
So a little child, conscious of the desire to 
exercise his powers, may have the illusion 
that he is moving an object which really 
Father or Mother is pushing from behind him. 
As man comes to know that phenomena 
happen according to law, as effects of causes, 
the doctrine of free-will breaks down, and he 
adopts a doctrine exactly opposite called 
determinism. 
We are still in a puzzledom about the will ; 
the idea of the will as free is a doctrine which 
is far from being extinct. The truth may be 
that man's attitude of mind is more helpful 
than his actual activities. While he cannot 
really permanently disturb cosmic happen- 
ings, even in his own economy (the wind— 
spirit—bloweth where it listeth), man may 
perhaps hinder as a meddlesome child might, 
54 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
or help as an intelligent and docile child might, 
the happenings in his immediate neighbour- 
hood. This middle doctrine is variously 
expressed.1 
As is his doctrine of the will, so is the whole 
conceptual subject’s outlook, whether he 
know it or not. All unconsciously the rank 
and file of mankind, especially in the West, 
still hold the doctrine of free-will. This is as 
good as saying that mankind is extremely 
immature in the conceptual life but capable 
of learning. The man who is confident, i.e. 
who assumes that he possesses free-will, is 
in a better position than the acquiescent 
determinist whose attitude to Life problems 
is prematurely “ sickbed o’er with the pale 
cast of thought.” 
The free-will doctrine implies a power- 
subject, actual or would-be. The perceptual 
power-subject manipulates matter, he domin- 
ates and enjoys, he creates and destroys. 
These are things which the conceptual subject 
cannot do immediately. Instinct and in- 
telligence are the mechanisms by which the 
1 Prof. Wm. James has an interesting essay on the Will published 
in a volume of essays called The Will to Believe and other Essays. 
55 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
life-force as we know it manifests immediately. 
The rank and file of mankind in self-con- 
sciousness give the impression of being willing 
to carry on the traditions of their sub-human 
ancestors, i.e. they seem anxious to forget 
some of the bearings of the conceptual life, 
and to devote the enhanced mental powers 
which accrue from it to experience on this 
globe only. Even the best among mankind, 
those for whom the immense possibilities 
implied in the fact that the life-principle 
has in us become self-conscious as a living 
reality, are often reluctant to pursue an 
impartial investigation of the problems of 
the human mind. Fear in some form is the 
deterrent. Fear in this sense is an attitude 
of mind to which in the Freudian theory 
the name resistance is applied. One of 
the unfortunate results of the confusion 
between consciousness and self-consciousness 
is that Professor Freud’s doctrine of the 
resistance is most poorly understood and 
improperly handled in psychological practice. 
Everywhere in human experience the lure of 
power holds the teachers of mankind from 
impartial enquiry, while fear shuts the door 
56 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
behind. Every conceptual advance is now 
as ever left to the prophets ; those who have 
passed fear like the poets Milton, Dante, and 
Browning, and the artist Watts ; or those 
who, still obsessed by fear, swell the ranks 
of the minor poets. 
3. THE ANALOGY OF the eye. Reference 
has been made to the fact that language 
has long sanctioned the comparison between 
the manifestations of the Life-force and 
those of light. To see, or have insight, to 
be blind, to imagine (i.e. to form a picture), 
to introspect, to reflect, all these and many 
other words bear this statement out. Many 
superstitions, as for instance those of the 
Evil Eye, belong to the same analogy. The 
dream supports it also ; it has a well matured 
doctrine of the Eye as the channel of self- 
consciousness. Presumably the portion of 
the life-force become suddenly self-conscious 
provides a newr focus of vivid psychic activity 
which easily suggests the physical eye. In 
the Creation Story the fiat goes forth “ Let 
there be light ”1 and in our reading of this 
noble piece of Wisdom literature the light 
1 Genesis I, 3. 
57 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
referred to is to be understood as self-con- 
sciousness. Jesus uses the same analogy : 
“ The light of the body is the eye.”1 Indeed 
literature and language, great vehicles for 
harmonising perceptual and conceptual ex- 
perience to the advancement of both, are full 
of the fundamental symbolism of vision 
applied to human habits of thought. 
Forces are convertible. To manifest as 
light a strong current of electricity must be 
passed through a very fine wire. Psychologi- 
cally speaking this situation is provided for 
the life-force. The infant in the period of 
sensori - motor inco-ordination is subjected 
to many kinds of emotional experience which 
he cannot abreact. Fear in the perceptual 
subject motivates running away that “ he 
may live to fight another day.” But the 
infant cannot run away, he cannot flee from 
the source of danger which threatens him ; 
emotions which as the name implies should 
produce “ movement ” can only work them- 
selves off in fruitless cries and tears. 
The eye conceptually speaking is evolved 
in the inter-action between the life-force and 
1 St. Matthew VI, 22. 
58 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
experience. It is just in this way that the 
physical eye has evolved. Let the analogy 
be changed; let us say that experience 
provides the prism which disperses the ray 
of the life-force. 
At one end of the spectrum is fear, at the 
other the positive life-urge which in this little 
treatise is called power. Did we wish to 
push the analogy further, we might include 
the idea that the cortical layers of the 
human brain which are latest in developing 
provide the collimator through which, as 
in experiments on dispersion of light, the 
life-force passes to the reflecting medium, 
experience. 
4. THE INTROSPECTIVE HABIT OF THE 
conceptual subject. Self-consciousness acts 
in a manner which is in most respects 
the reverse of consciousness. Consciousness 
rivets the subject’s attention on the things 
outside ; self-consciousness calls his attention 
to the things inside. He is spectator of his 
own states of mind, and these are in the first 
instance awakened by external stimuli. They 
are fear, hate, jealousy, love-hunger. This 
strange new absorbing experience would be 
59 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
overwhelming were it not for the larger group 
self-consciousness in which every conceptual 
subject must at first take refuge, and in the 
shelter of which the average subject ever 
remains. Cut and dried formulae which 
explain experience, promote control, and 
counter an undue introspection habit, are 
presented. The child is told that he is jealous 
or angry or self-satisfied. It is prescribed to 
him how it is appropriate to react; he should 
feel this way or that—sorry, grateful, ashamed, 
pleased. If he looks on at anything painful 
apparently unmoved or takes his pleasure 
seriously it is supposed that he does not feel ! 
Fables and stories with a moral which were 
invented by old men long ago are recited to 
him and their interpretation supplied. In 
other words it is realised that emotional 
experience must be organised in order that 
man may become effective as a self-conscious 
subject. This is Wisdom teaching and litera- 
ture of this class is properly called Wisdom 
Literature. How much a subject takes or 
leaves of all this Wisdom teaching depends 
on an inner individual factor. Most accept 
it with every degree of acquiescence ; some 
60 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
reject it with every degree of resentment. 
Wisdom teaching in nursery and schoolroom 
and indeed all through life, is of the first 
importance. 
May we say that wisdom principles act as 
the second prism does in experiments on the 
dispersion of light, that they recombine the 
constituents of the ray into a whole ? The 
process of recombination is however never 
complete. Human character it may be said 
never emerges as perfect white light. We 
should probably all agree that it is none the 
less beautiful; the resulting variety within 
proper limits is charming and agreeable. 
Besides both processes of dispersion and re- 
organisation are progressive. Experience can 
never be exhausted : “ the eye is not filled 
with seeing nor the ear with hearing.” 
There is danger however that experience 
at formative periods of life may disperse the 
life-force too energetically. If the wisdom 
opportunities of the subject be insufficient 
for recombination, or if he is incapable of 
receiving and assimilating the appropriate 
traditional teaching, the results may be 
disastrous. Unsatisfied anxiety expresses 
61 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
itself as curiosity and exhibitionism (or 
self-display) among other phenomena. Ex- 
tremes of fear and power may escape 
and in certain circumstances enter into 
rivalry with the main body of self-conscious- 
ness, producing the subsidiary personalities 
known in morbid mental states. 
The two processess known in psychology 
as Introjection and Projection correspond 
tolerably closely to the two processes (distri- 
bution and recombination) in the prism 
analogy. Emotion appropriated through wit- 
nessing the experience of another is the sense 
in which Dr. Ferenczi uses the term intro- 
jection. But introjection includes more than 
this — it covers the appropriation of all 
experience which furnishes material for the 
conceptual life. 
Introjection and Projection cannot be 
adequately dealt with in the compass of this 
small book. They are the reciprocal processes 
by which the whole fabric of the, human 
thought-life — a vast symbol-system — is 
created. All emotion of the conceptual 
subject is induced in the subject by the 
mechanism of passive sympathy. While the 
62 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
perceptual subject reacts to the situation in 
which he encounters an agent stronger than 
himself with fear and anger, or with pleasure 
and satisfaction to one in which he encounters 
a weaker agent, the conceptual subject reflects 
the emotional states of others. At first when 
he has no names for these the conceptual 
subject labels them by coupling with them 
the actual percept which awakens them, as 
we might indicate a colour new to us by 
naming a flower, or saying “ the colour worn 
by Mrs. So-and-so.” This is introjection. 
Projection properly speaking is the going out 
from the isolation of the early stages of the 
conceptual life, by way of identification 
of the self with others, into a conceptual 
social life, in which the Ego and the Alter, 
the self and the other person, are clearly 
distinguished. In cases in which the dis- 
persed life-force has escaped the re-organising 
medium, there is no clear distinction between 
the Ego, and the Alter, and paranoia may 
result. 
5. THE ANALOGY OF THE EAR. In a less 
degree the sense of hearing is laid under 
contribution to express the relation of the 
63 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
subject to conceptual experience. We speak 
of the man with or without music in his soul, 
of turning a deaf ear to advice etc., but there 
is no word belonging to this analogy which 
can compete with the word “ see." 
The dream of a musician provides an inter- 
esting example of the analogy furnished by 
the sense of hearing. The subject dreams 
that a certain Dr. Ramsay is lecturing on 
sea shells. The savant is standing with a 
quantity of broken shells on a table before 
him and letting the fragments run between 
his fingers. 
A main line of association given in the 
analysis of this dream was to a picture by 
G. F. Watts. The picture, which the subject 
had been told represented a deliberated 
attempt at humour on the part of the painter, 
represents a child sitting on the sea shore 
holding a shell to his ear. Hereby the dreamer 
expresses the fact that he, the dreamer, is 
a conceptual subject endeavouring to catch 
the message of the life-force, as the little 
urchin listens for the music of the shell. 
As Dr. Ramsay, old in experience, he is telling 
the story of broken and discarded efforts. 
64 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
The senses of touch and smell contribute 
their share to the building up of the language 
of the conceptual life. Touch provides among 
others the all important word feeling, 
and smell such phrases as “of good (or bad) 
odour.” Smell has besides a subtle kind of 
symbolic efficacy; Rousseau calls it the 
“ sense of the imagination.” 
6. THE CONCEPTUAL LIFE IS ONE EXPRESS- 
ING ANXIETY BECAUSE IN THE FIRST INSTANCE 
THE SUBJECT IS CALLED UPON TO RELINQUISH 
THE PRINCIPLE OF POWER AND TO ACCEPT 
THE PRINCIPLE OF EXPIATION. What, we 
may ask, is the message of the shell ? 
In one word it is anxiety. Humanity is 
always trying to forget anxiety claims, desir- 
ing to reap the benefits while forgetting 
the meaning of the conceptual life. In the 
dream it is never forgotten. On the one hand 
is the consciousness of power ; an urgent 
need to gratify the self, an insistent desire 
still to function, even in the conceptual life, 
like an animal, i.e. as a power-machine; 
to kill, to build, to devise leisure entertain- 
ments, to lay up money and secure powerful 
friends in order to do these things. On the 
65 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
other hand what ? In the first place is fear— 
fear instilled by the knowledge that this 
life is all too short, and that we are after all 
the life-principle become self-conscious : 
“ For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, 
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, 
Must give us pause: ” 
says Hamlet, the most consummate picture 
of the anxiety subject ever drawn. This 
question is ever behind the dream. It is the 
same problem as has given rise to all forms of 
religions, the most elevating as well as the 
most degraded and superstitious. In other 
words the conceptual subject’s problem is 
the problem of the relation of the individual 
to the Not-I and especially to the Life- 
Principle conceived as a whole. 
But the dream expresses more than fear, it 
expresses what I have called an expiation 
tendency—a willingness to give “ the fruit 
of the body ” (the child—phallus—power) 
for the sin of the soul. It is in love with 
castration (Jewish) and with the theme of the 
crucifixion (Christian). In innumerable ways it 
gives evidence of the knowledge that here 
there is no continuing city. The body is 
66 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
described in the dream as a house, subject 
to dilapidation and decay. Life is a journey. 
The dream may be said to stage a desire for 
death as well as a fear of it. Expiation as 
well as power is in the dream what Professor 
Freud calls a “ wish-fulfilment.” 
7. EXPIATION : THE GENESIS OF THE SOUL. 
Why is anxiety the meaning of the dream 
and what is the anxiety all about ? Why 
self renunciation ? and for what ? It is a 
demand it would seem arising within the 
life-principle itself and therefore coming with 
a special claim on the attention. 
I have for many years endeavoured to listen 
to the self-communings of the dream subject 
with an unbiassed mind. In spite of the fact 
that Professor Freud’s method appealed 
strongly to my judgment, I could not always 
fit in with his theories the data presented by 
subjects, neither did the results of treatment 
always tally with expectations I had formed 
from my study of Freudian literature. Having 
decided that if symbolism is the principle 
of the dream this principle must be enforced 
with logicality and allusions to sexuality in 
the dream must not be regarded as an ex- 
67 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
ception, I have been led to conclusions 
very different from the Freudian hypothesis. 
The dream-life in fact appears to me as nothing 
more nor less than the life history of the in- 
dividual soul, a soul seeking salvation in 
relation to life in every phase but especially 
in relation to life conceived as a universal 
principle. 
A Freudian physician has said to me: 
“ We do not want to find an ethical motive 
in the dream." My rejoiner is, “ Neither did 
I ! " Nothing ever astonished me more than 
the unexpected discovery. 
Let us suppose the anxiety hypothesis to 
be proven, still it may be objected that there 
is more than one alternative explanation of 
its raison d'etre. Why for instance an esoteric 
interpretation such as is suggested in this 
book ? Dr. Adler has linked up the psycho- 
neurosis with organic insufficiency; has the 
anxiety hypothesis no relation to his doc- 
trine ? In the second place there are the 
social interests of human affairs ; the advent 
of expiation as an endopsychic factor must 
be a mechanism which advances them. Why 
look further ? 
68 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
I take the Adlerian hypothesis first. 
Practically Dr. Adler has shown that the 
power-sense is a defence against organic 
insufficiency. He argues that the psyche's 
efforts are directed to compensate the sub- 
ject’s need and that it achieves this, but not 
always with equal serviceability. The young 
Demosthenes correcting impediments in 
speech by laborious exercises becomes in 
later life the first of orators ; a lesser man 
takes refuge in the compensations of phantasy. 
Can we not assume that the fear mechanism 
is also evolved in the interests of physiology, 
but as a defence ? In this case the defence is 
against the demands of organic appetite. 
Man as a self-conscious power subject could 
not survive without an automatic control 
system to limit his ambitious activities and 
so prevent him from straining his machine 
past repair. 
It is true that there is much in the dream 
work about the physiological condition of 
the subject, much which could be used 
practically to assist the Medical Art, but 
against this the dream analyst finds that 
expiation or self-inflicted punishment is as 
69 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
much a “ wishfulfilment ” as power. The 
dream is a quite unnecessarily elaborate 
mechanism to represent physiological inter- 
ests whether for compensation or defence. 
This is in essence the same argument that I 
advanced against the Freudian sexuality 
theory. Instinct is well provided with 
mechanisms both for aggression and defence. 
The raison d'etre of every fresh constructive 
effort must involve something more than is 
amply provided for at a lower level. A new 
departure demands a new apparatus, but so 
far as is by any means possible, the great 
Artificer, whom we call Nature, by which we 
mean nothing less than the Cosmic Life- 
Principle itself, employs the means which 
are found ready to hand. Self-consciousness 
is such a new departure, and the dream, 
its new apparatus, deals not with perceptual, 
i.e. biologic values, but with conceptual 
values. Biologic values in the dream repre- 
sent abstract values for which the subject at 
the conceptual level has at first no adequate 
language. The dream subject is indifferent 
to, and indeed reckless of, all interests but 
the conceptual ones. 
70 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Now let us glance at the sociological argu- 
ment. Can it be that the conceptual appara- 
tus is an elaborate mechanism providing for 
the social or moral aspect of human affairs ? 
“ Nature,” as Mr. Trotter truly says, “ has 
been hinting to him (man) in less and less 
ambiguous terms that altruism must become 
the ultimate sanction of his moral code.”1 
In a social environment man cannot any 
longer function as a power subject merely, 
here he must learn to give as well as to take. 
Again there is much to support such a point 
of view, but again I answer that even this 
psychological purpose would be served better 
by just those mechanisms with which we 
are familiar before the advent of self-con- 
sciousness. Where members of the same 
species of the higher animals are in intimate 
association, the division of power is clearly 
arranged for. The acquiescent mate, the 
female for instance, is smaller and muscularly 
weaker than her lord, the representative of 
power ; on the other hand herd members, 
male and female, are merged as a rule 
in a similarity which strikes an average, 
1 Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, p. 124. 
71 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
—subject as a rule to the principle of 
sex already quoted. In the orthogenic 
line of evolutionary advance, the line which 
leads with the fewest deviations from the 
lowest of the apparatus devised by the life- 
force to the highest, there is a stern disregard 
of the weaker species in favour of the higher, 
up to the very point at which the self-con- 
scious expiation subject appears, he who 
in Paul’s words " became obedient unto 
death Wherefore God hath also highly 
exalted him.”1 
This is the theological doctrine of the 
Kenosis or self-emptying ; it is the conflict 
about this of which every dream exhibits 
some phase. 
It cannot be denied that the anxiety 
mechanism serves the interests of altruism 
in a very high degree, but just as the self- 
conscious apparatus conceived as guardian 
of the physiological interests appears only 
to function along the lines of this interest 
if its own purposes chance to coincide with 
those, so as guardian of the sociological 
interest it is equally a mere ally suggested 
1 Phil. II, 8, 9. 
72 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
by convenience. The anxiety hypothesis 
explains equally a deed of mercy and a 
senseless act of murder, cowardice as well 
as heroism. Anxiety is as capable of de- 
grading the conceptual subject below the 
level of the subhuman perceptual subject 
as of raising him above that level. Without 
correction from the esoteric solution, i.e. 
apart from ideal projections, the human 
subject is driven by the working of anxiety 
rather in the direction of failure than of 
success, both physiologically and sociologi- 
cally. The esoteric solution appears to pro- 
vide just the supreme control mechanism 
which adjusts the balance ; it saves from 
despair. The conceptual subject is a part 
of the life-force become self-conscious and in 
the dream he knows this. 
The more the dream subject resents the 
claims of expiation the more they haunt 
him ; the more he rebels in consciousness the 
more does the “ Hound of Heaven ” in the 
deep unconscious pursue him. 
A great wave of materialism is spreading 
through the world. The medical profession 
in the name of the natural sciences has been 
73 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
teaching mankind to think of the body more 
and more as a machine detached from the 
rest of the vital interests. This machine it 
is expected must be perpetually under repair. 
No position could be more mistaken. It is 
as unreasonable as the theory which brings 
in the medicine man to beat the devil out 
of the sick. 
Latterly the medical profession has under- 
taken on biological lines the treatment of 
the mind as a separate machine and teaches 
that the ethical motive is a sublimation. If 
the facts were as they declare, their theory 
and practice would be at variance and psycho- 
analysis or analysis of any kind could only 
be productive of harm ; the one and only 
curative method at all justifiable, were their 
hypothesis tenable, would be of the nature of 
suggestion in order to re-inforce sublimation- 
capacity. Sublimation-capacity is a great fact, 
but, if there were no fundamental ethical 
motive sublimation would provide the merest 
veneer ; there would be no heroism in human 
life, no anguish of self-giving, no renunciation. 
But this is obviously wrong. Sublimation 
is the ideal aspect of projection and the human 
74 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
mind has a fundamental barter-sense in regard 
to perceptual and conceptual values. 
A wave of materialism is a group power- 
phase. It cannot sustain itself indefinitely, 
but in order that balance may be secured it 
must be succeeded by an expiation-phase 
proportioned to it in intensity and degree. 
That the trough is proportioned to the altitude 
of the wave is a law as true in anxiety as in 
the study of the ocean. 
75 CHAPTER IV 
THE MECHANISMS OF SELF-CONSCIOUS- 
NESS ARE THE DREAM MECHANISMS 
WHICH HAVE BEEN DESCRIBED BY 
PROFESSOR FREUD 
i. THE WORD “ MECHANISM ” EXPLAINED. 
The word me’chanism is a valuable one in 
psychology and deserves a few words of 
explanation. 
A mechanism is a contrivance for diverting 
and controlling energy. The life-force or 
life-energy requires for its manifestation on 
this globe apparatus appropriate to it just 
as any other force does, light or electricity 
for instance. In the last chapter a slight 
suggestion was given of the scheme which the 
life-force has adopted of putting apparatus 
together by means of which it may disclose 
its properties and powers. “ Mechanism ” 
would be an alternative name for “ appa- 
ratus ” here. The sum of these various 
76 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
mechanisms or pieces of apparatus constitutes 
the whole of organic life. The unit apparatus 
is the cell; cells group themselves together 
variously and produce organic tissues and 
systems. 
At first the apparatus of life is very largely 
organic, i.e. the physical elements count as 
of supreme importance; at a higher level of 
the Tree of Life the mechanisms of the life- 
force become less dependent on the material 
cell life and partake more and more of the 
nature of mental habits. The herd habit for 
instance which becomes increasingly import- 
ant depends little on physical structure, 
though it has a hand in modifying it. A herd 
animal like the dog is quite capable individu- 
ally of maintaining an existence separate 
from the herd. Yet the herd instinct may be 
described as a mechanism, for it plays a great 
part in the disposition of energy. It is a 
psychological mechanism. The conceptual life 
depends on mechanisms which are mainly 
psychological, but not entirely : there are 
certain very special cell layers in the cortex 
or outer layer of the human brain, which act 
like the collimator through which a pencil 
77 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
of light passes on its way to the refracting 
medium in experiments on the dispersion of 
light. Reference has already been made to 
these. As far as bulk and weight are con- 
cerned what is specifically human depends 
on a minimum of organic structure, but 
in this trifling something is the apparatus 
of the personality which over-rules all 
the rest of the individual economy, bringing 
harmony and beauty, or disorder, disease, and 
crime. 
2. THE MECHANISMS WHICH ARE CONCERNED 
IN PRODUCING THE DREAM : THE UNCON- 
SCIOUS AND THE PRECONSCIOUS. Among all 
psychological mechanisms the most impor- 
tant are those which Professor Freud has 
described as dream mechanisms. It is these 
mechanisms which as I will attempt to 
explain are the mechanisms of the conceptual 
life. 
It must be remembered that consciousness 
represents only a portion of the mental 
activity of an individual. Dr. Stanley Hall’s 
comparison of the human mind to an iceberg 
is well known. An iceberg shows one-eighth 
of its bulk above sea level, the rest being 
78 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
submerged. The submerged part of the 
mind is termed subliminal, i.e. below the 
limen (Latin) or threshold of consciousness. 
The mechanisms concerned in the pro- 
duction of the dream are of this subliminal 
character, although the resultant dream may 
be recoverable in consciousness if the condi- 
tions are favourable. We have no reason 
to doubt that these mechanisms are incess- 
antly at work. It is hi the passage to or from 
sleep we get glimpses of their activity and we 
call these glimpses dreams. 
The dream mechanisms consist of two 
important subliminal systems : the Un- 
conscious and the Preconscious. 
The Unconscious and the Preconscious are 
two special memory systems. In the Uncon- 
scious are stored the tremendous emotional 
experiences associated with the awakening 
of self-consciousness. This awakening is 
described in Chapter I Section 5. In some 
discipline situation or situations the infant 
becomes aware more or less suddenly of the 
fact of his own existence and of the existence 
of the Not-I. There is, at a single stroke as 
it were, aroused in him active self-conscious- 
79 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
ness. All the struggle for existence which 
has dyed with blood the record of animal 
existence lies behind this awakening. The 
infant cannot co-ordinate the sensori-motor 
apparatus. He cannot immediately react by 
fight or flight in the way made familiar by 
a heritage of perceptual experience. Some of 
his intense emotion he abreacts in tears and 
cries and aimless gestures, but the major 
portion of the excitement reverberates cen- 
trally, thrills may we say, the delicate cortical 
layers we have referred to as the physical 
basis of conceptual existence. These are at 
birth incompletely organised. They are like 
the fine wire which the electric current heats 
to illumination point. We have all known 
something similar to this shock in later life 
and we may have seen it in the faces of others. 
It is then unmistakeable, it blanches the face 
and lowers the vitality of the whole perceptual 
subject. But shock does not always express 
itself in a way so evident. 
The early situations which spark the con- 
ceptual life give information to the subject 
about his self-existence, about the life current 
which flows within him and its hungry de- 
80 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
mands for expression. At the same time it 
makes him aware of the fact that he is coun- 
tered by agent or agents vastly more powerful 
than himself. He is ignorant as yet of the 
fact that those gigantic personalities stand to 
him in a relation which is as a rule mainly 
one of love. It is sufficient for him that by 
sheer physical superiority they dispose of 
him in a way opposed to his immediate 
purpose. They may or may not inflict pain on 
him. Pain however slight, is, we may believe 
at this crisis an experience as momentous as 
the traditional expulsion from Eden. 
The second great subliminal system, the 
Preconscious, is also a memory system. It is 
the repository of more recent experience 
and this also is significant in the light of 
anxiety problems. Regarded as a memory 
system it records experience which has put 
the subject in possession either of power- 
principles or expiation-principles. Power- 
principles are principles by which as percept- 
ual subject the child learns to dominate his 
environment. He learns to handle objects, 
to express himself in language and to under- 
stand the great symbol system of the written 
81 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
word and many other things. Above all he 
learns how he may impress his wishes on the 
wills of other people. On the other hand he 
meets with set-backs in his efforts both as 
a perceptual and as a conceptual subject. 
He falls and hurts himself, or is in disgrace, 
pain or trouble of some kind. These experi- 
ences train him in expiation-principles. 
Rightly interpreted they carry him to a 
higher plane both perceptually and conceptu- 
ally, wrongly interpreted they bring about 
his deterioration; expiation may induce 
either pessimism or optimism, the latter 
being a violent reaction in the direction of 
power. In addition to individual experience 
the conceptual subject develops his conceptual 
life through information received from other 
conceptual subjects. Such information is 
called tradition because it is handed on 
(Latin trado) from one generation to another, 
and from one individual to another. 
3. BETWEEN THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE 
PRECONSCIOUS A THIRD SYSTEM, THE PSEUDO- 
UNCONSCIOUS, MUST BE INTERPOLATED. We must 
I think interpolate between the Unconscious, 
and the Pre-conscious, another system which 
82 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
we may call the Pseudo-unconscious. As 
the Unconscious refers to the period of 
sensori-motor inco-ordination, so the Pseudo- 
unconscious refers to the period of language 
insufficiency. 
The budding conceptual subject is now at 
the stage of experimentation. He is making 
important additions to his perceptual know- 
ledge by acquainting himself with the 
properties of objects in his vicinity, all which 
experiments we cannot doubt are under the 
control of the two great determinants Power 
and Expiation. The child is a power-subject 
when pleasure rewards, or success attends 
his efforts, he is an expiation-subject when 
he fails in his enterprises or strikes or burns 
himself, or is otherwise put in suffering by 
contact with the objects he would dominate. 
There is also the perpetual presence of large 
and formidable personalities who encourage 
or check him according to circumstances, 
and whose disposition of him cannot fail to 
seem to him most arbitrary, because, owing 
to language inadequacy, he can only in 
very small part understand their intentions 
or explain his to them. 
83 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
For brevity’s sake we may speak of the 
Unconscious and the Pseudo-unconscious as 
one ; they will be referred to in general, 
together, as the Unconscious. 
4. THE RELATION BETWEEN THE UNCON- 
SCIOUS AND THE preconscious. The relation 
between the Unconscious and the Pre- 
conscious is somewhat difficult to under- 
stand. The Preconscious carries on the 
business of the conceptual life, the conflict 
between power and expiation principles 
generated in the Unconscious. The Pre- 
conscious is unlike the Unconscious in being 
a record of anxiety situations which belong 
to a period in which experience has some 
degree of organisation. 
Professor Freud postulates conflict as 
between the two systems of the Unconscious 
and the Preconscious, and it is plain why he 
does so. Conflict is obviously the keynote 
of the dream mechanisms, and as he postu- 
lates only one dynamic principle in the 
Unconscious, the sexuality wish, he must 
find some second dynamic factor or agent 
to counter the first. Professor Freud seems 
to have missed the fact which Dr. Jung 
84 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
has noted, namely, that there is already 
conflict in the Unconscious and that the 
self-condemnatory motive is as truly and 
fundamentally endopsychic as the self-pleasing 
one. In fact the self-condemnatory motive, 
i.e. the fear, is stronger the nearer the 
approach to the original anxiety situation of 
infancy. It is here presumably that we find 
unadulterated the fear engendered in 
countless generations of animal ancestors by 
the danger and difficulty of perceptual experi- 
ence, together with the long subjection of 
primitive human ancestors to superstitions. 
The same however is at least equally true 
of the self-pleasing motive because as civi- 
lised man is the last representative of a line 
which carries survival value, power must be 
in excess of the second component of anxiety 
up to the point at which he appears. 
It is only as human life advances in know- 
ledge, both conceptual and perceptual, that 
room can be made for a relaxation of 
tension. 
Here is the key to the Freudian doctrine 
of the antagonism between the Unconscious 
and the Preconscious. They represent 
85 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
respectively two different levels of anxiety ; 
in the Unconscious, anxiety is of a different 
complexion from anxiety in the Preconscious. 
Unconscious anxiety is of a mechanical 
character as I shall hope to show in a subse- 
quent chapter ; anxiety in the Preconscious 
of modern man is capable of mediation by 
reason, commonsense, and idealism. The 
rational ethical subject of the Preconscious 
cannot understand that other self, the primi- 
tive self of the Unconscious, which shock and 
strain resuscitate in him from time to time. 
He recoils from him. A shock may be thought 
of as comparable to the moving of the switch 
of an electrical machine. Unseen anxiety- 
batteries are set in action by the fact of the 
shock, and Unconscious anxiety symptoms 
result, just as the electric bell rings or the 
electric light flashes out, because the switch 
has completed the circuit. 
5. THERE IS DANGER IN THE WRONG 
HANDLING OF UNCONSCIOUS ANXIETY. All 
unconscious anxiety must be mediated to 
the rational ethical subject of the Precon- 
scious, and the crises, which are inevitable, 
hopefully handled. 
86 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
To analyse, i.e. to interpret the dream is 
to control projection. All sensory dream- 
elements are symbolic and the meaning 
behind the dream symbolism must be elicited. 
It must not be taken at its face-value. To 
interpret anxiety biologically, i.e. to give 
the illusion that sexuality and its symbolism 
are to be taken literally, is to attempt to 
undo the work of ages of human experience. 
I surmise that energy is attracted by this 
form of treatment to lower cerebral centres 
instead of being encouraged to utilise higher 
centres. Either the character degenerates 
and there is a marked loss of self-control or 
of self-confidence, or, in cases where the 
subject is sufficiently ethical and rational, 
the suggestions expressed or tacit of the 
biological theorist tend to dissociate uncon- 
scious elements. The principles of power 
and expiation consequently work unobserved 
and automatically at this lower level and 
produce impairment of health, possibly deep 
physical conditions, or more or less violent 
psychic crises. There is still a third possibility. 
The subject, if his resistances are of adequate 
strength, may exhaust himself in the process 
87 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
and be no nearer a solution in the end. I am 
not prepared to say that the results are never 
beneficial, for the insight of the subject may 
be of the quality and quantity which avert 
the catastrophe. 
All psychological treatment must act like 
the second prism in experiments on light 
dispersion, it must recombine dispersed ele- 
ments. As said before (Chapter III Sect. 5) 
the dream subject is recklessly indifferent 
to all interests but those which concern 
salvation esoterically conceived. If survival 
in the sense ordinarily understood by that 
word is in view, then psychological rehabili- 
tation must take into account those higher 
interests, or the attempt had better be 
abandoned. 
The principle of Expiation willingly em- 
braced embodies, says the human thought of 
all ages, power far removed from all con- 
ceptions of earthly success. The latter is 
at best symbolic. It is appropriately repre- 
sented among the glories of the Acropolis 
by Wingless Victory (Nike Apteros) : over 
against this must be set the winged phallus, 
symbol of the soul: “ Perfect through 
88 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
suffering ” says the Christian. On the con- 
ceptual level Epictetus the slave may take 
rank with Marcus Aurelius the Emperor. 
89 CHAPTER V 
THE ANXIETY LIFE 
i. ANXIETY NOT ONLY CREATES, IT ALSO 
DOMINATES HUMAN LIFE. TWO ASPECTS 
OF ANXIETY : TRAGEDY AND COMEDY. We 
observe the ceaseless rush of human life 
to-day and even while participating in it 
cannot but wonder at it. Juvenal draws 
for us pictures of the life in Imperial Rome 
which in the essential features reproduce 
that of any modern city or indeed that of 
ancient Babylon ; the pursuit of wealth, 
place, pleasure, knowledge goes on every- 
where. The human mind is never satisfied ; 
there is no nice proportion between what 
the subject can enjoy and what he aims at 
obtaining ; attainment only brings a fresh 
vision. 
Professor James has said that man is 
great by reason of his wants. It is entirely 
true, but it would be equally true to say 
90 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
that by reason of his wants man is also little 
and miserable. 
It is the conceptual life imperfectly under- 
stood which makes man so insistently restless. 
He has left the smooth path of animal unity of 
purpose and is between the desire for, and yet 
fear of power on the one hand, and on the other 
the terror and yet hungry claim of expiation. 
Could we learn the secret of our genuine need 
and root out the superfluous anxiety of the 
deeper level, always provided that sufficient 
provision were made for the physical require- 
ments of the perceptual subject, human life 
should be as happy and beautiful as the 
poet’s dream. But the things of sense are 
insistent and these it is which are the vehicle 
of conceptual realities; sexuality in the 
anxiety life is the disguise for salvation, and 
place, power, knowledge symbolise justifi- 
cation by works ; money and service are the 
equivalent of what theologians call “ merit ” ; 
gambling masquerades as courage ; pleasure 
distracts the jaded subject ; fear makes 
man eat so much more than is beneficial 
for health, that a wit has said we dig our 
graves with our teeth. Attention, shifted 
91 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
from the conceptual realities themselves, is 
directed to their symbols.1 Hence the greater 
the conflict, the more in evidence the symbols. 
Anxiety is consequently seen to have two 
aspects. There is the original aspect, naked 
anxiety, the nuclear conflict as it may be 
called; in the second place there is the anxious 
manipulation of the symbols of the conflict. 
The first aspect is always intensely serious ; 
it is the tragedy aspect. The second may be 
accompanied by every degree and kind of 
humour ; it is the comedy aspect. There 
is an undoubted value in symbols and a 
place we may well believe for one and all, 
but it is a poor conceptual subject who 
advances the symbols into the place of the 
realities. This is what Martha of Bethany 
did while Mary chose the better part. 
2. THE TWO LEVELS OF ANXIETY. In the 
last section the nuclear or deep level of 
anxiety in the unconscious is distinguished 
from the anxious manipulation of symbols. 
This distinction requires further explanation. 
Anxiety in general expresses itself in 
symbols ; we must therefore look for marks 
1 This involves the principles called by Prof. Freud Displace- 
ment of Accent. 
92 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
by which we may differentiate symbolism 
expressing anxiety of the two levels. 
(a) Whereas anxiety of both levels may 
be normal, only anxiety of the deeper level 
can produce pathological symptoms so 
called. 
Normally anxiety of the deeper level 
organised in serviceable form expresses 
itself in religion, in the arts, and in the 
intimate social relations. Otherwise anxiety 
has the marks of comedy ; all the para- 
phernalia of existence whether pleasing or 
the reverse, serious or gay is a part of the 
“ game ” of life. It may be as well absorb- 
ing and instructive, as charming and dis- 
tracting, but it is essentially unimportant 
from the point of view of conceptual 
maturity. Tragic anxiety, anxiety of the 
deeper level, is called up into a region of the 
mind, nearer to self-consciousness than it 
should normally occupy, by every experience 
which is of the nature of a shock. From 
its new situation, the anxiety will then be 
attracted to some more recent experience, 
enhancing the latter’s symbolic value out of 
all proportion to what is reasonable. 
93 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Any example of a pathological mental 
state taken at random illustrates the above, 
for instance, that of an insane woman 
whose whole time is occupied in rocking 
and weeping over a piece of wood. The 
piece of wood is on the Anxiety Hypothesis 
the subject herself, notwithstanding the 
fact that she is apparently mourning her 
dead baby. It is a dead self i.e. a lost 
soul-self. A less extreme example is one 
in which a subject phantasies an accident 
or sudden death in the street. The sense 
of infantile guilt coupled with fear of ex- 
posure combines to dictate expiation in such 
a public situation. The secretive habit of 
the infantile misdoer requires that repara- 
tion be total and in public, and the obsession 
is easily suggested through witnessing an 
accident. 
(b) Deep anxiety expresses itself by 
excess or defect in the appreciation of a 
given symbol. In the use of soap and water 
for instance, and in general care of the body 
either the anxiety subject is over scrupulous 
or he is indifferent. Again, either self ex- 
pression is overdone, or the habit of the 
94 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
subject is one of reticence ; in feeding 
and sexuality the subject either abstains 
or he indulges too much. The discipline 
of reason in self-consciousness works for 
the proper evaluation of the symbol; 
the tendency then is to moderation, the 
the thing itself which provides the symbol 
losing what is superfluous of its symbolic 
efficacy, thus permitting the intelligence 
greater latitude in regard to it. 
In the deeper level anxiety often appears 
as the avowed enemy of reason, but the 
relative spheres of anxiety and reason are 
by no means so well marked off from one 
another as is generally supposed. That 
reason is itself a product of anxiety is I 
believe demonstrable, as I have suggested 
above (pages 36 et seq). 
More often then we suspect anxiety puts 
on a mask resembling reason which is called 
rationalisation. In this guise fear may 
inhibit many a rational enquiry. An an- 
tagonistic attitude to various forms of 
fruitful research is to be explained indiffer- 
ently as religion or reason. Again a meas- 
ure of anxiety which promotes enquiry 
95 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
in one subject may veto it in another. 
The symbol is ambivalent wherever this 
is possible ; thus, as we have already 
seen, sexuality is the way both of 
life and of death. The two determinants 
power and expiation emerging together, 
have both a share in moulding into a 
symbol anything to which anxiety attaches 
itself. 
Deeper anxiety may give rise as already 
said to an extremely anxious manipulation 
of the symbol. The subject who expresses 
anxiety thus is, to use Dr. Jung's term, the 
Extrovert. The subject of the extreme 
opposite type is a prey to anxiety in the 
deeper level, and cannot project at all. 
This is the Introvert. 
3. SYMBOLISM OF THE DEEPER LEVEL. 
The deeper the level the more terrifying the 
nature of the symbolism. I often wondered 
why nursery literature included such blood- 
curdling stories as Bluebeard and Red Riding 
Hood. A group of curly-headed youngsters 
crowd round some lovely gift book and the 
mere grown-up peeping over their heads 
gets a vision of the most ghastly pictures 
96 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
and hears snatches of the recital of deeds 
of bloodshed and wickedness mixed up with 
black and white magic. 
The anxiety theory makes it clear that it 
is just the most violent emotions which stir 
the breast of so-called innocent childhood. 
The infantile subject must therefore be 
weaned, emotionally speaking, and this is 
done by gradually diluting his literature. 
He begins with Bluebeard and Jack the 
Giant Killer, and proceeds through Bunyan’s 
Pilgrim’s Progress, or again by way of books 
in which abnormally good children convert 
abnormally wicked parents, to books which 
portray children like himself and parents 
like his own. The nursery library is constantly 
undergoing revision it is true, but generally 
speaking there is some order of this kind to 
be observed, and doubtless there is a genuinely 
psychological purpose served hereby. 
Certainly the symbolism of the deepest 
level is not only the most unrelaxing in its 
grasp on the human economy, but it also 
has the highest degree of anxiety. It works 
itself out literally in the flesh and blood of 
the subject. At this level there can only 
97 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
be a mechanical balance between the opposing 
determinants, and at the same time all anxiety 
expresses itself in terms of the body. Power 
expresses itself in kicking, biting and screams, 
expiation in tears and self-inflicted pain. 
Anxiety of this type is brought over from 
experience of the pseudo-unconscious period, 
the period of language-inadequacy when we, 
the elders, too often impose our wills on 
children through exhibitions of superior 
physical force and induce in them reactions 
imitative of our own. There is no sweet 
reasonableness displayed in crises at this 
period on either side ; as the child cannot 
communicate his ideas to us through language, 
we infer that he is only a little animal in- 
capable of ideas. His will or his temper 
must be broken ! 
The stimulus, which in after life activates 
anxiety connected with experience of this 
deepest level, resuscitates cognitive elements 
(memories) belonging to the original situations, 
and they control the symbols. Anxiety of 
this level therefore affects health and happi- 
ness very particularly. It contains the seeds 
of future disease. The subject suffers in 
98 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
proportion to his sense of sin (expiation). 
Sense of sin depends on the conceptual 
capabilities of the child, his intelligence 
and his capacity for love. In the lives of 
most of us there is a tendency for every 
little disappointment and failure to produce 
a crop of minor ailments ; colds, rheumatism, 
and more particularly bilious attacks, may 
one and all be considered as fruits of deep 
anxiety called out by some untoward incident 
in present day experience ; a misunderstand- 
ing in friendship, financial difficulties, con- 
sciousness of failing in any of the social 
duties serve as an appropriate stimulus.1 
A violent stimulus may produce a more serious 
condition ; a series of slighter stimuli ends 
in the same way. 
The medical profession and the public 
mutually encourage one another to interpret 
physical ills on physical lines, as if dealing 
from beginning to end with organic data. 
The profession for the purposes of their study 
naturally and rightly regard the cause of the 
phenomena they are interested in as be- 
longing to the same category as disease itself. 
Here however is the source of the capital 
1 Shylock : “ I pray you give me leave to go from hence. 
I am not well.”—Merchant of Venice, Act iv. Scene i. 
99 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
mistake from the point of view of the con- 
ceptual subject as a whole. While he is 
physiologically a machine which requires 
the most delicate adjustment, the root of his 
difficulty is after all not here. It is in the 
mind, in the anxiety life. The medical man 
enjoys so much prestige at the present time 
because the public is more and more learning 
to entrust him with its spiritual concerns 
along with the physiological ones.1 Neither 
physician nor client is aware of this, but 
through the mechanism of the “ transference ” 
i.e. the attitude expectant of salvation found 
in every sufferer, this condition of things has 
come about. The result will be that the more 
conceptually sensitive the race becomes the 
more it will suffer from physical disability. 
New diseases will add themselves to the list 
in the medical books, and the symptom 
complex of one and all will become more 
inchoate. Proposed cures will multiply in 
consequence. 
Perennial crops of physical expedients arise 
as it is : physical exercises, diet reform, 
study of the spinal column and the breathing 
function, etc., all useful in their way, but 
1 Through the fact that the Body is the conceptual subject’s 
svmbol for the unseen self. cf. p. 128. 
100 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
none bringing nearer the grand solution. 
For the trouble is central and the solution 
is not to be found along mechanistic lines. 
The claims of the medical profession have 
ceased to be even challenged by the Church. 
She has allowed the Doctor to hear confession 
of sin, to grant absolution and to inflict 
penances ; instead of prayers and fasting 
it is prescribed for us that we shall have all 
our teeth out or undergo an operation. Yet 
it is in religion that the anxiety life finds its 
native language. Disease is a type of sin 
now as surely as in the days when the healed 
leper presented himself to the Priest to fulfil 
the Mosaic law.1 Religion has lost its hold 
on humanity in the gross because its message 
is no longer understood in connection with 
the problems of anxiety ; and a psychological 
reform of the Church will be necessary if 
she is ever to come to her own once more. 
Psychologists need a very special type of 
courage, one not too often met with. To pass 
into the anxiety below the limen of conscious- 
ness is like meeting the Demons, well-called 
“ of the Threshold,” of which mysticism 
1 St. Luke XVII, 14 ; and Lev. XIII. 
101 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
speaks. Possibly the infantile fears and 
the mystic’s demons are one and the same. 
Defects of sight and hearing, and paraesthe- 
sias, keep pace with this progressive handing 
over of the treatment of conditions of central 
or psychological origin to the materialist. 
For the life-principle, become self-conscious, 
cannot itself acquiesce in such shuffling of 
responsibility and withdraws within itself 
more and more. Social suggestion vainly 
endeavours to maintain the idea that the 
human economy is merely a piece of physiolog- 
ical mechanism. A mechanism it is truly, 
but one too delicate for the reason of man 
alone to effect its redemption even here and 
now. 
While we must take all anxiety problems 
with the greatest reverence it is possible 
from one point of view to treat them too 
seriously. The anxiety which the baby 
subject negotiates in the solitude of his inner 
consciousness in the period of language- 
inadequacy, the rational and ethical adult 
subject should surely be capable of meeting 
again armed with all his wisdom principles 
later acquired,and under a qualified guide. 
102 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Courage and sincerity are the things that 
will stand him in best stead in the 
process. 
4. THE DREAM ALTHOUGH IT RECALLS 
ACTUAL EXPERIENCE IS A PRESENTATION OF 
THE SUBJECT’S OWN ANXIETY DRAMA. The 
dream appears often extraordinarily objective 
and sometimes has a vividness beyond the 
vividness of the ordinary sensory experience 
of man to-day. It is therefore a hard saying, 
that everything in the dream refers to the 
dream subject, one which will require elucida- 
tion. Dream analysis proceeds in two 
directions. 
(a) It refers to actual experience, and by 
the free association method this experience, 
often remote and apparently forgotten, may 
be recalled. 
(b) It has a symbolic presentation-value 
sometimes highly organised. Regarded from 
this point of view practically everything in 
the dream refers to what may be called an 
ANXIETY DRAMA. 
Dream analysis has made us familiar'with 
the first of the two facts stated above about 
the dream. There is ample evidence to show 
103 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
that,through the dream,persons and incidents 
may be recalled which formed part of the 
dream subject’s experience of the past which 
he had apparently forgotten. Indifferent 
everyday incidents which are built into the 
dream-picture appear often to have a sub- 
stitutionary value only. Persons are 
surrogates for others known long ago, and 
sometimes thought to be forgotten ; present- 
day situations recall situations of the past 
with which those appearing in the dream 
have some points in common. The persons 
or incidents in the dream are in themselves 
unimportant. 
This brings us to the second point enunci- 
ated with reference to the dream, namely 
that it has a symbolic presentation often 
highly organised ; from this point of view, 
everything in the dream refers to the dreamer’s 
own emotions which among themselves enact 
a little anxiety drama. 
In Chapter III, section 3, I have compared 
the life-force with light and attempted to 
establish an analogical relation between the 
action of experience in distributing the 
emotional constituents of the life-force and 
104 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
the dispersing action of the prism. As in 
the solar spectrum violet rays appear at 
one limiting edge, and red at the other, so 
fear (or hate) and power in the case of 
emotion. In the child’s experience there is 
only consciousness of the self in relation 
to the feeling. We have supposed that 
owing in the first place to sensori-motor 
inco-ordination, and in the second to language 
inadequacy, the potential of the life-force is 
raised in the few cells of the cortex which 
at this stage act as the collimator in the 
experiments on dispersion and a new thrill 
is experienced. The child’s attention is there- 
fore directed inwards to the self in the con- 
ceptual situation, in contra-distinction to the 
orientation of attention outwards to the 
environmental stimulus in the perceptual 
situation. One feeling (fear or hate) hurts 
and is disliked, the other (power) is satis- 
factory. As experience progresses situations 
which bring the satisfactory emotion tend 
to elicit from the outside social world the 
reaction to the subject which has for him 
the hurting emotion. If he function as power- 
subject, there are circumstances in which 
105 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELL-CONSCIOUSNESS 
his headlong career is checked—perchance 
he is punished. The emotional situation is 
hereby complicated and it is still further 
complicated as the child advances in self- 
knowledge by situations in which the hurting 
emotion (fear or hate) is encouraged in him 
by sympathetic approval, when for instance 
a child is exhorted to face danger, to stroke 
a strange dog, or to have a tooth pulled out. 
It is always his own emotional attitudes 
which are the objects of attention and 
concern in the conceptual life, hence as des- 
cribed in a previous chapter, the development 
of the introspective habit. 
We observe that, conceptually speaking, 
the emotion elicited by a stimulus tends in 
general to be of the same character as that 
expressed by the stimulus. 
Power in the stimulus promotes power in 
the conceptual subject even though per- 
ceptually in the same subject at the same 
time fear may be aroused ; tenderness in the 
stimulus promotes tenderness : we say love 
begets love. Nothing is more contagious 
than emotion. Professor McDougall explains 
this in Social Psychology describing 
106 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
passive sympathy.1 Passive sympathy is a 
mark of the emotional life of all group subjects. 
For emotions aroused in him in the period 
of language-inadequacy the subject has no 
names. Hence he labels them by associating 
them with the sensory image, visual or 
otherwise, of the object which arouses the 
emotion in him. This is just what we should 
do with regard to a new experience at any 
time. As already pointed out if we saw a 
new colour for which we had no name we 
should describe it by saying “ the colour Mrs. 
So-and-so was wearing,” and a corresponding 
image would arise in the mind. 
To sum up : The self-conscious life of the 
child concerns emotions mainly, some of 
which in general (power emotions) give satis- 
faction and yet are dreaded, because dis- 
approved of and arousing a sense of guilt; 
others on the other hand hurt and yet it is 
felt obligatory to entertain them ; these latter 
are in general emotions associated with accep- 
tance of suffering (expiation). The child 
therefore dreads his own feelings of satis- 
faction and loves his own brave attitude to 
1Social Psychology, p. 92. 
107 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
danger. His pre-occupation, conceptually 
speaking, is entirely with these emotional 
states, they form the self-concept; hence it 
is that this is the pre-occupation of the dream. 
Consequently in the dream contrary to 
every appearance the subject is alone. The 
dream is full of people and incident, but these 
all relate to his own emotional and anxiety 
experience and are represented by the stimuli 
which evoke them in himself, as he has no 
names as yet by which to express them. It is 
a strife in his own mind between emotions 
which should give satisfaction but cannot 
because they provoke hate in others, and 
emotions which normally hurt but are ren- 
dered desirable because of the fact that of all 
his experience just those are most highly 
approved by members of his little group. 
Complexity increases but the anxiety problem 
remains essentially the same. 
The objects in the child’s environment, at 
any rate those which come within his range 
of attention, are relatively few, and these 
become archetypes of specific emotional ten- 
dencies. Prof. Freud has pointed out how 
very important the father and the mother 
108 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
are in the dream. From this fact he deduces 
his famous theory of the sexual fixations on 
the parents (Oedipus complex), and names 
these fixations nuclear fixations to mark their 
importance. In the Anxiety Hypothesis the 
father and the mother stand in general for 
power and expiation. There is in all likeli- 
hood a racial tendency operative in the 
selection for it is by no means true that in 
present day life the mother is the humble 
slave and the father a terribly self-willed 
person. The sexual functions, however, 
remain constant. The mother is the bearer 
of “ burdens ” in the sex life and is hereby 
incapacitated in respect to liberty which the 
father enjoys. Sexuality relations remaining 
a constant, sexuality enjoys a unique place 
in symbolism as explained in Chapter II., 
sect. 5. 
5. THE ANXIETY PROBLEM PROJECTED : 
referred anxiety. In full self-consciousness 
the subject leaves the solitude of dream 
and phantasy and enters into conceptual 
relations with his fellows. His anxiety prob- 
lems are transferred to or projected on to the 
life of men and affairs. Here he functions 
109 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
both as power-subject and expiation-subject, 
and according to his phantasy conceptual- 
life, so will be his role in the world. It may be 
presumed that projection does not take place 
spontaneously but is prepared for by the 
dramatisation habit called play. 
Stripped of all superfluities the simple facts 
of anxiety are these : the subject who is 
initially a power subject, i.e., who wants his 
own way at any cost, is hated by his fellows 
and expiation assuredly awaits him ; on the 
other hand the expiation subject by kindli- 
ness and service attains an ample return in 
power. Expressed thus the problem seems 
simple enough. But in the dream life there 
are usually bewildering images which show 
the two determinants continually alternating 
and in conflict—power dodging expiation, and 
expiation as certainly dogging power. 
For less simple subjects the projected 
anxiety problem creates in actual experience 
situations which are inexplicably painful and 
jeopardise the subject’s happiness and through 
him the happiness of other people. 
Prof. Freud’s interesting doctrine of the 
prefigurative value of infantile phantasy is 
110 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
constantly borne out by experience, as also 
are his recent observations on the element 
of repetition. The subject's anxiety problem 
is ever seeking re-projection both in the 
external life and in the dream. It must be 
remarked parenthetically that, however ener- 
getically the subject takes part in life, his 
anxiety problem is never resolved by the 
mechanism of projection. For resolution 
of conflict the ideal course is indubitably 
an enlightened self - introspection with an 
attempt to bring harmony into the life within 
and without simultaneously. How this may 
be carried out will be considered in the next 
chapter. One serviceable result of projection, 
however, is that tension may be decreased 
thereby and a habit of extreme self-absorption 
discouraged. To this extent common sense 
is justified in its prescriptions. 
Among problems of projection there is 
one more particularly interesting. It is 
the problem of referred anxiety or more 
strictly the problem of referred expiation. 
There is a class of conceptual subjects who 
all unconsciously throw the onus of their 
own expiation in greater or less degree on 
111 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
others. At the first encounter this seems a 
cowardly role, but it must not be so regarded. 
The subject, be it observed parenthetically, 
is not strictly speaking susceptible of praise 
or blame in anything like the degree which 
the common usages of language imply. 
In general the tendency to refer expiation 
has great social value, it underlies the solici- 
tude normally felt by one human group 
member for another. It is the basis of what 
Professor McDougall calls active sympathy.1 
In certain cases moderation in referring 
expiation is exceeded. Dante as we learn 
from his own writings was a subject of this 
kind. 
The significance of the phantasies in the 
little autobiographical sketch, the Vita 
Nuova, was brought to my notice by one 
of the members of the Psychological Aid 
Society. It is a genuine study in dream- 
analysis and probably unique. Written about 
the close of the 13th century, it may yet 
stand as typical of the course of any dream- 
analysis to-day. Dante describes in the 
Vita Nuova the psychological processes by 
1 Social Psychology, p. 168. 
112 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
which he passed below the limen of self- 
consciousness to the deeper levels of anxiety 
in a mystical initiation, and attained, as the 
title of his book suggests, the NEW LIFE 
a spiritual majority. 
He describes the process of his acceptance 
of expiation. The character of naked anxiety 
in his treatment of this theme is announced 
by the severe simplicity of the first phantasy 
or dream, in which a glowing masculine 
figure holds in his arms the female figure 
draped in crimson who is to eat his (the 
poet’s) heart. In this initiation into the new 
life Dante experiences crises of suffering 
in body and mind, just as every subject 
to-day must do, whether in the discipline of 
psychological re-education or in the discipline 
of life. The female figure in the first phantasy, 
as in others that follow, is Beatrice. She is 
for Dante the major symbol of sacrifice. 
We seem here to be face to face with that 
which man thinks of as Destiny. Beatrice 
re-appears in Dante’s imagination as his 
guide on the other side. It is she who opens 
to Dante the secrets of Paradise in the Divina 
Commedia. Enquiries relative to the meaning 
113 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
of this denouement lie mainly outside the 
scope of a little introductory treatise, but, as 
I have said before, the student of conceptual 
psychology cannot dismiss the esoteric sum- 
marily. It must be included in his sweep 
of vision for it is undoubtedly before that 
inner eye which controls man’s terrestrial 
experience. 
For all his genuine masculinity, experience, 
for Dante, is saturated with symbolic efficacy. 
The Vita Nuova represents him blending 
with stern unbending purpose an acute 
sensitiveness ; if he is not to languish in 
inaction, the expiation element must be 
projected at least partially. 
Obviously to refer anxiety, i.e. to bring 
about a catastrophe in the life of another, 
is a typical male or power mechanism. In 
the sexuality symbol it holds entirely. It 
is impregnation. Acceptance of expiation 
is more literally the female side of the sexu- 
ality symbol. Sexuality is as we have seen 
the great determining symbol, but “ flesh 
of one flesh ’ ’ though the most sacred symbol 
of the conceptual subject, is a symbol 
only. 
114 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
6. THE WITNESS OF LITERATURE TO THE 
anxiety hypothesis. All spontaneous ex- 
pressions of the human mind voice the 
underlying current of anxiety. Literature 
may be taken to illustrate this statement 
but it is no less true of music and of all the 
arts. 
Within the sphere of literature, works of 
the imagination of all kinds exhibit the 
power subject in course of training as an 
expiation subject. In the Iliad the price 
Achilles pays for sulky obstinacy in the matter 
of a slave girl whom he grudges to his rival 
is not only his own life but that of his dear 
friend Patroclus. The heavy penalty incurred 
marks this poem out as a tragic production. 
Where the issues involved are not so stupend- 
ous or where a happy denouement is reached 
a comedy is presented. The Merchant 
of Venice for instance, fails to keep the 
bond given in the interests of friendship, 
through no fault of his own, and grave, 
unexpected danger arises but is triumph- 
antly averted. This well-known play of 
Shakespeare’s includes many potentially 
tragic situations ; there is a vein of intense 
115 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
anxiety running through it : 
“ Therefore Jew, 
Though Justice be thy plea consider this 
That in the course of justice, none of us 
Should see salvation : we do pray for mercy ; 
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render 
The deeds of mercy.” 
In the play the edge of the cruelty of the 
Merchant’s cunning foe is turned, however ; 
the lesson of mercy is inculcated and put in 
practice as regards the would-be child of 
Cain. The story ends with the ringing of 
wedding bells. Such is the comedy treatment 
of anxiety. 
With the success of brute-power there is 
no sympathy. A power subject, such as 
Julius Caesar, is capable of figuring as hero 
only because his tragic end redeems ; the 
;finale brings the. story into line with the 
cherished purpose of human life—the search 
for the soul. In a hundred different ways the 
purposes of redemption work themselves out, 
the means are always the same : love, as in 
the story of the Flying Dutchman ; death, 
as in that of Tannhduser. 
Another class of literature treats the 
116 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
anxiety theme from still another angle of 
vision. It informs us about the problems 
of anxiety and suggests solutions. It may 
be called in general WISDOM literature, 
a name actually given to a section of the 
writings of the Hebrews. A well-known 
specimen of this style is Ecclesiastes XII, 
beginning : “ Remember now thy Creator 
in the days of thy youth when the evil days 
come not ”—followed by a wonderful des- 
cription in symbol of old age, in which useful 
articles of man’s devising, especially parts 
of the house, are mainly used to describe parts 
of the body : window, door, pitcher, bowl. 
Some wisdom literature, like the Book of 
Proverbs, is more immediately didactic. 
In the class wisdom literature could be 
included for general purposes parable and 
fable, autobiography and allegory. It is not 
always quite plain whether the purpose of 
the writer is to throw light on anxiety prob- 
lems or merely to recite the history of some 
anxiety subject of a type which appeals to 
his own psychology. 
There is still another class of literature 
which might be called—again after a notable 
117 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Hebrew style—APOCALYPTIC. It is horatory ; 
it is a revelation of the triumph which awaits 
the enduring anxiety subject. The book of 
the Revelation is an example. 
Some literary productions are less formal 
but in some way the anxiety problem— 
always in the writer’s mind—contrives to 
gain expression ; an illustration is The Gates 
of Damascus by J. E. Flecker, which was by 
an outsider proposed for consideration to 
a meeting of the Psychological Aid Society 
and ably discussed in an illustrative exercise 
by one of the members. The reader is referred 
to Appendix II where the gist of this paper is 
reproduced. 
118 CHAPTER VI 
THE PERFECTING LIFE 
i. ALL ANXIETY TENDS TO WORK ITSELF 
THROUGH. WHERE SHALL THE SUBJECT FIND 
relief? “Ah, Hajji, whither wilt thou 
turn, when thou art there, when thou art 
there ? ” When the hour of shock comes, 
failure of plans and hopes, wounds in the 
love-life, reverse of fortune, or any other 
shattering experience, and naked anxiety 
confronts the subject, to what will he turn ? 
Anxiety is described by the poet as “ this 
ghost-life’s piercing phantom-pain.”1 
The words at the head of the chapter, 
“ the perfecting life." are what a dream-subject 
had in mind on awaking one morning; they 
were all that survived of what was probably 
an important dream. 
A dream of the kind, one devoid of all 
sensory images and consisting of a thought 
only, is pronounced by Professor Freud to 
1 See Appendix II. 
119 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
be as valuable for the purpose of unravelling 
the intricacies of the subliminal mind as an 
ordinary dream ; we may therefore accept 
this dream fragment as conveying a message 
as important as those moving pictures which 
the dream-life generally presents. 
What is the particular meaning of “ the 
perfecting life ?” was as usual the question 
put, but the dreamer could throw little light 
on the subject; the one point insisted on 
by him was that the word perfecting must 
have the accent on the second syllable, the 
idea apparently being that a further word was 
required to complete the sense. “ Perfect- 
ing ” he reiterated “ was a transitive verb, 
one requiring an object.” On putting the 
question, what that missing word could be, 
what life was in process of perfecting, the 
analysis came to a full stop as if the subject 
were up against a blank wall in his mind. 
What life perfected the dreamer could not 
explain. 
Since the Anxiety Hypothesis has been 
under discussion the dream would seem to 
have more significance. That which life 
perfects can be only one of two things, or 
120 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
both simultaneously. They are (a) the solution 
of the anxiety problem for the particular 
subject in the given circumstances, (b) The 
anxiety subject’s progress in the conceptual life, 
(a) The course of all anxiety is from 
power to expiation, by the purchase for 
the subject of higher life-values through 
surrender of lower ones. This entails either 
the sacrifice of the self or in cases of referred 
anxiety the sacrifice of a substitute. Often 
the sacrifice includes both the self and 
another or others. I have in Chapter IV 
quoted Dante’s mystical initiation, which 
included the sacrifice of Beatrice, as a 
remarkable case of transferred anxiety 
recorded by a historical personage. His 
case would be typical of an anxiety problem 
working through to a culmination. Every- 
one suffers from anxiety sooner or later, 
many people suffer from little anxiety 
crises all their lives. Anxiety crises include 
bodily illness, or mental disabilities like 
bad temper, depression, restlessness and 
want of concentration, or disturbances of 
conduct like abnormal sexuality, drink, 
crime. In their need the majority of people 
121 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
seek help somewhere ; most people at the 
present day ask the doctor for physic and 
physical treatment. Some ask advice of 
friends or ministers of religion ; many 
attempt only to forget anxiety in pleasure 
more or less innocent; a few find their way 
to the psychologist. 
The Miller Phantasies 1 which Dr. Jung 
has used as a thread on which to string 
together so much of interest that concerns 
human thought, both from the primitive 
man’s and the dream subject’s points of 
view, illustrate most aptly the “ perfecting 
life ” presented in a few beautifully artistic 
dream productions. The intuition of Dr. 
Jung led him to single out for discussion 
a series of dreams illustrating admirably 
a typical anxiety career in miniature. These 
phantasies were spread over a period of 
two years. They represent the dream sub- 
ject at first ecstatically dominant, gradually 
succumbing to the expiation principle and 
in the final scene achieving total surrender 
—“ the death of the infantile hero ” as 
Dr. Jung expresses it. 
1 Psychology of the Unconscious. 
122 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Dr. Jung's handling of these phantasies 
is most illuminating, and he comes singu- 
larly near to the Anxiety Hypothesis 
when he says “ The sexuality of the 
unconscious is not what it seems to be ; 
it is merely a symbol; it is a thought but 
expressed in the unreal sexual language 
of the unconscious,”1 and again “ It 
(the incest prohibition) may have been a 
question of a primitive separation of the 
pairs of opposites which are hidden in the 
will of life : the will for life and for death.2 
Unfortunately, in his summing up Dr. 
Jung makes unduly prominent the super- 
ficial interpretation. The Miller phantasies 
like all utterances of the conceptual subject 
have no immediate reference to the percep- 
tual life of that subject. It mayor may not 
be the fact that after these phantasies the 
dream subject was better fitted to accept 
the role of wife and mother. What is 
certain is that the phantasies in the last 
resort show the subject’s conceptual pro- 
gress ; from being a power subject she 
became the expiation subject. 
1 Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 433. 
2Ibid. p. 464. The latter italics are not in the original. 
123 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
The effect that all the ordinary methods 
of alleviation are expected to have is to 
arrest the climax of the problem. Rest, 
food, medicine, kindly sympathy, drink, 
cards, psychological treatment, all it is 
hoped will have the same effect; they 
should allay anxiety. Sometimes the pro- 
gress of the anxiety is arrested, sometimes 
it is hastened by a specific remedial measure. 
Occasionally the same means, the same 
medicine or the same advice, may at one 
time arrest the anxiety and at another time 
precipitate it. 
In other words all the known means of 
cure of the human soul—and I say soul 
advisedly for in nine cases out of ten it is 
the soul, even if only rheumatism or tooth- 
ache or bad temper is the complaint—are 
applied in the dark. We must except the 
consolations of religion for these are appro- 
priate to naked anxiety when the subject 
is ready to assimilate them. 
By no remedial means at present gener- 
alty employed is anxiety brought into the 
full light of consciousness. Yet only in the 
light of waking consciousness can anxiety be 
124 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
faced and converted into a form for which 
the Reason has an answer and a remedy, 
or if it have not one to hand, will set about 
finding one. 
(b) " Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self- 
control. 
These three alone lead life to 
sovereign power.” 
The above words were quoted by an 
analysis subject suffering from anxiety 
in a very painful degree and expressed 
in typical form and physically. They 
bring up the enigmatical thought dream 
“ the perfecting life,” and present its 
problem in the second aspect. The 
thing which life perfects may conceivably 
be the purpose of the conceptual life spiritu- 
ally conceived. Happy is the subject whose 
anxiety problem is solved simultaneously 
with his advance in the conceptual life. 
Progress here means the attainment of just 
these three things : self-reverence, self-know- 
ledge, self-control: things to be gained only 
at some expense in the teeth of anxiety. 
The brave soldier stands to his post when 
confronted by odds ; the coward runs away. 
125 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Progress in the conceptual life means 
(i) better control of the emotions generally, 
with overcoming of bad habits of thought 
and conduct in particular, and (2) liberation 
of the intelligence with quickened interest 
in life. If psychology cannot help the sub- 
ject to these it fails to justify itself. Psy- 
chological treatment is a process extremely 
distasteful and trying to most people, but 
like every proposed measure of alleviation 
it carries with it a suggestion of relief and 
therefore draws the subject on. Like the 
subject’s own doctor or own spiritual ad- 
viser, but in an even higher degree, the 
subject’s own psychologist receives the 
patient’s infantile confidence, infantile be- 
cause not founded on knowledge. This 
attitude of expectancy, this hungry hope 
for salvation, is directed to the particular 
practitioner in proportion to the measure 
of the anxiety and the hope that is aroused 
by the suggestion of help. This attitude is 
called by psychologists the transference. 
The transference disarms the resistance, i.e. 
the self protective capacit}? of the subject, 
at least in part : in proportion to the 
126 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
crumbling down of the resistance, energy 
which had been held in check is permitted 
to express itself, whereby a crisis may be 
precipitated. 
When this energy is destructive, its symbol 
in the dream is fire, when constructive, its 
symbol in the dream is light. 
Psychology, however applied, does not 
arrest anxiety crises any more than any other 
measure does, possibly less ; on the contrary, 
as said above, anxiety is released from jealous 
guardianship by the application of psychology 
and the subject tends rather to head for a 
crisis. This at least is true in the case of 
patients who are in the first instance mental 
sufferers. That is why treatments should not 
be too frequent nor too close together (unless 
the subject express very definitely a wish 
for this) as time must be allowed for central 
re-organisation. 
2. REFLECTION : THE GREAT MECHANISM 
OF THE PERFECTING LIFE. The word re- 
flection is one which it would be hard to 
replace. It is a symbol derived from the 
language of vision and expresses the greatest 
of all human faculties, the power to con- 
127 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
centrate attention on conceptual realities. 
“Now we see through a glass darkly,” 1 says 
Paul. 
In symbolising the body and its parts, the 
psyche somewhat satirically appropriates for 
the purpose useful articles : pots and kettles, 
furniture, buildings and their parts, e.g. 
windows, walls, doors, passages. 
There is an ingenious appliance which 
delights the primitive human mind, but 
fills with the strangest emotions the animal 
subject, who being devoid of self-conscious- 
ness sees an object only qua object. It is 
the mirror. The mirror, an article contrived 
by man for a useful purpose, is a symbol of 
a part of the body and it cannot be anything 
else than the human brain, for the human 
brain and it only, can reflect. No animal 
brain reflects. 
Again all living objects stand as symbols 
of psychic values. The subject’s body is 
therefore his supreme symbol, the symbol 
of his soul. The conceptual subject is very 
jealous about the condition of his body, 
XI Corinthians, XIII, 12., where the Revised Version has 
in a mirror.” 
128 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
as is shown by his pre-occupation with 
the mirror. A very anxious analysis sub- 
ject explained how her first remembered 
attack of anxiety came on when she was 
about io years of age: she looked in 
the glass one day and a great horror seized 
her. She thought she saw something there 
which indicated that all was not well with 
her soul. 
It is a common feminine habit to stand 
before the glass and turn now in this direction 
and now in that, to see the effect from every 
point of view of the hat or costume which 
the subject has just put on. Women are 
laughed at for their vanity, it is not realised 
that it is the mark of a deep anxiety. The 
Lady of Shalott saw all life in a mirror, but 
when the light reflected from the knightly 
person of Lancelot fell upon it “the mirror 
cracked from side to side;” for she had met 
the greatest of all conceptual realities, love, 
hopeless love as she conceived, and the life 
of symbol has no further attraction for her. 
She dies. 
The superstition maintains itself that if 
a mirror is broken there is a death. The 
129 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
bodily counterpart, the symbol, the illusion, 
perishes ; the soul, the reality, abides. 
When the subject reflects on experience 
he pieces it together, fits the parts into the 
whole, and reads the realities behind the 
symbols. Reflection is the great wisdom 
mechanism. There must be a place for 
reflection in the life of every conceptual 
subject who would use the experience of this 
existence to the best advantage. To see 
oneself from every aspect a second mirror 
is needed. The second mirror is the wisdom 
of another, whether written or spoken. 
The late Dr. Jessie Murray used to compare 
the analyst in the process of psychological 
re-education to the second mirror. The 
comparison is particularly apt, for the deeper 
meaning of the dream is always in part 
hidden from the dreamer himself. 
Dream analysis should respond to the great 
urge of the present day to understand its 
anxiety problems. It is a great means for 
cultivating the habit of reflection and should 
open out channels for appreciation of anxiety 
problems under every guise—literature, drama, 
art, music, science, friendship, humanity 
130 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
itself. The dream psychologist may say 
in the words of Shakespeare. 
“ And since you know you cannot see yourself 
So well as by reflection, I, your glass, 
Will modestly discover to yourself 
That of yourself which you yet know not of.” 1 
Dream analysis is no easy task ; it precipitates 
crises as has been said in the last section. 
At the same time it should control them and 
render the subject the healthy mind in the 
healthy body which he craves to be and 
which his friends desire to see him. He must 
bring up into consciousness not only the 
shame but the fear, all the emotional content 
of the deep-level anxiety which the terror 
and temptation situations of past experience 
have brought up from the unconscious and 
the pseudo-unconscious, and which em- 
barrasses him in daily life because it renders 
him morbidly self-conscious. He will shrink 
from doing this and find pretexts like 
“ boring ” or “ trivial ” which prevent his 
discussing what is most important. 
There is nothing more apposite to 
which dream analysis on the Anxiety 
1 Julius Caesar, act I, sc. 2. 
131 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Hypothesis can be compared than a mystical 
initiation. In my youth I read Bulwer 
Lytton’s Zanoni which the author purports 
to expand from an ancient Rosicrucian docu- 
ment, and I am often reminded in my practi- 
cal work of Clarence Glyndon’s attempt to 
meet and pass the Demons of the Threshold 
that he may win Viola. The demons surely 
represent the resuscitated infantile fears and 
Viola the soul. I leave the reader to follow 
out the thought. The whole novel is a quaint 
but most just conception of the anxiety 
problem in course of solution. 
The analysis subject has one great advan- 
tage over Clarence : “ life wrung out alone ” 
is not altogether true in his case. His analyst 
is his faithful companion and courageous 
guide. 
The subject must cultivate the “ meekness 
of wisdom ” if he undertake this task, and the 
analyst must do no less. 
3. WHAT THE SUBJECTIVE INTERPRETATION 
OF THE dream may do. The perceptual 
subject is always alone. So far as his 
fellow men are concerned the conceptual 
subject is no less alone at the dream level, 
132 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
i.e. in the remote recesses of the anxiety 
apparatus where are stored experiences of 
the periods of sensori-motor inco-ordination 
and of language-inadequacy. In chapter V 
I have attempted to show how every dream 
regarded subjectively turns out to be a 
representation of some phase of the subject’s 
anxiety drama. The dramatis personae are 
his own emotional tendencies masquerading 
as the symbolic objects which the subject 
long ago adopted to represent anxiety states 
for which he then had no names : father, 
mother, dog, cat, bull, pig, each aroused in 
him a specific emotion, either immediately 
reflected or transmitted through the medium 
of another mind. The child’s love for the 
family dog, for instance, is induced in him 
either because he observes for himself the 
animal’s attachment, or because his mother 
has described its characteristic fidelity. In 
certain acute phases of his introspective life 
the dreamer expresses his awareness of the 
importance of a particular symbol-picture 
by actually representing it as taking place 
on a stage. Other mechanisms which also 
convey the idea that the matter is important 
133 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
are the representation of an aspect of the 
dream as a picture, or as a reflection in a 
mirror, a story told or read, or again as a dream 
within a dream. 
In self-consciousness the subject projects 
his anxiety dream on to perceptual experi- 
ence. Control here will advance the " perfect- 
ing life." Misinterpretation leads to disaster. 
Projection of anxiety may prove no easy 
task. Mankind as well as “ things ” has a 
certain “ cussedness ” which prevents it lend- 
ing itself to any given subject’s anxiety 
drama. We are not always permitted to 
express love in the way we should prefer 
and in the interests of law and order the 
expression of hate is consistently repressed. 
Hence in self-consciousness we still tend 
to be alone. Even between nearest and 
dearest the anxiety life of each is a 
persistent though unknown barrier to full 
spiritual union : 
“ Alas ! is even love too weak 
To unlock the heart and let it speak ? 
Are even lovers powerless to reveal 
To one another what indeed they feel ? 
134 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Ah well for us if even we 
Even for a moment can get free 
Our heart and have our lips unchain’d, 
For that which seals them hath been 
deep ordain’d.” 
Matthew Arnold.—The Buried Life 
The barrier is removed in proportion as 
the wisdom principles of his group have re- 
combined the dispersed life energy of the 
subject into a single pencil of light. Com- 
munion with his conceptual fellows is the 
great compensation for loss of immediate 
power as a perceptual subject. For moving 
the smallest particle of matter through the 
smallest distance of space the conceptual 
subject is dependent on a perceptual subject, 
himself or another. His sphere of activity 
is an abstract one among conceptual subjects 
whose love and understanding are for him 
life—the New Life. Perhaps the high value 
set on leisure reflects an inner awareness that 
the conceptual life is detached from per- 
ceptual activities ; there is a feeling also that 
only manual employment can strictly be 
called labour. 
The New Life brings a new power ; its 
135 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
weapons and its tools are spiritual. Initiation 
into this life is a passage from a narrow 
sphere of physical domination where we are 
alone, to a large sphere where knowledge 
and thought are shared in a communion of 
self-conscious fellow subjects. 
In the Christian Churches the religious life 
begins with the sacrament of baptism ; the 
significance of this is the exact parallel of 
the climax of the anxiety drama : “ A death 
unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness.” 
The well known wisdom principles have 
their limitations ; they solve in the main 
only those problems which are such in self- 
consciousness, problems amenable to idealism, 
reason and common sense. The more scatter- 
ed shafts bearing the lurid tints of infantile 
anxiety will still lie in arresting bands or 
spots along the path of many a subject, in 
spite of all the wisdom principles which come 
his way. These may even ring in his ears as 
“ sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.” 
To recombine the scattered elements of the 
life energy, if it could be done, would mean 
that all the old wisdom principles would 
recover the living quality of their message, 
136 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
without the savour of their bondage ; the 
subject would become capable of the maxi- 
mum of ideal projection; in particular, he 
would become capable of the maximum of 
disinterested singleness of purpose in relation 
to his fellow conceptual subjects. The key 
to this possibly lies in a subjective attitude 
to the anxiety drama within the subject 
himself; a means by which it may be reached 
is the study of the dream on anxiety principles. 
This knowledge will acquaint him with the 
fact that when he is angry or sad it is not in 
the first instance with or about another 
person that he is angry or sad, but in respect 
to that person as representing one or other 
of the dramatis personae of his own anxiety 
drama. Armed with this knowledge he will 
be able to watch his own anxiety conflict 
and, in the illumination of the new insight, 
assist in staging a relatively easy finale. He 
will learn that expiation at the dream level 
can be transcribed into service and self- 
sacrifice in self-consciousness. More than this, 
when his own unconscious problems have 
been happily set in train he will be able to 
meet sympathetically other anxiety subjects. 
137 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Without becoming himself entangled in the 
psychological difficulties of those others he 
will be able to assist them effectively in their 
search for salvation. Knowing that every 
soul must work out her own salvation with 
fear and trembling, he will not force on others 
his own cherished wisdom principles since 
these may be altogether inapplicable at the 
stage at which his fellow is. Contra-suggesti- 
bility means perhaps the antagonism aroused 
in a subject at the infantile level by a 
scheme of salvation, i.e. a symbol system, 
which does not commend itself to him at 
the time. 
4. THE DEMONS OF THE THRESHOLD. The 
anxiety subject of every type has pre- 
figured to himself under expiation the 
necessity for punishment conceived in physi- 
cal terms. The accepted methods of 
bringing up the little child fix his attention 
on bodily states. In any case expiation in 
the dream is always conceived in terms of 
the perceptual subject's pain and deprivation. 
This is symbolic merely. What the subject 
is really concerned about is the soul, for 
which the body is the constant symbol. 
138 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Anxiety so projected on the body follows 
the course of any physical weakness already 
present, as Professor Freud points out in an 
early work on the hysterias, when describing 
the case of a patient called Elizabeth. 
Where there is no recent history of organic 
condition like the one simulated by the 
functional disorder, it is possible that the 
patient may have suffered from something 
of the kind in infancy. This was a factor in 
the case of a patient to whom when a child 
his state immediately after birth had been 
described ; the memory remained. If the 
subject was physically strong in infancy and 
early childhood, the organ or system in which 
he suffers later as an anxiety subject, must 
have been set apart for expiation under the 
principle of an infantile sense of sin later 
forgotten. It is probably the nutrition 
apparatus in the first instance which provides 
the appropriate target for his fears, as a child’s 
gustatory experience must be very vivid, espec- 
ially if he is insufficiently or inappropriately fed. 
By the interweaving of symbolism the genito- 
urinary system may later become involved in 
the condemnation of the alimentary tract. 
139 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
If there is sufficient evidence of a patho- 
logical condition when the patient consults 
his medical adviser the latter very rationally 
from his point of view regards the disease as 
amenable to mechanistic measures. If the 
evidence is slight, but the anxiety (i.e. the 
pain, which is always the index of conflict) 
is great, the medical man gives what is 
practically a placebo, by which is meant 
something to keep the patient placated. At 
this stage he may or may not pronounce the 
trouble to be of psychological origin. From 
his own point of view the medical man’s 
action is entirely justified, but nevertheless 
he may be aiding and abetting his patient, 
and through him his generation, in forgetting 
that medicinal measures are one aspect only 
of the human problem. His metier is properly 
based on a mechanistic, i.e. a physiological 
outlook ; what is wrong is that he too often 
assumes that his outlook covers the whole 
of the human problem. 
If it were realised that the body is regularly 
for the conceptual subject the symbol of the 
soul, the need for the searching out of the 
subject’s anxiety problems at the same time 
140 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
that the body, his anxiety symbol, was under 
treatment, would become apparent. Concen- 
tration of attention on the body, if the Anxiety 
Hypothesis holds, is the worst way to deal 
with the problem; the Vis naturae—and may 
we identify this with the perceptual self ?— 
is capable of dealing much more hopefully 
with its own problems if it is not interfered 
with too much. A subject who is “ self- 
conscious ” when he is engaged upon anything, 
if it is only entering a room or handing a cup 
of tea, is sure to do it less successfully.* 
The subject whose trouble is pronounced 
of psychological origin will continue to be 
worried about the organ or system which his 
infantile guilt sense has singled out as the 
seat of expiation. If his obsession is removed, 
by whatever kind of alleviative measure, 
anxiety is not checked unless he has linked 
it up with the infantile sense of sin. Was 
not the poet Cowper cured of a persistent 
1 “ The centipede was happy quite 
Until the toad in fun 
Said, " Pray which leg comes after which 
When you set out to run ? ” 
This wrought her nerves to such a pitch 
She sank exhausted in a ditch.” 
141 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
suicidal mania by discussing with a friend 
the doctrine of original sin ? 
Without the linking up in consciousness of 
the infantile sense of sin with the unconscious 
call to suffer bodily torment, the subject may 
actually develop disease, or if he resist this, 
be incapacitated by a general fatigue state. 
Finally, if the fundamental disharmony is 
too nicely balanced to be projected, i.e. if 
his sense of sin is overwhelming but his fear 
of bodily torment be equally too strong for 
him to yield to disease, the subject’s reason 
may become impaired. These extreme aspects 
of the conflict may hang together with con- 
ceptual isolation. “No one understands me ” 
—quite true ! The problems of a conceptual 
subject require to be understood and gone 
into. To receive qua conceptual subject 
disinterested attention from someone who 
he feels understands is to have hope. An 
emotional religious life supplies this need for 
some, the repeated doctor’s visits supply it 
for another ; but, with the fuller knowledge 
of the psychology of self-consciousness, better 
provision could be made for the anxiety 
subject, which would lighten the labours and 
142 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
dear up some of the chief difficulties of both 
the clerical and medical professions. 
The crux of the whole problem appears to 
be that punishment for sin is conceived as 
consisting in a call to suffer physical pain, 
the body being the supreme symbol of the 
soul. Fire, uncontrolled, is the constant 
symbol of the punitive agent ; it has been 
suggested on a previous page that there may 
be a physical basis for this. If this theory 
be accepted, the purgatorial fire and the 
bodily fever are interchangeable. The anxiety 
subject is an animal at bay, literally between 
two fires, Hell and Disease; he sees no way of 
escape. 
Behind all human conceptual suffering lies 
the ultimate cause of anxiety : the problems 
of Death and of the Hereafter. 
The life-principle, become self-conscious, is, 
as an individual, face to face with destiny. 
The little child comes in contact with death 
in many directions. He sees dead animals ; 
he visits the butcher’s shop ; he hears that 
so-and-so is dead ; he sees a funeral cortege ; 
perchance he looks upon the marble face and 
immobile form of some one whom he recently 
143 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
knew in life and activity. The life-principle 
in him dimly knows itself to be inextinguish- 
able. What a problem ! 
“ And Ah ! to know not while with friends I sit 
And while the purple joy is passed about 
Whether ‘tis ampler day divinelier lit 
Or homeless night without.” 
William Watson.—“ The Great Misgiving. 
Such briefly are the misgivings and such 
the fears which originate in them. They are 
the Demons of the Threshold. 
5. THE REVOLT AGAINST ANXIETY. The 
conflict between the wish for, yet fear of, 
functioning as power subject, and the urgency, 
yet dread of, submission to the claims of 
expiation, is under some central principle of 
control which dictates the staging of the 
anxiety drama. The source of this control 
must be within the life-force itself, become 
self-conscious. We have already in Chapter 
III discussed an analogy instituted spon- 
taneously between vision and the conceptual 
life ; in this analogy an inner discriminative 
principle figures under the symbol of the eye. 
This principle is by most men called conscience. 
144 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
As presented in the anxiety drama of the 
dream, the discriminative principle plays the 
part of an inexorable judge and it requires 
from the subject nothing short of total sur- 
render. The subject quails before the im- 
possible demand; he endeavours by self- 
deception to hide from it, or by self-justifica- 
tion to appease it. Short of dissociation, 
which is like letting down a safety curtain 
on to the stage, nothing avails, yet like the 
safety curtain dissociation does not put out 
the fire in the wings, it only hides it from the 
view of the spectator. 
The anxiety interpretation of the dream 
is markedly different from that of other 
dream psychologists ; it is practically im- 
possible to institute a comparison between 
the theories of these writers and the Anxiety 
Hypothesis, for the reason given in the 
introductory section of this book that the 
above thinkers do not draw the fundamental 
distinction between the perceptual or con- 
scious (animal), and the conceptual or self 
conscious (mind) subjects, both contained in 
the individual human being. The word 
instinct maintaining its place where concepts 
145 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
are in question, great confusion arises, because 
the conceptual life, unless understood and 
obeyed, turns the instinct life topsy-turvy 
whenever a dislocation in the psyche takes 
place. All instinctive processes are made over 
in the conceptual life into something awe- 
some, something vibrant with symbolic effi- 
cacy. A let-instinct-live theory of life in- 
volves for the subject a revolt against the 
fundamental law of his own conceptual life, 
expressed in the mystical words of our great 
poet: 
“ Sweet are the uses of adversity, 
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, 
Bears yet a precious jewel in its head.” 
The rebel, the Nietzschean, wants the 
jewel without the toad, nevertheless he has 
to swallow the toad.1 
We note also that in his great work The 
Psychology of the Unconscious, in that part 
of the collateral material which in lectures 
I have called the “ Chorus of Lofty Souls,” 
Dr. Jung has placed Job, the type of acqui- 
escent subject, over against Nietzsche. 
1 N.B.—Certain symbols, among which are fruit, serpent, 
toad, crab and tripod, provide a curious mystical symbolism 
for the sin of disobedience. 
146 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Dr. Jung’s analysis of the Unconscious is 
altogether more subtle and truer than Pro- 
fessor Freud’s, whose theories of repression 
and infantile sexuality are well-known and 
rightly dreaded. Dr. Jung includes “ Sacri- 
fice” and "Power” as fundamental compo- 
nents of human character ; he recognises a 
law of balance between these two, though, if 
I understand him aright, the balance is struck 
as between the unconscious and the waking 
life. He even says “ Morality is not inculcated 
from without. Man has it primarily within 
himself,” etc. But Dr. Jung seems to me to 
fail to catch the exact drift of the anxiety 
drama. He has words of commendation for 
both aspects of anxiety, sacrifice and power, 
writing as if these primitive moulders of the 
conceptual subject’s psychic life were capable 
of existing as alternatives, instead of co- 
existing in a state of conflict in all subjects, 
with the pre-ordained balance in favour of 
“ Sacrifice,” since all must die. He writes 
of power : " After all, does a more moral 
view-point exist than the let-instinct-live 
theory ? The unpardonable fault 
of the let-instinct-live theory is that it is 
147 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
much too heroic, too idealogic for the 
multitude.”1 
Dr. Jung follows up this analysis of power 
in connection with the history of Nietzsche. 
" Has it ever been understood what it means 
to confess to the sway of instinct ? Nietzsche 
desired to be so swayed and advocated it most 
seriously. He even sacrificed himself through- 
out his whole life with rare passion to the 
idea of the Superman, that is to the idea of 
the man who, obeying his instincts, transcends 
even his very self.” 
The results of identifying the self with the 
Superman, that power image which we 
associate with Nietzsche’s otherwise icono- 
clastic system, are duly noted by Dr. Jung : 
“ And what was the course of his life ? It 
turned out as Nietzsche himself prophesied in 
the passage in * Zarathustra ’ relating to the 
fatal fall of the rope dancer, the man who did 
not want to be surpassed O Zara- 
thustra, thou stone of wisdom ! Thou threw- 
est thyself high, but every thrown-stone must 
fall ! Condemned of thyself and to thine own 
stoning : O Zarathustra far indeed threwest 
4Collected, Papers on Analytical Psychology, 2nd Edn., p. 379 
148 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
thou the stone—but upon thyself will it 
recoil ! . . .” Dr. Jung continues : 
“ Nietzsche, who thus taught yea-saying 
to the instincts of life, must have his own 
career looked at critically, in order to discover 
the effect of this teaching upon the teacher. 
But if we consider his life from this point of 
view we must say that Nietzsche lived 
beyond instinct in the lofty atmosphere of 
heroic “ sublimity.” This height could only be 
maintained by means of most careful diet, 
choice climate and above all by many opiates. 
Finally the tension of this living shattered 
his brain. He spoke of yea-saying, but lived 
the nay. His horror of people, especially 
of the animal man who lives by instinct, was 
too great,”1 etc. etc. 
What Dr. Jung apparently does not recog- 
nise is that Nietzsche the power-subject nolens- 
volens becomes Nietzsche, the expiation-subj ect, 
and that this is the fate of every anxiety 
subject whose conflicts are unresolved. Yet 
as said above Dr. Jung is fully alive to the fact 
of the existence of two opposite determinants, 
not only in the dream, but in the very Un- 
1 ibid., p. 382. 
149 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
conscious itself indeed in the very constitution 
of the life-principle. He advances (ibid. p. 415) 
a Heraclitean theory of an enantiodromia or 
clashing together of opposites, but his 
explanation of this antithesis or clashing 
together of opposites is somewhat circuitous 
and by no means easy to understand. It is 
possible however that his Personal Uncon- 
scious is nearly the equivalent of what in this 
little book is called the power principle, and 
his Impersonal Unconscious the Expiation 
principle. Impersonal is a good term for the 
expiation principle, which is, as he says of the 
Impersonal Unconscious, “detached from what 
is personal,” and “absolutely universal.”1 
Dr. Jung avoids detailed dealing with the Im- 
personal Unconscious in analysis, I understand. 
Nietzsche the tragic power subject, to 
whose history and psychology Dr. Jung 
frequently refers in an important chapter 
on The Psychology of the Unconscious 
Processes, is in my opinion an entirely 
typical case of the anxiety subject in revolt 
1 Dr J ung’s terminology is unfortunately at variance with 
that of the Anxiety Hypothesis, Dr J ung choosing Power 
to express the Impersonal Unconscious which latter is 
here identified with Expiation. 
150 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
against anxiety. In the anxiety drama the 
power subject is always seen in the throes of 
the expiatory process, and as indicated 
in Chapter III, Sect. 7, expiation is in 
proportion to the subject’s revolt. “ Zara- 
thustra, thou threwest thyself high, but 
every thrown-stone must fall ! ”—and the 
fall is in proportion to the height attained. 
“ Condemned of thyself and to thine own 
stoning ! ” These words sum up in its bald 
simplicity the anxiety drama, a drama which 
is at the same time almost as individual as 
are the souls of men. 
Nietzsche represents the power subject in 
revolt. Whatever a subject thinks of the 
claim of expiation in consciousness, it is none 
the less a fact that its claims are paramount 
in the Unconscious. Poor humanity ! In 
vain it strives to raise new towers of Babel; 
the life-principle is within, become self-con- 
scious, and if in the Heaven of the soul God 
have not set his bow, there will be a flood. 
The stronghold of the ethical life is behind 
us in the dream life, which is the apparatus 
of self-consciousness. Whether conceptual 
success lie before us in the projected life 
151 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
depends, as far as this existence is concerned, 
on a variety of factors including (a) the in- 
tensity of the power-urge which the subject 
brings along with him from the remote 
periods of sensori-motor inco-ordination and 
language-inadequacy, (b) his power to assimi- 
late the wisdom-teaching of the human race, 
(c) his projection capacity. 
Sexuality is the symbol which is more 
particularly unmanageable, and, as Professor 
Freud has said, every psycho-neurotic is 
regularly abnormal in his sex-life. Sexuality 
is the deadly far-reaching symbol, which, 
like the python, twines itself about the 
victim. This symbol awakens fears in the 
inner consciousness of every subject, however 
sane he may be in consciousness, and when 
the stress of life converts him into the anxiety- 
subject, the Titan symbol stirs and turns in 
the fastnesses of the Unconscious. Possibly 
the mischief that may be achieved by these 
stirrings is in proportion to the dimensions 
and blackness of the shadow which has fallen 
on the soul from the principle of revolt 
against expiation at some remote period. 
In the great sexuality symbol which I have 
152 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
called above the Titan symbol, power is 
represented by illegitimate sex indulgence. 
It is the way of death and of enforced expia- 
tion. Legalised sexuality is the life through 
death ; it is expiation voluntarily accepted. 
Sexuality for the unconscious is always an 
awesome symbol, and this fact it is which 
underlies the conceptual mystery known as 
misogyny, that “ mystic detestation of 
woman,” as Professor Westermarck calls it, 
or “mystic avoidance of woman,”1 as Mr 
Marett. 
The woman is the symbol of the expiation 
principle, as the man is the symbol of the 
power principle ; and both these principles 
exist in every man and woman. That is, the 
conceptual subject is bisexual. 
Man hates the developing expiation princi- 
ple within himself, and hence also woman, 
symbol since she is of this principle of self- 
surrender which he abhors. Men project this 
symbol (i.e. fear of woman) on to women in 
daily life and sicken at the sight of every 
petticoat. Woman herself, amid her strange 
medley of unconscious motives, adds to jeal- 
i The Threshold of Religion, p. 25. 
153 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
ousy of her rival the further motive of hatred 
of her fellow woman, and even of herself, as 
symbol of expiation. 
The taboos on woman are easily intelligible 
in the light of the anxiety development of 
the human race. Apart from this they defy 
explanation. 
The fears and consequent taboos associated 
with the legalised union of the sexes are quite 
extraordinary, the anthropologist tells us. 
Mr. Marett, in The Threshold of Religion, 
quotes the fact that men and women of 
primitive cultures have been known to 
succumb to terror, to die within a short period, 
on discovering that they have slept on a 
blanket belonging to one of the opposite sex. 
" Only a twilight fear, a measureless horror 
could thus kill,”1 says Mr. Marett. 
“ Owing to the natural nervousness one 
sex feels against the other, as well as the 
unaccountable nature of various phenomena 
in the life history of woman, such as men- 
struation and child-birth, the notion of her 
as simply the “ weaker vessel ‘ is merged in 
another conception of woman as a mysterious 
1 ibid., p. 45. 
154 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
person.’ ” The last words are quoted by 
Mr. Marett from Mr. Crawley, from whose 
Mystic Rose he quotes further : 
“ Marriage ceremonies neutralise the dangers 
attaching to union between the sexes.” 
“ Woman is inherently taboo, yet with 
proper precautions she may be married,”1 
says Mr. Marett. 
A youth in analysis relates with great 
reluctance a dream the entire content of 
which is that his mother is going to have a 
baby. It is explained to him that mother 
and the new life stand for social service and 
the soul respectively. The dream is a signifi- 
cant one in the subject’s analysis and marks 
a turning point in his rehabilitation ; it 
presents the advent in the conceptual life 
of the soul, of the Mother principle, which he 
adores and fears. Dr. Jung has written about 
the mother principle in The Psychology of the 
Unconscious. He says : 
“ The myth of the hero, however, is, as it appears 
to me, the myth of our own suffering Unconscious, 
which has an unquenchable longing for all the 
deepest sources of our own being: for the body 
1 ibid., p. 96. 
155 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
of the mother, and through it, for communion with 
infinite life in the countless forms of existence. 
Here I must introduce the words of the Master who 
has divined the deepest roots of Faustian longings.” 
‘ Unwilling I reveal a loftier mystery— 
In solitude are throned the Goddesses, 
No Space around them, Place and Time still less : 
Only to speak of them embarrasses. 
They are THE MOTHERS ! 
No way ! To the Unreachable 
Ne’er to be trodden ! A way to the Unbeseech- 
able, 
Never to be besought ! Art thou prepared ? 
There are no locks, no latches to be lifted ! 
Through endless solitudes shalt thou be drifted ! 
Here, take this key ! 
The key will scent the true place from all others; 
Follow it down ! ’Twill lead thee to the Mothers. 
Descend, then ! I could also say : Ascend ! 
’Twere all the same. Escape from the Created 
To shapeless forms in liberated spaces ! 
To revert to Nietzsche whose life and fate 
are typical of the subject in revolt against 
anxiety, the explanation of this case is some- 
i ibid., p. 231. 
156 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
thing like the following : “Yea-saying ” con- 
cerns power, the first of the primitive pair of 
fundamental determinants of the anxiety 
life. The “ Will-to-Power ” is the claim which 
the untrained subject brings over from untold 
perceptual ancestors when the life-principle 
first awakens to self-realisation. The life 
urge, the compelling desire to express the self 
and the self only, whether in relation to 
sexuality, or any other natural appetite, nor- 
mally asserts itself first. Equally normally, 
in the conceptual life the power subject comes 
under the law of expiation. The impossible 
claim of total surrender is generally re-stated 
on a basis of release from anxiety through 
acceptance of a principle of redemption. 
Not all, however, can so re-state the claim 
of anxiety, some are driven to repudiate it. 
In the intellectual life the Will-to-Power 
takes on a new character, it becomes a Will- 
for-Certainty, a hungry desire to know the 
Worst if we cannot or will not wait to 
know the Best in the ultimate anxiety situ- 
ation. 
To the subject, whom experience in early 
childhood has rendered unduly sensitive, 
157 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
the claim of expiation may appear in an 
appalling form, perhaps literally as total 
surrender, as something quite beyond the 
powers of the individual to meet. Nietzsche 
at four years of age was brought face to face 
in his home circle with a great tragedy ; his 
father had a fall and died after a painful 
illness affecting his nervous system which 
lasted a year. Before he was five years old, 
one-fifth of Nietzsche’s experience was lived 
in full view, so to speak, of an appalling tragedy 
which could but end in one way. It may 
have been this terrible process, this closing 
in of the Nay, this terrifying awakening to 
the actualities of existence which called out 
an irrational resistance in the boy. Subjects 
of the type of Nietzsche will not accept expia- 
tion, nevertheless, like their more acquiescent 
fellows they, too, are fated to meet the inevit- 
able demand in the inner life as well as in 
the projected life. The more the subject 
asserts his Will-to-Power, derived from per- 
ceptual experience, the more vigorously does 
the conceptual reality Power-through-Expia- 
tion call him ; the greater the resistance, 
the more intolerable the suffering. “ Nietzche,” 
158 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
says Dr. Jung, “spoke of yea-saying, but he 
lived the nay.” 
The dream shows that this acceptance of 
higher values through the surrender of lower 
ones is the universal law, the law of the 
Peifecting Life. 
159 CHAPTER VII 
THE CONCEPTUAL SUBJECT. 
HIS OUTLOOK AND HIS RIGHTS 
i. A FINAL GLANCE AT THE CONCEPTUAL 
LIFE : ITS GENESIS, CONTENT, ORGANISATION 
AND PURPOSE. At the risk of incurring a 
charge of prolixity, the reader’s attention 
is to be asked for a final glance at the con- 
ceptual subject and his career. 
The baby must be considered at first in 
the light of a perceptual or animal subject. 
We may regard it as a moot point how far 
physical pains—even the worst contingencies 
of a difficult delivery or the torture of an 
operation without an anaesthetic—are capable 
of sparking the self-conscious apparatus, or 
whether these act only in the direction of 
making the subject sensitive. The sparking 
process in all probability requires the element 
supplied by an exhibition of another’s 
expressed emotion immediately countering 
160 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
an expression of the subject’s purpose. In 
the sparking process the baby awakens to 
the momentous fact of his own life-drive and 
also of his own feebleness in the face of 
impossible odds. Every subsequent encounter 
with other minds, which is at all intense, adds 
to the content of the self-conscious life, supply- 
ing a new phase of emotional experience. 
There are three points to be noticed in 
regard to experience at the period of enforced 
passivity, and these are: (a) That the 
conceptual subject by passive sympathy takes 
over the same emotion as that which the 
person in contact with him exhibits. A small 
child encountered by a power subject, an 
angry parent or nurse for instance, has 
aroused in him emotion proper to the power 
subject, although as perceptual subject he 
may at the same time feel fear of the bigger 
being that encounters him; (b) That emotions 
aroused in a child at this early stage before 
the difference between the I and the Not-I 
is well established arrest attention on them- 
selves and turn the interest inwards ; (c) 
That, having no names for these new experi- 
ences, he links them up with visual images 
161 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
representative of the stimuli which brought 
them into existence. These visual images 
form themselves into a cast of actors whose 
function it is to produce the little moving 
picture-show called the dream, which all un- 
known to the grown-ups becomes an absorbing 
interest to the baby subject, so initiating the 
introspective habit. An analysis subject tells 
me that she remembers sitting in a child's 
“ high chair,” resting her elbows on the little 
ledge attached to it to serve as table, and 
finding herself absorbed in a melancholy 
reverie, the substance of which she was, at 
the time of the analysis, quite unable to recall. 
We cannot doubt that the introspective 
experience of the mite in the high chair was 
more spectacular than the word reverie 
usually implies ; that the subject was not 
reflecting in the sense in which grown-up 
people use that word, but observing images 
which passed before the mind’s eye and 
probably presented themselves in character- 
istic power and expiation grouping. Some 
years later the same subject, during the whole 
of a birthday outing to a theatre with her 
mother, was obsessed with an image of her 
162 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
father lying on the hearth with his head under 
the grate and hot cinders falling on it. Prob- 
ably this intrusive phantasy was a fragment 
of, or at least a fragment directly descended 
from, the early experience which absorbed 
her so painfully as the “ high chair ” subject. 
The father in the later phantasy is not really 
her father but the power subject in herself 
which her father repeatedly conjured up. 
In many ways a kind parent, this man was 
often violent-tempered. The head under the 
grate with hot cinders falling on it is a 
striking expiation-situation. The anxiety 
accompanying the phantasy was intense and 
appears to the subject to be explained by the 
fact that she projects it on her real father, 
and interpreting her anxiety in terms of 
ill-will to him she suffers an agony of 
remorse. To refer the phantasy situation 
to her father is really an illusion, an illusion 
behind which lies a habit of the conceptual 
life called “ projection.” Projection provides 
the mechanism for the expansion of the 
conceptual life. Projection is not reached 
at a bound ; it is prepared for by putting 
all kinds of play objects, dolls, toy horses 
163 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
and acquiescent pets into dramatic situ- 
ations suggested by actual experience. All 
human play consists in a dramatisation 
of conceptual situations ; the play of 
childhood in addition affords the means 
of passing from the solitude of the intro- 
spective anxiety habit to a projected anxiety 
life, to the group conceptual life of self- 
consciousness. 
The above constitutes a slight sketch of 
the genesis and content of the deeper or 
dream level of the conceptual life. The 
question of the organisation of that life must 
now briefly occupy us. 
Power and expiation pre-occupations tend 
in general to a balance ; possibly a balance is 
struck also between the two aspects of the con- 
ceptual life : the dream or phantasy life, the 
deeper level, and that life projected on to the 
actual circumstances of the subject. The 
psychology of the subject whose phantasies 
have already been mentioned illustrates well 
this tendency to balance. The haunting 
expiation phantasy which intruded itself at 
the time of the birthday outing is referred to 
early adolescence, a time when a rising tide 
164 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
of power emotion is normally experienced. 
In adolescence the maturing of the repro- 
ductive system means a fresh afflux of energy, 
which in an animal of any species below man 
would lead to an immediate search for the 
sex-object. But instead of self-indulgence the 
human subject is called at this momentous 
crisis in his career to greater self-control. 
Now, or possibly never, his energies must be 
drawn up into those higher centres, where the 
conceptual activities reside, to be re-distribu- 
ted in the cultural and spiritual interests of 
that life ; as little as possible dare these be 
squandered at lower levels whence the energy 
will return to render the body gross, and the 
thoughts, if not actually grossly sexual, of the 
type which we call “ emotional.” In the 
absence of opportunities for self-expression 
and self-improvement, the expiation ten- 
dency, to effect a balance, will initiate, or 
more probably revive, appropriate painful phan- 
tasies based on actual experiences.1 
i Presque toujours, pour vivre en repos avec nous-memes 
nous travestissons en calculs et en systemes nos im- 
puissances ou nos faiblesses : ce1a satisfait cette portion 
de nous qui est, pour ainsi dire, spectatrice de F autre:” 
from “Adolphe,” by Benjamin Constant. 
165 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
This explains the recurrence of the quaint 
phantasy of the father with his head under 
the grate : it is a counterweight to adolescent 
power. 
To revive painful phantasies in order to 
keep sexuality pre-occupations in their place 
is a wasteful process if excessive ; moreover, 
it may lead to the morbid mental habits 
known as sadism and masochism, or in some 
cases to physical illness. Phthisis and the 
anaemias are typical self-inflicted penances 
of adolescence. Educational facilities in the 
largest sense of the term are therefore urgently 
needed at this time. Our adolescent girl with 
the phantasy of the father’s head under the 
grate is an example of how precious opportu- 
nities for culture may be wasted. I shall revert 
to the history of this subject in the last section 
of this book when I plead consideration for 
the rights of the conceptual subject. At the 
moment I am occupied with the bare facts. 
She was entered on an apprenticeship to 
church needlework where the habit of life 
was sedentary, the hours long, and the work 
very trying for the eyesight. Her case now 
exemplifies the fact that there is a tendency 
166 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
for the balance to be struck, not only as 
between power and expiation, but also as 
between these two great determinants in 
relation to the two aspects of the conceptual 
life, the dream or phantasy life of the deep 
level and the anxiety life as projected on to 
actual experience. The painful phantasy 
which counterbalanced a special treat was 
replaced by seductive phantasies. The pur- 
pose of these was to counterbalance the 
deprivations of a youth wasted in a sunless 
work-room over a task, supremely beautiful 
and inspiring in itself, but spoiled by com- 
mercialism and drudgery. In modern indus- 
trialism the children of Israel must still render 
to Pharaoh a prescribed tale of bricks, and 
conceptually speaking the worker must also 
provide his own straw.1 
After 12 years at this work our subject 
broke down, her eyesight became impaired 
and an anxiety habit was set up marked by 
a series of crises culminating in a complete 
nervous collapse in the thirties, which necessi- 
tated a period of residence in an asylum. 
l There are, I understand, industrial firms which hare 
ideals of work conditions different from the above. 
167 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Our final consideration concerns the service 
rendered to the human race by the conceptual 
side of mental development. The purpose of 
the conceptual life is the mystery of mysteries. 
The topic has already been referred to and 
the hypothesis put forward that the psyche 
gives evidence of a sense of relative values 
which is suggestive from the point of view of 
a fourth dimension and the doctrine of the 
immortality of the soul. However accepted 
by the subject, whether with insight or in 
utter blindness, whether with conscious in- 
tention or because dragged to the sacrifice 
like an unwilling victim, the conceptual out- 
look gives evidence of a call to give up 
immediate satisfaction for values which bear, 
to all appearance, no relation whatever to any 
with which we are acquainted as perceptual 
subjects of whatever grade. In many respects 
the conceptual subject answers to the descrip- 
tion of the soul put forward by exponents ot 
the doctrine of individual immortality. He 
has no power to affect or be affected directly 
by material conditions ; his life being one of 
thought and feeling only, it is independent 
of immediate sensory stimulation ; again, in 
168 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
i elation to time and space his values are 
different from those of the perceptual subject 
who is concerned with the external world 
alone. 
The solution of the enigma of personal 
immortality is doubtless within the life-prin- 
ciple itself. Man has no power to evolve 
anything new, his knowledge advancing 
strictly pari-passu with his experiences of 
present conditions (as explained in Chapter II., 
Sect. 4). These may include through the 
conceptual apparatus the means of making 
contacts with manifestations of the life-force 
which are independent of matter as we under- 
stand it. Some subjects, described as medium- 
istic, seem to have experienced a deeper 
awakening to the possibilities of life conceived 
as a whole than the average subject has. The 
change may prove to be associated with the 
rising of an abnormal tide of power. It is not 
impossible that some mental sufferers may be 
aborted mediums. In time probably scien- 
tific enquiry may incline whole-heartedly to 
the exploration of this supremely important 
problem; we shall then doubtless arrive at a 
point of vantage in the road of progress—a 
169 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
road which it seems “ winds uphill all the 
way —at some elevation whence the view 
is more extensive. The human race in its 
masses is unswerving in its belief that this 
elevation will prove a pisgah, a Mount of 
Promise. 
It is past belief that there should arise in 
the life principle at any phase appetitions for 
the satisfaction of which the Life-Principle, 
conceived as a whole, has no provision. The 
proposition is illogical. 
2. THE CONCEPTS ETHICAL AND FAITH. 
These concepts deserve a brief analysis in 
light of material obtained from dream 
subjects in the course of analysis. 
The inexorable principle within man which 
demands expiation is, let us suppose, the focus 
of the conceptual life, that illumination point 
at which the life force becomes self-conscious. 
Here a perfect white light is irradiated ; it 
burns undimmed. Before it every subject 
quails. It holds up before him an impossible 
ideal ; it demands nothing short of total 
surrender. Twist and turn as he may, in the 
dream the suffering conceptual subject, who 
is arraigned before it, cannot elude its scorch- 
170 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
ing influence. In the Biblical phrase : “ Man 
cannot look upon the face of God and live.” 
Now in self-consciousness, in the light of 
common-sense derived from experience, any- 
one knows that apart from making initial 
mistakes full attainment in any direction is 
impossible. If we think we can attain per- 
fection it is an illusion ; though we may 
excel, we cannot ever embody ideals. Every 
simple learning process entails a making of 
false moves. We do not learn even penman- 
ship apart from messing many a sheet with 
the poorest attempts at strokes and curves. 
How much more does this principle hold in 
the conceptual life ! Generally speaking the 
conceptual subject who suffers most is he 
whose vision is great and real and who at the 
same time feels that at the formative periods 
of life he has in some way been untrue to 
it. 
Their problem presents itself in the tortur- 
ing form of the Ciceronian quandary : videri 
aut esse (seeming or being) : they fear to live 
because in their own eyes their best is only 
seeming. I have known a little lady tortured 
to the verge of insanity by the anxiety prob- 
171 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
lem presented directly in this form, and I 
trace her painful condition to the emotional 
impression left by a dear and lovable, but 
most inconsistent mother. The latter, a great 
anxiety subject, amid the ups and downs of 
a chequered perceptual existence, expressed 
her anxiety in great part through the en- 
hancement of conventions and expedients, to 
the relative neglect of more important con- 
siderations. In the developing mind of her 
young and intelligent daughter the impression 
was produced that little things mattered much 
and that great things mattered little. For 
the child’s buried anxiety life, however, the 
anxiety values persisted, and there resulted a 
great re-arrangement of values!—displacement 
of affect as it would be called by Freudian 
psychologists—which ended in confusion. The 
task of readjustment in such a case is a heavy 
one, and strange as it may seem to many, it is 
one beyond the power of the subject to perform 
unaided. Her problem concerns what might 
be described as the “ ethical ” as distin- 
guished from the “ moral ” problem. 
“Moral,’’strictly speaking, describes the good 
group member, whether human or animal. All 
172 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
individuals, animal subjects conceivably as 
well as human subjects, vary a great deal in 
their fidelity to group mores ; an animal 
mother that neglects her young might well be 
described as immoral; however, the claims 
of human group membership are so much 
more extensive than those of animal life that 
we are in the habit of restricting the use of 
the word “ moral ” to the group life of human 
beings. 
“ Ethical,” on the other hand, can have no 
meaning at all in relation to the animal sub- 
ject, for it expresses obedience to the inner 
dictates of the life-principle become self-con- 
scious. At the deeper level this demand is 
the same for all: it is total surrender. Total 
surrender, however, being obviously at vari- 
ance with experience, there must be, in the 
interests of life itself, a re-statement. Religion, 
the language of naked anxiety, lays it down 
that the subject must be redeemed, but 
modern man has got so far away from an 
understanding of his anxiety life that he finds 
it repugnant to his common sense to call 
himself “ a miserable sinner.” Failing a 
scheme of redemption some re-statement is 
173 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
necessary. The subject must make up his 
mind what is and what is not the right mean- 
ing to attach to the extreme claim of the 
infantile anxiety. He cannot repudiate it 
with impunity, for he then lays himself open 
like the rebels, such as Nietzsche, to dangers 
attaching to invasions of anxiety from the 
deeper level; neither can he evade it, or like 
the subject mentioned in this section he will 
be torn between " seeming ” and “ being." 
This lady has more than once compared her- 
self to Mr. Legality in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s 
Progress. The subject normally frames cer- 
tain principles of conduct, in virtue of which 
he becomes an “ ethical ” subject. The 
ethical subject may find himself in collision 
with his group fellows, a thing which can, 
strictly speaking, never happen in the case 
of the merely moral subject. The early 
Christians were frequently perplexed, finding 
themselves in situations which marked a 
point of departure between their ethical prin- 
ciples and the mores of their group. Those 
Christians who were also Roman citizens, for 
instance, had to decide whether it was per- 
missible for them to worship the Emperor’s 
174 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
statue, according to the general custom on 
certain occasions. 
In nothing do human beings differ more 
than in this attitude to the claim made upon 
them by the life-principle become self-consci- 
ous. It is here, I think, that the concept 
“ faith ” belongs. The subject whose view of 
the anxiety claim is unobscured but rational 
will adopt a simple attitude to the life- 
principle, become self-conscious, within him- 
self. He will be sensitive to the admonitions 
which take their rise within. He will have 
faith in himself ; he will understand and obey 
the voice which says : “ This is the way ; 
walk ye in it.” Again, since all that is within 
is regularly projected on to the external 
world, the subject who has faith in the life 
principle,become self-conscious within,will find 
no difficulty in projecting the same subjec- 
tive attitude on to a concept representing the 
life-principle without. This in the first in- 
stance is the life-principle in his fellow man ; 
in the last resort it is the Life-Principle 
conceived as a whole, God. 
The subject under discussion in this section 
is not in the position of faith. She is afraid 
175 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
of the anxiety claim in its extreme form, her 
intuition makes her mistrust the re-statement 
of that claim derived from her mother, and 
she has never adjudged the matter for herself. 
She cannot be saved until she has faith, for 
conceptual benefits are always in proportion 
to faith. 
3. THE POST-EXPIATION LIFE : THE VITA 
nuova. It may be asked what life will 
be like when through the subjective inter- 
pretation of the buried life the depths of 
anxiety have been explored and the ex- 
piation crisis passed. To say that the values 
of the conceptual life are abstract sounds 
somewhat cold. 
On a nearer acquaintance the coldness is 
seen to vanish. The understanding of anxiety 
brings nearer the most desired objects of the 
conceptual life, the self-poise which comes 
with a true appreciation of human life, its 
problems and its purposes, including those 
of physical health, the closer touch not only 
of loving and loved souls but of one’s fellows 
generally, and a deep satisfaction in life. 
First, as regards the subject himself, he 
will compare favourably with the perceptu- 
176 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-COKSC1CEYKESS 
ally minded subject in stability of purpose. 
The latter, obsessed with the symbol, is fussy 
in the hour of achievement and irritable in 
the hour of disappointment. The anxiety 
subject either diffuses emotion about him on 
the most trifling pretext or is too fearful to 
let his feelings come to expression. An emer- 
gency may paralyse him ; it is from his win- 
dow that Love takes flight if Poverty chance 
to enter at his door. On the other hand 
the conceptually minded, taking less thought 
for the things of to-morrow, has more leisure 
for the things of to-day. Abstract values 
being what he pursues, it matters little to 
him if the vehicle in which the precious water 
of life reaches his lips be Sevres china or 
Delft ware. There are no terrors for him, for 
he has already envisaged the most painful 
that experience can bring. As a result of 
this emotionally free attitude to life, his in- 
telligence is more discriminative as regards 
what is inevitable in any given critical situ- 
ation, and what reducible by any means at 
his disposal. 
In Chapter V, Sect 5. we found that 
Dante at the end of the 13th Century, 
177 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
through the study of his dreams, gained a 
mystical initiation. Mr. Payling Wright, in 
a book unfortunately out of print, remarks 
that for Dante “ the most subjective experience 
becomes the indispensable preface to the most 
objective of Visions,'’1 and that the subjective 
vision was not dissimilar from that, which the 
Anxiety Hypothesis claims to see revealed in 
the dream, is supported by Mr. Payling 
Wright’s conjecture that the opening of the 
Divine Comedy witnesses Dante emerging 
from the wood of fear : 
“ That primitive fear of death through which men 
are all their lifetime subject to bondage.”2 
and through a brave facing of the symbols 
of anxiety attaining an eminence bathed in 
the sunlight of Truth. 
The conceptually minded subject walks 
" in the light of his God’s eternity ” as a 
subject reminds me, quoting a prayer she 
has read. He cannot therefore feel afraid ; 
among other things he will cease to punish 
1 Dante and the Divine Comedy, Studies and Notes, Chapter III. 
3Ibid, Chapter VIII. The motif of the Divina Commedia. The 
Leopard, the Lion and the She-wolf stand respectively, reasons 
Mr. Payling Wright, for the Joy of living the Devil and 
Death. The whole of this chapter deserves study. 
178 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
his body for the sins of his soul, having the 
requisite courage to face these larger prob- 
lems with a steady vision. 
In the second place, in relation to his fellow- 
men, the student of subjective experience is 
conspicuously more capable of a sympathetic 
understanding of them than is the perceptu- 
ally minded subject. 
The relation of most human beings to their 
fellows cannot be described as anything better 
than an armed neutrality. Anxiety directly 
projected on to perceptual experience makes 
a man fearful that as party to a business 
transaction he will be overreached, as servant 
exploited, as lover deceived. The conceptual 
life is blanched; its spontaneity drained 
away ; what is worse it may be poisoned. 
What the subjective treatment of the dream 
may do for social relations has already been 
suggested in Section 3 of the previous Chapter. 
By its means, the subject, we suppose, learns 
that it is worse than useless, that it is indeed 
positively harmful and very stupid, to project 
on to others gusts of grief and ill-temper. 
These belong properly to the anxiety drama 
which is being enacted within him. He will not 
179 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
be deceived by the fact that in the dream life 
his emotions masquerade as persons he has 
known, in the first place as persons who 
awaked in him these subjective states, but 
as others also who have aroused in him similar 
feelings and who may have replaced the 
originals. As a result of closer acquaintance 
with his own anxiety life, the subject will 
learn sympathy with the inner difficulties of 
others and will be able to enter into a com- 
munion with them transcending the pettiness 
of daily life as witnessed to-day. 
Lastly, it is not my intention to advocate 
an unduly serious attitude of mind to the 
disregard of all that is charming and utilitar- 
ian in our present state of existence. Quite 
the contrary, a wide range of experience is 
invaluable though mainly for conceptual pur- 
poses and not for immediate and perceptual 
purposes, as so many unfortunately think. 
I am not content unless my erstwhile 
anxiety subject finds a deep satisfaction in this 
life. Providing that the deep anxiety is not 
gnawing within, the human mind cannot fail 
to be vitally interested in all experience. 
There is room then for grave and gay alike ; 
180 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
contrast is essential for a perfect composition. 
I have alluded to the tragedy and comedy 
aspects of the anxiety problem ; the same 
two aspects of experience will be found again 
in the Vita Nuova. If I urge the need the 
conceptual subject has to embrace a view of 
life which includes more particularly the 
tragedy aspect, it is because I believe that 
the comedy aspect will be hereby enhanced. 
I am not advocating a transcendental life ; 
the great symbols do not need championship. 
It is the little symbols which I believe the 
Vita Nuova will re-instate. These are so 
important and so satisfying : the little joys 
we prepare for ourselves and others, the 
little tokens of sympathy, the little services, 
the smile and the few cheery words. 
Apart from the special problems of a partic- 
ular dream subject, the two aspects are well 
brought out by two dreams, dreamed on two 
successive nights by a subject who has 
artistic gifts. They show I think the concept- 
ual possibilities in this subject. Both dreams 
are appropriately about pictures. The first 
dream is a picture in which one part only 
stands out—the back view of a nude woman 
181 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
seated—the rest of the composition is entirely 
dim. In the second dream the picture itself 
is not seen at all but only the border, which 
is highly decorative and about which a 
difference of opinion arises. 
What could more charmingly embody the 
harmonious balance between the tragedy and 
comedy aspects of life ? The nude female 
figure is most suggestive of expiation ; it is 
literally naked anxiety. The border is the 
symbol life, the comedy aspect. It is des- 
cribed in the dream as beautiful; the symbol 
always possesses a strong appeal for the 
artistic mind, this is what the word artistic 
implies. There is a difference of opinion 
about this border : it is in reference to the 
symbol that preferences become apparent, 
the symbols affected express just those deli- 
cate shades of difference which give unique- 
ness and charm to all human personality. 
Such then is my conception of the Vita 
Nuova : self-poise, health, genuine sympathy, 
appreciation of life in all its aspects. 
4. THE CHARTER OF THE CONCEPTUAL 
subject. Kant, the great German philos- 
opher, in a most suggestive treatise on 
182 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Ethics, leads the student over devious 
paths in an analysis of man’s superorganic, 
i.e. moral and ethical nature. He arrives in 
a spacious place of philosophic calm which 
he calls a Kingdom of Ends.1 A Kingdom 
of Ends is a phase of group life where each 
group member regards himself and his fellows 
as objects of value in themselves, objects of 
“ intrinsic ” value. 
“ Member of a Kingdom of Ends ” is 
practically the same as “ conceptual subject.” 
In a Kingdom of Ends no one will be regarded 
as a means only, as a servant or a clerk or a 
labourer, but as a human soul. The con- 
ceptual subject, as member of a Kingdom of 
Ends, has rights : needs like those of every 
other member, needs which must be satisfied. 
We are all agreed to-day that the human 
subject qua human subject has rights, but to 
judge from current controversies we are not 
at all clear in regard to the extent or nature 
of those rights. The confusion may arise in 
part at least from not distinguishing the per- 
ceptual and conceptual subjects. Every 
I Kant, Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, translated by 
Thos, Kingsmill Abbott, p. 62 et seq. 
183 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
human being is both, and in each capacity 
he has needs and rights. 
In the first place every human subject is a 
perceptual or an animal subject. For this 
subject, the ultimates or realities—the things 
which give satisfaction—are the things of 
organic and sensory life : food, shelter, free- 
dom and opportunity to enjoy physical exer- 
cise and physical rest. 
Circumstances arise in which for his own 
good every subject is called on to face priva- 
tion, but in an ordinary way every perceptual 
subject should have sufficient to eat, a clean 
and secure shelter over his head, a warm and 
comfortable bed to sleep in and sufficient 
provision for rest and recreation. Require- 
ments of the perceptual subject vary with 
age and to a certain extent with sex ; what is 
necessary for one normal person, in ordinary 
health, of either sex, at any given age, should 
be considered necessary for all. There may 
be other causes of variation, for instance 
physical work may demand a greater bulk of 
food and longer hours of sleep, but these 
considerations need not detain us. My point 
is that freedom from sordid care is a sine qua 
184 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
non especially at the formative periods of 
life ; in the absence of these physical necessa- 
ries, the higher or conceptual subject may be 
unfairly handicapped. 
Superfluity may provide a counterpart 
handicap for the future conceptual subject; 
“ Give me,” says the Wise Man, “ neither 
poverty nor riches, feed me with food con- 
venient for me.” 
We must not in any discussion of super- 
organic man neglect that aspect of him which 
we call the “ moral ” subject. The moral 
subject must be interpolated between the per- 
ceptual and the conceptual subjects. He is 
common ground for the two. I have implied in 
the second section of this chapter that the sub- 
human animal as well as the human being is 
a moral subject; in human life the sphere of 
morality becomes the training ground for the 
conceptual subject ; the two great organic 
drives, nutrition and sex, which furnish major 
symbols for the conceptual life are more or 
less under the control of the group, more at 
first, less as civilisation advances. 
As food and sex come to vary as regards 
symbolic efficacy for the individual, in face 
185 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
of the native variety in the life principle, a 
unity of interpretation can no longer be 
ensured ; one man prefers his water of life 
in chiselled metal or marble, another lifts it 
to his lips in his hollowed palm : Socrates 
finds salvation in simple living, Alcibiades in 
splendid living. Every individual revelation 
creates a new species of conceptual subject 
and the process having once begun goes on 
at an increasing rate apparently. The thought- 
ful man looks around for some criterion to 
apply to this tendency to individualism. 
Where shall individualism end ? Shall the 
moral ideals be allowed to decay in face of 
it ? We see individuals to-day—and they are 
some of the best—advocating habits of life 
which would bring a blush to the face of 
simpler folk. We look at other cultures, back 
to Feudal or Mediaeval Europe or across the 
water to Brahman India and these seem to 
many to compare favourably with the 
twentieth century West. Nor is it altogether 
surprising ; if these others are tarnished by 
great injustices, the injustices are balanced by 
a harmonious working together of the major- 
ity. Present day London is to many a scandal; 
186 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
the emancipated “ flapper,” the “ road-hog ” 
motorist, the “ profiteer ”—the sensible mid- 
dle-class man and matron are nauseated at 
the thought of them. 
It is possible that the desired criterion for 
limiting individualism is to be found in the 
dream, in the original mechanism of the life- 
force become self-conscious which initiates 
and possibly watches over the career of the 
conceptual subject. The key will not lie in 
a biologic interpretation of the dream, for 
that can only make confusion worse con- 
founded, indeed it is an over-rash projection 
of the symbol, as if it were the real and 
ultimate value which, long before Freudian 
principles were heard about, was the original 
source of the errors of individualism. 
An interpretation, strictly symbolic, how- 
ever, may furnish a key to sane individualism, 
the dream acting as a compensating mechan- 
ism to regulate the distribution of the great 
life-principle as it comes to self-consciousness 
through the cortex of the human brain. 
From the study of the dream subject I 
propose to suggest the outlines of a charter 
for the conceptual subject. This charter may 
187 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
in some respects seem to fall short, in others 
again it may seem extravagant. In the first 
place I plead for every conceptual subject 
that his needs as a perceptual subject shall 
never be used to crack him as if he were a nut. 
I mean, for instance, that the bare necess- 
aries of existence should not be withheld from 
him, because he will not consent to adopt a 
line of conduct which commends itself to 
others but not to him, neither should they 
be forced upon him because others think them 
necessary for him. The conceptual subject 
must in fact be won by love and reason and 
never driven by fear, because where con- 
ceptual subjects are concerned if their im- 
provement be the object, the fear motive 
involves an illogicality, it belongs to the 
perceptual subject and its application de- 
grades the higher subject; where conceptual 
subjects are concerned a power sense in one 
opponent always raises a power sense in the 
other also ; the conceptual subject decrees 
his own punishment. 
A difficulty arises here, for, as a moral or 
group subject, intimidation is undoubtedly 
permissible to be used against the individual 
188 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
or race in the case of crime. The wisdom of 
Parliaments and of High Courts of Justice, 
speaking as the vox pofiuli, will decree what 
shall and what shall not be done with the 
individual or race as moral delinquent. A 
nice discrimination is needed in sociology and 
politics for deciding what individuals and 
what races have crossed the magic line which 
makes them more or less susceptible of treat- 
ment as conceptual subjects. To those on 
the farther side of this line, clemency in some 
circumstances will only appear in the light 
of weakness. The hour of justice vindicated 
is always the time appropriate to clemency, 
whereas it is only for subjects on the hither 
side of the magic line that the claims of 
justice can be waived by authority in the hour 
of defeated justice. 
Whatever penalties Society sees fit to im- 
pose on the criminal, these penalties must 
not act in the direction of making him a 
worse subject conceptually speaking, or 
Society will not be profited. 
Putting the criminal on one side our next 
consideration is the subject who is abnormal 
but not in a way to make him an immediate 
189 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
danger to the community. Again the aspect 
of the individual as a moral subject is in 
question for as the community cannot tolerate 
the criminal in its midst, so it cannot be 
burdened with those who are mentally too 
eccentric. Society as a whole is a “ subject ” 
and for it to be sane and happy it may not 
harbour those who deviate too far in any 
direction from the normal or average. It is 
here that the medical man touches the prob- 
lem of the distracted mind with greatest 
advantage, for his concern is the general 
physical health of the community and it is 
for him, in conjunction with other authorities, 
to say how the mentally abnormal affect 
this. 
Conceptually speaking, however, the psy- 
chological average is not necessarily the best. 
The abnormal subject is one who with more 
or less insight refuses to project effectually 
the punishment of infantile sins on his body, 
the symbol of the soul. This is most incon- 
venient, as medicine has a physiological 
theory for every disease but none for anxiety 
about the soul, and religion has consolations 
for the penitent but none for those who 
190 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
do not understand what there is to be 
penitent about. The abnormal subject there- 
fore, speaking generally, still remains an 
enigma, his possibilities—often considerable 
in spite of his handicap—may prove even 
greater than those of his brother, the average 
individual. 
The claim of this subject is for psychological 
aid. Whatever his possibilities, they await 
the advent of the practical psychologist with 
the requisite insight and training. If it were 
possible—and I am speaking now paien- 
thetically—one would fain exempt the func- 
tion of the practical psychologist from the 
ordinary commercialism of life. The work 
seems too sacred to be done in the first in- 
stance as a means of money making, for the 
solution of mental problems is the salvation 
of souls even more than of bodies. Again 
parenthetically, if it were possible, psycho- 
logical work would be most safely undertaken 
by those who have themselves known and 
overcome the anguish of mental disability. 
Obviously, the more practical and more first 
hand the acquaintance of any student with 
his metier, the better will be his appreciation 
191 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
of the difficulties and of the possibilities of 
his art. Practical individual psychology is 
a subjective study, not an objective one, the 
only truly subjective study, and one in every 
respect entirely new. That it requires a 
special equipment is a principle already to 
a certain extent acknowledged, all psycholo- 
gists being agreed that a necessary part of 
the future practitioner’s training is that he 
himself be analysed. 
The subjective qualification requires of 
course to be supplemented by a sufficient 
equipment of the ordinary kind. 
If the needs of the adult conceptual subject 
require special consideration, how much more 
urgent are those of the immature subject; 
the child’s conceptual future is almost en- 
tirely in the hands of those who are responsible 
for his training. The further we go back to 
the source of self-consciousness the more im- 
portant becomes the social element in the 
subject’s environment. The two major deter- 
minants of the anxiety life cannot fail to 
reflect the character of the parents ; happy 
is the subject for whom a mother’s simple 
devotion has made the principle of self-giving 
192 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
beautiful and for whom a father’s courage 
and unobtrusive rectitude have invested the 
principle of power with sanctity. 
If the eugenist raises his voice for an un- 
sullied physical heritage, no less must the 
practical psychologist demand that the social 
atmosphere during the first few years of life 
be one of mutual love. Disharmony in the 
home life is practically an invariable condition 
of a severe psycho-neurosis; love is the 
breath of life to the conceptual subject. 
Faults in the handling of the little child come 
out insistently in dream analysis ; as a result 
of my experience I could wish that parents 
would realise the fatal results for the future 
conceptual subject of physical punishment, 
ridicule, satire and abuse, in the formative 
period. Corporal punishment is torture, and 
torture conjures up the devil element at this 
stage ; sheer restraint arouses the worst 
passions, and like ridicule and satire which 
are far above the little subject’s compre- 
hension leaves behind an intense sense of 
isolation, if nothing worse. The conceptual 
subject in the child has no language but he 
has a thought life, his ideas presumably 
193 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
finding a vehicle in sensory images. It is 
essential to discover a medium in which to 
communicate with him, for mind must touch 
mind sympathetically, and that as early as 
possible, in order that there may be will and 
opportunity for discussion of experience which, 
by exciting curiosity, would otherwise lead 
to anxiety habits. 
Adolescence no less requires urgently to 
have its special needs met. The unfolding 
of the greatest symbol of the conceptual life, 
the sexuality symbol, belongs more particu- 
larly to this period. It is the misunderstand- 
ing of the sexuality symbol which is the root 
trouble of the human race. Sexuality dare 
not be debased into a mere biologic function 
but must always be reverently regarded as 
the most sacred symbol, terrible in all aspects 
for the buried anxiety, probably permissible 
here on the biologic level only when it is the 
vehicle of new life. The rash sex teaching 
of to-day spells race-suicide. In spite of the 
sincerity and courage of the advocates of 
freedom in sexuality such a course as they 
propose, if followed, can only mean a gather- 
ing storm of dissociated anxiety and this must 
194 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
surely end in physical and mental disaster. 
We cannot tell what the subject for whom 
the symbol is really liberated from infantile 
anxiety may be able to do in the direction 
of enriching perceptual experience. He may 
be able, without danger to character or 
health, body or soul, without detriment to 
himself or others, to exercise greater liberty 
of choice even in sexual experience. At present 
theie is every sign that this cannot be done. 
The source of the present day error of claiming 
individual freedom in the sexual life is based 
upon the confusion between the perceptual 
and conceptual subjects in the individual, 
and the consequent projection of the symbol 
on actual experience as if it were the ultimate 
for the conceptual life. 
To direct the nascent energies along con- 
ceptual interests as well as along those dic- 
tated by perceptual needs will prevent the 
degeneration of character in the plastic period 
of adolescence; hence the initiation of the 
adolescent subject into higher cultural ideals 
is of the first importance. The life-principle, 
if properly conserved, is now straining at 
the leash, eager to be on the scent of the 
195 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
thought life of humanity and to run to earth 
the art ideals of the race. 
If such things appear as “ caviare to the 
general " it is, apart from marked idiosyn- 
cracies, because the young subject is left in 
such a hopeless muddle about ultimates or 
realities that he has not the merest rudiments 
for the building up of a conceptual life : a 
young subject of 19, coming from a thoroughly 
good middle-class home, tells me, for instance, 
that he thinks Christmas is to commemorate 
the death of Jesus Christ and wonders dimly 
why people make merry on such an anni- 
versary ! Such confusion is a characteristic 
product of modern religious teaching which 
in protest against the mediaeval church has 
scrapped much of educational value along with 
doctrinal errors. 
The means for teaching elevated ideals are 
not as a rule far to seek : was not the material 
for such training actually at hand in the case 
of our girl adolescent referred to in the first 
section of this chapter ? What could have 
supplied a more fitting vehicle for the teaching 
of noble ideals than the beautiful church 
needlework on which she was employed ? 
196 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Instead, her occupation became the means 
of her conceptual ruin. 
A full conceptual life is what the human 
mind is really searching for—it is the necessary 
preparation even for the true evaluation 
and application of perceptual benefits. Is 
not this the meaning of the words of Him 
whom the West accounts the greatest of 
conceptual subjects, “ Seek ye first the King- 
dom of God and his (i.e. its) righteousness and 
all these things shall be added unto you ” 
“ The Kingdom of God is within you ? ” 
Mutual understanding between conceptual 
equals creates the blissful atmosphere of 
unity and repose for which man craves; 
love, not sexuality is the language of the 
conceptual life. Multae terricolis linguae 
coelestibus una. (Earth has many languages, 
Heaven but one). 
197 APPENDIX I 
THE MAIN PRINCIPLES OF THE 
ANXIETY HYPOTHESIS 
From a very early period the conceptual 
subject and the perceptual subject are to be 
discriminated in the psychology of a human 
being. 
A. INCEPTION OF THE CONCEPTUAL LIFE. 
THE DREAM LIFE AND THE CONCEPTUAL 
WAKING LIFE ARE AT FIRST ONE. 
1. The raw material of the conceptual 
life is the introjected emotional situations of 
the periods of sensori-motor inco-ordination 
and language inadequacy. Self-conscious- 
ness requires presumably expiation-situations 
for the " sparking ” process. 
2. This raw material is presented to the 
mind in pictures (sensory or “ hallucinatory ”) 
e.g. anger = angry face, and appears to the 
subject as forming an integral part of his 
own mental life, there being at this stage no 
distinction between the I and the not-i. 
198 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
3 The above elements, belonging respec- 
tively to the two classes, Power and Expiation, 
gradually sort themselves out and enter into 
conflict (so initiating the Anxiety Drama). 
B. DIFFERENTIATION FROM THE DREAM- 
LIFE OF THE CONCEPTUAL WAKING LIFE. 
1. Under the influence of social suggestion 
the subject tends to project the introjected 
anxiety material on to his environment by 
a process of dramatisation ; his first efforts 
are known as “ play.” 
2. The original source of anxiety tends 
to be jealously guarded or " reserved ” 
(“ repressed ” is Professor Freud's term) and 
falls into oblivion. Hence the " reserved ” 
habit of the human mind in matters which 
touch anxiety. Experience, carrying symbolic 
efficacy, awakens self-consciousness in some 
form (shame or ecstacy of joy, grief, or anger). 
The reserved material, organised into the 
anxiety drama, is the dream or phantasy 
life. It is also called in this book anxiety of 
the " deep level.” 
3. Projection gradually leavens the whole 
fabric of the waking life, converting percep- 
tual experience into an organised symbol- 
199 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
system, every detail of which is capable of 
being for consciousness the vehicle of con- 
ceptual reality. 
4. The symbol established first in time 
is Body = Soul. 
This symbol may be said to determine the 
symbolising habit. 
5. Sexuality is the greatest symbol of the 
conceptual life i.e. the most important and 
most far-reaching. 
C. THE NORMAL CONCEPTUAL CAREER. 
1. Throughout his career the conceptual 
subject is continually introjecting anxiety- 
elements, whereby his projection of anxiety 
is freshly stimulated. 
2. Balance between Power and Expiation 
at both levels is essential for health and sanity. 
3. Equally, for health and sanity the bulk 
of Power and Expiation must remain indissol- 
ubly united, the conflict in union of this 
inseparable pair of opposites providing the 
motor energy of the conceptual life. A power- 
projection implies power in evidence but 
expiation in the back ground; an expiation- 
projection implies expiation to the fore and 
power in the back ground. 
200 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
4. Projection divides into various streams. 
The principal of these are :— 
(a) Projections of Naked Anxiety : Religion, 
Philosophy, Art. 
(b) Anxiety applied to perceptual interests: law, 
warfare, social habits, business life, commerce. 
(c) Mock Anxiety : games of every kind. 
5. In the dream-life, restricted after infancy 
to sleep and rare intervals of “undirected think- 
ing ” (Dr. Jung's phrase), the “reserved ” Anxi- 
ety-elements of the earliest period, called infan- 
tile or “ prehistoric " (Professor Freud’s term), 
organise themselves into the Anxiety Drama. 
6. The fore-ordained finale of the Anxiety 
Drama appears to be the unification of Power 
and Expiation (corresponding to Marriage) 
with the resultant emergence of the soul 
(Rebirth; corresponding to Child-bearing). 
The ultimate concern of the conceptual 
subject is with his relation to the unseen.1 
i Act first, this Earth, a stage so gloom’d with woe 
You all but sicken at the shifting scenes. 
And yet be patient. Our Playwright may show 
In some fifth Act what this wild Drama means. 
Tennyson, The Play. 
The dream-life appears to be the way into the larger subjec- 
tive life which is the concern of religion and of all forms of 
mysticism. This more remote life is seen through the phantasy 
life as a distant view is seen through a break in the trees or other 
objects which are in the immediate foreground of a landscape. 
201 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
D. THE PERVERTED CONCEPTUAL CAREER 
AND THE FACTORS WHICH PRODUCE DIS- 
HARMONY. 
1. Some subjects show an undue dis- 
position to avoid all enquiry into the subjec- 
tive life. In some the interest is even ex- 
pressed " negatively " i.e. their attitude is 
one of open revolt against expiation. Some sub- 
jects on the other hand show an undue 
tendency to introspection. 
2. Excessive curiosity and exhibitionism 
(or self display) are anxiety habits expressing 
morbid interest in the subjective life. Ex- 
hibitionism may imply a positive, and curiosity 
a negative, attitude thereto. 
3. The abnormal attitude to the subjective 
life would seem to originate in the terror of 
early anxiety situations of special intensity. 
This terror may find expression, in conscious- 
ness, as interest in some specific phase of the 
“ problem of suffering." 
4. During his career, every subject, even 
the normal one, from time to time inevitably 
intro jects anxiety-elements of a more intense 
kind whereby his own Anxiety Drama is 
freshly stimulated. This constitutes a trauma. 
202 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
5. A trauma re-awakens the “ prehistoric ” 
or infantile Anxiety and promotes a continu- 
ance, or a rehearsal, of the Anxiety Drama 
which may or may not be projected as patho- 
logical symptom or symptoms. 
6. A pathological symptom originates in 
the literal projection of a symbol. It may be 
that the primary symbol, Body = Soul, is 
always involved in the production of a patho- 
logical symptom, or at least a derivative 
therefrom. 
7. All idiopathic disabilities are a result 
of the disturbance of the conceptual aspect 
of the mental life, through a traumatic experi- 
ence starting into activity the anxiety of the 
deep level. 
8. The nature of such disturbance is some 
phase, improperly projected, of the conflict 
between the two fundamental determinants 
of self-consciousness, Power and Expiation. 
CONCLUSIONS 
The future character depends to a great extent 
on the emotional experience which is intro- 
jected by the subject, as infant and little child, 
203 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
because the conceptual subject is in a high 
degree plastic in the periods of sensori- 
motor inco-ordination and language inade- 
quacy. Further every human being, qua con- 
ceptional subject, even in adulthood, unless 
armed with requisite knowledge, is liable to 
introject the emotional attitudes of those 
with whom he is in contact. Hence moral 
responsibility . The conceptual subject knows 
or should know that he is hereby his brother’s 
keeper. On the other hand as perceptual 
subject the human animal, like every other 
perceptual (animal) subject, experiences fear 
in the face of superior power, and a dominant 
spirit may be induced in him by exhibitions 
of what he considers “ weakness ” in others. 
Re-actions to emotional stimuli constitute 
therefore a rough criterion of human character 
values. 
204 APPENDIX- II 
ILLUSTRATIVE EXERCISE 
BY THERESA GOSSE 
On The Gates of Damascus. 
By J. E. Flecker. 
“ Everything we read has a secondary 
meaning, it brings to us the concepts of 
another mind. And just as everything we 
perceive comes to us laden with our life’s 
accumulation of associated meanings and is 
in this way a symbol of more than itself, so 
it is with what comes from us, what we express 
in our work and our play, our words and our 
deeds. And this is particularly true of the 
poet, everything he says is soaked with the 
concepts of his mind. 
“To no one is a gateway nothing but a 
hole in a wall, and to Flecker the Gates of 
Damascus stand for starting-points for four 
possible ways of life. He takes them in 
the form of a cross: East, West, North, 
South.” 
205 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
THE EAST GATE. First there is the East 
Gate leading to the Desert: 
“ Postern of Fate, the Desert Gate, Disaster’s Cavern, 
Fort of Fear.” 
This is the way that comes first and, if 
persisted in, it leads to death. There is no 
eagerness for this life, but a compelling 
attraction. The caravan that goes by it 
gradually leaves behind all living things 
until it comes to :— 
“ That silence where the birds are dead yet some- 
thing pipeth like a bird. 
Pass not beneath ! Men say there blows in stony 
deserts still a rose 
But with no scarlet to her leaf—and from whose 
heart no perfume flows.” 
Then the caravan breaks up into solitary men, 
each having to face despair and death alone. 
This we may take to be the way of retreat 
from life and from reality. The withdrawal 
of the soul. 
THE WEST GATE. Next comes the West 
Gate, the opposite pole, with the call to 
action, to endeavour and to high hopes. 
But here too after the first happy start:— 
“ O Sailor men, pass out from me ! 
1 hear you high on Lebanon, singing the marvels 
of the sea.” 
206 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
There comes to the adventurer first loneli- 
ness, then looming horror, then the terror : 
“ that screams like madmen shouting in their 
dreams.” 
THE north GATE. The road from the 
North Gate shows the life of immediate 
pleasures and quick returns for effort. 
“ the North Gate’s Master, 
Who singeth fast, but drinketh faster.” 
The activities of this way of life have their 
reward within sight and reach and are easily 
attainable : there is no self communing as 
in the first, no great endeavour as in the 
second, but a fixing of the attention on 
business and the pleasures of the senses. 
“ Thou hast not many miles to tread, nor other foes 
than fleas to dread ? 
And thou shalt sell thy wares for thrice the 
Damascene retailers’ price. 
And buy a fat Armenian slave who smelleth 
odorous and nice.” 
In this life there is an attempt to get rid 
of fear and care, to put anxiety out of mind: 
“ Eat not thy heart with fear and care, O brother 
of the beast we hate.” 
THE SOUTH gate. Finally there is the 
South Gate leading to the way of religion, 
“ the gate that fears no fall.” 
207 PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
Now the soul has become a " spiritual 
pilgrim.” 
“To Meccah thou hast turned in prayer with aching 
heart and eyes that burn : ” 
There is still anxiety in :— 
“Ah, Hajji, whither wilt thou turn when thou art 
there, when thou art there ? ” 
But nevertheless he has found his solution, 
his salvation. All the old fears and yearnings 
are there, but transformed : there is no longer 
loneliness or despair or a hiding from truth. 
The body is no longer a shameful thing to 
be hated and ignored but : 
“ God shall make thy body pure.” 
There is no longer desolation of despair 
but faith : 
“ God shall give thee knowledge to endure 
This ghost-life’s piercing phantom-pain, and bring 
thee out to Life again.” 
and hope : 
“ God be thy guide from camp to camp : God be thy 
shade from well to well; ” 
No longer an intolerable loneliness but 
companionship : 
“ thou shalt learn at journey’s end 
Who walks thy garden eve on eve, and bows his head, 
and calls thee Friend.” 
208 GLOSSARIAL INDEX No. I 
Of terms employed in the Anxiety Hypothesis; 
for more generally accepted definitions of 
psychological terms see G.I. No. II. 
Adolescence : the period of a further development of 
the Anxiety life because the maturing 
of the generative organs now takes 
place, 23, 165 (see also Balance). 
Amnesia : the, divides the two levels of Anxiety. 
17, 18. 
Analogy : conceptual knowledge dependent on, 39 
(see Symbolism). 
a standard of comparison between per- 
ceptual and conceptual values, 39. 
Anxiety : described, 15, 16. 
drama, follows an inevitable course. This 
is the meaning of the Perfecting Life, 
to the consideration of which Chapter 
VI. is devoted (see especially 150, 151. 
interrupted or arrested by ordi- 
nary remedial measures, 124. 
subject to repetition in the 
absence of psychological re-education, 
34, 111. 
emergence of, takes place in Anxiety- 
situations in infancy, 13, 15, 160, 161. 
habits, appreciation of relative values 
(barter sense), 44, 75, 168 ; curiosity, 
44, 62, 74, 194 ; dramatisation, 19 ; 
exhibitionism (or self-display), 62,129; 
humour, 92 ; introspection, 59, 60; 
language (including gesture), 33; 
symbolisation, 31, 32. 
209 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Anxiety (Cont.) hypothesis, explained, see Chapter I., 
especially sects. 6-8 ; see also Appen- 
dix. 
levels, two, one buried (the nuclear con- 
flict or naked Anxiety), the other 
normally operative in consciousness, 
17, et seq., 76, 92. 
literature, embraces all works of the 
imagination, see especially Chapter V. 
sect. 6. The following references are 
made to anxiety literature for the 
purposes of the argument of this 
book : 
Drama 55, 66, 115, 116, 131, 156. 
Essays, 55, 71, 178. 
Fairy Tale, 37, 38, 96, 97. 
Fiction, 132, 165. 
Hebrew Scriptures, 14, 57, 60, 117, 
118, 175. 
New Testament, 26, 54, 58, 72, 128. 
Philosophy, 158, 171. 
Poetry, 27, 73, 113, 114, 115, 118, 119, 
125, 129, 132, 134, 135, 144. 
of the deeper level, expresses itself in 
excess or defect, 94, 95 ; the source 
of idiopathic disabilities, 98-100. 
problem, presents many aspects, among 
which the following may be specially 
noted : genesis of the soul or re- 
birth, 155; salvation, 126; self- 
sacrifice or self-surrender, 66, 122, 
137, 170. 
Apocalyptic : literature. Anxiety literature which 
announces the final triumph of the 
conceptual subject in various terms, 
118. 
Balance : between Power and Expiation essential 
for sanity, 21-25, 73, 75, 164, 165 ; 
210 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Balance (Cont.) maintained by the mediation of 
experience, 22 ; even pathological 
states exhibit an attempt at mechan- 
ical adjustment, 97, 98 ; necessary to 
be maintained at both levels, 22, 167 ; 
re-established in adolescence by re- 
susitation of Expiation-situations, 24, 
25, 164, 165. 
function of the esoteric in relation to, 73. 
Barter Sense : in dream refers to life-values, 44, 75, 
167. 
Beatrice : Dante’s supreme symbol of sacrifice, 
113, 121. 
Benefits : of Anxiety habits (which see), 34-40 ; 
illegitimate use of, 56, 65. 
Biologic : interpretation of the dream reverses the 
process by which the conceptual life 
unfolds, 87. 
Body : parts of, symbolised by articles invented 
by man, 67, 117, 128; symbol of 
Soul, 128, 129, 138, 139, 140. 
Brain : human (the specifically human part of 
cortex) compared with the collimator 
in experiments on the distribution of 
light, 59, 77, 78, 105 ; symbolised by 
mirror, 129. 
Causal Nexus : (see Cause and Effect), 40. 
Cause and first observed in the dream by Professor 
Effect : Freud, 38 ; known through alternation 
of Anxiety determinants, 37, 38. 
Christian baptism, suggestive of the surrender 
Theology : motive of the Anxiety drama, 136 ; 
conscience, identified with the Fife 
or God-Principle within, 24, 25, 144, 
145 ; crucifixion, presented in dream 
as symbol of the surrender, 66; 
disease, a type of sin, cf. leprosy 
under the Mosaic Eaw, 101 ; faith, 
211 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Christian identified with the unconscious atti- 
Theology (Cont.) tude of simple acceptance of demand 
of Life-Principle, 175 ; kenosis, the 
motive of Anxiety drama, 72 ; merit, 
compared with the Anxiety attitude 
to money and service, 91.; original 
sin, the equivalent of the infantile 
sense of sin, (conscious craving for 
power) ; redemption, a religious 
re-statement of the “ total surrender ” 
claim in the unconscious, 173 ; sal- 
vation, aim of the Anxiety subject, 
68, 100 ; confused with its symbols, 
91, 92. 
Comedy : aspect of Anxiety, the anxious manipu- 
lation of symbols often accompanied 
by humour, 92 ; Merchant of Venice 
quoted to illustrate, 116. 
Concept : a unitary, if composite, experience of 
the thought-life (see also G.I., II.). 
first constructed, that of the self, the 
Anxiety subject, 7, 108. 
supreme, the Life-Principle conceived as 
a whole—God, 66, 175. 
Conceptual : must in all cases be understood to be 
the equivalent of self-conscious, 7. 
isolation, a great misfortune for the 
maturing subject, 40,134,135,142,194 
Conceptual Life: created by Anxiety, 13-16, 79-81, 160, 
161 ; dawns (i.e. is sparked) suddenly, 
dominates the perceptual life, 72, 73 
(see Projection) ; expressed 
through symbolism, 8, 9 (see Sym- 
bolism) ; framed out of elements 
of emotional experience introjected 
in infancy, 13, 14, 57 ; this material 
is retained in the form of sensory 
images, 63. 
212 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Conceptual Life: foe us of, the point at which the life- 
(Cont). principle becomes self-conscious, 57, 
170, 171. 
habits of thought of, in most respects the 
opposite of those of the perceptual 
life, 59 ; it is a new world, 33 ; which 
is subjective not objective, 19, 20, 34, 
35, 59 ; its concerns are the unseen, 
8, 29-31. 
neglect of, in modern life, 27, 28. 
progress in, depends (a) on perceptual 
experience, Ch. II. sect. 4; (b) on con- 
tact with other conceptual subjects, 
34 (see also Wisdom Teaching). 
purpose of the, the mystery of mysteries, 
67 to end of Chapter, 113; and Ch. VI. 
realities or values of, are abstract, Ch. II. 
sect. 2 ; 70, 168 ; are fundamentally 
concerned with life or love and its 
negation death or hate, 41 ; spiritual 
or abstract, 135. 
Conceptual 
Subject : is bi-sexual, 153. 
rights of, 182 et seq. 
Conflict : all conflict is pain and it is the key to 
Anxiety ; already in the Unconscious, 
85 ; also the state existing between 
the Unconscious and the Preconscious 
until self-culture mediates between 
the two levels, 85, 86 ; resolved by 
introspection, 111; under a central dis- 
criminative principle of control, 144. 
Consciousness : not to be confused with self-conscious- 
ness, especially in the sexual life, 1, 
Ch. II. sect. 5, 194. 
Crisis : an outbreak of Anxiety which may be 
stimulated by a traumatic experience 
or by psychological treatment, 126. 
213 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Dante : his self-analysis in the Vita Nuova 
typical of the course of dream analysis, 
112 ; example of a type which refers 
Anxiety, 112, 114. 
Death : one of the two great ideas ever before 
the mind of the conceptual subject, 
and a means of salvation (see Love), 
41. 
desire for, 67. 
desire for co-existent with the fear of, 123. 
fear of, 66, 143, 144, 178. The bitterness 
of this fear probably originates in a 
literal acceptance of the primitive 
symbol, body = soul. 
life after, assumed in evaluation of 
anxiety experience (see purpose 
under Conceptual Life). 
Destiny : perhaps a secret of the Anxiety life, 
114, 144. 
Determinants : two major, of Anxietv, 15 et seq., 
149, 150. 
Disease : Anxiety projected on body ; symbol of 
sin—this idea is a derivative from the 
soul body = symbol ; 97 et seq., 
140-143 (see Christian Theology). 
Dream : a scene from the Anxiety drama, 133 ; 
to be interpreted subjectively, i.e. as 
containing only phases of the self- 
concept, ibid. ; but it may be the 
entrance to the larger subjective life 
and the infantile fears may be the 
Demons of the Threshold, 138, Ch. VI, 
Sect. 4 ; life history of the individual 
soul, a soul seeking salvation, 68 ; 
stronghold of the Ethical Life, 151. 
analysis, compared with initiation into 
the New Life, 112, 113; also with the 
initiation of the mystics, 132 ; should 
214 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Dream (Cont.) control Projection, by providing a 
mechanism which functions in the 
interests of reflection (which see) 
Ch. VI. Sect. 3. 
proceeds in two directions (a) actual 
experience through association-giving 
(b) consideration of symbolic pre- 
sentation, 103 et seq. 
elements, when occurring as sensory 
images are symbolic, 87. 
life, the cycle of the Anxiety drama, 122. 
mechanisms, the mechanisms of the 
conceptual life — the Unconscious, 
Pseudo-Unconscious, and Preconscious 
(which see), Ch. IV. Sects. 2 and 3. 
Dreams : contain sensory images and thought- 
processes ; these are to be dis- 
tinguished, 119, 120; quoted, 64, 
113, 119, 181, 182. 
Ear : analogy of the, and of hearing, 63. 
Emotion : subjective experience which should 
promote action, but which in the 
period of sensori-motor inco-ordination 
cannot have this result, 13, 46; whence 
a new psychological mechanism, 62. 
law of, in the conceptual life ; emotional 
experience is first introjected (passive 
sympathy) 62, 63, 105-107, 161, 162 ; 
and afterwards projected (active 
sympathy), 62, 110, 163, 164, the 
opposite of the law of emotion in the 
perceptual life (see below). 
law of, in the perceptual life, Power in 
the “ agent ” provokes fear in the 
“ patient ” and vice versa, 106. 
Esoteric : solution of Anxiety, the supreme mechan- 
ism adjusting the conceptual balance, 
73, 114. 
215 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Ethical : a word descriptive of a conative attitude 
of the subject to the demands of the 
life-principle become self-conscious ; 
applicable only to conceptual subject, 
152, 172-174 ; to be distinguished 
from moral, ibid. 
Ethical Motive : fundamental and not a sublimation, 
67 et seq., 85, 147. 
Experience : conceptual and perceptual are inter- 
dependent (see Conceptual Life). 
conceptual, experience of the inner self- 
life which feels and thinks, Ch. I. 
Sect. 3, 31. 
emotional, the raw material out of which 
the conceptual life is created, Ch. I. 
Sect. 6, 59. 
perceptual, organic experience of the 
Life-Force on this globe, 32. 
perceptual, function of, to disperse the 
life-force and provide analogies by 
which conceptual experience is ad- 
vanced, 32, 57-59, 104. 
Expiation : the second of the two major determi- 
nants of the anxiety life, 18 ; willingly 
embraced transcends all perceptual 
values, 88 (see also Anxiety) ; 
genesis of the soul, 67 ; a “ wish- 
fulfilment ” equally with Power, 67. 
projected, see Anxiety, referred, Ch. V. 
Sect. 5. 
Eye : analogy of the, and of vision, Ch. III. 
Sect. 3, 144. 
Faith : an attitude of the conceptual subject in 
the first instance to the claims of the 
life-principle become self-conscious 
within, 175 ; next, the above pro- 
jected on to the life-principle without 
(ibid). 
216 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Faith (Cont.) conceptual benefits in proportion to, 176. 
(see Christian Theology). 
Family Life : disharmony in, dangers of, 193. 
function of, in the development of con- 
ceptual experience, 45, 46 (see Sex- 
uality). 
Father : as major Power symbol, 109, 193. 
Fear : all attempts to induce fear in a con- 
ceptual subject by fellow conceptual 
subjects intended for his improvement 
involve an illogicality, 188 ; blended 
with life-hunger, produces anxiety, 
15 ; an ingredient of second deter- 
minant, Ch. I. Sect. 6 (see 
Expiation) ; for the conceptual 
subject, attaches to the impossible 
demands of the Life-Principle, 145 ; 
in regard to sexuality, 43, 46, 152, 
153 ; must be brought up into con- 
sciousness in dream analysis together 
with shame, 131. 
Feeling : a type of awareness peculiar to sub- 
jective experience ; not so antagon- 
istic to thought (reason) as supposed, 
36, 37 ; a concept derived by analogy 
from the sense of touch, 65. 
Flecker : see Appendix II. 
Freudian expectations formed from study of, not 
Literature : always justified, 67. 
Freudian Method: scientific merit of, 67. 
God : the Life-Principle conceived as a whole 
through Projection, 175 ; this concept 
varies according to the perceptual 
experience of race, 39, 
Guilt : a word giving the objective aspect of a 
subjective state, which implies that 
some wrong has been committed, 21. 
It is a correct translation of the Latin 
217 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Guilt (Cont.) debitum which like the word guilt has 
a money implication ; on the other 
hand we have the word sin answering 
to the Datin sons which is the sub- 
jective aspect of the same thing. 
infantile, an essential element in the 
formation of the Expiation Tendency, 
94, 107, 141 (see Sin). 
Health : affected by Anxiety of deeper level, 
86, 87, 98, 99. 
key to, not to be found ultimately along 
mechanistic lines, 100, 101, 124, 
140-142. 
I : the, the conceptual subject, 19, with 
which is contrasted the Not-I. 
-class of objects, objects with which the 
1 is primitively identified, 19, 20, 34 ; 
with this is contrasted the NOT-I- 
class which comprises things more 
remote, ibid. Experience reinstates 
awareness of the essential difference 
between the I and the Not-I, which 
does not exist for the earliest con- 
ceptual experience, 161. 
and NOT-I, confusion between. The 
significance of the confusion which 
exists in the infant mind with regard 
to the I and the NOT-I is well brought 
out by Dr. Eerenczi in his Essay, 
“ Stages in the Development of the 
Reality Sense.” 
Iliad: quoted as an illustration of the tragedy 
treatment of Anxiety in literature, 
115. 
Individualism : errors of, due possibly to over-rash 
direct projection of the symbol, 187. 
Initiation : mystical, identified with dream analysis 
on Anxiety Hypothesis, 132. 
218 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Initiation (Cont.) rites, 23 (see Balance). 
Insight : inclusion in one act of understanding of 
perceptual experience together with its 
conceptual analogue, 34 ; character- 
istic of the developed conceptual 
subject, see Ch. VII. Sect. 3 ; reached 
through a subjective analysis of the 
dream, Ch. VI. Sect. 3. 
Instinct ; served sufficiently by physiological 
law, 44, 69, 70. 
and the mechanisms through which the 
Intelligence : life-force manifests at the perceptual 
level, 10, 12. 
Introjection : 62, 109, 134, and passim. 
and Projection, reciprocal processes 
which build up the fabric of the human 
thought-life, a vast symbol system, 
62. 
identified with passive sympathy, as 
described by Prof. McDougall (see 
Glossarial Index No. II.). 
Intuition : similar to but more automatic than 
insight (which see) 176. 
Kingdom of regarded as equivalent of conceptual 
Ends : life, 183. 
member of, equivalent of conceptual 
subject, ibid. 
Kingdom of regarded as equivalent of conceptual 
God : life, 197. 
Life Force : manifests through mechanisms ; (a) 
organic (b) psychological. 
(see Mechanisms). 
symbols of, wind, 47 ; light, 48, 57-59, 
129, 136; heat (fire), 127, 143 ; 
electricity (for the purpose of the 
present argument), 49, 50. 
unit mechanism of, the protoplasmic 
cell, 50. 
219 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Life Principle : may for general purposes be taken as 
equivalent to life-force. 
Light : major symbol of the life-force, 48 and 
passim. 
Love : the Life-Force expressed as a unitary 
emotion, 197 ; the conceptual subject 
must be won by Love and Reason, 
188 ; the greatest ot all conceptual 
realities, 129. 
benefits of, in family life, 45. 
— or life, one oi the two great objects 
ever before the conceptual subject 
and a means of salvation, 41 
(see Death). 
self, everywhere in the conceptual life 
set over against love projected, 45. 
Merchant of quoted as an example of the comedy 
Venice : treatment of Anxiety in literature, 
115. 
Miller a complete rehearsal of the Anxiety 
Phantasies: drama in miniature, 122, 123. 
Misogyny : intelligible on the Anxiety Hypothesis, 
the woman being the symbol of 
Expiation, 153 et seq. 
Moral : pertaining (a) generally to group life, 
(b) in particular to human group life, 
172, 173, 174 (see Ethical). 
Mother : the, major symbol of Expiation, 109,155, 
192 ; probably the stimulus of the 
process of the sparking of self-con- 
sciousness, 13. 
Mothers : the, 156. 
Mystery : secret or esoteric knowledge or doctrine, 
the attainment of which is the aim of 
the whole Anxiety Drama. The 
mystery is perhaps more especially 
the development of a soul-body, of 
which, the natural offspring, the baby, 
220 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Mystery (Cont.) is the symbol. Compare : “ By a 
secret unseen mysterious process, the 
fairest flower of the garden springs 
from a small insignificant seed.” 
Bishop Horne ; Works, IV., 29. 
“ As thou knowest not what is the way 
of the spirit nor how the bones do 
grow in the womb of her that is with 
child.”—Eccl. 11, 5. 
conceptual, the, known as misogyny 
(which see), 153 et seq. 
of the Mothers, quotation from Goethe’s 
Faust, 155, 156. 
Nietzsche : cited as type of power subject in revolt, 
147-159. 
Objective : a word describing the attitude of the 
subject to the Not-I, or to experience 
not his own, 35 (see Subjective). 
Pain : the index of conflict (which see). 
Perceptual : life, dawns progressively with maturing 
of organism, 11 ; expresses itself 
as Instinct and Intelligence (which 
see in G.I. II.) ; 10 ; subordinated 
by the conceptual life for the pur- 
poses of the latter, 8, 9. 
progress, depends on conceptual experi- 
ence, Chapter II. Sect. 4 (see 
Benefits). 
realities or values, are material and 
organic, 29. 
Perfection : demanded by the Fife-Principle become 
self-conscious; unrealisable, whence 
optimism suggests the ideal while 
pessimism dictates despair, 170, 
171. 
Perfecting : life, a phase in which the solution of the 
Anxiety problem approaches, 120 et 
seq. 
221 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Personalities : subsidiary, identified with extremes of 
Expiation and Power which elude 
recombination with character as a 
whole, 61, 62. 
Phantasy : waking Anxiety preoccupation, not con- 
fused with actual experience, 122, 
163 and passim. 
Play : human, the first efforts at projecting 
anxiety, 191, 164. 
Power : the one of the two determinants of 
Anxiety which is first in evidence, 
and which originates in the subject’s 
sense of physical life and natural 
desire to function positively, 18, 157 ; 
derived from experience of sub-human 
ancestors, 157. 
division of, arranged for at perceptual 
level by mechanical means, 70. 
new development of, in adolescence, 23, 
24. 
through Expiation, the goal of the con- 
ceptual life, 88. 
Preconscious : a psychological mechanism of the con- 
ceptual life consisting of a memory 
reservoir of organised Anxiety exper- 
ience, 81, 
and Unconscious, relation between these 
one of conflict (Ch. IV. Sect. 4). 
Anxiety in, capable of mediation by 
reason and idealism, 86. 
function of, to carry on the business of 
the waking conceptual life, 84. 
Prefigurative : the unconscious Anxiety has this quality 
because it is always seeking re-pro- 
jection in waking experience, 111. 
Projection : see Introjection. 
conceptual problem never resolved by; 
hence the problem constantly is 
222 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Projection (Cont.) sought to be re-projected (see G.I. II., 
Repetition). 
ideal {or anagogic), 73, 137. 
literal or direct, the source of good and 
bad in human life; when direct, 
projection may work injuriously. (It 
could then be called catagogic), 73, 
112, 139, 179. 
of Anxiety, identified with “active 
sympathy ” (which see, G.I. II.), 163, 
as described by Prof. McDougall. 
Psychological does not avert but rather induces crises, 
Treatment : 126, 127. 
Psychology : application of, releases Anxiety from 
jealous guardianship, 127. 
of dream, the onlv truly subjective studv, 
192. 
Psychoneurosis: liable to be organised in adolescence 
during re-adjustment of endopsychic 
balance, 24. 
Pseudo-Uncon- a psychological mechanism of the con- 
scious : ceptual life consisting of a memory 
reservoir originating at the period of 
language insufficiency ; for practical 
purposes this system may be classed 
with the Unconscious (which see), 
Ch. IV. Sect. 3. 
Reality : for the perceptual subject not the 
same as for the conceptual subject, 
29, 30. 
Realities : perceptual, are symbols for conceptual 
realities. A notable dictum of 
Dr. Jung’s is that the libido (? life- 
principle) is the only reality ; Prof. 
Freud on the other hand interprets 
reality in terms of materialism, the 
subjective life has for him no sub- 
stantiality. 
223 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Reason : a mechanism built up within the con- 
ceptual life, to deal more particularly 
with perceptual experience. Aware- 
ness in relation to the environment is 
hereby rendered objective (i.e. know- 
ledge) ; in contradistinction to feeling 
or intuition which is a type of sub- 
jective awareness, 36-38. 
applicable alike to conceptual and 
perceptual experience, 95 ; cannot 
be inherently opposed to the main 
current of the conceptual life which 
is one of feeling ; implied from the 
first in Anxiety experience, 36. 
(see Cause and Effect). 
Reflection : the principal mechanism of the con- 
ceptual life as a whole, combining as 
it does the two kinds of awareness 
peculiar to conceptual and perceptual 
experience respectively ; it is the key 
to the interpretation of symbolism ; 
the subject looks at himself in a 
mirror, Ch. VI. Sect. 2, 130 ; should 
be served by dream analysis, 130. 
Religion : the fundamental expression in con- 
sciousness of naked Anxiety or 
anxiety of the deeper level, 173. 
Repetition : observed by Prof. Freud ; due to con- 
tinual effort at re-projection of the 
Anxiety problem, 110, 111 ; a waste- 
ful process, 34, 35. 
Resistance : an endopsychic fear-attitude acting as 
a self-protective mechanism for the 
automatic control of the unconscious 
Anxiety elements in relation to the 
waking life, 56 ; disarmed by the 
transference, with the result that 
energy is released and a crisis pre- 
224 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Resistance(Cont.) cipitated, 126 ; may be improperly 
handled in psychological practice, 
86-88 ; may be an unconscious factor 
in deterring the enquirer after truth, 
56, 95, 96. 
Salvation : the goal of the Anxiety life expressed in 
terms of religion, 68, 159, 168, 191. 
Seeming and a great riddle for a certain type of 
Being : Anxiety subject, 171, 174. 
Self-Conscious : to be understood as the equivalent of 
conceptual (which see), 2 et passim. 
Self- confused with consciousness by Descartes 
Consciousness : and by dream psychologists, 2. 
Self-Knowledge: a necessity for the development of the 
conceptual subject; to be gained by 
introspection, 125, 126, 130. 
Self- the ultimate demand of the Dife- 
Surrender : principle within become self-con- 
scious, the denouement of the Anxiety 
drama, 145, 157. 
Sexuality : the word sexuality is obviously a con- 
cept, a concept debased to the level 
of a percept. Its use in describing 
physiological function cannot then 
strictly be justified (? ). It is so 
used, however, by authors of repute : 
Darwin, in “ Different Forms of 
Flowers ” (p. 310), writes : “ con- 
troversies about the sexuality of 
plants ” ; always a symbol for the 
conceptual subject. Neglect of this 
fact a cardinal error in Freudian 
psychology, 42; a biologic func- 
tion which brings into focus 
perceptual and conceptual interests, 
hence called “ first, last, and 
greatest symbol of Anxiety,” 41, 42, 
114, 194 ; or Titan symbol, 152, 153 ; 
225 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Sexuality (Cont.) symbol of life (Love) and Death 
(Hate), 41. 
Sin : perverted expression of the aims of the 
conceptual life, 73, 91. 
infantile sense of, to be linked up with 
self-appointed punishment if there is 
to be rehabilitation of the subject, 
139, 141, 142 (see also Guilt). 
Soul : (see Mystery). 
Sparking : or second quickening, an emotional 
process whereby is inaugurated self- 
consciousness, 14, 79, 80, 160. 
Subjective : a word descriptive of the attitude of the 
subject to his own experience. All 
experience is in the first place sub- 
jective ; through Introjection the 
emotional experience of others is 
appropriated by the human subject, 
afterwards to be objectified through 
Projection, 35, 137 (with which com- 
pare 59 and 63). 
nature of practical psychology, 192. 
Sublimation : the ideal aspect of Projection, 74. 
Symbol : a datum of perceptual experience used 
in the first place as a vehicle of that 
which is not perceived but conceived, 
as it belongs to the unseen self, 
Ch. II. and passim, especiallv 8, 47, 
94, 97, 152, 153, 194, 195 ; all true 
symbols embody Anxiety and are 
therefore ambivalent (see Symbolic 
Efficacy). 
first established, 128, 143. 
the, is perishable, 31, 130. 
Symbolic a quality possessed in varying degrees 
Efficacy : for the conceptual subject by per- 
ceptual experience presented or re- 
presented ; it renders experience 
226 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Symbolic exquisitely painful or pleasurable (the 
Efficacy (Cont.) word ecstacy is applicable here), and 
indicates that the given experience 
has marked significance for the partic- 
ular conceptual subject. Some per- 
ceptual experience has symbolic 
efficacy for the group, other experience 
has it only for individuals. It acts as 
a danger index, it warns away tres- 
passers from the mystery which 
can safely be approached only with 
certain precautions, 41, 55, 95, 114, 
185. 
Symbolism : a language system of the conceptual life 
originating in the periods of sensori- 
motor inco-ordination and language- 
inadequacy, to express Anxiety (or- 
ganised in the service of the soul), 
Ch. II., 109 and passim. 
Symbols : of the life-force, wind, light, flame or 
fire, electricity, 48 et seq., 127. 
Tradition : Wisdom teaching received from one’s 
forebears, 82. 
Tragedy : the original aspect of Anxiety; the 
naked aspect, 92. 
Transference : an attitude in which the subject gives 
his infantile confidence — infantile 
because not founded on knowledge— 
to his doctor, spiritual adviser, or 
psychologist, 100, 126. 
Unconscious : a psychological mechanism of the con- 
ceptual life consisting of a reservoir 
of fragmentary memories of the period 
of sensori - motor inco - ordination, 
Ch. IV., and passim. ; also used more 
generally to include the above to- 
gether with experience of the period 
of language-inadequacy, 84. 
227 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Vita Nuova : or New Life ; the post-expiation life, 
i.e. the conceptual life after total 
surrender, 112, 113, 135, 136, 181, 182. 
Will : in this book no original doctrine of the 
will is put forward, but the Anxiety 
Hypothesis will doubtless help to 
clarify our thoughts on the subject. 
The suggestion is hazarded that the 
primitive conceptual subject is a 
believer in free-will, 53, 54. 
for certainty, 157. 
for life and for death, Dr. Jung’s pair of 
opposites in the will of life, 123. 
free, expresses a power subject, 55. 
Wisdom attempts to solve Anxiety problems or 
Teaching : to bring the conceptual and per- 
ceptual ranges of experience into 
focus, 60, 61, 117. 
defective, 27. 
directed to control of conceptual experience, 
60, 61, 117. 
limitations of, 136. 
Wise Man : sayings of, 24, 185. 
Wish a term applicable both to Power and 
Fulfilment : Expiation, 67, 69, with which may be 
compared, 70, 85. 
Zanoni : quoted as an example of the literature 
of mysticism, the doctrines of which 
are found to bear a resemblance to 
the Anxiety drama, 132. 
228 GLOSSARIAL INDEX No. II 
GENERAL* 
N.B.—All technical words used in dream 
psychology should be compared with the 
Glossary in Dr. Jones’s “Papers on Psycho- 
Analysis.” 
Abreact, to, to work off repressed emotion by living 
through it again in feeling or action, 58. 
Adler, Dr., : theory of Organic Insufficiency (“ The 
Neurotic Constitution ” ), 68, 69. 
Amnesia, an : defect of memory ; specifically—The 
Amnesia, the forgetting of infantile 
experience. Prof. Freud remarks that 
he regards this, not as a natural 
process, but as caused by a psychical 
repression which plays a large part in 
early education, 17, 18. 
(see Freudian Theories). 
Analogy : Dr. Jung says (“ Psychology of the Un- 
conscious,” p. 155), “ we must heartily 
agree with Steinthal when he says 
that an absolutely overweening im- 
portance must be granted to the 
little phrase gleich wie (even as). In 
the history of the development of 
thought it is easy to believe that the 
carry over of the libido to a phan- 
tastic correlate has led primitive man 
to a number of the most important 
discoveries.” 39, 40 
* It is scarcely necessary to repeat that the Anxiety 
Hypothesis is diametrically opposed to the interpretation of 
Symbolism as biologic function which marks particularly the 
theories of Prof. Freud quoted in this Glossary. 
229 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Concept : the forming of concepts or abstract 
ideas is an outstanding problem in 
mental science ; certain conditions 
seem to be necessary :— 
1. “ Clear concepts imply images of 
particular objects (percepts) in the 
back-ground, ready to come into the 
full light of consciousness as occasion 
requires.” (Prof. Sully, “ Outlines of 
Psychology,” p. 372). 
2. “ Language is not merely an 
accompaniment of conceptual activity, 
it is an instrument essential to its 
development. It is an appropriate 
means of fixing attention upon ideally 
represented objects as distinguished 
from percepts. It becomes the more 
necessary the more abstract ideal 
representation is—in other words, the 
less it contains of the concrete 
details of actual sense perception.” 
(Dr. Stout’s “ Manual of Psychology,” 
p. 597). 
That which activates the concept- 
forming process, and wherein a concept 
essentially consists, is the enigma, 7. 
Conflict : collision between any two opposing ideas 
or systems of ideas, more particularly, 
Prof. Freud contends, between “ the 
primary and secondary systems of 
mental activity ” (the Unconscious 
and the Preconscious). Prof. Freud has 
shown that this conflict, one on which 
the very existence of civilisation de- 
pends, is recapitulated with modifica- 
tions in the experience of the individual 
(cf. Dr. E. Jones, ibid. p. 6) 84-86, with 
which compare Ch. VI., Sect. 5. 
230 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Curiosity : infantile, is regarded by the psycho- 
therapists as mainly, if not invariably, 
occupied with sexual preoccupations ; 
it is the impulse to look, the counter- 
part of the exhibitionistic impulse ; 
62, 194. 
Dream : interpretation, theories of. There are 
several theories in existence. The 
school of Prof. Freud is consistently 
in favour of an interpretation which 
makes the interests of the dream 
centre round sex and ego impulses. 
This is a biologic interpretation. The 
Anxiety Hypothesis at the extreme 
other pole favours the theory that the 
interest of the dream centres round 
a conflict of spiritual forces and the 
emergence therefrom of the soul 
(Ch. VI., the Perfecting Fife). 
Dr. Jung critising the Freudian 
position says, “ By analytical re- 
duction to something universally 
known (facts of sexuality, etc.) we 
destroy the actual value of the sym- 
bol ; but ” (he adds) “it is appro- 
priate to its value and meaning to 
give it an hermeneutical interpre- 
tation, an interpretation which con- 
sists in adding more analogies to that 
already given by the symbol; in the 
. first place, subjective analogies given 
by the patient as they occur to him ; 
and in the second place, objective 
analogies provided by the analyst out 
of his general knowledge, the result 
being a highly complex and many- 
sided picture, which may now be 
reduced to a tertium comparationis. 
231 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Dream (Cont.) Thence result certain psychological 
lines of development of an individual, 
as well as collective nature 
These lines vindicate their validity 
by their value for life. The chief 
thing in practical treatment is that 
people should get a hold of their 
own life.” (“ Analytical Psychology,” 
pp. 468-9). The object, therefore, 
before the physician of the school of 
Dr. Jung is essentially practical. 
Dr. Jung continues (ibid), “ there are 
no magical cures for neurosis ! Just 
as soon as we begin to elaborate the 
symbolic outlines of the path, the 
patient must begin to walk thereon. 
If he deludes himself and shirk, no 
cure can result.” This would be an 
entirely defensible position in tech- 
nique if we (the analyst, see above) 
were quite sure what the right path 
is ! But, since we do not know with 
certainty, is not this the old coercive 
system in a new guise ? 
Dr. H. Silberer, while admitting a 
psycho-analj'tical interpretation of 
the dream claims that the dream 
demands a so-called anagogic one for 
its full comprehension, “ an inter- 
pretation which aims at the exposition 
of the loftier activities of the soul.” 
Dr. Otto Rank, criticising Dr. Sil- 
berer (International Journal of 
Psycho-Analysis, published by the 
International Psycho-Analy tical Press, 
March, 1921, pages 117 et seq.) 
complains that Dr. Silberer fails to 
bring forward adequate proof of his 
232 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Dream (Cont.) assertions. According to Dr. Rank’s 
own analytic experience a dream 
practically never has two meanings, 
and dreams generally are quite in- 
capable of an anagogic interpretation. 
In cases where such a meaning is in 
question it is usually supplied inde- 
pendently by the dreamer. 
“ The correct interpretation (sic) of the 
material .... has to be sought by 
aid of the well-known technique.” 
To read this dogmatic statement 
brings something of a shock to those 
who years ago learnt to love the 
strictly inductive methods of Prof. 
Freud, the researcher. In the same 
context Dr. Rank restricts the classi- 
fication of the trains of thought of 
the patients under analysis to the 
particularised headings, sublimation, 
transference, and resistance (ibid). 
Emotion : “ the affective quality of each instinc- 
tive process and the sum of visceral 
and bodily changes in which it 
expresses itself.” (Prof. McDougall’s, 
“ Social Psychology,” p. 46). 
see Instinct. 
Endoctrine the collective ductless glands (of which 
System : the thyroid was the first studied), the 
secretions of which, called hormones, 
are of paramount importance in pro- 
ducing human character. (Prof. 
McDougall, “ Social Psychology,” 
p. 117) ; 44. 
Exhibitionism : sexual excitement at the act of dis- 
* playing any part of the body. 
Dess technically, self-display of any 
kind ; 62. 
233 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Expiation : “ Dans les manies de Vexpiation, la 
deuxieme action qui doit compenser 
la premiere a un caractere desagre- 
able, penible, elle prend l’apparence, 
d’une punition.” (Prof. Janet,“ Les 
Nevroses,” p. 103) ; 16, 52. 
Note that Dr. Janet observes the 
compensating action, referred to in 
the Anxiety Hypothesis as balance. 
Feeling and From the dawn of thought, philosophy 
Knowing has produced two opposite schools of 
(or Reason) thinkers, each finding itself on surest 
ground when arguing in terms of one 
or other of the above two mental 
habits respectively. The Anxiety 
Hypothesis finds evidence that the 
human mind has evolved along both 
lines, each separate from the other 
and each incapable of fulfilling the 
function of the other. Experience, 
as Knowing borrows from Feeling 
what in this book is called Symbolic 
Efficacy, or it could not maintain 
itself. Symbolic Efficacy is a quality 
not unlike the attribute, holiness, 
which attaches to the Deity in 
religion. Holiness as may be seen 
from any Biblical Dictionary, e.g., 
the Hastings Dictionary, has a 
contagious quality which can be 
communicated and must be removed 
by ritual ablutions before the admin- 
istrant, or the person who has 
accidentally become infected, can 
return to ordinary life. Hence holi- 
ness is interpreted as nnclcaness, 
cf. the saying, “ the reading of the 
law maketh the hands unclean.” The 
234 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Feeling and same metamorphosis takes place 
Knowing in conceptual experience generally, 
(or Reason) Biologic function has high Symbolic 
(Cont.) Efficacy for it is saturated with both 
the unspeakable delight which attends 
the satisfaction of the life urge ex- 
pressing itself as instinct, and the 
equally unutterable anguish which 
attends the denial of the life urge. 
Hence for the conceptual subject of 
the average type, biologic function 
from being sacrosanct becomes dirty, 
because regulated after the fashion of 
religious ceremonial. It is “ rude ” 
says the child to speak of such things. 
The principle of economy is possi- 
bly accountable, in part, for this 
change, as it is in religion, where the 
effect of contact with that which is 
really unclean and that which is holy 
is the same, namely ritual ablution. 
There is a frank disinclination for 
tedious formalities in the joyous 
natural man which warns him off 
from splitting differences and tamper- 
ing with mysteries. 
Freudian the following topics in Prof. Freud’s 
Theories : theory are alluded to in this book : 
(1) amnesia, the; 17, 18 (Introductory 
Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Prof. 
Freud, p. 168). 
(2) displacement of accent ;140 (Interpre- 
tation of Dreams, p. 283 ; 3rd ed.). 
(3) dream consciousness, a mode of per- 
ception, 2 (ibid 426). 
(4) dream psychology, the relation between 
the Unconscious and the Precon- 
scious. The mechanisms of the dream 
235 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Freudian Theories are described by Prof. Freud as two 
(Cont.) dynamic systems or instances of 
which one is the Unconscious, the 
repository of the infantile sexuality 
wish, and the other the Preconscious, 
78 (ibid 121). Between the two 
systems Prof. Freud postulates con- 
flict, the sexuality wish attempting 
perpetually to emerge into conscious- 
ness and being as often countered by 
the forces of the Preconscious and 
by the Censors ; these latter mould 
the Unconscious sexuality wish— 
hence the disguising of the wish and 
the emergence of the symbol; 84 
et seq (ibid p. 474 et seq.). 
(5) infantile sexuality wish the motif of the 
dream, 44, 68 (ibid p. 439 et seq.). 
(6) infantile fixation on the parents, (CEdipus 
complex), 108, 109 (ibid 221 et seq.). 
(7) causal relations in the dream, 38 (ibid 
p. 293). 
(8) prefigurative value (for the “ reality ” i.e. 
perceptual life) of the infantile sexuality 
wish, 110, 111 (ibid p. 211 et seq.). 
(9) repetition element in the dream, 111. 
(Prof. Freud’s Introductory Beetures 
on Psycho-Analysis, p. 330). 
(10) resistance, 56 (Interpretation of Dreams, 
p. 410). 
(11) symbolic presen tation in dreams (ibid p.260) 
(12) transference, displacement of affect from 
one idea to another. Specifically— 
displacement of love or hate from the 
subject’s guardians in childhood to 
the psycho-analyst, 100, 126. (Intro- 
ductory Uectures on Psycho-Analysis, 
p. 245, 367 et seq.). 
236 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Idiopathic : a term used in pathology to describe a 
primary morbid state, one which is 
not secondary or arising from any 
other disease (see Appendix, p. 203). 
Infantile : an epithet applied by psycho-therapists 
to “ nervous ” manifestations,whether 
occuring in “ retention ” or “ regres- 
sion ” conditions of morbid mentality; 
the word has for most writers a kind 
of approbrium attaching to it (cf. 
Dr. E. Jones’, “ Papers on Psycho- 
Analysis,” p. 140), 126. The deeper 
significance of the symptom and 
dream is left out altogether, for 
instance, Dr. E. Jones dismisses the 
spontaneous evidence of subjects on 
the esoteric aspect of the dream very 
briefly. Dreams and nervous symp- 
toms are remarked by him to hinge 
on superstitions and to be believed 
often by the subject to have pro- 
phetic application. But he enquires 
no further along this line (ibid p. 251). 
Dr. Jung’s deeply philosophic vein 
inspires many utterances which are 
in a quite opposite sense. 
Instinct : Prof. McDougall defines instinct as ‘‘an 
inherited or innate psvcho-physical 
disposition which determines its pos- 
sessor to perceive, and to pay atten- 
tion to, objects of a certain class, to 
experience an emotional excitement 
of a particular quality upon perceiving 
such an object, and to act in regard 
to it in a particular manner, or at 
least to experience an impulse to such 
an action.” (“ Social Psychology,” 
5th edition, p. 29). He applies two 
237 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Instinct (Cont.) criteria for the recognition of a prim- 
ary instinct, viz. (a) “if a similar 
emotion and impulse are clearly dis- 
played in the instinctive activities of 
the higher animals ”... (b) “ we must 
inquire in each case whether the 
emotion and impulse in question 
occasionally appear in human beings 
with morbidly exaggerated intensity” 
(ibid., p. 49). Kvery instinct has 
associated with it a specific emotion 
(which see;, e.g., fear with flight. 
Thus guided the Prof, recognises seven 
primary instincts, viz., flight, repul- 
sion, curiosity, pugnacity, parental 
instinct, self-abasement, and self- 
display, 10, 11 (ibid., 62 et seq.). 
Intelligence : is described by Prof. Hobhouse as aris- 
ing within the sphere of instinct. 
Whereas the instinctive action is 
hereditary, uniform, and relatively 
fixed, an intelligent action is devised 
by the animal itself on the basis of 
its own experience (“ Mind in Evolu- 
tion,” Ch. IV.). 10, 11, 55. 
Introjection : “ Absorption of the environment into 
the personality, so that external events 
are reacted to as though they were 
internal, personal ones. (Dr. Jones : 
“ Papers on Psycho-Analysis,” p.690.) 
Introjection, in Dr. Ferenczi’s idea, 
is characteristic of the “ large-souled 
psycho-neurotic,” projection, char- 
acteristic of the “ small-souled par- 
anoiac (see Dr. Eerenczi, “ Con- 
tributions to Psycho-Analysis,” Ch.II. 
“ Stages in the Development of the 
Reality Sense ”). The above authors 
238 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Introjection are using both words only in relation 
(Contd.) to pathological phenomena ; in the 
Anxiety Hypothesis they are on the 
contrary, used of all experience from 
the point of view of self-conscious- 
ness, 62. 
James, “ The Will to Believe and other Essays, ’ ’ 
Prof. Wm. referred to in footnote to page 55. 
Jung, Dr. Karl, analysis of Nietzsche and the Super- 
man, 148, 149. 
Doctrines of J ung referred to are: 
(references will be found in footnotes). 
(1) Division of Unconscious into Per- 
sonal and Impersonal, 149, 150. 
(2) Enantiodromia, or clashing to- 
gether of two opposites, not only in 
the dream, but also in the Uncon- 
scious ; the Will for Life and for 
Death, 150. 
(3) function of the sex instinct in 
furthering cultural interests, 43. 
(4) Introvert and Extrovert, 96. 
(5) Myth of the infantile hero, 155. 
(6) symbolism the language of the 
Dream, 32. 
Miller Phantasies, 122. 
McDougall, references to “ Social Psychology ” : 
Prof.Wm. 16,106,112,163. 
(a) exhibitions of superior physical force 
in relation to the training of the child, 
16 (b) sympathy (active) 112, 163; 
(c) sympathy (passive), 106, 107. 
See Sympathy. 
Marett, fears and taboos associated with 
Mr. M. M. marriage (“ The Threshold of Re- 
ligion,” p. 45) 153-155. 
Masochism : sexual enjoyment of mental or physical 
pain suffered by the subject, 166. 
239 GLOSS A RIAL INDEX 
Orthogenic : Evolution, “ must consist (if Mind is the 
highest thing) in the unfolding of all 
there is of latent possibility in Mind ” 
etc. (Prof. Hobhouse, Mind in Evo- 
lution, p. 5. 
Paraesthesia : altered sensation, 102. 
Paranoia : a form of insanity accompanied by 
delusions. See Projection ; 63. 
Phantasy : trains of thought which present them- 
selves automatically in waking con- 
sciousness, coming and going without 
apparent reason; see also the 
description of “ undirected thinking ” 
in Dr. Jung’s “ Psychology of the 
Unconscious,” Part I., Ch. I. 
“ Whence comes the bad reputation 
of the phantasy ? ” asks Dr. Jung 
(“ Analytical Psychology,” p. 468). 
He continues : “ The significance of 
the symbol is not that it is a disguised 
indication of something that is gen- 
erally known, but that it is an 
endeavour to elucidate by analysis 
what is as yet completely unknown 
and only in process of formation.” 
(ibid.) See Symbolism. 
Preconscious : subjective experience of which one is 
not aware at any given moment, but 
which may be more or less easily 
recalled to consciousness ; Prof. Freud 
says of the system which such mental 
processes collectively constitute, that 
it holds the keys of motility and con- 
sciousness. 
Projection : the ascribing to other people of what is 
in one’s own mind, a tendency 
characteristic of paranoia. 
Projection is a word much more 
240 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Projection (Cont.) commonly in use than its correlate 
Introjection (which see), 62, 63, etc. 
Rationalisation: the assigning of a merely specious ex- 
planation, as if it were a reasonable 
cause, to some phenomenon regarded 
as effect, 95. 
Repetition : later additions to Prof. Freud’s theory 
include the description of an ele- 
ment of Repetition in the dream 
and symptom of the psycho-neurotic. 
He says, “ with certain affects one 
seems to be able to see deeper, and 
to recognise that the core of it, 
binding the whole complex structure 
together, is of the nature of a 
repetition of some very significant 
previous experience,” which previous 
experience, the writer thinks to be 
that of birth (Prof. Freud, “ Intro- 
ductory hectares on Psycho-Analysis,” 
p. 330), 110, 111. 
Resistance : “ that which disturbs the work ” (i.e., of 
dream interpretation). 
see Freudian Theories, No 10. 
Sadism : sexual enjoyment accompanying the 
infliction of bodily or mental pain, 
by the subject on someone else, 
cf., Masochism. 
Self : identified by Dr. E. Jones with the body. 
“ The self comprises the whole body 
or any separate part of it, not the 
mind.” 
Consciousness, attributed by Dr. Jung 
to the power of the Incest prohibition. 
(“ Ps3rchology of the Unconscious,” 
p.303) 
Sexuality : the main preoccupation of the dream in 
the opinion of Prof. Freud's school 
(see under Symbolism). 
241 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Sublimation : a process by which the energy derived 
from a sexual impulse is directed to 
a non-sexual and socially useful pur- 
pose, 58. 
Symbolism : “ The number of symbols met with in 
practice is extraordinarily high, and 
can certainly be counted by thousands. 
In astonishing contrast with this 
stands the curious fact that the 
number of ideas thus symbolised is 
very limited indeed, so that in the 
interpretation of them the complaint 
of monotony is naturally often heard. 
.... All symbols represent ideas of 
the self and the immediate blood 
relatives, of the phenomena of birth, 
love, and death. In other words they 
represent the most primitive ideas and 
interests imaginable . . . The rela- 
tives include only father, mother, 
brother, sister, son, daughter . . . . 
Birth can refer to the ideas of giving 
birth, of begetting, or being born 
oneself. The idea of death is in the 
unconscious a relatively simple one 
that of lasting absence ; it always 
refers to the death of others . . . . 
Bove, or more strictly, sexuality, 
comprises a very considerable number 
of distinct processes, including some, 
such as execretory acts that are not 
commonly recognised to have a sexual 
bearing ; it would lead us too far to 
enumerate and describe them all here, 
but it may be said that the total con- 
ception thus reached, closely corre- 
sponds with Freud’s theory of sex 
(see “ Three Contributions to the 
242 GLOSSARIAL INDEX 
Symbolism (Cont.) Sexual Theory.”). The field of sexual 
symbolism is an astoundingly rich 
and varied one, and the vast majority 
of all symbols belong to this category. 
There are probably more symbols of 
the male organ itself than all other 
symbols put together.” (Dr. E. Jones, 
“Papers on Psycho-Analysis,” pp. 144, 
145). N.B.—The student’s surprise 
vanishes on recognising that sexuality 
provides the symbolism of the mystery 
of mysteries. 
Sympathy : Prof. McDougall (“ Social Psychology”) 
discriminates (1) a primitive passive 
sympathy induced in group animals 
by one of their number, e.g., fear and 
the flight impulse among sheep, 
(ibid. 91). 
(2) active sympathy, sympathy in 
“ the fuller, more usual, sense of the 
word.” (ibid. 168). 
Transference : see Freudian Theories, No. 12, 
Trauma : injury, mental or bodily. 
Trotter : “ Instincts of the Herd in Peace and 
War,” quoted 71. 
243