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Chapter 24
Conclusion
It has been said that there is no scrap of knowledge concerning the remotest star which will not, sooner or later, be found to have its bearing upon the problems of human life, and we may well ask what the science of human nature itself has to contribute to the solution of our daily problems.
The practical application of psychology has certain well-defined spheres. Its bearing upon education has long been recognised, and much valuable work done in relation to the study of the child mind. The psychology of fatigue, in relation to industrial efficiency, has also found recognition as a branch of applied science not without its practical value. The field of social problems is still largely awaiting exploration, and there can be little doubt that the study of the psychology of the criminal and unemployable would yield results of the greatest social value.
At the present moment, it is the field of abnormal psychology that holds the focus of attention. That inestimably valuable results are being obtained in this field of study no one can dispute, but its value is not confined to the relief of disease alone, but, as the research is progressing deeper, to the revelation of the conditions that give rise to disease. Just as the study of pathology gave us the science of hygiene, so the study of mental diseases is showing us the way to healthier thinking. It is teaching us that any abnormal attitude towards life will produce mental discomfort, if not actual disease, and it is showing us, just as physiological hygiene has shown us, that if the developing intelligence of man leads him to depart from primitive conditions wherein the instincts are sufficient guides, then he must also apply his reason to the new problems to which the new conditions give rise, and not leave the solution of these to instincts which are only fitted for the simplest form of functioning. The instinct of combativeness, or the instinct of flight, will not conduct the evolutions of a modern army, and neither will the primitive impulses enable man to live well and happily in conditions which elaborate mental processes have built up—as witness the terrible prevalence of unsolved sex problems beneath the fair show of our civilisation. Two-thirds, if not more, of nerve trouble have their origin in the efforts of a primitive instinct to function under civilised conditions and its failure to make the adaptation. We need to take our instincts out of the region of the subconscious and apply our reason to them if we are to solve the problems that press upon us.
Throughout this book it will have been seen that stress has been laid upon the functioning and activity of those levels of the mind that are below the threshold of consciousness, and that it has been pointed out that the instincts, and not the reason, are the key to the human mind. But it has also been shown that the mind is in a state of evolution, and that reason, as its latest development, has an equal biological significance with the instincts of sex and self-preservation, and that we can no more afford to ignore the higher attributes of the human mind than we can afford to deny their true place to the primitive.
Briefly, the primitive man lies at the base of our being, but the divine man stands at its apex, and we, in our ascent, are in a transition stage, with subconscious and superconscious not yet correlated in the conscious mind. We do not see our past and future save in the dim pictures of dream and vision, by the uncertain gleam of intuition rather than the clear light of reason, and no solution of any human problem, either social or psychological, can be valid which does not look to the future as well as the past. Hitherto psychology has sought its standards of normality in the primitive and subhuman, forgetting that the flower of humanity is a natural product as well as its weeds; that religion, charity and idealism are as much a part of human nature as those primitive instincts which give rise to unnameable crimes. A psychology which looks to the past can show us causes, but it is only a psychology which looks to the future which can find us cures. Evolution did not cease its progress when it produced the cave man guarding his family, but evolved the "Save the Children Fund," which before the echoes of the last shot had died away was sending succour to the helpless young of an enemy herd.
A psychology which bases its philosophy upon a return to the primitive, especially if that psychology undertakes the solution of human problems, individual or collective, is ignoring the data of evolution. We know that all life originated in the sea, and that the young of many species still pass the first phase of their life in the water. When, however, they have come ashore, and the gills have given place to lungs, they cease to be water creatures, and the structural traces of their origin are vestigial and not functional, and a frog can be drowned as easily as any other air-breathing creature, despite his tadpole past. So it is with the human psyche, unquestionably it has passed through a primitive phase in the course of its development, but if, in an effort to remedy some faulty development, it be thrust back to that phase after evolving to a higher one, it will perish as surely as the frog thrust under water. It should be the aim of psychotherapy, not to reduce the mind to its primitive elements and point of view, but rather to help humanity to make that transition from the lower to the higher which evolution is forcing upon us, whether we will or no. Adaptation to environment is the key to life, and the environment to which an individual must be aided to adjust himself, if such aid be sought, is not that environment which, generation by generation, is receding further into the past, but that future which hour by hour is becoming the present, and from which there is no escape.
It should be the aim of psychotherapy to work out the arc which evolution is describing, and to set the feet of racial wanderers upon its path. It is a futile and dangerous philosophy which proposes a return to the past as an escape from the present.
Geology, zoology, sociology, and comparative psychology, all show us the evolution of that which is simple into that which is complex, from the cave man, with his few needs and problems, to the complications of a modern industrial society. And we see in the little segment of the evolutionary arc with which we are most closely concerned that the chief factor is the herd instinct which is pressing us all the time towards a more complete socialisation of humanity, and that any adaptation which an individual makes must be in relation to his integration as a social unit and not to his needs as a solitary individual.
Diagnostic and descriptive psychology must be distinguished from remedial psychology of which we have had all too little. Research on the abnormal mind alone will not give us the key to a healthy life, we must study social psychology as well as individual psychology, because man is a social animal, and his mental processes are determined by this fact; any adaptation he makes, and adaptation is the basis of psychotherapy, must be in relation to his social group as well as to his own subconscious wishes; it is not enough to bring these wishes into the light of consciousness, they must be synthesised with the rest of the personality, to the social organisation of which that personality is a unit, and to the great evolutionary drift of which even the race itself is but a partial expression. Psychotherapy may begin with the primitive, but it must end with the divine, for both are integral factors in the human mind.
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