The Unconscious Mind Anxiety

The seeds of anger, like love, are sown in infancy. Frustrations evoking and nourishing anger begin at birth, when the human being is "continually encountenng the painful ex­perience that the world is no longer shaped so exactly to his subjective demands as was the maternal womb."

Infants are born with certain instinctual reactions which are sometimes called "fears."

However, the face and substance of fear changes as experience enlarges. For example, people get progressively more afraid of snakes as they grow older. One of the most pervasive human fears is that of loss of parental love, or, more abstractly, fear of rejection or social disapproval.

Fear is the emotion associated with flight from danger which threatens survival. Fear and cowardice are not the same thing; one can feel afraid and still act bravely, which is what most "heroes" do.

Personality   patterns,   it   should   now   be plain, reflect the constant interplay of posi­tive and negative emotions. In wholesome personality development the "loving" emo­tions are encouraged to blossom and modify the effects of the negative emotions. Techni­cally speaking, we seek to "eroticize our aggressions." We turn now to consider the un­conscious   mind,  where  these things occur.

The Unconscious Mind

The unconscious mind is a paradox. We become aware of it only when and to the ex­tent that it releases memories, thoughts, and feelings to consciousness. It holds and with­holds many secrets.

We assume the existence of an unconscious mind because it offers the most rational and scientific way of explaining human behavior. This hypothesis has super­seded the animistic explanation that a child is "bad" or his father an alcoholic because the Devil is in him.

There are those who cling to "free will" and reason as the fundamental determinants of human conduct. On this score it can be said that we must act as if our wills were free and as reasonably as our unconscious minds will allow us. But there can be little doubt today that individual reason and will are persistently limited by unconscious forces. We are fundamentally driven by our emo­tional reactions. We can do only what the structure of our personality permits.

For these and other reasons we must now examine the structure (or construct) of the unconscious mind in some detail. It is the major area of psychic processes and hence the central subject matter of mental health and mental hygiene. To use several figures of speech, the conscious mind is only the facade of the unconscious; it is the part of the iceberg that floats above the water; it is just the skin of the apple. The picture of the unconscious mind that we shall now try to paint in a few strokes is of necessity generalized and over­simplified. But it is not merely hypothetical; it corresponds with and explains how human beings actually behave.

The structuring of the unconscious mind here set forth is based on psychoanalytic theory, initiated and expounded principally by the Viennese physician, Sigmund Freud. It has acknowledged limitations, but it is far from being outmoded.

The Unconscious Mind Anxiety

There comes a time, usually between the ages of four and seven, when the imitative child wants jealously and intensely to "pos­sess" the parent of the opposite sex. Little boys naively say, "When Daddy is at the of­fice, I'll be Daddy"; and the little girls ear­nestly assert, "When I grow up, I'm going to marry father." This stage of development, which certainly occurs in Western culture with its ideal of romantic monogamous mar­riage, is called oedipal love, after the Greek legend of King Oedipus, who was fated to kill his father and marry his mother.

In later childhood, as the boy and girl be­come aware that their oedipal longings are impossible of fulfillment, emotional attach­ments shift outside the home and become centered in "loyalty" to a gang or a "crush" on a friend. The new libidinal attachment is usually to a person of the same sex- This is sometimes designated as homosexual love. In late childhood, a period of sexual latency, this is a perfectly natural and normal emotional attachment and is not to be confused with adult homosexuality.

When the tides of puberty begin to rise, love attachments return to the opposite sex. But this usually begins as a kind of idealistic love for some distant, unattainable personal­ity—as unattainable in reality as was father or mother, but secretly and subtly cast in the parent images. The idealistic yearnings of hosts of teenagers for the same popular and symbolic figure of the sport or entertainment world is a repeatedly observed phenomenon.

The next and final stage in the develop­ment of the capacity to love is heterosexual love flesh and blood love for a person of the opposite sex. This is the high point and ful­fillment of the normal course of love development. But it does not wipe out all previous love attachments, some self-love, for example, always remains. Nor does it exclude the si­multaneous presence in the psyche of power­ful "negative emotions." It is possible to be exceedingly angry at those we love.

Anger and Fear "Negative Emotions"

The negative emotions such as anger, fear, hate, jealousy, and revenge are in a sense protective reaction patterns, slumbering re­flexes evoked by threats of suspicions of dan­ger. They were evolved in the long history of the human race to help assure survival of the individual and the race. They mobilize psy­chic energy and physical resources for that end. But when too frequently or constantly evoked, particularly by imagined danger, and when unchecked in their operation, they can have a destructive effect on personality.

Anger, or aggression, in its many guises is the normal but primitive response to frustra­tion. It is basically the desire to remove by attacking, killing, or destroying anything that threatens the survival of the individual in body or spirit. All too often anger is de­structively turned against oneself.

When you are thwarted or frustrated by yourself, others, or circumstances, you cannot help feeling angry. But there is a vast differ­ence between feeling angry, appearing angry, and acting angry. You can learn to do some­thing constructive with your mobilized en­ergy. You should neither swallow it (repress it) nor turn it against yourself. For anger re­pressed will return in some other emotional disguise.

The Unconscious Mind Anxiety

With the poetic insight and in a poet's lan­guage William Wordsworth captured in the passage quoted on this page one essential secret of normal personality development — step-by-step constriction of the innate im­pulses of the newborn infant.

Personality has been aptly described as "the sum total of our ways of behaving, espe­cially toward other people.'' Our behavior is controlled not only by apparently conscious thought and decision in the here and now but also by our emotions, which have roots in the past. To put it in another way, we are al­ways influenced more or less by our uncon­scious mind, which is the dwelling place of our emotions and the matrix of our personality structure.

PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

"As the twig is bent, so the tree inclines." "The child is father to the man." In these old proverbs also is summed up a great deal of the best present-day knowledge of normal personality development. This development begins at birth. The behavior patterns of later life are established in the cradle, the nursery, and the elementary school room.

Despite individual differences, personality development follows a fairly consistent and universal pattern. It normally proceeds step by step, stage by stage toward the elusive, relative, and rarely attained goal of "emotional maturity." Physical growth and biolog­ical readiness precede the emotional develop­ment. Each intermediate stage in personality development must be worked through before a person can go on to the next stage. No one can leap from infancy to adulthood. Arrested and distorted development, however, is all too common. The relationship of the individual with his own family, from earliest infancy onward, is a crucial factor in personality de­velopment

The Stages of Love

The newborn infant is small and helpless, utterly dependent on his mother or her sub­stitutes for very survival, yet he is born with the divine spark of life in him the will to live and love. The innate will to survive, to grow up and enjoy life is the basic font of vital human energy, it has been given the name of libido. As personality development progresses, a large part of the libido evolves into more directed and controlled feelings, which we call love. Fully developed, the libido repre­sents all those inner strivings which tend to preserve and extend life to "heal, cultivate, protect, and inspire" the human personality. But in the infant this love force appears in a crude, undifferentiated, untutored form.

The infant begins by loving himself. This is called narcissistic love, after the Greek legend of Narcissus, the handsome lad who fell in love with his own image in a pool. The infant "loves" and finds pleasurable gratification in different parts of his own body in a regularly observed succession. His first libidinal at­tachment is to his mouth (he puts everything into it), then to his anus, then to his genital organs.

As he becomes increasingly aware of the difference between himself and other people, the infant gradually shifts his love to objects outside himself. The first libidinal shift is to his mother, then to other members of the household. The young child identifies himself closely with his parents, idealizes them, and seeks to imitate them. This is imitative love.

The Unconscious Mind

The most serious criticism of the psychoan­alytic formulation of human conduct is prob­ably that it does not give full enough weight to the physiological factors involved; it more or less takes them for granted. Freud himself, who began as a neurologist, anticipated this criticism and worked out his theory precisely because there was not enough information at

 that time on the physiology or pathology (disorder) of the human nervous system to explain the huge backlog of unhappy people and mental illness that confronted him.

The success of recent drug therapy (e.g. tranquilizers and cerebral stimulants) in treating mild and severe mental illness sug­gests that physiological modifications of the nervous system can favorably modify the events presumed to occur in the unconscious mind. But the new ability to alter and im­prove the physiological factors in mental ill­ness does not entirely wipe out the psychic factors.

Those who doubt the existence and impor­tance of the unconscious mind must find a better explanation for such questions as: How can a fact be remembered one minute and forgotten the next? Where do dreams come from? Why do so many people feel uncomfor­tably anxious and guilty about trivial and unimportant events of their past and present experience? Why do patterns of reaction es­tablished in childhood persist throughout adult life?

Although other terminology for the struc­ture of the unconscious mind can be and has been used, the well-accepted (Freudian) con­struct divides it into three interacting parts: the id, the ego, and the superego.

The Id

A newborn baby, helpless though he is, nevertheless has a lust for life, instincts, and aptitudes (like the sucking reflex) for sur­vival. This passion for existence, this inher­ent vital emotional energy we have pointed out. can he described as his libido In a more impersonal term it can also be characterized as the id. All that we can guess or posit con­cerning the existence of the id we gain from observations of the conduct of the libido. (We have already traced the normal course of libido attachments to "love objects" from early inlancy through adulthood.) In the structure of the unconscious mind, therefore, the id can be construed as the uncontrolled source of the inborn tendencies, the instincts, the uncon­scious striving of the human organism to live and enjoy life

The id, however, has characteristics which are not in accord with the best in human con­duct Like a child who "wants what he wants when he wants it." the id constantly seeks its own pleasure and gratification. It acts as if pleasure were the only thing in the world that counts. It operates on the pleasure prin­ciple exclusively. This is the way infants and children behave, and it takes education, ma­turation, and social pressure before they give up the pleasure principle as the chief guide to conduct. Even in adults, of course, the pleasure-seeking drive persists but it is under greater control.

The pleasure-seeking id does not distin­guish between good and evil It is illogical; it holds contradictory wishes and impulses at the same time. In a word, the id it unrealistic The human organism which responded solely to its whims, its sexual and aggressive tend­encies, would probably not long survive.

The Superego

Crudely speaking, the superego is the con­science, the still, small voice within us that warns us against temptation and wrongdoing. But the voice we hear is only the conscious part of the superego. A larger part of it is buried in the unconscious, where it frequently bullies the ego and makes itself felt in vague but distressing feelings of guilt and shame. The superego embraces not only our conscious moral standards but also our "ego ideal" the picture of ourselves as we would secretly like to be and appear to the world.

While the reality principle restricts the ego to what is possible, the superego tells it what is permissible, or, to put it another way, what is socially acceptable. The superego is an es­sential check on asocial or antisocial conduct.

A peculiarity of the superego is that it is often behind the times. Its sternest admoni­tions frequently are those that were formed in early childhood. The nature of the superego is the heart of the doctrine: "Give me the child until he is seven and you can have him for the rest of his life."

This brings us to the ori­gin of the superego.

The superego is formed in childhood, principally between the ages of three and six. At this time, as already noted, the child is strongly identified with his parents (or their substitutes). Their least prohibitions and com­mands, their values, and their attitudes are etched deeply on the young and weak ego of the child, and these feelings become the es­sence of his superego.

The unfortunate catch in this is that the parents, impelled by their own superegos, too often urge the child to be better than he can be ("a perfect little lady or gentleman") and better than they (the parents) are or were themselves.

UNCONSCIOUS MIND

Now that we have described the unconscious mind, we are in a position to understand the conflicts that occur in it. The conflicts can be understood as battles between the ego and the id, the superego and the id, the ego and the superego, and struggles within the id. The focus of these conflicts is on the ego. It must mediate between the id and superego; it must obey the dictates of the su­perego; it must control the whimsical de­mands of the id; it must satisfy the needs of external reality; it must guide the entire per­sonality through the shoals and competitions of the real world. Some egos are stronger than others, but no ego can always meet all the demands upon it. It must sometimes adopt compromises, subtle means of self-protection variously called "ego defenses," mental mech­anisms, and mental dynamisms.

When the ego is under stress from the id or being "punished" by the superego, the indi­vidual whose ego is being hurt suffers from anxiety-a vague but often powerful feeling for which he has no obvious or immediate explanation. He cannot put his finger on the source of the anxiety because it is concealed and disguised in the unconscious mind. The anxiety may express itself in feelings of ten­sion, guilt, inferiority, or even physical symp­toms (e.g. a headache). There are always some physical reactions to the stress of anx­iety. In one sense anxiety may be considered an admission on the part of the ego that it is temporarily unable to cope with its taxing job.

Later in this chapter we shall deal with constructive ways of handling anxiety. At this point we shall set forth some of the men­tal mechanisms by which the ego seeks to defend itself against otherwise intolerable anxieties generated by conflicts in the uncon­scious mind.

THE MENTAL MECHANISMS

Mental mechanisms (mental dynamisms, ego defensesl operate solely in the unconscious mind. At the time we are using them, or over­using them, we are not aware of the fact. In retrospect we can sometimes recognize how our egos were defending themselves, and we are usually acutely aware of the mental mechanisms grossly employed by other people.

It is possible to identify some types of behavior originating in the use of mental mechanisms; childish behavior in an adult, for example, indicates the use of a mental mechanism called regression. Different people habitually use different mechanism; most people use several- When one com­promise fails, the uneasy ego grasps des­perately for another.

We must not blame ourselves or other peo­ple for using mental mechanisms; they are sometimes necessary to a particular individ­ual to enable him to deal with his real-life situations. We may, however, fairly question the persistent overworking of one or another mental mechanism. This betrays serious un­resolved conflicts in the unconscious mind, or, in other terms, an unsettled personality or a troubled person.

Repression

The most important mental mechanism is called repression; it is an emotional block that keeps us from remembering something even if we want to. In brief, the ego buries unpleasant memories and associations and frightening feelings. It also inhibits pleasant feelings, which arouse the threat of the id going out of control and prompting socially unacceptable behavior of a sexual or aggres­sive nature. Repressed material represents emotional reactions that we want to hide even from ourselves. But this repressed, buried, warded-off, hidden material does not disappear. It seeks expression one way or an­other. Since it is barred from directly entering the consciousness, it usually appears in a disguised and distorted form.

Among the ways in which repressed memo­ries and experiences may assert themselves are dreams, amnesia, purposeful forgetting, slips of the tongue, and the formation of neu­rotic anxiety symptoms. Dreams are "the royal road to the unconscious mind"; in them appear disguised images of the circumstances that have been repressed into the uncon­scious. Dreams usually represent wish ful­fillments—but of wishes we would not dare harbor in the conscious mind. Very often they are wishes to harm those we love —parents, spouse, children, brothers, and sisters.

Amnesia means loss of memory forgetting or repressing whole spans of time. Unpleas­ant war experiences, for instance, are some­times thus blanked out. Again, we do not like to look forward to events that threaten pain,   difficulty,   or   embarrassment.   So we purposefully forget a dental appointment; we stand up a date we didn't want in the first place. Of great significance is the universal experience called infantile amnesia. Almost everyone "forgets" the feelings of frustration, fear, and other experiences that occurred dur­ing infancy and early childhood.

Identification

Identification is the process by which the ego gains strength through attachment to another person, group (notably the family), or institution. The infant, as noted, identifies himself first with his mother, then with other members of his immediate family. The young child feels and behaves as though he were the parents themselves. He uncritically imi­tates their ways; he unconsciously adopts their traits, habits, ideas, prejudices, and values. When he is angry at them, he may hit himself!

Identification in later life represents the need for belonging to some group or "herd" and being accepted by that group. Even out­casts and outlaws huddle together for mutual reassurance. Identification is on the whole one of the most satisfactory adjustment mechanisms. However, overidentification with one's family, school, or other group may sharply limit one's personal development, inhibit outgoing feelings toward other people, and indicate unresolved inner feelings of a childlike dependency on others.

Some Other Mental Mechanisms in Operation

From the descriptions and examples of mental mechanisms already given it should be obvious that hidden struggles and conflicts within the unconscious mind create not only psychosomatic illness but also the wide di­versity of characters and personalities we meet in real life and in fiction. Without going into the complete details of the psychic processes involved in each, we shall give brief descriptions of generally recognizable "stock characters" whose peculiar behavior patterns are controlled by overworking ego defenses and mental mechanisms.

The extrovert. He turns to the outside world, to fierce rounds of activity, to careless and unreflective action in order to smother his inner conflicts. "The life of the party" is usu­ally running away from himself.

The introvert. He substitutes thought for action. He shrinks from his social environ­ment. He finds decision painfully difficult. He looks too long before he leaps.

 The perfectionist. He sets his goals so high that neither he himself nor others can reasonably criticize him for failing to achieve them.

The specialist. He chooses so odd or unique a line of endeavor that there is little compe­tition in it; thus he escapes the normal com­petitive struggle.

The know it all." He covers up his inner sense of inadequacy by an attitude of supe­riority. He appears too cocksure, dogmatic, and positive about his knowledge and opin­ions- He knows all the answers, he thinks; but he holds only minor jobs.

Mrs. Grundy. She viciously gossips about and criticizes others to compensate for her own feelings of inferiority. She secretly fears that, given the chance, she would behave worse than those she criticizes.

The alibi artist. He cannot face overt criti­cism. He fears that others will discover and confirm the low opinion he has about himself.

The isolationist. His unconscious mind has fashioned logic-tight compartments so that some parts of his inconsistent, paradoxical, multiple personality are completely isolated from others. This is the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde character. A more recent portrayal of the multiple personality is to be found in the well-known psychiatric study entitled Three Faces of Eve.

The symbolist. He performs symbolic acts as a bribe to his superego in order to blot out or undo even more painful thoughts lurking in his unconscious mind. A classic example is Lady Macbeth repeatedly washing her hands in the vain hope of washing away her deeper feelings of guilt about having instigated murder.

The fetishist. He displaces his stong feelings for a person onto a thing. Afraid to express openly a love for a particular woman, he holds some physical symbol of her a hand­kerchief, a lock of her hair in even higher esteem.

Pollyanna. She persistently looks at the world through rose-colored glasses. She child­ishly denies that life includes struggle and difficulty. Eventually she is tripped up and overwhelmed by it.

Sublimation

Sublimation means directing, channelizing, and converting basic emotional drives, crude instinctual impulses, into socially acceptable and useful activities It is the true taming of the id by the ego under direction of the su­perego. Sublimations are the most construc­tive compromises and the happiest solutions to the inevitable frustrations that life sets before us. Though difficult to achieve, they bring social reward and approval which rein­forces and strengthens the ego.

Sublimations take many forms. Some serve for a time; others for a lifetime. The lives of dedicated men and women scientists, art­ists, missionaries, and others devoted to great causes illuminate how satisfying and crea­tive sublimations can be Pierre and Marie Curie, discoverers of radium, offer a lofty ex­ample of beautifully sublimated lives. So does the life of Abraham Lincoln. The creative arts have served man any as a  means of sublimating their inner drives and conflicts. Most com­monly the making of a home and the rearing of a family give the opportunity for the subli­mation of feelings to a most socially useful end.

Sublimation is not entirely an unconscious process. Conscious will, thought, and effort enter into it. One deliberately chooses realis­tic goals and activities which he can step by step, in spite of frustrations and difficulties, hope to reach This is the uphill road to sus­tained personal happiness the only road there is.