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.