The result is that those who attempt the complete emancipation
possible to a properly-organized mind are confronted first by the lag
of our institutions and traditions, and secondly by the unconcealed
suspicion of all those--and they are as yet the large majority--in
which the conflicts arising out of sex are unresolved. It is from the
sum of those conflicts that the spirit prevalent with regard to sex
to-day derives its character--shocked and shamefaced as regards one’s
own sexual life, vindictive and grudging as regards the difficulties
of others. The bulk of men and women cannot treat sexual problems in a
scientific spirit, because of the store of bottled-up emotion in the
wrong place that they have laid up for themselves by their failure to
come to proper terms with their sexual instincts. The soul should grow
to deserve the words Crashaw wrote of St. Theresa--“O thou undaunted
daughter of desires!” But this the soul of such disharmonic beings can
never do.
This brings us to our other pressing question. Should the results
of psycho-analytic methods, the knowledge that the sex instinct is
fundamental and is interwoven into the roots of the highest spiritual
activities--should the inculcation and demonstration of this be part
of education? Some would say yes, and would argue that to know oneself
is essential to a proper realization of one’s capacities. Personally I
am extremely doubtful of the correctness of this answer. Knowledge of
the processes of digestion is not necessary to digest well--so long as
we go on digesting well: it is only necessary when we digest badly. In
that case the processes involved are automatic: but even in processes
which require a great deal of learning, we find a similar state of
affairs. A man can become expert at, say, a game requiring the most
delicate adjustments of hand and eye without analysing the processes
he employs, but by practising them as finished articles, so to speak;
and it is equally obvious that Shakespeare and Shelley and Blake and
other great writers produced their works without the least analytical
knowledge of the obscure and rather unpleasant processes which, if we
are to believe the critics who psycho-analyse dead authors in the pages
of Freudian journals, were “really” at work below the surface. Analysis
constitutes a serious surgical operation for the mind, and, as one of
the leading Austrian psycho-analysts has recently said, we do not want
to perform this operation on healthy people any more than we want to
open their abdomens merely for the sake of seeing that their viscera
are normal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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