Opus 21: Descriptive Music for the Lower Kinsey Epoch of the Atomic Age, a Concerto for a One-man Band, Six Arias for Soap Operas, Fugues, Anthems & BarrelhouseWylie, Philip
Philosophy
Opus 21: Descriptive Music for the Lower Kinsey Epoch of the Atomic Age, a Concerto for a One-man Band, Six Arias for Soap Operas, Fugues, Anthems & Barrelhouse
Wylie, Philip
Authors -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Patients -- Fiction; Philosophy -- Fiction
"No. But we note that, to extend his physical capacities, he has
used logic and reason. He has sometimes tried to employ them on his
consciousness; but never--except intuitively, till recently--has it
dawned on him that he is usually unconscious of his own real motives.
That his cultures represent guesses--or trial and error. You take a
creature that is governed by instinct--and doesn't realize it--one
who confuses instinct with deity and identifies deity with himself--a
creature who has made logic work in every dimension of the objective
world and is extremely smug about himself in view of the results--and
you have an animal cut off from its own nature and hence from Nature
itself. Modern men can't tell whether anything they think or say or
do is suitable to them, or merely the result of a tradition--as the
semanticists claim--or whether, perhaps, their motives rise in a desire
to hide instinct, to deny the animal, to inflate ego, or what not."
"I'm confused again."
"Put anybody through psychoanalysis--all the way, not just far
enough to scare the wits out of him, and so make him hide his fear
from himself by turning upon and ridiculing psychoanalysis--and that
person will discover there is more instinct in him that he didn't know
about than there is ego that he knew. Awful shock. Then put the same
person through an analysis by a Jungian, and he will get numberless
clues about the images and dreams and the feelings we have which
are intended, by Nature, to make us conscious of the whole of human
instinct _as a pattern_."
Yvonne shook her head. "Let's talk about me."
I wanted--I always want--to continue that line of explanation. It seems
logical to me that man would have in his head the means to recover a
consciousness of instinct--and to find, in that recovered awareness,
not just the psychological history of the past, as man finds history in
his body, but intimations of the future, which also exist in his body,
as countless extrapolating anthropologists have shown. There must be
some way, I have always thought, to shove aside the immature id and
also the disguising images, taboos, compulsions, and descriptions of
the modern superego, and to see what lies beyond them both--looking
backward and looking forward. Having at long last followed Jung's
inquiry into this process, having grasped his techniques and repeated,
through idioms of my own personality, the same empirical experiences
which Jung has demonstrated in hundreds of other human beings as well
as in societies seen as wholes--I have been afflicted with an urge to
bring the steps to wider attention and understanding.
And I suppose I shall try to do so, sporadically, all my life. But I
realize now the futility of the effort as a "cause."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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