Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of PsychotherapyJackson, Josephine A. (Josephine Agnes)
Science
Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of Psychotherapy
Jackson, Josephine A. (Josephine Agnes)
Nervous system -- Diseases; Psychoanalysis; Therapeutics, Suggestive
=The Perpetual Feud.= There thus arises the strategic struggle
between that which the race has found good in the past and that which
the race finds good in the present. As the older race-experience is
laid in they body and built into the very fiber of the individual,
inherited as an innate impulse, it has become an integral part of
himself, an individual need rather than a social one. On the other
hand, man has, as another innate part of his being, the desire to go
with the herd, to conform to the standards of his fellows, to be what
he has learned society wants him to be. Hence the struggle, insistent,
ever more pressing, between two sets of desires within the man
himself; the feud between the past and the present, between the
natural and the social, between the selfish and the ideal. On one
side, there is the demand for instinctive satisfaction; on the other,
for moral control; on one side the demand for pleasure; on the other,
the demands of reality.[13]
[Footnote 13: "All the burdens of men or society are caused by the
inadequacies in the association of primal animal emotions with those
mental powers which have been so rapidly developed in
man-kind."--Shaler quoted by Hinkle: Introduction to Jung's
_Psychology of the Unconscious_.]
Two factors intensify the conflict. In the first place, the older
habits have the head start. Compared with the almost limitless extent
of our past history, our desire for the control of the instincts is
very new indeed. It requires the long look and the right perspective
to understand how very lately we have entered into our new conditions
and how old a habit we are trying to break. In the second place, the
larger part of the stimulus comes from within the body itself. When
studying the other instincts, we saw that the best way to control was
to refuse to stimulate when the situation was not suitable for
discharge. But with the organically aroused sex-instinct there is no
such power of choice. We may fan the flame by the thoughts we think or
the environment we seek, or we may smother the flame until it is out
of sight, but we cannot extinguish it by any act of ours. The issue
has always been too important to be left to the individual. The
stimulation comes, primarily, not by way of the mind but by way of the
body. With this instinct we cannot "stop before we begin," because
Nature has taken the matter out of our hands and begins for us.
THE BULWARK WE HAVE BUILT
With the competing forces so strong and the issues so great, it is not
to be wondered at that society has had to build up a massive bulwark
of public opinion, to establish regulations and fix penalties that are
more stringent than those imposed in any other direction. Nor is it
remarkable that in its effort to protect itself, society has sometimes
made mistakes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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