We believe, by implication, in our metaphysical selves and our corresponding
obligations, more strongly than we have taught ourselves to recognize. But
to this fact we make ourselves blind through a species of repression, just
as many a child, confident of its parents' affection, assumes, for his own
temporary purposes, the right to accuse them of hostile intentions which
they do not entertain.
We forget, or repress, the fact that the mind of man cannot be made subject
to the laws of physics, and yet we proceed to deal with the phenomena
dependent on the working of the mind of man as if these laws actually did
prevail.
The misleading effects of this tendency are clearly seen where it is a
question of the conclusions to be drawn from the researches, admirable in
themselves, made under the influence of the genetic method.
The notion seems to prevail that we should prepare ourselves for the
formation of just ideas with regard to the mode in which the higher
faculties of men come into existence by wiping the slate clean to the extent
of assuming that we have before us no data except some few acts or thoughts
that are definable in the simplest possible terms, and then watching what
happens as the situation becomes more complicated. But one is apt to forget,
in doing this, that there is one thing which we cannot wipe off the
slate,--namely, ourselves, not taken in the Bergsonian sense alone, but as
fully fledged persons, possessed of the very qualities for which we
undertake to search, yet without the possession of which the search could
not begin. This does not, of course, militate against the value of these
genetic researches in one sense. The study of evolutional sequences is
still, and forever will be, of enormous value. But it does not teach us
nearly as much of the nature of real creativeness as we can learn through
the introspection of ourselves in the fullest sense; and I maintain that
psychoanalysts are persons who could do this to advantage.
Is not the notion that through the careful watching of the sequences of the
evolutionary process, as if from without, we can get an adequate idea of the
forces that really are at work, exactly the delusion by which the skillful
juggler tries to deceive his audience when he directs their attention to the
shifting objects that he manipulates, and away from his own swiftly moving
hands?
My contention is that there are other means of studying the force which we
call "Libido" besides that of noting its effects. The justification for this
statement is that the force itself is identical, in the last analysis, with
that which we feel within ourselves and know as reason, as imagination, and
as will, conscious of themselves, and capable of giving to us, directly or
indirectly, the only evidence we could ever hope to get, for the existence
of real creativeness, spontaneity and freedom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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