The machinery of the mindFirth, Violet M. (Violet Mary)
Science
The machinery of the mind
Firth, Violet M. (Violet Mary)
Psychology
Briefly, the primitive man lies at the base of our being, but the
divine man stands at its apex, and we, in our ascent, are in a
transition stage, with subconscious and superconscious not yet
correlated in the conscious mind. We do not see our past and future
save in the dim pictures of dream and vision, by the uncertain gleam
of intuition rather than the clear light of reason, and no solution of
any human problem, either social or psychological, can be valid which
does not look to the future as well as the past. Hitherto psychology
has sought its standards of normality in the primitive and subhuman,
forgetting that the flower of humanity is a natural product as well as
its weeds; that religion, charity and idealism are as much a part of
human nature as those primitive instincts which give rise to unnameable
crimes. A psychology which looks to the past can show us causes, but
it is only a psychology which looks to the future which can find us
cures. Evolution did not cease its progress when it produced the cave
man guarding his family, but evolved the “Save the Children Fund,”
which before the echoes of the last shot had died away was sending
succour to the helpless young of an enemy herd.
A psychology which bases its philosophy upon a return to the primitive,
especially if that psychology undertakes the solution of human
problems, individual or collective, is ignoring the data of evolution.
We know that all life originated in the sea, and that the young of
many species still pass the first phase of their life in the water.
When, however, they have come ashore, and the gills have given place
to lungs, they cease to be water creatures, and the structural traces
of their origin are vestigial and not functional, and a frog can be
drowned as easily as any other air-breathing creature, despite his
tadpole past. So it is with the human psyche, unquestionably it has
passed through a primitive phase in the course of its development, but
if, in an effort to remedy some faulty development, it be thrust back
to that phase after evolving to a higher one, it will perish as surely
as the frog thrust under water. It should be the aim of psychotherapy,
not to reduce the mind to its primitive elements and point of view,
but rather to help humanity to make that transition from the lower to
the higher which evolution is forcing upon us, whether we will or no.
Adaptation to environment is the key to life, and the environment to
which an individual must be aided to adjust himself, if such aid be
sought, is not that environment which, generation by generation, is
receding further into the past, but that future which hour by hour is
becoming the present, and from which there is no escape.
It should be the aim of psychotherapy to work out the arc which
evolution is describing, and to set the feet of racial wanderers upon
its path. It is a futile and dangerous philosophy which proposes a
return to the past as an escape from the present.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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