The Act of Creation (39 page)

p. 285
. I am using 'self-transcending
emotions' as a short-hand expression for 'emotional states in which the
self-transcending tendencies dominate'.

 

 

To
p. 290
. In the only excursion into science
fiction of which I am guilty, I made a visiting maiden from an alien
planet explain the basic doctrine of its quasi-Keplerian religion:

 

'. . . We worship gravitation. It is the only force which does not
travel through space in a rush; it is everywhere in repose. It keeps
the stars in their orbits and our feet on our earth. It is Nature's
fear of loneliness, the earth's longing for the moon; it is love in
its pure, inorganic form.' (Twilight Bar, 1945)

 

 

 

 

 

XIV

 

 

ON ISLANDS AND WATERWAYS

 

 

In the chapter on the
'Logic of the Moist Eye'
I have discussed weeping as a manifestation of
frustrated
participatory emotions. Let me now briefly consider the
normal
manifestations of this class of emotions in childhood and adult life.

 

 

As Freud, Piaget, and others have shown, the very young child does not
differentiate between ego and environment. The mother's breast seems to it
a more intimate possession than the toes on its own body. It is aware of
events, but not for a long time of itself as a separate entity. It lives
in a state of mental symbiosis with the outer world, a continuation of the
biological symbiosis in the womb, a state which Piaget calls 'protoplasmic
consciousness'. [1] The universe is focussed on the self, and the self
is the universe; the outer environment is only a kind of second womb.

 

 

From this original state of protoplasmic or symbiotic consciousness,
the development towards autonomous individuation is slow, gradual, and
will never be entirely completed. The initial state of consciousness may
be likened to a liquid, fluid universe traversed by dynamic currents, by
the rhythmic rise and fall of physiological needs, causing minor storms
which come and go without leaving any solid traces. Gradually the floods
recede and the first islands of objective reality emerge; their contours
grow firmer and sharper and are set off against the undifferentiated
flux. The islands are followed by continents, the dry territories of
reality are mapped out; but side by side with them the liquid world
co-exists, surrounding it, interpenetrating it by canals and inland lakes,
the relics of the erstwhile oceanic communion. In the words of Freud:

 

Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself
the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only
a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling -- a feeling which
embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego
with the external world. If we may suppose that this primary ego-feeling
has been preserved in the minds of many people, to a greater or lesser
extent, it would co-exist like a sort of counterpart with the narrower
and more sharply outlined ego-feeling of maturity, and the ideational
content belonging to it would be precisely the notion of limitless
extension and oneness with the universe. [2]

 

It is this 'oceanic feeling' which mystics and artists strive to recapture
on a higher level of development -- at a higher turn of the spiral.

 

 

Until the end of the second or third year, while the separation of ego and
non-ego is as yet incomplete, the child tends to confuse the subjective
and the objective, dream and reality, the perceived and the imagined,
its thoughts and the things thought about. Children and primitives not
only believe in the magical transformations which occur in myths and
fairy tales, but also believe themselves capable of performing them. The
child at play becomes at will transformed into a horse, the doctor,
a burglar, or a locomotive. Some primitives believe that they change
at night into certain animals; if the animal is killed, they have to
die. Magic causation precedes physical causation; to wish for an event
is almost the same as producing it; children are great believers in the
omnipotence of thought. As thought becomes increasingly centred in verbal
and visual symbols, these become instruments of wishful evocation --
of word-magic and symbol-magic.

 

 

This erstwhile method of establishing magic connections between events
-- regardless of distance in space, succession in time, or physical
intermediaries, is a basic feature of primitive, but also of some highly
developed societies, particularly in the East. Lévy-Bruhl -- an
anthropologist now somewhat out of fashion who greatly influenced Freud,
Piaget, and Jung -- had called this phenomenon 'participation mystique'
or the 'Law of Participation'. [3] It is reflected in innumerable rites
and observances; in the individual's experience of a quasi-symbiotic
communion between himself, his tribe, and his totem; between a man and
his name, a man and his portrait, a man and his shadow; between the
deity and its symbol; between a desired event -- rain, or a successful
hunt -- and its symbolic enactment in dance, ritual play, or pictorial
representation. Here is the ancient, unitary source out of which the
dance and the song, the mystery plays of the Achaens, the calendars of the
Babylonian priest-astronomers, and the cave-paintings of Altamira were to
branch out later on -- a magic source which, however great the distance
travelled, still provides artist and explorer with his basic nourishment.

 

 

At an even earlier stage of social evolution, magic participation could
be achieved by still more direct methods: the physical prowess of animals,
the courage and wisdom of other men, the body and blood of the sacrificed
god, could be acquired and shared by the simple means of eating them.* The
sacrament of Holy Communion reflects, in a symbolic and sublimated form,
the ecstasies of the Dionysian and Orphic mystery-rites: the devouring of
the torn god. The participatory magic of trans-substantiation operates
here not only between the communicant and his god, but also between all
those who have partaken in the rite, and incorporated the same substance
into themselves. A ghastly degeneration of this ritual was revealed
when the circumstances of taking the Mau-Mau oath became known. A more
harmless form of it is the 'blood-brother' ceremony among Arab tribes,
performed by drinking a few drops of the elected brother's blood; a
socially valuable survival of it are the rites of conviviality -- from
the symbolic sharing of bread and salt, to the ceremonial banqueting of
the Chevaliers du Taste-Vin. The emotions derived from the feeding-drive
seem to be of the purely self-assertive type; in fact, commensality,
with its archetypal echoes, invests them with a more or less pronounced
participatory character.
The progress from the historically earlier, or infantile forms of
symbiotic consciousness towards voluntary self-transcendence through
artistic, religious or social communion, reflects the sublimation of the
participatory tendencies -- emerging at the other end of the tunnel,
as it were. Needless to say, the culture in which we live is not very
favourable to this progress; the majority of our contemporaries never
emerge from the tunnel, and get only occasional intimations of a distant
pinpoint of light. The forces which effect the gradual replacement of the
child's subjective by objective reality arise through continuous friction
between self and environment. Hard facts emerge because objects are hard,
and hurt if one bangs against them; wishes do not displace mountains,
not even rocking horses. A second type of friction, between the self
and other selves, drives home the fact that these latter too exist in
their own right. Biological communion with the mother is dissolved by
a succession of separative acts: expulsion from the womb, weaning from
the breast, the cessation of fondling and petting, Western man's 'taboo
on tenderness'. Things and people wage a continuous war of attrition
on the magic forms of participation -- until the floods recede, and the
waterways dry up. Symbiotic consciousness wanes with maturation, as it
must; but modern education provides hardly any stimuli for awakening
cosmic consciousness to replace it. The child is taught petitionary
prayer instead of meditation, religious dogma instead of contemplation
of the infinite; the mysteries of nature are drummed into his head as
if they were paragraphs in the penal code. In tribal societies puberty
is a signal for solemn and severe initiation rites, to impress upon the
individual his collective ties, before he is accepted as a part in the
social whole. Vestiges of these rites still survive in institutions such
as the Church and the Army; yet the majority of individuals take their
place in the body social not by a process of integration, but as a result
of random circumstances and pressures. The romantic bursts of enthusiasm
in adolescence are like a last, euphoric flicker of the self-transcending
emotions before they submit to atrophy and begin to shrivel away.
But they are never completely defeated. For one thing, the attritive
forces of the social environment affect different strata of the
personality in different ways. The most affected are the conscious,
rational surface-layers directly exposed to contact; whereas the
non-socialized, non-verbalized strata become the natural refuge of the
thwarted participatory tendencies. The more remote from the surface,
the less sharp the boundaries between the self and non-self; in those
depths the symbiotic channels still remain navigable in the dream and
other games of the underground, from which mysticism, discovery, and
art draw their intuitions.
There exists, however, a whole range of more ordinary phenomena through
which the self-transcending emotions manifest themselves in everyday
life, and which I must briefly mention. The most banal of these is
perceptual projection
, which does not properly belong in this
context -- except in so far as it demonstrates that the boundaries of
the self in our subjective experiences are not as clear-cut as we are
wont to believe. 'Projection' in this technical sense means that the
processes which take place in the retina and the brain are experienced
as taking place not where they actually do take place, but yards or
miles away. (This becomes at once obvious when one remembers that very
low-pitched sounds are experienced -- correctly -- as reverberations
inside
the ear, and dazzling flashes, again correctly, as
occurring in the
retina
.) Similarly, when you drive a nail into
the wall you are aware, not that the handle has struck your palm, but
that its head has struck the nail, as if the hammer had become part of
your body. [4] These are not inventions of psychologists to make the
simple appear as complicated, but examples of our tendency to confuse
what happens in the self with what happens outside it -- a kind of
'perceptual symbiosis' between ego and environment.
Projective empathy
-- again in a technical sense -- is based
on a similar confusion: an arrow drawn on paper is felt to manifest a
dynamic tendency to move (probably a consequence of our own unconscious
eye-movements); a church spire seems to 'soar' upwards, a picture has
'movement' and 'balance', and so on. Not only motions, but emotions too
are projected from the self into lifeless objects; my car, climbing a
hill, 'groans' and 'pants' under its 'effort'; the weeping willow weeps,
the thunder growls. The tendency to animism, to project unconsciously
life and feeling into inanimate bodies, is well-nigh irresistible --
witness the two millermia of Aristotelian physics; we can only conclude
that it is a basic feature of our psychic make-up.
Equally inveterate is the tendency to project our own emotions into other
living beings -- animals and people. The first leads to anthropomorphism
-- ascribing to our pet dogs, horses, and canaries reasoning processes
modelled on our own; the second to what one might call 'egomorphism' --
the illusion that others
must
feel on any subject exactly as I
do. A more complicated projective transaction is
transference
--
where A projects his feelings, originally aimed at B, on to a substitute,
C: a father figure, sister figure, or what have you, each further
transferable to D, E, etc. The Who's Who of the subconscious seems to
be printed with coloured inks on blotting paper.
Introjection
is meant to signify the reverse of projection,
though the two phenomena are often indistinguishable from each other.*
When somebody bangs his head on the doorpost, I wince; when a forward
in a soccer game has a favourable opportunity to shoot, I kick my
neighbour's shin. Adolescents unconsciously ape their hero's mannerisms;
our super-egos were supposedly moulded by our parents at a time when
the self was still in a fluid state. Throughout his life, the individual
keeps introjecting chunks and patterns of other people's existence into
his own; he suffers and enjoys vicariously the emotions of those with
whom be becomes entangled in identificatory
rapports
. Some of these
personality-transactions have lasting effects; others are more transitory,
but at the same time more dramatic. Laughter and yawning have an instantly
infectious effect; so have cruelty, hysteria, hallucinations, religious
trances. In the
hypnotic
state 'the functions of the ego seem
to be suspended, except those which communicate with the hypnotizer as
though through a narrow slit in a screen' (Kretschmer); the personality
of the hypnotizer has been substituted for the dormant parts of the ego;
the 'slit' acts as a gap in the frontier between the self and non-self,
letting in the contraband.
Freud, though disappointed at an early stage with hypno-therapy,
kept stressing the affinities between hypnosis and love on the one
hand, hypnosis and mass-behaviour on the other. In states of extreme
enamouredness (the German technical term is
Hörigkeit
--
bondage, servitude, subjection) its object replaces the super-ego or
the hypnotist. The poetry -- or pathology -- of the condition lies in
the total fascination of the bondsman by the bond, an attenuated but
protracted variant of the hypnotic rapport. Awareness is focussed on the
object of worship, the rest of the world is blurred or screened. The
perfect symbol of the hypnotic effect is in Stendhal's "Charterhouse
of Parma": young Fabrice, in his prison cell, stares for hours on end
through a narrow slit in the screen covering his window, at the figure
of Clelia across the street.