The Nonhuman Environment in Normal Development and in Schizophrenia

Citation preview

THE MONOGRAPH SERIES ON SCHIZOPHRENIA

No .

I-DEMENTIA

PRAEcox OR

THE GROUP OF SCHIZOPHRENIAS

By Eugen Bleuler Translated by Joseph Zinkin Foreword by Nolan D. C. Lewis

No.

2.......-5VMBOLIC REALIZATION

A New Method of Psychotherapy Applied to

4

Case of

Schizophrenia

By M. A. Sechehaye No.

3-PSYOHOTHERAPY WITH SCHIZOPHRENICS

Edited by Eugene B. Brody and Frederick C. Redlich

No. 4-A

WAY TO THE SOUL 0., THE MENTALLY ILL

By Gertrud Schwing Translated by Rudolf Ekstein and Bernard H. Hall

MONOGRAPH SERIES ON SCHIZOPHRENIA NO.5

/n,

Nonhuman Environment,

/

In Normal Development and in Schizophrenia

Harold F. Searles, M.D. \\

INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITIES PRESS, INC. NEW YORK

Copyright 1960 by Harold F. Searles, M.D.

Library 0/ Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-9579

Second Printing 1973 Third Printing 1979

Manufactured in the United States of America

To Sylvia

Contents

Preface Acknowledgment

ix xii

Part One INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS 1 Man's Kinship with the Nonhuman environment .

3

Part Two THE NONHUMAN ENVIRONMENT .-\5 EXPERIENCED BY THE HEALTHY INDIVIDUAL

2 The Infant's Subjective Oneness with His Nonhuman Environment . . . . . . . . . 29 3 The Nonhuman Environment in Subsequent Healthy Personality Development . • • • . • . 54 4 The Mature Person's Attitude Toward His Nonhuman Environment . . . . . . . 100 5 The Psychological Benefits Which Derive from a Mature Relatedness with One's Nonhuman Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

Contents

viii Part Three THE NONHUMAN ENVIRONMENT IN PSYCHOSIS AND NEUROSIS

6 Confusion Between the Self and the Nonhuman Environment . . . • . . . . . . • . • 7 Anxiety Lest One Become) 01 Be Revealed as, Nonhuman . . . . . . . • . . • . . . 8 The Desire to Become Nonhuman As a Defense Against Various Feeling-States . • . . , . • 9 The Desire to Become Nonhuman As a Function of the Striving Toward Maturity via CtPhylogenetic Regression" ......•...... 10 The Reacting to Other Persons As Being Nonhuman 11 The Reacting to Elements of the Nonhuman Environment As Being Human. . . . . . . 12 Transference Distortions, and Miscellaneous Other Distortions, in the Indioidual's Conception of His Environment . . . . . • . • . . . . . 13 Detailed Data [rom the Patient-Therapist Relationship

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

..

143

178

223

250 269 289

325 348

Part Four FROM THE CULTURAL FRAME OF REFERENCE

14 Cultural Attitudes Concerning Man in His Nonhuman Environment . . . . . . . . . 383

Part Five TOWARD THE FUTURE

15 The Potential Value in Further Investigation of This Subject

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

• •.

411

Bibliography

427

Index

441

Preface

Probably for every one who has found life to be more kindly than cruel, the land of his youth is a golden land; youth is such a golden time of life. Certainly for me the Catskill region of upstate New York possesses an undying enchantment, a beauty and an affirmation of life's goodness which will be part of me as long as I live. For as far back as I can recall, I have felt that life's meaning resided not only in my relatedness with my mother and father and sister and other persons, but in relatedness with the land itself-the verdant or autumn-tapestried or stark and snow-covered hills, the uncounted lakes, the rivers. In subsequent years, the so-different life in cities-Boston, New York, San Francisco, \Vashington-has shown me that the "nonhuman environment" here is equally enchanting and profoundly meaningful to one's living. Whether in surroundings that are largely natural or largely man-made, I have found that moments of deeply felt kinship

Preface

x

with one's nonhuman environment are to be counted among those moments when one has drunk deepest of the whole of life's meaning.

My personal psychoanalysis, which concluded seven years ago, further deepened my appreciation of the significance of the nonhuman environment. I shall never forget, to give but one example, the grief I felt upon realizing that the very building in which I had grown up, which had been sold some years before, was now lost to me forever. My work with psychiatric patients during the past twelve years, particularly with schizophrenic patients whose therapy has been my main occupation, has shown me many previously unsuspected ramifications of this subject, ramifications which evidently are not confined to those persons who are psychiatrically ill. What I have learned about this subject, in the course of psychotherapeutic work, has helped me to understand a little better the great mystery of what the deeply schizophrenic person experiences, and this in tum has shed some light upon that even greater mystery: the psychodynamic processes involved in the experience of the normal infant, whereby he is changed, gradually, from a newborn human animal into a person who is aware of himself as an individual human being.

An additional source of fascination which I have found in this subject is the fact that it constitutes a natural meeting ground, a rare if not unique meeting ground, for data flowing from an extraordinarily wide range of fields of inquiry-not only psychiatry and psychology and the other behavioral sciences, but philosophy and religion, biology, physics, and so OD, throughout literally all possible studies of either man himself or the world he lives in. It has been a delight to me to find that the very little I know of philosophy, or physics, or art, or anthropology, or myth.. ology J or great literature, possesses-for me, at least-illuminating relevance to this subject of the nonhuman environment in man's psychological experience.

Preface

Xl

This whole subject may be likened to a vast continent, as yet largely unexplored and uncharted. Some persons have set adventurous foot here before me-rather many persons, in fact, I have found as I have gone along; my book cannot endeavor to chronicle the discoveries of every one of my predecessors but can give only what I hope and believe to be a large sample or their discoveries. I believe that this book represents the first attempt to bring together as many as possible of these earlier discoveries; but I am, after all, trying here mainly to record my own discoveries, at least a fair number of which are I believe genuinely new. In a book of this sort, designed to stimulate interest in and provoke thought about what I regard as a predominantly ne.. glected subject, it seems to me not only permissible but desirable to give free rein to speculation, and this I have done. I am not trying to nail down conclusively, once and for all, this subject of the nonhuman environment in human living but rather to open it up, unprecedentedly widely and deeply, to the curious, seeking eye. If my book raises more questions than it answers, then it will have served its purpose wen.

Acknowledgment

The late Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann made it possible for me to write this book. To her is my greatest debt of gratitude) and this despite her never having read more than a few pages which sketchily outlined what I had in mind here; it was through her good offices that I was enabled to obtain, from the Foundations' Fund for Research in Psychiatry, the grant which financed my investigation of the subject upon which this book is based. Moreover, she allowed me a completely free hand in pursuing this investigation, and this quite unfettered atmosphere for m.y work meant a great deal to me. Dr. Robert G. Kvarnes, Executive Director of The Washington School of Psychiatry, through which the above-mentioned grant was disbursed, has been warmly encouraging and consistently helpful to me through all the phases of this investigation and the

Acknowledgment

xiii

writing of this book. His ever-reliable support has been a major source of strength to me. All the following colleagues, members, or, in a few instances, ex-members of the staff of Chestnut Lodge, have been most generous in permitting me to include clinical data from their own work} data which help greatly to fill various gaps in material from my clinical experience: Drs. Marvin L. Adland, Clay F. Barritt} Donald L. Burnham, Cecil C. H. Cullander, Jarl E. Dyrud, John P.. Fort, Milton G. Hendlich, Robert G. Kvarnes, Berl D. Mendel, Cesar Meza, Norman C. Rintz, Clarence G. Schulz} Roger L. Shapiro, Joseph H. Smith, and Naomi K. Wenner. For the mode of presentation of their data here, as well as for the theoretical interpretations placed upon them, I am, of course, solely responsible. Dr. Dexter M. Bullard, Medical Director of Chestnut Lodge, gave me many valuable and encouraging suggestions for revision of the first draft of the book manuscript, as did Drs. Donald L. Burnham (Director of Research at the Lodge), Robert G. Kvarnes, and Joseph H. Smith. Dr. Marvin L. Adland, our Clinical Director} and Dr. Otto A. Will, our Director of Psychotherapy, have shown a friendly and encouraging interest in this work from its inception, and in the final stages of my revising the manuscript they helped me to find the necessary time by freeing me from certain of my regular hospital duties. The support of all these long-time colleagues has meant a great deal to me. Mrs. Lottie Maury Newman, Editor of International Universities Press, has contributed to the final revision of the manuscript not only her highly professional editorial skill, but an equally professional grasp of psychodynamics and a scholarly acquaintance with psychoanalytic literature. She has been particularly helpful in pointing out to me, in the field of psychoanalysis with children-a field in which I have done no clinical work and only relatively scanty reading-writings of relevance to my topic. Mrs. Verdelia F. Scott and Mrs. Lois E. Baker have given me

xiv

Acknowledgment

most patient and kind, as well as extraordinarily competent, secretarial assistance with the successive drafts of the manuscript.. Mrs, Grace H. Ennis has been similarly helpful and competent in typing the many letters which my correspondence with various persons, concerning copyright permissions and other matters, has entailed. Mrs. Hilma Beall, our Librarian, has provided her assistance pleasantly, patiently, and unstintingly throughout my innumerable visits to the library.

Although the Foundations' Fund for Research in Psychiatry, which financed this work, and The Washington School of Psychiatry which disbursed that grant to me, are organizations rather than individuals, my gratitude to them is nonetheless genuinely personal in nature. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers and authors for their permission to quote from the designated writings: Robert Bronner, Inc.: Interpretation of Schizophrenia, by Silvana Arieti. Dr.. Michael Balint and The International Journal of Psycho-Anal.. 'Psis: "Friendly Expanses-Horrid Empty Spaces," by Michael Balint. Liveright Publishing Corporation: Primary Love and Psycho-Analytic Technique, by Michael Balint. The Williams and Wilkins Company: "Process of Recovery in Schizophrenia,' by H. Bertschinger; "Variations in Ego Feeling Induced by D-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25) ,It by Charles Savage; and "The Delay of the Machine Age," by Hanns Sachs. International Universities Press: "The First Treasured Possession," by Olive Stevenson; The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, by Paul Schilder; Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, by Eugen Bleuler; Practice and Theory of Psychoanalysis, by Herman Nunberg; "Notes Upon the Emotionality of a Schizophrenic Patient and Its Relation to Problems of Technique," by K. R. Eissler; Chronic Schizophrenia, by Thomas L. Freeman, John L. Cameron, and Andrew McGhie; "An Ego Disturbance in a Young Child," by Erna Furman; Ego Psychology

Acknowledgment

and the Problem of Adaptation, "Psychoanalysis and Develop.. mental Psychology," "Contribution to the Metapsychology of Schizophrenia," "Notes on the Reality Principle," "Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego," and "Comments on the Formation of Psychic Structure," by Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Rudolph M.. Loewenstein; "On Changes in Identification from. Machine to Cripple," by Lisbeth J. Sachs; "Hospitalism-s-An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood," by Rene A. Spitz; and Comparative Psychology of Mental Development, by Heinz Werner. Doubleday & Co." Inc.: The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury (Copyright 1949 by Ray Bradbury). G. P. Putnam's Sons: Alone, by Admiral Richard E. Byrd (Copyright 1938 by Richard E. Byrd) . Oxford University Press, Inc.: The Sea Around Us, by Rachel L. Carson. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, Inc.: Wisdom~ Madness and Folly--The Philosoph" of a Lunatic, by John Custance {Copyright 1952 by John Custance; Two Adolescents, by Alberto Moravia (Copy.. right 1950 by Valentino Bompiani & Co., S. Art). W. W. Norton 8t Co., Inc.: The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, by Otto Fenichel. The Psychoanalytic Q,uaTlerly: "Psychoanalytic Notes Relating to Syndromes of Asthma and Hay Fever," by Flanders Dunbar; "On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia," by Victor Tausk; and "Configurations in Play-Clinical Notes," by Erik Homburger Erikson. Estate of Albert Einstein: Out of My Later YeaTS, by Albert Einstein. Basic Books, Inc.: An Object-Relations Theory of the PeTsonalit", by \¥. Ronald D. Fairbairn; "One of the Difficulties of Psycho. Analysis," by Sigmund Freud; and The Construction of Realit'Y in the Child, by Jean Piaget.. Rutgers University Press: Nature and Human Nature, by Lawrence K. Frank, The Hogarth Press, Ltd.. : "One of the Difficulties of Psycho-Analysis," by Sigmund Freud. The University of Chicago Press: Psychotherapeutic Intervention in

xvi

Acknowledgment

Schizophrenia, by Lewis B. Hill; Martin Buber--The Life 01 Dialogue, by Maurice SOl Friedman. Rinehart & Co., Ine.: The Sane Society, by Erich Fromm (Copy.. right 1955 by Erich Fromm) . Simon and Schuster, Inc.: The Impact of Science on Societv, by Bertrand Russell; A Treasury of Great Poems, English and American, edited by Louis Untenneyer; Journey to the FaT Amazon, by Alain Gheerbrant; The Open Mind,. by J. Robert Oppenheimer. University of California Press: T he Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin. Editions Cahiers d~Art: "Conversation with Picasso," by Christian Zervos. The American Federation of Arts: "Before Paris and After," by Julian Levi, in Magazine of A,t~ December 1940. Hany N. Abrams, Inc.: Vincent van Gogh, text by Robert Gold.. water. Little, Brown & Company: Mythology, by Edith Hamilton (Copy... right 1940, 1942 by Edith Hamilton). Psychiatr~Journal for

the Stud')} of Interpersonal Processes." "The

Personal Meaning of the Human Figure in the Rorschach," by Max Hertzman and Jane Pearce. E" P. Dutton & Co., Inc.: Annapurna, by Maurice Herzog.

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: Green Mansions, by W" H. Hudson. Longmans, Green & Co", Inc.; The Varietus of Religious Experience, by William James.

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry: "Problems of Nosology and Psychodynamics of Early Infantile Autism/' by Leo Kanner; and "The Space Child's Time Machine: On 'Reconstructionll in the Psychotherapeutic Treatment of a Schizophrenoid Child," by Rudolf Ekstein. Thomas Y. Crowell Company: King Solomon's Ring, by Konrad Z. Lorenz (Copyright 1952, by Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York, Publishers). Museum of the American Indian-Heye Foundation: "Zuni Breadstuff," by Frank Hamilton Cushing. George Allen & Unwin Ltd.: How Natives Think, by Lucien Levy. Bruhl.

xvii

Acknowledgment

Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc.: Primitive M4n as Philosopher, by Paul Radin. The New York Times: Editorial (unsigned) on November 28, 1948. Henry Holt and Company, Inc.: Ou; of My Life and Thought~ by Albert Schweitzer. Yale University Press: The Courage to Be, by Paul Tillich. Mr. A. E. van Vogt: (tVault of the Beast." by A. E. van Vogt, The International [ournal of Psycho-Analysis: "The Schizophrenic Defense Against Aggression," by Robert C. Bak; and "Autism and Symbiosis, Two Extreme Disturbances of Identity," by Margaret Schoenberger Mahler. Warren M. Brodey, M.D.: "Narcissistic Relationship-s-A Paradox," and "Some Family Operations and Schizophrenia: A Study of Five Hospitalized Families Each with A Schizophrenic Member," by Warren M. Brodey, Margaret Schoenberger Mahler, M.D~: "The 'Influencing Machine' in the Light of the Psychotic Child's Body-Image Development," by Paula Elkisch and Margaret Schoenberger Mahler. Rand McNally & Co.: Ken-Tiki, by Thor Heyerdahl. The Humanities Press: The Child's Conception of Physical Causalit,,~ by Jean Piaget. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic: "The Theory of Ego Autonomy: A Generalization," by David Rapaport; and "A Sunday with Mescaline," by Philip B. Smith. HAROLD

RockvilleJ M atyland

F.

SEARLES)

M. D.

PART

ONE

INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS

Man's Kinship with the Nonhuman Environment

CHAPTER

I

Most writings concerning human personality development and the dynamics of mental illness, whether by Freud and his followers, by lung, Rank, Adler, Sullivan, or others, limit them... selves, for all practical purposes, to a consideration of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes. What I shall refer to as the nonhuman environment (that is, the totality of man's environment, with the exception of the other human beings in it) is, by implication, considered as irrelevant to human personality development, and to the development of psychiatric illness as though human life were lived out in a vacuum-as though the human race were alone in the universe, pursuing individual and collective destinies in a homogeneous matrix of nothingness, a background devoid of form, color, and substance.. Freud was aware) certainly, that this is an unduly limited picture of man's psychological life. It may be that he simply was

4

The Nonhuman Environment

fully occupied with making his innumerable great discoveries concerning the psychological processes that transpire within man and between man and man, that he did not often find time for detailed searching into this other dimension of man's psychological existence. Actually his whole psychology is grounded in the concept of man as a product of the biological evolution of species, a process which had been described by Darwin in 1859. Freud was largely concerned with our basically animal inner natures, and the psychoanalytic therapy which he devoloped aims to help us come to terms with these animal impulses. In his propounding of the controversial, and now largely rejected, theory of a death instinct (50), he was showing a keen awareness that man's biological fate, the return to a nonhuman state, possesses deep psychological significance in the motivation of the living individual. If any doubt remains as to how Freud viewed mankind's psychological position in the larger animal world, his following words, written in 1917, should dispel that doubt:

80

In the course of his development towards culture man acquired a dominating position over his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom.. Not content with this supremacy, however, he began to place a gulf between his nature and theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to himself he attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine descent which pennitted him to annihilate the bond of community between him and the animal kingdom. It is noteworthy that this piece of arrogance is still as foreign to the child as it is to the savage or to primitive man. It is the result of a later, more pretentious stage of development. At the level of toteinism primitive man has no repugnance to tracing his descent from an animal ancestor. In myths, which contain the deposit of this ancient attitude of mind, the gods take animal shapes, and in the art of prehistoric times are portrayed with animals' heads. A child can see no difference between his own nature and that of animals; he is not astonished at animals thinking and talking in fairy-tales; he will transfer to a dog or a horse an emotion of fear which refers to his human father) with. out thereby intending any derogation of his father. Not until he

Introductory Considerations

5

is grown up does he become so far estranged from the animals as to use their names in vilification of others. We all know that, a little more than half a century ago, the researches of Charles Darwin, his collaborators and predecessors put an end to this presumption on the part of man. Man is not a being different from animals or superior to them; he himself originates in the animal race and is related more closely to some of its members and more distantly to others. The accretions he has subsequently developed have not served to efface the evidences, both in his physical structure and in his mental dispositions, of his parity with them [49].

The views which I shall propound in this book will be extensions of various of the psychodynamic concepts which Freud introduced. But it remains true, nonetheless, that in Freud's own writings, as well as in those of other investigators, it is a rare thing to find explicit acknowledgment paid to the significance of the nonhuman environment in man's psychological life. This disregard of the significance of the nonhuman environment to psychology and psychiatry has persisted despite the accumulation of abundant data, provided by numerous and varied scientific disciplines, which show us beyond doubt that man is not an alien in his nonhuman environment but in kinship with it. For many years we have had convincing evidence that man is a member of the greater animal kingdom and, in tum, of the still larger realm of animate Nature, and, finally, in terms of the chemical structure of his body as well as in terms of his fate-the inevitable return to an inorganic state when his life span is ended-an integral part of the fabric of all created matter, including the great inanimate environment of which our known Universe is predominantly composed. I shall shortly bring forward, merely by way of reminder, a number of examples of the kind of long-known data to which I refer here. What is apparently, however, very little recognized is the importance of the implications which such data have for the scientific disciplines which are concerned with human behavior and, most particularly, for psychoanalysis. The thesis of this volume is that the nonhuman environment, far from being of

6

The Nonhuman Envi.ronment

little or no account to human personality development, constitutes one of the most basically important ingredients of human psychological existence. It is my conviction that there is within the human individual a sense, whether at a conscious or unconscious level, of relatedness to his nonhuman environment, that this relatedness is one of the transcendentally important facts of human living, that-as with other very important circumstances in human existence-it is a source of ambivalent feelings to him, and that, finally, if he tries to ignore its importance to himself, he does so at peril to his psychological well-being. It is as if we live in a time when the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme from that represented by ancient man's anthropomorphized conception of his nonhuman environment when he felt, as it were, so intimately wedded to it that he had yet to arrive at a realization of his own differentiation from it as a unique product of creation, a human being. Myths handed down from ancient times show us how human beings of some thousands of years ago viewed this environment. One example, charming as are many such myths, will suffice: Midas had been chosen as one of the umpires in a musical contest between Apollo and Pan. He expressed his honest preference for the music of Pan, which reflected his poor judgment not only in musical matters but also in politics; Apollo was the more renowned musician of the two and was also a god, far more powerful than Pan, a mere satyr. Midas paid for his mistake when Apollo changed his ears into those of an ass, saying that he was only "giving to ears so dull and dense the proper shape." Midas hid his shame under a cap, but his servant found the secret hard to keep, and he finally whispered it into a hole which he dug in a field. But, Hamilton tells us) "in the spring reeds grew up there, and when stirred by the wind they whispered those buried words-and revealed to men not only the truth of what had happened to the poor, stupid King, but also that when gods are contestants the only safe course is to side with the strongest" (66). Anthropological data about the attitudes concerning this subject held by various so-called primitive peoples likewise provide,

Introduclor')1 Considerations

7

of course, a rich source of such anthropomorphic conceptions of the nonhuman environment, To give, again, a single example from a vastly fruitful field: . . . I once heard a Zuni priest say: "Five things alone are necessary to the sustenance and comfort of the 'dark ones' [Indians] among the children of the earth: "The sun, who is the Father of all. "The earth, who is the Mother of men. "The water, who is the Grandfather. "The fire, who is the Grandmother. "Our brothers and sisters the Corn, and seeds of growing

things" [104]. For presumably hundreds of thousands of years, men felt themselves to be in mutually interchangeable kinship with the rest of their environment; but they presumably felt, very possibly more often than not, that this relation was not one of such gentle kinship as the last quotation portrays but rather one in which they were at the mercy of an animistic, and often anthropomorphized, nonhuman environment which was basically hostile, chaotic, utterly uncontrollable. It may perhaps be counted man's proudest achievement that he has come, largely through the medium of

scientific endeavor, to realize so many of his uniquely human potentialities, to free himself to the extent that he has from an ancient) overwhelming awe of the nonhuman, and to attain a position of very considerable supremacy over it. At the same time, the processes and products of technology tend to cause him to lose sight of the basic kinship between human and nonhuman. This divorcement has probably been additionally encouraged, during the past two thousand years, by the spread of Christianity, which so often preaches that man loses the hope of union with the Godhead to the extent that he yields to his "animal" impulses -the impulses which form his psychological bonds with his closest kin, the other member-species of the animal kingdom. The Christian religion is to be contrasted, in this regard, to the pantheistic paganism of Ancient Greece, which preached that the

The Nonhuman Environment

8

revered deities themselves often took the forms of various membent of the animal kingdom or even of the vegetable kingdom. William. James, in his classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience (85), displays his keenest interest in the basically emotional realization that a state of unity exists between oneself and the universe about oneself. He calls science to account for denying the validity of such personal, subjective, emotional elements as characterize this kind of religious experience. He asserts that Science . . . has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view. " .. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilib.. rium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be [85a].

He foresees that science will turn from its pursuit of a coldly impersonal perception of the universe, toward a union with that which is personal, emotional, basically mystical in man's religious strivings.

Yet science itself, which along with the more ascetic components of Christian religion has tended to foster in man a convic.. tion that he is basically alien to his nonhuman environment, has yielded abundantly convincing data, from various sources, to show him how closely akin he is to that environment. At the level of psychology, the science of animal psychology has shown us that there are psychological processes in various vertebrate species-psychological processes comparable with those occuring in human beings. These include pathological processes that may be compared with-although very far from being identical with-the neurotic proc~es with which psychiatry is familiar (103, 57, 93, 105). At the level of physiology, we find that each of the basic physiological processes which sustain human life-digestion, respiration, the circulation of vital fluids, excretion, the functioning of the nervous and endocrine systems, and reproduction-has its analogue in innumerable other species of the animal kingdom,

1ntroducto1Y Considerations

9

including invertebrates as well as vertebrates, and most of these processes have analogues, as well, in many species of the vegetable

kingdom. In terms of anatomy, both gross and microscopic, we find here, too, startling similarities between the organ systems of the human body and those of many other species of the living entities) animal or vegetable, which occupy the nonhuman environment. Any college textbook of biology brings before one the fact that the human family is itself a part of the vastly larger, infinitely more varied, family of all living things. Coming to the level of chemical constitution, we find that among the seventeen chemical elements of which the human body is composed, all but one of these-carbon-are also distributed widely throughout the inorganic, nonliving matter which comprises the vast bulk of our nonhuman environment, and all seventeen of these elements are to be found widely distributed among the organic, alive or once-alive matter which comprises the remainder of that enviromnent. There is no chemical element -including carbon-s-which is found in the organic realm and is totally absent from the inorganic realm; even carbon exists in inorganic nature, in the form of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and a few other compounds which are generally considered to be inorganic. Even down at the most basic levels to which science has penetrated into the matter of the universe, the levels of atomic and subatomic particles, we find this kinship between man and his nonhuman environment. It appears, even, that at these levels the kinship is so close as to be called, more properly, a state of one.. ness. Dr. Paul C. Aebersold, an atomic scientist who is head of the Oak Ridge Isotopes Division, has stated that the ten billion billion billion atoms that make up our body are all second-hand, having been used before, from the beginning of time, by people, plants, animals, trees, flowers, and everything else that makes up biologically exchangeable matter. He says that during a man's life he takes in and puts out a total of 1,000 billion billion billion atoms, and that about half the atoms in one's body are replaced every month (160).

10

Th» Nonhuman Environment

When) lastly, we take the dimension of time into account and contemplate the earliest phases of the human individual's physical development, we find still further corroborative evidence of this kinship with his nonhuman environment. In the science of ernbryology, it is a basic prinicple that "ontogeny repeats phylogeny" -that the developmental phases of the human embryo recapit.. ulate the phylogenetic phases which transpired in the evolution of the successive forms of animal life on earth, leading, finally, to the emergence of the higher forms. The human organism begins with the union of the sperm and the ovum as a two-ceUed entity only somewhat more complex, in terms of its microscopically visible appearance, than the lowest forms of present..day animal Iifet the unicellular organisms such as the amoebae. It then goes OD, in the developing complexity of its structure, to assume a form anatomically very similar to the embryo of Amphioxus, a primitive form of fish, and to the early embryo of the frog. Its next fonnative phases yield structures which are closely comparable with those of the embryos of reptiles and primitive mammals. Many of the structures which the human embryo transitorily assumes in the course of its evolving are similar not only to embryonic structures in other Iife-fonns, but also to the definitive structures in the mature state of these life-forms, For example, by the sixth week: of its development the human embryo possesses a prominent tail (which gradually disappears within the ensuing two weeks). In one phase the heart possesses only three chambers, an arrangement similar to that found in adult fishes, before proceeding to the differentiation of its fourth chamber. Up until the relatively late phases of development, the formation of not only the gross subdivisions of the embryo but even that of its separate organs--heart, liver, lungs, eyes, ears, and so on-is so closely comparable with the fonnation of those organs in, for example, the pig, that the study of the embryology of the pig constitutes one of the standard means by which the premedical student acquaints himself with the so similar intrauterine develop.. ment of the human being (3, III ). It is even more surprising that psychoanalytic theory has remained largely undeveloped in this important area when we

Introductory Considerations

11

consider not only the relevant data from science itself, as touched upon in the foregoing paragraphs, but in addition the overwhelming abundance of data inherent in man's daily life, in our culture, indicating how essential to his psychological well-being is his relatedness to the nonhuman environment. This kind of data is so familiar to us all that I find myself somewhat apologetic about mentioning them; but I feel that it is this kind of disparagement-through-familiarity that our science must work against. To me it is reminiscent of the disparagement shown by various Southern-born patients in saying anything, early in therapy, about the Negro nursemaids who, as further therapy reveals, were the prime sources of the love, during their early years, which literally saved their psychological lives. We must not disdain the familiar, for it may, if we take a second, searching look at it, teach us most of all. The data I have in mind here consist in our love of gardening; our love of frequenting familiar haunts of Nature; our enjoyment of active sports-golf, boating, hiking, and so on-which in their pursuit bring us physically closer to Nature; the very real and important places which pets have in the lives of many of us; the fascination which so many persons, both children and adults, find in going to zoos; the appeal of beautiful landscapes in motion pictures, in paintings, in literature, and, not uncommonly, in the very dreams that well up from our innermost beings. The language of romantic love, like the language of poetry, is saturated with similes and metaphors which compare or identify human qualities with aspects of the nonhuman environment. It is rare to find a great novel which so skeletally limits itself to a portrayal of human beings alone as does psychoanalytic theory. Much more often, great literature embeds its studies of human beings in a portrayal of them as being collectively an integral part of larger, nonhuman Nature itself. Much great art, to the best of my limited knowledge, does likewise. The work of various popular humorists, too, reflects our interest in our relatedness with the nonhuman environment; we chuckle at cartoons which show dogs, for instance, soberly en.. gaging in what we like to consider uniquely human activities,

12

The Nonhuman Environment

and laugh when James Thurber solemnly tells us of his Uncle Zenas who died of the chestnut blight (155). The anxiety which is often, I believe, behind our laughter will be described in Chapter II. The tremendous popular appeal of the subject is manifested by the recent series of article; in Life magazine entitled The W orld We Live In (94), by the series of beautiful Nature movies produced by Walt Disney, and by books concerning this general subject} such as The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson (23). All these convey the message that man is not only in the Universe but of it. The first chapter of Miss Carson's book conveys this message more beautifully than anything else I have read, in its portrayal of the fiery creation of the entirely inorganic earth, its slow surface-cooling to the accompaniment of centuries-long rains which eventually fonn the oceans, the formation in the sea of the most primitive forms of life, and the gradual evolution of increasingly complex forms of life, concluding with the emergence-as an integral part of the unbrokenly continuous over-all process--of human life. Despite the readiness with which one can tell oneself that much of this portrayal arises from theory rather than incontrovertible fact, it makes profoundly stirring reading, and that such literature does so deeply influence so many readers is a fact, a psychological fact whose significance deserves more attention in psychoanalytic literature than it has thus far received. In philosophy and in various religions, man's relatedness to his nonhuman environment has long been a matter of focal interest; in the study of philosophy, that is, as well as in the pursuits of his everyday life, man has progressed much beyond the limit reached so far, in this area, by psychoanalytic theory. The field of philosophy is but one among many fields of knowledge-s-physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, religion, and others--each of which contains, I strongly surmise, rich docu.. mentation of the theme of this present volume, documentation which could be provided by anyone interested in this theme and expert in the particular field of study. Since my own grasp of these fields is extremely limited I shall give only two references

1nlToducto11 Considerations

13

here, to a work by Albert Schweitzer and to one by Bertrand Russell. In touching upon some of the philosophical systems which were prominent in the past, Schweitzer has this to say of the Stoicism of ancient Greece and Rome, and the ancient Chinese philosophy of Lao-tse and his followers: ..... the fundamental thought of Stoicism is .... that man must bring himself into a spiritual relation with the world, and become one with it. In its essence Stoicism is a nature philosophy which ends in mysticism. . . . . Lao-tse •.. For him, too, the important thing is that man shall come, by simple thinking, into a spiritual relation to the world, and thus prove his unity with it by his life [129]. In Chapter IV I shall quote some relevant material concerning mystical experiences. Schweitzer in another passage presents us with the core of his own contribution to philosophic thought) a contribution directly in line with the subject at hand: The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach. A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as [weU as] that of his fellow men [129a].

It is my conviction that we need, similarly, to extend the focus of our psychoanalytic investigation to include more than mankind alone. But I would not draw the limit, as Schweitzer does regarding the concern of ethics, to include only that wider sphere of all that lives; I hope that the clinical data which will be brought forward later here, as the solid foundation of this book, will convince the reader that psychoanalysis needs to concern itself with the total nonhuman environment, including the inanimate as well as the living elements in it. Pragmatism is defined by Websters New Collegiate Dictionary as a belief that "the meaning of conceptions is to be sought in

14

The Nonhuman Environment

their practical bearings, that the function of thought is as a guide to action, and that truth is pre-eminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief' (161). Bertrand Russell rejects such a philosophy on the grounds that Pragmatism appeals to the temper of mind which finds on the surface of this planet the whole of its imaginative material; which feels confident of progress, and unaware of non-human limitations to human power . . . But for those who feel that life on this planet would be a life in prison if it were not for the windows into a greater world beyond . . . to men who do not find man an adequate object of their worship, the pragmatist's world will seem narrow and petty) robbing life of all that gives it value, and making man himself smaller by depriving the universe which he contemplates of all its splendor [120J.

When we tum now to a sampling of the explorations which psy.. chiatry and psychoanalysis have made into this fundamental subject, we find that the development of theory has lagged far behind the development of widespread technical practices in this regard. Here I refer specifically to practices which have long ago become accepted as valuable in the institutional therapy, as conducted by psychiatrists of either a general psychiatric or a psychoanalytic orientation, of patients suffering from psychotic Of severe neu.. rotic illness. That is, even in strongly psychoanalytically oriented institutions (144), where the therapeutic effort is focused primarily upon the intrapersonal and interpersonal processes of the illness, considerable efforts are also maintained to provide occupational therapy activities (wood and metal working, weaving, and so on), to provide beautiful landscaping about the hospital, and to provide opportunities for gardening and for visiting nearby places of natural beauty. Zilboorg informs us, in his A. History of Medical Psychology, that occupational therapy was introduced about one hundred years ago, and landscaping, at least one hundred and fifty years ago (16B). We carry on these efforts in hospitals without having, I think, any adequate place provided for them in our psychoanalytic theory. This is a matter of more than theoretical importance, moreover, for it has seemed

1ntroductoT'Y Considerations

15

to me, in my own institutional work) that one reason for the notorious difficulty in psychoanalysts' working with and appreciating the efforts of the staff members of the occupational and recreational therapy department is that our psychoanalytic theory does not embrace that field; our theory has not shown us the common ground in which the psychoanalyst and the occupational and recreational therapist are working. To continue with the findings which psychiatry and psychoanalysis have unearthed concerning this subject, we sometimes find richly suggestive material in the accounts, by recovered patients, of their own illnesses. The most valuable such account with which I am acquainted is that in which John Custance brilliandy describes the experiences which he underwent while in the grip of episodes of manic-depressive psychosis (26). Regarding his manic episodes) he says, One of the striking features . . . was a strong tendency to anthropomorphism. The sun came to have an extraordinary effect on me. It seemed to be charged with all power; not merely to symbolize God but actually to be God. . . . The moon had a similar effect, though less intense, so had birds, animals and trees

[26a]. In another passage he gives us a description which) to anyone who has worked with manic patients) will be, I think, reminiscent. He is speaking about his delusions of grandeur and his drive for power, associating himself with the cat tribe: I first noted it in the padded cell at Brixton while in a state of acute mania. I saw a series of visions which impelled on my consciousness a strong sense of destiny and leadership. I imagined myself a sort of lion destined to conquer the world, and in conformity with this delusion paced interminably round and round my cell on the balls of my feet with a sense of extraordinary muscular looseness or suppleness [26b].

Marcel Heiman, a psychoanalyst, has written an extremely valuable and interesting paper entitled "The Relationship Between Man and Dog" (73). He not only presents, with abundant

16

The Nonhuman Environment

clinical documentation, an impressively original concept of his own, but provides a rich survey of existing psychoanalytic literature concerning this broad subject. One will find in this paper many important references which I have not attempted to duplicate in the bibliography of my own volume. I am indebted to Dr. Heiman for his sending me a copy of his paper prior to it) publication; this copy was more extensive than is the published version. The psychoanalytic literature on this subject usually stresses the importance only of animals (the dog, most particularly) J and the importance of animals not basically resident in their innate biological relatedness to man, but rather in their serving as the bearers of individual man's transference feelings, projections, and identifications. In reading such material, one feels that it has been lost sight of that, to use Gertrude Stein's kind of phraseology, a dog is a dog is a dog, and that as a dog he is of real significance to human beings. We see this same traditional slant reflected in Heiman's own original conception, very interesting though his contribution is. The following passage is from the conclusion of his paper: The domesticated animal, in particular the dog, is for civilized man what the totem animal was for the primitive. The dog represents a protector, a talisman against the fear of death, which is first experienced as separation anxiety. Since separation anxiety gives rise to an increase in the cannibalistic drives, the dog is also in that sense a protector. By displacement, projection, and identi... fication, a dog may serve as a factor in the maintenance of psychological equilibrium [73].

The remarks of a number of discussants are appended to the unpublished version of Heiman's paper. Among those by Dr. Louis Linn are some comments which stress the kind of emphasis which I am trying to keep foremost in this book. I gather that Linn considers this paper, as I do, to be a valuable and creative contribution; but I enthusiastically support his following words: This leads us to one aspect touched upon in Dr. Heiman's

Introducto,y Considerations

17

thesis, although not, it seemed to me, sufficiently elaborated. Clearly, the dog is no inanimate repository of symbolic meaning, but a living being that eats and bites and destroys and urinates and defecates and can lavish affection and has a. sex life and, finally, is subject to illness and death. . . . In short, dogs are capable of entering into human emotional relationships which seem almost as complicated bilaterally [73].

In giving Heiman's paper the attention it deserves I have digressed somewhat from the main stream with which this book is dealing, up along a tributary current; dogs, and even animals taken collectively, constitute but one facet of the broad subject to which my efforts here are devoted. The only writing heretofore published, of which I am aware, which deals with this subject in its entirety is the volume N ature and Human Nature (44) by Lawrence K. Frank, who may best be termed a social philosopher. His book, with which I became acquainted only late in the preparation of this volume, I found not only fascinating but inspiring. The concept of human per· sonality which Frank provides us is at once spiritually enlarging and scientifically sound, consonant with the recent findings of all fields of science, whether concerned primarily with human or nonhuman elements of the universe. My own volume might be considered to offer documentation, from the particular science of psychoanalytic psychiatry, to the broad concepts which Frank puts forward. In essence, Frank describes all the infinitely varied constituents of the universe as being produced by the same basic physical, chemical, and biological processes; he describes all as consisting in different configurations of energy, persisting only by a ceaseless process of actively absorbing and releasing or transforming energy; and he shows that each organism, including man himself, is a slowly altering pattern, through which the universe is ebbing and flowing, as it daily captures, stores, and releases parts of the geographical environment-a pattern which, when it can no longer maintain these vital transactions, dies and disintegrates. Piaget (113a) states, similarly, that it is impossible even so

18

The Nonhuman Environment

much as to think of "an environment" and "an organism" without abstraction; there exists between these two, he says, a complexus of relations, of changes and reactions which implies complete physicochemical continuity. Rather than giving here any further material from relevant literature in psychiatry and allied fields, I shall bring in such material from time to time as we go along, as it proves useful in expanding various points which will be considered successively. It may be well, before proceeding further, to deal with a number of objections which, I anticipate, have by now arisen in the reader's mind concerning my thesis; I more or less assume their presence, for they soon emerged into my own attention, sometimes repeatedly, in the course of my developing interest in this subject. I shall include here a major objection raised by a colleague after hearing an outline of this volume. Many, of course, may be the objections which I cannot foresee. First, one may protest that the nonhuman environment, as I have called it, does not exist; one may assert that all of man's surroundings, including not only his own artifacts but also the unspoiled works of nature are} in man's perception of them, so invested with numerous personal and cultural meanings that, in terms of his subjective relatedness with them, they can not be accurately called "nonhuman." To this, I would say that I realize that such meanings are indeed there, that the whole of an individual's "nonhuman environment" may constitute, for him, the expression of a mother's love or a father's hatred, for example; or all of nature may present itself to him as something to be mechanistically used or devoutly worshiped, depending upon the cultural attitudes which have been instilled into him during his upbringing. To my way of thinking, it has been a serious lack in psychiatry that we have underestimated the importance of the nonhuman environment; but to try to minimize the significance to man of his own fellow men would be an obvious folly. I have no illusion, for example, that a beautiful maple tree, beloved to one's childhood, can really have made up for the lack of a childhood friend. When I myself have felt misgivings on this particular score-

Introductory Considerations

19

have thought that perhaps the nonhuman environment, if it could be stripped of its interpersonal and cultural meanings in our perception of it, would be found devoid of psychological significance to man-I have repeatedly come up against a persistent conviction that it would be illogical to think that man could feel entirely unresponsive, psychologically, to this nonhuman environment which is so akin to himself at so many levels -biologicalJ chemical, and so on. Moreover, my own personal life experience, as well as my clinical experience with psychiatric patients, has convinced me that man relates to his nonhuman environment on a dual level. That is, however important is the level of his relating to, for instance, a cat or a tree in terms of their constituting, in his perception of them) carriers of meanings which have to do basically with people (by way of displacement and projection of his own unconscious feelings onto the cat or the tree, transference of interpersonal attitudes on his part on to them, perceiving them through various cultural distortions, and so on), there is also another level on which he relates to them: to the cat as being a cat and to the tree as being a tree. Second, one might object) "What difference does this make in, for example, psychoanalysis or psychotherapy with patients? If an individual's relationship to his nonhuman environment is disturbed, it is only because of his intrapersonal and interpersonal difficulties; once these have been resolved, he can tum to that environment and make the most of it, psychologically, without difficulty." To this, I would say essentially what I have said in the paragraph immediately above, and would add that the clinical material which is to follow in subsequent chapters will indicate, I think, that in the life of a psychiatrically ill individual his ability or inability to relate himself constructively to the non.. human environment may be of more than a little importance, both in terms of causing his life to be significantly less, or more, grievous, and in constituting a real factor in the prognosis of his illness. I have repeatedly gotten the impression in clinical work that to the seriously ill patient the threat of impending psychosis, for example, conveys terror not merely in that it will bring with it bizarre and frightening and confusing experiences (hallucina-

20

The Nonhuman Environment

tions, delusional distortions in his perception of himself and other persons, and so on), but also in that it will mean the loss of familiar relationships with other persons (family members at home, co-workers, and so on) and of the familiar nonhuman

environment. Third, it might be asserted that if the nonhuman environment does in itself possess psychological significance to human beings, that significance could not possibly be ascertained, because this environment is composed of such innumerable, and such tremendously varied, elements. To this, I would reply that a science ~psychiatry and its related disciplines-which has been able to achieve, to date, a very respectable formulation of the complex processes of intrapersonal and interpersonal living, need not quail at the subject now before us, however chaotically complex it may

appear at first. The fourth) and perhaps most fonnidable, of the objections which I anticipate may go something like this: how, one may ask, can the nonhuman environment possibly be considered of real significance in personality development and in psychiatric illness, since we all know that a paranoid schizophrenic illness, for example, in an individual reared on a Midwestern farm is not fundamentally different from such an illness in an individual reared in so very different a nonhuman environment as New York City? And, as another example, two persons, one reared in the Adirondack Mountains and the other reared in the so-verydifferent desert country of Arizona, can both develop obsessional neuroses which are of quite similar structure. Does this not clearly rule out the thesis of this book as possessing any validity? I think not. We may find, for example, in two individuals each of whom shows an obsessional neurosis, that the neuroses are very similar in structure but differ in content. Moreover, when we try to compare the two persons who are manifesting those illnesses, we find ourself in two territories which are far vaster, far more complex, and far less comparable to each other than are the much simpler, much more stereotyped, territories of the two illnesses. We can describe an illness in relatively few words; we cannot describe a person adequately in any space

Introductory Considerations

21

much shorter than a long novel. It is my strong impression that the relationship which the individual has had to his nonhuman environment has been very influential in the development of his over...all personality. The types of psychiatric illness are relatively few, but the "kinds of persons" who are ill are illimitably varied; in fact each person is, as we know, unique. 1 One may say) further, that it is the quality of this over-all personality, with the development of which I believe the nonhuman environment has had much to do, which determines whether or not the individual possesses the requisite strength to recover from his neurosis or psychosis. Among normal persons, also, I conjecture that each individual's nonhuman environment has had much to do with the development of his particular personality. We know that among normal persons (as among persons with psychiatric illness), the infinite variety in terms of personalities fully equals the variety in terms of the nonhuman environments among which various personalities have developed. One kind of experience which has substantiated my feeling that there is validity in the thesis I am pursuing is my repeatedly finding that acquaintances, upon my bringing up this subject as a topic of conversation, respond eagerly to it with affect-laden personal reminiscences. One colleague was promptly reminded, with much feeling, of how crucially important certain inanimate possessions, particularly treasured books, had been to him at various times in his life. Another person, one of our most highly valued and experienced psychiatric aides, when this general subject came up at the lunch table said, simply and with tears in her eyes, UWhen I was growing up I got all my affection from animals." In her saying this she gave no impression of rancor against people in her past, of making a wildly distorted statement for the purpose of blaming her parents; her comment came as a simple, and very moving, statement of subjective fact. What I especially wish to emphasize is the impression I have gotten repeatedly from such respondents, that one has tapped here a ~ Gregory Bateson, in the book entitled Communication-s-Th« Social Mo.· tri» of Ps"chiatT'Y, by Jurgen Ruesch and himself, says, "It would appear that the phenomena of pathology are actually simpler, more general, and more recurrent than those of normality and health" (119).

22

The Nonhuman Environment

territory of personality which has lain long hidden from interpersonal view, full of thoughts and feelings which have remained private through the years and which eagerly respond to the opportunity to gain expression to another human being. I have been interested to find the same eager responsiveness reported in an article by Olive Stevenson, "The First Treasured Possession: A Study of the Part Played by Specially Loved Objects and Toys in the Lives of Certain Children" (146). In Chapter lilt concerning the significance of the nonhuman environment in normal personality development, I shall refer to this valuable article at some length. At the moment I wish merely to give two passages from it, each of which reports the same kind of responsiveness in respondents as that which I have seen in my own experience. D. W. Winnicott, in his preface to Stevenson's article, mentions that he has found, in his own history-taking from mothers concerning the place of such first treasured possessions in the livesof their children, that

. . . By remembering these early details they get into touch with the early stages of development of their children and usually they are not in any way disturbed by reminding themselves of these things. Usually parents will be found to be pleased that these early details are given full significance. In the same way it is surprising how many children can remember back to infancy along this channel, since the original object, where there has been one, is often still in use or is kept in the back of the toy cupboard or at the bottom of the drawer; or alternatively there is a poignant memory of the moment at which the object was lost, thrown away, given away, or confiscated . . . [l46a].. [And Stevenson herself reports that] It was rarely difficult to make a quick and friendly contact with mothers on this subject [t46b]. During the past approximately sixty years, the focus of psychiatry's attention has gradually become enlarged, from an early preoccupation with intrapsychic processes (particularly the Indlvidual's struggles with his own conflictual id, ego, and superego strivings), to include interpersonal and broad sociological-an-

1ntroductory Considerations

23

thropologicaJ factors.. It would seem, then} that a natural next phase would consist in our broadening our focus still further, to include the investigation of man's relationships with his nonhuman environment. Harry Stack Sullivan, for example, became progressively occupied, during the last few years of his life, with a field concept of psychiatry which was limited to 'lithe world of culture and of people" (150). By contrast, I am emphasizing in this volume that the significant field, the field which psychiatry needs to consider, is a much more inclusive one, containing, in addition to the world of culture and of people, the nonhuman environment If Sullivan included this latter under the term "culture," he did so only implicitly; it deserves more explicit consideration than he accorded it. Sullivan said, in effect, that the human being is an indissoluble part of the world of culture and of people; I am saying that he is an indissoluble part of the fabric of all created matter. By this, I do not mean to assert, as did Sullivan, that the sense of personal individuality, of uniqueness, is an illusion; to my way of thinking, man both individually and collectively is unique in the universe, and his kinship with the nonhuman environment, on however many levels, does not erase the fact of his uniqueness. Margaret Mead, in the recent anthropological anthology edited by herself and Nicolas Calas (104)} describes a form of resistance which is analogous to that which we encounter in ourselves when we try to come to terms with the fact of our kinship with the nonhuman environment. The resistance of which Mead is speak.. ing is that which the people of one culture must resolve before coming to realize their basic kinship with the people of another, alien culture. Mead points out that a new kind of objectivity, a new dimension of historical consciousness, is born when the members of a culture refer to themselves by the names which other men apply to them, rather than calling themselves "human beings," while referring to others as "eaters of snakes" or "dwellers farther inland" (104a). It is well known that analogies all prove to be inaccurate if pursued far enough, and that it is therefore dangerous to accept them uncritically. But if approached in a spirit of tentativeness,

24

The Nonhuman Environment

of reservation of final judgment, they can prove illuminating. It is in such a tentative spirit that I shall present one more analogy, for the reader to make of it what he feels it to be worth. This analogy has to do with the historical evolution of physicists' conception of the universe, from the classical mechanics of Newton up to present-day views which hold that all physical phenomena-whether concerning hydrodynamics, heat, light) gravity, electricity, or whatever-are various manifestations of a basic.. ally unitary field, are not to be regarded as particulate phenomena, but rather as field phenomena. Mathematiciam are, as we know~ striving to formulate an equation which would "explain" all these phenomena taken together. It seems to me this development in physicists' thought may constitute a useful analogy to the development in psychiatry, a development which, although many years behind the one in physics, also represents an increasing broadening of focus beyond the individual particle (in psychiatry, the human individual). Einstein has traced this development in

the science of physics in a stimulating fashion. For example, concerning the contributions of Faraday (1791-1867), be says, For us, who took Faraday's ideas so to speak with our mother's milk, it is hard to appreciate their greatness and audacity. Faraday must have grasped with unerring instinct the artificial nature of all attempts to refer electromagnetic phenomena to actionsat-a-distance between electric particles reacting on each other. How was each single iron filing among a lot scattered on a piece of paper to know of the single electric particles running round in a nearby conductor? All these electric particles together seemed to create in the surrounding space a condition which in tum produced a certain order in the filings. These spatial states, to-day called fields, if their geometrical structure and interdependent action were once rightly grasped, would, he was convinced, furnish the clue to the mysterious electromagnetic interactions. He conceived these fields as states of mechanical stress in a space-filling medium, similar to the states of stress in an elastically distended body .•• [30a]. [Einstein expresses his own opinion on this subject in the following words:] What appears certain to me . . . is that, in the

Introductory Considerations

25

foundations of any consistent field theory, there shall not be, in addition to the concept of field, any concept concerning particles. The whole theory must be based solely on partial differential equations and their singularity-free solutions [SOb].

The question may now be raised, "Why has there not been formulated, before this, a more comprehensive psychoanalytic theory than we have at present, a theory which takes into account not merely man in his human environment, but man in his total environment (including, that is, the nonhuman environment)?" Part of the answer to this presumably consists in the simple fact that psychoanalysts have had their hands full with the task of investigating, and developing valid theories about, Intrapersonal and interpersonal phenomena. This task has been so complex, of such pressing importance, and so inexhaustibly productive of new mysteries beneath the recendy solved mysteries, that we had, as it were, no time to raise our eyes to the larger environment around us, feel a sense of appreciation of how important must this nonhuman environment be to the psychological life of man, and to be drawn to the pursuit of the mysteries that beckon over here. It may well be that we have first had to develop at least a moderate degree of reliable understanding concerning the intrahuman and interhuman processes, before we could then, with this clearing in which to work, start cutting paths into the greater forest surrounding WI" But, primarily through the genius of Sigmund Freud, we have had such a solid foundation for some time now. The circumstance of this time lag, plus a number of other evidences to which I shall refer in subsequent chapters, suggests that we have been hampered not only by ignorance concerning these possibly more pressing, "exclusively human" processes, but also by another fac.. tor: anxiety which we psychoanalysts possess, along with other human beings generally, concerning our relatedness with the nonhuman environment. In the next chapter I shall attempt, partly with the aid of clinical material, to elucidate something of the extent, and the sources, of that anxiety.

PART

TWO

THE NONHUMAN ENVIRONMENT

AS EXPERIENCED BY THE HEALTHY INDIVIDUAL

The Infant's Subjective Oneness with His Nonhuman Environment

CHAPTER

2

In psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature a great deal of attention has been paid, in recent years, to the early development of the ego and of object relations. Many writers have described normal infancy as including a very early phase in which the infant, in his subjective experience) has not yet become dif.. ferentiated from other human beings--in particular, from the mother. And the infant's achievement of a sense of separateness from the mother is depicted as being of crucial significance in the development of human personality. Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein (72), Hofler (79) J Fenichel (40), Sullivan (149), and Hill (78) are a few among the many writers whose publications have emphasized this point. But there is, I believe, an additional dimension involved here which all these· writers, to the best of my knowledge, either whoUy neglect or, at most, touch upon only fleetingly: this crucial phase

30

The Nonhuman Environment

of differentiation involves the infant's becoming aware of himself as differentiated not only from his human environment but also [rom. his nonhuman environment. Prior to his reaching this degree of psychic structure, he experiences himself as being at one not only with his mother, but also with the nonhuman environment which faUs within his ken. This is a dimension of early development which warrants more than merely passing mention, for, as I hope to show in the course of this book, the postulated subjective oneness with the nonhuman environment (as well as with the human environment), which holds sway in the early postnatal life, has repercussions which flow throughout the subsequent development of the personality, even in the years of adulthood, in "normal' as well as psychiatrically ill human beings. The whole theme of this book, in fact, is that the human being is engaged, throughout his life span, in an unceasing struggle to differentiate himself increasingly fully, nat only from his human, but also from this nonhuman environment, while developing, in proportion as he succeeds in these differentiations, an increasingly meaningful relatedness with the latter environment as well as with his fellow human beings. While there are differences of opinion in regard to the theoretical explanations of the early postnatal period, perhaps many analysts would, if asked, agree with the concepts of the developmental psychologists, Werner and Piaget, to the effect that the infant experiences himself as one with the environment: he does not distinguish himself from his surroundings, whether human or nonhuman; he does not distinguish between inner and outer sensations; in the brief periods of wakefulness he and the world around him are one. The long periods of sleep are punctuated by stimuli impinging upon the infant from outside-coldness, abrupt shifts in position, loud noises, and so on- and from sensations originating within his own organism-the most insistent and regularly persistent being hunger. The infant's utter helplessness, his complete dependence on the environment, is also the factor which "teaches" the infant gradually to appreciate reality-for he depends on human beings to alleviate the unpleasure caused by sensations

The Healthy Individual

31

of hunger, Of, as I would prefer to say, to alleviate the tension caused by internal physiological processes. The mother's ministrations lead to the dawning awareness that unpleasure, tension, discomfort are relieved by the appearance of mother. In this way the image of the mother gradually becomes cathected and differentiated from the rest of the world. But this process takes many months. Moreover, what we have called the image of the mother is by no means a clear perceptual or ideational representation of mother as a human being, with distinct personal characteristics. At this stage, mother is, in Anna Freud's (45c) term, a "need.. satisfying object" that may be comprised of the breast, a bottle) the flow of milk inside the infant's mouth. Such descriptions of the infant's subjective experience are of course predicated on what little we know about the functioning of the primitive psychic apparatus, particularly the perceptual one. Unless we attribute complex psychic functions to the newborn infant-and the majority of authors do not-we realize that even on the perceptual level there is initially so little differentiation that we have lumped animate and inanimate "objects" together. There is no conclusive evidence, to my knowledge, whether the infant can perceptually distinguish between animate and inanimate objects. That he does not do so visually was demonstrated by Spitz's ( 143a) experiments on the smiling response. This response does not appear until the child is three months old, and even then it is elicited by the perception of a configuration (resembling the human face) in motion. But the infants responded with a smile regardless of whether a person nodded or whether they were confronted by a nodding mask. Mahler (102), on the other hand, assumes that the newborn infant can distinguish tactually between animate and inanimate objects. Referring to Stirnimann and von Monakow, she indicates that as early as the first day of extrauterine life the infant has the ability to discriminate "in a sensorimotor way between the living part-object and lifeless matter." Stircke in 1921, in his paper entitled, "The Castration Complex" (145), describes the infant's experiencing the mother's lactating breast as an integral part of himself (as integral a part

32

The Nonhuman Environment

as is his own penis) ; in instances where bottle feeding takes the place of breast feeding, this inanimate object, the nursing bottle, is experienced as an equally integral part of the infant's self; finally Starcke emphasizes how very important a part of the infant's self is constituted by the breast, so that "the nipple . . . is perceived as the centre of one's own personality . . ." From Stiircke's reasoning, which seems thoroughly sound to me, flows the rather odd and startling implication that in an infant who has had only bottle feeding, an inanimate object (the nursing bottle) is perceived as the very center of his own per.. sonality. One wonders whether, if all this is so-as I for one am quite ready to believe-it does not have an important, if subtle, influence upon the course of later personality development. Stircke, as will be seen, expresses his conviction that there is such an influence. I know of no research results which have demonstrated that bottle feeding as contrasted to breast feeding, yields any differences later in the adult's personality. But at least I find this idea thought provoking; one sees so very many patients) both psychotic and neurotic patients, who are troubled by deep-seated doubts about their own humanness, and even about their own aliveness. Such doubts can be found, to be sure) to have numerous determinants; but one wonders whether in some cases a history of exclusive bottle feeding may be one of the determinants, especially if the child is not held and cuddled by its mother but left alone with a propped bottle. And to extend this to a consideration of the infant's over-all experience, beyond simply the matter of bottle or breast feeding, one would wonder, by the same token, whether the individual's lifelong personality development may not be profoundly in.. fluenced in one or another direction by the clrcumstance of his having spent his infancy in) on the one hand, an environment rich in human contact, or, on the other hand, an environment made up almost exclusively, the greater part of time, of inanimate objects. Some three or four years ago I saw a picture in Life magazine which I think caused many readers, like myself, to shudder: pictured was a glass case, scientifically so skillfully designed as to provide the infant in it with satisfaction for pre-

The Healthtj Individual

33

sumably all his physiological needs, so as to require an unprecedented minimum of care by any human mothering peISOO. Certainly, were any infant actually subjected to spending its infancy in such a contraption, we would not hesitate to expect such an experience to leave an important scar in the subsequently developing personality-that is, assuming the infant survived. What I have been saying here ties in with material reported by Margaret Ribble (118) in 1944, showing that in hospitalized infants, an abundance of human contact, in the fonn of motherly responses from the nurses, is in some instances of literally life.. saving importance; without such care the infants grow apathetic to the point of death, particularly those who have previously known mothering. We could formulate such findings, as I believe they have generally been fonnulated in the literature, in terms of the infant's having a need for cuddling, stroking, and other aspects of being mothered, a need which is to be regarded as at least semiphysiological, and fully as real and important as the need for air and food. We might also formulate such findingK from this other point of view which I have been utilizing, simply to throw some possible light upon a different aspect of the situation: we might think that an unfortunate infant who, upon being hospitalized, receives a minimum of such mothering, is left most of the time in a world almost exclusively made up of inanimate objects, and may consequently experience himself as being an Inanimate, and therefore naturally inert, object. In line with this reasoning, I find it of interest that Spitz (140· 143), in his findings reported in 194546 concerning hospitalism and anaclitic depression in the infants and children in a foundling home, findings similar to those of Ribble, describes an "anxious avoidance of inanimate objects" (141) in these children, and at another point mentions, again, that "a curious reluctance to touch [inanimate] objects was manifested" (143), These findings suggest that the earliest modality of experience is mediated via tactual-kinesthetic sensations. Hence, even on the primitive perceptual level-s-and certainly on the symbolic and ideational ones-there is little discrimination of objects, and no distinction between the infant and the rest of the world.

34

The Nonhuman Environment

While there is substantial agreement among analysts in regard to descriptions of the infant's subjective experience, different conceptualizations have been advanced. These theories have changed with the development of psychoanalysis and reflect its growth from the early almost exclusive preoccupation with libido theory to the introduction of the structural point of view. In 1911 in the Schreber case (46) and in 1914 in his paper "On Narcissism" (47) Freud developed his theory. of object relations-and the relation to the nonhuman environment, in which I am interested here, is of course also a function of object relations, since in psychoanalytic terminology "object" refers to the "object of the drives," regardless of whether human or nonhuman. 1 Freud postulated an early stage of primary narcissism as the universal original libidinal condition, with true object love developing later. Melanie Klein (88) and W. R. D. Fairbairn (38), on the other hand, assume that the infant's libidinal strivings are from the very beginning directed outward. Michael Balint (6, 7J 8), taking issue with the concept of primary narcissism, as did Edith Jacobson later ( 84a») assumes an early mode of relatedness between infant and mother, which he calls "primary love." ~ Mahler (101, 102) describes this early period as a symbiotic one. From the structural. point of view, these problems have been formulated by Hartmann (67), who postulates an early undifferentiated phase of development, in which "Strictly speaking, there is no ego before the differentiation of ego and id, but there is no id either, since both are products of differentiation . . ."

(67a). These analytic concepts have their counterpart in the developmental psychology of Heinz Werner (162). His Comparative Psychology of Mental Development provides rich documentation, 1 In actual practice, however. "human" has almost become equated with "object.." This is no doubt due to the paramount importance human beings have in the development of penonality-an importance I do not wish to deny. S In this mode of relatedness, Balint says, the mother is so very important to the infant-his dependence upon her is so absolute-that he can scarcely afford to make any allowance in her respect, to show her any consideration; 'Qr the infant she il~ indeed. only an Obj6Ct, to be taken for granted.

The Healthy Individual

35

from a wide variety of fields of study, for the phase of oneness with-nondifferentiation from-the surrounding nonhuman environment. Much of that volume is devoted to the nondifferendation, or, in Werner's term, "syncretism," which permeates the psychological functions of (a) animals of many different species, (b) children, (c) members of "primitive" cultures, (d) schizophrenic patients, and (e) patients with organic brain damage. Werner presents voluminous material, from his own researches and from those of a multitude of other investigators, showing the great extent to which the individuals in each of these five categories are psychologically at one with their total environment. These three passages will, I hope, give some hint of the richness, and relevance to my topic, of his book:

. .. . it is characteristic of primitive mental life that it reveals a relatively limited differentiation of object and subject, of perception and pure feeling, of idea and action) etc. The biologist Buytendijk says: "It appears that in the whole animal world the correlation of the animal and environment is almost as intimate as the unity of the body.." The perceptions of the animal exist, therefore, only in so far as they are part of a wider totality of action in which object and inner experience exist as a syncretic, indivisible unity [t62a]. . . . Radin and others are certainly justified in stressing the admirable ad justment of the aborigine to his surroundings; but this all too perfect adjustment is the sign of a lower form of behavior, rather than of an advanced. A primitive, highly balanced, "one-track" culture Jacks that friction between individual and environment, that flexibility and freedom in unceasing attempt to readjust, which is the very life and essence of higher, advanced cultures [162b]. One of the most fundamental preliminary conditions for any magic fonn of behavior is a highly integrated (syncretic) unity of world and ego. The world is separated only slightly from the ego; it is predominantly configurated in terms of the emotional needs of the self (egomorphism). But, conversely, the ego, seen from the opposite angle, is highly susceptible to the emotional stimulation from the milieu. The egomorphic view of the milieu means a "personalization" of things, of such a kind that things cease

36

The Nonhuman Environmen'

to be rigid, inanimate objects and become living, vitally effective entities. . . . [162c]. In connection with the passage just quoted, Werner describes magic practices which are known as the "magic of continuity": the Papuans rub their backs and legs against rocks in order to partake of the rocks' strength and durability, and they embrace strong trees with their arms and legs in order to draw power and resistance from the trees; the African Galla wanior stands on turtles and the Cherokee Indian brave binds turtles to his legs, so that the soles of the feet and the leg muscles, respectively, may become as tough and hard as the shell of the reptile. I find that these, and similarly exotic data} provide colorful documentation for the concepts which one finds in psychoanalytic literature} by Hartmann and others, concerning the evolution of psychic structure. AIl these writings imply that there is a primitive stage of development, in which the child has not yet become aware of the distinction between himself and his environment. That is, if the infant is for a time unable to distinguish himself from his human environment, and unable (as a few investigators-c-to be mentioned in Chapter III-have reported) to distinguish animate from inanimate in the outer world, then he presumably is similarly unable, for at least some time postnatally, to distinguish himself from his surrounding nonhuman (inanimate, plant) animal) environment -unable to be aware of the fact that he is living rather than inanimate, and a human creature rather than plant or animal. The time span, after birth, normally covered by such a phase of nondifferentiation is, of course, a matter of great relevance. I know of no literature which explicitly endeavors to define the limits of 'such a phase. But the age levels at which the other, presumably later, differentiations are achieved have been described by various investigators. Ackerman and Behrens (1) state that it is somewhere in the second to the fifth month that the infant becomes subjectively differentiated from the mother; in other words, the normal infant-mother symbiosis extends over the first two to five months of life. Hoffer (79) says that whereas

The Healthy Individual

37

to a hungry infant of four weeks it will not make much difference whether it is the infant's own hand or fingers, or a bottle or comforter, which comes into his mouth, the infant of sixteen weeks has achieved an ability to distinguish among these various things. Inhelder and Piaget (82a ) describe the state of nondifferentiation between self and outer world as occurring with relative prominence in three phases of normal maturation: (a) in infancy and early childhood, on a sensorimotor or perceptual level; (b) in later childhood, on a "representational," or verbal language) level; and (c) in adolescence, on the level of formal thought Ol cognition. Concerning adolescence, for example, they point out that when the adolescent first becomes able to formulate long-range plans for his life, and theories about the world, he is at first unable, again here on this new plane (as previously on the planes of, respectively, sensorimotor experience and verbal-communication experience), to distinguish between self and outer world. Thus, he feels himself to be at the center of a world which he is called on to reform. One is reminded, here, of the clinical experience that although a chronologically adult member of a symbiotic relationship has long been able to differentiate at a conscious, perceptual level between himself and his symbiotic partner, it will be only by dint of much psychotherapeutic work-if ever- that he becomes able to develop a conceptual image, at an unconscious as well as conscious level) of himself and of the partner as being distinct entities. Thus it is, presumably, with our position vis-a-vis the nonhuman environment in nonnal development: at unconscious levels of concept formation, subjective oneness with that sector of the environment persists long after differentiation on a purely perceptual and conscious level has been effected. Were the nonnal-neurotic psychotherapist completely and irrevocably differentiated from the nonhuman environment, at unconscious as well as conscious levels) he would be unable, as a matter of fact) empathically to sense the anxiety which the so greatly dedifferentiated schizophrenic patient experiences in this book will repeatedly describe the anxious, weird, regard.

nus

38

The Nonhuman Environment

eerie sensations which I, and various of my colleagues, have found in ourselves upon coming face to face with the anxiety of a patient who is subjectively undifferentiated from his nonhuman environment. Were the therapist, in each of these instances, entirely free from any remnant of such nondifferentiation, he would be blind to the meaning of the clinical phenomenon before him. Werner makes this point when he emphasizes that . . . man possesses more than one level of behavior; and . . . at different moments one and the same man may belong to different genetic levels. In this demonstrable fact that there is a plurality of mental levels lies the solution of the mystery of how the European mind can understand primitive types of mentality [162d].

With such thoughts in mind we can read the following passage from Fenichel and gain from it a realization which the author is, apparently, not intending to convey--a realization of the anxiety which may be experienced by the infant in the face of an as-yet ...

unrnasterable environment which is totally, inantly, comprised of nonhuman elements:

or

at least predom-

The ego becomes differentiated under the influence of the external world. Correspondingly, it can be said that the newborn infant has no ego. The human infant is born more helpless than other mammals. He cannot live if he is not cared for Innumerable stimuli pour out upon him which he cannot master. He is not in a position to move voluntarily and is not able to differentiate the encroaching stimuli. He knows no object world and has no ability yet to "bind" tension. One can guess that he has no clear consciousness but has at most an undifferentiated sensitivity to pain and pleasure, to increase and decrease of tension [40a].

Here we are beginning to get some hint of the anxiety which, I believe, is aroused in one who attempts to investigate the subject at hand. To my mind, much of the delay in our coming, in the psychoanalytic profession, to a realization of the importance of the nonhuman environment, is attributable to the circumstance

The Healthy Individual

39

that any determined effort to penetrate this area brings up in us the kind of anxiety which, I surmise, we knew all too much of as infants, when the world around us seemed, oftentimes, comprised largely or even wholly of chaotically uncontrollable nonhuman elements. Such anxiety is, surely, no total stranger to our everyday experience; each of us has known the anxiety occasioned by OUf feeling overcome by the unmanipulability of a mechanical device, or the seemingly impossible complexity of a home.. carpentry job, or the seemingly unorganizable chaos of figures and Government regulations which flood us when we start to cope with an income-tax return. I believe that beyond the sheer intellectual difficulty of organizing a great deal of unstructured material, one experiences anxiety lest one--eut off from the world of people to a considerable extent, as one must necessarily be in such work-be overwhelmed by this nonhuman materiaL There is a second great source, I think, for the anxiety which impedes our exploration of this whole subject. Not only do we have unconscious memory traces of infantile experiences in which we were surrounded by a chaotically uncontrollable nonhuman environment that was sensed as being a part of US; in addition, we presumably have unconscious memory traces of our experi.. ence with losing a nonhuman environment which had been sensed, heretofore, as a harmonious extension of our world-ernbracing seH. Starcke, in his previously mentioned paper, has pointed out that "It is this separation in the primitive ego} the formation of the external world, which, properly speaking, is the primitive castration" (145). Thus the exploration of this whole subject, no matter upon how scientific a plane we attempt to pursue it, impinges upon a deeply rooted anxiety of a doubleedged sort: the anxiety of subjective oneness with a chaotic world, and the anxiety over the loss of a cherished, omnipotent

world-self, This hypothesis is an extension of that which I have just been discussing, and I regard it as being considerably less firmly grounded in evidence than is the former one. But I find some reason to think that there is validity in this second hypothesis:

40

The Nonhuman Environment

the development of the ego in the healthy human individual recapitulates the phylogenesis of the human race-it recapitulates, that is, the evolutionary history of the human race, from the beginnings of that history in an entirely inorganic world. proceeding through the phase of the appearance of the first elementary forms of living matter, and on through successively higher forms of life to the final triumphant emergence of the human fonn of animal life on this planet. I do not mean, of course, that the individual ego, in the course of its development, experiences its existence as being that of, for example, each and every successive form of life in the trunk of the evolutionary tree. But I do believe that in its broad outlines such a recapitulation does actually take place, namely. that the earliest rudiments of the human ego may experience existence as being totally inorganic, totally inanimate, including itself, followed by later phases of experiencing itself as something living but not yet human, and only later .still experiencing an awareness of oneself as a living, individual human being. Let me recommend, once again, the first chapter of Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us (23) for its beautiful, deeply moving portrayal of this history of the human race, this history which, I believe} we can find repeated in at least broad outline in individual ego development. It is primarily because of two factors that I believe this second hypothesis may hold true. (a) Accounts of the evolution of human life on earth, such as the account given by Carson, have the capacity to stir and thrill one with a profound fascination, a sense of exhilaration; this fact at least suggests to me that such accounts may strike a deep chord in us, a chord tracing back to experiences early in our own individual lives, preverbal experi... ences unformulable directly in our memories, when we were struggling up along an analogous path, a path toward the achievement, and subjective realization of, our status as truly human personalities. (b) Very deeply regressed psychotic patients show evidence-evidence which, again, I shall reserve largely for the later chapters of this book--of having "phylogenetically regressed" to a stage} a stage presumably comparable in various respects to early infancy, in which they experience them-

The Health'Y Individual

41

selves as being something subhuman: animallike, or even inani...

mate. I do not mean, by this, to say that objectively they quite lose their humanness; but subjectively they seem. to have regressed to an earlier phylogenetic stage. It is of interest, here, that the previously mentioned John Custance subscribes, as a result of his own personal experience of severe manic-depressive psychosis, to a view such as I have proposed in this second hypothesis: Just as in the physical sphere the human embryo compasses untold centuries of development into a few months, starting as a speck of protoplasm and climbing the ladder from invertebrate to vertebrate, doubtful at one moment whether to become a bird or a fish, before finally emerging as a mammal, so in the mental sphere the soul of the child seems to follow the path traced by his ancestors. He starts as a purely instinctive creature of a few urgent impulses and needs, with their corresponding sensations, and gradually puts on, partly as a result of environment and partly of development, the complicated psychological apparatus of modern civilized man [26c].

Mythology provides a rich source of material about this whole

subject, material which constitutes at least highly suggestive evidence in support of the hypothesis which I have presented, It seems to me that the prevalence in ancient Greece, for example, of myths-which at that time were popularly regarded as factportraying man as being interchangeable with his nonhuman environment, long before science had become able to demon-

strate the evidence that man is indeed integrally related to his nonhuman environment through the tree of evolution, bears witness to the probability that individual ego development has, as its initial phase, such a subjective interchangeability with the nonhuman environment. In utilizing this occasion to touch again upon the treasure which mythology offers us, I shall arbitrarily limit myself to a few examples of myths concerning the origin of mankind. These myths, portraying mankind as having emerged from a primordial animal state, or even an inorganic state, seem to me to reinforce the hypothesis which I have just advanced as regards the ego

42

The Nonhuman Environment

development of the individual.. Edith Hamilton (66) tells us that in Greek mythology heaven and earth were the first parents. The Titans were their children, and the gods their grandchildren; finally the gods created mankind. As to the specific methods by which the gods created the human race, various Greek myths differ. According to one account, Hamilton tells us, the gods experimented with various metals. They made their first race of men from gold, then one of silver, and after this race also passed away, they tried using brass. The human race which now inhabits the earth, according to this myth, was made from iron. A second account claims that the gods created mankind from stones, This took place when Pyrrha and Deucalion came down from Pamassus, the sole survivors of a great flood which had finally receded. Finding a temple, they gave thanks to the gods for having escaped the flood and prayed for help in their awful loneliness. Suddenly they heard a voice commanding them to veil their heads and to cast behind them the bones of their mother. At first the command struck them with horror, and they were perplexed as to its meaning. But then Deucalion realized the implication:

"Earth is the mother of all," he told his wife. "Her bones are the stones. These we may cast behind us without doing wrong." So they did, and as the stones fell they took human shape. They were called the Stone People, and they were a hard, enduring race, as was to be expected and, indeed, as they had need to be, to rescue the earth from the desolation left by the flood [66g]. Robert Graves (64) presents a similar account of this myth involving Pyrrha and Deucalion, as well as a number of other Greek creation myths which seem comparably reflective of man's sense of having emerged, primordially, from the nonhuman world about him. In a subsequent chapter I shall report upon a schizophrenic patient who evidenced anxiety lest she be "turned into a rock.' 1 Schilder (128e) says that some melancholic patients complain that they have been turned to stone. In Norse mythology concerning the creation of the world and

The

Health~

Individual

43

of mankind, we find, similarly, that "the first man and woman were created from trees, the man from an ash, the woman from an elm. They were the parents of all mankind" (66h). Erich Fromm in The Sane Society (55) briefly refers to similar myths among various other peoples.. He says that, according to the belief of the Winnebago Indians, creatures in the begin.. ning did not have any permanent form.. All were neutral beings which could transfonn themselves into either man or animals. At a certain period, they made a decision to become definitely that which they remained thereafter. The Aztecs, Fromm tells us, believed that the earth at one time had only animals and that the era of human beings arrived with Quetzalcoatl. Some Mexican Indians still believe that a certain animal corresponds to a particular person; and the Maoris believe that a certain tree, planted at an individual's birth, is thereafter identified with him. I fi~d that Trevett (157), in a recent paper entitled, "Origin of the Creation Myth: A Hypothesis," has come to a conclusion very similar to mine, as to the likelihood that myths of creation are expressive of very early experiences in the course of ego development, and development of awareness of the surrounding world. He presents a number of interesting passages from relevant literature, including a work by George Field, published in 1869, in which Field put forward an identical hypothesis as to the significance of myths of creation. My above-described hypothesis constitutes a further elaboratlon, when compared with those by these writers, to include the nonhuman environ.. ment, That is, Trevett's hypothesis, for example, limits itself to hypothetical infantile sensations having to do with the infant's dawning awareness of the mother (or parts of her) especially the breast), and with the infant's dawning awareness of himself, experienced presumably as a human being. My hypothesis extends this, by suggesting that the infant's awareness of himself progresses through the stages of (a) experiencing oneself as being alive, and therefore distinct from the inanimate things in the environment; (b) awareness of oneself as not only alive but human, and therefore distinct from the animate sector of the

44

The Nonhuman Environment

nonhuman environment (I.e., animals and plants); and (c) awareness of oneself as a living human individual, distinct from other human beings including one's mother." For further evidence of man's buried susceptibility to feeling a sense of interchangeability between himself and his nonhuman environment, I shall tum now to a second field-the field of anthropology. In the anthology of Margaret Mead and Nicolas Calas (104), primitives are said to regard artificial likenessespainted, carved, or sculptured-as the real thing, as real as the individuals represented. In the same anthology we read: In North America, the Mandans believe that the portraits taken by Catlin are alive like their subjects, and that they rob these of part of their vitality. . . . "I know)" says one man, "that this man put many 0/ OUT buffaloes in his book, for I was with him, and we have had no buffaloes since to eat, it is true,' "They pronounced me the greatest medicine-man in the world," writes Catlin) "for they said I had made living beingsthey said they could see their chiefs alive in two places-those that I had made were a little alive-they could see their eyes move----could see them smile and laugh, and that if they could laugh} they could certainly speak, if they should try, and they must therefore have some life in them." Therefore, most Indians refused him permission to take their likenesses. It would be parting with a portion of their own substance, and placing them at the mercy of anyone who might wish to possess the picture. They are afraid, too, of finding themselves faced by a portrait which, as a living thing, may exercise a harmful influence [104b].

This anthology also contains an interesting description of a belief held by the Jukun, a Sudanese tribe. They believed their king to be identified with the annual com crop. When a king died, his death was kept secret and his body preserved until after the I Lewin's (92) paper in 1953 entitled, "Reconaideration of the Dream Screen." is of inteI"elt in connection with Trevett's hypothesis. Lewin finds that the dreams of lome patients are experienced by them as if projected upon a blank 'Idream. screen," like the screen upon which motion pictures are projected, and he find. evidence that this dream screen is traceable to the dreamer. earliest infantile perception of the motherl breast.

The Health" Individual

45

harvest lest the crops wither; especial care was taken to avoid burying him in the dry season lest the com die forever. We also learn that the Ogallala Indians consider the clothing of a deceased person as retaining the individuality of their late owner. Since they believe that the dead person's spirit will linger about these articles, they will never wear any clothing which has been wom by one now dead" One of the many relevant pieces of anthropological data from Wemer's book is this passage:

A great many primitive people seeno contradiction in believing that various forms of life, continuously changing, represent one identity. A Congo native says to a European: "During the day you drank palm-wine with a man, unaware that in him there was an evil spirit. In the evening you heard a crocodile devouring some poor fellow. A wildcat, during the night, ate up all your chickens. Now, the man with whom you drank, the crocodile who ate the man, and the wildcat are all one and the same creature [162d]6 Coming now to our own culture and our own time, we find our third and fourth sources of evidence to reside in, respectively, the fairy tales which children read, and the humorous cartoons and literature which adults enjoy. Among fairy tales there is, for example, the story of Pinocchio (25), a story which has fascinated generations of children, about a wooden puppet which, after many tribulations, finally emerges triumphant, metamorphosed into a real boy. In a subsequent chapter, I shall have occasion to mention a few more among the many popular fairy tales which are expressive of the same general theme: the interchangeability between the human being and his nonhuman environment; or, to put it in another way, the basic lack of qualitative distinction between the human being and his nonhuman environment. One of the richest sources of such data, in contemporary life, is comprised by humorous literature, and humorous cartoons. James Thurber is an outstanding humorist who deals much with this kind of material, in both his writings and his drawings (155).

46

The Nonhuman Environment

Another writer who. works to some extent in this same general area is William Saroyan. In his semiautobiographical book, illy Name Is Aram (125), Saroyan as a boy accompanies his uncle during the latter's first visit to a piece of desert property which the uncle has acquired. In the description of this visit we find a rare and delicate humor, a humor based upon the childlike won.. der, the mingled feelings of kinship and alienness and an undercurrent of anxiety, which a human being-here, the author's uncle--experiences upon meeting something new in the non.. human enviromnent (in this instance, the world of desert nature) for the first time, face to face. The childlike freshness of the uncle's experience givesus a rare insight into the meaning which, I think, the nonhuman environment has had for each of us in our early childhood. At once humorous and touching is the uncle's evident uncertainty and uneasiness as to whether he is innately superior to the desert creatures, or vice versa. For in..

stance: My uncle looked the homed toad straight in the eye. The homed toad looked my uncle straight in the eye. For fully half a minute they looked one another straight in the eye and then the homed toad turned its head aside and looked down at the ground. My uncle sighed with relief [125].

As far as humorous cartoons are concerned, it appears to me that, as an example, in the very popular The New Yorker 19501955 Album (108), something like one out of every ten cartoons depends, for its laugh-provoking capacity, upon its portrayal of some situation in which we suddenly find that certain longaccustomed distinctions are suddenly absent, or are at most only very fuzzily present-s-distinctions between man and animal, man and plant, man and inanimate object. We see animals behaving like human beings, human beings looking like animals or plants or inanimate objects, inanimate objects seeming to be endowed with a disconcertingly humanlike life, and human beings revealing a semianimal or a semi-inanimate constitution. We have so largely mastered our confusion about all these different elements in the world of our experience--a confusion which once pre..

The Healthy Individual

47

vailed over each of us as an infant, a confusion by which many adult schizophrenic persons are once again overwhehned-that now we sense a bit of anxiety, easily mastered, and we chuckle," A fifth source of evidence is comprised by dreams, no matter whether these are produced by "normal," neurotic) or psychotic individuals; here, too, is reflected the integral part which the nonhuman enviromnent plays in the constitution of human personality. We all know how relatively infrequently the substance of a dream is limited to purely human material; much more often, dreams abound in nonhuman elements, such as animals, inanimate objects, landscapes) and so forth. I well realize that one can object, "But if human beings are to be portrayed in their carrying out of human activities, they must be shown in the process of using nonhuman materials, or moving in a nonhuman setting, as human beings do." This is an obvious troth; but if we reflect that all dream material has long been held to consist entirely in projections on the part of the dreamer, it would seem to me to be going too far if we regard only the dream portrayals of human beings as representing integral parts of the dreamer's psyche. The nonhuman elements must also, by the same token, be looked upon as projections-as) likewise, integral parts of the dreamer's unconscious. Furthermore, one occasionally encounters dreams in which a patient's self is represented by some subhuman life form, or even by an inanimate object; he himself puts it that, "I had a dream last night in which I was a (such-and-such)." There have been patients, some of them in therapy with me and some of them in therapy with my colleagues at Chestnut Lodge, who have had repeated dreams in which the patients' selves were portrayed as various domestic or jungle-type 'Of interest in this connection is Kris'. (89a) explanation of the curious fact that ctlrictlture appeared so relatively Iate-i-namely, the end of the sixteenth century-in the development of art. He notes that caricature, when it did finally appear, transformed inanimate objects and animals into human beings, and vice versa, and he says that one of the major reasons why this art form had not previously appeared is that people had only now matured to the point where they no longer believed that magic could be worked in this way-that such transformations could actually be effected, in reality, through the drawing of such pictures. To me, this implies that people had Dot become) theretofore, lufticiently lUre of their own humanness viJ.~·vis the nonhuman environment to accept) with humorous appreciation, such an art form.

The Nonhuman Environment

animals, or protozoa; and one chronically schizophrenic woman reported a dream in which she was "a bombed-out building."! Sixth] with hallucinations, likewise, a very considerable portion of the content seems usually to be made up of nonhuman material. For instance, I have seen a patient to be comforted by the hallucination of a machine which, he felt, constantly watched protectively over him; a woman who was in terror at the experiencing of there being a line of "exploding teeth" which filed up the side of her room, across the ceiling, and down the other side; and another woman who, utterly bewildered, indicated that she experienced the (actually unpeopled) landscape outside her window as being filled with an indescribable confusion of clanging trains and roaring trucks.. The following quotations from a paper by Savage (126) J which contains valuably detailed de• In the course of the final revision of my book manuscript, I have encountered dream material reported by Boss (15a) in 1958 which strikingly documents my hypothesis that ego development recapitulates the phylogenetic development of the human race. BoIS presents the salient features of more than 800 dreams which were reported by a schizoid, overly intellectual engineer who had never dreamed, to his knowledge, until some time after the analysis had begun. The patienis dreams were limited in their content, for the fint sUe and a half mon tha, to inanimate objects such as turbines, cyclotrons, automobilel t and airplanes. Then) at the end of this phase. for the first time he dreamed of a living thing: a potted plant. He went on" then, to dream of pine trees and of rosee, though the latter were diseased and withered. During the ensuing few months he began dreaming of such creatures as worms and insects; over a half-year period) beret he dreamed 105 times of insects. Then followed a half yeat in which he dreamed of toads, frogs, and anakea; then mammals were included: first a mouse, then a rabbit, and pigs. Two yean after the beginning of the psychoanalyaist there occurred hi, tint dream about a human being: an unconscious woman under the surface of an ice-covered pond. The dreams went on) subsequently" to include conacioul, very much alive human beings. Concomitantly with this evolution of his dreams) he had come to realize, during the first of the above-mentioned phases, that although married and able to carry on his profession, he had not really been aware t heretofore, of the full reality of the outer world~f the inanimate things a plants, animals, and people about him. He realized that he felt himself to be only a cog in an industrial machine. and that the people in hi. world were nothing more than marionettes and ghosts. In essence, Boss describes an evolution, in the patient. experience of reality in waking life, which occurred hand in hand with the remarkable sequences of his dreaming. The author credits Jung with being "the first to draw attention to such a -Phylogenetic developmentof dream phenomena: to serial dreams which take place during especially intenae periods of maturing in the life of the dreamer,"

The Health'Y Individual

49

scriptions of the hallucinatory experiences of subjects in whom transitory psychotic processes have been induced by the admin.. istration of LSD·25 (D-Iysergic acid diethylamide}, help to show something of the multitude of inanimate objects lying, so to speak. in our unconscious: If the individual closes his eyes or sits in a subdued light, he is overwhelmed by a kaleidoscope of fantastic images. There is a progression from the change in appearance of external objects, "a blue flame shooting out from the tip of the pencil" through bright lights flashing in the periphery, neon lights which organize to form geometric designs, lattice works and arabesques; then formed objects appear, such as tapestries, animated wire-like drawings of people, such as airplanes with pilots and finally very realistic representations of human beings. "Everything is dark now except for that naked woman. She is certainly voluptuous." . . . uA landscape with peasants in the field hoeing com" . . . "Donald Duck with eyes puffed out; they are emerald litfeet with glistening bunions;" "Groucho Mane-his wig turned into a rat and ran off the piano" [126a]. One subject who saw a picture of a golden flower of unequalled beauty, wished he could sketch it, then thought why not photo. graph it. Expressing this idea aloud reminded him that this was an hallucination [126b].

Seventh, recent reports by W. W. Heron et al. at McGill University (74) and by John Lilly at the National Institute of Mental Health (95) of the effects upon human beings who are kept in experimental isolation, . .in so far as practicable, from all enviromnental stimuli, seem to me strongly to reinforce my views as to the essential importance of the nonhuman environment in human personality functioning. In these experiments) the personality functioning of most of the subjects deteriorated with surprising rapidity-far more rapidly, evidently, than is known to be the case with personswho have suffered, for whatever reasons (polar exploration, shipwreck, imprisonment) and so on) isola.. tion from the human environment only. Although the findings from these two fascinating research studies have been discussed

50

The Nonhuman Environment

much in both lay and professional circles) I have not found this particular interpretation applied to them heretofore.. I find it of interest in connection with these isolation experiments that Biran is quoted by Piaget (115e) as saying, in about 1800, that "consciousness arises through contact with things." Rapaport (11 7), in an interesting discussion of the above-mentioned experiments, reviews the evidence that the ego structures with which psychoanalysis deals require "stimulus nutriment" for their development, and cites the work of Piaget (114) and Erikson (35, 36) in this connection. Among the situations characterized by stimulus deprivation he includes also (a) the circumstances of induced hypnosis, (b) the concentration camp, and (c) the technical setting of psychoanalysis (the couch, the analyst as a blank screen, and so on) ; and he points out that the modifications in the psychoanalytic approach which are found useful for the therapy of borderline cases (i.. e., such modifications as the face..to-face situation, and more active participation by the therapist) are such as to provide the patient with greater stimulus nutriment, Also of relevance) here, is Spitz's (141) report of the living conditions at the foundling home, where the children developed hospitalism, as contrasted to conditions at the nursery, where the children were free from this syndrome. Although Spitz attaches abnost exclusive significance to the disparity in mothering," what he describes concerning the disparity in nonhuman environmental stimuli is to me very suggestive, He found that whereas in the nursery nearly every child had one or several toys, hardly a single child in the foundling home had a toy. And whereas in the nursery the children had a ready view of trees, landscape and sky, 'as well as of mothers busy with their. e·-It U true that the children in Foundling Home are condemned to lolitary confinement in their cots. But we do not think that it is the lack of perceptual stimulation in g,n"al that counts in their deprivation. We believe that they suffer because their perceptual world is emptied of human partners, that their isolation cuta them off from any stimulation by any per.ons who could signify mother-representatives for the child at this age. The result . . • is a complete restriction of psychic capacity by the end of the first year...... By the end of the second year the Developmental Quotient sinks to 45, which corresponds to a mental age of approximately 10 months, and would qualify these children as Imbecllea" (141).

The Healthy Individual

51

babies, Spitz discovered that in the foundling home "the corridor into which the cubicles open ••• is bleak and deserted, except at feeding time • . . Most of the time nothing goes on to attract the babies' attention . • . probably owing to the lack of stimulation, the babies lie supine in their cots for many months and a hollow is worn into their mattresses" (141) But by far the richest source of evidence for the hypothesis in question-a source already touched upon in the above comments concerning hallucinations-is found in intensive, long-range psychotherapy with schizophrenic patients; in the most deeply ill of these individuals, one finds a conscious (not only unconscious, as in "normal" and neurotic persons) inability to distinguish clear boundaries between the self and the nonhuman

environment. For example, a young man, hospitalized for several years because of an unusually severe schizophrenic illness, is often noted by his therapist (one of my colleagues) to be feeling the outlines of his face, especially of his mouth and chin, in a confused way. Occasionally he expresses his belief that one side of his face has "slipped"; this is said as though he were referring to an inanimate object rather than a portion of his living body. During one therapeutic hour, when a maintenance man starts hammering on a water pipe several rooms down the corridor, he draws back, pats his chin and says in a tone of distress, "1 don't like the way they hammer on my chin that way." On a later occasion, during one of the prolonged silences which characterize his therapeutic hours, he suddenly demands of his therapist, "How would you like to have square eyes?') The therapist feels taken aback at this question} coming as it did out of the blue, and for a moment is immersed in feeling how it would be literally to have square eyes. Then a flash of insight comes to him and he asks, "Is it that you've been in psychiatric hospitals for so long, looking outside through the windows, that you feel as though your eyes are square?" In response to this the patient gives one of the corroborative responses which have come rarely from him. It is work with such patients as this young man, patients who are not only schizophrenic but who are unusually ill--unusually

52

The Nonhuman Environment

deeply regressed-even among schizophrenics, which tells one much about the presumable state of affairs in the very early development in the human ego. Such work substantiates a prediction made in 1945 by Feniche!: . . . it may be expected that the study of schizophrenia will elucidate the processes of the earliest period in the infant's life, in the same way that the study of compulsion neurosis provided insight into anal sadism [40].

It is my hope that, by the same token, the data from my work, and the work of various of my colleagues, with these very deeply regressed schizophrenic patients will contribute toward filling the gap which, as Hartmann (69i.) comments, exists by reason of our lack of verifiable clinical findings concerning the undifferen... tiated phase of development. Hartmann, like Fenichel, emphasizes how important to our knowledge of early development is the method of reconstruction based upon our clinical findings in adult patients: It is a memorable fact that Freud, using reconstructive methods, could ascertain not only experiences of early childhood, typical or atypical, but also typical maturational sequences that had escaped the methods of direct observation, as in the case of the stages of libidinous development . . . A great number of childhood situations of incisive significance for the formation of adult personality have a low "probability of direct manifestation" . . .; but in such cases analytic insight, the bulk of which is based on reconstruction, enables us to gain an understanding of the continuity of development . . . Theories about early developmental stages have to be built on data of both reconstruction and direct observation [68b].

While I unfortunately cannot offer observational data, reconstructions based on psychotherapeutic work with schizophrenics suggest an early phase of oneness with the total environment and a subsequent pha8e~the animistic period-in which all objects are personified. These probably precede the infant's recognition of his own aliveness.

The Health'Y Individual

53

I feel that these hypotheses furnish us with a far broader, richer, truer frame of reference from which to understand early ego development, than is provided by the usual preoccupation solely with the infant's differentiation of its self from the mother. And I believe, further, that these hypotheses provide a likewise enhanced basis for considering the subsequent maturation, throughout life, of the individual personality; this maturation needs to be seen, thus, as inextricably a part of the total matrix, a matrix comprised not only of other human beings but, as I have earlier emphasized, of predominantly nonhuman elements -trees, clouds, stars, landscapes, buildings, and SO on ad infini-

tum.

The Nonhuman Environment in Subsequent Healthy Personality Development

CHAPTER

3

The whole of the Part Two, dealing with the role of the nonhuman environment in the life of the healthy human individual, will be relatively brief in comparison with Part Three, for a number of reasons. First) this is too vast a subject for me to hope to deal with it in any comprehensive way; I cannot do more than bring out a few points about this subject, points which seem to me significant and some of which, so far as I have been able to determine, have not previously been expressed in our professional literature. Secondly, since I have had no formal, detailed experience with the investigation of normal human personality comparable with my experience in the investigation of neurotic and psychotic human personality, my data about the subject now at hand are, inevitably, relatively scanty, Thirdly, I wish to avoid in so far as possible observations which are banal; for example, it seems to me unnecessary to elaborate upon the obvious point that

The Healthy Individual

55

the personality of the healthy human adult in our culture cannot be considered entirely apart from the individual's car, his home, his clothing and all his manifold other material possessions, nor apart from the particular skills which he possesses in dealing with his nonhuman environment (whether in his daily work or in his hobbies), nor apart from his animal pets, and so on. It is clear enough to every one, I think, that all these are, in a very real sense) ingredients of the human individual's personality in our culture. My fourth, and last, reason for keeping Part Two brief is that I wish to avoid undue repetition. In keeping with my experience that there are no qualitative, but only quantitative, differences between the neurotic or psychotic individual on the one hand and the healthy individual on the other hand) I believe that everything which will be said in Part Three about the role of the nonhuman environment in psychosis and neurosis applies here, too) in spite of differences in degree. That is, I believe that every human being, however emotionally healthy, has known, at one time or another in his life, the following feelings which) as will be shown in Part Three, hold sway in psychotic, and to some degree in neurotic, patients: feelings of regard for certain elements in his nonhuman environment as being integral parts of himself-and, upon the loss of such objects, feelings of having lost a part of himself; a resentful conviction that some animal or inanimate object is being accorded more consideration and more love than he himself is receiving; anxiety lest he himself become, or be revealed as, nonhuman; desires to become nonhuman; and experiences of his own reacting to another human being as if the latter were an animal or an inanimate object. Further, I think it could readily be shown that normal, adult human beings frequently undergo temporary "phylogenetic re.. gression," in waking life as well as in dreams, as a means of gaining release from the demands of interpersonal living and a means of gaining a restoration of emotional energy so that, refreshed now, they can participate in more strictly human interpersonal relatedness with new freshness and vigor. And I believe that in a second respect the data from psychotic

56

The Nonhuman Environment

and neurotic individuals, in Part Three, will help to provide us, by implication, with a richer picture of the role of the nonhuman environment in normal personality development and in normal adult living. Here I refer to the implications as to what is normal with regard to the nonhuman environment, which we find in constructing a hypothetical contrast to the abnormal relatedness to the nonhuman environment which will be detailed in Part Three. Such hypothetical implications cannot be, of course, a substitute for actual detailed investigation of normal personality in this respect.. But from these data about the abnormal we can draw hypotheses which would seem, at least, to be worth utilizing as guides to the investigation of normal personality as regards this subject of the nonhuman environment. As examples, from the data derived from investigation of the personalities of psychotic and neurotic individuals, one can set up, with some confidence} hypotheses that the parents of a nor... mal child relate to him predominantly (though surely not unvaryingly) as being of greater innate worth than are any animal pets, plants, or inanimate objects in the household; that the nor... mal infant and young child has been aided, in the maintenance of feelings of personal security and in the development of a sense of personal identity, by having about him a relatively stable non.. human environment as contrasted with the kaleidoscopically changing homes of many infants and children who 'later become schizophrenic j that the healthy human adult has sufficient sense of personal identity as a human being so that he is not more than occasionally tormented by anxiety lest the beast in him will reign supreme} nor so integrally attached to myriad nonhuman possessions that he cannot retain a sense of personal identity when separate from many, or even all, of them; and so on. Now, in presenting the material concerning the nonhuman environment in normal personality development} I shall review ( 1) some of the literature bearing on the differentiation between animate and inanimate; ( 2 ) some analytic hypotheses which might help to explain how the nonhuman environment achieves an importance in its own right; (3) the contributions which this

The HelJlthy Individual

57

nonhuman environment makes to the normally developing child and adolescent. In this review I shall be neither systematic (in terms of chronological sequence) nor comprehensive (I shall not present in detail the entire analytic theory of object relations), but will merely emphasize those concepts which seem to me to be particularly relevant.

The Differentiation Between Animate and Inanimate In Chapter II the matter of the timing of such a differentiation, in normal development) was briefly touched upon. There is a range of opinions about this, varying from Mahler's (102)

statement that the infant is aware by the first postnatal day of the distinction between animate and inanimate in the environment, to Piaget's (113) findings which indicate that this is not fully achieved until eleven or twelve years of age. Hartmann

(67e) quotes BUhler as saying that the first signs of intentionality appear around the third month of life, Spitz (143) emphasizes that after the sixth month the infant, because he now possesses locomotion, can express actively his demand for social relations, whereas he previously was limited to a passive responding to the adult's initiative. These observations are perhaps relevant to the timing of the infant's becoming aware of his own aliveness; but we" must always keep in mind that his awareness of this- his subjective experience-may lag considerably behind our (i.e., objective) awareness of him as being, now, a very-much-alive creature.. There is an additional point which must be kept in mind. The differentiation of animate and inanimate itself proceeds through several stages and must be achieved on each level of integration -from the perceptual to the most complex one of conceptual integration. The question of timing this discrimination is therefore related to the different levels of integration. Hoffer (79), as I mentioned in Chapter II, indicates that by sixteen weeks the infant can distinguish between his own (alive)

58

The Nonhuman Environment

fingers and the ( inanimate) bottle. Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein (72d) report that between the third and fifth month, the infant recognizes his mother as she prepares his food, which suggests that by this time he has achieved a quite appreciable differentiation between animate and inanimate in his surroundings. Mahler (102) states, similarly, that at three or four months the infant can perceive, at least temporarily, the mother's breast, face, and hands. The work of Spitz (140) on hospitalism and anaclitic depression would imply, in my interpretation of his results, that within the first two years of life a relatively solid differentiation of oneself as alive, vis-a-vis the inanimate elements in one's surroundings, has been achieved. That is, Spitz found that after the age of two years children are not susceptible to the development of these syndromes (i.e., in terms of my hypothesis, susceptible to dedifferentiation to the level of oneness with the inanimate elements in their surroundings) despite such depri.. vations as give rise to these pathological states in younger children and infants. But always there are the meticulously reported observations by Piaget to remind us that these very early degrees of differentiation between animate and inanimate are only partial and relatively superficial, and that a significant degree of nondifferentiation in this regard may persist, subtly, for very much longer. He says (lt5!), for example, that not until the age of nine or ten months does the infant search for vanished objects (for example, objects which are hidden by a screen) so actively as to remove solid objects which are screening or covering them, and he points out the significance of these} and other comparable, observations in highlighting the infant's inability, heretofore, to distinguish between his own activity and the object (whether inanimate or animate) toward which the activity was being directed. He says, Childish animism . . . shows that the child endows nearly all bodies with a certain spontaneity of movement [I.e., responds to them as if they all, inanimate and animate alike, were animate]. It shows, above all, that the distinction between a body's own

The Hl!a1th'Y Individual

59

movement and that which is determined from outside lit] is reached only after much groping and many difficulties [113b]. [For example, in the explanations which children give concerning the movement of clouds,] Five stages may be distin.. guished. . . . The first stage is magical: we make the clouds move by walking. The clouds obey us at a distance [i.e., here we see the child unable to differentiate between himself and the inani.. mate cloud]. The average age of this stage is 5. The second stage is both artificialist and animistic. Clouds move because God or men make them move. The average age of this stage is 6. During a third stage, of which the average age is 7, clouds are supposed to move by themselves . . . [which shows something of the difficulty which the child encounters in trying to differentiate between animate and inanimate in his environment] [l I Sc].

As regards the movement of the heavenly bodies (SUD, moon, stars), Piaget (113d ) finds, similarly, that the six-year-old still regards these as being alive and conscious, and as following him when he walks because they "want" to. He says (113e) that during the early stages, every movement is regarded as the manifestation of a living activity--i..e., a manifestation of aliveness. So reminiscent of the boy described by Elkisch and Mahler (33) who felt himself to be a machine and who reacted to the inanimate machines about him as if they were fascinatingly and frighteningly alive, Piaget says that, for the normal young child, . . . while the external world is perceived by means of schemas of internal origin, internal phenomena (thought, speech, dreams, memory, etc.) are in their turn conceived only through schemas due to external experience. The child vivifies the external world and materializes the internal universe [113£].

Werner provides this summary of one of Piaget's (112) earlier works, a summary in which the development of differentiation between animate and inanimate in the surrounding world is explicitly traced: Piaget concluded from his studies that four developmental stages of animism can be distinguished: at the first stage, life is

60

The Nonhuman Enuironment

characterized by activity in general j at the second (6-8 years) ~ life is indicated by movement; at the third (8-10 years), life is denoted by spontaneous movement; at the fourth (10.. 12 years), life is restricted to animals and plants [162e]. Werner (162f) gives a succinct resume, too, of the concomitant, but as it were opposite, process of "de-personalization" of the inanimate things in the world of the child; he bases this partly on his own work, but largely on the work of Piaget concerning causality. In the first stage, lasting until about five years of age, physical events receive egomorphic, anthropomorphic explanations; in the second stage, things and events are the product of man's activity;' and in the third stage, namely at about seven or eight years of age, inanimate things are now "de-personalized" -i.e., perceived as indeed inanimate (although, as I have mentioned, Piaget does not consider that the adult conception of causality is fully achieved until eleven or twelve years of age) . Before leaving Piaget for the time, let us note that he implies (and this is reminiscent of Spitz's comment [141] that the child learns to distinguish animate objects from inanimate ones by the spectacle provided by the play of emotions on the mother's face) that people playa leading role in the child's differentiation between animate and inanimate in the environment: he says (115g) that people doubtless constitute the first permanent objects, and very probably are also the first objectified sources of

causality. Hanns Sachs (122), in a paper in 1933 entitled, "The Delay in the Machine Age/' presents a theoretical concept which bears upon our discussion of the differentiation between animate and inanimate, and which is reminiscent of Piaget's observational data concerning the subtle persistence, until relatively late in development, of nondifferentiation in this area of experience. Sachs raises the question of why the ancient Greeks and Romans, despite the requisite technical skills, failed to invent machines; lOne of my schizophrenic patients is currently in a comparable phase in the evolution of her view of the world around her: she regards all the nonhuman environment as having been made by people-and, in fact" as having been mtJd. Old of people.

The Healthy Individual

61

by "machines" he means sufficiently complex machines (as examples, the mechanical loom, the steam hammer, the locomotive) to do the work predominantly alone, so that man need only be the master mind in control. In answer to this, Sachs suggests that these ancient peoples possessed so great a degree of narcissism, and a narcissism so bound up with the body image, that for them any ego simulacrum in the form of a machine, inanimate but functioning in a manlike way, would have aroused an intolerable degree of uncanny feeling" Sachs reminds us that " . . In some vague way, which we ourselves often disavow, we all know this feeling as a reaction to the sudden appearance of animation in the inanimate when without warning an object begins to move or to speak in a human manner" The use of automatons in literature, the theatre, and the cinema, in order to produce an effect of uncanniness, is so general that it seems superfluous to cite examples and proofs" •. "

He cites comparable data from schizophrenic patients' delusions of influencing machines, and agrees with Tausk's statement that "The machines produced by the wit of man are fashioned after the likeness of the human body, an unconscious projection of his own bodily construction." Whether or not one finds the psychoanalytic concept of primary narcissism to be usefully applicable here (and I do not), it does seem plausible that even though these ancient peoples must have considered themselves to be fully aware of the distinction between animate and inanimate in their environment, and of the distinction between their own animate selves and inanimate ingredients of their surroundings, at an unconscious level this distinction was insufficiently clear so that whenever anything approaching manlike machinery began to be developed, it was, as Sachs points out, used merely as a form of entertainment rather than being developed seriously further" Mankind's becoming able to break through this collective resistance, many centuries later, into the era of invention and utilization of such machines, would seem to have much the same psychodynamic meaning-s-i.e., a deepened awareness of the distinction between animate and inan-

62

The Nonhuman Enoironment

imate, between human and nonhuman-as did the similarly belated development of the art of caricature, which Kris (89a) has discussed . Werner's volume contains many passages which bear upon the differentiation between animate and inanimate, and between human and nonhuman" Concerning} for example, the concreteness of primitive thinking, he says, Among primitive peoples, and also children, there is found a kind of thinking which, with great justification, may be termed "concrete" thinking. Its distinctive characteristic lies in the fact that the conceptual activity operates in indivisible unity with motor-perceptual and imaginative processes. It is only gradually that a non-sensori-motor-that is, abstract-mode of thinking separates itself from this unity [162g]. The language of primitive man is concrete because it must be so in order to designate a world marked by an inunensely rich variety of concrete things and events. It is quite possible that the primitive man does not use a general term for "knife" because he is primarily concerned with the specialized functions of the knife in cutting different objects, or with the functions of many specific knives used in performing varied operations [162h].

We obtain, here, some glimpse of the degree to which the "primitive" man is at one with, or wedded to, the concrete world around him, and it seems to me that the concreteness of his language gives us some suggestion of how much a part of him are the nonhuman objects which abound in the outer world of any human being. In a recent paper (136) I have discussed the differentiation between concrete and figurative thinking in the recovering schizophrenic patient, a subject to which I shall return, here, on pages 174-177. The concreteness of the child's thinking suggests that for him, as for the member of the so-called primitive culture and for the schizophrenic adult} the wealth of nonhuman objects about him are constituents of his psychological being in a more intimate sense than they are for the adult in our culture, the adult whose ego is, as Hartmann and Werner emphasize, relatively clearly differentiated from the surrounding

The Healthy Individual

63

world, and whose development of the capacity for abstract think... ing helps to free him, as my paper on this subject pointed out, from his original oneness with the nonhuman world. Werner describes the role of "things-of-action" or "signalthings"-i.e., things which have a special affective meaning, or a special significance in the sensorimotor functioning of the individual-in early phases of differentiation: . . . the perceived things of the primitive world are constructed differently from the things of advanced, civilized man. Things do not stand out there, discrete and fixed in meaning with respect to the cognitive subject. They are intrinsically formed by the psycho-physical organization of which they constitute an integral part, by the whole vital motor-affective situation. Hence we may speak of "things-of-action,' or of "signal-things" in such a primitive world [162i]. . . . a relatively undifferentiated functioning leading to a predominance of things-of-action is characteristic of the earlier stages of childhood4 .•. [162j].

The relevance of this to the differentiation, for example, between animate and inanimate is indicated in this passage:

. . . the fact that the objects are predominantly understood through the motor and affective attitude of the subject may lead to a particular type of perception [namely, "physiognomonic" perception]. Things perceived in this way may appear "animate" and, even though actually lifeless, seem to express some inner form of life [162k]. For instance [the child] wants something from [an] inanimate object, and as a result of this desire it inevitably comes to personal life [162 I] 4

Of interest as regards the sequences involved in differentiation is Werner's concept that the whole world is perceived "physiognomonically" before persons emerge as such: It may be that the child apprehends persons physiognomonically more readily than other objects in his surrounding world. This

The Nonhuman Environment

64

fact might give rise to the erroneous impression that the child first discovers physiognomonic characteristics in human individuals and then transfers them to nonhuman objects. The more direct assumption, however, and one which is in greater accordance with the facts, is that the child, grasping the world as he does through his motor-affective activity, will understand the world in terms of physiognomonics before personifying. The relatively easy understanding of human expressions and gestures is possible because of the early development of physiognomonic perception [162m].

Wemer notes that primitive languages reveal the extent to which categorizations of the ingredients of the surrounding world -namely, the human beings, animals and plants, and inanimate things in the world-are dependent not upon what we would consider the "real" characteristics of these, but rather upon the affective evaluations of them in the mind of the primitive person. Thus we see how greatly the differentiation of the surrounding world into animate and inanimate, human and animal and plant, is distorted by affective factors: In the Ban tu language there is a class of persons and also a class of things. But aU persons who are in any way contemptible or unworthy are relegated to the class of things. The blind, the deaf, the crippled) and the idiot all belong to this thing-like class. The language of the Algonquin Indians often puts small animals into the class of inanimate objects, whereas large plants are often placed in the class of animate things. In the Gola language of Liberia the prefix 0 denoting the human or animal class is substituted for the customary classificatory prefix when the object is to be emphasized as one that is especially large, valuable, or

important [162n].

Werner (1620) mentionsthat for the Zuiii, everything madewhether building, utensil, or weapon-is conceived as living a still sort of life. He mentions (162p) that it is a universally dominant idea among children (of our culture) that they can

The Healthy Individual

65

become, or at some time have become, animals. And of the beliefs of the primitive Brazilian Indians, he quotes Karl von den Steinen" as reporting that We must quite disregard the boundaries between man and beast. Any animal can be cleverer or more stupid, stronger or weaker, than the Indian himself. . . . as yet there is no humanity in the ethical sense so far as the primitive Indian is concerned

[162q].

The Development of Object Relations

As stated earlier, the way in which an individual comes to appreciate the nonhuman environment is a function of the de.. veloprnent of object relations. However, it seems to me that psychoanalytic writings have almost exclusively been limited to the theory of interpersonal relations. When psychoanalysts have been confronted with phenomena in which a nonhuman object has played an important role in the life of an individual, they have generally assumed that this nonhuman object derived its significance from its symbolic or defensive value." That is, the significance of such a nonhuman object was attributed to a displacement of cathexis, either from an important person, or from the child's own body. The object, whatever it may be, "stood for)' or "represented" either mother or a part of the body. Spitz, for instance, goes so far as to say that . . . perception is a function of libidinal cathexis and therefore the result of the intervention of an emotion of one kind or another. Emotions are provided for the child through the intervention of a human partner, i.e., by the mother or her substitute. A progressive development of emotional interchange with the mother provides the child with perceptive experiences of its environment [141]. 3 I have not attempted, in the instance of each of the quoted passages from Werner) to mention the reference sources which he has wed; the interested reader should consult his voluminous bibliography. • See, for instance) the theories of childhood phobias or of fetishi!m.

66

The Nonhuman Environment

Spitz, and many others like him, thus would say that a person's interest in nonhuman objects derives directly from the human object. Another point of view has been expressed much earlier by Ferenczi, who relates the gradual appreciation of reality to the child's interest in his own body. Ferenczi (41) believes that the child, during the animistic period, views every object as endowed with life and tries to find in the object his own organs and their activities. Having been concerned exclusively with his own body and its satisfactions through sucking, eating, defecating and so on, he is now especially attentive to those objects and processes in the outer world which bear even a distant resemblance to his dearest experiences. Thus, Ferenczi says, there arise those intimate connections between the human body and the objective world, connections which remain throughout life and that we call symbolic. On the one hand, the child in this animistic stage sees in the world nothing but images of his physical self; on the other, he learns to represent by means of his body the whole infinite variety of the outside world. An intermediate view is found in the work of Winnicott (164) and Stevenson (146) concerning the role of "transitional objects" in the life of the infant and young child. In a preface to the article by Stevenson, Winnicott states: In a paper read for the British Psycho-Analytical Society (1953) [164] I drew attention to the importance of the first object used by the infant. . . . It is important to note that this object is not part of the infant, like the fist or the thumb or the two middle fingers. Its use is related to thumb-sucking. Some infants when sucking the thumb fiddle with the face with the fingers, or else while sucking one hand they twiddle their hair or a piece of cloth with the other hand. . . . The transitional object is also not the same as the next soft toy. It can be said that the next one must be acknowledged as coming from the world . . . . but [the transitional one] from the infant's point of view was created by the infant. . . . . . . this transitional area of existence between inner reality

The Healthy Individual

67

and external reality is a very important third aspect of life which is surprisingly neglected in psychoanalytic writings [l46c].

Stevenson herself writes, Transitional objects are in fact an entirely healthy and normal manifestation of the beginnings of the reconciliation between reality and fantasy: in normal children they finally lose importance with growing interests and awareness of the outside world. But, Winnicott points out, they may and frequently do become a defense against anxiety and reveal the tension which the growth toward unity of personality-the fusion of fantasy and realitymust involve [146d]. Wishing to concentrate mainly upon the functions of these first treasured possessions in the lives of normal children, Stevenson obtained her material mainly from mothers' clubs in different

parts of London, and from a request for information published in a magazine, The Nurse~I'Y World. From these sources she obtained between fifty and sixty examples. As she puts it, her main interest here is in the healthy, comparatively normal manifestations, occurring in children who seem to be making a fairly successful adaptation. One may question whether, by this method of going about her data collecting) Stevenson was making contact with the most outstandingly normal of mothers; but these latter are surely not easy to contact in any organized research, and I, at least) am not inclined to quibble on this basis about the applicability of Stevenson's findings to any "more normal" homes which, very possibly,

may exist. As an example of the kind of communication which she received from the mothers about this subject, she quotes a mother's comments about what her small son called his "own pillow": UWhen will he give it up? I don't know but I do know that I shall never insist. I feel when he no longer needs it he will do so of his own accord. It is too deeply loved and has helped him through too many trials to be too easily discarded."

The Nonhuman Environment

68

The view expressed here [Stevenson comments] is one which was implicit in the remarks of nearly all the mothers to whom I spoke. Moreover, mothers seemed to sense that they themselves were in some way connected with these objects and many linked them with anxiety in the children. In one or two instances where children clung with exceptional fervor to their '(teddies," etc., at an age when they should perhaps have been relinquishing them, it was obviously felt by the mother to be in part a failure in herself. Thus the mother of Mary wrote concerning "Golly-bear" : "I am convinced that the Golly filled the gap between my daughter and myself because at times I did not fill my role successfully"

[l46c]. She mentions that sometimes the existence of such a transitional object in the child's life may pass unnoticed by the mother. But there are cases where one feels that a conspicuous lack of any transitional object may be an indication of a deviation away from the normal, whether it be toward an extreme of dependence on or independence from the mother [146f].

Even though there were, evidently, at least a few such atypical cases among the relatively normal group of children, Stevenson's findings in a comparative study of twenty children in residential nurseries show, indeed, strikingly different data: . . . the fact that the children whom I observed did not even try to retain constant possession [of "cuddlies"] may be an indication that the basic relationships, from which the child can move into transitional satisfaction, are not being established...... The nursery children whom I observed treasured little or nothingand destroyed much. Among twenty children (aged one to five) with whom I worked, not one could be said to cherish a toy or an object for more than a passing hour or two-and then possession was usually maintained to thwart another child I146g]..

She gives the following example of later behavior of those she terms "objectless" children:

The Health'Y Individual

69

Caroline (now thirty) was the third child of the family) having two elder brothers, both of whom were moderately devoted in their infancy to teddies, Caroline never evinced the slightest need for any such object. Her mother greatly desired a daughter) and her identification with her own mother (Caroline's grandmother) was exceptionally strong, She was a mother whose adaptation to the needs of her daughter was excessive, with a tendency toward emotional and erotic overstimulation. There was ample evidence of an inverted oedipal situation, Caroline playing a somewhat masculine role in her relationship with her mother, the mother compensating for her own unsatisfactory marital relationship. Caroline's homosexual tendencies became evident in other relationships. Here we have an example of a bond so close in infancy as to prohibit an object relationship • . . Caroline from babyhood had no "woolly" of any kind whatever [146h].4

Such "objectless" children constitute an example of one among several points which I shall make in a later chapter-points concerning the failure of some children to develop a normal degree of relatedness with their nonhuman environment, because of their having to be excessively absorbed with interpersonal relationships in the home. I believe, incidentally, that this work by Winnicott and Stevenson provides a valuable frame of reference for the further investigation of various manifestations of schizophrenia. In my own experience I have seen, for instance, that some schizophrenic patients show "objectless" behavior; some are strikingly destructive of all inanimate objects which come within their reach; and others cherish certain inanimate objects for long periods of time. Each of two of my patients who manifested at first a particularly conspicuous noncherishing of inanimate possessions came to show an intense cherishing of such objects as therapy progressed. These 'This child may be compared with certain of the children Spitz (143) describes as suffering from anaclitic depression as a result of the loss of the mother: "In the case of Aethelberta, for instance, as well as in that of another child, the games consisted in rolling fecal pellets, which seemed to be the only toy these children enjoyed . . . .t. Caroline, described above by Stevenson, evidently was also without a mother, in the seDse of a mother experienced as a separate object.

70

The Nonhuman Environment

are broad and rudimentary observations from a field which is, I feel sure, rich and deserving of detailed investigation. It is evident that the above-described "transitional objects" are transitional in two respects. First, although the teddie bear (for example) is not objectively a part of the Infant's body, it is not experienced by him as coming, either, from the outside world -as are the later toys. In the same way, it still stands in a close affective relationship to mother. Thus this security-engendering object helps the infant through the transition period leading up to the recognition that there is an outside world. Secondly, and by the same token, the teddie bear represents a transition step in the child's becoming aware of his own aliveness, for here we see that an inanimate object is experienced as being a part of the infant's body, to a degree at least approximating that of his own thumb, before the next phase is reached when inanimate objects (toys, blankets, and so on) are experienced as coming from, or "belonging to" the outside world rather than being a part of his

own alive self. In an attempt to describe the further steps, by which nonhuman objects can gain significance, I shall now tum to Hart-

mann's contributions. Hartmann introduced two highly useful concepts: namely, primary and secondary autonomy of the ego. As regards primary autonomy of the ego, he makes the point, in essence, that there is already at birth something present in the form of ego apparatuses which from the beginning possess a degree of autonomy, of independence, vis-a-vis the id, and which are preadapted to outer reality. This implies that the infantile state of nondifferentiation is, even in earliest postnatal Jife t not total-a concept which is of obvious relevance to a work, such as my present one, which endeavors to assess the role of the nonhuman environment in human living. In a paper in 1950 (69c), Hartmann refers to the inborn ego anlagen as "ego nuclei" and "autonomous preparatory stages of the ego," and in a paper in 1956 he states that . . . We should also consider what is, I think, a necessary assumption, that the child is born with a certain degree of pre..

The Healthy Individual

71

adaptiveness ; that is to say, the apparatus of perception, memory, mobility, etc., which help us to deal with reality are, in a primitive form, already present at birth . . . [7lb].

Further, he makes the point that not only is the existence of such elements already established at birth, but that their future development tends innately to proceed along certain already established lines. Of this latter point, namely, the autonomous factor in ego development, he says in that same paper) u • • • we may speak of an autonomous factor in ego development in the same way as we consider the instinctual drives autonomous agents of development" (69d). Hartmann (6ge) points out that Freud (53) in 1937) modifying his previous stand as to the ego's developing out of the id, had come to find it credible that, even before the ego exists, its subsequent lines of development, tendencies and reactions are already determined. Parenthetically, it is of interest, here, that Rapaport (117) credits Erikson ( 34 ..36 ) with being the first person to trace the course of autonomous ego development, and to propose a scheme encompassing its phases, in various writings

between 1937 and 1953. In a paper in 1950, Hartmann speaks not only of the abovedescribed "primary autonomy" in ego development, but touches upon his concept of "secondary autonomy" in ego development: Ego development, like libidinous development, is partly based on processes of maturation. And of the ego aspect, too, some of us are agreed that we have to consider it as a partly primaryJ independent variable, not entirely traceable to the interaction of drives and environment; also that it partly can become independent from the drives in a secondary way_ That is what I mean by the terms primary and secondary autonomy in ego development

. . . [68a]. In his 1939 monograph he explains this "secondary auton.. omy," and describes it as arising from a "change of function": . . . the phenomenon of "change of function," the role of which in mental life and particularly in the development of the

72

The Nonhuman Environment

ego seems to be very great. . . .: a behavior-form which origi.. nated in a certain realm of life may, in the course of development) appear in an entirely different realm and role. An attitude which arose originally in the service of defense against an instinctual drive ma,,~ in the course of time, become an independent structure [My italics], in which case the instinctual drive merely triggers this automatized apparatus. . . . Such an apparatus may, as a relatively independent structure, come to serve other functions (adaptation, synthesis, etc.}; it may also-and this is genetically of even broader significance-- through a change of function tum from a means into a goal in its own right. . . .

[67b]. In another paper in 1950, he restates his definition of "change of function," and gives an example of the secondary ego-autonomy which results from it: . . . What developed as an outcome of defense against an instinctual drive may grow into a more or less independent and more or less structured function. It may come to serve different functions, like adjustment, organization and so on. To give you one example: every reactive character formation, originating in defense against the drives, will gradually take over a wealth of other functions in the framework of the ego. Because we know that the results of this development may be rather stable, or even irreversible in most normal conditions, we may call such functions autonomous, though in a secondary way {in contradistinction to the primary autonomy of the ego I discussed before [69f].

It is apparent that Hartmann's formulations provide the theoretical tool by means of which we can explain how the nonhuman environment attains importance "in its own right" ( as I think of it). The concept of primary antonomy implies that the perceptual apparatus functions from the very beginning; thus the infant has the tools with which to relate to his environment. The concept of secondary autonomy implies that regardless of its origin in conflict-whether as a defense against the affects aroused in mother-infant relationship, or as a direct derivative from the positive elements of this symbiosis-through a change of

The Health" Individual

73

function an activity or an object may, as it frees itself from the original conflict, gain importance in its own right. Chapters IV and V are devoted to the individual's mature (Le., "conflict-free") relatedness to his environment, Here I wish to include some brief material relating to more primitive forms of relatedness. For example, there are a series of papers-including those by Tausk (153), Banns Sachs (122), Lisbeth Sachs ( 123 ), Ekstein (32), Bornstein (14), and Rank and Macnaughton (116 ) -which describe patients who (a) either delusionally experience fantasied machines by which they are influenced, or which the patients themselves can wield in a subjectively grandiose way; (b) or who identify with various actual machines in their environment. In each instance, the machine in question, whether real or fantasied, is described by the writer as serving-sby reason of the symbolic meaning with which it is invested-a defensive function in the patient's ego functioning. I would not argue against such an interpretation of these phenomena, given the partial adequacy of ego organization, the fairly considerable degree of establishment of ego boundaries, which each of these particular patients exhibited. But I believe that there are patients--such as some of those whom I shall describe in later chapters of this book-whose ego organization has deteriorated to a level comparable with so very primitive an infantile ego state that such inanimate ingredients of the surrounding environment (e.g., machines) cannot yet be experienced as sufficiently delineated from the self so that they can be employed in this kind of symbolic-defensive fashion. I find it significant that a number of other investigators, including Ferenczi (41), Sharpe (138)} Langer (91), Kubie (90)} Little (97 J 98), and Freeman et al, (45), have emphasized that, in order for the individual to become capable of symbolic thinking and experiencing, there must first be established finn ego boundaries which demarcate him, subjectively, from the external world . In short, I postulate that, in the instances of many of the patients whom I shall subsequently describe, the nonhuman environment is subjectively part of the ego, and to that degree is infringing upon the functioning of the ego; regression has occurred to such

74

The Nonhuman Environment

a level that there are insufficient ego boundaries to allow for the nonhuman environment to be experienced as outside the ego, and selectively utilized by the ego, on the basis of symbolic meanings to which various of these nonhuman environmental ingredients lend themselves, in the service of defense against various instinctual drives. Concerning these more deeply regressed patients, I find it of interest that Rapaport (117) terms catatonic conditions "the prototypes of surrender of the autonomy from the environment." Another phrase which Rapaport employs I find similarly apt: "stimulus slavery," Such phrases help to convey the great degree to which very deeply regressed-whether catatonic, hebephrenic, or paranoid-patients are psychologically welded to, undifferentiated from) the environment. A number of writers have described ego development as a process of increasing differentiation, over the years, between ego and environment-s-of, in other words, increasing ego autonomy vis-a-vis the environment. I quote a number of relevant passages here because, as one reads them and thinks of the process operating in reverse-"dedifferentiation," in Hartmann's valuable phrase-we can receive, again, some impression of the great degree to which the deeply regressed schizophrenic patient is subjectively at one with the world about him. Hartmann says, Freud states that the ego, by the interpolation of thought processes, achieves a delay of motor discharge. This process is part of .... [a] general evolution, namely, that the more differentiated an organism is, the more independent from the immediate environmental stimulation it becomes" " . . [67c].

And he shows that this differentiation proceeds apace with, or results from, the differentiation between ego and id: It is possible, and even probable, that it is just this sharper differentiation of the ego and the id-the more precise division of labor between them--in human adults which on the one hand makes for a superior, more flexible, relation to the external world, and on the other increases the alienation of the id from reality.

75

The Healthy Individual

In the animal neither of these two institutions is so flexibly close to or so alienated from reality.. " . [67d]. . . . probably as a result of the differentiation of the human mind into systems of functioning, the id is here much farther removed from reality than are the instincts of animals [7Ie]" " . " many aspects of the ego can be described as detour ace. tivities; they promote a more specific and safer form of adjustment by introducing a factor of growing independence from the immediate impact of present stimuli. In this trend toward what we call internalization . [69g]. 4

•

Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein phrase it that " . " To the degree to which differentiation [between ego and id] takes place man is equipped with a specialized organ of adaptation, i.e., with the ego. . . . The instincts of the animal mediate its adjustment to the reality in which it lives and their properties determine the extent of possible adaptation. With man, adjustment is entrusted to an independent organization.. " . [72b] "

Rapaport (117) not only presents with welcome lucidity the essence of Hartmann's views about primary and secondary ego autonomy and related concepts, but gives us an over-all, balanced picture of ego development in which we see new dimensions of meaning: Summing up, the organism is endowed by evolution with apparatuses which prepare it for contact with its environment, but its behavior is not the slave of this environment since it is also endowed with drives which rise from its organization, and are the ultimate guarantees against stimulus slavery" In tum, the organism's behavior is not simply the expression of these internal forces, since the very apparatuses through which the organism is in contact with its environment are the ultimate guarantees against drive slavery. These autonomies have proximal guarantees also, in intrapsychic structures. The balance of these mutually controlling factors does not depend on the outcome of their

76

The Nonhuman Environment

chance interactions, but is controlled by the laws of the epigenetic sequence, termed autonomous ego-development.

Much of my case material will highlight the degree to which the above-described delicate balance is upset, in severe and chronic schizophrenia, and the degree to which some of these individuals become enslaved to stimuli from the environmentincluding the nonhuman sector of that environment. This case material is such as to suggest that, even though in earliest infancy ego apparatuses may already exist (as has been postulated by Freud, Hartmann, Erikson, and Rapaport) and the infant may thereby be shielded from the subjective experience of total oneness with nonhuman environment, he may be, in that undifferentiated phase of early infancy, appreciably less well differentiated from that great sector of his surroundings than we have been prepared to believe heretofore. Hartmann points out that The autonomous factors of ego development . . . may secondarily get under the influence of the drives, as is the case in sexualization or aggressivization. To give you only one example: in analysis we observe how the function of perception, which has certainly an autonomous aspect, may be influenced-and frequently handicapped-by becoming the expression of oral-libidinal or oral-aggressive strivings. . . . the reality ego gradually evolves precisely by freeing itself from the encroaclunent of such instinctual tendencies. . . . The autonomous factors may also come to be involved in the ego's defense against instinctual tendencies, against reality, and against the superogo.. • . • [69h].

In line with this point made by Hartmann, I have found repeated and clearcut evidence that dedifferentiation, involving relinquishment of ego boundaries, is one of the ego defenses which are prominent in schizophrenia. Thus it is conceivably possible that in those adult schizophrenics whom we find to possess extremely little ego autonomy from the environment, there

The Health" Individual

77

had been in earliest infancy more of such autonomy than we now find, but this had been largely overwhelmed by the sexual or aggressive drives, or sacrificed in the defensive service of the

ego. I An example of such. events in childhood is described by Elkisch and Mahler (33), in a paper entitled "The 'Influencing Machine' in the Light of the Psychotic Child's Body-Image.') They describe a psychotic boy who equated himself with a mechanical man, constantly in motion, which was riding a bicycle on a large advertising sign in the vicinity; and with fire engines, blowers in the school gymnasium) the wall telephone) light switches, and elevators. He reacted to these mechanical devices with emotions varying from fascination to terror, depending upon the aspects of himself which he projected upon them. It was evident, they state, that

. . . a complete confusion between inside drives and outside powers . . . results in equating the outside fascinating machineries with the inside visceral sensations. This in tum results . . . in the equation of these bodily sensations with the machine, so that the child would talk about his physiological processes 41 if his body tuere a machine.

The previously mentioned papers by Tausk (153) and Mahler ( 102) (see also Furman [56]) provide additional examples of the identification with machines serving defensive functions, Le., attempts to cope with the concretized and projected inner im-

pulses. Since my main emphasis in this chapter, however, is on the normally developing child, I shall now tum to the contributions which accrue to the normal child from the nonhuman environment. II for one cannot believe) however, that the d,=differentiation we see now ia 10 severe as to have had no precedent in the Individual's life history, even

in earliest infancy.

78 The Contribution Development

The Nonhuman Environment

0/

the Nonhuman Environment to Normal

( 1) The first point I wish to make is that this nonhuman environment apparently provides, in the life of the normal infant and child, a significant contribution to his emotional security, his sense of stability and continuity of experience, and his developing sense of personal identity. The child's relatedness to his nonhuman environment-to animal pets, to plants, to inanimate objects-provides a context in which his own getting to know himself, his becoming aware of his own feeling-capacities and personality traits, is facilitated. A number of my patients first became aware of their own sadism and selfishness, for example, in their childhood relationships with their pet dogs; these undesired personality traits tended not to be noticed in the child's relationships with the parents, siblings, and other human beings. There, it was relatively easy for the child to project onto these other persons the possession of these "bad" personality traits---relativeJy easy for the child to blame the other penon and not notice his own hostility, or what not.. But when the child related himself to his innocent, trusting dog and found himself treating his pet in a cruel, teasing manner, the child's own cruelty came to his attention in a relatively unobscured way. One such patient, who showed an abundance of sadism in the transference relationship and who had spent many months in blaming his parents, when he finally came to grips, now, with his own sadism, recalled how he used to love to torment his dog when he was a child. Similarly with positive feelings, also, the child can find recognition of his own similarly unobscured capacities for tenderness, for example, in the loving care which he bestows upon pets and other nonhuman ingredients of his surrounding world. In terms of both positive as well as negative personality traits, the nonhuman environment provides a relatively pure-culture medium in which the child is both helped, and required, to see himself as he really is, to a greater extent than is true in the much more

The Healthy Individual

79

complex medium of the interpersonal world, wherein it is so relatively easy for the child to convince himself that whatever is transpiring is a process in which he has no really responsible participation. Dr. Norman C. Rintz, in a personal communication, points out the additional factor that in the child's relatedness to the nonhuman, as contrasted to the human, environment there is a freedom from words-words which the child so often finds confusing in his relationships with other human beings. By the same token, the child is aided in getting a clearer picture of the personalities of each of his parents, his siblings, and other significant persons, by observing the fashion in which they relate themselves to the nonhuman environment. One obsessive-compulsive man, for example, finally began to realize, after many months of analysis, that his mother really had treated him in an unwann, rejecting fashion, when during a visit by her to his marital home, he noticed how she kept shrinking away from contact with a kitten which he and his wife had. The mother was sitting on a sofa, and the kitten kept trying to snuggle against her, while the mother kept moving away in evident aversion. A great deal of data concerning this aspect of the patient's relationship with his mother had already emerged in his analysis, but it was this simple observation of his mother's response to the kitten which finally drove the realization home. In other instances, patients have observed a parent's being able to reveal capacities for affection, in relating to an animal pet or a household plant, which the parent was relatively shy about revealing directly in interpersonal relations. I have mentioned the papers by Mahler (102), Elkisch and Mahler (33), Ekstein (32), Lisbeth Sachs (123), and others who describe the schizophrenic child's disordered, inaccurately differentiated experience of the human beings and nonhuman ingredients in his environment; his projection of various unendurable emotions onto nonhuman things about him; and his regression to identification with nonhuman things (such as rna.. chines) at times of increased anxiety. These findings are such as to suggest that, in normal ego development also, the nonhuman

80

The Nonhuman Environment

functions as a kind of shock absorber, upon which the child can project various part aspects of himself, until such time as his ego is sufficiently strong to integrate them into his developing sense of self. Erikson (34), for example, presents vivid evidence that children use their toys to symbolize their own internal conflicts. He tells, among other interesting cases, of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy who, struggling against enuresis, took to bed with him each night a home-made closed cylinder, made of the center of a roll of toilet paper, with a milk bottle cap over each end. All night the little boy would try to hold the cylinder closed. When he eventually did achieve control of his bladder, his still-persisting urges to expel were expressed, still, via the nonhuman environment: before going to sleep, he would throw all available objects out the window and, when this was prevented, he stole into other rooms and spilled the contents of boxes and bottles onto the floor. Erikson describes, also, an interesting series of experiments he conducted with college students as well as children, in which the subject was asked to construct a dramatic scene with the use of toy building-materials and toy people, animals, and vehicles. The results were such as to suggest that both normal children and adults tend, to a surprising degree, unwittingly to arrange their nonhuman surroundings in accordance with their inner conflicts and attitudes. Mahler (102) describes the symbolic meaning which certain elements of a prepsychotic boy's environment represented to him, in his struggle against ego dissolution at the time of his mother's pregnancy: During the last months of his mother's pregnancy he developed an absorbing, exclusive interest in examining his inanimate en.. viromnent by touching objects.. ' .. George became conspicuous · · · by his strange compulsive interest in barrels, beer barrels in particular ( they lived near a brewery). . . . Following this preoccupation with barrels he became fascinated by pipes of all sorts. • • • Mter a few months he developed a similar preoccupation with electrical appliances; he would endlessly pretend to be plugging a flex into a socket. Still later George developed an

The Healthy Individual

81

intense interest in fires, and this was predominant at the time of his hospitalization at six and a half years of age. [In her interpretation of George's behavior, Mahler says that] George seemed to have tried frantically to adopt countercath.ectic devices against fragmentation of his brittle ego. He tried to counteract the threatening loss of the libidinal object world by attempting to recapture it in a concrete sense ... he obviously tried to distinguish between, to compare, beer barrels and his pregnant mother's body. After his baby sister's birth, George compared, in this tactile way, concrete symbols of male and female anatomy . . .

This whole book endeavors to demonstrate that the nonhuman surroundings possess psychological significances for us which are not confined to their serving as such a shock-absorbing background; but this function, which is implicit in such psychoanalytic writings as those mentioned above, should not be omitted here. I wish to re-emphasize a point I made earlier: to the degree that some differentiation between ego and surrounding nonhuman environment has been achieved, various specific elements of the nonhuman realm (such as machines) can be reacted to, by the developing ego which is engaged in a defensive struggle) as symbols of the warded-off drives and affects. It will be seen, incidentally, that the various contributions of this nonhuman realm to normal personality development which I am enumerating here and in the remainder of this chapter, imply in most instances an already achieved differentiation of the ego from the nonhuman creatures or things under discussion. The next few paragraphs, which focus upon the earlier era preceding such differentiation-the era prior to the achievement of true object reIations---are an exception to this. Susanne K. Langer, in her stimulating book entitled, Philosophy in a New Key-A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and

Art (91) points out how significant a role the nonhuman enviromnent plays in the human being's developing conception of his seH. She suggests that, by reason of its relative simplicity and stability-e-as contrasted to the confusing complexity and changea.. bility of the human beings in one's environment-it provides a kind

The Nonhuman Environment

82

of backdrop vis-a-vis which the immature human individual can arrive, via a process of projection, at an increasingly rich, and increasingly strong, sense of personal identity: . . . One of my earliest recollections is that chairs and tables kept the same look, in a way that people did not, and that I was awed by the sameness of that appearance. To project feelings into outer objects is the first way of symbolizing) and thus conceiving those feelings . . . The conception of "self,' which is usually thought to mark the beginning of actual memory, may possibly depend on this process of symbolically epitomizing our feelings [91a]. lJlw4j's

Similarly in her discussion of the symbolism extant among primitive peoples, Langer points out how logical it is that many of their gods appear in animal form; it is so much easier to see this or that animal as the symbol of this or that moral quality, whereas human personalities are confusingly complex, varied) hard to generalize. Thus, she says, animal worship seems to have preceded, almost everywhere, the evolution of higher religions. "Before men can find these traits clearly in themselves they can see them typified in animals" (91b) . I believe that the normal infant and child is enabled to derive such use from his nonhuman environment through finding his particular nonhuman. environment to be relatively simple and relatively stable, rather than overwhehningly complex and ever shifting; and to be genuinely available to him, rather than walled off from him by too many parental injunctions against his relating to it, and parental distortions, conveyed to him by the parents, concerning the nature of this environment. Work with schizophrenic patients strongly suggests, for example, that the considerable percentage of these persons who as children have had the experience of numerous changes in residence have been deprived thereby of what is, in normal living, an important source of security for the child-the security of dwelling, year after year, in familiar surroundings. I have repeatedly seen these patients struggling to remember where they lived, at what age, struggling in a way which indicated that it

The Healthy lndiuidual

83

was very important for their own sense of personal identity, of personal integration, to be able to establish such a continuity of experience in their memory. I believe that such feeling experiences of the adult schizophrenic patient have much similarity to the feelings which a normal, very young child experiences upon finding himself in a strange nonhuman environment. I am reminded here of a train trip which my wife and I took with our son, then almost two years old. The joy and relief which he evidenced when, upon our taking him to the bathroom, my wife pulled out of a paper bag his own familiar "potty-chair" and placed it on the unfamiliar toilet seat, gave one to realize how much of a strain he had been finding all this unfamiliarity, not only all the unfamiliar people but the new and quite strange nonhuman environment of the

train. Szalita-Pemow's article, "Further Remarks on the Pathogenesis and Treatment of Schizophrenia" (152), contains the following valuable comments which indicate how important it is, for the normal development of a child, that his approach to his non.. human environment is not complicated by excessively great mis.. conceptions conveyed to him by his parents, concerning that environment =

... the animal world and inanimate nature are often introduced to the child as a distorted animistic and fantastic world, The literature read so delightedly by adults to children provides amply for this distortion and indicates that the animistic beliefs are still strong even among OUf adult contemporaries [152a]. A great proportion of schizophrenic patients, in my experience, seem to view the world as being one of overwhelming complexity and, often, vagueness, without any fundamental meaning which emerges and which can be grasped. I do not mean to imply that "normal" persons are entirely strangers to such a view of the world; but, from what I have seen, the schizophrenic person has much greater difficulty in this regard than does the nonnal person. The kind of thing I am speaking of is seen most vividly

The Nonhuman Environment

84

in paranoid schizophrenic patients who have not yet managed to arrive at a pseudo meaning through the crystallization of a relatively fixed delusional system, and in catatonic patients who, usually interspersed through long periods of mutism, are able to verbalize the very abstract and complicated thoughts about moralityand about the meaning of life in which they are, apparently, often immersed. The thinking of hebephrenic patients, which is characteristically highly fragmented, likewise shows these patients' inability to grasp the basic realities of their life situation. This general phenomenon may be illustrated by a quote from William james's The Varieties of Religious Experience (85). Schizophrenic patients usually are not capable of so much articulateness and objectivity as this; but this is, nonetheless, one among the infinite varieties of "unreal" views of the world to which I am referring: "When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, 'I have been dream-

ing''' [85d].

The conjecture I wish now to raise-without getting into matters of psychiatric diagnosis such as hysteria and schizophrenia, and matters of psychiatric symptoms such as depersonalization and derealization-s-is this: a chronic inability, during infancy and early childhood, to relate oneself to a relatively stable, relatively realistically (rather than animistically) perceived, relativelysimple rather than overwhelmingly complex, world of inanimate objects may have much to do with one's inability now, in adult life, to find fundamental, graspable realities in one's life-to find, as it were, a tangible meaning in life. This is only a hypothesis; for it to become a conclusive observation would require vastly more data than I have accumulated, including data which are

The Health, Individual

85

quite beyond my position to obtain, from very long-range studies of persons in their infancy and childhood, and in their adulthood. But I do think it highly significant that many schizophrenic patients who are bewildered as to the meaning of their lives have had a bewildering early experience with not only the human beings about them, but also with the nonhuman environment. It strongly suggests to me that the relatedness of the infant and the young child with, for example] his toys, his clothing, the furniture of the home, the house itself, and so on, has much greater repercussions, for good or ill, in adult life than has been noted so far in psychoanalytic theory. (2) The second main point I wish to present is that the nonhuman environment of the infant and the young child, through its being in general more simple and stable and manipulable than the human environment, provides him with a kind of practiceground in which he can develop capacities which will be useful to him in his interpersonal relationships. The child's toys, for example, being without the capacity for inner-directed physical movement and being without any capacity for thoughts and feelings so that the child need not concern himself about the toys' "own responses" to him, are much more manageable than are the human beings about him. In his play with the toys he can develop his capacities for physical dexterity, for imagination, for sequential thought, for discrimination, and so on-abilities which he will need in the more preponderantly interpersonal years of his life which lie ahead. The little girlleams various things about baby care from her taking care of her doll, so much more manageable than the real human baby which she will some day be caring for. The little boy, through his play with his miniature and therefore relatively manageable airplanes and boats and automobiles and tools of various sorts, learns some of the rudiments of knowledge and skill which will be useful to him later on in the world of men. One finds instances in adult life, also, where elements of the nonhuman environment constitute a kind of practice-ground for the development of a relatedness which ean be eanied over, Iater, into relatedness with other human beings. In my work with

86

The Nonhuman Environment

neurotic patients, for example, I have seen upon a number of occasions something which probably occurs not infrequently in "normal" living: a childless couple, through learning to care fOT plants and animal pets in the home, help to prepare themselves for the later rearing of children. Some excerpts from one of my analytic hours with a thirty-three-year-old obsessive-compulsive man will serve as an illustration of this. He had had a very lonely boyhood, during which he had experienced little of any warm and active closeness with his aloof and rather unmasculine father.. The patient had been married about three years prior to this particular analytic hour. The marriage had contained, from the first, much of conflict and grim unhappiness; but during the most recent several months the addition of a pet dog to the home had helped appreciably to bring more life and joy into the situation. At this present time, the wife was very early in her first pregnancy, and the patient had been voicing doubt about his capacity to measure up, as a father. The following excerpt from his verbalized ruminations shows something of the very considerable value which the dog was having, in this regard, for himself and his wife. I have italicized certain passages: Things are going along pretty smoothly [he began, in a tone of confidence which was unusual for him; he then said, of his wife:] She made the remark this morning that if the Boy Wizard [their name for me] made me more cocky than I am, something would have to be done--which was very pleasing to me, particularly in the light of so much in the past that was uncertain And the more I think about the child . . . , the more I think it'd be sort of fun [slowly and thoughtfully}--uh--and I think I'd sort of be proud of being father to a cherub-I think it'd be sort of exciting--certainly a rather new experience-uh-and, uh--I certainly feel that if we're going to have children we certainly oughta have them now and not wait, because I think the older ya get, the less adaptable ya are, and the more trouble children are. I think the chiId-I know it'll be a good thing for my wife, who doesn't have enough to occupy herself. . . . I think she'll be a good mother [tone of conviction]. And I keep thinking

The Health)' Individual

87

about it's being a boy-and I keep wondering, "What the hell would you teach a boy about life and what life is about?H-I think I could probably do that-I suppose ltd have a tendency to overstress those things that were lacking in my OYl1l early lifeuh-and I suppose I should be on guard not to overstress themI feel that the setup we have out there [in a remodeled farmhouse] would be very conducive and very efficient for having a child, having childrenCertainly if the pleasure uie'ue gotten out of this animal is an~ faint indication-it has been a pleasure" much less of course {than that of having children], but Q, mutual responsibilit,y [said in a tone of solid satisfaction]-even when we'd gotten pretty far apart in terms of our feelings toward each other" the dog always had tJ kind of bridging eDect--uh-I find that some of the things that used to irritate me about my wife, they don't seem to irritate me so much- ... the same things [i.e., things which they used to say to one another in contempt] are said, but they're said in a very different way-it's almost as if they're said on a basis of esteem rather than scorn- . . .

I have italicized, for special emphasis, that portion of his remarks which has to do with the dog, specifically. But it should be noted how integrally woven are these remarks, about the animal pet, with all his other remarks which show a developing attitude of pleasure and confidence about his marriage in general and about the prospect of the arrival of the baby. ( 3 ) In manifold wa ys, the nonhuman environment of the infant and child offers relief from the tensions, and satisfaction for the hungers, which arise in his life among other human beings. He is often able to find in it peace, stability, and companionship at times when his interpersonal relationships are filled with anxiety and loneliness; and he can often vent upon it various feelings which he cannot release toward the human beings in his environ-

ment. Many a child has been able to find, in his relationship with an animal pet which his parents have obtained-t-or at least have allowed him to obtain-a kind of reliable friendliness and companionship which helps him through the times when the parents

88

The Nonhuman Environment

themselves are not able to give him the love and understanding he needs. Since this general point has been touched upon before, particularly in the references to the articles by Stevenson (146) and by Heiman (73) J I shall not elaborate upon it here. But I refer the interested reader to Margaret Mead's (104c,d) description of child rearing among the Arapesh, a primitive Australian tribe, for an extreme example of suppression of interpersonally expressed aggression, coupled with almost unlimited freedom on the child's part to vent his interpersonally engendered rage upon the nonhuman objects about him. The house in which the child lives is no tabooed world of adults' treasures which he is forbidden to touch, and when angry he is allowed to destroy nonhuman objects with a freedom which goes far beyond the mere door slamming and other relatively mild outlets which are time-honored modes of venting frustration in our own culture. Mead's description of the Arapesh culture gives one to realize vividly how important to child rearing in our culture is the question of whether or not the child is relatively free to release "interpersonally tabooed" feelings toward his nonhuman environment. (4 ) Closely related to the foregoing point, the nonhuman environment can be seen to provide a milieu, again of what might be called a pure-culture variety as contrasted to the interpersonal milieu, in which the child can become aware of his own capabilities (referring here to physical strength and dexterity, ingenuity, and various intellectual abilities) and of the limitations upon those capabilities. In his relatedness to this environment he has opportunities to see, in a particularly clear-cut, realistic fashion, that he is in various ways powerful, but not omnipotent . Patients' memories of such childhood experiences may be most refreshing to hear. One neurotic man, after almost four years of difficult analytic work during which he had been dealing with chronic and intense anxiety, despair, cynicism, and neurotic competitiveness, finally made contact, so to speak, with healthy areas of his late childhood. In one particular analytic session} he began expressing pleased recollections of how he used to love to climb on the cliffs along a river near his home. He said with

The Healthy Individual

89

pleasure and self-confidence in his tone, "It was a testing of myself. . . . It was not so much a competing with anybody else as a seeing what I could do myself, and it was fun." About such childhood experiences there seems to be a certain unspoiled quality, a quality of the child's coming to know his abilities simply and undisguisedly and most intimately. (5) N ow I come to a point which has to do with adolescence; I shall discuss this point in some detail because it is not only important but also, as far as I have been able to ascertain, entirely neglected so far in psychoanalytic and psychiatric literature. I believe that one of the major phenomena of adolescence, one of its deepest meanings, one of the greatest achievements of this phase of human living, is the maturing person's becoming committed to his status as a human being. Not only does the boy become a man and the girl become a woman, but each becomes more deeply human, and aware and accepting of his or her human status vis-a-vis the nonhuman environment, than had been true before. In this transitional period, he tums his greatest interest from the world of Nature, and of other nonhuman things, to the world of his fellow human beings. This change in orientation is required of the adolescent by reason of his developing sexual needs, which can find really adequate gratification only in a relatedness to a fellow human being, and by his socially fostered yearning and ambition to establish himself as a husband and father in the case of the adolescent boy, or as a wife and mother in the case of the adolescent girl. The turning is made possible at this time by reason of sufficient development, by now, of various powers-sexual, muscular, intellectual, educational--so that he or she is enabled to carve out a place for himself or herself in the world of other human beings, which could not be made earlier. In working with patients in psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, we have an opportunity to see at first hand the patient going through this process, belatedly-this process which normally takes place during adolescence. I shall describe briefly my experience with a twenty-eight-year-old man, in analysis for a severe obsessivecompulsive neurosis. as an example of what I mean here.

90

The Nonhuman Environment

This man had had a lonely childhood, throughout which he suffered from severe feelings of unacceptability and inferiority. Until the age of six he spent a great deal of time playing with his toys in the attic of his home. He vividly recalled, during his analysis, the fear which he had felt upon "leaving the attic," then, upon being required to start grammar school. Although he did extremely well academically throughout grammar school, high school, and college, he failed to establish normally secure and satisfying relations with other boys and girls.. For example, throughout grammar school he spent each recess by himself in a comer of the school library, feeling afraid of and depised by his classmates who were playing together on the playground outside; in college, although he went through the motions of doing a good deal of conventional helling around, he continued to feel inwardly as apart from others as ever. He had sought analysis because of the fact that certain compulsive rituals were interfering seriously with his work as a Government lawyer. As the analysis progressed, it became evident that this man had never really, as yet, left the attic, in terms of his actual feeling-orientation toward other persons. For a long time, he persisted in dealing with other human beings much as if they were inanimate objects; either he felt, at infrequent times of moderate euphoria, that he had the ability to manipulate them to his own greater glory, as he had taken pleasure in childhood with marshaling large numbers of toy animals, or he felt-as he did most of the time-that people were discouragingly and in.. furiatingly large mechanical obstacles in his path. He was quite oblivious to the sensitivities, the feeling-capacities, of other human beings. It was only after several months of analysis that he was able to allow me to participate at all, at a verbal level, in the analytic work; prior to that time, if I were at all persistent about saying anything, it seemed to threaten him with anxiety of nearpanic proportions. Over the course of four years of analysis, this man eventually came to marry; became a father; moved into a closer, more warm and alive relatedness with men and women with whom he worked; and became concomitantly much more relaxed, spon-

The Healthy Individual

91

taneous, and participative with me in the analytic relationship. His obsessive rituals, which at the beginning of analysis had been threatening to isolate him most profoundly from other people, had nearly disappeared. He left the analysis at a time when, despite the gains which I have mentioned, there was much reason for me to feel that he was at the threshold of not only consolidating these gains, but of obtaining still deeper ones. He was still a person who was troubled with much self-doubt, neurotic competitiveness, and guardedness toward other people. But there was one most funda.. mental achievement which we had accomplished together: he had left the attic. I felt sure that whatever interpersonal difficulties lay ahead for him, he was safely committed to really living in the world, as a human being among other human beings. A most beautiful expression of this general shift in orientation, this shift from the nonhuman environment toward one's fellow human beings, is to be found in Wordsworth's poem, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintem Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798 (167). The poet, recalling the hours he had spent, in bygone years, among the cliffs and hills and streams his eye once again surveys, recalls that . . . Nature then To me was all in all. . . . and he phrases incomparably the shift in orientation which he has undergone in the interim: . . . That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense. For I have learned To look on Nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity" . . .

92

The Nonhuman Envi,onment

As Fountain (43) phrases it in a recent paper entitled, "Adolescent into Adult: An Inquiry," the adolescent •.. becomes to some degree "responsible" for his fellowman..•. This shift in predominant orientation, in the course of adolescence, from non-human to human, seems to me to be at the heart of the "idealistic crisis" of adolescence which Inhelder and Piaget (82b) describe, a crisis during which the adolescent feels himself called upon to reform a world of which he is himself the center; following this crisis there is • . . the return to reality which is the path from adolescence to the true beginnings of adulthood.

It may well be that the adolescent's urge to reform mankind, to whom he feels a newly deepened sense of belonging, springs in part from his projecting, upon his fellow human beings, the residua of his erstwhile identification with the nonhuman world: he feels called on to save them from the nonhuman status (rom which he himself, in actuality, has only now fully emerged. I find that this shift in orientation is applicable, too, to Erikson's (37a) concept of the "identity crisis') which occurs in adolescence. In Chapter VIII I shall present a number of clinical examples which indicate that such identity crises, such conflicts as to whether to be this or that or the other kind of human being are founded upon a deeper-lying ambivalence as to whether to be human or nonhuman. W. H. Hudson's classic novel, Green Mansions (81), the story of a love affair between a young man and the bird-girl Rima, whom he finds in the tropical forest of South America, is an entrancingly lovely portrayal of the transition state in which, I think, an adolescent youth exists. The love of the protagonist, Abel, toward the bird-girl is still largely love for Nature; Rima never emerges as a fiesh-and-blood human being distinct from the Nature which surrounds her. I shall mention later something of the psychodynamics which I believe to be at work in the typical adolescent love affair of which Hudson's story is a most extraordinarily beautiful example. But first I shall present some

The Health'j Individual

93

passages from this story, passages which must be somewhat lengthy in order to convey the flavor of poetic beauty, of ethereal love activated by a new-found and wondrous suspense and excitement, which Hudson captures in an incomparable fashion. John Galsworthy, who in 1915 wrote a preface to this novel, termed Hudson the most distinguished naturalist living, and the most valuable writer of the age. And of this novel, Galsworthy wrote that it "immortalizes) I think, as passionate a love of beautiful things as ever was in the heart of man" (81 a ) . The popularity of this story over the past forty years, among a host of readers, is a fact which constitutes in itself some evi.. dence that Hudson has struck a chord that lies within many persons of our culture. I think this story can be truly said to give eloquent voice to the adolescent in each of us. The first passage which I shall quote is a description of Abel's first contact with Rima, in which he only hears her; he does not yet see her:

an

After that tempest of motion and confused noises the silence of the forest seemed very profound; but before I had been resting many moments it was broken by a low strain of exquisite birdmelody, wonderfully pure and expressive, unlike any musical sound I had ever heard before. It seemed to issue from a thick cluster of broad leaves of a creeper only a few yards from where I sat. With my eyes fixed on this green hiding-place I waited with suspended breath for its repetition, wondering whether any civilized being had ever listened to such a strain before. Surely not, I thought, else the fame of so divine a melody would long ago have been noised abroad.. I thought of the rialejo, the celebrated organbird, or flute-bird, and of the various ways in which hearers are affected by it. To some its warbling is like the sound of a beau... tiful mysterious instrnment, while to others it seems like the singing of a blithe-hearted child with a highly melodious voice. I had often heard and listened with delight to the singing of the rialejo in the Guayana forests, but this song, or musical phrase, was utterly unlike it in character. It was pure, more expressive, softer --so low that at a distance of forty yards I could hardly have heard it. But its greatest charm was its resemblance to the human

The Nonhuman Environment

94

voiee--a voice purified and brightened to something almost angelic. Imagine, then, my impatience as I sat there straining my sense, my deep disappointment when it was not repeated! I rose at length very reluctantly and slowly began making my way back; but when I had progressed about thirty yards, again the sweet voice sounded just behind me, and turning quickly I stood still and waited. The same voice, but not the same song-not the same phrase; the notes were different, more varied and rapidly enunciated, as if the singer had been more excited. The blood rushed to my heart as I listened; my nerves tingled with a strange new delight, the rapture produced by such music heightened by a sense of mystery. Before many moments I heard it again, not rapid now, but a soft warbling, lower than at first, infinitely sweet and tender, sinking to lisping sounds that soon ceased to be audible; the whole having lasted as long as it would take me to repeat a sentence of a dozen words. This seemed the singer's farewell to me, for I waited and listened in vain to hear it repeated .. [8Ib]. 4

It seems to me significant that, as these foregoing and subsequent passages show, Rima emerges from-although never wholly---the surrounding Nature of which she is part; and Abel's love for her emerges from his basic love of Nature. I think that here may be a somewhat more specific portrayal of what takes place in the transition which adolescence involves; that is, it may be not so much that the adolescent's predominant emotional orientation shifts from the nonhuman environment toward the world of human beings, but rather that from his loving relatedness to Nature and to other elements of his nonhuman environment there emerges a loving relatedness, now the primary focus of his emotional life, to other human beings. The intensity of Abel's love for Nature, inseparably commingled with his love for the still-unseen possessor of the birdlike voice, is explicitly shown in various passages which need not be reproduced here. It is clear that even Nature became more poignantly lovely and meaningful to Abel as his love for Rima grew; thus we find the implication that one needs to mature at least to adolescence in order to ex-

The Healthy Individual

95

perience the depths of loving relatedness with either Nature 01 human natu"e. In the following description of Abel's first view of Rima, we find that she is still--though now visible-as much a part of Nature as before. Note here that her disappearance, after her being briefly in view, is "as if she had melted away into the verdure." I had not been watching her more than three seconds before the bird [with which Rima was playing], with a sharp, creaking little chirp, flew up and away in sudden alarm; at the same moment she turned and saw me through the light leafy screen. But although catching sight of me thus suddenly, she did not exhibit alarm like the bird; only her eyes) wide open, with a surprised look in them, remained immovably fixed on my face. And then slowly, imperceptibly-for I did not notice the actual movement, so gradual and smooth it was, like the motion of a cloud of mist which changes its form and place) yet to the eye seems not to have moved-she rose to her knees, to her feet, retired, and with face still towards me, and eyes fixed on mine, finally disappeared, going as if she had melted away into the verdure. The leafage was there occupying the precise spot where she had been a moment before-the feathery foliage of an acacia shrub, and stems and broad, arrow-shaped leaves of an aquatic plant, and slim, drooping fern fronds, and they were motionless, and seemed not to have been touched by something passing through them. She had gone, yet I continued still, bent almost double, gazing fixedly at the spot where I had last seen her, my mind in a strange condition, possessed by sensations which were keenly felt and yet contradictory. So vivid was the image left on my brain that she still seemed to be actually before my eyes; and she was not there, nor had been, for it was a dream, an illusion, and no such being existed, or could exist, in their gross world: and at the same time I knew that she had been there-that imagination was powerless to conjure up a form so exquisite [Blc],

When, later on in the story, Abel is expressing his love to Rima, his language is basically like that which every adolescent employs,

96

The Nonhuman Environment

in speech or thought, to express the beauty of his beloved: he compares her with, and often likens her to, the elements of Nature. Concerning the psychodynamic processes involved in Abel's love for Rima, which as I say may be looked upon as the prototype of adolescent love in general) one finds in the story various evidences-too long and too numerous to include here in their entirety-that the following salient factors are at work here. First, as the following brief passage suggests, it appears that Abel's love of Nature is akin to the child's love for his mother:

Ah that return to the forest where Rima dwelt, after so anxious a day, when the declining sun shone hotly still, and the green woodland shadows were so grateful! . . . I likened myself to a child that, startled at something it had seen while out playing in the sun, flies to its mother to feel her caressing hand on its cheek and forget its tremors. And describing what I felt in that way, I was a little ashamed and laughed at myself; nevertheless the feeling was very sweet. At that moment Mother and Nature seemed one and the same thing ..• [Old].

Secondly, Abel's conception of Rima as being so much a part of Nature, Nature which itself is conceived by him in an idealized form, entirely beautiful and innocent and unspoiled, appears to be a function of his struggling-and here, still, I have primarily in mind the typical adolescent whom Abel personifiesto preserve his love for Rima as an ideal love, without any "taint" of lust, hostility, cannibalistic impulses, and so forth. There are many hints, in the story, that such a process is at work. For example, the relationship between Abel and Rima never involves sexual passion, frankly felt as such. Also, Rima, who is adamantly opposed to the killing of any of the forest creatures, reacts to Abel with repugnance for a time after he has yielded to his hunger for meat and eaten some of the cooked flesh of a coati-mundi. Rima is finally killed by savages, who set fire to a gigantic tree in which they have trapped her. Following this, Abel, revealing a capacity for murderous hostility which he had managed to keep

The HeGlthy Individutd

91

quite apart from his love for Rima while she was living, vengefully kill~ the leader of these savages and incites a tribe of their enemies to murder many of them, Galsworthy, in his foreword to the book (8Ie), is, I believe, quite correct when he says that the story "symbolizes the yearning of the human soul for the attainment of perfect love and beauty in this life-that impossible perfection which we must all learn to see fall from its high tree and be consumed in the flames, as was Rima the bird-girl." From this point of view, then, it appears that the adolescent's particular way of regarding his loved one, as being a part of an idealized Nature, is a function of his unconscious effort to keep his love for her "pure," free from a variety of emotions-e-some of which were mentioned above-which are not in keeping with his ideals. The child struggles to maintain much the same conception of the mother, I think, as the adolescent struggles to preserve concerning his loved one. The successful resolution of the conflicts of adolescence constitutes the youth's becoming a man, then, in terms of his integrating such idealism with his other emotional capacities which he comes to accept now, at Jastcapacities for lust, murderous feeling, and so on. His erstwhile perception of his loved one) as a being who is very much part of an idealized Nature, surely involved projection-projection of an unconscious view of himself as fonning such an integral part of Nature. It would seem, then, that the successful dealing with the adolescent phase of maturation involves one's relinquishment of such a view of one's self or of any other human being. Before leaving Hudson's novel I shall quote one final passage from it, and briefly discuss the psychological significance which I find in this passage. This, now, is after Rima's death, and after also Abel's killing of the leader of the savage tribe and the murder of many members of that tribe by a tribe of their enemies, whom Abel had incited against them. It is evidently in a state of repressed grief and repressed remorse that Abel now experiences his existence as dwelling alone on a vast stony plain in everlasting twilight, where there was no motion, nor any sound; but all things, even t

••

98

The Nonhuman Environment

trees, ferns, and grasses, were stone. And in that place I had sat for many a thousand years) drawn up and motionless, with stony fingers clasped round my legs, and forehead resting on my knees; and there would I sit, unmoving, immovable, for many a thousand years to come-I, no longer, I~ in a universe where she was not, and God was not [81£].

Here it is as if Abel has lost not only his sense of identity as a human being but, beyond that, his sense of identity as being a manifestation of animate Nature-this latter sense of identity which, I believe, the child attains before it manages to attain, particularly through the successful transition of the adolescent phase of maturation, his sense of identity as a full-fledged human being. Here in the case of Abel, it is as if the adolescent love experience has met with such disaster that Abel's sense of per· sonal identity regresses, and with it his perception of the world about him, until he experiences himself as an inanimate thing in an inanimate world. Incidentally, we know that some psychotic patients will sit or lie, for days on end, as much like stone statues as Abel is depicted here. I have worked with one schizophrenic patient who expressed to me the unmistakable conviction that she had been "a statue myself, over and over." She said this in the course of asserting her definite belief that certain well-known statues which she had visited in nearby Washington were really people, "put into concrete," and she protested to me that if only the doctors here "would go around stripping statues," freeing the persons entombed within them, we would then be doing good, in place of our present evil work. A less deeply ill person can experience this figuratively, as did the patient of one of my colleagues who spoke of his own "crust of hatred," for example; but I do not doubt that the most profoundly regressed persons experience this literally, as did Abel in the story. The perception of the nonhuman environment as being blended with the interpersonal, which is so prominent a theine in Green Mansions (here I refer to the portrayal of Rima as a person who merges with Nature) J has, I think, a special appeal

The Healthy Individual

99

for us. The following passage from Walden (154) provides us with a variation upon this same theme. Here, instead of another individual person's being perceived as blended with the non... human environment, it is mankind collectively-as represented by church beIls-whom Thoreau so perceives: Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had. strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph [154d].

As I have already indicated, it appears that a new source of energy, and with it a new and intense need, which both enable and require the adolescent to grow on beyond such a perception, is constituted by his new-found genital powers and needs. That is, these both help and require him to perceive himself and other persons as truly differentiated from, despite however many similarities with, the rest of Nature. But in Green Mansions Abel, I believe, fails to carry through to this final differentiation of himself as a full-fledged human being" Those persons who, like Abel, fail to make this final achievement of normal adolescence apparently continue throughout their lives to identify themselves more with Nature than with mankind. Toward Nature they experience a passionately close kinship, toward mankind they have a misanthropic attitude; their fellow men seem alien to them.

The Mature Person's Attitude Toward His Nonhuman Environment

CHAPTER

4

Not until I had been working upon, and thinking about, this overall subject of the nonhuman environment for many months did I come to believe that there is perhaps one attitude toward that environment which can be said to be characteristic of the emotionally mature human being. For a number of reasons one is hesitant to postulate any such single attitude. First} such a postulation tends to smack of undue rigidity, on the very face of it. Secondly, the nonhuman environment is so very complex as to give one great reason for pause here; one thinks, for example, of how varied may be the psychological meanings of a forest to} in tum, a Iumbennan, a reaI-estate dealer, a naturalist, an artist, and a casual stroller. Thirdly, we know that emotional maturation in general involves from childhood onward not a progressive simplifying of emotions, not a progressive loss of capacity to ex-

The Healthy Individual

101

perience varying emotions, but rather a growing ability to experience ever more rich and complex ones. My colleague Joseph H. Smith has made to me the following valuable suggestion: the very fact that it proves so difficult to define the mature person's attitude toward the nonhuman environment is itself of deep significance; it may well be, then, that maturity involves a readiness to face the question of what is one's position about this great portion-by far the greatest portion-s-of one's total environment, rather than fleeing to some pat explananon (such as primitive peoples' regarding this environment in an animistic light, or modem-day psychiatry's predominantly assuming it to be only a frame for psychologically meaningful human living, rather than an-in many respects-integral part of such living). True maturity probably involves a large, lifelong measure of open interest in, of seeking and questioning, the meanings which this facet of one's life holds. But I believe that there is indeed one basic attitude which is of general validity here) one central emotional orientation to which the mature human being returns, vis-a-vis his nonhuman environment, however widely and richly his feelings in this regard may fluctuate, over however wide a range, in the varying circumstances' of his everyday life. One can think of this basic attitude as a finn island upon which man grounds himself while directing his gaze into the encircling sea of meanings, more or less difficult of discernment and some no doubt inscrutable, which reside in this area of human existence. This basic emotional orientation can be expressed in one word: relatedness. By "relatedness' I mean, on the one hand, a sense of intimate kinship, a psychological concomitant to the structural kinship which, as I have described in Chapter I, exists between man and the various ingredients of his nonhuman environment-structural kinship in terms of physiology, anatomy, atomic structure, and so on, as well as kinship with respect to the evolutional history of mankind and the biological fate of the individual human being (the inescapable destiny of our physical body to become a part of the nonhuman environment after our death).

102

The Nonhuman Environment

This experience of relatedness involves on the other hand, and simultaneously, a maintenance of our own sense of individuality as a human being, a knowing that, however close our kinship, on however multiple levels, to the nonhuman environment, we are not at one with it. That is, although the mature person does not shield himself from experiencing a sense of real and immediate kinship to, for example, a dog or a tree or an inanimate object, he does not shield himself either from the awareness that he is inescapably human. He does not relinquish his ego boundaries; he is not deluded into the conviction that he can be in union with nonhuman elements of Nature or with any other ingredients of the nonhuman environment. He knows that he is irrevocably, irreversibly a member of the human species, and can rejoice as wen as despair in this knowledge of his unique humanness. In this regard then, the sense of relatedness which the mature person experiences toward the nonhuman environment is qualitatively different from mystical experience; the latter involves a loss of ego boundaries which, if it occurs at all in mature human experience, is, I believe, atypical and in itself a mark of immaturity rather than of maturity. Martin Buber (20) has pointed out that "entering into relationship" presupposes a "primal setting at a distance," and when one applies this valuable concept to man's relatedness with the nonhuman environment, we see that in order for him to enjoy the mature relatedness with it which I am discussing here} he must first have become able to "put it at a distance"-he must have achieved a recognition of his separateness from it. It can be seen, then} that the relatedness to which I refer is different from the adolescent's orientation toward the nonhuman environment, which was discussed in the immediately preceding chapter. The adolescent has not yet fully accepted his human status, his unbridgeable apartness from the nonhuman environment. He has emerged partially from his environment; in con... trast, the infant is totally unaware of any distinction between himself and this environment. The mature human being has achieved a full emergence, a full realization and acceptance of

The Healthy Individual

103

his status as a human being; in fact this is, I am convinced, one of the significant earmarks of emotional maturity. As I have stressed repeatedly, however, adult living involves an unceasing struggle to maintain, and ever more deeply realize and develop, one's humanity vis-a-vis the surrounding nonhuman world. We are reminded of the subtle persistence of nondifferentiation between ego and outer world when we read, for example, the following passage by Erikson (34): . . . men easily identify women with the wishes which they stimulate. If they learn to have contempt for "lower" drives (and their pregenital componen ts), they may also have contempt for women so far as they are the objects of their wishes.• · · This failure to differentiate between the drive and the object of the drive calls to mind Piaget's finding that there is a persistent tendency for the child to confuse his own response to an

object-whether the object be human or nonhuman-with the object itself. Moreover, since the phenomenon which Erikson describes is certainly not uncommon in our culture, the subtle persistence of subjective oneness with nonhuman as well as human objects, in so-called adult living, would seem highly likely. Later on, in this chapter) I shall describe this relatedness in greater detail and shall give some examples of it. But before doing so I shall deal, en bloc, with all the variations upon, or subsidiary components of, this emotional theme, to the extent that I have become aware of these. These are, that is, various other kinds of feelings which the mature human being may experience vis-a-vis his nonhuman environment, feelings which are concomitant to this basic relatedness-orientation; perhaps one may best think of these as feeling-components which contribute to the rich complexity of the basic sense of relatedness. I have already expressed (on page 55) my conviction that all those phenomena which are to be described in the section concerning the nonhuman environment as experienced by the psy.. chotic or neurotic individual can be found, with only quantitative differences, in the experience of the healthy individual. Not

104

The Nonhuman Environment

to repeat the phraseology I used there, I presume that there is no human being so mature, so secure in his own sense of his hu.. manness and, at the same time, so secure in his sense of kinship with the nonhuman environment, that he does not at times struggle with the "beast" in himself, alarmed at its unhuman ferocity; or yearn to relinquish his human status and be able to be an untroubled dog or a tree; or become so involved in the problems of human living that he feels quite out of -touch t really, with the nourishing ground of Nature; or enjoy his moments of animal grace with much the same pleasurable sensation of being, indeed, an animal, as is experienced with full conviction by the manic patient; and so on. These feeling-variations, or feeling-components, which I shall discuss in the next several pages will include: man's sense of inner conflict concerning his awareness that he is a part of Nature and yet apart from all the rest of nonhuman Nature; and the two great ingredients of this inner conflict-man's "earning to become wholly at one with his nonhuman environment, and his contrasting anxiety lest he become so and thus lose his own unique humanness. It seems inevitable that the human being-even the mature human being-will experience varied and conflictual feelings about his nonhuman environment, for mankind's position in regard to this environment is existentially-innateIy-a conflietual position. He is grounded in Nature, and yet is unbridgeably apart from it. The history of mankind's arrival into such a state is portrayed in the following words by L. L. Whyte. In his book, The Next Development in Man, Whyte says that the following change transpired in man's psychological orientation during the period between 3000 B.C. and the opening of the Christian era: The outward-looking pagan became introspective; man became aware of moral conflict, aware of himself, and aware of his own separation from nature. Knowledge of conflict led to self-consciousness and to the sense of guilt. Man fell from innocence. . . . universalism was achieved at the cost of inner dissociation. The struggle of the spirit against nature had begun [163a].

The Healthy Individual

105

This conftictual position of mankind vis-a-vis Nature has been most eloquently expressed by Erich Fromm. In The Sane Society (55 ), he develops the basic concepts of what he calls "humanistic psychoanalysis," of which the main thesis is that . . . the basic passions of man are not rooted in his instinctive needs, but in the specific conditions of human existence, in the need to find a new relatedness to man and nature after having lost the primary relatedness of the pre-human stage [55b].

Fromm describes this innately conflictual situation in forceful terms: Self-awareness, reason and imagination disrupt the "harmony"

which characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, into the freak of the universe. He is part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet he transcends the rest of nature. He is set apart while being a part; he is homeless, yet chained to the home he shares with all creatures [55c]. The necessity to find euer- new solutions [or the contradictions

in his existence, to find ever-higher f01.m6 of unit" with nature} his fellowmen and himself, is the source of 411 prychic forces which motivate man, of all his passions, affects and a nxieties.

[55d; Fromm's italics]. Birth . . . , in the conventional meaning of the word, is only the beginning of birth in the broader sense. The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we mould be fully born, when we die-although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born. We are never free from two conflicting tendencies: one to emerge from the womb, from the animal form of existence into a more human existence, from bondage to freedom; another, to return to the womb, to nature, to certainty and security. In the history of the individual, and of the race, the progressive tendency has proven to be stronger, yet the phenomena of mental illness

106

The Nonhuman Environment

and the regression of the human race to positions apparently relinquished generations ago, show the intense struggle which accompanies each new act of birth [55e].

I believe that the various subsidiary reactions which the mature human being experiences vis-a-vis his nonhuman environment, the variations from his basic emotional orientation of relatedness to this environment) derive from mankind's conftictual situation, which is so well described by Fromm. Thus it is not surprising that one can find innumerable evidences of a widespread yearning, on the part of man, for full union with Nature, and on the other hand, likewise innumerable evidences of man's continuing anxiety lest he lose altogether his human status through just such a union. The appeal which the experience of a subjective union with Nature holds for man-even for the emotionally mature human being, although I very much doubt, as I have said, that this is more than an atypical ingredient of his over-all orientation toward the nonhuman environment-is well conveyed by descriptions of mystical experiences. William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (85) contains many accounts by persons who have undergone religious conversions of a basically mystical sort. The following is an example of these accounts:

UI remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hill-top, where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. I t was deep calIing unto deep-the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me, and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His. The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exultation remained . . ." [8Se].

Deeply pleasurable though such experiences are, and however essential they may be to normal personality development dur-

The Healthy Individual

107

ing childhood and adolescence, I believe that they are not the characteristic mature orientation toward the nonhuman en.. vironment. Portrayed in the above account is an experience of dissolution of ego boundaries, a loss of identity as an individual human being and a perception of oneself, in an infantile.. omnipotent fashion, as being at one with the totality of one's environment. Such experiences, which as I say hold great appeal even for mature human beings, are very different from the experience of relatedness to the nonhuman environment which I have described. In this latter experience, by contrast, the person feels a sense of real and close kinship, but does not lose his awareness of his own individuality; that awareness is, instead, deepened. It would be a major error to assert, however, that experiences of subjective unity with the nonhuman environment have no place, ever, in the mature person's living. Such experiences may mark turning points of the most essential importance following crises in our lives, crises into which we have been cast by tragically great losses or major frustrations, crises in which we feel utterly cut off from the outside world by our grief, despair, anxiety. We may find restitution following such crises by undergoing transitory regression to very early ego states in which we re-establish contact with the world about us through feeling, initially, wholly at one with it, as we once felt in infancy. This process is qualitatively identical, I believe, with the process of recovery-through-phylogenetic-regl'ession, which I shall describe, in a later chapter, as taking place with some schizophrenic patients. Such experiences of oneness with the totality of our environment may also form a vital phase of creativity, as I shall shortly describe. But I believe that one's orientation toward the nonhuman environment is nearly as far removed from mature reality relatedness when one is in an infantile-omnipotent state of feeling at one with the universe, a universe saturated with God, as is that of the melancholiac who perceives his nonhuman environment as being saturated with evil. The former experience, however joyous, is, I believe, basically an infantile experience of sensing

108

The Nonhuman Environment

oneself to be in union with the Good Mother, an experience no more mature than that of the melancholiac who feels himself to be in union with the Bad Mother. One can see the similarity here in passages from James's book: When we come to study the phenomenon of conversion or religious regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequent consequence of the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth. In melancholiacs there is usual1y a similar change, only it is in the reverse direction. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with .•.

[S5g].

The distortion in psychotically depressed patients' perceptions of their nonhuman environment is, I think, not greater in degree than, however different in quality from, that of individuals who have undergone religious conversions such as are portrayed in the following accounts: God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I feel his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer harmony with his laws as written in my body and mind. I feel him in the sunshine or rain , .. [85h]. God surrounds me like the physical atmosphere. He is closer to me than my own breath. In him literally I live and move and have my being [85i].

I have devoted considerable space here to a discussion of the psychological significance of mystical experiences, as expressive of man's-s-even, at times, mature man's-s-yeaming for oneness with the nonhuman environment. One may protest that, however well the above descriptions of such experiences depict such a yeaming, mystical experiences-whether religious or otherwise -are, after all, not a prominent aspect of present-day Western culture, But a second fashion in which this yearning is manifested is considerably closer to home: the fascination which

The Healthy Individual

109

literature of a oneness-with-nature variety, or a close.. relatednesswith-nature variety, holds for vast numbers of people in our culture. Green Mansions (8t) is such a work of literature. Another prime example is Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us (23). Certainly a significant portion of the appeal of this beautiful account, whose popularity is attested by the fact that it remained at or near the top of the nonfiction best-seller lists for something like two years, resides in this theme which permeates the book: man's intimate kinship with Nature-with the inorganic as well as the organic elements of the Nature which surrounds him. The following passages, even when taken from the contextual pattern of the book of which they are an integral part, vividly show this -theme: When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammaI---each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago" when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea. . . . And as life itself began in the sea, so each of us begins his individual life in a miniature ocean within his mother's womb, and in the stages of his embryonic development repeats the steps by which his race evolved, from gill-breathing inhabitants of a water world to creatures able to live on land . . . Eventually man . . . found his way back to the sea . . • He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively . • . And yet he has returned to his mother sea only on her own terms. He cannot control or change the ocean . . . The sense

The Nonhuman Environment

110

of all these things comes to him most clearly in the course of a long ocean voyage, when he watches day after day the receding rim of the horizon, ridged and furrowed by waves; when at night he becomes aware of the earth's rotation as the stars pass overhead; or when, alone in this world of water and sky, he feels the loneliness of his earth in space. And then, as never on land, he knows the truth that his world is a water world, a planet dominated by its covering mantle of ocean, in which the continents are but transient intrusions of land above the surface of the all-encircling sea [23a].

,

Another recent book whose fascination emanates, to a significant extent, from the prominence of this same theme--the kinship of man with his nonhuman environment-is Journey to the Far Amazon, by Alain Gheerbrant(59). This is an account of a journey made by the author and his three friends from Venezuela to Brazil, from the Orinoco river system. over into the Amazon river system through previously unexplored, and reportedly impassable, jungle. These men, who endured almost incredible hardships in the course of their fourteen-months expedition, were sustained by a deep conviction that they could relate themselves, on friendly terms, to the members of the various native tribes of the region, no matter how far removed from civilized mankind, and how warlike, these tribes were reputed to be. The book beautifully describes the four men's setting out from civilization (at Bogota) and moving slowly into areas of less and less civilized peoples, until finally they reached the area of the Ouaharibos, the least civilized of all these tribes they encountered and, in many respects, living much like animals among other animals. A spirit of fellowship was reached even between the Guaharibos and the four explorers; I feel that this marks the capstone of the book's portraying, however implicitly, the continuous thread joining civilized man with the animal world. Shortly after leaving the area of the Guaharibos, in the deepest heart of the previously unexplored jungle, the men reached the Amazon river system and, progressing down ever-larger branches of the Amazon, reached progressively more civilized peoples again.

The Health, Individual

111

In Gheerbrant's book is a photograph of a Guaharibo woman nursing a dog; the author found that these women nurse dogs and their own children indiscriminately) and more than once saw a baby sharing its mother's breasts with a puppy. Once he and his comrades saw two small monkeys being nursed at a woman's breasts like twin babies; he tells us that the Guaharibos believe themselves to be the descendants of monkeys, and worship them. These people eat insects, marsh flowers, and even earth if it seems rich enough. Gheerbrant says that they do no work, but merely exist as plants and animals exist, being distinguished from the animal world by little but their upright stance and their ability to make fire. Of the Piaroas, another primitive tribe with whom the travelers stayed, the author mentions that these natives consider the lamentins, whalelike creatures of the Amazonian rivers, to be their grandmothers, and therefore never kill these creatures. Concerning the Maquiritare tribe, a somewhat more civilized tribe with whom Gheerbrant and his comrades stayed, the author says that one of the members "told me that the first Maquiritares were wild boars" (59a).1 The book contains one passage memorably reflecting the spirit of relatedness which the four men felt even toward the inanimate possessions which they carried with them; that is, the spirit of relatedness in which the men regarded the human beings of the various native tribes, however little civilized, extended even to this level. We find this passage in Gheerbrant's account of how he and his friends felt when, near the end of their journey, it developed that in order to save their lives, with only two dugout canoes remaining to the party, they would have to abandon a large part of their equipment and of the scientific material they had collected during the expedition: k-

We began to sort out our things. Having got them so far we J

Werner tells us that "In the opinion of the Brazilian Bakairi the canni-

balism of a neighboring tribe may be accounted for by the fact that these people are supposedly descended from jaguars. As a result of this ancestry, to a certain degree they stiU remain jaguars...• Similarly, the Bakairi also believe that the Trumai are a certain kind of aquatic animal" (162r).

112

The Nonhuman Environment

had become sentimentally attached to them all and it was terribly difficult for us to divide them into the saved and the damned, into a group whose fate was still to be linked with our own, and another group which was to be left behind. It seemed almost as though each item, having shared our troubles and our labors, had thereby acquired an individuality of its own and a right to live, almost as though it were a human being [59b].

In turning now (rom the subject of adult man's yearning for oneness with his nonhuman environment to the subject of his contrasting anxiety lest he become at one with that environment and thus lose his status as a human being, again I shall not endeavor to describe comprehensively the ways in which this particular feeling-reaction shows itself. I shall mention only two aspects, as examples, in which this reaction is manifested. The first is the great proclivity on the part of human beings, even adult human beings, for the development of prejudicial attitudes toward groups of other human beings, prejudicial attitudes which include the conviction that these groups of their fellow men are really subhuman, really more animal than human. Such prejudicial attitudes, to which I believe we all are in some degree drawn, betray our own unconscious lack of sureness that we ourselves are fully and unmistakably human. We all have some tendency, great or small, to project onto fellow men who are members of other racial or religious groups, or who are hospitalized with psychiatric illness, or who in some other respect can be looked upon as alien to ourselves, the less-than-human creature which we unconsciously believe to reside in us. A second manifestation of this same anxiety is seen, I believe, in our enjoyment of using figures of speech-metaphors, similes, analogies, and so on-in which a nonhuman creature or an inanimate object is endowed with human qualities, or in which human beings are endowed with nonhuman characteristics. I refer to such sentences and phrases as "He was a raging bull," "Her walk had a catlike grace," "a rocklike determination," "a craggy brow," "the murmuring of the water," "the whispering leaves, U and so on. The use of such expressions arises not only

The Healthy Individual

113

from the wish to add color to our language; it simultaneously constitutes a mode of dealing with our unconscious anxiety lest we become nonhuman. In employing such expressions we reveal our enjoyment of being able to distinguish between human beings and the nonhuman environment and, especially, to distinguish between ourself and the nonhuman environment. It is as if we demonstrate to ourself our mastery over any anxiety in this regard by our so freely, and with such good control, comparing or equating the human with the nonhuman. The psychodynamics involved here, which I have described, are identical with the psychodynamics of wit and humor as described long ago by Freud. We shall see, in a later chapter, that the inability of the schizophrenic to employ figurative language in that fashion stems at least in part from his inability to make clear distinctions of the sort which I have been describing here-s-distinctions between himself and his nonhuman environment, and between the human and nonhuman elements of his environment. I mentioned earlier in this chapter that I would return to the subject of the mature human being's characteristic relatedness to the nonhuman environment-that kind of relatedness which is one of the earmarks of emotional maturity in the human being-and discuss it in more detail. Having discussed, however sketchily and incompletely, a few of the myriad variations [rom this basic sense of relatedness, during the preceding few pages, I shall now deal in more detail with that basic sense itself. Let me make clear, first, what I am trying to do here. I am not trying to delineate some extremely narrow band on the broad spectrum of human feeling-capacities, and label that band "the mature attitude" toward the nonhuman environment, an attitude remaining after all other possible emotional responses to this environment have been shorn away, eschewed as earmarks of neurosis or psychosis. Maturity is in no wise to be conceived of as a narrow band on a spectrum, or a slender catwalk running through a gulf in which richly varied neurotic and psychotic experiences abound at every hand. Quite the reverse is true: it is mature experience which is broader, richer, and more varied, which includes the feeling-components that one finds conspicu-

114

The Nonhuman Environment

ously manifested in neurosis and psychosis and much more besides. The mature person is, I believe, capable of feeling the essence of that which the psychiatrically ill individual feels---otherwise, psychotherapy would not be possible-and other feelings and attitudes that in order to be experienced require greater ego strength and ego differentiation than the psychiatrically ill individual has yet developed. Maturity in face of the nonhuman environment may be considered to include, for example, the ability to experience that environment as totally menacing, on occasions when it is realistic to so conceive it (when, for instance, one found oneself in an area heavily contaminated with radioactive fall-out). But unlike a deeply paranoid schizophrenic patient, who might be unable to experience any attitude other than this one, a fixed and rigid attitude maintained irrespective of the inherent malevolence or beneficence or innocuousness of his actual nonhuman environment, the mature person can readily go on to changing responses as his actual situation changes. And it is valid, I think, to say that there is a kind of response to the nonhuman environment which the psychiatrically ill individual is-so long as he remains ill-incapable of experiencing, and which forms, by contrast) the core, the essence, of mature experience vis-A-vis that environment. It is this core which I am now endeavoring to define. I find it helpful to quote the viewpoint of William James (85), a viewpoint which differs considerably from my own and one which may be taken as at least a caricature of much of presentday psychiatry's implied attitude toward this subject, as a starting point for introducing my own concepts concerning the essence of mature relatedness in this respect. James says, Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it (IS it emts~ purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible

for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond

The Health')' Individual

115

another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, character, expression or perspective. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus pure gifts of the specta.. tor's mind [85£].2

It is my conviction, in contrast to that of James, that the more directly we can relate ourselves to the nonhuman environment as it exists-the more our relatedness to it is freed from perceptual distortions in the fonn of projection, transference, and so onthe more truly meaningful, the more solidly emotionally sarisfying, is our experience with this environment. Far from our finding it to be in a state of negativity and deadness, we find in ourselves a sense of kinship toward it which is as alive as it is real. James states, further: The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist writer [as Emerson], but for of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas.. that lend it its significance.

an

We feel, he says, that such abstractions as essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, and SO on, soak through all things to which we attribute these qualities, and he says that Everything we know is "what" it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions . " . in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects} these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception. t While it would be inaccurate to term James'. view solipsistic, it seems to me but one step removed from solipsism. Of interest, here) are Rapaport's comments concerning two opposite views. in philosophy! of man and the world about him: UIn the Berkeleian view) the outside world is the creation or man's imagination. In this solipsistic view, man is totally independent of the environment. and totally depend8nl on the forces and images residing within him; he cannot envisage an external world independent of these inner forces•... In the Cartesian world, on the other hand, man is born u a clean slate upon which experience writes. No forces or images exist in man except for those which arise from the impingements of the outside world. In this world) man is totally de"nd,nt on ... the outside world .... Observation confinns neither of these l extreme] views·' ( t 17) .

The Nonhuman Environment

116

. . . beings they are, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space. •

Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since [85j].

I concur with James's opinion that "The whole universe of concrete objects . . . swims .... for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas •.." But I disagree with his view that it is this state of affairs which gives significance to what we perceive-which gives significance to, for example, our nonhuman environment. I believe, on the contrary, that the less marked is this state of affairs, the more significance do we find the nonhuman environment to possess for us. The more we are able to relate ourselves to this environment as it really is-s-the more our perception of it becomes freed from seeing it to be bathed in Evil or Good or what not-the more satisfying and rich is our relatedness to it. My conviction in this regard is based upon my own personal experience and upon my experience with psychiatric patients. In the chapters dealing with psychotic and neurotic patients, I shall describe many instances in which patients' relatedness to their nonhuman environment, and to themselves, is extremely distorted because these patients react to abstract ideas, figurative concepts, as though they possessed concrete reality, a reality far more tangible to the patient than that possessed by all sorts of objects which are most concrete, most ureal," to the nonpsychotic and, relatively speaking, nonneurotic person. I feel that the more completely man can penetrate any such veils of reified abstract ideas, veils which are at their most blinding in the case of the psychotic person, the more satisfyingly alive will be his relatedness to the nonhuman environment. This is a subject which I find valuably illuminated by the thinking of Martin Buber, a philosopher and theologian who has been called "the most distinguished and influential of living Jewish thinkers," and "not only the representative figure of Western European Jewry but of world Jewry as well" (54). His

The Healthy Individual

117

UI.T hou" philosophy, or "philosophy of dialogue," contains profound insights which can be of much value to psychoanalytic theory and practice. To bring out Buber's central concept of I-Thou relatedness and 1...lt relatedness, and to show to what an extent Buber is concerned here with man's relatedness not only to man but also to what I call the nonhuman environment, I shall quote some excerpts from Maurice S. Friedman's recent study of Buber's thought, entitled, Martin Buber-i-The Life 0/ Dialogue (54): . . . man's two primary attitudes and relations: "I-Thou'· and "I-It." .. The I of man comes into being in the act of speaking one or the other of these primary words. But the two Its are not the same: "The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being. The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being." The real determinant of the prima,y word in which a man .takes his stand is not the object which is over against him but the wa)' in which he relates himself to that object. I-Thou is the primary word of relation. It is characterised by mutuality, directness, presentness, intensity, and ineffability, Although it is only within this relation that personality and the personal really exist, the Thou of l-Thou is not limited to men but may include ani· mals, trees, objects of nature, and God. I-It is the primary word of experiencing and using. It takes place within a man and not between him and the world. Hence it is entirely subjective and lacking in mutuality. . . . The It of I-It rna)' equally well be a heJ a she, an animal, a thing, a spirit, or even God, without a change in the primary word. Thus I-Thou and I-It cut across the lines of our ordinary distinctions to focus OUT attention not upon individual objects and their causal connections but upon the relations between things, the dauoischen (uthere in...between")

[54a). "The It is the eternal chrysalis, the Thou the eternal butterfly!' What at one moment was the Thou of an I-Thou relation can become the next moment an It and indeed must continually do so. The It may again become a Thou, but it will not be able to remain one, and it need not become a Thou at all. Man can live continuously and securely in the world of It. If he only lives in this world [of It], however, he is not a man, for "all real living is meet-

118

The Nonhuman Environment

ing." This meeting with the Thou of man and of nature is also a meeting with God. " . . . in each Thou we address the eternal Thou [Godf' [54b]. . . . He who treats a person as "another In does not really see that person but only a projected image of himself. Such a relation, despite the warmest "personal" feeling) is really I-It [54c]. "It is only by way of true intercourse with things and beings that man achieves true life ...." .... true fulfilled existence depends on our developing a genuine relationship to the people with whom we live and work, the animals that help US.t the soil we till, the materials we shape, the tools we use [54d; my italics].

As the above passages indicate, Buber's thinking bears much upon various subjects which I have mentioned in this book, such as persons' dealing with other persons as being nonhuman, and persons' dealing with elements of the nonhuman environment as being human. That portion of his thinking which I am particularly focusing upon here is his concept that the I-Thou relationship} and likewise the I.It relationship, can exist either between man and man OT between man and what I am calling here the nonhuman environment.. It would seem that, in Buber's thinking, the kind of relatedness which the mature human being experiences toward the nonhuman environment is identical with that relatedness which he experiences toward fellow human beings. I am fully in accord with Buber's view here, a view with which I became acquainted only after having myself developed the conviction that the mature human being's essential orienta.. tion toward the nonhuman environment is one of relatedness.. I found that Buber had already carried much further and had refined, as is obvious, this concept which in my own thinking had been left in so crude a state. I was interested to learn, in addition, that Buber's thinking hCL~ gone through an evolution, over the years of his long and productive life, with regard to the question of whether, as we might phrase it here, the mature person's characteristic orientation toward the nonhuman environment is one of subjective unity, or rather one of relatedness. Friedman makes clear that Buber, in his earlier writings, considered the feeling of unity to be the

The Health'Y Individual

119

highest, the most mature, order of experience in this regard, and that he came later to conclude that the T-Thou relatedness is, instead, the most mature orientation. To turn now, for a moment, to the book by Erich Fromm which was mentioned earlier in this chapter, we find that in his thinking, also, the highest order of human existence-termed by him "the productive orientation't-c-involves a creative relatedness not only with one's fellow man but also with the nonhuman environment (i.e., nature, the materials of one's work, and so on) : Love is one aspect of what I have called the productive orien.. tation: the active and creative relatedness of man to his fellow man, to himself and to nature. In the realm of thought, this productive orientation is expressed in the proper grasp of the world by reason. In the realm of action, the productive orientation is expressed in productive work, the prototype of which is art and craftsmanship. In the realm of feeling, the productive orientation is expressed in love, which is the experience of union with another penon, with all men, and with nature, under the condition of retaining one's sense of integrity and independence [55£; my italics].

Incidentally, where Fromm speaks in the above passage of "unity," it is clear that he does not mean the kind of unity which Buber came to reject, unity in the mystical sense of a dissolution of ego boundaries. Rather, that which Fromm calls "unity .. " under the condition of retaining one's sense of integrity and independence" may be likened to Buber's I-Thou relatedness.

The Psychological Benefits Which Derive from a Mature Relatedness with One's Nonhuman Environment

CHAPTER

5

Having attempted to delineate, in the preceding chapter, the essence of the mature person's sense of relatedness with the nonhuman environment, I shall now try to portray the fruitful effects, in his ongoing personality functioning, which flow from his being able to experience, vis-A..vis this environment, the kind of related.. ness which I have described. These fruitful effects can be presented in four broad categories: (1) the assuagement of various painful and anxiety-laden states of feeling; ( 2 ) the fostering of self-realization; (3) the deepening of one's feeling of reality; and (4) the fostering of one's appreciation, and acceptance, of one's fellow men. The separation of these effects into categories is, of course, a somewhat artificial one. The excerpts from various works of literature which I shall present, in illustration of these various beneficial effects, have to

The Healthy Individual

121

do only with one broad segment of the nonhuman environmentnamely) Nature. The works of Nature by no means constitute, of course, the entirety of our nonhuman world; but they are the part of it which, not only in me but perhaps in the majority of persons, strike the deepest chord. By way of contrast to all the other examples which will follow it is the following excerpt from Philip B. Smith's (139) account of his experiences after having received, as part of a scientific experiment, a dose of mescaline; here we see how warm a relatedness one can feel toward an inanimate work of man:

I lay down on the floor of the rest room in a patch of sunlight. I knew this might look foolish, but it was quite satisfying for the moment. I knew I could not explain it to others, but I could not care. It fulfilled me! I felt, toward that sunlighted floor, compassion and tenderness! I felt a bitter-sweet compassion for the existence of any object. I was glad it existed and loved it for existing! The feeling was much like the warmth one feels for a beloved pet or the fulfillment one gets in comforting a tired child. I patted the floor and said, "Bless your little heart." This struck me as humorous, but is was so purely intellectually funny and so insipid, compared to the feeling I had for the floor's very existence, that it was worthy of something better than laughter. when I showed the above passage, in a spirit of hesitancy and semi-derision toward the author, to a colleague who has a serious interest in painting, he commented unhesitatingly, "Every artist feels that way." Also by way of preface it should be noted that there may be significant differences in various persons' relationship to various aspects of Nature. A mountain may be only an object of beauty to the average vacationer; but to the mountaineer it may be, in addition, an extreme challenge; and to the geologist it will present still other interests. For the excerpts which follow, concerning man's relatedness to Nature, I have selected passages in which the meaning of this relatedness is not dependent solely upon some special vocational or recreational interest.

122

The Nonhuman Environment

The Assuagement Which the Individual Finds in His Sense of Relatedness with the Nonhuman Environment

This sense of relatedness helps to assuage man's existential loneliness in the Universe, the loneliness which resides in his knowledge that he, a self-aware, reasoning being, must always stand somewhat apart from the rest of Nature. Further, it 3.1leviates his fear of death. It helps him, also, to find a sense of peace, a sense of stability, of continuity, and of certainty. Finally, still in much the same general vein, it counteracts feelings of worthlessness and insignificance. The assuagement which man finds, in these various respects, from his relatedness with his nonhuman environment is, I think, wen shown in the variety of passages which I shall now quote. These passages vary greatly in fonn and content, and their sources are very diverse; but each one expresses one or another, or several, of the kinds of assuagement to which I have been refening. And this is expressed, by each one, with unusual beauty. The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, in his volume of existentialist philosophyentitled The Courage to Be ( 156), writes: The anxiety of fate and death is most basic, most universal, and inescapable. All attempts to argue it away are futile [156a]. The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self...a ffinnation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the universe [ 156b] . Even loneliness is not absolute loneliness because the contents of the universe are in him [i.e., in man] [156c].

Like Tillich, the social philosopher Lawrence K. Frank dwells upon the relatedness of man to Nature as a whole, and points to the benefits, for human living, which can flow from our recognition of that relatedness. The following passage from his previously mentioned book, Nature and Human Nature (44) shows some of his thinking about this subject: By viewing the human organism . . . as a part of nature, sharing the same dynamic processes and exhibiting the same

The H84lthy Individual

123

underlying pattern of organization that is operating everywhere from the atom to the stars, throughout the whole universe, man begins to emerge from the former beliefs and misconceptions that taught him to despise his body and to consider human life of little significance save as a preparation for the hereafter. No longer need he assume that he is by nature incapable of developing a way of life that will have meaning and significance in human terms [44a].

William James noted many years ago, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (85), that . . . apart from anything acutely religious, we all have moments when the universal life seems to wrap us round with friendliness. In youth and health, in summer, in the woods or on the mountains, there come days when the weather seems all whispering with peace, hours when the goodness and beauty of existence enfolds us like a dry, warm climate, or chime through us as if our inner ears were subtly ringing with the world's security [85k].

Wordsworth's poem, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintem Abbey (167) ~ sings of the joy and solace, the peace and strength, which one can find in one's relatedness with Nature: . . . Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, Through aU the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy; for she can so inform The mind that is within us) so impress With quietness and beauty, and 50 feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, not all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith that all which we behold Is full of blessings. . • .

124

The Nonhuman Enoironment.

For eight years I have treasured the following editorial from The New Yo,k Times, an editorial which appeared late in the month of November: THE CERTAINTIES

The wind sweeps out of the west, with the faint breath of blizzard far away; but the skies are clear, without even the shredded, high-flying clouds of storm. And so November leans toward December, and late autumn creeps past, silent as the stars. The hush of winter approaches, and short days lie upon the land.. Now is the time that the countryman has the country to him. self. The visitors are gone, vacations over. Even the migrant birds are gone. The squirrels go quietly about their business. And a man has time to survey his world and understand his own place in it, if he is ever to understand. Now it becomes clear that it isn't the little pleasures of the country that make life worth living there. It is rather the big assurances. The little pleasures are for the casual visitor; but one must live with the wind and the weather and know the land and the seasons to find the certainties. The flash of a goldfinch or the song of an oriole can delight the senses; but the knowledge that no matter how sharp or long the winter" they win be back again for another spring provides an inner surety. To see a hillside white with dogwood bloom is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty; but to walk the gray winter woods and find the buds which will resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity. To feel the frost underfoot and know that there is both fire and ice in the earth, even as in the patterned stars overhead, is to sense the big assurances. Man needs to know these things, and they are best learned when the silence lies upon the land. No one can shout them.. They need to be whispered, that they may reach the questing

soul "[107]. Thor Heyerdahl's book, Ken-Tiki, the account of the voyage which he and his three companions made across the Pacific on a raft, contains many passages which illustrate the point I am making. One of these is the following, from a chapter entitled "Halfway" :

The Healthy Individual

125

The weeks passed. We saw no sign either of a ship or of drifting remains to show that there were other people in the world. The whole sea was OUI'S) and) with all the gates of the horizon open, real peace and freedom were wafted down from the firmament

itself. It was as though the fresh salt tang in the air, and all the blue purity that surrounded us, had washed and cleansed both body and soul. To us on the raft the great problems of civilized man appeared false and illusory-like perverted products of the human mind. Only the elements mattered. And the elements seemed to ignore the little raft. Or perhaps they accepted it as a natural object, which did not break the harmony of the sea but adapted itself to current and sea like bird and fish. Instead of being a fearsome enemy, flinging itself at us, the elements had become a reliable friend which steadily and surely helped us onward. While wind and waves pushed and propelled, the ocean current lay under us and pulled, straight toward our goal [77a]. Admiral Byrd, in his book entitled, Alone (22), gives an account of the four and one half months which he spent in 1934 on the Ross Ice Barrier, 123 miles directly toward the South Pole from Little America, living alone in a hut, with the South Polar night prevailing most of the time outside, where the cold was as low as 84 degrees below zero) Fahrenheit. In passages of poetic loveliness he describes the peace, the exhilaration) the reassur... ance, and the relief from loneliness which he found in his sense of relatedness with his nonhuman environment: About 1 o'clock. in the morning [of his second day alone], just before turning in, I went topside for a look around. The night was spacious and fine. Numberless stars crowded the sky. I had never seen so many. You had only to reach up and fill your hands with the bright pebbles. Earlier, a monstrous red moon had climbed into the northern quadrant, but it was gone by then. The stars were everywhere. A sailor's sky, I thought, commanded by the Southern Cross and the wheeling constellations of Hydrus, Orion, and Triangulum drifting ever so slowly. It was a lovely motion to watch. And all this was mine: The stars, the constellations, even the earth as it turned on its axis. If great inward

126

The Nonhuman Environment

peace and exhilaration can exist together, then this, I decided my first night alone, was what should possess the senses [22b]. Took my daily walk at 4 p.m, today [about two weeks later on], in ·89 degrees of frost. The sun had dropped below the horizon, and a blue--of a richness I've never seen anywhere else -flooded in, extinguishing all but the dying embers of the sunset. Due west, halfway to the zenith, Venus was an unblinking diamond; and opposite her) in the eastern sky, was a brilliant twinkling star set off exquisitely, as was Venus, in the sea of blue. In the northeast a silver-green serpentine aurora pulsed and quivered gently. In places the [Ross Ice] Barrier's whiteness had the appearance of dull platinum. It was all delicate and illusive. The colors were subdued and not numerous; the jewels few; the setting simple. But the way these things. went together showed a master's touch. I paused to listen to the silence. My breath} crystallized as it passed my cheeks, drifted on a breeze gentler than a whisper. The wind vane pointed toward the South Pole. Presently the wind cups ceased their gentle turning as the cold killed the breeze. My frozen breath hung like a cloud overhead. The day was dying, the night being born-but with great peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence-a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps. It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man's one... ness with the universe. The conviction came that the rhythm was too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance-that, therefore, there must be purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental offshoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man's despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was as rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and night [22c]. A man's moments of serenity are few, but a few will sustain him a lifetime. I found my measure of inward peace then; the stately echoes lasted a long time [22d].

The Healthy Individual

127

The Role of the Individual's Sense of Relatedness with His

Nonhuman Environment in Fostering His Self-Realization This same sense of relatedness-usually when coupled with aclive working in relation to the nonhuman environment-fosters the individual's self-realization. That is, it helps him to gain a deeper sense of personal identity, of individuality; it helps him to develop his creative capacities; and it helps him to gain a fuller realization of the extent of his abilities and of the limitations upon those abilities. Brooks Atkinson, in his introduction to Walden and Other

Writings of Henry David Thoreau (154), tells us how important to Thoreau, as regards the development of a deepened sense of personal identity and the flowering of his creative capacities, was his long sojourn at Walden. He tells that Thoreau's watching and listening, studying, thinking, dreaming, attending to the varying moods of the pond, writing in his journals, and weighing the virtue of the great outside world against simple truths of his secluded existence, brought the philosopher's career to fruition. Although, Atkinson says, Thoreau supported himself, after leaving the hut, by such homely crafts as surveying and pencil making, he had found at Walden the path to a wise approach to life, and from then on his destiny was clear to him. In Thoreau's own incomparable words, I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undis.. turbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like com in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been [154e].

128

The Nonhuman Enoironment

Erich Fromm says, of man, that

He emerges from nature by mastering her; he develops his powers of co-operation, of reason, his sense of beauty. He separates himself from nature, from the original unity with her, but at the same time unites himself with her again as her master and builder. The more his work develops, the more his individuality develops [55g].

Incidentally, I wish to point out here that the unfortunate child who, in his growing up, is often treated by his parents as being of less importance than many of the elements of his nonhuman environment (furniture, other furnishings in the hornet and so on) is greatly handicapped, during childhood and during

his adult life also, when he tries to deal with inanimate objects in such a fashion as to develop his own creative powers, whether in

work or play. He has a deeply ingrained attitude of exaggerated respect for, of deference to, such inanimate objects-whether they be, now, a piano which he is trying to learn to play upon, or various materials of work with which he is trying to cope, or what not. He experiences, in exaggerated and persistent form, the kind of timidity which the sculptor Henry Moore describes as typical of the sculptor who is using material new to him: When first working direct in a hard and brittle material like stone, the lack of experience and great respect for the material, the fear of ill-treating it, too often result in relief surface carving, with no sculptural power [60].

Concerning creativity, I am inclined to believe that it is essential to the creative process that one become open to feelings of intense relatedness, and even oneness, with the totality of one's environment (including, of course, the nonhuman environment) ; or, to put it another way, that one become open to the experiencing of very early ego states of oneness with the totality of the environment. W. Clifford M. Scott, in his paper entitled "Narcissism, The Body, The Body Image and The Body Scheme)' ( 131), states that "In a primitive form many phenomena which

The Healthy Individual

129

later tum out to be ... creative acts are first recognizable during momentary regressions," and he speaks of "infantile, omnipotent creativeness." Kris, too} speaks of "ego regression during creative processes" (89b). Likewise in the valuable book entitled The Creative Process (60), edited by Brewster Ohiselin, one finds a number of hints that creativity may involve such a phase of regression to very early ego states. states of oneness with the totality of the environment. Note, for example, in the following paragraph from Ghise-

lin's introduction, how closely his description of the early stages of the creative process compares with psychiatric descriptions of very early ego states--as being featureless, oceanic, and so on: Creation begins typically with a vague, even a confused excitement, some sort of yearning, hunch, or other preverbal intimation of approaching or potential resolution. Stephen Spender's expression is exact: "a dim cloud of an idea which I feel must be condensed into a shower of words." Alfred North Whitehead speaks of "the state of imaginative muddled suspense which precedes successful inductive generalization," and there is much other testimony to the same effect. In some invention there is consciousness of a stage yet more primitive, a condition of complete indecision-in the words of Isadora Duncan, Ilea state of complete suspense"-in which nothing tends toward determination, nothing of a particular character seems to be implied, in which, therefore, all is still apparently free [60a]. Ghiselin~s book reproduces an account, by Christian Zervos, of the latter's interview with Picasso. Included among Picasso's paraphrased views concerning art are the following:

The artist is a receptacle of emotions come from no matter where: from the sky, the earth, a piece of paper, a passing figure, a cobweb. This is why one must not discriminate between things. There is no rank among them. One must take one's good where one finds it [60b]. The painter passes through states of fullness and of emptying. That is the whole secret of art. I take a walk in the forest of

130

The Nonhuman Environment

Fontainebleau. There I get an indigestion of greenness, I must empty this sensation into a picture, Green dominates in it. The painter paints as if in urgent need to discharge himself of his sensations and his visions [60c].

I think that this same point concerning creativity is reflected, similarly, in the following statements by the painter Julian Levi, quoted in Ghiselin's book: There is another aspect of an artist's choice of his subject matter which I think could be profitably explored. It is that I believe he is affectively related to certain fonns and designs. I believe his choice is channeled by the compulsion to find an objective vehicle for inward plastic images. I certainly do not know why" but I am stirred by certain geometrical relationships, certain rectangular forms and arabesques out of which grow particular harmonies and rhythms.. In deciding what subject I shall paint I am irresistibly drawn to objects which contain the skeleton of this type of plastic structure. Whether I am spending the swnmer on Barnegat Bay or on Cape Cod or merely sketching along the Harlem River, I somehow contrive to find the exact set of lines and contours which this inner appetite demands [60d].

And Tillich comments that Most important is the creative individual, the genius, in whom, as Kant later formulated it, the unconscious creativity of nature breaks into the consciousness of man.. Men like Pico della Miran.. dola, Leonardo da Vinci, Giordano Bruno, Shaftesbury, Goethe, Schelling were inspired by this idea of a participation in the creative process of the universe [156d].

In Chapter III (on page 88) I mentioned that the nonhuman environment constitutes a milieu which facilitates the child's exercising of, and his becoming aware of, his own abilities-his finding out in what various respects he is potent, but not omnipotent. Even after reaching adulthood, now, he continues to engage in this same process vis-a-vis his nonhuman environment,

The Healthy Individual

131

and I wish now to say something of this particular function of this environment in man's adult existence. Human beings are continuously finding, individually and collectively, through struggle with the nonhuman environment, that they possess previously unsuspected-and, in some instances, previously undeveloped-capacities, capacities which tend not to be evoked through man's relations with his fellow men alone, but which are discovered in this process of his coping with the larger nonhuman environment surrounding all of mankind. To give but two among myriad examples, only within the past year (at the time of my writing this) has a human being run a distance of one mile in less than four minutes, for the first time in recorded history; and only thus recently have human beings first set foot on the top of Mount Everest. As Admiral Byrd, whose own experiences enable him to speak with extraordinary authority about this, phrases it, Few men during their lifetime come anywhere near exhausting the resources dwelling within them. There are deep wells of strength that are never used [22e] . We never cease to thrill at accounts of the reaching of new heights of physical, intellectual, artistic, or spiritual achievement, by one or another of our fellow representatives of the human species, in their individual, and mankind's collective, ongoing struggle with the nonhuman environment. It may well be that each such victory represents to us, symbolically, a surmounting of the nonhuman part of our own personality by the human being in us. We gain a sense of exhilaration, of deepened self-appreciation, through identifying with our fellow men who have reached such heights. And, as is shown by the impact upon us of the following passages from King Solomon:s Ring (100), a book by the naturalist) Konrad Z. Lorenz) we can get this same kind of sensation through identifying even with creatures of a nonhuman species, creatures alive like ourselves, in their triumph over that part of our nonhuman environment which is, perhaps, most alien to us-the inorganic portion of it:

132

The Nonhuman Environment

In the chimney the autumn wind sings the song of the elements, and the old firs before my study window wave excitedly with their arms and sing so loudly in chorus that I can hear their sighing melody through the double panes. Suddenly, from above, a dozen black, streamlined projectiles shoot across the piece of clouded sky for which my window forms a frame. Heavily as stones they fall, fall to the tops of the firs where they suddenly sprout wings, become birds and then light feather rags that the storm seizes and whirls out of my line of vision, more rapidly than they were borne into it. I walk to the window to watch this extraordinary game that the jackdaws are playing with the wind. A game? Yes, indeed, it is a game, in the most literal sense of the word ~ practised movements, indulged in and enjoyed for their own sake and not for the achievement of a special object. And rest assured, these are not merely inborn, purely instinctive actions, but movements that have been carefully leamed. All these feats that the birds are performing, their wonderful exploitation of the wind, their amazingly exact assessment of distances and, above all, their understanding of local wind conditions, their knowledge of all the up-currents, air pockets and eddies-all this proficiency is no inheritance, but, for each bird, an individually acquired accomplishment. And look what they do with the wind! At first sight, you) poor human being, think that the stonn is playing with the birds, like a cat with a mouse, but soon you see, with astonishment, that it is the fury of the elements that here plays the role of the mouse and that the jackdaws are treating the storm exactly as the cat its unfortunate victim. Nearly, but only nearly, do they give the stonn its head, let it throw them high, high into the heavens, till they seem to fall upwards, then, with a casual flap of a wing, they turn themselves over, open their pinions for a fraction of a second from below against the wind, and dive-with an acceleration far greater than that of a falling stone-into the depths below. Another tiny jerk of the wing and they return to their normal position and, on close-reefed sails, shoot away with breathless speed into the teeth of the gale, hundreds of yards to the west: this all playfully and without effort, just to spite the stupid wind that tries to drive them towards the east. The sightless monster itself must perform the work of propelling the birds through the air at

The H8Qlthy Individual

133

a rate of well over 80 miles an hour; the jackdaws do nothing to help beyond a few lazy adjustments of their black wings. Sovereign control over the power of the elements, intoxicating triumph of the living organism over the pitiless strength of the

inorganic! [100aJ.1 An unusually beautiful and inspiring example among the accounts of man's own triumphs in relation to his nonhuman en.. vironment is Annapuma (76), by Maurice Herzog, the leader of a French expedition which scaled, for the first time in history, that Himalayan peak. This is a record of almost incredible courage, determination, skill, and endurance of physical suffering; Herzog himself almost died, after the peak had been reached, from exhaustion and from gangrene of the extremities which required repeated amputations. Lucien Davies, himself prominent in French mountaineering circles, writes in his preface to Herzog's book:

That wonderful world of high mountains, dazzling in their rock and ice, acts as a catalyst. It suggests the infinite, but it is not the infinite. The heights only give us what we ourselves bring to them. Climbing is a means of self-expression. Its justification lies in the men it develops, its heroes and its saints. This was the essential truth which a whole nation grasped when it offered its praise and admiration to the conquerors of Annapuma. Man overcomes himself, affirms himself, and realizes himself in the struggle towards the summit, toward the absolute. In the extreme tension of the struggle, on the frontier of death, the universe disappears and drops away beneath us. Space, time, fear, suffering, no longer exist. Everything then becomes quite simple. As on the crest of a wave, or in the heart of a cyclone, we are strangely calm-not the calm of emptiness, but the heart of action itself. • Lorenz's book is one of great value to anyone who wishes to read further about the over-all subject of this present volume. And I think that the feelings one experiences while reading his book attest to the sense of kinship, dormant but strong, which we possess toward other living creatures: as one reads his accounts of successful communication between animal and man, and his descriptions which help one to see new meaning in the interactions among fUh or among birds or among animals, one experiences an extraordinary sense of fascination and, often, joy.

134

The Nonhuman Environment

Then we know with absolute certainty that there is something indestructible in us, against which nothing can prevail. A flame so kindled can never be extinguished. When we have lost everything it is then we find ourselves most rich. Was it this certainty that all was well that gave Maurice Herzog the steady courage to endure his ordeal? The summit is at our feet. Above the sea of golden clouds other summits pierce the blue and the horizon extends to infinity. The summit we have reached is no longer the Summit. The fulfillment of oneself-is that the true end, the final answer?

[76a]. Herzog himself thus describes the feelings which he experienced upon attaining, with one of his comrades, the top of the

mountain: Our mission was accomplished. But at the same time we had accomplished something infinitely greater. How wonderful life would now become! What an inconceivable experience it is to at· tain one's ideal and, at the very same moment, to fulfill oneself. I was stirred to the depths of my being. Never had I felt happiness like this-so intense and yet so pure. That brown rock, the highest of them all, that ridge of ice-were these the goals of a lifetime? Or were they, rather, the limits of man's pride? [76b]. I believe that each time we-and here I refer not only to such outstanding persons as Herzog, but to all of us more ordinary persons as well-have achieved some triumph in coping with our nonhuman environment, some triumph which has called forth our very utmost powers, the satisfaction which we experience has to do not alone with our having discovered previously unrevealed powers in ourself. The satisfaction has to do also, I believe, with our having seen, beyond doubt, that we are not omnipotent. There can be in this a sense of relief, of comfort, which I think may truly be called satisfying. I find such a kind of satisfaction expressed in the following passage by Herzog: In overstepping our limitations, in touching the extreme boundaries of man's world, we have come to know something of its true

The Health'Y Individual

135

splendor. In my worst moments of anguish, I seemed to discover the deep significance of existence of which till then I had been unaware. I saw that it was better to be true than to be strong. The marks of the ordeal are apparent on my body. I was saved and I had won my freedom. This freedom, which I shall never lose, has given me the rare joy of loving that which I used to despise. A new and splendid life has opened out before me [76c].

Byrd expresses this more explicitly, this sense of relief and selfacceptance which one can gain from an experience which hac; delineated the very utmost limits of one's capacities, an experience which brings home to one, beyond the possibility of any doubt or conflict, that one is not omnipotent. He tells thus of his eventual departure from the hut where he had endured long months of isolation, bitter cold, and, before a rescue party was finally able to reach him, near-fatal carbon monoxide poisoning: I climbed the hatch and never looked back. Part of me remained forever at Latitude 80 degrees 08" South: what survived of my youth, my vanity, perhaps, and certainly my skepticism. On the other hand, I did take away something that I had not fully possessed before: appreciation of the sheer beauty and miracle of being alive, and a humble set ~f values. All this happened four years ago. Civilization has not altered my ideas. I live more simply now, and with more peace [22£].

The Deepened Feeling of Reality Which the Individual Finds in His Sense of Relatedness with His Nonhuman Environment

The third fruitful effect of the mature human being's sense of relatedness with his nonhuman environment-an effect which is perhaps so closely interwoven with the second effect, just discussed, as not to warrant a separate presentation here--is the enhancement, the sharpening, the deepening, the strengthening, of the individual's experiencing his own existence, and the existence of the world around him, as being Teal. To illustrate this point, I find that the following passage from Walden (15 4-) serves, once again, superbly well. Thoreau writes that

136

The Nonhuman Environment

Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me,-anchored in forty feet of water) and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand) some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook [154f].

Thoreau's description of his solitary) noctumal fishing and thinking can be looked upon, for our purposes here, as beautifully symbolizing the importance) for one's maintenance of con.. tact with reality, of one's preserving at least a slender thread of awareness of, and acceptance of, one's relatedness with Nature. In working with psychotic patients, by contrast, one finds with great regularity that their intolerance of their own "animal" needs and impulses is such that they have become overly absorbed in "vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres." That is, they have become so greatly preoccupied with highly abstract problems--of morals, of ethics, or various other intellectual problems of a highly cerebral sort-that they have fostered their own becoming cut off from the awareness of their own kinship with

The Healthy Individual

137

Nature and, by much the same token, cut off from their own unconscious. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, one finds in intensive psychotherapy with schizophrenic patients that those relatively infrequent patients who appear most "animallike," most subhuman, are those who are most harshly repressing their own normal animal needs. And, as I said, one finds that in these persons their animal needs are struggling to break through the repression and bring the patient back into contact with a reality which seems to him abhorrent, but which in actuality can be of life-saving, or at the very least sanity-saving, value for him. The normal human being, on the other hand-the person who never becomes either psychotic or markedly neurotic--does not shut himself off from the awareness of, and acceptance of, the circumstance that he is a member of an animal species and that he has, therefore, animal needs which are natural and normal and which must be heeded. However many hours a day he may spend in thought of however abstract a sort, the way to his own unconscious remains open, the way to this recognition of his animal needs remains open, the way to his experiencing moments of relatedness with his nonhuman environment-s-with all the refreshment, invigoration, peace and assurance which this sense of relatedness brings-remains open. The Individual's Finding, Through His Sense of Relatedness with His Nonhuman Enoironment, a Deepened Appreciation of, and Acceptance of, His Fellow Men I have mentioned, and have given illustrations of, the relief from striving-toward-omnipotence--or, to put it another way, the increased self-acceptance-s-which one may gain through one's relatedness with the nonhuman environment. By the same token) to the extent that one can perceive one's fellow men as being) like oneself, chained in many ways by an innate structural and functional relatedness with the nonhuman environment and, at the same time, transcended by that environment) dwarfed by it ~to that extent one tends to have an appreciative, accepting

138

The Nonhuman Environment

and, above all, compassionate attitude toward one's fellow human beings. All men become, to that extent, brothers, brothers who share the same biological end, brothers all of whom, individually and collectively, find themselves alone in a nonhuman environment which is incredibly more vast than mankind-alone and yet, at the same time, hopelessly wedded to that environment by indissoluble. bonds which exist, as I have mentioned earlier, at multiple levels (at the level of biological similarity, at the level of similarity of chemical structure, and so on). To the extent that we can find the courage to look squarely at our common situation as human beings, we find that an attitude of appreciation, acceptance, and compassion toward ourselves and one another is the only attitude which is tenable. Farthest removed from such an orientation of mature compassion---or, one could put it, most afraid of experiencing such feelings of compassion-is the paranoid schizophrenic person. His orientation toward other persons as well as toward himself is predicated upon the conviction that all human beings are poten.. tially omnipotent. He cannot conceive that other persons are unable to better a situation; it is only their malevolent workings which account for whatever dissatisfaction, suffering, and tragedy he encounters or has encountered in the past .. By the same token, he cannot accept, either, his own inability to make the whole earth a Paradise. One of my patients, for example, who spelled out such convictions with unusual clarity, W~ convinced that no one is ever ill or injured except through the malevolent agency of another human being; that no one ever really dies, but is only changed into some other fonn by malevolent persons who operate what are purported to be funeral parlors; that no one grows old through natural causes; that there are no phenomena of weather and climate which are not perpetrated by human beings; and so OD. She used to assert, for instance, that

There's no reason for anybody in the world to be unhappy or miserable in the world today. They have antidotes for everything. They just keep pulling the wool over people's eyes.. People don't die. . . . [She went on to say that in actuality

The Healthy Individual

139

people who are thought to be dead have been "changed," moved about over the face of the earth" placed without their own knowledge into the casts of motion pictures, and so on] It's a government that has girded the earth with horror and hell. (She asserted, with evident conviction) on the morning following a nocturnal thunderstorm:] That thunderstorm-thing. That was the taxpayers' money going up in flares.

For approximately two years, this woman devoted the bulk of the time during her psychotherapeutic sessions to a violent condemnation of me and of everyone else about her. It quickly became evident that an unconscious struggle against repressed self-condemnation-self-condemnation so intense that it threatened to annihilate her-lay behind her so persistent viewing of other persons as being incarnations of evil. This woman's compassionate feelings were finally reached, little by little, only after the therapeutic relationship had survived two years of her venting such condemnation upon me, as well as murderous feelings of great intensity. It eventually became clear that at the heart of her illness lay long-repressed, intensely conflictual feelings toward her mother-murderous feelings coupled with deep tenderness and compassion.

PART

THREE

THE NONHUMAN ENVIRONMENT

IN PSYCHOSIS AND NEUROSIS

Confusion Between the Self and the Nonhuman Environment

CHAPTER

6

I discussed in Chapter II the basic situation of the young infant's inability to distinguish himself as a human individual, distinct from his environment-distinct not only from the human beings in his environment but also from the nonhuman dements in it. I indicated that in psychiatrically ill individuals-particularly in schizophrenic patients, from whom most of my data comes--one sees abundant evidence of an inability to distinguish between the self and the nonhuman, as well as the human, environments. This confusion in the chronologically adult patient may be regarded as a testimony both to (a) some degree of failure to achieve at the nonnal time) in infancy, as clear-cut and profound a differentiation of the self from the total environment as is achieved by the healthy infant; and (b) the depth of the present-day regression, coming as a result of the impact of very' intense anxiety, and involving the reactivation of this mode of experiencing one's

The Nonhuman Environment

144

existence as being chaotically undifferentiated, this mode which is presumably characteristic of all infants, even normal infants, at a very early phase of ego development.

Initial Review of the Literature In Chapters II and III, in discussing the infant's and young child's ego organization, I described the areas of convergence and

divergence as between the views found in psychoanalytic literature on the one hand, and my own concepts on the other hand. These same areas of agreement and of difference apply now ipso facto in the interpretation of the regression found in schizophrenia. Hartmann, despite his having introduced in 1937 the valuable concept of dedifferentiation (67£),1 continues to adhere, in his paper in 1953 entitled "The Metapsychology of Schizophrenia," to Freud's concept of withdrawal of libidinal cathexis in schizophrenia: Freud (1911), in the Schreber case, has given us a classical description of the pathological process in schizophrenia, the withdrawal of libido from the objects and its subsequent investment in the self. . . . I think that Freud's correlation of reality loss with libido withdrawal is very likely true [70a].

Hanns Sachs (122), in his paper in 1933 entitled, "The Delay of the Machine Age/' also follows Freud's concepts: Freud found the change in libido distribution which forms the basis of schizophrenia to consist in a regression to narcissism. In catatonic conditions this expresses itself directly as a complete withdrawal of libido from object-investment. . . .

Sachs's theoretical explanation for the delay in the machine age, although as I mentioned it fits very well with my concept of nonclifferentiation from the nonhuman environment, makes this point only by implication; it focuses primarily, instead, upon a A term

abo wed by Werner (162.).

Psychosis and Neurosis

145

Freud's concept of a narcissistic conflict. This is the same reasoning which Tausk, despite his immensely valuable introduction of the concept of loss of ego boundaries in schizophrenia, pursues in explanation of the delusion of the influencing machine:

The feeling of strangeness is a defense against libidinal cathexis, no matter whether it concerns objects of the outer world) one's own body,- or its parts. . • • When, in paranoia, the feeling of estrangement no longer affords protection, the libidinal drive towards the homosexual object is projected on to the latter and appears, by a reversal of direction, as aggression towards the loving one (the patient himself) in the form of a sense of persecution. Strangers become enemies. The enmity is a new and more energetic attempt at protection against the rejected unconscious libido. The narcissistic organ libido in schizophrenia may undergo a similar transformation. The estranged organ-in OUf case, the entire body-appears as an outer enemy, as a machine used to afflict the patient [153a].

Bak (5), although as I have mentioned he thinks of schizophrenia as involving regression to an undifferentiated phase, and although he says of this phase such things as: "Retained selfobservation refers to this phase, as: 'I'm becoming an animal,' or 'I'm turning into a protoplasmic mass' . . . ," nevertheless limits his conceptual frame of reference to the infant-mother relationship, rather than seeing the nonhuman environment as important in its own right, and employing a "phylogenetic" frame of reference. He subscribes to the usual psychoanalytic concepts:

There is substantial agreement among psycho-analysts that in the schizophrenic illness three processes are largely involved: First, the withdrawal of libidinal cathexis from object representations; second, the regression of the ego to primary narcissism; and third, the attempt at restitution. In my own work with schizophrenic patients I find neither of the first two concepts helpful; as for the third, an attempt at restitution is always discernible in any human being, schizo-

The Nonhuman Environment

146

phrenic or otherwise, at any time, and is to be seen in any symptom of schizophrenia. To me, a much more adequate explanation of the phenomena in question is to be found in Werner's (162t) description of the schizophrenic process as consisting in regression to primitive modes of perception, thought, and emotional experience, in which there is a dedifferentiation, or "syncretism," in all these spheres. An experiencing of both inner and outer worlds persists, but unbeknownst to the patient it is grossly distorted by psychological contents which, "belonging" in an outer or inner direction, have lost their differentiation as such. Werner bases his views upon the findings of Schilder, Storch, Piaget, and other psychiatrists and psychologists, as well as upon those of a multitude of investigators in related disciplines . To return to Hartmann for a moment, we see that he moves far in this very direction when he says that the more differentiated an organism is, the more independent from the immediate environmental stimuli it becomes (67g), and that "the fusion of self and world [is] a central problem in the symptomatology of schizophrenia" (70b) In this regard, I have found it of interest that, for a number of my most deeply and chronically schizophrenic patients, it has required several years of intensive psychotherapy before} in each instance, sufficient ego differentiation -including sufficient independence from the immediate environ.. ment-e-has been achieved so that the patients can now experience dreaming and fantasying as such.. When such patients begin therapy no such realm of subjective experience exists for them, and the first dream or fantasy is often described with both wonder and pleasure. In each case, over the earlier years of our work the patient had reported an abundance of what would objectively be labeled, by me or any other observer, as fantasies or dreams, but he. had experienced them as representations of real.. ity; t so until now he had been unwittingly denied not only the benefit of more realistic appraisaJ of reality, but also the pleasure and freedom of subjective fantasy and dreaming. t

a

-I til) of course, normal for any dreamer to experience his dream .. a representation of reality) while he il dreaming; but these patients had experienced them thus even later, while describing them to me.

Psychosis and Neurosis

147

Eissler (31) has described the symptomatology of a schizo-

phrenic woman who seems to me an excellent example of dedifferentiation to a level at which there is subjective oneness with other human beings, but at which the differentiation between human beings (including oneself) and the nonhuman environment has not been wholly sacrificed to the relatively moderate schizophrenic process. Of her) Eissler says that .•. she was fixated to a level which may be called a social animism. Her outlook on the social group was based on the principle that any emotion she experienced in the presence of others had to have a palpable social effect. . . . It is remarkable that this basic principle never spilled into the representation of the physical world but was strictly limited to the social area.

As he beautifully describes, this woman at times of increased anxiety experienced a feeling of deadness. We might say that at these times she regressed to an ego state analogous to one of the developmental phases of infancy which I have postulated: a phase in which the infant is aware of certain figures in the outside world-c-e.g., his mother---as being alive, but in which he is not yet aware of aliveness as a quality which he himself also possesses. The loss of distinction between animate and inanimate - ( l loss which Eissler's patient evidently only partially underwent-has been termed "de.. animation" by Elkisch and Mahler (33). The previously mentioned papers by Ekstein (32), Furman (56 ), Lisbeth Sachs (123), Mahler (102), and Elkisch and Mahler (33) all contain relevant material illustrating, in each instance, a schizophrenic child's equating himself with machines, or otherwise revealing an inability to distinguish between human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. In the authors' interpretation of such material, however, as I described in Chapter II, the emphasis is always upon interpersonal matters; the importance of the nonhuman environment as such, that is to say in its own right, is entirely ignored. In the paper by Elkisch and Mahler, for instance, the machines which fascinate and terrify the

148

The Nonhuman Environment

psychotic boy are only considered to be, for him, concretizations of inner impulses which in tum are traced exclusively to his relations with people. In the paper by Mahler, the inanimate object is held to be, in the world of the psychotic child, only a "symbol for the introject"; and although she says that in autistic children one finds an inability perceptually to discriminate animate and inanimate, and hence an inability to perceive the mother as a living being, she persists in tracing the etiology of this to the child-mother relationship.. It seems to me that we should not neglect the possibility that the infant needs, for example, a certain measure of stability in his nonhuman environment as such, in order for him to evolve, out of this foundation, a picture of his mother as a living entity.

Clinical Material

On page 51 I gave examples of one schizophrenic patient's inability to distinguish clear boundaries between his self and his nonhuman environment, and I shall now give a few more such examples from other schizophrenic patients) before taking up, a bit later in this chapter, other matters of psychodynamic theory. In subsequent chapters there will appear many additional instances of patients' confusion in this regard, in the course of my tracing out some of the ramifications of this central theme.. A deeply confused schizophrenic woman, twenty-two years of age, muttered in one of her hours with me about a post in her head, wondering if she had gotten it out. Her communication had the shocking, horrifying impact which I have regularly found, and is found by my colleagues also in similar situations) when a person is conveying to us their confusion of their animate self with inanimate objects. On another occasion this woman shockingly conveyed to me the statement that the whole left side of her head ais gone .•• caved in," speaking as if in reference to an inanimate object; one sensed her own horror and despair about this. Oftentimes she plucked at her scalp, and in so doing spoke, on one occasion, about bugs; this, together with her speaking of herself on another occasion as being "bugs," suggested that she

Psychosis and Neurosis

149

experienced her psychosis as a matter of, quite literally, having bugs in her head, and her scalp plucking seemed an effort to, as it were, get the crazy ideas out. She once demanded of a nurse, "Why did you take that piece out of my head?') referring to her head as though it were an inanimate thing. In an hour with me she spoke about having gone canoeing one time, and added, "It wrecked my body." The tone of this comment was the significant thing, and impossible for me to reproduce in writing; it conveyed a sense of shock, as if she were referring to her body not as being her living corporeal self, but rather an inanimate object which had been irreparably damaged. To another nurse she once confided that she (the pa.. tient) had cotton in her head, shoulders, and legs. To think of such communications as reflecting merely the patient's literal phrasing of what is, in her, a figurative concept does not, I think, do justice to the degree of anxiety and confusion which she is experiencing; I personally have no doubt that to her the cotton. the post, and so forth, were experienced quite literally. Both in this woman's history and in her hours with me, I found further evidence of her inability, during her psychosis, to distinguish between her own ego and the surrounding nonhuman environment. The hospital to which she had first been admitted, a year before her transfer to Chestnut Lodge, reported that "She seemed to have the feeling that in some way or other things were 'changed,' but was unable to express what these changes were or why she was so concerned about them." It is my impression, based on long work with her, that she was experiencing what were basically internal, psychological changes taking place in her during the development of her psychosis as being physical changes in the surrounding nonhuman environment. The first hospital's report further says that "She has expressed the idea that her father is in some way bringing about the strange sensations that she experiences-movements of the bed, movements of the wall . . ." She did at times evidence, at the first hospital, delusions as to the shape and color of her body, and in one of my own hours with her she said, "I feel as though I'm turning into a Negro.." looking at her arms as she said this. On two or three later oc"

150

The Nonhuman Environment

casions she gazed closely at her right hand, as though fascinated and perplexed by its appearance, and confided to me at one such time, "My hand looks big to me." When I first went out walking with her] on the grounds, a week or two after her admission, she conveyed to me in her mut .. tered, fragmentary comments that she felt the surrounding buildings and landscape to be constantly changing in a terrifyingly confusing fashion. This reminded me of the dreams one sometimes hears from neurotic patients, in which a house, for example, may be now one's childhood home, now one's adult, marital home. At another time she said to one of our nurses, in much anxiety, "The wall is moving . . . I don't know what's wrong with my hands, but I can't keep them still," as though her hands, like the walls, seemed to her to be uncontrollable inanimate objects. There are abundant data further to indicate this woman's evident inability to distinguish between her self and her nonhuman (as well, of course, as her human) environment, and her confusion about both, indiscriminately. Another schizophrenic woman who was no longer hospitalized, when she now began to go, in therapy, into a deeper exploration of her intensely ambivalent feelings about her mother, feelings which were at the heart of the psychosis which had earlier overcome her, commented anxiously after coming into my office that she noticed that the floor of the building (over which she had walked for these many months, to and from her hours) wac; sagging; it was significant that she had evidently been unaware of this fact until now. Still another schizophrenic patient, a man, while in the hospital kept asserting, almost incessantly during his psychotherapeutic sessions, that he was now well and fully able to live outside the hospital; but every once in a while he would reveal a nagging alarm lest the building might fall to pieces at any moment. The precarious state in which he felt the building to be actually was quite true of his own personality functioning, as experience with him showed. Here it seemed that he could not distinguish, at an unconscious level, between his own ego and the building in which he was housed and had his psychotherapy; the

Psychosis and Neurosis

151

fragility of his own ego organization was projected onto the structure of the building.. An acutely schizophrenic man, looking about in bewilderment at the very simple furnishings of his room, seemingly struggling conceptually to grasp these relatively few elements of his nonhuman environment, asked with regard to the window in his door and the light in the ceiling, "What's that for?" Such incidents remind one that the infant and very small child, in normal development, may be similarly unable to cope with more than the simplest sort of nonhuman environment, may be as susceptible as are these schizophrenic patients to becoming quite overwhelmed with confusion when exposed to a very complex and shifting nonhuman environment. In the recorded staff presentations of patients here at Chestnut Lodge, given by the various therapists, the detailed accounts of patients' histories often reveal that there were markedly traumatic circumstances, of one sort or another, in the patient's relatedness to his nonhuman environment in infancy and childhood. The following excerpt, from the staff presentation of a woman with unusually profound overt schizophrenia, shows one example among a great many, similar in terms of broad import but greatly varying in terms of individuals' life circumstances:

. . . much of the time the patient and her mother lived in San Francisco or at their country place which is a modem house and which the patient describes as being a place where there is constant shifting around going on, that there are additions and rooms being added. The father [a building contractor] gets new ideas of a structural nature, builds something new, and then there is a shifting around. She even put it as directly as that she wouldn't know which bed she was going to sleep in from one week to the next, that sometimes her mother would be in her bedroom and she would be in her mother's, etc. and she seemed to make quite a point of that. The last sentence in the above excerpt gives a hint that, in normal upbringing, a greater stability of room arrangements can

The Nonhuman Environment

152

give the child support in the struggle for individuation from the mother and in the struggle against incestuous impulses. This same woman had undergone various changes of residence in childhood, in addition to her having lived, as described above, in the ever-changing country home. One wonders if this past experience did not have much to do with the patient's impaired sense of personal identity, as indicated in the following passage from a later part of the presentation) where the therapist is describing one of his therapeutic sessions with her: I said that 1 was interested in hearing about her and what she was doing here. I believe I put it in terms of "I want to hear about Miss Baldwin [the patient's name'] . " She said, "Well, I'm not Miss Baldwin. She lives at such-and-such a number Pacific View in San Francisco't-e-which was the residence of the family at one time. "I am Miss Williams,," Well, that [name] registered only as one of the graduate nurses that we had here in training for a while ...... In my own work with one of my patients, a schizophrenic woman, I saw a more clear-cut indication that her sense of personal identity was linked with the familiar nonhuman environment. This particular woman on many different occasions revealed how tenuous was her sense of personal identity. Repeat... edly, for example, she spoke poignantly of how much more competent, how much less harried by anxiety about myriad things, she had felt before her overt illness, by contrast to her present suffering. She would wonder longingly "what became of myself," indicating that her sense of being herself had been lost, through the intrusion of all the strange new psychological experiences in which her psychosis had enveloped her. But I wish to quote in particular a communication from her which indicated that one factor in her experiencing, or not experiencing, a sense of personal identity was the presence or absence, respectively, of a familiar nonhuman environment. This communication came during an hour in which she was describing her having gone, from • Pseudonym, as is each

or

the patients' names used in this book.

Psychosis and Neurosis

153

her home in the suburbs of a large Southern city, into the city's business section to begin working as a stenographer. She was speaking in a very puzzled, halting way, with a confused expression on her face: That's funny-162 Central Avenue--I wonder what became of me, going down there? [said in a tone which clearly conveyed that she had lost her self in going down there}--that wasn't a residential section-aU those great big buildings-very imposing buildings [awed tone]-that was a business section-it wasn't a residential section, like the section where I lived . . .

She went on, later in the hour, to make statements which

indicated that she experienced a similar loss of her sense of personal identity currently, upon the occasions of her coming over from an outlying building where she was living to the relatively large main building of the hospital, where my office is located, for her sessions with me. So much, then, for the mere presentation of examples of this confusion between the self and the nonhuman environment. Next, let us see what effect it may have upon the individual to experience the loss, or the threat of loss. of elements of the nonhuman environment which possess the above-noted significancethe. loss, that is, of things which he reacts to as being parts of his

self. What we find, in essence, is an effect which bears out the theoretical formulation put forward by Stiircke ( t 45 ) in his classic paper in 1921 entitled, "The Castration Complex," which I mentioned in Chapter II. It will be recalled that he portrayed the situation of the infant's being weaned from the breast as being a primal castration. In essence, that is, be stated that the infant reacts to the loss of the breast as constituting the loss of an inestimably important part of himself. The point I now wish to emphasize is that for such patients as those referred to immediately above, the 10M of various elements of the nonhuman environment, elements which have become part of the person's body image, may be experienced as a mutilation of the physical

154

The Nonhuman Environment

body itself, entirely similarly to the reaction which may be felt upon the loss of another person, or (as in the instance of the mother's breast, in the paper by Starcke) a part of another person, which has been experienced heretofore as a part of the body image. In other words, it is my impression that the patient reacts to separation from significant elements of the nonhuman environment with the same feelings of having been physically mutilated, as though he had been physically castrated or dismembered. I cannot present clinical material which is sufficiently unequivocal to elevate this point beyond the level of a hypothesis. My conviction concerning its validity is based chiefly upon work with psychotic patients, work in which the decisive data concerning this point consisted in feeling-tones conveyed by the patients and responsive feelings aroused within myself upon my registering their communications, which cannot be adequately reproduced here in writing. For example, the woman who was previously quoted as having expressed to me the feeling that the left side of her head "is gone . . . caved in" many times spoke with precisely the same tone (of being physically mutilated) in many muttered, bereft references to the (quite real) desolation as regards the furnishings of her room, whose barrenness contrasted so poignantly to the beautiful furnishings of the home in which she grew up. It was unforgettably moving to hear) among the great confusion of fragmentary utterances which she made, references here and there, as she looked at the bare-topped dresser and the few other items of furniture which stood in her room, to the "beautiful linen tablecloth," the "rug," the "lovely silver," and so on, with the most bereft of facial expressions. The suffering which she experienced in this regard-s-suffering which various of her other symptoms made impossible to alleviate at all quickly-s-seemed fully as immediate and intense as though she were experiencing feelings of loss of parts of her body. In the early months of the therapy she often used to grab at my penis, my glasses, my wrist watch, and my belt, talking fragmentarily of her own desolation at not possessing these, and it was my distinct impression that the

Psychosis and Neurosis

155

watch, the glasses, and other inanimate possessions caused her to feel as painful a lack in herself as did my penis. Another patient, a man in a manic psychosis, while also on a disturbed floor, clearly seemed to me, over the first few months of therapy there, to be holding onto some vestiges of rationality chiefly through his desperate acquisition of, and clinging to, many of the kinds of inanimate belongings-snch as beautiful books) expensive clothes, and so on-in which he had found a kind of shaky, social-prestige self-esteem for many years. Schilder (128c) says, Starcke has postulated that in psychosis the castration complex plays the same part as the Oedipus complex plays in neurosis. This would not be true if we considered only the genital part of the castration complex; but there is some truth in his statement if we consider the fear concerning the integrity of the body as a whole, which comprises the pre-genital activities as well as the genital ones. Fear of mutilation of any kind is based upon the narcissistic love of our whole body. The dismembering motive is the expression of the castration complex on the level of narcissistic self-love; in melancholia especially, where the sadistic tendencies are so cruel and strong, disruption of the postural model of the body is common. The melancholic subject denies the existence of almost any part of the body. He complains that his intestines have gone, that he can no longer urinate and defecate, that he has no limbs; or he may complain that his limbs have become enormous.

When one takes the above quotation from Schilder and puts it together with those other passages previously quoted {rom his volume, one sees that he has actually given us all the elements needed to form the hypothesis which I have presented-namely, that if various inanimate objects are experienced as being parts of one's body image, then separation from those objects may be experienced as a physical dismemberment, or other mutilation, of one's body itself. Schilder did not go on to reach such a hypothesis, however; Starcke had reached it as a theoretical reconstruction of what must have transpired in the life of the

156

The Nonhuman Environment

normal infant, but did not present clinical data-as I have tried to do here-indicative of this feeling-experience within the adult

patient. In this connection it is useful to quote briefly from Admiral Byrd's valuable book entitled, Alone: The silence of this place is as real and solid as sound. More real, in fact, than the occasional creaks of the Barrier and the heavier concussions of snow quakes . . . It seems to merge in and become part of the indescribable evenness, as do the cold and the dark and the relentless ticking of the clocks. This evenness fills the air with its mood of unchangeableness; it sits across from me at the table} and gets into the bunk with me at night. And no thought will wander so far as not eventually to be brought up hard by it. This is timelessness in its ultimate meaning. Very often my mood soars above it; but, when this mood goes, I find myself craving change---a look at trees) a rock, a handful of earth, the sound of foghorns, anything belonging to the world of movement and living things [22]..

And Thoreau, who during his two years of living alone in his hut at Walden Pond, with only the barest of civilization's artifacts to sustain him, had likewise an extraordinary opportunity to think upon the meaning of some of the elements of what I am here terming the nonhuman environment, elements which exist in the lives of most of us in such profusion that it is hard for us to assess their importance to us: We don garment after garment) as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis, or false skin} which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man [154]. . . . a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone [154a].

Psychosis and N eurosis

157

The latter of the above two quotations from Thoreau reminded me of a newspaper photograph which appeared following the death, a few years ago, of Mahatma Gandhi, showing the rnaterial possessions which this great man, whose spiritual richness has probably seldom been exceeded in all of history, had at the time of his death. They included only some ten articles--a pair of sandals, two or three books, a pair of eyeglasses, a garment, and a few other things. The total material worth of these articles was less than two dollars. But Gandhi and Thoreau are surely exceptional in this regard; for most of us, myriad material possessions form an integral part of our existence. I have been dwelling upon the feelings of physical mutilation, or intimate personal deprivation, which may ensue upon one's having lost various elements of the nonhuman environment which have constituted parts of one's body image. Closely related, of course, is the anxiety experienced by one who is threatened by such a loss which is impending. Such anxiety is most clearly discemible, in my experience, in those persons who have already, as a consequence of rapidly advancing psychosis, lost contact with nearly all of their nonhuman environment (as well, of course, as their human environment) and are striving desperately to hold onto, as it were, those few things with which they are psychologically in contact. On page 151 I described a young man who, upon being admitted to the hospital in a state of acute schizophrenia, showed to what a great degree he had lost contact with his nonhuman environment by gazing wonderingly at each of two simple, inanimate objects in his environment--thc overhead light. and the window in the door-and asking, in the naivete of a very small child) "What's that for?" One sensed how utterly unable he was to cope with any complexity in his environment, and how desperately important to him was his ability to register the perception of these simple items in his surroundings. Another young man, in psychoanalysis because of an obsessivecompulsive neurosis, remembered in detail his experiences when, some years before, he had undergone schizophrenic symptoms which had nearly, but not quite, overwhelmed him. These came upon him with almost instantaneous suddenness, in a setting

158

The Nonhuman Environment

which threatened him with the recognition of previously deeply repressed oedipal conflicts. In the course of less than two hours he had become so submerged in strange somatic experiences, so subjectively cut off from the human beings--his mother and father-about him, that he was in imminent danger of completely losing contact with reality. There was one thing) however, with which he managed to retain a sense of contact: a picture, on the wall of his bedroom, of a landscape. This one element in his environment provided him with a sufficient feeling of possessing a thread leading to reality, so that he was able to fall asleep and, by the following morning, the psychotic symptoms had become partially re-repressed, so that he was able to keep functioning, although these symptoms thereafter remained partially incapacitating for nearly two years. Savage, in another, as yet unpublished article concerning LSD psychoses, has reported a similar bit of clinical material:

. . . we forbade anyone to take the LSD in the absence of medical supervision. One person [who was not a psychiatric patient] decided to take LSD anyway. He took 100 micrograms of LSD and holed up alone with an audograph to record his experiences . . . [Then, as time passed, after he had experienced various other symptoms: ] He felt as though he were wrapped around with gauze and that an electric field insulated him from the rest of the world. He could barely change the record.. He felt that he was being sucked or drawn into the machine. He was then faced with the fact that he was completely unable to shake off the effect, that he was overwhelmed by it, that he had lost control and that he was totally incapacitated. . . . Some of his comments are quoted: "I heard a noise, thought it was the repair man coming to replace me. I thought I heard the repair cart ~ • . They turned on this machine to shake me •.. It certainly is a good torture device, being hooked up to a mind-reading outfit) thoughts being broadcast to the whole world." . . . he hated the recorder, felt chained to it, wanted to smash it, but was not sure if he would not be destroying himself. . . . [After about six hours] he alternately paced the floor and sat and

Psychosi: and Neurosis

159

stared at a piece of candy he had. He wanted desperately to eat the candy but felt that it was his last link with reality, and that if he ate it his last hold on reality was gone and he would be permanently crazy [127].

Here we see that to this individual in an LSD psychosis the audograph, although in reality an inanimate object, felt to him to be an indissoluble part of himself, and likewise another inanimate object, the piece of candy which constituted to him a last link with reality, possessed as much importance as though it were a part of himself which it would be disastrous to lose. In the last portion of his paper Savage ventures, on the basis of such clinical experiences as those which he has been reporting, a critique of the established modes of dealing with individuals who are in a state of acute schizophrenia: I would like to suggest that our treatment of the acute schizophrenic reaction is all wrong.. At a time when the schizophrenic is desperately trying to hold onto some vestige of reality, we do everything in our power to destroy his hold on reality. We take him from his home, from there to the police station, from there to the emergency hospital, from there to the admission ward, and from there either to the treatment ward or to the mental hospital. We cloud his sensorium with soporifics, and shock, dealing a blow to his grasp on reality. We isolate him. We put him in a quiet room, which seems about as unreal an environment as one could ask for [127].

Although Savage is focusing in this paper primarily upon intrapersonal and interpersonal factors, not explicitly stressing the importance of the nonhuman environment as such, it is implicit in the passage just quoted that a considerable part of the trauma suffered by the acute schizophrenic patient in the process of being "treated" conventionally as Savage has described-treated in such a way that his hold upon reality is further loosened rather than strengthened-resides in his being forcibly separated not only from persons at home who are familiar to him, but also from the familiar nonhuman environment of his home. Freud long ago

160

The Nonhuman Environment

described a symptom of the early stages of schizophrenia which has been subsequently described as being frequently encountered in this condition: a fantasy that the world is coming to ail end (46). This has been ascribed, in the psychoanalytic literature, to a withdrawal of libido from other human beings in whom the patient's libido had been invested (40b). Presumably an additional detenninant of this symptom, in those patients who have been subjected to such a chain of changes in environment as Savage describes, is the actual fact that the patient's known "world," the world which is familiar to him both as regards the other persons in it and the nonhuman elements in it, has been taken away from him," In the light of this integral importance which various items of the schizophrenic's nonhuman environment can possess for him) one sees how shockingly castrative is the coldly unfeeling disregard with which the parents are so often found to have dealt with such things. For example, a schizoid youth who had no friends was raising some ducks on his parents' farm, and loved to feed the ducks and to spend his time watching them. His mother, annoyed by the noise which the ducks made in the mornings, summarily had them sent away, with no regard whatsoever for their importance to her son. It was shortly after this that he developed an overt paranoid schizophrenia, which led to a series of prolonged hospitalizations. I do not mean, of course, to imply that this was the sole precipitating cause of his first psychotic break; I did get the definite impression in my work with him, however, that this had constituted an important trauma. When I undertook therapy with him, some years after the incident of the ducks, he was in his fourth hospitalization and had been committed as being hopelessly insane. Early in my work with him I had an interview with his father, who was also the legal guardian. • I stress this unfortunate side of patients' removal from their home surroundings because I feel it has been too little emphasized in the professional literature, The potentially beneficial aspect of this procedure has more often been pointed out, in such comments as this one by Rapaport (117): c'• .• the removal of the patient from his usual surroundings to a hospital, and psy. chotherapy itself, tend to deprive those defensive structures which have be.. come part and parcel of the patient's pathology of their stimulus-nutriment" and thereby undermine their eHectiveness and persistence."

Psychosis and Neurosis

161

The father commented that he had just had a chat with his son earlier that day, and had found him to be perturbed upon the father's mentioning that he had just sold the young man's favorite car. This car had been of the same order of importance to the patient as a bosom friend would be, and the {ather showed an utter lack of recognition of how much the car meant to his SOD, both as a personally cherished object and as a symbol of the hope that he might some day become able again to live outside the hospital. The father commented to me, in the same chillingly unfeeling way, that he had recently thrown away a lot of letters which his son had received from a girl friend-the only person with whom the son had been able to maintain a somewhat close relationship prior to this hospitalization. Similarly in the case of a thirty-six-year-old schizophrenic man, his automobile was of the greatest importance to him, both as having been a kind of most intimate personal friend and as being, now that he was in the depths of an unusually profound psychosis, a major symbolic link with life outside the hospital. His pleasure and confidence in driving had been, apparently, among the last of his normal activities to become invaded by the psychotic process, In the course of an interview which I had with his mother and father, at a time when it was touch-and-go as to whether the patient could ever manage to respond to our therapeutic efforts, and when he desperately needed the reassurance that his own family members cared for him and were genuinely dedicated to his recovery, his mother casually mentioned to me in an utterly matter-or-fact way, in passing, "We've sold his car. We haven't told him about it. We thought if he ever got out [her tone here being that with which one might comment, "if it doesn't rain tomorrow," or "if the morning paper doesn't come"] we could get him another one, anyway." Another measure of the emotional significance which nonhuman objects can possess for human beings is the grief that evidently wells up in a patient who, having long been hospitalized in rooms necessarily quite barren as contrasted to the surroundings to which he had been accustomed in his life at home, is suddenly exposed to surroundings relatively rich in those non-

162

The Nonhuman Environment

human elements, serving to remind him of the so much fuller life he had known before the onset of his psychosis. I think, for example, of one young woman, long hospitalized on the disturbed ward because of a severe schizophrenic psychosis, who upon starting to come to my office for her hours, at first seemed quite overwhelmed by the grief occasioned by her seeing my glass ash trays, the rug on the floor, the attractive desk, the drapes at the window, and so on-all being of a sort which are quite unremarkable by ordinary standards, but quite impossible to afford to persons as destructive as she had been. She made clear that the pain and grief which these caused her had to do with her being reminded of the furnishings of the beautiful home in which she had grown up. This woman, incidentally, is the same person whom I mentioned earlier as being some one whose feelings of physical mutilation seemed to be in part attributable to her having been separated from her familiar nonhuman environment. Material possessions, and other nonhuman elements, had been of much more than ordinary importance in her upbringing, deficient as it was in love from the human beings about her. As a second example of this same point, I shall mention briefly my work with a schizophrenic man who helped me to see, quite clearly, what may in many cases be the psychodynamics at the basis of the frequently seen circumstance that schizophrenic persons want all or nothing. That is, they function in the following terms, and often actually verbalize them: "I have to have my life just as it was before, or I don't want anything. I'm not interested in simply having the opportunity to go into Rockville or Washington; I want only to have restored to me all my life as it was.') In other words, they seem to demand the whole loaf; they show no interest whatsoever in having a quarter of the loaf, or half of it, or even nine tenths of it. This particular man made me realize that it was, in a sense, much lese; painful for him to remain constantly in bed, not doing anything, than to walk about out of the hospital and about the nearby conununity. When he began doing this latter, he would see people tending their lawns and their flower gardens, and this

Psychosis and Neurosis

163

overwhelmed him with grief and nostalgia about the lawn and the flower garden which had been, as it were, his dearest companions at home. Some of my frustration at this man's extreme slowness in leaving my office, at the end of each psychotherapeutic session, was resolved when I realized that he was lingering not primarily because he wanted to make life difficult for me, but because he loved to sit and look at the telephone} which was to him like a piece of his former life} a piece which he was not able to sit and gaze upon during his life on the ward. So I came to realize, in short, that it was more tolerable to him to have, as it were, nothing of his former life in the nonhuman environment about him now than to be exposed to various inanimate reminders of that life, a life which he could not yet have in anything like its entirety. It is my belief that such a process is at the basis of many patients' great difficulty in making the transition from living on a sparsely furnished disturbed floor to living in an unlocked hospital building, or an outpatient residence, where they are now exposed to so many grief- and nostalgia-stimulating elements in this more complex nonhuman environment. In this same connection I shall mention briefly two other clinical examples. I recall feeling profoundly moved by a description, given by a woman newly admitted to the hospital for a chronic manic-depressive psychosis at the moment in a hypomanic phase, of how she had felt upon being allowed to spend a day or two in the marital home where she had lived for many years with her husband and her three children, a home which she had not seen for several years because of prolonged hospitalization. She had only this brief interlude in her home before having to come, at the insistence of her family and the advice of the doctors, to Chestnut Lodge for further hospital treatment. All the children were grown up and had left this home some time before. What was most poignant in her account was her description of her treasuring the time she could spend with the inanimate but deeply cherished furnishings of the horne, including furniture, pictures on the wall, and so forth, which she had known and cared for long ago, before her illness began. It seemed so clear to me that it had been to a great degree upon these things that

164

The Nonhuman Environment

her love, over the years before her illness, had been bestowed. My impression was that her husband and children, who had much reason to shun her because of the dominating, devouring quality of her efforts to give them love, had given her to feel that it was only these inanimate things in her environment which did not reject her reaching out-which could, as it were, accept her love. Similarly, another patient, upon returning to Chestnut Lodge after her first visit to her marital home in two and a half years, told her therapist that she came to realize, during that visit, how much of her feelings had been directed, all along, toward objects rather than toward people. The next point I want to make is a hypothesis that the ideational content of a psychosis may be looked upon as an effort to fill the void left by the loss of reality-including, importantly, the loss of the familiar nonhuman environment, as well as the loss of contact with important other persons.. 'That is, my clinical experience has suggested to me that-as I have been indicating by the foregoing clinical examples-the loss of the familiar nonhuman elements of the patient's environment leaves in him a greater feeling of loss (whether conscious or, more often, unconscious) than we have realized, and, further, that such psychotic phenomena as his hallucinating of abundant nonhuman as well as human figures may constitute an unconscious attempt on his part to avoid experiencing the fullness of this loss. Although the dread which we hear expressed by neurotic or prepsychotic patients, concerning the horrors which the prospect of "going crazy" holds for them, is perhaps most often couched in terms of their anticipating that insanity would bring into their life various experiences which would be in themselves terrifying, it is not a new concept in psychiatry that, when such dreads (con.. cealing often, as is well known, unconscious longings) are swept aside, the really greatest trauma that psychosis actually brings, the actually greatest suffering that it causes when it comes, is to be found in the loss which it entails-the loss in the sense of relatedness to other human beings, the loss of psychological and physical functions which regression involves, and-I wish to stress here-the loss, too, of those myriad nonhuman elements in

Psychosis and Neurosis

165

the home environment which have formed an integral part of the individual's personality functioning. In this connection, we find that Fenichel has stated that In neuroses two steps must be distinguished ~ (a) the repression of the objectionable demand of the id, and (b) its return in a distorted form. In the development of psychoses two analogous steps can be seen: ( a) the break with reality, and (b) the attempts to gain the lost reality. However, as Freud has pointed out, there are characteristic differences. In neuroses, the second step, the return of the repressed from repression, is of more importance in producing the illness; in psychoses, loss of reality causes the pathological result

[4Oc]. And he comments, concerning delusions, that they represent "an attempt to supplant the lost parts of reality" (40d). Thus Fenichel stresses the importance of the loss inherent in psychosis, although, as usual, he implies that he has in mind only the loss of other human beings. Hill shows at least a cognizance that what I am terming the nonhuman environment is of some importance when he says, concerning the changes in an individual's subjective experience upon his becoming schizophrenic, that UWhat is lost is an adequate grasp upon the perceivable environment, particularly the human environment, and the ability to evaluate its meanings" (78b; my italics) . Even such an implication that there is a nonhuman environment, which may possess psychological significance, is rarely encountered in psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature. Werner states that . . . in the incipient stages of schizophrenia the invasion of the subjective forms of activity into the objective world is felt not as an enrichment of the content of the personal life] as with normal primitive types] but as an impoverishment. A patient says: "Reality, as it was formerly, no longer exists. Real life has suffered a decline." 5 There is a specific sign, a sign not present • This clinical item is from Storchls volume (148) t now out of print.

166

The Nonhuman Environment

in other primitive types, which is characteristic of schizophrenic reality, and that is its insubstantiality. Provided that the schizophrenic is not already completely wrapped in his own delusions, is not making himself at home in an entirely autistic reality, he will frequently feel this de-differentiation of objectivity as a loss of a stable, substantial, secure world [162u].

Furman (56), in her description of a severe ego disturbance in a girl about three and a half years of age, includes a comment which suggests how great a loss, in one's experiencing of the surrounding nonhuman as well as human environments, may result from the utilization of denial as an ego defense: Carol used internal and external denial extensively. She would not see or hear. • . . As she began to express herself verbally, she summed up her defense once, when she saw a block building, by saying, "Sometimes I am angry with the building, and then it's not a building."

The impoverishment of the perceived world for some adult schizophrenics I have known, traceable in part to this mechanism of denial, is difficult to exaggerate, and approximates that of the subject in the isolation experiments described by Heron et al. (74) and Lilly (95). In these latter situations, as is by now well known, hallucinations occur as if to fill the void caused by the ex.. perimentally induced sensory deprivation. With one of my adult schizophrenic patients whom I had long known to be hallucinating frequently in auditory, visual, and oHactory spheres, it came as a source of amazement to me when she was able to convey how unpeopled and otherwise bleak was the basic perceived world, for her, upon which these hallucinatory phenomena-were projected. In one hour with me, for example, though sitting only a few feet from me and looking into my face, she anxiously conveyed to me that she felt herself to be on a deserted street; her anxiety about this went far beyond what a mere reproach to me, for not being more interactive with her, would imply. Another patient finally confided to me, after years of therapy, that she had long doubted that anyone really exists. Another schizophrenic

Psychosis and Neurosis

167

woman (the patient of another therapist on the staff}, to whom I gave a lift in my car on the hospital grounds, asked with a bereft facial expression and in an anxious tone as she sat down next to me] "Do you think there is any world there?" I replied, wannly and reassuringly, "Sure-there's plenty of world there.. You doubt it sometimes?" To this she said, in a way which left me deeply moved, "I doubt there is any world left, because of my experiences." 6 In the previously mentioned account by Admiral Byrd there is a passage which is of value for this particular point. During his almost unendurably lonely months at his Antarctic outpost he became exposed after a time to carbon monoxide fumes, from a defective engine] which nearly cost him his life. In his description of the despair which he experienced when his physical state was at its lowest ebb, he gives us a profound glimpse into the importance which one's nonhuman environment-as well, of course, as one's human environment-possesses in giving one's life its dearness, its deepest meaning: The dark side of a man's mind seems to be a sort of antenna tuned to catch gloomy thoughts from all directions. I found it so with mine. That was an evil night. It was as if all the world's vindictiveness were concentrated upon me as upon a personal enemy. I sank to depths of disillusionment which I bad not believed possible..... eventually, my faith began to make itself felt; and by concentrating on it and reaffinning the truth about • In this unconscious denial of outer reality, as in the instance of every other symptom of schizophrenia, there can be discerned evidence of not only a pathologic process, but also of a restitutive, or striving-toward-health process. This latter is revealed in the circumstance that the denial of outer reality serves to provide the patient with a more or less blank screen upon which a necessary reprojection of pathologic introjects, an externalization of mternal conflicts derived from the past, can now be effected. This unconscious denial of the outer world can be seen) thus, to provide a tool analogous to the relatively "neutral screen" atmosphere which the psychoanalyst deliberately attempts to foster) in working with the neurotic patient, in the knowledge that such an atmosphere promotes this potentially useful projecting and externalizing. The psychot.i~ patient is usually so overwhelmed by the welter of Introjects which emerge, onto the blank screen which I have described, that it is difficult for the therapist-who often finds himself overwhelmed by the welter of projections coming from the patient-s-to realize that there is this potentially constructive side to the matter.

168

The Nonhuman Environment

the universe as I saw it, I was able again to fill my mind with the fine and comforting things of the world that had seemed. irretrievably lost. I surrounded myself with my family and friends; 1 projected myself into the sunlight, into the midst of green, growing things. I thought of all the things I would do when I got home; and a thousand matters which had never been more than casual now became surpassingly attractive and important. But time after time I slipped back into despond. Con... centration was difficult, and only by the utmost persistence could I bring myself out of it. But ultimately the disorder left my mind; and, when I blew out the candles and the lantern, I was living in the world of the imagination-a simple, uncomplicated world made up of people who wished each other well, who were peace... ful and easy-going and kindly [22a; my italics] .

I do not possess unequivocal clinical data concerning this point; that is my reason for terming it only a hypothesis. That is, I cannot present clinical material clearly portraying patients' utilization of psychotic ideation to fill the void which has been caused by the loss of familiar reality, in particular nonhuman reality. But the following clinical vignette, despite its "human" frame of reference, shows the kind of process which is, I believe, at work also as regards the nonhuman environment. The patient was an ambulatory schizophrenic young man who was in psychotherapy with me in an outpatient clinic. His paranoid ideation was so formidable that he could barely maintain himself outside a hospital and he lived, of course, an extremely isolated existence. He initially sought psychotherapy partly because of his being tortured b-y obsessive thoughts of a homosexual nature. Mter a time, as he began to respond to psychotherapy, I noticed in one of the hours that there were now two indications that he was improving: he no longer referred to his feeling of loneliness as something constant, but rather as being, now, intermittent; and he mentioned that he was no longer having the "perverted thoughts," as he called them. But then, during the next hour, in emphasizing to me his loneliness, he said in a distinctly regret.. ful tone, "I don't even have the fears [that is, the "perverted thoughts"] I used to have. Sometimes 1 compare which is worse

Psychosis and Neurosis

169

[the "perverted thoughts" which he used to have, or the loneliness which he now feels]. Before, I had so much to think about that I didn't have time to think about feeling lonely. Now I haven't anything to think about. It's all loneliness." Throughout much of this chapter I have been emphasizing that the nonhuman environment is more than normally important to the ego of the developing individual-typically a very lonely individual-who subsequently becomes schizophrenic. On the immediately preceding few pages I have been stressing the importance which the loss of this nonhuman environment represents, therefore) to the individual who, having become psychotic, is now separated from that environment which had been familiar to him and had formed, to a considerable extent, a part of his very ego. There is another form of "loss" of the familiar nonhuman environment, a more chronic state of affairs, which can be seen in neurotic as well as psychotic individuals. This is actually more accurately described as a failure to develop an even average degree of relatedness with one's nonhuman environment, because of one's need, in growing up in a home setting of much intrafamilial tension, to be constantly alert to emotional undercurrents flowing among other persons, and between oneself and these other persons. Similarly, some children are hampered in their development of a feeling of direct relatedness to their nonhuman environment if their parents "spoil" them by incessantly bathing them in a kind of basically destructive admiration and approval, or scorn and disapproval, for the children's way of dealing with various nonhuman objects in the environment. In such circumstances, the child's need to become acquainted with his nonhu... man environment in its own right is interfered with by reason of his becoming convinced that this nonhuman environment is not to be meaningfully related to directly, as giving pleasure which can be an end in itself, but rather only as a means of gaining the parents' approval or of avoiding the parents' disapproval. There are many moments in a child's life when he or she needs to be given the privacy to relate to the nonhuman environment, and when a parent at such a moment starts to shower praise, for

170

The Nonhuman Environment

example, on the child, this does indeed "spoil" what has been an important ego-building experience. In a subsequent chapter I shall present clinical data bearing upon this point. ., This latter kind of "loss" of the nonhuman environment seems to be more characteristic of those persons who are still striving for interpersonal acceptance; the more deeply ill persons) those who have become largely reconciled to their own unacceptability in the eyes of the human beings about them, are the ones who tum to their nonhuman environment and endeavor to make the most of it. I have expressed my conviction that the normal individual and the schizophrenic individual are alike in having experienced a developmental phase in which the ego is subjectively indistinguishable from the surrounding environment, including the nonhuman elements in that environment; and, further, alike in that the unconscious (now, in the schizophrenic, to a considerable extent in consciousness) possesses much content material which is of nonhuman origin (that is to say, which originated from past perceptions of elements in the nonhuman environment). I have stated that one sees in the schizophrenic person, by contrast to f Since this passage was written I have come upon a paper> U yet unpublished, by Brodey (19) which presents relevant data from his work at The National Institute of Mental Health. He participated in a most interesting investigation, beaded by L. Murray Bowen, which involved the plychothecapy of schizophrenic patients and their familles, housed on the same hospital ward. On the basis of two years of experience in this study he presents, among other findings, evidence of the schizophrenic patient's blotting out much of external reality and reacting to the mother's inner workings 35 if these were the on ly reality. Incidentally, this schizophrenic experience of external reality which Brodey reports is reminiscent of the lack of significance attributed, in such psychoanalytic literature as that by Elkisch and Mahler, Spitz, Tausk, Hartmann, and the others whom I have mentioned, to the nonhuman environment in its own right. It seems to me that these writers have assumed, as the prototype of the normal ego state in infancy, a state of affairs in the infant-mother relationship which is in actuality highly pathological-namely, such a state of affairs as is found by Broder to exist between the schizophrenic and his mother, in which the mother's own ego organization is so fragile that the child must accept her projections and denials as constituting his only external reality. Brodey's data are closely comparable with some of the transference data from my individual work with patients. See, for example, the data (p. 352) indicative of a patient's apparently experiencing me as comprising the totality of her external reality---comprising even the walls of her room.

Psychosis and Neurosis

171

the situation obtaining in the normal person, an impairment of the ability to distinguish between the self and the surrounding nonhuman environment, with, at times, extraordinarily intense anxiety in this connection. As this volume proceeds I shan endeavor, from time to time, to explain why the schizophrenic differs from the normal person here. For the moment, let me bring up only one of the developmental factors which, I think, make for this difference: the schizophrenic person had, as a child and as an adolescent, to tum more than did his normal counterpart to various elements in his nonhuman environment~to books, to animal pets, to trees, and so on-in search of the companionship, the relatedness, the reassurance of there being a meaning in life, which he was not finding to an adequate degree in his relations with other human beings. From the history of, and from intensive psychotherapy with, one schizophrenic person after another I have found abundant data pointing toward such a lonely early life, a life in which the nonhuman environment was not merely of great importance but, it would not be too much to say, of life-saving importance. In the instance of one schizophrenic patient I have treated, our social worker included the following remarks in her report of an Interview with the mother: "From the mother of the patient I get a picture of a conforming child who realized that it would be easier for her if she did not do things which annoy the mother, Her childhood may have been isolated because I got nothing of friends and playmates in the picture. Material posses.. sions were bountiful and the girl and her brother both went to the very best of schools, had parties, etc. When she got out of school she had a Packard convertible." In my own work with this patient I found evidence that the "material possessions" had been of as much importance to her as though they had been, literally, of her own flesh and blood. I have seen a number of instances in which a schizophrenic patient had evidently succeeded, for many years, in staving off the eventually overwhelming psychosis, chiefly through the maintenance of a relationship with a dog, a dog that provided the individual with the com.. panionship, the love, and the assurance of being needed by the

172

The Nonhuman Environment

individual, which were unobtainable from the available human beings. One such patient revealed, upon the outbreak of his schizophrenic psychosis, a capacity for psychological insight which his family members had never suspected; one of the statements now made by this man who had been, they felt, entirely contented with what had been in actuality a life almost incredibly desolate as regards human relationships and rendered supportable mainly by a faithful cat, was, "People should love people, not cats." Much later, after many months of psychotherapy, this man man.. aged to convey to me his cherishing of our relationship; he had not yet achieved the ability to express fond feelings in an unambivalent way, but when on one occasion he protested to me, "Why have you treated me like an animal here?" his tone was actually one of love and gratitude which quite overbalanced the ostensibly condemnatory content of his question. It was evident here that, for him, being treated "like an animal" meant being treated with genuine love---Iove such as he had bestowed upon his cat over the years, for lack of family members who could receive and value it--despite the usual conventional meaning of that expression.. A schizophrenic woman had been reared in a very strict Methodist rural home in the Midwest, with very little companionship beside her paranoid mother, her paranoid maternal grandfather, her bullying elder brother, her dog, and a number of horses, I have never had experience with another such therapeutically resistant, paranoid folie deux as that in which this patient and her mother were enmeshed. It was not surprising to find that the modicum of emotional health which persisted in this patient had been) apparently, a function of her experience with nonhuman elements in her home environment. The nurses used to report that) on the ward, she was "acting horsey't-s-just one of the indications that she had formed identifications with the horses who had supplied so much of her childhood's healthy companionship. This patient, whose name was Miss Holden, was still childless as her childbearing potentiality was drawing to a close,

a

Psychosis and Neurosis

173

and for some years she had been poignantly expressing her desire to carry on the family name (there being no married male siblings) by naming a succession of her horses "Holden /' "Holden ," "Holden ~u and so on. In one of her psychotherapeutic sessions) although she never showed grieI about the separation from the human beings of her childhood, she once said, looking out at a tree neat her window, "There's a tree like that down in Reedville (the small community at the edge of which she had grown up]," with tears streaming down her cheeks. Two of the few occasions when I felt that I was being allowed a glimpse into the nonpsychotic areas of this deeply ill woman's personality came during a few walks in which I accompanied her about the hospital grounds. On one such stroll, the trees were covered with sparkling ice on a beautiful winter's morning, and she showed appreciation of this scene in a rare moment of freedom from psychosis. During another walk, in the spring, as we went by a barnyard where two horses were standing, she approached them) patted their heads and spoke to them tenderly, with a kind of confident familiarity) a freedom from anxiety, such as I had never seen her manifest in relation to any human being. Hill gives us a description of a somewhat similar patient, whose emotional relatedness was, likewise, strikingly in reference to her nonhuman environment: I recall one patient who, being afraid that the house was wired, would not talk to me in her home but insisted on walking in the garden, through which ran a stream.. To my moderate distress she picked out of the stream a little red scorpion, a tadpole, and a frog and insisted that I hold them while we talked. It developed that this girl lived what to her was her real life out in this garden. She was on intimate terms with all the cold-blooded animals and a good many of the plants. I made some comment upon the absence of human beings, and the girl informed me that she would have supposed that I, a psychoanalyst, would interpret the scorpion-a little red fellow-as having to do with her father's penis. She went on to add that she could not tolerate her father

174

The Nonhuman Environment

in any form and was glad to know that I had not regarded the scorpion as representing him. She then went on to explain which of the cold-blooded animals represented her mother. One turtle in particular reminded her of mother in its well-encased defensiveness, Others of the animals represented a sister and a dead brother. I never found out which of them represented me. This girl had some ability in writing poetry, none of which made any reference to human beings other than herself [78a].

I come, now, to this chapter's final theoretical point: the inability of the schizophrenic to make clear distinctions between himself and his nonhuman environment, and between the human and the nonhuman elements of his environment, fonns one of the roots of his inability-an inability described by Goldstein (62), Benjamin (to), and others-to employ figurative language knowingly, Le., knowing it to be figurative. Do we not see that first-mentioned inability reflected in, for example, the following language peculiarities of the schizophrenic as described by Arieti? If one says, "When the eat's away, the mice will play:' a normal listener will understand that by cat is meant a person in authority. A schizophrenic patient gave the following literal interpretation of that proverb: "There are all kinds of cats and all kinds of mice, but when the cat is away, the mice take advantage of the cat." In other words, for the schizophrenic the word "cat" could not acquire a special connotation. . . . Many beginners in the field of psychiatry get the impression that schizophrenic language and thought are highly metaphorical and poetic. In reality it is not so. . . . For instance, a schizophrenic will be able to identify a man with a wolf on account of a common characteristic, greediness, but will not be able to accept the concept wolf as a symbol of greedy men [4a]. That is, in my experience, the schizophrenic patient's thinking is largely restricted to a literal, concrete level because he must struggle to distinguish bettueen, for example, human beings and animals, or human beings and inanimate objects. He is not able to make such distinctions sufficiently easily to be able to move 00,

Psychosis and Neurosis

175

in his thinking, to the higher level of being able to refer to alI these in abstract, figurative terms, terms which so often involve equating one kind of perceptual object with another, in many ways very different, kind of perceptual object. He is too prone to mixing all of them up, in his thinking-too vulnerable to confusing them with one another, even at a literal leveL A schizophrenic man was sitting, during a therapeutic session, on the couch near me, looking at my face as he talked in a pleading, protesting way, asking for answers to various questions. As usual, I was not attempting to answer these, but rather was pressing to hear more of the thinking which lay behind them. He seemed to be trying, as was his long-established custom, to get some reaction from me, by trying to get me to give answers, or by trying to make me laugh, or what not. His demeanor kept conveying that he felt it hopeless to make me behave toward him differently from my being, as he interpreted my investigative approach, "always angry-my therapist is always angry at me." He next said, in very much the same tone of discouragement and exasperation, that his father had recently purchased some heavy floor lamps for the parents' apartment, lamps so heavy that one could move them only with great difficulty. I commented) "And you feel, perhaps, that your therapist is like the heavy floor lamps-very hard to move?" I was trying to encourage his expressing his feelings-feelings which had been communicated for many months by his facial expressions and his verbal tone, but which he had never actually verbalized in any detail-eonceming my way of responding to him. At this comment he laughed as though it were ridiculous, saying, "No, I know you're not a floor lamp, Dr. Searles." I persisted, "But do you feel there's some similarity-that both the floor lamp and I are heavy, hard to move?" He replied, still laughing as though the idea were utterly ridiculous, ccNo-I know you're not a floor lamp. There's a floor lamp," he said, pointing to the one in my office, "and there's Dr. Searles," he finished, pointing toward me. For somewhat more than two years, this man repeatedly expressed to me his conviction, an unmistakably sincere conviction,

176

The Nonhuman Environment

that I was crazy. He was sure of this for the reason, among others, that I use such figures of speech as that described above. It eventually became clear that the precariousness of his own ego boundaries, a condition which had been inconspicuous because of his fairly good social facade, was such that he was not yet able to think in such figurative terms. One indication of his proneness to confusion in this regard was his extreme concern, shown for some months during his life on the ward) to keep his material possessions from becoming "mixed up with" those of other patients. After approximately three and a half years of therapy, this man began to show the very fundamental change of now being able more and more to think and converse effectively in figurative terms and, by the same token, in comparative terms. It was now possible for him to compare one person with another and one relationship with another; to compare his own feelings, so mixed and rapidly changing, with the changeable weather which sometimes included simultaneous rain and sunshine; and so on. His thinking was now at last freed from its attachment to the concrete, the literal; and the therapy accelerated as if it had found wings. Clinical experiences of this kind indicate that, in normal development, the establishment of finn ego boundaries is necessary to the evolution of metaphorical (and other varieties of symbolic) thinking} as a number of writers (41, 45, 90) 91, 97, 98, 138) have stated. But we find in this material a hint, too, that the process works in the other direction as well: the evolution of symbolic thinking is one of the factors which helps to free the child (or the adult who is recovering from schizophrenia) from his erstwhile identification with the nonhuman world. I have mentioned Kris's discussion of the reasons for the late appearance, in the history of art, of caricature; he pointed to the evidence of a decrease in peoples' belief in image-magic} and I mentioned that the same evidence he adduces suggests) also, that people had achieved, by now, a sufficiently comfortable differentiation from the nonhuman world that they now found it not sinister} but humorous, to see themselves caricatured as animals

Psychosis and Neurosis

177

or inanimate objects. One passage from Kris's chapter on this subject was very reminiscent, to me, of the above-described man's significant new freedom from concrete experience: The birth of caricature as an institution marks a conquest of a new dimension of freedom of the human mind, no more, but perhaps no less, than the birth of rational science in the work of Galileo Galilei {8ge].

Anxiery Lest One Become, or Be Revealed As, Nonhuman

CHAPTER

7

The psychopathological phenomena which will be presented from now on, in this chapter and in all the subsequent ones in Part Three, are referable to the basic ego defect 1 which I have just been discussing: the inability of the psychotic patient-and to a lesser degree, of the neurotic patient-fully to distinguish between his self and the nonhuman environment about him. These phenomena will be seen to be either facets of, ramifications of, or in some instances contributory causes of, that basic

confusion. 1 When I say "the basic ego defect" I mean, of course, basic 10 far as this special subject of the nonhuman environment is concerned; I am not trying to say that this defect is more basic or important than various ones which have to do with the patient's int.,personal relatioDi--8uch as his not yet having achieved a clear realization, at a deep Ievel, of the ego boundaries deiimiting his self from other people. Always, in this book, I am deacribing what] believe to be a major s'gment of developmental psychology and psychopathology~ rather than the whole of these subjects.

Psychosis and Neurosis

179

& has been indicated already, in the small bits of clinical data which I have presented thus far, this basic confusion results in, on the one hand, disturbances in the patient's conception of his self, and, on the other hand, disturbances in his conception of his environment. These two broad consequences thus provide us with two categories-admittedly arbitrary and somewhat artificial-into which the clinical data about this entire subject, this actually so unitary subject, can be arranged for the sake of an organized presentation. Chapters VII through IX will focus upon disturbances in the first of these two broad categories - disturbances in the concep.. tion of the self-and Chapters X through XII will deal with disturbances in the conception of the environment. Chapter XIII, the final chapter of Part Three, will discuss both such disturbances as seen in the setting of the patient-therapist relationship. So) now, I shall begin with one of the manifestations of the psychotic or neurotic patient's warped conception of his self: his anxiety lest he become, or be revealed as, nonhuman. In 1952 Szalita-Pemow (152) made, in a paper concerning schizophrenia, the following important comment: "While the term regression is used primarily to designate a definite defense mechanism, I consider that regression in its main structure is what we defend ourselves against." In my own work I have seen this statement convincingly documented in a number of instances, by patients who showed an unmistakable-and well-founded-anxiety lest they regress to an infantile state, with all the devastating loss of adult functions which such a change would entail. One might, it has seemed to me, think of this as one form of castration anxiety; certainly it is hard to think of a more effective form of "castration" than such regression, when it actually occurs, brings with it. But the concept which I wish now to advance goes a step further and, to the best of my knowledge, has not previously been stated in the literature. That is, I believe that we (l.e., human beings in general) have anxiety-usually at an unconscious level, and under extraordinary circumstances at a conscious level-

180

The Nonhuman Environment

not merely lest we regress ontogenetically (to an infantile or an intrauterine state, for example) but also lest we regress further, phylogenetically as it were, to an animal, vegetable, or even inorganic state. Such anxiety is particularly intense, in my experience, in neurosis and psychosis-above all, in the latter. Evidence for this concept presents itself in a number of areas; I shall deal with the more general of these areas before tuming to that of my own major interest, psychotherapy with schizo.. phrenic patients. The myths of ancient Greece and Rome reflect mankind's anxiety and fascination with this subject, in their richness in incidents wherein. human beings are changed, sometimes by wicked beings, more often by avenging gods, into animals, trees, or stones (66). A few among many examples are the Gorgons (creatures with wings and scales, and with snakes instead of hair on their heads) turning into stone whomever gazed upon them (66a) ; the enchantress Circe's turning men into swine and other animals (66b); Niobe's being changed into a stone by the gods, because of her arrogance toward them (66c); and Callisto's being changed into a bear by jealous Hera) whose husband Zeus had fallen in love with this young maiden (66d). The following myth of Dryope, being brief, can be given in full: With her sister lole she went one day to a pool intending to make garlands for the nymphs. She was carrying her little son, and seeing near the water a lotus tree full of bright blossoms she plucked some of them to please the baby. To her horror she saw drops of blood flowing down the stem. The tree was really the nymph, Lotis, who fleeing from a pursuer had taken refuge in this form" When Dryope, terrified at the ominous sight, tried to hurry away, her feet would not move; they seemed rooted to the ground. Iole watching her helplessly saw bark begin to grow upward covering her body. It had reached her face when her husband came to the spot with her father. lole cried out what had happened and the two, rushing to the tree, embraced the still warm trunk and watered it with their tears. Dryope had time only to declare that she had done no wrong intentionally and to beg

Psyohosis and Neurosis

181

them to bring the child often to the tree to play in its shade, and some day to tell him her story so that he would think whenever he saw the spot: "Here in this tree-trunk my mother is hidden." "Tell him too," she said, "Never to pluck flowers, and to think every' bush may be a goddess in disguise." Then she could speak no more; the bark closed over her face. She was gone forever [66e].

Fairy tales likewise show mankind's concern with this subject; in them, also, the tragedy often presents itself in the form of the hero's or heroine's being turned into some nonhuman form, and the final triumph is represented by a liberation into human fonn once more, or, in some instances, liberation into some beautiful form of animal life. Two of Hans Christian Andersen's tales may be mentioned as examples. In The Wild Swans, eleven princes are turned, by their stepmother, the wicked queen, into wild swans, and are eventually freed into their human form again by their devoted sister, who casts over each of them a shirt which she has knitted out of flax made from stinging nettles, thus breaking the spell (2). In The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, an arrogant, selfish little girl falls into the clutches of a witch who turns her into a statue. She is eventually liberated, many years later, by a child's sympathy and by her contrition, and flies away as a bird (2a). In the Bible (Genesis 19: 26) we find, of course, the oft.. repeated story of God's turning Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. And Christian sects have long held that man is separated from the Godhead primarily by reason of his own "animal" impulses -sensuality, greed, and so on. Dante's Inferno (27), the classic conception of Christianity's Hell, which was written in approximately 1307 t describes, as a punishment of one group of the damned, their having been turned into stunted and poisonous trees:

own

Not green the foliage, but of colour dusky; not smooth the branches, but gnarled and warped; apples none were there, but withered sticks with poison [27a].

182

The Nonhuman Environment

And Dante tells of his experience with them, when, unknowinglyThen I stretched my hand a little forward, and plucked a branchlet from a great thorn; and the trunk of it cried, UWhy dost thou rend me?" And when it had grown dark with blood, it again began to cry: "Why dost thou tear me? hast thou no breath of pity? "Men we were, and now are turned to trees: truly thy hand should be more merciful, had we been souls of serpents" [27b].

In general literature, too, we find not infrequently the theme of a person's turning into some nonhuman form. In Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (147), the quite civilized Dr. Jekyll turns at times into the subhuman monster, Mr. Hyde. In Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (86), a man awakens one morning to find that he has been transformed into a giant insect. These horror stories are only two of the best known among many such accounts. John Collier, a specialist in what the Germans call Galgenhumor (literally, gallows humor), mixes amusement with horror in his short story, Green Thoughts (24), about a carnivorous plant, among the fronds of which the heads of its victims appear in succession. Such stories occupy a fairly prominent place among those which fill the pulp magazines of fantasy and science fiction; irrespective of the literary merit of such magazines, the popular appeal of such stories-which a glance at any newsstand shows-is a significant psychological fact, and is the point which I am making here. I shall present clinical material, concerning the anxiety lest one regress to an infrahuman level, from two schizophrenic patients. Data to be found later, concerning subsequent theoretical points, will be seen to substantiate this point also. One might phrase it thus: the habitual utilization, in the face of recurrent or chronic anxiety, of this particular ego defense, namely that of dedifferentiation, or regression, to a state of subjective oneness with the nonhuman world, interferes, more than does the utilization of other ego defenses (such as, for instance, the intellectualization employed by the obsessional or

Psychosu and

~euro~

183

the dramatization employed by the hysteric) with the development and maintenance of a sense of humanness, an identity as a human being. A thirty-one-year-old paranoid schizophrenic woman, whom I saw in intensive psychotherapy for somewhat more than two and a half years, showed this type of anxiety as one of the most prominent elements in her complex delusional system. For example, here is a portion of a nursing report: Between 1 and 2 A.M. lying on hall seat-looking thoroughly miserable. "I feel tenible all over, and if they tum me into a fish again I'll die" (It was storming at the time-rain just pouring down).

In one of her psychotherapeutic hours, she mentioned to me that she had been shaking lately, and demanded to know what was coming next, protesting that she had already been "every sort of animal in the Ark, and birds, too." Her conversation throughout the hour repeatedly returned to the theme of "fright." Although at times this woman would produce such material in a facetious tone, there were many occasions when she produced it in obvious terror, in unmistakably genuine anxiety lest she be turned, not figuratively but literally, into a fish, or a cow, or a tree, or a stone. During another of her hours with me she ges.. tured, in great anxiety, toward another woman patient on the ward who had been nearly always, for months, standing mute and motionless in the hall, and loudly demanded, "Why, look at Grace Phillips! Is there any difference between her and a cow chewing its cud or a hOISe standing in a pasture? Why, this is the most unhealthy environment In She then went on to emphasize her own determination to keep talking, giving me the distinct impression that she felt threatened here lest she regress, as she evidently considered various of the other patients to have done already, to an animal state. I found, in many hours with her, much evidence that this threat under which she labored wast in a sense, quite real: her archaic superego was so crushingly strong vis...a-vis her extremely

184

T he Nonhuman Environment

weak ego, that nearly every one of her daily activities had to be struggled through, by her, in the face of heavy taboos. As one example, many of the normal activities (such as work in the occupational therapy department) which she managed to continue were the cause of much misgivings to her; she felt them to be contributing to the cause of various malevolent persons whom she hated, and she brought herself to these activities only because she felt her life simply could not be borne without them. In this same vein, it is quite understandable why she felt threatened by seeing a considerable number of the patients about her to be tremendously inhibited in their activities; it was as if they were being even more defeated by their superego than she was. In another of my hours with her, something of the psychodynamics of this particular anxiety of hers emerged unusually clearly: Near the beginning of the session) she said, "My throat hurts," and added determinedly, "They're not going to turn me into a tree. I was a rock once," she went on} in a tone as if to say, "and I'm never going to go through that sort of thing again I She then continued, at length, to deplore and protest about the-to her-e-fact that "they tum people into trees." She emphasized the absurdity of this practice, in view of the fact that there is no lack of trees from natural sources-from seeds of other trees. She mentioned, in passing, "I used to dig up seedlings and transplant them, and take care of them,' as if to illustrate that trees can be obtained from natural sources. She said, "One time I was in a place where they turned people into trees. It was on the West Coast} supposedly. They were called 'liveoaks,'" she emphasized, looking at me signifi.. cantly, as if to indicate that this name was a giveaway. She went OD, looking squeamish and distinctly anxious, "It was eerie-I don't want to talk about it." Later, with some encouragement from me to continue} she added, "There was an ann---a branch [correcting herself]-tom off one of them, and it didn't look like wood. You could see the fibers, like muscle fibers," She looked unusually uneasy and squinny as she said this. Later in the hour she said, protestingly, "It would be underU

PS'Ychosis and Neurosis

185

standable if they got bored and wanted to turn a tree into a person-make a friend-as the next project," but, she emphasized, there is no lack of people or of trees; so why do they tum people into trees) and trees into people, she protested. This particular statement had a very poignant quality; it conveyed her intense--though always, of course, stoutly denied--loneliness, her need for a friend. I noticed that at one point in the hour she made a reference-unusual for her-to her two young children, saying that for all she knew they were grown up and married and had children themselves now, "But I don't have anybody," she said, feelingly. On two occasions during this hour) the superego inhibitions under which she labored became apparent. At one point) she said that she would like to subscribe to a magazine, The American Home, which she used to read at home before her hospitalization, but that she now felt very uneasy about doing this, because all the numbers and initials which she found on the subscription card might, she felt, refer to part of "the plot," and she feared that if she subscribed she might unwittingly be volunteering to become turned into an animal, or some other nonhuman entity.. At another point, she mentioned that she did not like to tell me the things she heard around here, because what with the matter of persons' being able to disguise themselves as some one else, she might, without meaning to, incriminate innocent individuals. Thus, when one looks over the material from this hour, one sees a number of likely determinants for her anxiety lest she be turned into something nonhuman: ( 1) Her need for a friend drives her to the wish-fulfilling delusion that trees can be turned into persons-which carries with it the possibility that she might be able to acquire a friend in this way-and this opens up to her the frightening conviction that this process works the other way, too: persons can be turned into trees. (2) Her need for love contributes to the delusion that she might be turned into trees: trees are things which are cared for; she mentioned that she used to "take care of them." (3) Her hostility, her wishes io dismember people, are glimpsed in the comment about the

186

The Nonhuman Environment

liveoaks; it is as if she were so eager to see people dismembered) in retaliation for the suffering they have supposedly brought upon her, that she unconsciously likes to think that damaged trees are really people who have been dismembered. But, of course, if persons can be turned into trees, then this presents the threat that this might happen also to her. (4) Her crushingly self-punitive superego, as already indicated, constantly threatens progressively to stamp out her human activities, her personality functioning, until she reaches a state which she literally considers to be that of a cow or a tree, for example. In touching upon some of the determinants of this kind of anxiety, I am anticipating the material of the next chapter. In that chapter, concerning the desire, conscious or unconscious, to become nonhuman, the matter of such determinants will be explored in detail. This woman's anxiety in this respect is very similar to that of a male catatonic patient, the psychodynamics of whose illness was described in a highly illuminating paper by Nunberg, A passage from Nunberg's paper (109) shows this similarity: Since a detailed discussion of the entire delusional system would take us too far afield I wish to limit myself to the most essential features only: And what first strikes us as least clear is the fearful delusion that the patient might change into an animal, a worm. This "procedure' as our patient called his "Theory of Transfermation" is not restricted to human beings, it is rather a process that takes its course in the entire world, for all living creatures go through a "migration," changing successively into ever-lower beings, until they become inanimate objects like plants, minerals, dirt, and so on. From dirt, however, new life springs, a reverse transformation starts in tum, up to the human being; and that continues endlessly. Not only are men subjected to this process of transformation, but also the earth, the whole world.

The delusions of these two patients bear considerable likeness not only to the beliefs of ancient peoples such as the Greeks and Romans ( as reflected in their myths), but also to the beliefs of present-day followers of Buddha, who believe that the

Psychosis and Neurosis

187

imperishable soul of a human being has been at times in the past, and will be at times in the future, incarnated in various animal forms as well as human ones. The second patient, a twenty-six-year-old man who upon admission to Chestnut Lodge was suffering from acute catatonic schizophrenia, undertook psychotherapy with another of the therapists on the staff. This colleague, in a presentation of the patient's case before the staff, mentioned a number of points which indicated anxiety on this man's part lest he become nonhuman" Prior to his hospitalization, the patient had been noted at times to walk stifily, "like an a utomaton." He manifested, early in his stay in the hospital, a loss of ego boundaries, such that he sometimes felt at one not only with other persons (such as his wife, his hospital roommate, and so on), but also with nonhuman objects" He referred to himself at times as "it," while crouching on the floor in a fetal position. On one occasion he said to his therapist, confusedly, "1 am not the whole ward-I am not a ward of the hospital." One could interpret this latter in figurative terms, particularly because there had been in the past-although not recently-some talk of committing him; but to him this seemed to have a quite literal meaning: it was as though he were unsure that he was not a ward, a section, of the hospital. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (85), provides a vivid description of this anxiety, as recounted to him by an individual who had suffered a period of melancholia: . . . suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non ..human. This image and my fear entered into a

188

The Nonhuman Environment

species of combination with each other. That shape am 1, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear" [85b].

It will be recalled that the individual reported in Savage's unpublished paper concerning LSD psychoses, the person who unauthorizedly administered LSD to himself and then closeted himself with an audograph to record his experiences, experienced anxiety lest he become part of his nonhuman environment: "He felt that he was being sucked or drawn into the machine"

(127) . It has appeared to me that the phenomena of uncertainty as to whether one is male or female, a phenomenon long known to occur frequently among schizophrenic individuals, often overlies-masks, as it were-a more basic uncertainty as to whether one is human or nonhuman. I was interested to find that Nunberg, in his account of the catatonic man who was anxious lest he "change into an animal, a worm," says of this man at another point that "According to his statement he has always been uncertain to which of the sexes he belonged." Nunberg goes on to quote the patient, here, as saying, "I am at one time a man, at another time a woman" (t09a). A patient whom I have treated, a young man whom I began seeing upon his becoming hospitalized for acute schizophrenia, catatonic type, provided some suggestive material concerning this hypothesis; I have encountered comparable material with the majority of all my schizophrenic patients. As a sample of the kind of data this man produced in this regard, I shall give some portions of one of the hours I had with him while he was continuing psychotherapy on an outpatient basis, after the subsidence of the acute phase of his illness. Early in the hour, he spoke of "wanting to be sure" whether he were going to obtain a certain college-faculty position which

Psychosis and Neurosis

189

he had been seeking. He showed considerable tension in saying this. I suggested, "Let's see what 'wanting to be sure' brings to mind." He replied, in a small voice, after some blocking, "Wanting to be sure whether you're a man or a woman." The "you" seemed to be referring to myself, rather than to have been used in a general sense. Later on in the hour, after material some of which I shall mention below, when I came back to this "Wanting to be sure whether you're a man or a woman" and asked for associations to it, he replied, "I said 'you'; but I had myself in mind." This was only one fragment of data, among many which emerged during my over-all work with him, suggesting that he felt uncertain not only about my sex, but about his own. What I wish to emphasize here is the kind of material which he produced in the interim, in this hour, before I returned to this theme of "Wanting to be sure whether you're a man or a woman." The free-associational material in this interim consisted in detailed, unusually fond recollections of the relationship which he had had as a child with a Negro handy man in the household-a relationship whose emotional richness evidently stood in marked contrast to the relatively barren relationship he had with each of his parents--with occasional, similarly fond, references to his (the patient's) dog; he had long since made clear, in the analysis, that this dog had been very dear to him. At one point along here, when he was reminiscing about the servant's telling stories to him and showing him how to do various jobs about the house and grounds, and about his own love of playing pranks on the servant-a kind of teasing which the handy man. had evidently enjoyed as much as had the boy himseH-I commented on the contrast between the fond, lively, enjoyable relationship between him and the handy man, and the in many ways tense, unhappy relationship he had had with his father. He agreed, indicating he had not had such a pleasurable, close relationship with his father, and added, moreover, "or with my mother." Somewhat later in this interim, he brought

190

The Nonhuman Environment

out material which clearly showed how much despair he had felt about trying to identify with either his father or his mother. On the basis of such material as this, substantiated by confirmatory data scattered through preceding hours) I suggested to him that his uncertainty about his own sex seemed to overlie a deeper uncertainty as to whether he were a person, pointing out his felt inability to identify with either his father or his mother, and his childhood experience of feeling, instead, emotionally closer to his dog and to the Negro servant who had been, I conjectured, perhaps not regarded by him as being a person. He promptly nodded assent at this last, saying, "He wasn't considered to have any intellect." The patient, who at this phase of his analysis was seldom receptive to interpretations, seemed to accept this particular formulation as a meaningful one to him .

The Experiencing of Parts of One's Self As Being Nonhuman Next I shall consider those patients, whom one encounters from time to time in clinical work, who react to various parts of themselves as being nonhuman" It is as if such patients have particularly abundant reason for their anxiety lest they become wholly nonhuman, for parts of themselves have already, in their subjective experience of these parts, become so. In Chapter VI were described, in illustrating the basic confusion between the self and the nonhuman environment, a few patients who showed this particular phenomenon. Recall, for example, the patient who demanded of a nurse, "Why did you take that piece out of my head?" referring to her head as though it were an inanimate thing, and who on another occasion shocked me by saying that the whole left side of her head "is gone" .. caved In," again as if referring to an inanimate object. Such patients, in reacting to parts of themselves as being nonhuman, are utilizing a primitive form of projection whose origin has been described by Fenichel as follows: The first judgment of the ego distinguishes between edible and nonedible objects: the first acceptance is swallowing, the first

Psychosis and N eurosis

191

rejection is spitting out [51]. Projection is a derivative of the first negation; it has the content of "I want to spit it our' or, at least, of "I want to put distance between it and myself," Projection is essential in that early stage of development of the ego which Freud has called the purified pleasure ego [48] in which everything pleasurable is experienced as belonging to the ego (Usomething to be swallowed"), while everything painful is experienced as being nonego ("something to be spit out")" So long as the line of demarcation between ego and nonego is not yet sharp, which is true in the early years of childhood and again in psychoses, the mechanisms of the state of the purified pleasure ego may be used by the ego for defensive purposes" Emotions or excitations which the ego tries to ward off' are "spit out" and then felt as being outside the ego [40c].

One schizophrenic woman, while standing during an hour with me, stuck out her left arm rigidly toward me and said, in a tone of loathing and hostility, "Here, you want to fix the tennis racket?" A feeling of awed, shocked discovery came to me, that she was literally unsure but what her arm were really a tennis racket. The reader may find such an interpretation incredible; he may think that the patient was merely highlight.. ing what a boob of a therapist she had, who did not know his patient's arm from a tennis racket. I can only re-emphasize my conviction as to what she was experiencing here, a conviction based upon my sensing her anxious confusion about herself (conveyed behind, as it were, the loathing and hostility), and based upon my discovering on many other occasions that she was far more confused about herself than I had thought possible. A patient of one of my colleagues confided to his therapist a delusion that a wolf had gotten into the patient's stomach and had gradually eaten up more and more of his insides, growing bigger and bigger, until now the wolf had replaced all of him except his skin. One of my patients indicated that she felt her voice not to be her own, because it said things which she would never say. I once treated a thirty-one-year-old woman who had been hospitalized because of a depressive condition. Although her

192

The Nonhuman Environment

symptomatology was neurotic, with mixed depressive, hysterical, and obsessive-compulsive features, her basic personality structure was predominantly narcissistic in the immaturity of her object relationships. As therapy progressed, I was interested to discover that she showed a single basic orientation toward ( a) other persons, (b) the elements of her nonhuman environment, and (c) parts of her self which were, subjectively, nonego: all these were experienced by her as being equally unmanageable, inanimate objects. Her reacting in this spirit to parts of her self is, of course, the aspect of her situation which is of special relevance here. In the course of my two years of work with her} she vituperated against various of her own psychological functions, physiological functions, and anatomical parts. In aggregate these rejected functions or parts comprise a long list, of which the following are only some examples: her poor memory, her tears, her chronic nasal discharge, her hand in which she still at times experienced pain following a severe bum some years before, her menstruation, her brain ("It's a hell of a brain l" ), her round shoulders, and her chilly body. At times, she spoke of each as if it were an inanimate object outside her. The price which a patient pays for his utilization of such a defense, in terms of the jeopardizing of his conception of his over-all seH as being human, can be seen in the following more detailed description of such a case. This thirty-one-year-old woman evidenced, at the time I undertook intensive psychotherapy with her, paranoid schizophrenia with, as it were, an extraordinarily hard shell of chronic defenses against anxiety. She had already been hospitalized for two and a half years, and a previous therapist here had stopped work with her in discouragement at the resistivity of her delusional thinking and of her other psychotic defenses. One of her most prominent delusions was that, as she put it, "I'm a machine ..• I have no control over myself.') She was convinced that machinery had been installed into her abdomen and that a chain had been fastened upon her heart, long ago, in order to control her, and that her head had likewise been

Psychosis and Neurosis

193

tampered with for the same reason, She retrospectively misinterpreted the purpose of several surgical operations which she had undergone, earlier in life, to fit in with these delusions. That is, she was convinced that a frontal sinus operation, done when she had been a child of seven) had consisted in "their)' putting a hole in her head as a way of running her as a machine; that a removal of a benign tumor from her left breast, at age fourteen, had consisted in "their" placing a chain upon her heart; and that an appendectomy at age nineteen had amounted to "their') installing machinery, designed further to ensure "their') control over her, into her abdomen. She had been making, for years here in the hospital, incessant demands to be sent to a "real hospital" where she could have operations by trustworthy surgeons who would remove the machinery and the chain. Although it was, as the reader may surmise, relatively easy to find figurative meaning in what she said about these things, the manner in which she expressed these delusions left no doubt that she meant them liteTall~that, for example, she was quite literally convinced that there was an actual chain upon her heart, and actual machinery in her abdomen. It quickly became apparent that a repression of various af· fects was at the basis of her experiencing these, and various other, parts of her body as being essentially nonhuman instruments of "their" will, or laden with inanimate objects (the chain, the machinery) . At the beginning of my work with her, her general demeanor conveyed the degree to which, figuratively speaking now, this repression had rendered her machinelike. Her face, instead of reflecting the spontaneous, frequently shifting play of feelings which is shown in the facial expressions of normal persons, was a mask of tense musculature. In my notes concerning one of our earliest hours I described her facial expression as one of "stony hopelessness," and I was reminded of this phrase when, months later in therapy, she revealed her anxiety lest she be "turned into a rock." Her massive repression did indeed tend to render

194

The Nonhuman Environment

her rocklike-figuratively so to the observer, literally so in her own subjective experience. Her speech, too, bad a flatness of tone and a stereotyped repetitiveness of phraseology which were distinctly machinelike. As time went by in my work with her, her experiencing of herself as being so largely nonhuman-so largely being comprised of, or filled with, metallic or otherwise hard, inanimate partsgradually resolved into a freer expression, and evidently greater subjective awareness, of the various emotions which had been, while under their former repression, evident to her only in this congealed, delusion ally distorted form. For example, in the fifth week of our work, when she said that she was constantly "filled with radioactive material," her erstwhile stony demeanor had already come to reveal so much evidence of anxiety (trembling hands, dilated palpebral fissures, and so forth) that it was easy for one to translate "radioactive material" as "anxiety"-although at this point she still had largely to deny to herself any such translation of it. . Likewise when, after about a year of our working together, her grief started to come closer to her awareness, she began to do a great deal of weeping. Still for some months, however, she evidently did not experience the grief in awareness} but was aware only that something--perhaps, she thought, poison gas liberated by "them" into the room where she was sitting--was causing the "cords in my neck to tighten, and tears to come to my eyes." At first she would describe such experiences in a strikingly dispassionate way, as if she felt herself to be merely an observer at a mechanical performance being worked upon her body. In one hour, when she was more trusting toward me than usual} she confided that she felt that "the church must control my tear ducts, because tears just suddenly corne out without any ideas connected with them." I replied, "So that makes you feel that they must be caused to come by some outside source?" She said, "Yes." I went on, "You don't feel that they may be coming from inside?" She replied, uncertainly, "Well, sure, I know there's a subconscious [the first such acknowledgment by her in more than nineteen months of my work with her]; but with that, at least

Psychosu and

JVeuro~

195

you have an idea" along with the emotion. This helped me to see how understandable was her impression that the weeping was being caused by some controlling agency outside herself. In the same period of our work together, about nineteen months after we had begun, when her feelings of both grief and fondness were emerging much more openly and her formerly almost incessant paranoid tirades had become a rarity, I realized that I had not heard anything for months now about the chain upon her heart, which she used to complain of, or rage about, in practically every hour. It was as if a chain had been, indeed, removed from her positive feelings. Over this same period of time, her references to "machinery" in her abdomen changed into progressively more meaningful communications-communications which shed increasing light upon the basically emotional, interpersonal, origin of this delusion. In the sixteenth month of our work, she put it that "different parts of my anatomy have been compromised by different nations," i.e., controlled by different nations-her gut by one nation, her heart by another, and so on. She went on to give data about her childhood which strongly suggested that this delusion was traceable to conflicting loyalties toward various servants of different nationalities. She still had largely to repress any feeling of fondness or dependency) however, and so could not yet ex.. perience her conflict in psychological terms; she still loudly asserted that she cared for no one, and never had cared for anyone. For some time still, she expressed her abdominal sensations in, as it were, inanimate terms: she kept demanding to have an abdominal operation to "cut the strings" which bound her to various persons-particularly persons whom I could see to represent mother figures to her, whom she consciously hated and feared, and toward whom she unconsciously felt tender and dependent. But in the twentieth month she expressed this, now, in frankly human terms, so to speak, when she protested feelingly, not in the usual paranoid-raging fashion, but in a vigorous effort to get me to see how she feels, "Why, I'm not even myself! If you don't think that's humiliating 1 Those people are in my bowels and in my stomach and in my heart! If you don't think that's

196

The Nonhuman Environment

humiliating!" She then reverted quickly to her demand that she be sent to a cereal hospital" for an operation to "cut the strings" that bound her to those people. The long and productive work which we carried out subsequently} which I cannot detail here, carried much further, and established in the form of increasing emotional health, the trendfrom inanimate to animate, from nonhuman to human---of which I have sketched, above, the early phases. In the literature there are two case reports, one by Ekstein (32) and one by Lisbeth J. Sachs (123) which, despite those authors' traditionally psychoanalytic interpretation of their clinical findings} portray their patients' evolution from a predomi.. nantly nonhuman identity to a predominantly human identity in the course of successful psychotherapy} very reminiscent of my experience with this woman" Ekstein, in his paper entided, "The Space Child's Time Machine," reports, from his work with a borderline schizophrenic boy who had been nine years of age when therapy had begun and was now twelve, the evolution in the patient's fantasied time machine as the therapy progressed. Whereas it had been at first a weird contraption, much removed from ordinary human experience, it came to be a lovely little house with colorful doors and windows. With this latter revelation the boy poignantly asked: "Does that mean that I'm getting better now that I'm building things that look like houses even if they are not?" Also, this time machine no longer took him back millions of years but, for example, five years only, and Ekstein tells us that "He now did not speak about the past in archaeological and historical terms but the past had now assumed personal significance. It was the past in his own life." Lisbeth J. Sachs, in her paper entitled, "On Changes in Identification from Machine to Cripple," gives an extraordinarily moving accout of the changes in a boy who, when he began therapy at the age of five years, showed much evidence of regarding himself as a machine, and who over the course of three years of treatment reached a firmly established conception of himself as a human being, although as yet a crippled one. At the

Ps~cho~

and lVeurostl

197

beginning of therapy he avoided human companionship and spent his time in solitary impersonation of machines, uttering weird sounds and showing machinelike behavior. When asked to draw a person, he drew a machine. As therapy proceeded, his behavior and speech became more and more human in quality, and his drawings-a series of which are reproduced in the paper -took on increasingly human characteristics:

The changes in identification were clearly expressed in his drawings. As "treatment progressed, Robert drew a machine with such human features as eyes. Gradually the drawings began to resemble human beings, though they looked more like embryos than boys of his own age, as would be expected from a healthy child. Later he was able to draw people, quite sophisticated, with a considerable amount of detail} but these figures were crippled. They were either peg-legged or hook-armed [123]. Still later in the therapy, the boy went on to draw normal human beings, both children and adults. Sachs shows, in the course of her paper, that the boy would transitorily revert to his identification with machines at times of increased stress, after this identification as a persistent and predominant modus vivendi had been relinquished." Incidentally, I believe that the clinical data I have presented here, from this paranoid woman who at the beginning of our work had felt herself to be so predominantly a machine and who became subjectively human as therapy proceeded} help to fill at least some of the gap in OUf scientific observations which Tausk (153), in his paper on the influencing machine in schizophrenia, mentioned: "One of my adult schizophrenic patients, who for yean had shown evidence of a predominantly nonhuman identity. recently indicated to me that she felt there to be a flower growing out of her leg« Her tone, in indicating this by a few words along with a gesture toward her leg, made clear that she found this a pleasurable rather than a grotesque experience. It was as though she felt, here, a cherished remaining link witb the nonhuman world of which she had felt herself to be, earlier in her illness, 10 predominantly a part,

198

The Nonhuman Environment

It is necessary to assume . . . that the influencing apparatus represents the terminal stage in the evolution of the symptom, which started with simple sensations of change. I do not believe that heretofore the entire sequence in the development of the symptom could have been studied completely from a single case . But I have observed the connection between at least two stages .. " and I have no hesitation in maintaining that under especially favorable circumstances it may be possible to observe the entire series of developmental stages in a single patient.

Since Tausk's day, the psychotherapy of schizophrenia, although still highly imperfect, has developed to the point where, in at least some instances, as in the case of this woman I have described and in the instance of the boys whom Ekstein and Sachs have described, we have the good fortune to see a [auorable evolution of these phenomena, rather than the evolution in the direction described by Tausk-namely, into increasing depths of illness.

The Genesis of This Anxiety: Its "External" Root

The genesis of this anxiety-the anxiety lest one become, or be revealed as, nonhuman-is a complex subject. For the sake of an organized presentation here, it may be thought of as possessing two roots, one based in causes "external" to the individual (i.e., causes operative in the environment in which he spent his formative years), and the other based upon the "internal" psychodynamics of the individual himself. Such a dichotomous portrayal of this over-all causation is, of course, to a degree artificial, rather than being inherent to the nature of the psychological processes which obtain in the over-all, actually unitary, field comprised of the individual-in-his-environment. a lIt is probable that there is also, in each Individual instance, a third root which I shall not attempt to discuss here became it u a nonspecific one: any anxietyll from whatever source-i-whether from the surging into awareness of previoully repressed incestuous feelings, or murderous feelings, or grief, or whatever other affect---which is sufficiently severe to precipitate the patient'l regression toward the ego state of the infant's subjective oneness with the nonhuman environment, can be thought of 8J one of the roots of this particular anxiety which I am discusling here.

Psychosis and Neurosis

199

In the next chapter I shall deal with the "internal" root of this particular anxiety; there, the thesis will be developed that much of such anxiety is a cloak for, and consequence of, the individual's repressed desire to become nonhuman. For the moment I shall deal only with the "external" root: the individual's having been dealt with by his parent(s), during his upbringing, as being nonhuman (an inanimate object, an animal, or whatever). That is, my experience suggests to me that the individual was dealt with in this fashion often enough, and long enough, and by a person or persons whose opinion of him was sufficiently important to him, that he developed a now-repressed conception of himself as being other than human. My data have consistently indicated to me that the basis for the parent's functioning in this fashion resides in the parent's own anxiety about closeness with the child, and consequent need to react to the child as if he or she were on an utterly different plane of existence, were an entity of an entirely different species, from the parent. An aspect of this whole matter is that the child is, as it were, left alone to deal with his "animal" impulses- his need to be cuddled and stroked, his desires to stroke the body of the parent, his need to kiss and be kissed, and, as time goes on, his developing sexual feelings. The subsequent experience of finding that the parent pays little or no heed to his own individual ideas, opinions, intellectual interests, and so on, only adds to the child's conception of himself as not fully possessing the dignity of a human being, as being instead, more or less, something subhuman. During an interview with the mother of a schizophrenic girl, I heard a memorable expression of how a woman who is anxious about her own "animal" desires may feel upon becoming a mother and relating herself, now, to that veritable bundle of such desires, her infant offspring, She said, regarding each of her four children in their infancy, that she wanted intensely to hold them but, knowing that she herself had been nervous in childhood and adolescence, she was afraid her children would become so. Her anxiety about this was heightened by something she read in a Government pamphlet about child rearing, which "stressed that

200

The Nonhuman Environment

if you picked up babies or handled them much it would make them nervous." She went on, "I enjoyed it so intensely, holding them, that I wondered if there were something wrong with me. You know-having a baby's head on your shoulder, and cuddling it." There was much poignancy in this; I felt she possessed a great deal of maternal tenderness} but was intensely anxious about this in herself. She added, in a very uncertain tone, "Over the years I've wondered about that feeling"-wondered whether it was a normal feeling. In recent years, she said, she had been pleased to find that she felt this same feeling toward her grandchildren when she was holding them. "So I felt it was me, and not because of my glands, like a mother kitten." But she said that she still wonders about this, and does not understand it. It is not hard to imagine something of what it must do to the infant and, later, to the growing child, who is on the receiving end of such a maternal attitude, in terms of the developing conception of the self. This particular mother seemed to me remarkable not in terms of having such an attitude, but in being able to express it; I have seen many such mothers of schizophrenic patients who exhibited such an attitude but, their anxiety in this regard being probably still greater, were not able to verbalize it." One sees precisely the same sort of anxiety-about-closeness in many fathers, too. Such parents are described in detail by Kanner in the third of his series of articles concerning what he calls "early infantile autism," which he considers the earliest possible manifestation of childhood schizophrenia, occurring as early as within the first two years of life. I do not mean to imply that all the adult patients, from whom I have presented and shall present clinical material, are to be thought of as having manifested, in infancy and very early childhood, the particular syndrome to which Kanner gives the title "early infantile autism"-although, indeed, one of these patients has been reported} by Darr and Worden (28) as such a case; it is Kanner's description of these • Hill, in his previowly mentioned book, lays, ··A few of the mothen lof schizophrenic patients1 report that they discontinued nursing because they found it pleasurable" (?8e).

Psychosis and Neurosis

201

parents in which I am interested here, for they sound just like the parents, so far as I have known them at first or second hand, of adult patients who manifest the anxiety lest they become nonhuman.. By way of a preface) it should be mentioned that Kanner describes early infantile autism as follows: ••• the characteristic features consist of a profound withdrawal from contact with people, an obsessive desire for the preservation of sameness, a skillful and even affectionate relation to objects [by this, Kanner means inanimate objects], the retention of an intelligent and pensive physiognomy, and either mutism or the kind of language which does not seem intended to serve the purpose of interpersonal communication [87]. [Concerning the parents of these children, Kanner says] One is struck again and again by what I should like to call a mechanization of human relationships [87a]. The parents' behavior toward the children must be seen to be fully appreciated. Maternal lack of genuine wannth is often conspicuous in the first visit to the clinic. As they come up the stairs, the child trails forlornly behind the mother, who does not bother to look back . The mother accepts the invitation to sit down in the waiting room, while the child sits, stands, or wanders about at a distance. Neither makes a move toward the other. Later, in the office, when the mother is asked under some pretext to take the child on her lap, she usually does so in a dutiful, stilted manner, holding the child upright and using her arms solely for the mechanical purpose of maintaining him in this position [87b]. The children were, as modern phraseology usually has it, "planned and wanted." Yet the parents did not seem to know what to do with the children when they had them. . • . The mothers felt duty-bound to carry out to the letter the rules and regulations which they were given by their obstetricians and pediatricians. They were anxious to do a good job, and this meant mechanized service of the kind which is rendered by an overconscientious gasoline station attendant [87c].

Brodey (18) presents interesting data from a mother-child relationship, data suggestive to me of how the child, in this par-

202

The Nonhuman Environment

ticular kind of interaction with. the mother, would tend to grow up equating his own individual self with an inanimate object: This mother whom I shall call Mrs. Crompton had come to the children's clinic because she was terrified that something dreadful would happen to her 5-months-old child because she stated "he could not burp." The over-all picture indicated, it was mother who was moving rapidly into a psychotic episode. Her hypochondriacal symptom she had externally located in the body of her child. I watched Mrs. Crompton play with her infant boy, I noted that she was only aware of movements in the child that she herself had "initiated"-if the child smiled in response to his mother's smile, the mother responded. If he smiled of his own accord, Mrs. Crompton, though desperately clinging to the child's every move, was entirely unresponsive, and it seemed, unaware. The child's autonomous smile did not seem to exist for her, in any way. It did not alter even the timing of Mrs. Crompton's frantic efforts to have the child smile. Mrs. Crompton was aware that her baby did not burp as she expected. She concluded "logically" then that the baby "must be full of gas," It was this lack of symmetry with mother's expectation that became the focus of Mrs. Crompton's fears for the baby's welfare, and her diagnosis that the child was sick. The operations of this relationship are quite different from those of the mother who responds to the child's smiling however it happens to smile. Mrs. Crompton did not at any time acknowledge the child's lead. The child existed only as a distant "herselj," an image superimposed on the child which denied its separate existence. This image she must energize and direct.

It may well be partly as a result of such mothering as Kanner and Brodey describe that we find a patient functioning as though he were an inanimate object. A particularly vivid example of such patients is the boy described by Elkisch and Mahler (33) who was fascinated with light switches and other kinds of machinery and who, as they tell us, behaved as if he himself were a rnachine: Stanley appeared to be unable to express his emotions and affects other than in the most primitive and extreme forms . . .

Psychosis and Neurosis

203

If he displayed any emotion at all, it would be either in a state of extreme panic, or in orgiastic ecstasy. At other times he showed complete apathy or even a catatoniclike stupor. As these two crudely extreme fonns of affective behavior sometimes alternated within one treatment hour, sometimes even several times back and forth, it seemed to the observer as though the boy were switching himself, as it were, from one mode of behavior into the other. Once he had switched himself u on/ ' it often seemed as if the emotion were generated from within him, as from an enginean engine gaining momentum and running so powerfully that the child had no way of stopping it. Moreover, the emotions which Stanley seemed to turn "on' and "off," like one of his switches, were created by him in a most peculiar and rather "unemotional" way. The child, evidently knowing that certain emotional expressions were expected of him by his environment and, in his attempt at adaptation, trying to comply with those expectations, at times gave the impression that he made himself "learn" emotions.

Stanley, in his apparent effort to "learn" emotions, is very similar to the schizophrenic woman described by Eissler (31 ) , who in many interpersonal situations experienced herself as being dead, and "The feeling of deadness set up a tabula 1'D.saJ so to speak, upon which the ego artificially could put the socially required emotion, like a painter puts the correct pigment on the

canvas." Next I shall present brief clinical material, from nine different

patients, to highlight this etiological factor which I have described. 1. A schizophrenic woman, twenty-nine years of age at admis.. sion, a person with whom I carried an intensive psychotherapy for some years, often functioned in what might be caIled a nonhuman manner. At times she painted herself, and moved, like a marionette; at other times, like some kind of indescribable apparition. She often made sounds which were like nothing human. This brief portion of a nurses' daily report is one among many of the same kind: "Patient on ward at change of shifts, at end of hall cackling

204

The Nonhuman Environment

like a hen and squealing like a puppy getting his tail twisted." At various phases of the therapy, personnel members were in agreement that her laugh sounded now witchlike, now like a chicken, now like a yelping dog. In one period, she spent her psychotherapeutic hours, for more than two months, standing motionless in a comer of my office, silently, obdurate to either verbal encouragement or physical efforts to help her to sit down; later on she divulged that she had felt herself to be treated "like furniture" here in the hospital-i.e., utterly ignored-and hence was determined to behave "like furniture." She showed, for several months following her admission to the hospital, terror lest she be raped. Much of this was traceable, historically, to her relationship with her father, who was extremely anxious about sexual feelings, and had taught her to look upon sexual activity as literally robbing one of one's status as a human being. This became clear when, as her terror about sex gradually subsided so that she was able to start talking about this subject, she made the following statements in an hour with me = "There must be some other way [to have a baby] than by a man's penis. There must be., through food or something •.. Sex from the waist up is enough to satisfy any man . . . My father said people turn into animals [during the sex act]." An incident which occurred a few months after her admission helped to make clear that her terror about sex had partially to do with an intense sadism with which, in her experience-particularly her experience with her father-sex had long ago become linked. One of our female psychiatric aides, assigned to be present during a visit by the father to his daughter, was amazed at what she saw taking place. The patient behaved, not surprisingly-for this was typical of her behavior here in the hospital at the time-in a seductive fashion, with her skirt up above her knee, and giggling. The thing which stunned our aide was that the father reacted to this by poking at her, nudging her, not in any friendly, playful way, but as if his daughter were some sort of strange animal which he were poking with a stick. Later on I had occasion to see repeated in therapy this patient's father transference, as well as her identification with her father

Psychosis and Neurosis

205

in this same respect. She had established a transference toward a male psychologist on our staff as a father figure, a transference which was remarkably unyielding, for a long time, to therapeutic efforts. It was decided that he and a woman therapist here, who had been working as a team in sitting in on therapeutic sessions in cases where treatment was going poorly, should do so in this case.. It was hoped that this might in general help to clarify my relationship with the patient, and that it might specifically help to clarify something of the patient's transference to the psychologist, whom I shalI refer to as Dr. Graham. The postinterview notes which I made during that consultative period} written long before I had developed the concepts embodied in this book} are, I think} of considerable value here: Second session: During this session I got some new. slant on possible psychodynamics in Betty. I was noticing how very much she was treating Dr. Graham like an animal) oftentimes teasing and tormenting him, sometimes doing it in what seemed an uncruel way, but always doing it as though he were a type of organism essentially different from herself.. Along with this, she made some comment during this hour about how "it would be uncivilized" (or her to want something or other-I think she mentioned that it would be uncivilized for her to want any vigorous sex with Dr. Graham. . . . What I wondered, regarding Betty's psychodynamics, was whether she may have some repressed conception of herself as being an animal, a conception which she projects onto other persons, including Dr. Graham, and treats them as animals.

Third session: What particularly impressed me about this hour was that, even more than yesterday, she talked to Dr. Graham in a tormenting fashion which kept reminding me of a person's pulling the wings off a fly and causing it to die slowly, or of a jailer's teasing, taunting, tormenting (often with a pseudo affection and solicitude) a prisoner before killing him. Sixth [the final] session: At the beginning of the hour, she came and sat at Dr. Graham's feet, as has often happened before; but this time her expression was clearly son-awful rather than seductive, and throughout the hour, even though she went through a

206

The Nonhuman Environment

lot of puppy-dog, marionette, and to some extent prostitute sort of behavior, her mood was clearly a heavy-hearted one. She repeatedly spoke to Dr. Graham in terms of his being her father, and often asked, "Don't you think I look like a puppydog?" At one point she kept trying to get him to say whether she would not look better if she put Imra [a depilatory] on her eyebrows, and then put on eyebrow pencil.

2. A paranoid schizophrenic woman, twenty-five years of age, early in my work with her often misidentified herself, not only as one or another among many other persons, but also as one or another sort of animal. In one hour she confided, with forced casualness, "Of course, I'm Rin-Tin-Tin,' a dog which she had seen in a motion picture shortly prior to her hospitalization. For several months, as she later brought out in therapy, she had been seeing many movies each week, and identifying so strongly with various of the characters in them that she literally felt herself to be-not only during, but long after, any particular movie-this or that figure in it. When I expressed incredulity at her statement about Rin..TinTin, she said, nonchalantly, "Oh, people can turn into animals." I asked, "Do you mean that they can become animallike in their feelings or behavior, or actually in their physical form?" She replied that she meant they can become so in their physical form, and asked, "Did you see that picture, Fantasia [a Disney cartoon movie]?" I replied that I had. She reminded me, with unmistakable seriousness, that in that picture people tum into animals. The reader, here, may think that the patient was merely pulling my leg; but my work with her convinced me beyond doubt that she was genuinely so deeply confused about her own identity, and so unable to distinguish a cartoon movie from reality, as literally to consider herself to be a dog. During another hour, referring to a rash upon her skin, she explained that she was "getting a new skin; I do this every year," as if she felt hersell to be a snake. In still another session with me during the acute phase of her psychosis, she mentioned her having seen a movie about a vampire woman, and added uneasily,

Psychosis and Neurosis

207

looking at her left hand, "That changed me for quite a while afterward." Then, still looking at her hand and starting to flex the fingers, she mumbled something about "claws." In many other hours, she produced material which suggested that she conceived of herself, consciously or unconsciously, as being an animal-usually a dangerous kind of animal. Her anxiety concerning her murderous feelings constituted one of the greatest problems in therapy. Throughout the fifteen months of my partially successful work with her, she proved to be the most intensely scornful individual whom I have ever known. It developed that she perceived other persons as being as devoid of humanness as, in the above-quoted comments, she felt herself to be. She sneeringly referred to the social worker as "a functionary .•. just an appendage of Dr. [the psychiatric administrator]'~; to the psychiatric administrator as "just an obstacle in my path [said in a tone as if she were referring to an inanimate object]"; to her father as "just nothing-s-he's a cipher"; to her fellow patients as though they, too, were subhuman; and often-as I shall detail in the next chapter-to myself in equally dehumanizing terms. It was only with the greatest difficulty that this defensive scorn, almost flintlike in its adamancy, was eventually eroded through sufficiently to reveal glimpses of the derogation which she had suffered in childhood, which had originally caused this de.. fense to be erected within her. Such derogation had come chiefly at the hands of her mother. The mother was much interested in community activities, and inherited wealth had enabled her to gain much social prestige through her lavish contributions to various organizations. She and her husband had been separated when her daughter was six years of age; and every year from then until the girl was seventeen, the mother sent the daughter off, from the home in the Midwest, to one or another among a long series of boarding schools in New England, in Canada, and later in Italy and Spain. The girl suffered tremendous loneliness and anxiety in these various schools, in the instances of those in Italy and Spain was unfamiliar with the language spoken there, and in a number of these schools was much derided by the other girls

208

The Nonhuman Environment

for her American ways. At the age of nine, from a school in Italy she wrote to her mother, "Unless you take me out of here by next Monday, I'll kill myself." This threat failed to work, however. Each of these schools was selected upon the whim of the mother, apparently primarily upon the basis of how impressed her social acquaintances might feel upon learning that her daughter was attending this or that distant and expensive school. The girl saw her father, who spent most of his time in pursuing medical treatment for various psychosomatic symptoms, only on rare occasions. After this kind of childhood and adolescence the mother enrolled her in a girls' college in the eastern United States. Then, because of steadily increasing schizophrenic symptoms, she flunked out at the end of the first year, and was now too ill to make any show of continuing her education anywhere else. Her mother, denouncing her as an idiot-UI never thought I would have an idiot for a daughter'I-e-admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. There, shortly after admission, the girl stabbed herself in the chest with a knife, so seriously that only extraordinarily prompt medical attention saved her life. Later, at the time of her second hospital admission, again for acute paranoid schizophrenia, the admission physician wrote: "I then saw the mother and heard her complaints about the daughter's aggressive and unpleasant behavior, the mother missing or not being much concerned about the delusional aspects of the girl's behavior. The mother's principal complaint was that the daughter did not treat her with sufficient deference. Also [she] told of an argument she had had with the girl when she told her daughter she was a poor investment, that she had spent a lot of money on her treatment and that she wasn't getting any dividends out of It." Her having called the daughter "a poor Investment," referring to her as if the daughter were something inanimate rather than a human being) seems to have been typical of the mother. The girl was in her fourth hospitalization when I became acquainted with her. During the period of my work with her, relatively brief in terms of the severity and chronicity of her illness, she never became able to reveal more than a few details of

Psychosis and Neurosis

209

the slights which she had suffered) as indicated above, at the hands of her mother and other persons in her past. Much more often she expressed such feelings in terms of the treatment she felt she was being accorded here in the hospital. It was in this context that she most often revealed her feeling of being treated as if she were an inanimate object. She would say to me, for example, with a kind of flat bitterness, "People don't do things for me; they do things at me," and "I'm in the position of being thought

at.J.J 3. A thirty-two-year-old woman with paranoid schizophrenia of many years' duration, the most assaultive woman with whom I have worked in psychotherapy, had grown up in a home with her mother and maternal grandmother, both of whom were themselves distinctly paranoid. These two women had evidently needed, for the sake of preserving their own precarious psychological defenses, to have some one close to them whom they could cast down, as often as the need arose in them, into the hell of their condemnation. The girl had been elected for this with great regularity. She was able to tell me, usually in fragments, something about the way in which she had felt herself to be treated at home. For example, in one hour she started telling, at first allegorically and gradually in more direct terms, about cats) about the houseowner's telling the cats to scat, then finally she said, "My grandmother said to me 'Scat I-and when I say scat I mean scat!' " She then went on to tell about once, at home, hitting a cat with a shovel and chasing it about the yard, up a tree, onto the garage roof, and so on. The grandmother let the cat into the house, but would not allow the girl herself to come in " 'until you learn not to be mean to cats.' " This incident seems to have epitomized the girl's conviction that she was even Jess acceptable, to her mother and grandmother, than an animal. To be sure, her behavior on that particular occasion had been such as to draw intense condemnation from almost any parent figure; but all the evidence I obtained, both from the patient herself and from repeated in.. terviews with her mother, convinced me that the child had been forced irresistibly into such an intrafamilial integration. During

210

The Nonhuman Environment

the approximately eight months of my work with her, we failed to resolve her conception of her mother as a kind of saint, the personification of all love and virtue, and of herself as an innately murderous creature who was, therefore, hopelessly unacceptable among human beings. 4. Another woman with paranoid schizophrenia, twenty-nine years of age, revealed in an. hour with me her feeling, like that of the patient described immediately above, of being worth less even than subhuman forms of life. In describing her having had an electrocardiogram, recently carried out despite her vigorous protest, she emphasized what a futile, wasteful procedure it had been. She told of how much paper it had consumed, indicating with her hands a length of perhaps three feet, "Almost," she said in protest and concern, "a whole tree:" What she conveyed to me, by both her words and her tone, was her conviction that she was not worth all that paper, which she considered so great a part of a tree. Her statement was so poignant that tears came to my eyes and, feeling more tender toward her than I had in almost two years of working with her, I said simply, "You're worth more than all the trees on earth." The infinitesimal state of her self-esteem had been revealed many times before in the therapy. One major cause of this had been her having been treated during her childhood, particularly by her mother, as some one who had little or no importance in her own right, but had usefulness chiefly as some one upon whom the mother-an. overtly schizophrenic woman, evidently, throughout the girl's developmental years-could project her own unacceptable feelings and attitudes, and through whom the mother strove to achieve, vicariously, satisfaction for her own grandiose aspirations. As in the immediately preceding case, above, the father had evidently been more able to give the girl love, but had been too much under the domination of the mother to enable his daughter to develop a sound ego. 5. The following passage, from another therapist's staff presentation of a woman with latent schizophrenia, gives us a glimpse of one kind of childhood experience which tends to inculcate in

Psychosis and N.eurosis

211

the growing individual a conviction that his innate worth is less than that of various inanimate objects in the home: Alice talks of her mother as being unable to love anybody and as being a compulsive sort of person. The mother's great interest during Alice's childhood was in collecting antiques. She furnished a home almost entirely with this, and Alice talks of her mother's having boasted as [i.e., when Alice was] a very young child, almost as a toddler, she was playing near one of her mothers antique chairs and the mother very imperiously said, "Don't!" and after that the girl never touched that or any other of the valuable things around the house ..• The patient feels that her mother never liked children or pets. Pets are just something to mess things up and the less you had to do with them) the better.

6. A twenty-five-year-old man of a hysterical personality struc-

ture, in the course of psychoanalysis, made clear that his upbringing had been such as to convince him that his existence could be either in the form of (a) a savage animal, or (b) a cute little doll, but not in the form of a human being. This conception of himself had arisen largely as a function of his relationships with each of his parents, who chronically treated him as being a cute little doll, and shied away from real ftesh-and-blood feelings of all sorts, giving the patient the unconscious conception that any such feelings within him were so unacceptable, among human beings, as to be in the nature of actual animal phenomena. His father's favorite mode of addressing him in conversation, was "Kewpie-Boy." His mother, as he came to realize relatively late in analysis, regarded him less as a flesh-and-blood son than as, in his phrase, a cute bit of costume jewelry to wear to social

functions." 5 During a psychotherapeutic session, a thirty-seven-year-old schizophrenic woman who had been hospitalized for several years, whose remnants of selfesteem resided chiefly in her physical beauty, and who had gradually become able to formulate her own very rigid, long-held attitude! about life, made some memorable comments in this same regard. "An attractive person is considered a mechanical thing-you know," she explained, "like a good movie, a book, or a nice dress," She went on to explain, in essence, that an attractive person exists to provide "enjoyment,"

212

The Nonhuman Environment

The following two dreams} separated by. a period of one year, helped to clarify this antithetical pair of roles which he felt were ope~ to him-e-these two so different kinds of creatures which he bad unconsciously felt himself, all along, to be. The first of these dreams occurred at the end of about two years of analysis: I was-you were in it-I'd been coming over [to my office] and this time I came over and the whole thing had been changed drastically. It was no longer this room with the familiar furniture. It was a very dark, very terrifying jungle-lair. On the floor was a pile of bones, as if an animal had had many meals there; yet the pile of bones looked a lot like the piled-up jackstraws I used to play with when I was little. I walked in and I was very surprised. I looked and in that comer over there [a far comer of the office] was a saber-toothed tiger, and it started to scream or roar and bare its teeth, and I screamed and I was startled and I woke up. The second dream, occurring a year later, was as follows:

I was with a baby. I didn't know much about caring for a baby, and I had to give the baby its bottle. This baby was so tiny. It was alternately a baby and a doll, and the doll had a tiny little head. I can't breathe, hardly [he interjected; he was showing much anxiety throughout this account]. Its face would come off, soso it [blocking] didn't have any face. It was faceless, like an unand that if she makes herself unattractive, this is "not proper," The most striking thing about these comments was the tone in which she uttered them: her tone was expressive of no protest or doubt whatsoever; it was as if she were simply making statements about something which, to her, was an obvious and long-known fact. She was very confused during most of this session; these were among the few relatively clear concepts which she got across to me, during an hour of much. confused and confusing verbalization, Another point which came through fairly clearly was that men are the ones at the top, and that the attractive person exists to provide enjoyment to a man, and herself is not supposed to have any feelings-whether of enjoyment, loneliness, physical or emotional pain, or whatever. The history of her relationship with her father, whose own psychological test results showed prominent Don Juan tendencies, and who evidently used to take much narcissistic pleasure in being seen with one or another of his own three beautiful daughters, was such M to make it quite understandable that she should have developed this conception of an attractive person's raison dJilre.

Psychosis and Neurosis

213

painted puppet. I made some bread pudding, and I ate the pudding, because it was a doll, and if I ate the pudding, it would live -it was witchcraft. It kept changing from a doll into a baby and back again. Data from this hour, and from various other sessions} made clear that the doll-baby, like the tiger in the first dream, represented an unconscious conception of himself. These unconscious conceptions of himself were, for a long time during the analysis, projected upon other persons. For example, later in the same hour in which he reported the second of the two above dreams, he was describing a date he had had, recently, with a beautiful and popular young woman. He enthused, "This girl-this beau... tiful thing [N.B.]-going with me to a dance! . . ." In an hour about four months later, he said, exasperatedly, concerning his conflictual feelings about his sister, "If only you didn't have to notice feelings and emotions-if only people were kind of dolls

and hollow shells and didn't have any kind of insides-e-things would be simple." For a long time, all other persons were, in his perception of them, in one of three categories: ( a ) "normal" people, whom he reacted to as being empty-headed robots; (b) a certain few neurotic individuals whom he perceived as being invested with a totally unreal kind of glamour; and (c) certain persons whom he considered to possess a kind of animal passion which both frightened and fascinated him. There were none of what we would think of as real human beings in the total picture. There is one other aspect of his situation which I wish to mention here. Abundant evidence indicated that he had been, indeed, treated less as a person than as an inanimate object-a doll-by his parents during his upbringing. But now, in his daily life as an adult, he unconsciously did that which we so frequently find patients, with whatever kind of psychiatric illness} to be doing: he strove to maintain a fantasied control over this process which he experienced, at a still deeper level, as being quite beyond his controL Specifically, he unconsciously encouraged other persons to treat him as an inanimate object. For example, he raged in one hour that his roommate in

214

The Nonhuman Environment

graduate school "treats me like an inanimate object. This mom.. ing he said to me, 'Do your part of the cleaning!' as if he were talking to an object I)' But what he had yet to realize was that his roommate, as in the case of other persons in different situations with the patient, had already gone through the process of approaching him in a more considerate way, several times over, until the roommate's patience had become exhausted and, despairing of getting any cooperation from him, had been reduced to commanding him as if he were an inanimate object, or, for example, a dog. Or so, at least, I would assume} on the basis of many experiences of this general kind which I myself had with the patient. 7. A twenty-two-year-old schizophrenic woman appeared, at the time of her admission to the hospital and frequently for some months thereafter, distinctly unhuman. When I went to the closed ward where she was housed, for my initial interview with her, I found in the nurses' notes an aide's description of her which stated that "This woman looks at times like a demon." I thought, with some amusement, that this must be an inexperienced, overimpressionable aide who had written this. But when I saw the patient I found that she did indeed look at times like a veritable demon, reminiscent to me of Lionel Barrymore's characterization of the mad monk, Rasputin, and of some of Lon Chaney's grotesque and demoniac portrayals in movies long ago. Her psychiatric administrator ~ a man with more than thirty years of experience with hospitalized psychiatric patients, at a general staff conference nearly a year and a half following her admission phrased it that "Irma was one of the most repulsivelooking things I've ever seen when she first came in here. She looked more like some sort of tamed wild animal or something." He added, "Now that has changed," indicating that she had become more human in appearance. Incidentally, I may express my conviction here that one of the most valuable contributions which Chestnut Lodge makes, toward the recovery of many of its patients, consists in the ability of personnel members to perceive, in just such an initially animallike patient as this, a fellow human being.

Psychosis and Neurosis

215

The head nurse of the ward had the same general sort of impression of this patient, as functioning like an animal. In one of her notes, for example, many months after the patient's admission, when the animallike quality had become more of a friendly than a repelling sort, the nurse put the following amused report in her notes: "Galloping over the pasture-e-er, I mean the ward. Being very friendly arid overactive . .. ." On another occasion the patient was described, in the nurses' notes, as having run out onto the porch, lifted her leg over a wastebasket and urinated into itt like a dog.. In my work with this woman, I found abundant evidence that she frequently felt herself to be an animal. I also obtained some clues as to the etiology of this view of herself; of these I shall mention only a few. During the two years preceding her psychosis she had developed a conspicuously stertorous mode of breathing, partly as a result of unusually severe and chronic sinusitis. Her father, during my interview with him at the time of her admission, showed extreme loathing in speaking about this, describing how it shocked him to hear this breathing when he was near her. Her mother, likewise, was made tremendously anxious by this condition; neither parent had been able to talk about the matter with her. A second factor, which presumably at least added to her animalistic conception of herself was the fact that, in the first hospital to which she had been admitted upon becoming overtly psychotic, the staff had rarely, if ever, had experience with so deeply and grotesquely ill a person as she; their report to us strongly suggested that their attitude toward her had been one of shocked withdrawal. A third, much longer-standing, and undoubtedly far more potent reason for this patient's conception of herself was found to reside in an unusually severe, continuing, rejection of her by her mother} apparently from the girl's infancy, and by the father from a somewhat later age. 8. A forty..year-old woman, for the first few months of her psychotherapy, sat motionless as an inanimate object and was entirely mute throughout many of the hours.. Her catatonic symptoms were sufficiently severe to require one and a half years of

216

The Nonhuman Environment

hospitalization, and it was only after some years of additional outpatient treatment that she began evidencing anything like a healthy physical mobility and freedom of verbal expression during the therapeutic sessions. There were numerous indications, both from her demeanor and from historical data which she eventually became able to provide, that prominent aspects of her personality were comprised of unconscious identifications with various elements of the nonhuman environment of her childhood. For example, one important conception of herself was as a doll. She often dressed like a doll; she lay motionless as a doll on the analytic couch; in her social life she encouraged men to treat her like a doll which is to be picked up and played with when the spirit moves one, and then cast aside until one is, at some later time, again moved to pick it up; and she also, in the course of freely associating, late in the psychotherapy, repeatedly associated herself with a doll. Such identifications with nonhuman objects were found, in her case as in most (though not all) other similar cases in my experience, to be traceable mainly to aspects of her relationship with her mother. For instance, in an hour after more than four 'years of therapy, she said, "Sometimes when my mother looks at me I feel as if she were looking at a dress-shop dummy." She said this in a puzzled, uncomfortable tone, as if such experiences gave her the creeps. I asked, "Sort of speculatively and appraisingly?" She replied, "Yeah. I feel as though any minute she's going to tell me I'm a sight and is going to tell me I should dye my hair and have it cut differently and waved differently, and that I should wear less conservative clothes, and use a different shade of lipstick, and so on and on. n There was abundant corroborative evidence, not only from the patient but from my own interviews with the mother, that she treated her daughter like an inanimate object, to be picked up and worried over and remodeled as the need arose, and then dropped. In a second fashion, too, she habitually had treated the daughter as inanimate. A very energetic, obsessive-compulsive, intensely ambitious woman who regarded the achievements of her two children as an absolute

Psychosis and Neurosis

217

measure of her own worth as a mother, she treated the patient as a kind of storage battery which needed continuous recharging, rather than as an animate human being with abundant internal sources of energy. 9. This thirty-five-year.. old, unmarried schizophrenic man had grown up in a family in which conventional success was tremendously overvalued, and human needs were rigidly repressed in oneself and ignored in others. Each of his' two siblings man.. aged to achieve sufficient worldly success so that the resultant prestige kept them going, psychologically. But this man had been a thoroughgoing failure in that regard} and consequently suffered the most intense derogation by the other family members, who functioned largely as though he did not exist. The effect which this long-continued treatment had worked upon him was reflected in his behavior in the hospital. At times, it was almost as if he had no existence. A tall but slender person, he lay motionless and mute in bed nearly all the time for several

months after his admission, looking like simply a somewhat unu.. sually large wrinkle in the bedcover, When he became able, after some months, to come downstairs to my office, he moved in a very slow, noiseless, ghostly way. At times I would find him behind my open door, out in the corridor, standing in the sharp angle between the door and the wall. Once, having called the ward and asked the nurse to send him down to the hour, I turned to my files for a few minutes. When I tumed away from them, he had materialized in the usual chair, noiselessly, two feet away from me. During various of the therapeutic hours} which were for a long time almost totally silent} I often thought, upon looking over at him, still and crumpled in the chair} that he appeared to be more an empty sack, or a bundle of clothes, than a person. During warm summer days he began to sit out on the lawn, and a colleague, upon coming into the hospital one morning, told me in amazement of how much the patient had looked to him like a pile of clothes on the ground. As he became, while the weeks and months went by, a little more alive, he would drag himself in a small circle, on the front lawn, looking for all the world like a

218

The Nonhuman Environment

drab, thin bird with a broken wing, and later, as still a bit more energy became available to him) he roamed the streets of the nearby community, aimlessly, very much like a homeless stray cat. For many years, in the family home, his most "interpersonally' alive relationship had been, indeed) with his pet cat. Upon his becoming psychotic, he surprised his family by making a number of psychologically perceptive utterances, one of which was, "People should love people, not cats." e During his psychotherapy with me, his relationship with the cat was recapitulated in the transference relationship, with his at times treating me as if I were a cat of which he was fond--once, for example, offering me candy in a fondly teasing fashion, as if it were a tidbit he was offering to a cat, trying to get the cat to stand up and meow for it. On another occasion, when his moving to outpatient status seemed near at hand, he asked a question in which the verbal content was full of reproach, but his voice was full of love and grief in asking it: "Dr. Searles, why have you treated me like an animal here?" What his question revealed to me was an attitude on his part of which he was not yet conscious, but which revealed itself to other persons repeatedly: his unconscious attitude, evidently, was that he had been loved and cherished here as he himself had fondly cared for his pet cat and, although he consciously wanted desperately to be released from the hospital, unconsciously he was broken-hearted that we were about to let him go. Such sporadic moments of open fondness as the offering-thetidbit-to-the-cat incident merely punctuated, for many months, long periods of his seeming to feel totally ignored by myself and the other personnel members. He was convinced that we valued various inanimate items of property more than we valued himthat we took care of the building, for instance, but gave no thought to taking care of him. On one occasion he showed great hesitancy about putting something upon my desk next to his chair. He brought out, with some encouragement from me) that • This comment. as we!! as some of the other data given in this paragraph, was mentioned in the preceding chapter (on page 172) .

Psychosis and Neurosis

219

he was afraid he would scratch the desk and then "you would make me leave.') All these reactions had clear antecedents in his life at home. His father and eIder sister, the dominant members of his family, were extremely rigid individuals who were quite unable to conceive of his becoming, in the COUISe of treatment, anything but the Charles they had always considered him to be prior to hisillness. His sister berated him, during a visit, for having "acted like an animal" during the initial, acute phase of his psychosis. This condemnation presumably reinforced his own evident conviction that he could only be (a) someone who conformed-as he consciously had done throughout the years prior to his psychosis-to hisfamily's rigid standards of behavior, repressing his own needs for interpersonal intimacy and accepting the status of, in effect) an inanimate object; or (b) an animal. As a final "clinical example" of the etiologic factor under discussion-the parent(s) treating the child as nonhuman-I

shall quote briefly from Alberto Moravia's novel, Two Adolescents (106). Fictional though this work is, I find it so perceptive, psychologically, that I consider it a piece of unusually valuable clinical material. In passages too long to reproduce in full, the author expresses beautifully a youth's feeling of being treated as an inanimate object by his parents, and his feeling of thereby being relegated to relating to the world of inanimate objects-a world of inanimate objects which) in this case) are perceived as being thoroughly hostile to himself. Concerning the rages to which the youth Luca was chronically subject, Moravia writes that More than anything it was the dumb, inert resistance of inanimate objects, or rather, his own incapacity to make use of such objects without fatigue or injury that threw him into these devastating rages.

Luca becomes convinced of the malignancy of the whole world around him when, while attempting to repair the house's elec.. trical circuit, he is subjected to a severe and prolonged shock,

220

The Nonhuman Environment

which he experiences as coming not from the wires alone, but from the whole hated world surrounding him. And a second incident of similarly deep significance occurs when, during a train trip with his parents, he has been led by them to look forward to having the rare pleasure of a meal in the dining car, only to find at the last moment that his parents calmly decide, between themselves, to follow the family's usual practice of foregoing this bit of luxury, after all: What offended him most was that neither of them asked his opinion and that they treated him as an inanimate object, which, being a mere object, had neither preferences nor ideas, neither tastes nor wishes ..... [He was filled now with] the usual fury that assailed him every time he became aware of revolt and insubordination on the part of things and people in opposition to his own will . . . In any case, the important thing was not so much the question of whether he had lunch in the dining car or in the compartment as the feeling that his parents were made of the same hostile, defiant matter he was aware of in other things. And like other things, they could not, with all the love that they felt for him, be tolerated [106a].

Thus far, in dealing with this matter of the genesis of the individual's anxiety lest he become nonhuman, I have been focusing upon only one factor-the "external" root-namely, the individual's being treated by his parentfs), during his childhood, as if he were nonhuman. But we know that, both for understanding the psychogenesis of any personality type or any type of psychiatric illness, and for psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic treatment, such a focus is too limited. The human individual, certainly beginning rather soon after birth, is no mere lump of clay upon which pathological influences leave their imprint. Reaching back to some indeterminate but surely very early time in infancy, his own innate energies and needs also start exerting a powerful and ceaseless influence upon the development of his individual personality. So in this instance we must try to grasp the contributions, so to speak, which the individual himself

Psychosis and Neurosis

221

makes toward the development of this anxiety lest he become nonhuman. In the above passage from Moravia's novel, for example, we see that more is transpiring than simply Luca's parents' treating him as if he were an inanimate object. We find much evidence that Luca himself is still largely entrenched in an infantile-om.. nipotent orientation toward the outer world, including the human beings-his parents-as well as the inanimate objects in that world. Accordingly, he is so preoccupied with his own desires and his own frustrations that he himself does not seem, at a real feeling level, to react to his parents as human beings; he reacts as though they, along with everything else outside himself, were in the nature of frustrating inanimate objects which refuse to meet his needs, to bend to his will It would seem, then, that his feeling of being dealt with by them as though he were an inanimate object is based only partially upon fact; partially it is based upon his projection upon them of his own orientation, of which he is largely unconscious, of treating the other person as an inan .. imate object. In each of the nine clinical examples given above, as with other such patients in my experience} this same process has ap· peared to be at work. With regard to the first-described patient (the woman whose father, during a visit with her, poked and nudged her as if he were poking with a stick at a strange animal), for instance, the psychologist's report of her performance in the drawing-a-person test is significant, in implying that the patient herself viewed men as being strange objects rather than fellow human beings: The patient's drawings and her responses to them suggest a very simple form of narcissism, centering around her external characteristics as an attractive female, with emphasis on clothes.. Part of her dilemma may lie in that the necessary counterpart to this picture, namely, the male, is really an unknown quantity to her about whom she knows nothing and cares less [italics mine]. Thus she cannot be effectively attractive to him for long and must repea tedly meet with un understood rejection.

222

The Nonhuman Environment

In addition to this element of the patient's projection, onto others, of his own view of the other person as being nonhuman (a process which) as I have just indicated, makes him feel that he is being treated as nonhuman by the other person}, there is another great "contribution" which the patient himself makes toward the anxiety lest he become nonhuman, and it is this subject with which the next chapter will deal: his own (largely unconscious) desire to become nonhuman.

The Desire to Become Nonhuman As a Defense Against Various Feeling-States

CHAPTER

8

The desire to become nonhuman has, of course, multiple determinants. I shall present only those which seem, in my clinical experience, to be the most important ones. Furthermore, I shall spend little time upon those which are relatively accessible to the individual's own consciousness and which are, therefore, obvious; my main effort is to delineate determinants which are most deeply buried in the unconscious. All the following determinants may be present to some extent in any "normal" individual as well as in any neurotic or psychotic patient; but nearly all of them seem to exist more importantly, more powerfully, in psychiatrically ill persons than in "nonnar' persons. At the outset, I shall simply mention, briefly, the readily apparent positive aspects of nonhuman existence as we human beings perceive it, That is, when we see a puppy happily playing,

224

The Nonhuman Environment

we may desire to become such a puppy, simply because the puppy's existence, as we see it at the moment, involves having fun. And when we see a cat dozing contentedly before a fire, we may wish to become a similar cat, purely to be able to enjoy such contentment as the cat appears to be enjoying. All the following determinants (i.e., determinants of the human being's desire to become nonhuman) which I shall describe in this chapter have to do with the negative side of the matter. That is, they represent desires to escape from unpleasant states of feeling. Among such states of feeling, the following seem particularly important in this connection: (a) anxiety concerning one's own mortality--eoncerning the inevitable eventuality of death; (b) anxiety concerning the assumption, and maintenance, of responsibility for one's own living; (c) sexual conflicts; (d) bel plessness: (e) superego pressures; (f) ego instability; and (g) loneliness. The next chapter will describe a determinant which is on the first-mentioned, the positive, side of the matter; there, we shall see evidence that this desire to become nonhuman can be not simply a flight from something (such as the present chapter will portray), but also a positive striving-a striving toward an af.. firmative, constructive goal. Specifically, the next chapter will be devoted to the presentation of a hypothesis of "phylogenetic regression": the individual's striving to escape from the human situation in order) as it were, to get a fresh start at becoming an adult human being.

Anxiety Concerning One's Own Mortality This anxiety feeds into our desire to become nonhuman, for we cling to the hope that we can thereby transcend death. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt presumably hoped to overcome death \ly having the pyramids built, which have survived for several thousands of years.' Creative individuals in many fields of en~ Relevant to this conjecture is the following passage from an article conteming Titian: UAfter sitting for Titian) Charles V would permit no other ..tist to paint his portrait. After Titian had finished the third portrait) the 1mperor exclaimed: "This is the third time I have triumphed over teath!* n (99).

PS'Ychosis and Neurosis

225

deavor-artists, composers) writers, engineers) and so on-probably are activated, in part, by the yearning that, through the medium of their creations which "live" after them, they may achieve an existence which conquers their own biological deaths; they hope to live on by, as it were, "becoming" their nonhuman creations. It is significant, in this connection, that when we search our minds for words to pay the highest form of tribute to creative works which we admire, we think of words like "timeless" and "immortal." The myth of Hyacinthus provides a beautiful expression of mankind's yearning to become immortal through transformation into some nonhuman fonn. Edith Hamilton tells this myth in the following way: Another flower that came into being through the death of a beautiful youth [she says, after recounting the myth of Narcissus] was the hyacinth, again not like the flower we call by that name, but lily-shaped and of a deep purple, Of" some say a splendid crimson. That was a tragic death, and each year it was commemorated by The festival of Hyacinthus That lasts throughout the tranquil night. In a contest with Apollo He was slain. Discus throwing they completed, And the god's swift cast Sped beyond the goal he aimed at and struck Hyacinthus full in the forehead a terrible wound. He had been Apollo's dearest companion. There was no rivalry between them when they tried which could throw the discus farthest; they were only playing a game. The god was horrorstruck to see the blood gush forth and the lad, deathly pale, fall to the ground. He turned as pale himself as he caught him up in his arms and tried to staunch the wound. But it was too late. While he held him the boy's head fell back as a flower does when its stem is broken. He was dead and Apollo kneeling beside him wept for him, dying so young, so beautiful. He had killed him, although through no fault of his, and he cried, "Oh, if I could give my life for yours) or die with you." Even as he spoke, the

226

The Nonhuman Environment

bloodstained grass turned green again and there bloomed forth the wondrous flower that was to make the lad's name known forever [66f].

Anxiety Concerning the Assumption, and Maintenance, of Responsibility for One's Own Living From this anxiety, also, one may long to escape by becoming nonhuman. At times when our lives as human beings seem in.. tolerably filled with complex decisions to be resolved, and with complex feelings to be borne within ourselves, we may wish that we could put all this aside by achieving what may appear to us to be the enviably passive, simple existence of various nonhuman forms of life, or even of inanimate objects. I have been interested to see that a person's being legally conunitted, as being incompetent and therefore unable to maintain responsibility for the guidance of his own affairs, may be construed by him as providing an unconsciously wished-for nonhuman status of this kind. In a sociologically and legally quite real sense, the role of a legally committed individual differs from that of other human beings in our culture, inasmuch as the patient may interpret his loss of some civil rights and social responsibilities as signifying-even though they do not objectively signify-that he is no longer regarded as a human being. One such individual, for example, a paranoid schizophrenic man who was legally committed throughout my three years of work with him, frequently vented intense bitterness and resentment about his committed status; he was deeply humiliated by the essentially nonhuman position which he felt himself to occupy, vis-a-vis other persons. But over the course of the therapy it became clear to me that his conunitment was fulfilling an unconscious desire on his part to yield up the responsibility for his own life to others. Thus, for instance, it was evident that" this man, who haughtily emphasized how self-reliant he was by nature, was quite unable to make major plans concerning his own life, and his committed status served to help him avoid the recognition of his helplessness in this regard. Instead of arriving at any such recognition, he would tell me bitterly, "Of course,

Psychosis and Neurosis

227

I can't make plans as long as I'm subject to control by others," At another point, he was able to say, regarding his ill mother, "1 think that if I were a free person I would be quite concerned about her welfare) and would have quite a feeling of responsibility about taking care of her," but that under the circumstances -with his own being legally committed--it would be pointless to have such feelings. This man, several months after having progressed to outpatient status, finally moved, at his own long-continued insistence, to his distant home on the West Coast. He continued psychotherapy with an analyst there, and when I wrote a report to that analyst, of my work with the patient, I made one observation which ties in with what I have been saying here: It has been my own belief for at least ten months that the commitment is not necessary; but it has been very interesting to see how many still-present unconscious needs his commitment satisfies. As examples: . . . it relieves him from the necessity of making many decisions for himself, and decisions are very difficult for him to make, although he would regard this statement as a great affront; it provides him with a person (other than myself, who rarely serves this purpose for him) who acts as a representa.. tive of conventional society, in the form of his opinionated uncle [who was the legal guardian] who is only too ready to tell the patient that this or that expenditure, for instance, is "sensible' or "ridiculous!' Once Mr. Martin [the patient] can get his uncle's opinion, indecision is resolved: he can now proceed to do exactly as the uncle says, or, as often happens, to do exactly the opposite.

William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience contains a passage regarding Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, which is similarly expressive of the desire to become nonhuman. That is, it would seem that in this instance, too, this desire is determined in part by the individual's longing to yield up the responsibility for his own human existence:

III ought)" an early biographer reports him [i.e., Loyola] as saying} "on entering religion, and thereafter, to place myself en-

228

The Nonhuman Environment

tirely in the hands of God, and of him who takes His place by His authority. I ought to desire that my Superior should oblige me to give up my own judgment, and conquer my own mind. I ought to set up no difference between one Superior and another, . . . but recognize them all as equal before God, whose place they fill. For if I distinguish persons, I weaken the spirit of obedience. In the hands of my Superior} I must be a soft wax, a thing, from which he is to require whatever pleases him, be it to write or receive letters) to speak or not to speak to such a person, or the like; and I must put all my fervor in executing zealously and exactly what I am ordered. I must consider myself as a corpse which has neither intelligence nor will; be like a mass of matter which without resistance lets itself be placed wherever it may please anyone j like a stick in the hand of an old man, who uses it according to his needs and places it where it suits him. So must I be under the hands of the Order, to serve it in the way it judges most useful. "I must never ask of the Superior to be sent to a particular place, to be employed in a particular duty. . . . I must consider nothing as belonging to me personally, and as regards the things I use, be like a statue which lets itself be stripped and never op.. poses resistance" [85c].

A harsh, self-punitive superego is likely, of course) to be found in such individuals; I shall elaborate upon this factor shortly. Sexual Conflicts

These may form a powerful determinant of the desire to become nonhuman-specifically, in this regard, to become a "higher" form of life, leaving behind the conflict-producing human proclivities for "animal" sexuality. The ascetic Thoreau asserted that Chastity is the flowering of man . . . He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied [154b J.

Psychosis and Neurosis

229

Next I shall present material from my work with another psychiatric patient, material showing that this patient, in an unconscious effort to defend herself against anxiety-laden sexual conflicts, tended to conceive of herself as a nonhuman thing.. A deeply schizophrenic woman, twenty-nine years of age at the time when she began psychotherapy with me, for more than two years showed confusion as to whether she was male or female. This confusion she expressed indirectly, as in the exchange with me which is quoted below. Two words of prefatory explanation: the patient's first name was Nanette; the comments in brackets are mine.

'IAn ane is a donkey, isn't it?" [Uin French, yes.. "] "An ane is a donkey in French, yes. It's a game where you're blindfolded and you pin a tail on a donkey. That's my name: a-n-e (laughing). The 'a' has that-what do you call it, over it?-an inverted v.n e'Let's see what an inverted V brings up."] "My nose is sort of in the shape of a V. I had a pin that was V-shaped-well, 1 didn't have it. I didn't have any jewelry. It was Ruth's (Ruth: her younger sister) . . . . ane- I don't know whether it's masculine or feminine.. It doesn't have to be either; it's l-apostrophe.."

Note her repeatedly associating tine~f which she says, "I don't know whether it's masculine or feminine't-e-with herself. This confusion about her own sexuality she repeatedly projected onto her environment. She once spoke of a "statue of a woman in Rock Creek Park," imitating with upraised arms the posture of the statue, and went on to say that she liked it very much because of "its masculine grace." I replied, in surprise, "Its masculine grace?" She nodded and went on speaking. Also, she described on several occasions, during the first two years of the therapy, an incident when, prior to her hospitalization, she had visited, uninvited, the home of a young man with whom she was having an autistic love affair. Each time she spoke of this, it was evident that she was confused as to whether the person who met her at the door was male or female. She was not sure

The Nonhuman Environment

.230

whether this was the young man himself, or his sister who lived there with him and their father. In one of her accounts of this, she at first said she knew the person was a girl, but she kept referring to the person as "he," saying at one point she "was 60 per cent sure" the person was a boy. She described, however, the person as having "bright red lipstick and lots of powder, and blonde hair swept up in back." This person's name, the patient found upon inquiring, was Janet-very similar to the patient's own name, Nanette; and the patient herself had blonde hair. The patient went on to say, giggling tensely, "He looked like a fashionable sketch," and then added, "The other day Dr. - - [a doctor at the Lodge with whom she had, for a long time, an autistic love affair] looked like a fashionable sketch." This last hinted at her confusion concerning the sex of Dr. , a confusion which similarly emerged on various other occasions. All this kind of material from her is suggestive that her confusion about the sexuality of figures in her environment is related to her confusion about her own sexuality. It is well known that schizophrenic individuals are frequently confused as to their own maleness or femaleness. But this woman presented, further, material suggestive of the previously mentioned special point which is, I think, less well known, and which constitutes the main point toward which the above clinical excerpts have been leading: this confusion, this conflict, concern.. ing the individual's own sexuality may push toward resolution by way of the person's conceiving of himself, or herself, as nonhuman-neither male nor female nor both, but instead a sexless thing. Not only does existing as a subjectively sexless, inanimate object serve to allay the confusion arising from one's ambivalent sexual strivings, but the immobilization implied in this self.. concept (i.e., the inanimate aspect of this self-image) serves to allay one's fear that one will lose control of these strivings. Some of the material suggestive of this point emerged in one hour when she again describing her experiences of going to the young man's home. She said, "When it came out of the bed.. room it looked just like Fred [the name of the young man]-bright

was

Psychosis and Neurosis

231

lipstick, a lot of some kind of powder base, and hair done up. Its eyes and nose and mouth were just like Fred's. It was very tall and broad," she said with a gesture of revulsion. "I've never seen anything so broad." If we continue to think of her perception of this other person as involving much projection of her own conception of her own sexuality, we see the likelihood that, during this visit to the young man's home, in circumstances of, for her, intensely conflictual sexual temptation and sexual threat, her own unconscious conception of her sexuality went in the direction of considering herself to be a nonhuman, sexless thing (as a fonn of escape from all this intensely anxiety...p rovoking conflict), with projection of such a concept of herself onto the person who came out of the bedroom. Note especially her repeated reference to that person as "it.' In her tone, also, she sounded as though she were speaking of a weird thing rather than a human being. Other evidence corroborative of this point was provided by the patient's own appearance and behavior, for many months during the psychotherapy: she oftentimes appeared (in her manner of dress and in her use of cosmetics), and behaved, like a nonhuman thing-a marionette, or an indescribable apparitionnot only in my opinion but in the opinions of other personnel members who were dealing with her. I shall not attempt to provide here any detailed material to show further how terrified this young woman was concerning the subjective threat of sexual activity. In the words of her administrator, she was "crawling with terror" for several months after her admission to the disturbed ward, and in her hOUIS with me she left no doubt that one of her greatest fears was of being raped. She used to plead for, and demand) assurance that she would not be raped. The psychotherapy eventually brought to light her very strong homosexual desires, desires to rape other persons, and desires on her own part to be raped. She had, as is perhaps by now obvious enough, intensely conflictual desires to be male plus a hatred of, and aversion to, maleness. The point I am making here is that she showed an unconscious tendency to defend her-

232

The Nonhuman Environment

self against the anxiety concerning sex, about which she had such a welter of conflictual feelings, by conceiving of herself as being a nonhuman, sexless thing. In one hour with her I experienced what appears to have been a kind of participation in her own intensely anxiety-laden confusion as to her sexuality. She had come into the hour vividly Ilpsticked and face..powdered and with a very sexy coiffure, and was lying on the couch with her head propped up and her feet crossed-a posture which impressed me as masculine. I suddenly got a strong conviction that she was a man dressed up as a woman, I kept trying to dismiss the idea as patently absurd, because I knew that the nurses had helped her to change menstrual pads and had given her baths; so I knew it utterly irrational to think. that under these circumstances she could have remained on a female ward for many months. But the idea persisted during the remainder of that session, and was accompanied by an eerie feeling which was most uncomfortable. Within the ensuing week, she produced sufficient verbal evidence (some of which I have given above) of her own confusion as to her sexual identity, so as to suggest to me that, as I mentioned in one of my notes during that week, U • • • my feeling about Nanette as a transvestite probably was not entirely 'imaginary')' i.e., self-produced-probably reflected Nanette's doubt as to her own sex, a doubt reflected in her posture, her mannerisms, and so forth." My belief is that I had experienced, here, a taste of the eerily uncomfortable feelings which presumably assailed the patient herself, in connection with her uncertainty concerning her sexual identity, and that it was partly to relieve just such anxiety as this that her unconscious conception of herself as nonhuman arose. One might label this an instance of the therapist's feeling "communicated anxiety" from the patient. I think it also correct to say that the patient and the therapist were each feeling threat.. ened with conflictual feelings regarding threatening sexual temptation-and-danger in the therapeutic relationship, and were both utilizing mutually reinforcing unconscious defenses against such anxiety. I think, that is, that my sensing her to be some kind of weird, repellent male-female represented a defense against sexual

Psychosis and Neurosis

233

temptation on my own part. But the initial point remains, I believe, valid: I was experiencing a brief sample of the kind of anxiety which was chronically threatening her, as indicated by her acting, oftentimes, as a sexless, nonhuman object. The schizophrenic woman described in Eissler's (31) previously mentioned paper showed an ego defense somewhat comparable with that of the woman I have been describing. In his patient, similarly, there was what one might call a dedifferentiation to a state of subjective oneness with the inanimate environment, occurring at times when, for instance, she was threatened by the arousal of romantic..erotic feelings: When the patient saw a man whom she loved enter the office, she was in danger of feeling love in his presence, which would have made it impossible for her to function; for " . . she was certain the man would notice her passion and that she would walk up to him and express her feelings. Under such circumstances she instantly felt dead" Feeling dead temporarily solved the whole problem" The production of the feeling of deadness was the main tool with which she solved the majority of the innumerable social complications through which she went constantly. " ..

Eissler describes this as though it were a consciously willed process, a process which the patient was able to tum on and off. I surmise that it was, rather, a temporary dedifferentiation over which the patient had only fantasied control.

Hel'plesmess The desire to become nonhuman is a facet, in some instances, of the grandiose conception of oneself as being able to be anything, a conception serving as an unconscious defense against profound feelings of helplessness. One example of this emerged in my work with the thirty-oneyear..old paranoid schizophrenic woman described on pages 183.. 186, part of whose delusional system included her conviction that she had repeatedly been turned into various nonhuman forms. I have described her showing apprehension lest she be again

234

The Nonhuman Environment

turned, imminently, into an animal, or bird, or tree, or what not. I repeatedly saw how productive it was of anxiety and terror to her. It was this anxious side of the delusion which was most obvious for many months. But as time went on, it became more clear that this delusion was also serving her grandiose conception of herself: she attributed to herself the power to become, however unwillingly, these various nonhuman forms. One incident which helped me to see this was when she said in one of the hours) in a tone of overt protest but of covert boasting, "I don't see why they knock me out and make me do all these things [i.e., innumerable dramatic and adventuresome things} many of them utterly beyond human capacity, and none of them being actual things which she was doing or had ever done] unconsciously, because I can do consciously all the things they make me do unconsciously~ except for changing into a bird or fish or animal." The covert boastfulness left the further implication that she could do even this last-the "changing into a bird or fish or animal't-e-unconsciously. Schilder's previously mentioned book, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, contains some passages which are relevant here, and which include some observations concerning normal people in this same regard: When people wear enormous masks at the carnival in Nice, they are not merely changing the physiological basis of their bodyimage but are actually becoming giants themselves. One of the pleasures to be derived from this pageant is the possibility of playing with the enlargement of our body-image and thus in.. creasing our own importance. Our body-image is in a continuous process of enlargement and shrinking and we enjoy these changes in it. The body-image changes continually and we triumph over the limitations of the body by adding masks and clothes to the body-image. This is the explanation of the animal masks of primitive peoples which actually identify the wearer with the animal [128d].

Ekstein's (32) paper entitled, "The Space Child's Time Machine," provides some excellent examples, from his work with

Psychosis and Neurosis

235

this schizophrenic boy, of how an identification with delusionally fantasied machines can serve to allay feelings of helplessness. Ekstein tells us how these space.. and time-conquering projections or the boy's own self served, for a long time in the therapy, as safeguards against the recognition of profound feelings of helplessness: We see . . . that he attempted to master his anxiety about the present, his fear of death, of destruction and annihilation by making himself the master of the past. He who could change the past might thus secure survival and save the future. The helplessness of early childhood, the lonesomeness and the feeling of rejection, his weakness, his smallness, all of it was reversed into its opposite, and just as once [with the use of a fantasied space ship] he had governed space, he now was governing time. Rather than recalling the past and the misery of his early life as he must have experienced it, he felt himself as a master of the past. Since he had changed the past, he did not need to change the present and he did not need to be afraid of the future.

Superego Pressures Toward Omnipotence Various of the already mentioned factors are obviously heightened in importance-heightened in their capacity to drive the individual toward desiring to become nonhuman-in so far as the individual's superego is of an archaically harsh, self-punitive sort. In particular, anxiety concerning the assumption and main.. tenance of responsibility for one's own living, and anxiety regarding sexual desires and sexual conflicts, are aggravated by the presence of such a superego. And the profound helplessness which one eventually finds to lie behind such grandiose delusions as those of the patient mentioned above (in the section on helplessness) is found to be not so much a helplessness to meet the demands of reality per se, as a helplessness to meet the impossibly harsh requirements of the archaic superego in the course of one's living. I wish now to indicate how the demand which such a superego places upon the individual's ego) namely, the demand that he be omnipotent, feeds into his desire to become nonhuman

236

The Nonhuman Environment

-as a means of escape from the tormentingly burdensome superego injunction that he must be capable of doing anything, thai he must never accept either failure in any endeavor or any imperfection in himself. Brief material from three schizophrenic patients will serve to demonstrate that such a superego demand tends to give rise, in the individual, to desires to become nonhuman, as a form of surcease from this internal pressure-toward-omnipotence. The first patient is the forty-year-old woman described on pages 215-217 as showing various indications of having formed important childhood identifications with dolls, partly as a function of her relationship with her very hard...driving mother who treated her more as an inanimate object, a kind of storage battery which needed continuous recharging, than as a human being with internal sources of energy. I should now like to mention that this woman, during the course of four years of intensive psychotherapy, made clear to me that a prime factor which had led to her catatonic illness had been her own intensely self-punitive superego. Her superego had driven her incessantly toward the goal of omnipotence, much as the mother herself was driven and much as the mother endeavored to drive the daughter. The patient's doll-like behavior was found to constitute an expression of her desire to find relief from these excessive superego demands, to find relief through becoming an inanimate object.. She proved, not surprisingly, to be extremely afraid of her strivings toward passivity. In one hour, for example, she revealed a long-felt need to get people angry and critical toward her, lest, in the absence of such stimulating responses from them, she become completely passive. On further development of this fantasy by free association, however, she brought out that she felt she would become like a pig; and she next recalled that, as a child on her grandmother's farm, she used to envy the life which the placid pigs had, and used to find glee in stirring them up. It had required about three years of psychotherapy to unearth this desire to become a pig. It was four months later that she brought out the material, referred to above, indicating the iden-

Psychosis and Neurosis

237

tification with the dolls, as well as the following related material: In the course of freely associating, she expressed some thoughts about the termination of psychotherapy, putting it in terms of my "finishing" her. I suggested, "Let's see what the idea of my 'finishing' you brings to mind." She immediately replied, "Somebody finishing the laundry." I was startled to hear this, startled at the inertness, the utter lack of initiative, implied here, and instantly thought that the termination of therapy, which I had been thinking was perhaps not more than a few months off, had now receded many months into the future. But I pulled myself together, and inquired calmly, "What gives with the laundry then? What happens with It?" She said, equally promptly, "It's ready for the next time someone wants to use it." I still felt dismayed at her conception of the termination of therapy; it is much sweeter music to one's ears when the patient associates to, for instance, a young plant, bursting with life and eager to grow further. But within a few minutes it occurred to me that these communications probably represented, for her, a very good step, that she could now so candidly express her longing for passivity, a longing which had been formerly so shameful and anxiety-provoking to her. It was as though she had achieved) in the course of our work, a sufficiently clear differentiation of herself as an animate entity so that she could now dare to recog.. nize a wish to be like the inanimate objects (such as the laundry) in the world about her-this world of inanimate objects with which she had been unconsciously so much at one, earlier in her therapy. She no longer had to act out this wish, by unconsciously identifying with such objects, but could permit it to enter her awareness. Only in retrospect did I see evidence here of countertransference: my alarm, in reaction to her expressions of striving toward passivity, brought me into very close similarity with her hard.. driving mother. One might well surmise, then, that some of her ostensible striving toward passivity was a disguised effort on her part to thwart the mother therapist who was trying to make her become omnipotent. This surmise is substantiated by

T he Nonhuman Environment

238

abundant data from the therapy; I did have, indeed, such a countertransference problem, which, as can be seen in the bit of interview material given above) tended to interfere with my helping her to become free from her own superego's demands for omnipotence. The second patient, a schizophrenic woman, twenty-two years of age) wrote the following description of God, a description which is vividly suggestive of the archaic harshness of this young woman's superego: God

God is burning everlasting hate. God is killing, chaos and everlasting destruction. God is doom. God is fury. God is consuming fire. God is merciless and deadly. God is ever-lasting war and vengeance. God is World War «( (ad infinitum!]!!») [underlined four times]. God is fierceness, wrath and vengeance. God is burning hate, fury, chaos and destruction. God is fighting, war, chaos, destruction and perdition. God is eternal fire. God is the power of burning hate, death and destruction eternal. God is pneumonic plague. God is white hot grinding rock. God is burning hate everlasting, chaos, destruction and fury. God is everlasting wrath. God is cancer. God is the temperature of «( ((infinity) )). [underlined three times]. God is all hatred, war, chaos, destruction, violence, tempest, flood, fire, chaos, earthquake, grinding burning rock. God is white heat. God is all [underlined tWice] furnace. God is furnace. Eternal furnace is God. God is the {( ( (opposite)))) of mercy. God is Doom. Therefore souls shall be destroyed. Personally since I have a soul that means all souls including mine shall be destroyed eternally. Death and hell and perdition is our fate. God is a lake of fire burning with brimstone which bumeth forever and ever which is the Second Death. God is eternal death, destruction and all perdition. God is the eternal Second Death.

This young woman, hospitalized with severe schizophrenia since the age of fourteen, struggling with the kind of superego portrayed above, poignantly sought freedom from the oppres-

Psychosis and N .eurosis

239

sion of that superego by identifying, oftentimes, with the changing elements of the weather-the clouds, the wind, the rain) and so forth. She spent much of her time out on the grounds, standing off by herself staring fascinateclly up at the clouds, and when a storm would come up, she would come into the ward and rush about delightedly, fluttering her hands and declaring herself to be the wind, not in a way which connoted destructiveness, but rather a delicious senseof freedom. The third patient, a schizophrenic woman, twenty-eight yean of age at the time of her admission to the hospital, remains in my memory as having been, for approximately her first two years at Chestnut Lodge, among the most animaIlik.e human beings I have ever known. I vividly recall many occasions when, upon going to our maximum-security ward for women, to have a psychotherapeutic session with one or another of my patients, I would bear this woman in a seclusion room, snarling and roaring with animallike rage, and jouncing her bedsprings up and down in a most frightening manner. Even for one who has been accustomed to witnessing human rage as any psychotherapist is, it was an awesome, shocking experience to hear this woman: it sounded for all the world as though the creature in there were a beast rather than a human being. Seclusion is resorted to only sparingly at the Lodge; but this woman, short but powerfully built and violently assaultive, required it not infrequently. Now, after I had thus formed an impression of this woman (whom I often saw, looking terribly anxious and confused and hostile, out on the ward) as being someone who stood with at least one foot in the realm of savage beasts rather than that of human beings, I learned from her therapist something which gave me a quite different view of her, and which moved me greatly. He told me that, during the height of what one might calI this nonhumanlike period of her several years' stay at the Lodge, she spent the vast majority of her waking hours sitting in her room and writing, reporting in meticulous detail everything which she could set down of the thoughts she experienced, and of every least physical movement her body made. What struck me, as he told me about this, was that here was a woman

240

The Nonhuman Environment

cruelly enslaved by an almost incredibly severe superego, a superego against which she kept trying to rebel with her sporadic outbursts of animallike rage. Her therapist had formed the same opinion, in the course of his work with her. She made her notes on large sheets of unlined paper, and over the months hundreds, possibly even some thousands, of these sheets accumulated. When one sees samples of these sheets, one finds an amazing number of words per page; my careful estimate showed that, in contrast to the approximately 300 words per page ordinarily taken up by a person's handwriting, one sheet of this woman's notes contained 1360 of her tiny, careful words, while another contained 2508 words. I mention this because it is expressive, I think, of the tremendous constraint under which her superego caused her to function. The content of the following excerpts from these notes will be seen to provide much direct evidence of her self-punitive super· ego. It is also noteworthy that she makes references to her body functions and body movements as though her body were something inanimate outside her self. I shall present an excerpt from each of two different sheets. The omission marks were inserted by me; otherwise the material is given as it was written by her:

I have no esteem of you~we-Paper was on far side of the am-i-are just invented-Great mixup between tug on head-Leaned over and looked at paper on other side of bed--slipped on page--Leaned over and looked at paper on other side of bed-pencil moved-the thing is to drain a woman and walk in on her-No idea of accepting him-Leaned over and looked at paper on other side of bed-Frankly, no acceptance whatsoever by woman-s-absolutely uncontrollable remark made by those Above--you realize you are absolutely uncontrollable why don't you show acceptable deportment-went into other room and saw some cookies on the bed and ate them--saw some sandwiches and ate them-That is not proper deportment say those who are Above-I'm an absolute screwball we can't control- . . . bed~Paper-I

Leaned back-it could-stop me from doing spellbinding" . • Thought why do you wear that suit- • . . Made me think

Psychosis and Neurosis

241

of Self Made Man ••• -Handled pencil-Woman walks down hall to remind me-- .•. Peachie- .•• You go to hell-s-Difficulty of writing to young man-. . . -Dangerous-Am not sure-Iousy- . . . -Whistle these examinations are difficultStupid- . . .-Look at whole paper and all these examinations I hope to pass--Caught-Got up--- . • . -Finger placed on paper- . . . - Thwnb placed across paper-s-pcor-c-I'm exhausted-Air through nose- . . .-being refined-blew through nose-- .... For months she spent almost every waking moment) from morning till night, in making such notes. One might well think of her note taking as representative of her struggle to retain her status as a human being, a struggle to keep under control her "nonhuman" id impulses, impulses which succeeded sporadically in breaking loose and causing other persons to shrink from her in the way that I myself inwardly shrank from her upon hearing her during her overtly disturbed periods, when she sounded for all the world like a beast. I have arbitrarily chosen, for the sakeof illustrating the present point, to place the interpretative emphasis upon this other view which likewise has, I believe) validity: the periods of animallike behavior represented what one might think of as a basically healthy determination to throw off the shackles of her self-punilive superego, a superego which demanded such impossible things of ber as the incessant recording of all that she experienced throughout every waking moment, a superego which demanded, in short, that she be onmipotent.

Ego Instability It has long been known that one of the greatest sources of the schizophrenic patient's anxiety is a confusion as to his own ego boundaries. Repeatedly, in this volume, I have presented material which illustrates how chaotically disrupted is his consequent experiencing of himseH vis-a-vis the outer world. Anyone who works much with overtly schizophrenic patients sees repeatedly

242

The Nonhuman Environment

how utterly unstable and discontinuous is their own experiencing of their ego, including their body image, the subjective bound. aries between themselves and the outer world either being absent entirely or fluctuating irregularly as a result of the patients' intense involvement in processes or projecting onto the outer world and taking into themselves persons and various nonhuman elements from the outer world. It seems to me that the anxiety attendant upon this ego instability may constitute another driving force, another ingredient, of the patient's desire to become nonhuman-specifically, to become an inanimate object such as the relatively stable inanimate objeets he perceives in his environment. I do not have clinical data to document clearly this hypothesis. A clinical example to be presented in another regard} in Chapter XI (on pages 321.324) contains strong implications that such a process is occurring in that particular patient, and the interested reader would find it worth while, I think, to read that example in connection with the present discussion." For material more explicitly revealing of this particular (hypothetical) dynamic process, I shall present some passages from two fictional works which portray it in a way which I have found stimulating and, I believe, "clinically)' sound. The stories are from the field of science fiction, a realm of literature which some colleagues regard with scorn and which others, like myself, find to provide not only entertaining "escape reading" but, oftentimes, reflections of very interesting psychological processes. To those who may tend to dismiss the following p~ges as worthless because of their source, let me simply point out that they were written by human beings, and, further, that they have appealed to other human beings sufficiently widely so that they are now among the classics of science fiction; to me these considerations represent psychological facts worthy of attention. 'a The paper by Elkisch and Mahler (33) J in which they describe a schizophrenic boys identifying with machines in his environment as a means of "ccneretislng" and thus mastering the inner impulses which threaten to overwhelm him, is relevant to this point.

Psychosis and Neurosis

243

The first story, entitled Vault of the Beast, by A. E. van Vogt, concerns a strange being from another planet which has invaded a space ship. The beginning of the tale is as follows: The creature crept. It whimpered from fear and pain, a thing, slobbering sound horrible to hear. Shapeless, formless thing yet changing shape and form with every jerky movement. It crept along the corridor of the space freighter, fighting the terrible urge of its elements to take the shape of its surroundings. A gray blob of disintegrating stuffJ it crept, it cascaded, it rolled, flowed, dissolved, every movement an agony of struggle against the abnormal need to become a stable shape. Any shape! The hard, chilled-blue metal wall of the Earthbound freighter, the thick, rubbery floor. The floor was easy to fight. It wasn't like the metal that pulled and pulled. It would be easy to become metal for all eternity . . . [Then, as a crewman approached along the corridor in which it was lying:] Pain came to the thing on the floor. Primeval pain that sucked through its elements like acid burning, burning. The brown floor shuddered in every atom as Parelli strode over it. The aching urge to pull toward him, to take his shape. The thing fought its horrible desire, fought with anguish and shivering dread, more consciously now that it could think with Parelli's brain. A ripple of floor rolled after the man. Fighting didn't help. The ripple grew into a blob that momentarily seemed to become a human head. Gray, hellish nightmare of demoniac shape. The creature hissed metallically in terror, then collapsed palpitating, slobbering with fear and pain and hate as Parelli strode on rapidly-too rapidly for its creeping pace. The thin, horrible sound died; the thing dissolved into brown floor, and lay quiescent yet quivering in every atom from its unquenchable, uncontrollable urge to live-live in spite of pain, in spite of abysmal tenor and primordial longing for stable shape. To live and fulfill the purpose of its lusting and malignant creators [158a].

My clinical work has strongly suggested to me that it is much this kind of intensely anxious conflict, fictionally presented in the above passages, which is suffered by the deeply regressed schizo...

244

The Nonhuman Environment

phrenic patient, who finds himself pulled into uncontrollable identifications with elements of his environment-both human and nonhuman elements of it-in the attempt to find surcease from an almost unendurable instability of his own ego boundaries. This same general psychological process is portrayed, likewise, in a particularly beautiful fashion by Ray Bradbury, a sciencefiction writer whose stories possess a combination of poetic beauty and imaginativeness which has won him much acclaim even outside the science-fiction field, and whose psychological perceptivity I have found informative to me on more than one occasion. I refer to what will be found portrayed, in this second example) as "this same general process" for the reason that we see, here again, a similar fluidity of ego boundaries, a similar tendency to identify helplessly with elements in the environment. But in this particular example it is with people, rather than ingredients of the nonhuman environment, that one is tending to identify. Thus it is well to keep in mind that the following excerpt from Bradbury's story, and my subsequent discussion of it-the material, that Is, on the next few pages-is to be considered in the nature of background data, or tangentially relevant data) with respect to the theme per se which I am expounding: the individual's desire to become nonhuman--to become, specifically, an inanimate object-as a means of finding surcease from the anxiety aroused in him by the instability of his ego boundaries. In his book, The Martian Chronicles, an account of colonization of Mars by people from Earth, Bradbury describes the native denizens of Mars as a race of creatures who assume whatever form a human being in their proximity needs to perceive them as possessing. In a chapter entitled The Martian, he describes in detail the confusion which ensues among the colonists when a Martian comes into their midst and is regarded variously by different persons, each of whom is quite convinced that he is someone personally known to them-in many instances, that he is a dear relative from Earth. The denouement concerning this confusion) the discovery that it is a Martian whose presence accounts for it, is as follows:

Psychosis lJnd Neurosis

245

Before their eyes he changed. He was Tom and James and a man named Switchman, another named Butterfield; he was the town mayor and the young girl Judith and the husband William and the wife Clarisse. He was melting wax shaping to their minds. They shouted, they pressed forward, pleading.. He screamed, threw out his hands, his face dissolving to each demand.. "Tom!" cried La Farge.. "Alice!" another. "William!" They snatched his wrists, whirled him about, until with one last shriek of horror he fell. He lay on the stones, melted wax cooling, his face all faces, one eye blue, the other golden, hair that was brown, red, yellow, black, one eyebrow thick, one thin, one hand large, one small

[16a]. It is not extreme to say that many schizophrenics feel the same agonizingly mercurial instability of ego boundaries, the same helplessness to prevent their being molded to fit the needs of other persons in their environment and to identify with these other pen;oDS, as is symbolized by Bradbury's description of the Martian. A considerable number of patients have been able to verbalize to me their anxiety about this; one borderline schizophrenic young man, upon voluntarily hospitalizing himself, expressed to me in the admission interview his anxiety about becoming housed among deeply schizophrenic patients: "I'm afraid I'll jump out of my own skin and into the skin of one of the psychotic patients." Such fears are all too well founded; it is well known to personnel who work with hospitalized schizophrenic patients that the latter are often helpless to stop themselves from identifying with patients about them as regards grossly symptomatic behavior," Greenson has described) in a recent article (65), his psycho'Storch (148) reports that one schizophrenic woman "experienees every upruah of thought, every relation to another person) as giving up of a part of her pelSOnallty. 'Gradually] can no longer distinguish how much of m~ self is in me, and how much is already in others. I am a conglomeration, a monstrosity, modelled anew each day.'" In a recent paper (134) I have presented comparable data. from intensive psychotherapy with a number of patients.

246

The Nonhuman Enuironment

analytic findings in a group of patients who struggled against identifying themselves with an important parental figure. These patients, whose illnesses were in the form of neurosis rather than psychosis, or in any case were far less severe than those of the hospitalized schizophrenic patients who have provided the bulk of my own clinical data, showed qualitatively this same phenomenon of helplessly identifying with another person. But his patients manifested, in each instance, such an identification only sporadically, and the identification had to do only with a single other person --in each case a parent-in the past." Schizophrenic patients, by contrast, in my experience show this uncontrollable identification with multiple other persons, persons in present proximity to the patient as well as persons in past life. This is one of the great reasons, I think, why schizophrenic patients are so unable to tolerate prolonged physical closeness with another person, for such closeness constitutes a very real threat to the patient's ego boundaries, a very real threat to his individuality. I made this point in an article some years ago (133), without elaborating upon it to the extent that I have done here. I shall now return, from this tangentially relevant subject to which the past few pages have been devoted-the subject of one's helplessly identifying with other persons-i-ss» the main theme of man's identifying with what I call the nonhuman environment, or, to put it another way, man's desire to become nonhuman, in order to relieve the anxiety attendant upon the instability of his ego boundaries. Erich Fromm., in The Sane Society, deals with this theme when be describes man's effort to find a sense of identity through regressing to, and identifying himself with, nature: While the infant is rooted in mother, man in his historical infancy (which is still by far the largest part of history in terms of time) remains rooted in nature. Though having emerged from

•Jacobson's (83, 84) writings concerning the metapsychology of psycnotic identifications are relevant to Greenson's findings. She states that in schizophrenia there is "an escape from superego conflicts by a dissolution of the superego and by iu regressive transformation back into threatening parental images" (83).

Psychosis and Neurosis

247

nature the natural world remains his home; here are still his roots. He tries to find security regressing to and identifying himself with nature, the toorld 01 plants and animals [My italics]. This attempt to hold on to nature can be clearly seen in many primitive myths and religious rituals. When man worships trees and animals as his idols, he worships particularizations of nature; they are the protecting, powerful forces whose worship is the worship of nature itself. In relating himself to them, the individual finds his sense of identity and belonging, as part of nature [55a].

Loneliness Here I have in mind a number of schizophrenic patients who have shown an outstandingly unhuman appearance and behavior for long periods in their hospital stay, including in each case such marked assaultiveness as to require them to be physically secluded in their rooms, away from other patients for long periods. In these patients I have seen evidence that their hopelessness about ever finding a satisfying relatedness to other human beings had reached such a point that they seemed to be experiencing a longing to become at one with the trees outside their windows, trees which, quite literally, for hours at a time provided them with a companionship which they were not getting from other human beings. In such cases, it seems as if the loneliness is even more unbearable than the threat of losing their human identity. Another factor in this is the patient's own having built up such an intensity of rejeetingness toward all his fellow men, bis own baving come to find all other human beings so utterly unacceptable to him, that he subjectively relates himself more to the trees, and to other nonhuman things about him) than to the other patients or the personnel. As one such patient, while gazing out her window, flatly and emphatically stated it, "I certainly miss horses, and I don't like another living thing," then added as an afterthought, "--except trees," In a subsequent chapter I shall present clinical material showing patients' "personalizing" their nonhuman environment-perceiving it in animistic terms-in an unconscious effort to assuage

248

The Nonhuman Environment

feelings of loneliness. Taking that concept along with this present one, the more comprehensive statement may be made that the individual may, in order to find assuagement for loneliness, unconsciously strive to achieve a homogeneity as between himself and elements of his nonhuman environment, either by perceiving those elements animlstically, or by perceiving himself as being nonhuman like those elements. In a therapeutic hour with such a patient, when he or she reveals such a feeling of intense relatedness to, for example, a tree outside the window, this may of course represent simply a displacement of feelings, on the patient's part, from the therapist to the tree. But my belief is that we are, if anything, too ready to place emphasis upon this explanation, and to underestimate the real and great importance which the tree possesses in the life of a lonely patient who is, quite literally, cut off from human companionship much of the time. The following passages from a chapter entitled "Solitude," in Thoreau's Walden, show this same psychological proc~ at work in the author. In this instance, the individual-Thoreauis relatively successful in warding off any awareness of loneliness; but presumably he manages to avoid, for the most part, any intensely felt need for human companionship only at the cost of his maintaining a somewhat animistic view of his nonhuman. envi-

ronment: I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life . .. [But then:] Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathyand befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and hwnanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again [t54c].

A3 an example from another field of human creativity, the field of art, we find in Vincent van Gogh's careful painting of

Psychosis and Neurosis

249

his chair-a simple, rudely constructed straight chair resting upon the red-tiled floor of his room-an expression of this same phenomenon: a troubled and lonely human being's tendency to view animistic ally, to personify, the nonhuman. Robert Goldwater, Associate Professor of Art at Queens College in New York, makes this commentary about the painting: What gives this picture its expressive power? Is it Van Gogh's conscious concern with the effect of light? Perhaps in part) for he has changed a chair of unpainted wood into yellow in order to heighten its contrast with the red and to achieve an integrated hannony of color. But beyond the problem of design is the utter seriousness with which the painter regarded such familiar objects, a respect so profound as almost to transform them into living beings (My italics]. Like the rest of his bedroom in Aries they become symbols of stability in Van Gogh's world of continual crisis [63].

The Desire to Become Nonhuman As a Function of the Striving Toward Maturity via "Phylogenetic Regression"

CHAPTER

9

In the preceding chapter, I described various unpleasant states of feeling from each of which theindividual may seek escape in the longing to become nonhuman. That iSJ I have thus far been occupied mainly here with describing the longing to become nonhuman as a defense against various unconscious affects. Now we come to a qualitatively different facet of the whole matter. This yearning to become nonhuman can frequently be viewed as a need, on the part of the patient, to regress phylogenetically, to "return" symbolically to the nonhuman state out of which the human race emerged in the long course of evolution, in order to get a fresh start in the struggle to achieve individuation, and subsequent emotional maturation, as a human being. This particular theoretical point, just stated, is an outgrowth of my basic concept of the general phenomenon of regression, a

Psychosis and Neurosis

251

concept which I shall now sketch in as a background for this more specific point. Regression is usually described, in psychiatric and psychoana.. lytic literature, as an expression of the individual's unconscious striving to recapture some form of existence, some mode of inter.. personal relatedness, which he experienced at a chronologically earlier age-a fonn of existence, a mode of relatedness to others, which afforded him greater satisfaction and security than he is presently experiencing. With such a concept of regression I do not disagree, so far as it goes. But the trouble is that the concept stops there; it does not, to my way of thinking, go far enough. Left as it is, such a concept of regression does not do adequate justice to the human being's ceaseless striving (whether at a conscious or an unconscious level) toward further psychological growth, toward further emotional maturation. Such a striving never really leaves a person, no matter how profound or long-lasting the mental illness which is hampering these strivings toward growth. · My own clinical experience with patients has gradually convinced me that regression represents the individual's striving (generally a more or less completely unconscious striving) to achieve the chronologically earlier relatedness, as mentioned above, in order to achieve sufficient satisfaction, security} peace, physical and psychological strength, and what not, so as to be able to make a fresh attempt to overcome the particular maturational obstacle upon which he has so far come to grief. That is, I consider that regression always possesses a restitutive facet, and for this reason the phrase which Kris applies to certain varieties of regression-"regression in the service of the ego" (89d )-is applicable to every instance of regression, as is Hartmann's phrase, "regressive adaptation" (67h). It is obvious, of course, that regression alone does not lead to this long-range beneficial result of advance in emotional maturity; all patients are capable of reaching a state of regression, yet many do not emerge, subsequently, into a state of health. Very often} the individual becomes fixed in a state of regression; unfortunately a considerable percentage of all the persons in mental

252

The Nonhuman Environment

hospitals spend the rest of their lives in just such a state. But when such a person can have the benefit of an enlightened psychotherapy, and ward-nursing care, wherein the potentially positive facet of the regression is seen and worked with, there is then a reasonably good chance that his recovery can occur and that the period of his regression can be seen, in retrospect, as a phase of the recovery process-a phase of the emergence of what is youngest and healthiest in the patient. I believe that a major reason why so many patients become fixed in this phase of regression is that the persons about them fail to discern the basically positive striving which is at work here, and the patients are chronically responded to, rather, by the persons in their environment as though devoid of any striving to change beyond the present state of deep

regression. And in this same connection I wish to make it equally clear that I do not conceive of the regressed patient as being conscious of the desire which I am postulating. His regressive behavior is to be regarded rather, I believe, as the acting out of an uncon.. scious desire of this sort. All our clinical experience shows us} again and again, that the patient whose behavior is most regressed, most infantile, is least able to admit into his awareness any actual desire to behave thus. Hence, since the patient himself is unconscious of the emotional determinants of his regression, it is all the more important that persons about him be aware, and help him to become aware, of the constructive aspect of all this. I do not present this concept of regression as an original view of mine. Certainly many practitioners of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy can be assumed to conduct their work upon the basis of such a concept. I know of at least two persons in the field of psychotherapy with schizophrenics, Madame Sechehaye (137) and Gertrud Schwing (130), whose writings implicitly convey that they see regression to have this kind of basically positive, constructive significance. But it is certainly rare to find the concept explicitly so stated in the literature.' 1 During the final revision of my manuscript, I have come across two papers by Winnieott (165, 166), originally presented in 1954 in which he expresses a concept of regression which bean much similarity to that which I have given. j

Psychosis and Neurosis

253

It has been 'inspiring to me to see one after another of my own schizophrenic patients, over the course of difficult years in psychotherapy, gradually emerge from the encrustations of illnessgradually slough off the bizarre behavior, the warped thinking, and other manifestations of sickness-into a phase of their appearing healthier and younger. For example) a forty-year-old woman with paranoid schizophrenia of many years' duration, as her illness gradually became resolved, came to appear more and more as a healthy girl of about fifteen. A man of forty-two with a hebephrenic illness of many years' duration, who at the beginning of psychotherapy looked, as did the woman just mentioned, at least his chronological age, gradually came in the course of psychotherapy to behave more and more like a healthy child of eight, or at times even as young as two years of age. When one sees a patient going through such a metamorphosis, one gets no feeling whatever that the patient has now arrived at his final destination-that he has succeeded in reaching a desired emotional age and is now determined to stay there, to cling to this for the rest of his life. On the contrary, such a youthful phase has all the earmarks of temporariness, of a kind of resting. up period, a period of resetting one's sights, before resuming the struggle to mature further. The subsequent clinical course in each of these patients of mine (and the two mentioned are only examples from among several) has substantiated this theoretical concept of regression. In fact, it was in the course of my witnessing such clinical developments in my own patients, and in various patients of other therapists who had learned, as I have, not to fight against the patient's regressive strivings, that such a theoretical view of regression grew up in my thinking. Returning to the specific point made before this backgroundpainting digression, I want to restate that although regressive strivings have as their intermediate goal some phase in the individual's own infancy or childhood, sometimes one finds that the intermediate goal lies so early in his infancy-the regression progresses to an ego state characteristic of such early infancy, characteristic of that early phase of his infancy before he had achieved an awareness of himself as being a human entity-that he un-

254

The Nonhuman Environment

consciously experiences the regression as if he had actually regressed phylogenetically, as if he had sunk, that is, to a state of existence characteristic of forms lower on the phylogenetic scale than is man himself. In this discussion I place quotes about the term "phylogenetic regression" not only because I am dealing here with a hypothesis rather than with. a thoroughly documentable fact, but also because I consider the regression to be only subjectively a phylogenetic one," I am more than half inclined to think that in working with any individual patient, whether neurotic or psychotic, we may find times when it is valid to think of his regressive strivings in such a "phylogenetic" rather than a simply ontogenetic context. This concept, which looks at first glance unscientifically metaphysical, as I well realize, has become formulated in my thinking as a result of experiences with patients. I have been interested to find, in a paper by Bertschinger and in one by Freud, references to phylogenesis as playing a part in the composition of the human being's unconscious. Bertschinger, in 1916, says in his paper, "Process of Recovery in Schizophrenia," Perhaps the psychic content, which in mental diseases comes up into the consciousness, lies always ready in the subconscious [i.e.. , what we now term the unconscious] in aU men. These are in paTt the instincts, wishes, views, common to all men, which originate in phylogeneticall'Y older periods and in the course of individual psychical development are ontogenetically abbreviated, again passed through and suppressed: in part, individual wishes, strivings) repressed by discipline into the subconscious {12; my italics].

And Freud in his paper, "Neurosis and Psychosis," written in 1924, says, There always remains as a common feature in the aetiology both of the psychoneuroses and the psychoses the factor of frustration ~ For my purposes, it is unnecessary to go into the controversy, in the science of embryology, between the ·'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' con.. eept, and the somewhat more recent concept of genetic parallelism. Werner ( 162v ). who adheres to the latter concept, provide, a diac:wsion of both these theories.

Psychosis and Neurosis

255

-the lack of fulfillment of one of those eternal uncontrollable childhood~s wishes that are so deeply rooted in OUT composition, phylog6netically [ore-ordained as it is [52; my italics]. Now I shall present a number of clinical examples of patients' achieving, by way of a period of "phylogenetic regression," progress in their struggle toward human individuality and maturity. 1. A colleague of mine was treating a male patient for a chronic hebephrenic illness. The patient was himself a physician who had completed an impressively long and high-quality training in his chosen specialty, internal medicine. He was a number of years older than the therapist, and despite his oftentimes grossly disturbed behavior, he retained a capacity for expressing cutting sarcasm-s-expressing it in an intimidatingly derisive father-figure fashion. This sarcasm proved, during the first several months of the therapy, to be quite threatening to the therapist. For example, on one occasion the patient brought up the subject of football, to which the therapist replied that he himself had not often attended football games. The patient then sneered, with a significant look, "I'll bet you haven't ru causing the therapist to feel defensive about his own masculinity. When the therapist described this kind of relatedness between himself and the patient, during a seminar meeting, we other seminar members helped him to see that the patient was succeeding, repeatedly, in causing him to feel defensive, so that he failed to see how very anxious and defensive the patient himself felt. The therapist seemed reassured by our comments. Two days later he reported that, in the first therapeutic hour following the seminar meeting, he had been greatly moved to find the patient coming over and "lying down at my feet like a dog," an act which had conveyed the feeling that the patient had found a source of security in the therapist, and could now freely show his intense need for that security. It would seem in retrospect that the therapist had uncon.. sciously been afraid of the intensity of the patient's dependency needs, which he must have sensed to be lying behind the man's sarcasm, competitiveness, and generally authoritarian approach

256

The Nonhuman Environment

to him. Presumably the seminar meeting helped him to become less afraid of the patient's dependency. The point I wish to emphasize for our present purpose, however, is that the constructively regressive behavior which the patient showed in that postseminar therapeutic hour, when he revealed his dependency feelings toward the therapist, was in a form which went beyond even a small-child or infantile one; his behavior was as if he were a dog. It was as though he felt the disparity between his own strength and that of the therapist to be so great that he could relate to the therapist, now as he moved into a closer relatedness to the latter, only as a pet dog might relate to his beloved master. 2. In the course of my own work with a deeply schizophrenic young woman, it gradually dawned upon me that she felt herself to be in a doglike position toward me, as a vastly more powerful, more capable being than herself.. She often addressed me as if I were a great leader among human beings, and on a few occa... sions revealed that she thought of herself, vis-a-vis me, as a dog. This kind of thing did not have a connotation of her feeling derogated by me, nor of her being derisive toward me as being a pompous ass, both of which feelings she managed to convey on many occasions. This came, rather, at times when her feelings toward me were of a positive sort, when she was most freely able to reveal her intense dependency upon me. The disorder of her emotional reactions, of her intellectual processes, and of her interpersonal relationships was so very profound) and so painfully evident to her, that I believe she quite honestly felt that in her relating to me she was not relating as one human being to another human being, but rather as a dog relating to a very great human being. Here) again, as in the first clinical example, such an attitude on the part of the patient emerged only after months-many months, in this instance--of predominantly "distancing" emotional reactions on her part, reactions of loathing, sarcasm, and other forms of hostility toward me. 3. A schizophrenic young woman with whom I worked went through a period of about one year, following her transfer to

Psychosis and N.eurosis

257

Chestnut Lodge, of extremely withdrawn behavior; she lay curled in bed, silent, most of the time, and when she did move about among other persons on the ward she protested stridently if any one touched her physically in any fashion. Then certain individuals among the personnel, including an experienced psychiatric nurse engaged in a research project on the ward, gradually succeeded in helping her to become more accepting of physical closeness. The research nurse was quite struck with the fact that the patient "just purred, practically," when her back was scratched-very much as though she were a kitten, basking in the experience. This young woman's gradual movement toward other human beings was manifested by various animallike mannerisms which I shall not attempt to detail here. Animallike sounds and behavior were prominent for about the next year and a half) when they gradually gave way to a more "fully human" way of relating to people. Incidentally, I cannot resist mentioning, in this context, my experience with a hebephrenic man of forty-one who) as his intense hostility toward me gradually diminished over the course of three years of difficult therapy, went through a period of appearing and behaving very much like a cuddly little animal. In some of the hours during this period, hours which were largely devoid of any words from him, he would occasionally meow like a contented kitten. 4. A young man developed an acute schizophrenic reaction, was first hospitalized elsewhere for six months; and then, because he was not doing well in his treatment there, he was transferred to Chestnut Lodge. The initial hospitalization had been maneuvered by his mother and father through their telling him they were going to drive him home from medical school so that he couId rest at home for a time from the strain under which, he realized, he had been laboring increasingly at school. But they drove him instead to the hospital, revealing to him on the way, with much guilt, their actual destination. After three and a half years of rather consistently good work

258

The Nonhuman Environment

in his psychotherapy, he finally brought out, to the accompaniment of more grief than he had ever before expressed during the sessions, as well as much anxiety, a detailed recollection of this trip to the hospital. The apex of his grief and anxiety came at the point when he described his father's drawing up at the hospital entrance and his own running from his parents into the hospital, "feeling like an animal." The description of this had all the earmarks of h~ fleeing, like an animal, from a now utterly bankrupt relationship with his parents and, more generally, from the now finally hopeless effort to relate to any others of the human beings whom he knew (his interpersonal relationships in general had been progressively deteriorating, one after another, over the preceding several months), into the refuge of the hospital. He did indeed succeed in utilizing the hospital environments in such a way that he gradually grew from an initial considerably regressed (predominantly catatonic) state into a very considerable degree of emotional maturity, establishing unprecedentedly satisfactory relationships with each of his parents, working successfully as a physician) and eventually marrying. We might say, then, that here again was someone who, through regression to, subjectively, a nonhuman state, achieved rebirth as a human being, followed by a more successful growing up than he had previously been able to accomplish. 5. Here is" a clinical example the theoretical interpretation of which I feel most unsure. I have persistently regarded it as being a manifestation, like the foregoing and the following examples, of subjective regression in the phylogenetic scale. But because the patient never emerged more than transitorily from a profoundly psychotic state during the period of my experience with her, I have insufficient evidence to be able to assess the significance, and possible constructive results, of the regressive experience in her particular case. My belief is that there were some constructive results from it, in terms of her acquiring, through it, at least some rudimentary sense of separation from a remarkably symbiotic relatedness to her mother. The patient ( already described on pages 209..210) was a

259

Psychosis and N eU10m

thirty-two-year-old woman with paranoid schizophrenia of many years' duration, whose upbringing had apparently been such as to convince her that she was even less acceptable, to her mother and grandmother (each of whom was herself distinctly para· noid), than an animal. The grandmother had long been hospitalized with an incurable physical illness, and the patient and the mother had been living together for many years, locked in a paranoid folie-a-deux with their intense hostility toward one another repressed and projected upon the outer world, a world which both in consequence agreed to be filled with people who were bent upon murdering, raping, robbing, and otherwise attacking each other. And the mother projected her own tabooed hostile and sexual feelings to a large extent, also, upon the patient; her private opinion of her daughter's basic make-up is suggested by the fact that upon her interropting the daughter's treatment at Chestnut Lodge, she placed her in the care of a psychiatrist who had had little or no experience in work with schizophrenic patients) but had received nationwide publicity through his testifying as a professional witness at a recent murder trial. The daughter had never married, of course. The intensity of the symbiotic relatedness between the two women is suggested by their behavior following a heart attack suffered by the mother. In the mother's words, the discovery of incurable illness in her own mother--the patient's previously mentioned grandmotherhad "caused my heart attack; I never got over it." Every night then, for the ensuing three years, the patient, who slept in the basement of the home, had attached to her wrist one end of a string) the other end of which was attached to the wrist of her mother, sleeping on the floor above, in order that she could respond promptly to the mother's needs not only by day but also by night. I worked for eight months with this patient, a most deeply psychotic and physically assaultive woman, until her treatment was interrupted by the mother, whose frequent inspection trips to the hospital, involving her prying into the most minute details of her daughter's care, through talks with the psychiatric adminisJ

260

The Nonhuman Environment

trator, the charge nurse, and myself, had made the therapy additionally difficult throughout. During the eight months of therapy-much too short a time, of course, for psychotherapy to establish a solid recovery in so deeply and chronically schizophrenic a person-the patient did not develop a durable sense of individuality vis-a-vis her mother, although she was making a real beginning in that direction when the treatment was interrupted. The bit of material suggestive of "phylogenetic regression" was reported to me by her mother. The mother, after a visit with her daughter during the seventh month of the psychotherapy, told me: She got into the confused idea of who were relatives and who weren't, and whether she was man, woman, or child. . . . She said we both had been buried deep in the earth and the worms had eaten us ... that we were different people than we used to bet Her treatment of me was exactly the same [i.e., the same respectful, solicitous, deferential treatment which the daughter had always accorded to the mother]. She told me she wanted me to know that she had never done anything to bring disgrace upon my name. [At another point in the interview the mother put it that.] She said she is identical with the Elizabeth Miller [the patient's name] who was buried in the earth, whom the wonns ate up. She said she is the direct replica -of Elizabeth Miller.

Significantly, it was in this same visit with her mother that the patient expressed with unprecedented clearness her possession of some sense of individuality, some degree of psychological separateness from the mother. The mother, while ostensibly not understanding the deep significance of the communication, faithfully reported it to me as follows:

There was more symbolic talk yesterday. She said something about the spIit..rail fence would be across a piece of land-the road I would take and the road she would take-s-she wanted her road to be close to mine-it couldn:tt be the same as mine [my

Psychosis and Neurosis

261

italics], but close together. I believe she meant the places we lived should be close together.

My own experience with the patient provided substantiating evidence that she was making real progress, sporadically, in achieving a sense of her own individuality, in the course of her period of psychotherapy with me. 6. As the final portion of clinical material concerning this point, I shall present dream material from two neurotic patients. In each instance, the patient's dream suggests that there is an unconscious conception of the self as being a nonhuman form of life-in the first instance, an animal; in the second instance, a plant. In each instance, the forms of nonhuman life are beautiful forms, and the dreams are "recovery dreams," signalizing crucial landmarks in the resolution of the neurosis. I presume that other analysts encounter such material commonly enough in their work with neurotic patients. I present this not as being particularly unusual data (as are, I believe, much of the data which I have presented from schizophrenic patients}, but rather as being beautiful examples of their kind of data) and being very much to the point here. The first of these two patients, a woman of forty-two with a hysterical personality structure, had been on the verge of a para... noid psychosis when I began seeing her, after she had already undergone approximately six yean of work with a series of three previous analysts. Over the course of the first two years of her work with me, the threat of psychosis gradually subsided. But she retained an abysmally low self-esteem; she showed an intense penis envy and} behind this, a basic despair as to her ability ever to become a woman among women. The analysis with me was an unusually stormy one, as had been her work with each of the previous analysts. She expressed a tremendous amount of hostility toward me for about three years, and as she became gradually aware of the intensity of her hostility, this awareness seemed, for many months, only an additional burden to her low self-esteem: she despaired of ever becoming a person capable of receiving and giving love.

The Nonhuman Environment

262

Then, in the thirty-eighth month of my work with her, she reported an unprecedentedly clear-cut and convincing "recovery dream," revealing a greater degree of self-esteem than she had ever before shown. She began this particular hour, as had so often happened before, by expressing despair and suicidal feelings, saying that she was "frightened all the time. I'm obsessed with death all the time. I'm convinced I have heart disease and cancer of the breast and tuberculosis . . . [etc., etc.]." But then, later in the hour, she reported the following dream. Not only is the content of the dream significant, but also her emotional tone in recounting it: she spoke with tenderness, weeping as she told it; both were unusual emotional manifestations in this woman, who had been more accustomed to voicing sarcasm, recrimination, and rage.

I got this collie dog, a wonderful good-natured animal. It was a female one. The man who ran the kennels was too busy to tell me what I should feed her. I had to learn to look after this dog myself-and why shouldn't I? [She asked this in a tone of most unusual self-reliance.] The kennel owner said, "This is the best dog in my kennels-it's a beautiful creature," and I thought it was, too--gentle, lovely, nice dog. And I so frequently dream about myself as an animal; I suppose most people do. I heard the dream as a powerfully moving indication that her self-esteem was growing up through alI the despair which had burdened her for years. associational material of the hour strongly supported such an interpretation. The dream represented the climax of a recently mounting struggle between what one might call her neurotic self and her healthy self. I felt that this dream about the dog, more than anything I had heard from her, forecast the coming triumph of her healthy self. Subsequent events validated this impression. As regards the particular subject under discussion, it is interesting that approximately ten months later she had a dream portraying herself in a similarly healthy light, but now as a human being, although a very young one as yet:

The

Psychosis and Neurosis

263

A rather chubby, very active, very pretty baby, two years old or so, with a mind of its own, able to run around, kept frisking all over the place. Was in a school gymnasium, running around naked, all pink. Was very skilled at certain things, like tumbling. I thought it was a little boy but it didn't have a penis [disappointed tone; but then she told with pleasure of how skillfully and pleasurably it would do acrobatics]. It was a bouncy baby and I don't know whose it was. I associate that it was related to me or I had to take care of it; but it wasn't really mine.

In associating to the little girl in the dream, she recalled ex.. periences as a girl when she herself had felt self-confidence in athletics, seH-confidence such as was being manifested in the

dream-child's acrobatics. Although at this stage of the analysis her penis envy had yet to be resolved, as can be seen by the dream, she had made much progress in terms of her unconscious conception of herself as a human being and a healthy one, although still immature and, so to speak, "only a girl." The second of these two patients, a twenty-nine-year-old woman chemist with a character disorder, showed at the beginning of analysis an ingrained harsh and sarcastic approach to other persons; an intense penis envy founded upon despair of becoming, in her OVlIl eyes, a real woman; and a severe repression of her tender feelings in her interpersonal relationships in general. Although married and the mother of three young daughters, she reacted to her own external genitalia with loathing, and was convinced that her menstrual flow W~ pathological; she was horrified on more than one occasion, during the early phase of the analysis, to find what she considered to be gruesomely ab .. normal bits of material in the menses. In the fourteenth month of the analysis there occurred a dream which marked a significant forward step in her becoming free from all these symptoms: I had the persistent feeling that I was trying to be a man, or act like a man, and was getting very tired of it, didn't think I could go on with it. Then I dreamed-I was thinking that-uhsuddenly I saw a rosebush, blooming with lovely red roses the color of blood.

264

The Nonhuman Environment

During her subsequent associations, she reported that following her previous analytic hour (late in the afternoon), "I went home -Norm [her husband] gloorny-I indicated to Nonn that I was interested in having intercourse [she had rarely felt able to make sexual overtures to him prior to her analysisJ-we had such a nice time-Norm.'s been so happy for a couple of days-I wouldn't feel like doing that every night, but this was just real pleasurable . . ." When I suggested, for association, "Roses the color of blood," she responded, "I just think of roses we" used to have on the dinner table at home, when I was little; all of us liked rosesand always when I think of blood I think of menstruatingDiana [her youngest daughter] asks me sometimes, when we go walking around the neighborhood, who makes flowers and birds and trees--I tell her, 'Mother Nature, I guess.' " Later in the hour her thoughts returned to "the rosebush-aU of a sudden it started blooming, had these nice big, velvety red roses all over it-well, the blood, the menstruating, could and does mean that one is no longer a child, that one has to start menstruating, get breasts-and is something one can't hide-you can act like a man, work alongside men in a chern-lab; but, by jeepers, you menstruate . . ." Throughout this hour, she had appeared unusually relaxed, with none of the considerable pressure of speech which had regularly been present earlier in her analysis. She seemed distinctly more self-confident and friendly in her demeanor; her tone in referring to her husband, to her daughter, and to her parental family, was a very fond one, with none of the harshness and sarcasm which she had so often conveyed in her reporting. And when she now referred to menstruation she spoke of it not as something pathological but as a beautiful expression of femininity. When one finds, as in the cases of the two neurotic patients just mentioned, how frequently the most significant of human growth experiences are portrayed, in the unconscious, by such nonhuman symbols as plants and animals, one gains a deeper appreciation of how profound is the affinity between the human being and his nonhuman environment,

Psychosis and Neurosis

265

I have already expressed my belief that this "phylogenetic

regression" must have to do basically with ontogeny, with the individual's own life history. Unless we are to adhere to some kind of Buddhistic conception that an individual human soul has had innumerable previous incarnations, sometimes in nonhuman forms, and on top of that some conception that the individual has at an unconscious level a memory of having existed in life forms lower down on the Darwinian scale, we must assume that his unconscious conception of himself as "a plant" or "an animal" represents a translation into literal terms of something which was once, indeed, true, but only figuratively. This is, I think, the only scientifically tenable view of this whole subject. Considered in figurative terms, each human being was once an animal (or, we could say, has functioned also like a tree, or a rock, or what not). We say that this person is animallike in his physical grace, that person is sturd y as an oak, the other person is rocklike in his uncompromisingness, and so on. When an individual reveals anxiety lest he become, say, an animal, this is, I believe, most apt to mean that he has anxiety lest he regress to a very early period in his postnatal life, when he knew a kind of existence which he now reacts to, unconsciously, as being literally that of an animal. In this connection, it is interesting to read the conjectures of Hill (78), developed during his long experience in psychotherapy of schizophrenic patients, regarding the infancy of the person who later becomes schizophrenic. I have italicized the passages which are of particular interest here: Maternal ambivalence is an area in which there is contradictory evidence. A number of the mothers of schizophrenic patients have reported murderous intents toward their unborn children. . . There is equal''Y reliable evidence that many of the mothers of schizophrenics actually accepted their babies warmly and took excellent animal care of them while these babies were small and were not regarded as individuals having any will or wilfulness

contrary to that of the mother. . . . (78d]. On the whole, there is a suggestion that the earliest relationship of the baby to the mother was relatively good, quite satis-

266

The Nonhuman Environment

factory to both mother and child, at least in comparison with what followed .••. [78e]. If this infantile situation were as altogether desperate as pic. tured, these children would die. Some of them do" Those who do not must have experienced something of animal comfort in their infancy. Even if they did not get this mothering in their own right as babies, they did get attention and admiration as playthings OT as exhibits of their mother's craftsmanship [?Sf].

If Hill's beliefs about this are COITect, then we might consider that when such an infant, later now as an adult schizophrenic) manifests anxiety lest he become (a) an animal, or (b) an inanimate object, he may be expressing unconsciously a wish to become again (a) a baby..animal loved by his mother, or (b) a cherished plaything of the mother or an inanimate exhibit of her craftsmanship.

Next I shall present, still in this same connection, some excerpts from a short story, a classic in the "horror story" area of general literature. This story is of value here because it vividly expresses the human being's anxiety lest he regress to a subhuman status, and further because we can discern, in the "latent content" of the narrative, the unconscious wuh to become "subhuman't-e-i.e., to recapture an unconsciously longed-for infantile, or possibly fetal, relationship to the mother. This story is by E. F" Benson (11), and concerns the legendary subhuman creatures, known as Abominable Snowmen, which have long been reputed to inhabit very high mountains such as the Himalayas and the Swiss Alps. The protagonist, early in the story, listens to the account of a fellow mountaineer who had seen one of these creatures on the fictional Alpine peak known as The Horror Hom. The narrator describes how the sight of this hair.. covered beast-man, absorbed in the animal satisfaction of finishing its meal of raw meat, had frozen him with horror-had filled him with the horrifying realization that there was an ancestral bond between this bestial creature and himself: "When I sa",' that creature sun itself, I looked into the abyss out of which we have crawled" (11 a). The protagonist himself, who subsequently

Psychosis and Neurosis

267

encounters one of these beings-a female one-s-tells of the feel.. ings he experienced at this sight: A fathomless bestiality modelled the slavering mouth and the narrow eyes; I looked into the abyss itself and knew that out of that abyss on the edge of which I leaned the generations of men had climbed. What if that ledge crumbled in front of me and pitched me headlong into its nethermost depths? [lib].

It seems to me that the above material has profound psychological meaning. We may, I think, regard the first of the two subhuman creatures, the male one, which is giving "a purring murmur of content" while utterly absorbed in oral pleasure, as a personification of the viewer's own past states of similar contentment and satiety as an infant. The female creature is, I think, a representation of the mother of one's infancy or of one's intrauterine existence, and the viewers' anxiety lest they be plunged into the "nethermost depths" of the "abyss," as well as the portrayal of both those subhuman creatures as being so hor.. rifying, are unconscious defenses against the repressed longing to regress into the animallike state of oneness with the mother which one experienced in utero and, during the postnatal period, at the mother's breast. In some individuals there may be an additional factor, not present in every one, which intensifies the unconscious desire to regress to a nonhuman state: the experience, during childhood, of seeing one's mother bestow upon household plants and household pets a loving care which she denied, or was unable to reveal toward, the child himself. It has seemed to me that this is not an uncommon experience in homes where the mother has personality difficulties which make it impossible for her to reveal the fullness of her love for her child, so that she displaces much of her love to these nonhuman elements of the family environment. The child then grows up with reason to think that if only he were a plant or an animal, he might gain access to his mothers love. There is one last consideration, applicable to schizophrenic individuals and probably to neurotic individuals also, which I

268

The Nonhuman Environment

shall mention before leaving this subject of the unconscious desire to become nonhuman. It appears that in the psychologically healthy human being there is, easily accessible to awareness, a sense of relatedness between one's self and one's nonhuman environment; such a sense of relatedness appears to be an essential ingredient of psychological well-being. In schizophrenic persons, and I believe in neurotic persons also, this sense of relatedness is grossly interfered with. Particularly in the schizophrenic individual, one sees how far the patient has become-with his abhorrence of anything "animalistic" in himself, with his striving to achieve some highly cerebral, "pure" (nonsexual, nonaggressive, and so forth) existence-removed from such a healthy sense of relatedness to the nonhuman environment. In such persons, then, the unconscious desire to become nonhuman seems in part to represent a healthy striving to overcome the patient's harmfully great degree of detachment from the nonhuman environment.' Or one could put it that the normal awareness of human relatedness to the nonhuman environment has been repressed, and strives to emerge from the repression. In line with this, my experience has indicated that the more animallike a patient is in appearance and behavior, the more complete is the repression from his awareness of anything which he might consider to be animallike in himself. It is erroneous, I think, to assume that the most animalistic-looking patient is the one who is consciously most convinced that he is an animal; something like the opposite is probably the case. He has to deal with animallike desires (many of which would be freely accepted by the normal person's ego as natural expressions of one's inescapable animal needs) by projecting them onto other persons about him, and by acting them out (in his posture) his facial expressions, his vocalizations, his manner of eating} his manner of dress, and so on) outside awareness. • Some forms of luicide-such as drowning, or jumping to the earth from a great height-appear, from my experience with the analysis of suicidal Inclinations, to represent in some instances a misguided effort to overcome IUch a psychological detachment from the nonhuman environment.

The Reacting to Other Persons As Being Nonhuman

CHAPTER

10

The immediately preceding three chapters (VII, VIII, IX) have dealt primarily with distortions in the ill individual's self...concept, resulting from his basic confusion between his self and his nonhuman environment. This chapter, and Chapters XI and XII also, will deal with his distorted concept-distorted by reason of this same basic conlusion-of his environment. Psychotic patients frequently behave as though they react to persons in their environment as being nonhuman-as though these others were, for example, animals or inanimate objects. And it is unfortunately not rare---aIthough, in my experience at Chestnut Lodge, it is infrequent-that members of the personnel deal with certain patients as though these patients were not fellow human beings but animals or inanimate objects. In Chapter 111 I have briefly referred to Michael Balint's formulation, Balint (6) 7, 8) states that in the Infant-mother

270

The Nonhuman Environment

relationship (even under normal, not only pathological) circumstances), each person reacts) by turns, to the other as being an object designed to meet one's own needs, rather than as a human being with needs of his or her own. Keeping in mind this formulation-a sound one, in my opinion-we can conjecture, then, that when the neurotic or psychotic individual reacts to another person as being nonhuman, he is manifesting a phenomenon which is well known in psychopathology: the reactivation, in adult life, of an earlier ego state, as a neurotic or psychotic defense against some anxiety-laden repressed affect. Such "dehumanizing,') by the neurotic or psychotic person, of his environment presumably occurs by a process of projectionprojection onto the environment, including other human beings, of his own repressed conception of himself (or of something in himself) as being nonhuman.' Bleuler gives us a bit of clinical material which seems to be an example of this process: An intelligent [schizophrenic] lady who for many yean was mistaken for a neurasthenic "had built a wall around herself so closely confining that she often felt as if she actually were in a

chimney" [13]. Here an inner, psychological wall within the patient was evidently projected by her, so that she experienced herself as being enclosed by actual, outer walls. In two papers by psychologists, concerning Rorschach data, we find material which is more precisely relevant to our point here, for these papers report findings which seem to substantiate the concept that an individual may have an unconscious picture of himself as being nODi Brodey (19) J from his work with schizophrenic patients and their families, housed on the same hospital ward, has made observations which suggest that these parents see thems,lv,sJ in relation to the patient, as being in effect nonhuman-even into his chronological adulthood, long after the normal mother-infant phase of such relatedness which Balint discusses. Thus we find an additional major reason for the patient's viewing those about him as being nonhuman: the parents' own self-concept, in their relating to him~ encourages this, As Brodey describes it: "The parents see themselves u the feeders, the purveYOI'l of reality) the sacrificing ones who are consumed in the process of giving) the Ones who have no demands for themselves, only operating for the othert-aa performers of fragmented functions but not as persons. This image seems comparable to what has been postulated as the infant·1 image of the parent. n

P5ycho5i.s and Neurosis

271

human, and hence may project this picture upon the environment. These studies describe the patients' projection of such a self-picture upon the relatively unstructured Rorschach cards; but such data would seem to substantiate the notion that the projection can be directed toward other persons in the environment as well. One paper is by Hertzman and Pearce, and is entitled "The Personal Meaning of the Human Figure in the Rorschach" (75). As the title shows, the authors were primarily concerned with human responses; such nonhuman material as we are mainly interested in here, is a more or less incidental part of their data. A patient acts as if he were repulsive. He avoids all contact with people whose esteem he values. He attributes this opinion of himself to others in various neutral incidents and dreams of himself as diseased in various ways. If he sees in the Rorschach a variety of unattractive subhuman images, it is considered likely that these represent some reflection of how he really feels about himself. The identification is complicated by the fact that at the beginning of analysis this image is not clear to the patient and by the fact that many of the compulsive patterns are designed to repudiate this feeling and keep it out of awareness [75a]. .•. attitudes toward the self may be found in responses that at first do not look as if they represent the subject, such as some responses with animal content [75b].

Therapeutic data indicate that the failure to produce human responses or the production of a small number which then turn out to be uncommunicative is associated with suppression of the self-picture or a hOITOr of the self as the person sees it [75c]. The second of these two studies is by Goldfarb, entitled "The Animal Symbolin the Rorschach Test and an Animal Association Test" (61). Goldfarb suggests here that animal responses in children's records often represent parental figures or the child himseli,

In the following clinical examples one can see that this process,

272

The Nonhuman Environment

of relatedness to the other person as being nonhuman, serves various defensive functions-that it functions as a defense against various repressed emotions. It will be recalled that, in Chapter VIII, the desire to become nonhuman was portrayed as functioning, similarly~ as a defense against various repressed feelings. In that chapter, such feelings were categorized under a number of headings; that procedure need not be repeated here, since the defensive principle is what I am primarily trying to illustrate in both these sections. 1. This thirty-four-year-old married man was transferred from another hospital to Chestnut Lodge in the manic phase of a manic-depressive illness which had begun, with an initial depressive phase, five years previously. For the first eleven months after his admission here, his behavior was such that he had to be housed on a disturbed ward. A conspicuous element in that behavior involved his reacting to his fellow patients as though they were nonhuman. He put it that he was engaged in "healing" them, On a number of occasions I witnessed this "healing"; it involved his striding up to one or another apathetic, deeply psychotic man, clapping him on the back and saying, in a tone as though he were addressing a puppet, "Buck up, old man!" or "That's it; sit up good and straight !-there) now you feel top-notch, don't you?" The scorn, the dehumanizing quality, of his tone was chilling to hear. The ward personnel had to seclude him from time to time, to protect other patients from this, and to protect him from retaliation by some of those patients who were occasionally assaultive.. This same apparent lack of recognition, on his part, that other persons around him were human, was evidenced not only when he was engaged in this "healing," but at other times also.. He showed this attitude toward me from time to time during the psychotherapeutic sessions, and at the end of one session, when I happened to leave his room and walk into the corridor just as a Negro attendant was coming into the ward, the patient nodded toward him and said to me, loudly enough for him to hear also, "You ought to talk to him-you could learn a lot from him. U Here his tone held such scorn as to "dehumanize" both the at-

273

Psychosis and Neurosis

tendant and myself. On another occasion he spoke, similarly unfeelingly) of "that thing out there," whereupon the startling surmise came to me that he was referring to Mrs. N - - - . a middle-aged nurse who had just been assigned to the ward, having previously worked at a nearby building called Little Lodge. I was amazed that he might be refening thus to another human being. My hunch was quickly confirmed when he went on, "It came over from Little Lodge. I went out and asked it where it had come from-from the Congo or the Himalayas or the Lost City of Atlantis or where. • • . It had lots guts; when I put my hand on its head it turned into my mother-my mother Catherine. n His tone) when he spoke of "its" turning into his mother Catherine, was one of only dispassionate interest. I replied to this last by saying, "I assume you know that Mrs. N is not your mother) but that you find this a useful way of telling me what your mother was like." He seemed to accept this as a statement of what he was, indeed, doing. This was one bit of data which helped to point the way toward his early relationship with his mother as a source of this "dehumanizing" behavior in the patient. I shall report, shortly, further data concerning that relationship. There were various indications that, in his reacting to other persons as being nonhuman, he was responding to a projection, a projection upon these other persons of an unconscious conception of himself as being nonhuman. For instance, in one of his sessions with me he let me know that he was impatiently awaiting "my mate-Jupiter or Juno or a pig or a sewer rat, whatever it is." This seemed to be not only an indirect expression of ambivalence concerning his wife and concerning myself, but also a hint that he considered himself to be nonhuman, and hence a fit mate for him might be either a deity or an animal. On another occasion, he confided to me that he bad always disliked his name, George; his brother (three years older than himself) had given him this name, he said bitterly, after the name of a puppet which the brother possessed. I found this story credible in the light of what I came to learn about the boys' mother. It is interesting in this connection that his psychiatric administrator, when asked

or

274

The Nonhuman Environment

during a general staff conference for his evaluation of this patient, expressed his observations in the following words: "He acts like a little puppet who has played along through life and then suddenly realizes that the time for playing is over, that being chronologically an adult man, a husband and father, means the end of all this playing around." During the first eleven months of his stay here) there was not only this phenomenon of his reacting oftentimes to other persons as if they were nonhuman; there were indications that he felt more akin to creatures which were, in reality, nonhuman, than he did to his fellow human beings. He was convinced that the birds in nearby trees) and dogs on the hospital grounds nearby, "talked" to him with their chirping or their barking; and he fcit able to converse with them-he was convinced that they responded to things he called out to them. There was also a feeling on his part, beyond this, of being much of the time at one with-"en rapport with'~--the whole of his environment, including all the nonhuman environment, In short, this man seemed quite confusedly unaware of the qualitative differences distinguishing, in his environment, inanimate objects from human beings, and animals from human beings; and similarly unaware of the distinction between himself as a human being on the one hand, and his nonhuman environment on the other hand. As I learned more about his past relationship with his mother, I saw how many ingredients of that relationship had been such as to give rise to just such confusion. In the first place, there was convincing evidence from a variety of sources that the mother, who had died when the patient was sixteen, had been latently psychotic throughout the patient's upbringing. She would speak of various persons as being Joan of Arc and, the patient said, "Even a horse we had-Mother used to exclaim about what beautiful, soft, understanding eyes he had, that he must be St. Francis of Assisi, Many people would be afraid they'd be put into a mental hospital if they said this or that; but Mother would go right ahead and say what she felt like saying, and didn't seem to care." Though hampered by congenital heart disease, and a foreign-born person who had great

Psychosis and Neurosis

275

difficulty in adapting to the language and customs of this country, she was the dominant figure in the family, exhorting the easygoing father, a clothing retailer, to greater efforts, and setting very high standards for her two sons---especially the patient-to fulfill. The mother read a great many books-written in her native language--eoncerning metaphysics, was interested for a long time in some mathematical conception of the universe, and used to speak at times of "being in tune with the Infinite." The patient, in telling me this, said that he had not understood what his mother meant by this; but "I now know what she meant," saying that he himself experiences a feeling which he believes to be the kind that his mother had, except at times when disturbing emotions come up to interfere with that experience. My work with this man, although prematurely terminated by his wife's taking him out of our care, directly back to the marital home, shortly after the subsidence of the manic episode, provided a number of clues as to the determinants of his "healing" of other patients, which had been so chilling a process to witness and to hear. First, there were various hints that his highly preoccupied mother had been equally inappropriate in her efforts to exhort the father and the two sons toward the achievement of the irnpos.. sible goals which she set for all three of them. It was as if this "healing" behavior represented an identification on the patient's part with his mother, who had been so incapable of genuine 'person-to-person rapport. I surmise that it represented, also, the patient's acting out of repressed scorn concerning the psychotherapeutic technique of his previous therapists and of myself. Secondly, there were apparently a number of determinants, in this regard, flowing from the following series of events: The mother became psychotic when the patient was fifteen. For a week the patient and his brother cared for the mother at home, while the father did little to cope with the situation. The patient told me of his fear, during that period, when he would awake at night and his mother would be standing over the bed. She became, as her symptoms rapidly progressed, a raving maniac, would talk about being Circe and turning men into swine, would threaten

276

The Nonhuman Environment

to kill the two SODS j and repeatedly made onslaughts upon them with dangerous kitchen implements. The mother had to be placed in a state hospital, where she remained for what proved to be the last year of her life. She finally died while deeply and very disturbedly psychotic; the death was attributed to stress upon her diseased heart by insulin-coma treatment, which the sons had persuaded their father to authorize. The patient's wife, whom he had known since childhood, and who gave me many details about the mother's illness, reported that, during the last three or four weeks of her life, she had been "in restraints, quite psychotic, on a very disturbed ward .•. at times wouldn't even know George . . . George would have to see her in restraints, in a bed covered with urine and bowel movement." When I asked her what effect all this had had upon George, she replied, "Very depressing, even to the point where George got a great kick out of visiting his mother, and feeling that he himself had great influence over the other patients." I asked her whether he had seemed to feel that he had such an influence over his mother. "Not particularly his mother," she replied, "but the other patients-he would go around consoling them." In connection with the wife's account, it is interesting that during my initial interview with the patient he told me, "When I came in here and saw the patients lying on the floor [two or three patients, at that time, were accustomed to sitting on the floor], I was so happy!" He went on, laughing with ostensible gayety, to say that he was going to heal them all, telling me that he had healed all the patients on the ward of the hospital from which he had just come. But then, during the remainder of the hour, he twice spoke of his inability to cure his mother, putting it once that "I couldn't heal my own mother, who was a madwoman before she died." The patient made it abundantly clear that he felt extremely guilty about the mother's psychotic illness and death, and his own illness seemed in various respects to be patterned after that from which his mother had suffered. Thus it would seem that another determinant of his "healing" behavior lay in his guilt-laden helplessness to cure his own mother, with a

Psychosis and Neurosis

277

consequent need to atone for this by trying to cure all subsequent psychotic patients whom he encountered. Moreover, the utterly ineffectual nature of his efforts to cure them revealed, I think, how desperately helpless he felt in the face of his own illness, which was, as I have said, so similar in various regards to the terminal illness of his mother. Still another determinant of that particular "healing" behavior emerged late in my work with this man. His wife had described the mother, to me, as having been an extremely cold person, and had expressed her conviction that her husband and his brother, despite much ritualistic manifestations of solicitude toward their mother, had always hated her. The patient, likewise, until late in my experience with him, referred to his mother always as having been an utterly cold, unloving individual whom, for example, he had never seen to bestow a kiss upon the father. But as the therapy proceeded) I saw hints that behind all the outward coldness in this mother-son relationship there had been real affection and compassion. But it was quite clear that such tenderness had to be repressed in their relationship, and it seemed that the facade behind which it remained repressed was a facade of treating one another in a cold fashion, as if each regarded the other as more an inanimate object than a cherished human being. So, then, it appeared that a similarly repressed compassion lay at the basis of some of this man's treating his fellow patients, in the process of "healing" them, as if they were puppets; his upbringing had been such as to require him to repress the feelings of genuine compassion which, I came to believe, this situation fostered in him. One final determinant was suggested to me by the material which I have reproduced here, and by my experiences with other psychotic patients whose cases were similar, in some relevant aspects, to that of this man. This man had evidently been much afraid of his always eccentric, unpredictable mother, who finally became openly and violently psychotic and repeatedly threatened -and even, as I have said, actually tried-to kill him.. He showed, on more than one occasion during his stay here, a similarly intense fear of his psychotic, unpredictable fellow patients.

278

The Nonhuman Environment

I believe that his treatment of them as puppets, during his "healing" of them, was part of an effort to think of them as utterly controllable inanimate objects (puppets) rather than perceiving them for what they were: human beings who, like his mother, were unpredictable and even, in some instances, dangerously uncontrollable by him. His projection of his own repressed rage upon these supposed puppets was undoubtedly an important factor in all this; for some months after his admission here he was given to unpredictable outbursts of rage, and probably the most important incident in the whole course of his psychotherapy occurred when, having just torn all his bed clothing to pieces dur.. ing an outburst of murderous rage, he "came ton and, although at first shocked and unbelieving that he had done this, was able then to realize that he did indeed have such rage in him, that the person who had just demolished the bed clothing was him-

self. 2. In this second example we find, again, the defensive function of one's reacting to another person as being nonhuman. Here we find the patient herself being treated thus by her fellow patients, and her own treating other persons in a comparable fashion. A schizophrenic young woman frequently showed, for several months following her admission to a disturbed ward here, extraordinarily intense grief. I saw this during my psychotherapeutic hours with her, and at other times, also, when I would happen to enter the ward for some purpose other than to have an hour with her. To see her in this grief was a shaking experience. She was completely given over to it, completely overwhelmed by it to an extent which, I believe, one rarely if ever sees in a normal adult. She was contorted with wracking sobs, and tears poured out in streams. As nearly as I can describe it, she gave one the feeling that here was a very small, utterly bereft child who was completely submerged in inarticulate grief. The point I want to make here is that whereas it was shaking to me to see and hear her like this, for the other patients on the ward} who were exposed to this so much more frequently than I,

PS'YChosis and N .eurosis

279

and who were having a hard struggle with their own buried grief, this was distinctly too much to bear. They could not endure her proximity, and the tone in which they would order her to get away from them, or to stop doing this, was as if they were addressing an inanimate object. It was a kind of scorn more intense than one would reserve for any fellow human being or even for any animal; it was precisely the tone in which the first patient; described above, addressed the "it" from Little Lodge. In this particular instance, I felt that the patients who addressed this woman in such a fashion did so primarily out of anxiety in the face of their own repressed grief; it was as if they had to derogate to the greatest possible degree this woman who was the personification of overwhelming grief, in order to maintain their own similar grief under repression. Not surprisingly, this patient herself showed) for many months, an inability to distinguish between human elements and inani... mate elements in her environment. This inability was evident in, for example, her way of relating herself to a doll which she possessed (or several weeks. Upon more than one occasion, during my psychotherapeutic sessions with her, she was holding this doll at her bared breast and weeping in anguish because she could not get it to nurse. This had no connotation of play-acting; she left no doubt in my mind that she felt the doll to be a real baby. This went on not only during, but also between, the times of her sessions with me) as is seen in the following nurses' report sheet from that period of her treatment: Became depressed and was crying in her room. When I went

in to talk to her, she asked me out. Later Mr. Jones [an aide] went in and she told him that she was crying because her baby wouldn't nurse.

Interestingly, when she became able, very slowly, to relate herself a bit more closely to other patients, this sometimes took the form of her treating them as if they were dolls. For example, here is an excerpt from a nurses' report sheet, approximately twenty months later on in therapy than the one just quoted:

280

The Nonhuman Environm8nt

Ate sandwiches and drank juice constantly all evening. Went into Grace Randall's room. Played with Grace's body some and jumped from bed to dresser, etc. After 11:00 P.M. there was some noise in her room. I went back and watched. She was using Clara [her roommate] like a baby doll, moving her aU over the bed and undressing her and playing some with her breasts.

3. For several months, a schizophrenic woman came to address the nurses and attendants on the ward more and more as though they were inanimate objects devoid of any sensitivity or self-interest, objects whose sole reason for existing was to meet whatever need she was experiencing at the moment. She eventually made known her conviction that if she herself were required so much as to ask for something, that fact itself meant that the nurses and attendants were unsatisfactory: their duty was not only to meet her needs but to anticipate what her needs would be, without her having to make a request. This situation grew more and more intolerable on the ward. The great tendency among the ward personnel was, naturally enough, to react to the flat impersonality, the cutting imperiousness, of her demands as being infuriatingly derogating-to feel protest at being treated as inanimate objects, and to experience retaliatory anger, without perceiving the covert anxiety and profound feelings of helplessness which were compelling the patient to address them in this fashion. The following account by a nurse who expressed her feelings about this, during a recorded ward-personnel conference, is a good statement of the seething resentment which this situation typically engendered in personnel:

As far as she's concerned, are we supposed to jump at her every wish? I'm new. I don't know. I asked about it; but the impression she gave me is-the first time I was on the floor [i.e., the ward], she said .. "You do this!" WellJ I'm rather rebellious to that and I didn't care to. I came out in the office and I said, "What would happen if I didn't?') And just to keep peace, they said, "Well, you'd better do it." So I did. But I don't like to be pushed around like that, and I-they say, "Do as you feel." Well, I didn't feel like letting her push me around; but if that's what

Psychosis and Neurosis

281

you're doing-I mean, if you're going to jump at her very wish, why- . . . uyou get my glassest" And I just didn't feel like getting them. I felt like saying to her, "If you ask me right, I'll get them for you." But I didn't know the floor and I didn't know what to expect; so I went and got the glasses.

The eventually successful management of this difficult situation is vividly described in the following informal comments made by Miss Betty Cline, the nurse in charge of the patient's ward, during a general hospital-staff conference. I have italicized the most crucial of the points which Miss Cline made: From the standpoint of nursing, Clara has presented two problems. One was her demandingness. [The other problem need not be described here.] For awhile, I think, there would be four demands a minute in this loud, screeching voice: "Nursel-e-smoke!" "Nurse[-light[U until people were just frantic. She would smoke a cigarette and then throw it on the floor, use a Kleenex and throw it on the floor, eat a candy bar and throw the paper on the floor, so that she was just sitting in a heap of litter. We would suggest that she use a waste basket and she would say, "Well, you're my maid. Clean it up. That's what you're paid for." And the nurses were very, very unhappy with Clara. There would be battles with her: "We won't get you cigarettes until you ask for them properly. Say, 'Please'!" "I won't be treated like a maid! I won't do things when she asks me that way[" And the problem increased considerably. We had several floor meetings-at least two that I know of. We finally got around to saying that maybe this was her need to be recognized as a person, and it was the onlyway she knew how. So we would try to meet all of her demands and even go a step farther and maybe even guess at what some of them might be and give them to her before she asks.. Several were a little reluctant but agreed to go along with this. Everyone started to get her cigarettes for her [i.e., without the patient's having to ask for them to be brought]. We got her a waste basket so she could have it right by her chair, and that solved that problem a great deal.. Within a very short time her demands died out-not entirely, but to a very great degree. Some

282

The Nonhuman Environment

days she would be so quiet, we began to worry if she was still with us. Just recently we had two people come on the ward who could not see this. There was a great deal of feeling about meeting these demands. They went through the same battIe that we had all gone through, not too long before.. I know that the next two days Clara was practically in a panic. She was just screaming in a panicky sort of way, over and over as though her life depended upon getting that particular thing. I think this was pretty good evidence of what [i.e., what intense anxiety-anxiety of a life-or.

death intensity] was behind it.

I recall that Miss Gwen E. Tudor (now Mrs. Gwen Tudor Will) and Dr. Morris S. Schwartz, who were engaged in a so... ciological research study on the ward at that particular time, were, along with Miss Cline, helpful in promoting this beneficial change in the ward personnel's responses to the patient's demandingness. It seems to me that the successful ward management of this woman's desperately urgent demandingness fonns a nice documentation of Michael Balint's views about "primary love," quoted on page 34. Interestingly, it was only after this problem had become largely resolved, on the ward, that the patient was able to make clear, during her psychotherapeutic sessions with me, her conviction that it was unreasonable for her to be required to express her needs verbally-her conviction that other persons should detect these needs and provide the necessary supplies without her having to make a request. The ward personnel had to find their way to a therapeutic group response, here, without benefit of that knowledge. Also of interest is the fact that, about two years later in the psychotherapy, the patient made clear that, in terms of the demand which her own superego made upon her, in order for her to maintain any vestige of her status as a human being she had to be able, among other things, to achieve fulfillment for her needs, from people around her, without having to ask or demand, over and over, for any particular need to be met. Thus from this new vantage point, one could look back upon that so troubled ward situation of more than two years previously, and

Psychosis and N eurosis

283

see that the patient had treated the nurses and attendants as though they were not human beings--as though they were, instead, inanimate objects-because she had felt her own status as a human being to be at stake. It struck me quite forcibly, as I came to see more of the role which her superego was playing in this) that a superego demand can require gratification with just as urgent an intensity, with just as much of a live-or-die kind of anxiety energizing that demand, as one sees in the case of a Physiological need such as the infant's oral hunger or, to use Balint's analogy, an adult person's need for air to breathe. The specific superego demand to which I refer, in the case of this patient, is the evident demand that, in order for her to qualify as human, she must have no unsatis... fied needs. I should make explicit the fact that in this woman's "dehumanizing" treatment of the ward personnel she had defeated her own apparent purpose: she developed in those about her the impression that it was she, not the person whom she was thus addressing, who was nonhuman. Her demanding behavior had become so stereotyped, and her strident utterances had become so chillingly devoid of any overtones of human feeling, that she be... came, until the situation was eventually successfully dealt with in the way which I have described, only more and more firmly entrenched in the social role of a nonperson, Her psychiatric administrator frankly said, during a staff conference in that troubled period of time, that his relationship with her had "no feeling in it at all," that he had been reaching no more real feeling contact with her '(than if she were a clothing store dummy." 4. The following material is from my work with a schizophrenic woman previously described (pages 183-186, 233f.) as being convinced that, in her ongoing existence, she was metamorphosed time and again, by powers outside herself, into various nonhuman forms (various animals, a rock, a tree, and so on) . As I said, she often manifested intense anxiety in the face of the, to her, imminent threat that this would happen again.. I mentioned a number of apparent determinants of this particular delusional experience.

284

The Nonhuman Environment

Another area of this same general delusion was her conviction that other persons, too} were changed without their knowledge into various nonhuman forms. Gradually the psychotherapy yielded} over the course of approximately one year, much evidence that heretofore-repressed desires to tum other people into nonhuman fOIl1l8 (animals, insects, and so on) had much to do with her own feeling so threatened by this supposed external danger. The following samples of these data show, in particular, her reacting to other persons as being nonhuman, as a defense against her own fond feelings toward those persons; and her desires, gradually emerging from repression, to turn other persons into animals, as an expression of her vindictiveness and envy toward them. Upon one occasion when I went into the living room on the ward, for a psychotherapeutic hour with her, I found her en.. gaged in a lively, and unmistakably friendly, conversation with another woman patient, sitting near her. The other woman quickly excused herself so that the patient could have the therapeutic session. A few moments later, while talking volubly as she generally did with me, my patient made} to my amazement, some verbal reference to the other woman-with whom she had been sharing an unmistakably friendly togetherness so shortly beforeas "that thing." Not only this verbal phrase} but also her tone in referring to the other woman} was as utterly impersonal as though the other patient were an inanimate object. This occurrence fit in with other evidence that she had to deny any feelings of fondness, however obvious these feelings might at times be to other persons. Another manifestation of this denial was her adamant refusal to sleep in a dormitory with several other women patients; she endured this sleeping arrangement for two or three nights, but thereafter could stand it no longer. The therapy revealed that she was not yet prepared to face the welter of repressed conflictual feelings, among which intense fondness was a most prominent ingredient, toward other women. She dealt with this by perceiving the other women patients as being subhuman, and for that reason she could not endure their proximity during the night She asserted with chilling scorn, loudly enough for all

PS'Ychosis and Neurosis

285

these others to hear, "I won't spend another night in that dormitory with those cattle !" The emergence from repression of her vindictive and envious desires to turn other persons into animals was, as I said, a gradual process. One of the earliest occasions when she expressed such desires was an hour in which, while raging about "the Jews," she said in a tentative fashion) "It's got so I almost think they all ought to be turned into hammerhead sharks and dropped into the ocean." Then, in an hour nine days later, she was evidently seeing me, convince dly, as being one of the Jews whom she held responsible for all the outrages which she experienced as happening to her currently; for instance, she was sure that during the previous night something had been stuck into her vagina in order to make a man of her. Her tirading veered over after a time to another target, a patient who lived in an adjoining room, and in the course of her raging more and more about that woman, the following came out: "I hope to God I never get to the point-" she began in a somewhat shocked tone, "where IJd ever be delighted to--' , and then her tone became very clearly one of sadistic delight~CCtake the biggest Jew I could find and turn it into a horse and then ride it and kick it to death l'~ She ended on a note of undisguised vengeful triumph, looking at me as she said this. She left no doubt in my mind that she harbored such feelings toward me, as well as toward the neighboring patient. These vindictive feelings, eventually traced to her childhood experience with her mother, who from all reports had indeed greatly abused the patient as a child, both verbally and physically) had never before emerged so nakedly in the therapy. For many months it was quite obvious to any observer that this woman devoted much of her energy to debunking, deflating, and in general making a mockery of established authority, in whatever form such authority presented itself-the Government, the legal profession, the medical profession, psychiatry, newspapers) telecasts and radio broadcasts) and so on. But in the therapeutic sessions it became clear to me that she was not aware of the fact that her utterances had any such mo-

286

The Nonhuman Environment

tive behind them: from her own point of view, she evidently felt that she was very much an underdog, seriously protesting against various intolerable abuses which were being perpetrated by all these vastly powerful agencies.. The prime target of her ridicule was the Baptist church, which actually had been of tremendous importance in her emotional life during her upbringing. It was evident to me that she was still deeply attached to the church, and that her studiedly sacrilegious mockery of it concealed profound feelings of cherishing it) and cherishing her past experiences with it. In this regard it was particularly clear that behind all her mocking, sneering jousts at established authority lay a desperate longing to find some authority strong enough to weather her attacks and prove able, therefore, to provide her with the strength to which she felt a desperate need to ally herself. An important development in her gradual-and, I felt, under the circumstances quite healthy-rapprochement with her religion came when, after many weeks of tentative hints in that direction) she finally went and told her troubles to a local Baptist minister. This was the first time in years she had invested that much hope in a representative of the church. She described this visit in great detail to me in the following session. In essence, she had much reason to feel-although, I gathered, she did not consciously feel so-that she had made a monkey of the minister, so to speak. She had barraged him with so much of her delusional concepts about religion, in her usual forceful, challenging manner, that he had evidently been very disconcerted and quite at a loss for arguments to disprove her views-these views being, of course) sweepingly sacrilegious toward all the most sacred tenets of the church. But-and this is the particular point which I want to bring out here-s-she evidently did not place such a figurative connotation upon her interaction with him as I have done here. She did not say that she had made a monkey of him; instead, she told me in genuine puzzlement, "His ears looked strange-they looked like a monkey's.. " Behind all her describing of what to me was her figuratively making a monkey of the minister, and what to her was her find ..

Psychosis and Neurosis

287

ing that the minister literally had ears like those of a monkey, were hints of painful disillusionment and disappointment that he had not proved strong enough to make her feel at one with the church again, as she had felt during her childhood. I have mentioned the importance, in this woman's psychopathology, of repressed envy . As the therapy proceeded, it became clear that delusional thinking would supervene at times when it would be normal for her to experience, in the light of what she had just been saying, feelings of envy. Thus, time and again when she would begin to speak of various persons who, in reality, were in po .. sitions which might naturally elicit envy from any one-s-persons who were highly placed in Government, or who were wealthy, or who enjoyed great popularity as motion picture or television stars -this woman would, instead of experiencing any envy toward them, manage to experience a variety of pity for them, by delu.. sionally perceiving them as living thus without their really being conscious, and hence without being able to enjoy the positions they occupied. Another part, she was sure, of what happened to them while unconscious was that they were turned into various animals by the vague powers which supposedly held them captive. She had great cause, by reason of her past experience with seeing her two brothers to be favored, time and again, over herself) to feel especially envious toward men.. It seemed to me that repressed envy toward men was at work in the following delusional experience, which took place in the course of her coming out of a movie theater. She let me know, in her therapeutic session the following morning, that she had gone, during the previous evening, to see a movie about jet pilots. Evidently this movie, which of course lionized the glamorous jet pilots, had tended to activate her envious feelings. But she expressed no envy during the hour, and apparently had consciously experienced none during the movie. What she communicated to me, instead, was this: she demanded in a very anxious, awed tone, "Why, those pilots with those masks --how did they know that was oxygen they were breathing? How did they know it wasn't some kind of gas that turned them

288

The Nonhuman Environment

into scarabs--those bugs I saw on the sidewalk when I came out of the movie last night?" In the course of the subsequent discussion, I asked her, "Would you say that the idea of a person's being changed from a jet pilot into a bug would imply a decrease in status, in prestige?" She replied emphatically, "I certainly would l" adding, "Who would want to be a bug?-you couldn't [hear, see, and so forth-c-or words to that effect] . . ." Somewhat later, I suggested how natural it would be that she might feel some envy toward the jet pilots. She immediately snapped back, as if insulted, that she was not a child. I inquired if she considered it unthinkable that an adult person would feel envy, and she corroborated that she did believe this} without question. It required literally years of intensive psychotherapy before she could begin to acknowledge any feeling of envy. Interestingly, only a few days before the exchange which I have just described, she had been demanding, in an intensely threatened way, that I explain to her "why I have to go on living this way," saying that her existence was one of "living in fear and trembling for fear you're [referring to herself] going to be turned into a sheep or a cow or a goat or [etc.] •.. ~' The over-all course of the psychotherapy provided much data which suggested that, as long as she was unable to become aware of her repressed envious desires to, for example, humble the glamorous jet pilots by turning them into lowly bugs, she had to project these repressed desires, and consequently lived in fear and trembling that she herself would be turned into one or another infrahuman form of life by supposedlyexternal malevolent powers.

The Reacting to Elements of the Nonhuman Environment As Being Human

CHAPTER

I I

Here we come to a kind of clinical data which is, as it were, the reverse of the kind presented in the last chapter: rather than examples of patients' reacting to other persons as being nonhuman, we now have examples of patients' reacting to nonhuman things as being human. This particular subject, only another facet of the broader topic of distortions in perception of the environment, can be introduced by the following three brief examples, in which we find patients on the verge of reacting to a nonhuman object as if it were a human being. One schizophrenic young woman, whose severe confusion abated only very slowly in her work with me, had been in inten... sive psychotherapy for about fifteen months when an incident occurred which caused me to realize, for the first time, that her confusion was so profound that she was vulnerable even to con..

290

The Nonhuman Environment

fusing inanimate objects with persons. She said, anxiously, while draping a pajama top over the head of her bed, "I hope the bed won't change into David." Later on in the therapy) while she was still quite confused and was continuing to lead a very isolated existence, another incident with, I believe, a similar significance took place. She was standing a few feet away from me, while I was sitting in a chair. Nearby was an empty chair which I had brought in for her, as usual. She said to me goaclingly and derisively, gesturing toward the empty chair, "''''hat does it say?" The feeling-tone of her question, which-as has been so often the case throughout this volume-was the particularly revealing factor, and which defies accurate reproduction in words here, conveyed to me the realization that, in her day-after-day loneliness and in her chronic and quite frankly expressed dissatisfaction with me for not talking more during the therapeutic sessions, she very probably yearned often to have a chair, or this or that other inanimate object in her environment, converse with her. And, I realized, it was entirely possible that she sometimes experienced this as actually happening. My feeling, which accompanied each of the two discoveries just mentioned, was of a sudden, amazed recognition of a large realm of experience of which I had been entirely unaware. This feeling was precisely like that of a fellow therapist who had the following experience with a deeply confused schizophrenic man. This man, like my patient, had already been in psychotherapy (or a long time-for about two years, in this case--when the incident took place. He said in the therapist's presence, in a tone as if puzzled and emphasizing something to himself, "Now that set of drawers," gesturing toward a set of drawers in his room, "isn't a person. Or that," he said, pointing to his bed, "isn't a person. Could be one doing a back bend," he added thoughtfully, in reference to the bed. When the therapist told of his hearing these comments from this mao, he said, "I realized that I'd been operating on a different wave length from his." He had known for a long time that the patient was very confused, but had not realized how deeply the confusion extended. One might conjecture that, in the

Psychosis and Neurosis

291

case of each of these two patients, the patient's confusion earlier in the therapy had been even greater than it now was, and that it was only now, when they had become somewhat less confused, that the patients were able to verbalize these things to the thera-

pist.' These three clinical examples have been given, as I said, by

way of introduction. Now, in presenting the remaining bulk of the clinical material} I shall use three different headings, under which the data can be categorized, however loosely: ( 1) the experiencing of basically interpersonal emotions indirectly, via the nonhuman environment; (2) relatedness to the nonhuman environment in lieu of satisfactory relatedness to other human beings; and (3) projection upon, or failure of ego differentiation from, the nonhuman environment. It might be said that these three categories represent an increasing order of severity, as regards impairment of ego function or immaturity of ego function.

The Experiencing of Basically Interpersonal Emotions Indirectly, Via the Nonhuman Envi"onment 1. A thirty-four-year-old woman with latent schizophrenia, an aloof, outwardly cold individual, was quite unable, at the beginning of her psychotherapy, to express fond feelings for anyone, and for several months she continued to maintain vigorous defenses against the open expression of fondness. But then, following an automobile trip through the Blue Ridge Mountains with a man friend} she revealed to the therapist a hithertoconcealed side of herself. To be sure, the therapist heard little or nothing of any undisguised fondness, on the part of the patient, toward the man; she said very little about him. But her description of the mountain scenery was poetically, enthrallingly beautiful-filled with the tender feeling which she was not yet able to express directly about her man friend, her therapist, her parents, or any other human being. As regards this woman's upbringing, it is interesting that her mother, although customarily a tyrant who was utterly blocked from expressing tenderness J

I am indebted to Dr. Robert W. Gibson for this thought.

292

The Nonhuman Environment

and who reared the girl much as a Marine drill instructor deals with a recruit, revealed a different side of herself in one particular kind of situation: when she would go walking in the forest with her daughter, as she did not infrequently, the mother would speak with unaccustomedly deep and tender feeling of the trees and other elements of Nature. It was only in that indirect way) evidently, that she could express her love for her daughter. 2. I bad a similar experience with a schizophrenic young man who, unlike the patient just mentioned, was-and had been for several years-hospitalized. He led a bleakly isolated existence, and during my several months' experience with him as his ad.. rninistrative psychiatrist I found him to be an aloof, rigid person who gave little hint of an inner richness of feeling with which one could empathize. But then later on, while his therapist was on vacation, I was asked to see this young man as an interim therapist for three weeks. This proved a memorable experience for me; for the first timt; I felt I was coming to know him. I remember particularly his telling of the many places where he and his parents had lived when he was a boy. His father, now a very high-ranking army officer, had been away nearly alI the time, and the boy's need for his father poignantly emerged in his groping effort to establish continuity, more in his own memory than in the mind of myself, his listener, as he tried to recall where he lived when he was five years old, and where they moved after that, and so on. He kept getting the many diHerent-and widely scattered-places and the many different dates mixed uPJ and I began to grow bored with listening to this history which he was volunteering, until I realized how important was this effort of his to establish a sorely needed sense of continuity with his own past. A second development which I remember particularly welland the one to which I have been leading up, with the foregoing comments-was the description given to me by this young man, who throughout his upbringing had been so deprived of adequate fathering, concerning a trip which he had taken, by car, through various European countries. While he had been still in boyhood, his schizophrenic illness had come to interfere more and more

Psychosis and Neurosis

293

with his relations with people, until all efforts toward the establishment of normal school life were finally given up, and he was left largely at home with his mother and his maternal grand. mother, His efforts to make friends with other boys, at a long series of boys' schools, were finally bankrupt, and he continued to see relatively little of his father" But then, one summer, his parents sent him on a leisurely automobile trip throughout Europe, with a paid attendant in the form of a man in his early thirties, who did the driving and who served as a parentparticularly, as a father-to the patient, then sixteen years of age. From the patient's description, it was as if he had entered, in this trip, a new and wonderful world; certainly I was seeing a new and wonderful world in his personality as he talked. I have never heard another so fascinating account of a journey. He spoke with intensely keen appreciation, and with most impressively detailed knowledge, of the various kinds of forests they had seen, of cities, bodies of water, mountains, climatic changes-in short, of all sorts of elements of what I have been calling, here) the nonhuman environment. Of the father person who had been with him all during this wonderful trip, he said practically nothing; the man scarcely had a name, and the car might almost have been driven by some kind of automatic piloting device, for all I heard from the patient about this companion of his. It seemed that it had been almost exclusively in terms of the nonhuman environment, through which he had passed during the trip, that the patient had been able to experience the sense of wonder, the keenly live curiosity, and the richly satisfying fulfillment of his need to relate himself to something outside himself, all of which animated his description. But all these basically pertained, too, I felt sure, to his relationship--no doubt outwardly disinterested and impersonal on his own part-toward the father figure who accompanied him. It has occurred to me, belatedly) that they must all have pertained to me, also, as a for-the-moment satisfying father figure to him in the immediate situation. 3. This material comes from my work with a forty-year-old schizophrenic man with whom I spent approximately two years

294

The Nonhuman Environment

in almost totally silent sessions. During these many months he dressed untidily and rarely made any sounds except for grunts, belches, and the frequent passing of flatus. As these months wore on I found-initially, to my great dismay-that I could not help reacting to him as being more an offensive animal than a human being, much as did, evidently, others who dealt with him. But after about four months, during which such negative feelings on my part had predominated, I found myself occasionally experiencing an hour with him as being, however verbally un .. productive, deeply enjoyable and enriching to me. Then such hours became more and more frequent, and would predominate for weeks at a time. We both sat gazing out of the window much of the time, and on several occasions I found myself, while lookjog at a very tall and luxuriant tree which towered nearby, to be feeling an unusually keen appreciation of its beauty, an appreciation poetic in quality and foreign to my usual nature. I saw the tree as being infinitely fascinating; its foliage formed, I realized, a tapestry of endless variety, but nonetheless the tree formed a wonderful wholeness of light and shadow, form and color-a wholeness far more alive than I had ever realized a tree could possess. After having been immersed in this experience for some time, I began to wonder if it was saying something about my relationship with the patien~, I sensed that my experience was pooh.. ably a reflection of the patient's own feelings---a reflection of his own poetic feeling for Nature; he had made two or three remarks, over the months, which revealed such a capacity in him, and I left it at that. But several months later, upon looking over my notes concerning that hour, it seemed to me that my experience had possessed an additional meaning: it had been, I now felt, my way of vicariously appreciating the beauty of the patient himself, Even now, while I had advanced considerably into the recognition of my positive feelings for this man, this interpretation was startling to me. The patient, although still as silent as ever in the psychotherapeutic sessions, had improved considerably in his grooming

P~chosu

Gnd

~eu10su

295

and his demeanor; but one would hardly think of him as beau-

tiful. This later interpretation of my experience found, I believe, some verification in a comment the head nurse of the ward made to me eighteen months later still. The patient, still silent in the psychotherapy, had progressed a considerable distance in tenus of becoming a more likable human being. But he still managed to behave and act enough like a pig so that it came as quite a surprise to the head nurse when, upon seeing him come out of his room one morning, she found herself quite carried away with delight and exclaimed, "Joe, you look beautijul!" which he was evidently equally pleased to hear. I feel that neither she nor I had responded simply to some superficial beauty of his appearance, but rather to the beauty of him as a whole personality. To restate the point I have been making here: I had at first been unable to experience this appreciation directly, as concerning the patient himself; I had only found myself feeling an inordinately keen appreciation of the loveliness of the tree outside my window.' In Chapter XIII will be found a description of additional aspects of my work with this man. 4. A schizophrenic woman expressed, toward an object in her nonhuman environment, feelings which clearly seemed "meant for" me) in the course of a session which I shall have occasion to describe at greater length. in Chapter XIII. In essence, upon my responding sympathetically to her expression of grief, she began alternately (1) to weep with more open grief, hugging her pillow closely to her, with her head buried in it; and (2) to I As I have detailed in a recent paper (135). it has been my many-timesrepeated experience) both in my own therapy with schizophrenic patients and in my supervisory work with colleagues who are treating such patients, that this kind of incident is one of the typical earmarks of a genuine turning point in the transference evolution, from a previous transference of a predominantly negative variety to one of, now, a genuinely positive variety. The events subsequent to such an occurrence confirm, as I have tried to mention briefly in the above case, that the occurrenee marked not a tapping of profound anxiety) but a tapping of~ rather, profound and long..repressed lovingness in the patient.

296

The Nonhuman Environment

say to me, in a tone of intense loathing, "God, you're freakish! ---slliny ~-dopey !" I distinctly felt that she was so afraid of closeness-closeness to which her grief repeatedly exposed herthat she had to try to defend herself against it by loathing me; but her repeatedly hugging her pillow told me that, unconsciously but nonetheless intensely, she longed to hug me and pour out her grief to me as she was actually doing with the pillow." 5. A woman with paranoid schizophrenia, who had ventilated intense hostility toward me over the course of many months of psychotherapy, came to express unprecedented fondness toward me in the indirect fashion which I have been illustrating here, namely, via expressing the feeling consciously and ostensibly toward elements in the nonhuman environment-toward, in this instance, a nesting mother bird and its young. She had begun the hour in a characteristic way, bellowing a lot of paranoid material about "their" trying to make a man out of her, and "their" raping her; much of this raging was directed toward me, as had often happened. She went on, still in a not unusual vein, to rant that she knew she had again been made pregnant against her will (which, she had long been convinced, happened over and over again), because she could "feel life" in her abdomen.. She most vigorously disclaimed my suggestion that maybe in a way she wished very much that she were preg.. nant.. But in the latter half of the hour she beckoned to me to come over to look out the window and see where some birds had a nest behind a window ledge. As I came over and stood close to her, looking with her at the birds in their nest, she laughed warmly at the foolishness of a bird that would build her nest in such a place, commenting that ths mother bird generally has to shove her young birds out of the nest, to get them to flying, and • The recent volume by Freeman, Cameron, and McGhie contains a few examples, reminiscent of this one) of schizophrenic patients' displacement of interperaonally aroused emotionl onto inanimate objects. For example: It• • • one female patient made manifest sexual overtures to one of the therapists. She repeatedly invited him to come upstairs with her, finally turning away and crossing the room slowly to the comer where the vase was standing. She stroked it gently, leaned her cheek against it, and killed it several times" (45a).

PJ'Ychosis and Neurosis

297

pointing out how foolish, therefore, was this mother bird's choice of a nesting site--behind a ledge, where it would be very difficult to shove the young birds off and get them to flying. This communication was, of course, saying many things about her relationship with me. In her feeling-tone while she said these things, there were hints that she was relating to me as her husband, as her mother, and as her child. The point I want to make here can be put in general terms: she was manifesting toward me, via her talk about the birds and their nest, a depth of fondness, of warm familial feeling, which she had not been able to show before. The maternal feeling-the desire to have a babywhich had been so vigorously and delusionally denied earlier in the hour, was now, in this indirect fashion, clearly revealed. 6. A thirty-three-year-old man with a mixed psychoneurosis had already come, after only ten weeks of analysis, close to being able to express much fond feeling toward me as a parent figure. But at this point, on the eve of his going away on a vacation, he could not yet express this directly to me. Instead, before leaving the room he paused, looked down at the couch, and said tenderly, "Good-bye, couch." Then he added, to me, very touchingly, "Take good care of the couch while I'm gone," It was as if he could not quite, as yet, say fondly, "Good..bye, Dr. Searles. Take good care of yourself while I'm gone." 7. A twenty-one-year-old man with borderline schizophrenia of a catatonic type almost never, during the first several months of our work together, looked at me, and then only fleetingly. Moreover, during this time, such verbalizations as he was able to make were almost exclusively highly critical ones, concerning myself as well as other persons. But then, after seven months of therapy, he glanced at the chair in which I was sitting and said, "That chair always looks funny to me because it doesn't go with the rest of the room." The striking significance of the occurrence was that, despite the critical content of his remark, both his facial expression-as he gazed so near to me-and his affective tone in speaking, were filled with radiant warmth. Many months of therapeutic work remained before he could express directly to me such warmth as he had here bestowed upon my chair.

298

The Nonhuman Envi7'onment

8. A fellow therapist, reporting on the status of his work with a forty-two-year-old ambulatory schizophrenic man, whom he had been seeing in intensive psychotherapy for approximately four years at this point, said that For the first two and a half years the man presented himself to me in such a way that I thought very often that he was dealing with me. . . . But as time has gone on, the secrets that I've begun to hear about, in terms of attachment to me, are not memories of what I say or what I might SQ,'Y~ but rather they're such things as the sketch of the building where my office is located, a pen-and-ink sketch which he made one time and he carried it around until it is now practically wrinkled into oblivion and he has to make another sketch of the building. We talked about the business of moving [i.e., the therapist's moving his office to another location in the same city] and he presents that move as if he were leaving me, as if we weren't going together. . . . But what really comes to his mind is in terms of the couch, in terms

of the chair, in terms of the desk and my chair, and those are the things he can't leave, and he wants to come in and sort of break the office up on the last day so that he doesn't have to go on with the memory of the articles of furniture.

That is, this man was experiencing his ambivalent feelingshis fond and dependent feelings, his murderous feelings, and his grief-not directly) as having to do with the therapist himself, but indirectly) in terms of various inanimate objects related to the therapist-the sketch of his office building, and the furniture of his office. 9. For almost three and a half years after beginning analysis with me, a twenty-five-year-old woman with a mixed psycho.. neurosis had continued to defend herself against the recognition of her need for affection, by the maintenance of unusually intense hostility toward me and toward persons in her extra-analytic life. The emergence of her repressed positive feelings first took place with regard to various nonhuman elements of her environmentin particular, the works of Nature. Then an hour occurred in which she made statements that memorably reflected the exten..

Psychosis and Neurosis

299

sion of such feelings to include human beings) also. "Last night I felt I'd die if I didn't get out to the country. . . . I suppose if I do hunger so for music, and for the trees, and the ocean, I suppose it's true of some human beings," she said thoughtfully. Then she added hesitantly but with sincerity, "I did call you 'Sweet One' once in a [recent] letter." These comments contained a depth of positive feeling which was most unusual for her to convey.

Relatedness to the Nonhumas: Environment in Lieu of Satisfactory Relatedness to Other Human Beings Having given a number of examples of persons' experiencing indirectly, via the nonhuman environment, feelings which have basic reference to another human being, I shall now give some examples of persons' relating to that environment in lieu of a satisfactory relatedness to other human beings. There is, of course, much overlapping of these two phenomena in actual life situations; throughout this book, in fact, I am trying to separate out, for purposes of presentation, phenomena which in actuality merge imperceptibly into one another) and occur in varying degrees concomitantly with one another. Melanie Klein, in reviewing the history of her development of the psychoanalytic play technique, comments upon what one might call the substitute value of nonhuman objects, a value which has enabled such objects to form a central part of the medium of psychoanalysis with children: Play analysis had shown that symbolism enabled the child to transfer not only interests, but also phantasies, anxieties, and guilt

objects other than people. Thus a great deal of relief is ex.. perienced in play and this is one of the factors which make it so essential for the child (88a].

to

In the following clinical examples we find, similarly, the individual's having, or seeking to have, a relatedness with some animal, or some nonhuman object, a relatedness which he lacks in his experience with other persons.

300

The Nonhuman Environment

1. A thirty-nine-year-old schizophrenic man's first overt expression of grief, during his psychotherapy, came in response to the death of a dog which had been a pet on his ward. As he later told his therapist, he had found himself unable to show grief while the head nurse was telling him of the dog's death; but now, during his therapeutic hour, he wept. He went on to say that as a boy he had had a dog, and that the dog had died, and that when this had happened, he had felt in his mother's presence as he bad felt in the presence of the head nurse. As a boy he had gone, feeling badly inside about his dog's death, to his mother with some idea of her comforting him. But for some reason or other, he remembered, he had not been able to cry while with his mother and, still feeling badly, he had gone out into the stable and had put his head on the neck of his horse and had cried, with the fantasy that the horse was Mother. There had been a feeling of warmth and softness with the horse, he said, and actually the horse, a mare, had just foaled a short time before, and he (who, incidentally, had no siblings) used to play with the foal. In this instance, then, the boy had been able to find, in his relationship with the mare, something which he had been either unable to obtain or unable to ask for in his relationship with his mother: release of his feelings of grief, and maternal comforting. 2. A forty-year-old schizophrenic man had been hospitalized constantly for eleven years thus far, living an extremely lonely existence and never having had, so far as anyone knew, a close friend at any time in his life. His first use of the word "friend" came in the seventeenth month of his psychotherapy when, in the process of talking in detail about the idea of having a car (making clear that he himself had owned one, although as usual disclaiming so) he said, with much feeling, "That's your best friend." This man, whose positive feelings had heretofore been maintained under the most vigorous denial, was finally able to reveal here, in reference to his car, a feeling of caring very deeply. I believe that his or her automobile has been many a schizophrenic person's best friend; but I had never heard one of my patients express this so simply and so movingly. 3. A forty-one-year-old schizophrenic woman, who had been

Psychosis and Neurosis

301

leading a life of severe emotional (although not physically seeluded) isolation on a disturbed ward for years, was looking closely) during an hour with her therapist, at a painting by Utrillo on the wall of the living room, where the interview was taking place. She asked, "What do you think of the people?" He replied, "Well, they look rather indistinct, don't they?" She commented, "They look like dolls," Then, running her finger over them, she said, "I wish I could make them come to life," The therapist felt, both from her words and her tone, that she was conveying how lonely she felt, and commented, "I suppose it is pretty lonely around here. n As if in answer to this--he felt it to be a corroboration--she slumped down on her chair, face down, head buried. 4. A thirty-five-year-old schizophrenic woman had slowly improved, in the course of her stay in the hospital, sufficiently to be free to go, as she wished, into the nearby village, unaccompanied by an attendant. But she was still leading an intensely lonely life -just how lonely I did not realize, until an hour during which she began speaking about the mannequins in the store windows. She asked me, hesitatingly, if I had ever noticed how real the hair looks on them, and so forth, and as she went on speaking) slowly and hesitantly, I realized how poignantly she wished that these humanlike figures in the store windom,· at which she gazed during her walks to the village, would come to life and assuage her loneliness. For the first time it came to me that she probably often fantasied that the mannequins-s-she mentioned, in talking, both adult ones and child ones-were real people, her friends and her family. I had long known that this woman, who was a widow with no children, and who felt largely cut off from her parental family, suffered much from loneliness; but, as I say, I had not realized how deeply she suffered from it, or-perhaps more accurately-to what lengths she went to avoid experiencing the full intensity of it. 5. A thirty-six-year-old woman, who had been hospitalized briefly for catatonic schizophrenia had now improved sufficiently, after long psychotherapy, to be holding a job as a stock clerk in a department store. But her interpersonal relationships were still deeply troubled, and it is of interest, here, that one of her psy-

302

The Nonhuman Environmtnl

chological defenses, erected in her struggle to make her job situation endurable, was that of personifying the shelves of mer.. chandise with which she worked. For example, in one of her hours with me she said, "I take a lot of satisfaction in knowing that those shelves have never been in such good condition in their lives." On another occasion, when she had felt-as she usually did-unappreciated by the man who was head of her department, during a conversation with him she had retorted, "At least the shelves appreciate me!" 6.. A fellow therapist, upon my mentioning the title of this book and telling him a few words about it} feelingly spoke of his past experiences when, at times when he was feeling thoroughly helpless in his relationships with other people, he would experience great relief at finding that he could at least deal with the material world-that he could, at least, pull a chair toward him and it would move . 7. A forty-three-year-old schizophrenic man was now living as an outpatient; but a year previously he had been involved in very assaultive behavior which had been going on for months. During that disturbed period he had been secluded most of each day, he had urinated not infrequently on the floor of his room, and the attendants were so afraid of him that at mealtimes they would shove in his tray on the floor. It had been even worse than this at another hospital, from which he had been transferred to Chestnut Lodge several months before; at the previous hospital} he had been so greatly feared, because of his assaultive ness, that when he was taken to the bathroom he was routinely escorted by six male attendants. During one hour in this disturbed phase, of a year ago, his therapist noticed that the patient was gazing about rapidly, and asked him, "What do the voices say?" The patient replied, "I'm not hearing voices-I'm looking at my two pet flies, Lum and Abner." The therapist looked closely in the direction of the pa.. tient's gaze and saw that there were, indeed, two flies flying around high on the window screen. He said, "Gosh, it sure must get lonely up here," The patient replied, with much feeling,

Psychosis and Neurosis

303

"Yeah, it sure does." The therapist asked him, then, if he had had any pets, but received no answer. The therapist heard nothing further about this incident until now, a year later, when the patient was finally able to tell him about the voices he used to hear, back during his disturbed period of a year and more ago. He confided that they had been women's voices which had kept telling him to hang himself, to tear out his eyes, to bash in his skull by ramming it into the door. He pointed out that all these things which the voices had said were condemnatory and hopeless-sounding. The first hopeful sign, he went on, was when the voices told him to tell those two flies, Lum and Abner, to fly to a factory in his home town in California and to light on a certain one of the machines there. That, the voices had said, was his only chance of hope. "That may sound odd," he said, "But up until then I didn't have any feeling of hope, and I did feel that this was my chance." He confided, further, that he had waited until he was alone and then told the flies this, because if anyone had seen him they would have thought he was insane. This desperate man had thus been able to invest in the flies a hope which he did not' yet dare to place in his therapist or in any other human being. 8. On page 279 I described an incident which constitutes another example of relatedness to a nonhuman object as a substitute for an (as yet) unattainable relatedness, of this variety, toward another human being = this incident involved a schizophrenic woman's holding a doll at her bared breast and weeping in anguish because she could not persuade it to nurse. She related not only to her doll as though it were a human being, but also related similarly to her own stools, as shown by the following excerpts from nurses' report sheets, written on two different days: At 10 P.M. she went into the large bathroom and defecated on the tile floor-two big hunks. She was saying when checked, "This is twins and this one is a boy; I see his penis," Patient didn't want me to flush them down "john" for fear they might drown.

The Nonhuman Environment

3M

Patient was found playing with a small hunk of feces and named it after Edwards [a male attendant] as her little baby boy. Showed tenderness toward it and expressed great deal of sentiment.

This woman's treating her doll as a real, human baby is like the behavior of a schizophrenic patient described by Bleuler, in

his sectionon autism: A patient who was still fairly well-mannered and capable of work, made herself a rag-doll which she considered to be the child of her imaginary lover. When this "lover" of hers made a trip to Berlin, she wanted to send "the child" after him, as a precautionary measure. But she first went to the police, to ask whether it would be considered as illegal to send "the child" as luggage instead of on a passenger ticket [13a].

Anna Freud refers to similar phenomena. In the symposium on "Infantile Neurosis," she states: Dr. Bychowski describes a rhythmic, autoerotic play activity

which some of his patients had carried on with their feces, creating out of their own body a pseudo object with which they could enter into some sort of pseudo object relationship. I want to confirm Dr. Bychowski's remarks by referring to a case history of a two-and-a-half-year-old child. The boy had a series of traumatic experiences at the end of his second year. There was a complete upheaval in the external conditions of his life; there was a sudden short separation from the mother due to illness on her part; and finally, there was a period of mourning and depression on the part of the mother, caused by the loss of her relatives. The boy reacted to the accumulated strain by soiling, and investigation proved that this was more then a regression in toilet habits. He called the stool out of his body quite deliberately, to have company at a time when he felt abandoned by his mother and, in reaction to her mood, withdrew his own feelings from her

[45c].

9. A paranoid schizophrenic woman, twenty-nine years of age,

Psychosis and Neurosis

305

loudly asserted during an hour with me, "1 spent my entire youth under a piano with a dog, because I'd rather be with a dog than with people, who lied to me and slapped my face and told me 1 was evil because they were!" This statement was made in a spirit of condemnation toward me as well as toward her parental family and was, obviously, an exaggeration. But it contained far more than a kernel of truth; she produced abundant data, during relatively calm and collaborative sessions as well as during more disturbed ones, over the course of years of psychotherapy, which convinced me that during the years of her childhood her dog had been, indeed, her closest and most trusted companion. Feeling oftentimes intensely threatened in all her relationships with other people, and unable to trust her own intuition as to whether this or that person in her presence were a friend or an enemy, she grew accustomed to relying upon the dog's ability to detect whether the other person were friendly or hostile toward her. 10. A twenty-two-year-old schizophrenic woman, one among that relatively small percentage of patients in my experience whose appearance and behavior, for many months after the beginning of their psychotherapy, were striking "nonhuman," began, after about eighteen months of intensive work with me, to reveal how intense were her feelings of rejection toward all her fellow human beings. In the course of one hour she frankly expressed bitter resentment concerning her mother, her father, myself, and some girlhood friend. In the midst of saying these things she began weeping bitterly and, gazing through the win.. dow at the tree-dotted hospital grounds, said emphatically, "I certainly miss horses-and I don't like another living thing;" then added as an afterthought, u--except trees." 4 11. A thirty-nine-year-old spinster had led a lonely life prior to her hospitalization and now, in psychotherapy because of paranoid schizophrenia, for a long time had kept herself largely aloof from me and from other members of the hospital personnel, as well as from her fellow patients, showing intense anxiety in the lace of any developing close relatedness with anyone of us. Her • On page 247 I quoted, in another cenectlon, this statement of hers,

306

The Nonhuman Environment

adult life had been a very "sheltered" one; her activities had been confined, for the most part, to keeping house for her elderly father and mother. After many months of psychotherapy, she came into my office one day and told me, with unprecedentedly deep feeling in her voice, that she had just received a jar of blackberries, sent by a woman who long had lived in the house next door to her parents' house-berries from bushes near the kitchen window of the patient's home. She went on, with tears in her voice, to describe the bushes as being "just covered" with blackberries each year. She spoke of the bushes with as much feeling as though she were speaking of very dear friends, much as the man described above (in example 2) had spoken of his car, More by her tone and by what was left unsaid than by what her relatively few words made explicit, I realized that, to this lonely woman who had spent much time working in the kitchen, the berry bushes had come to possess something of the order of personal meaning with which, ordinarily, only human friends are invested. This last example illustrates the impossibility of categorizing this clinical material into really sharply defined groups, in terms of psychodynamic mechanisms involved, as I am endeavoring to do. I do not doubt that the berry bushes were often reacted to, by this lonely woman, as dear personal friends in their own rightJ when there was no human friend at hand to assuage her loneli.. ness, But who is to say that much of the feeling she expressed to me, consciously with reference to the bushes, was not unconsciously directed toward the neighbor woman-and, very possibly, toward myself also? Certainly the neighbor must have possessed a sensitive appreciation of the patient's feelings, to have sent her so thoughtful a gift; and certainly I must have come to stand in much of a friend-relatedness to the patient, for her to reveal these feelings to me. When one considers all these clinical examples presently being given-including those in the immediately following section, reported as illustrations of patients' projection upon, or failure of ego differentiation from, the nonhuman environment--one can

Psychosis and Neurosis

307

well surmise) I think, that in most instances all three of these psychodynamic processes are simultaneously involved, with one or another of them merely predominating. Projection Upon, or Failure of Ego Differentiation From, the

N onhuman Environment When .one uses the term "projection," one usually assumes, I believe, that this is a process which has another person as its target. The fact that we human beings tend to project not only onto other human beings, but upon elements of our nonhuman environment also) is a circumstance which tends to go by unnoticed. In this book, however, I have already included a number of clinical examples (particularly in Chapter VI) of patients' projecting onto their nonhuman environment, and other investigators before me have presented material of this sort. At this juncture I shall present a few relevant excerpts from the literature-without attempting to report an exhaustive review of all the literature about this subject-and shall give a number of additional clinical examples from my own experience. In this presentation I shall not try to draw any distinction between ( a) projection upon the nonhuman environment, and (b) failure of ego differentiation from the nonhuman environment. If there is a distinction to be made here, I fail to see it; any process of projection automatically implies, by the same token, a failure of ego differentiation from one's surroundings, to my way of thinking" Of course, it might be said that failure of ego differentiation is a more primitive process, to be found in pure culture only in infancy, and that projection implies that ego differentiation has been accomplished in the past-that the subjective self has been psychologically detached from the environ.. ment, and that now in the process of projection. some parts of the subjective self are being reattributed to the environment from which they had been initially detached. At any rate, such a distinction, if actually present, can be disregarded in reading the following material

308

The Nonhuman Environment

LrrERATUIlE

These excerpts from the literature, like the clinical examples following them, portray various degrees of impairment of ego differentiation, ranging all the way from a total inability to demarcate anything of the self from the environment, to the projection of certain specific parts of the self onto the environment. Nunberg's previously mentioned paper, "On the Catatonic Attack," first published in 1920, containing his formulation of the psychodynamic meaning of successive symptoms experienced by his male catatonic patient over the course of development of the illness, includes the following comments: We observe still another change here; up to this point the patient had distinguished between the ego and the outside world. In taking exercises or selected foods he pursued the goal of changing himself and of influencing the world indirectly, insofar as he hoped by these actions to gain consideration and recognition for himself. After the "end of the world," however, the patient in a certain sense no longer distinguished between "inside' and "out.. side"; the outside world coincided with the ego; it was directly affected by changes in the ego, and vice versa. To speak in Tausk's words" the bound4'~ of the ego was resolved [l09b].

Fenichel, in The Psychoanalytic Theory 01 Neurosis, published in 1945, makes a number of comments with reference to patients' projecting upon what I call the nonhuman environment, He says in discussing anxiety hysteria that persons who are afraid of trains, boats, and airplanes project upon the vehicle the excitement which it has precipitated, at an unconscious level, in them, and consequently they experience a need to escape from the vehicle-a need which is in actuality a need to escape from their own excitement. And he says in these instances the train, for example, represents one's own body, or at least its sensations, which one tries to get rid of by projection. Similarly with a phobic person in a narrow street, Fenichel says: he introjects the street's narrowness, and thus feels frightened, and in some in-

Prychosis and Neurosis

309

stances, as a result of projection, even behaves as if the street itself were afraid; thus we see how incomplete are the ego boundaries which subjectively demarcate him from the street. Fenichel quotes Sachs's (121) concept that "consciousness of nature" consists not in becoming aware of the real physical and geographical elements in nature, but in becoming aware of feelings within ourselves, which we believe are connected with those physical or geographical elements. 5 And later, in his chapter on schizophrenia, Fenichel comments that the projection of feared excitements onto nature or onto particular environmental situations, which he described in connection with anxiety hysteria, occurs in a more obvious manner in schizophrenia. Werner (162), using Storch's (148) 1924 monograph, now out of print, as one of his reference sources, implies that a developing dedifferentiation between the self and the nonhuman environment .is one of the earmarks of the onset of schizophrenia, a concept to which I was led independently by my own clinical experience. Werner comments, A genuine daemonism can arise on the basis of such ego- and anthropomorphism [as characterizes primitive thinking] as soon as the emotion of intense anxiety begins to formulate the sinister elements of any situation [162w]. [In schizophrenia] The milieu invades the ego and, on the other hand, the inner experience spreads outward into the world of things. The milieu becomes daemonic and the ego susceptible to daemonism [162x]. The first stage in the schizophrenic decline is often characterized by a growing '(queerness" in everything. Things come to have a hitherto unheard-of "deeper meaning"; they become sinister and alive with mystery, and any harmless object may be invested with signs and portents [162y].

Savage, in his paper, published in 1955 concerning psychoses -Incidentally, I differ, of course, with Sachs's evident view that we react to nature solsly in a projective manner. As I indicated at the outlet of thi. book, one of my basic theoretical tenets is that the nonhuman environment can be found to be meaningful to us in its"f-the more richly BO, in proportion 31 Our reactions to it become free of IUch diltorting ingredients as those ariBing from projection.

310

The Nonhuman Environment

induced in normal subjects by LSD-25, describes the subject's typical experience as follows: His concept of spatial relations is impaired. He loses the ability to integrate objects in space. The stability of the outer world is lost. Corners lose their rectangularity; solid objects move; lines and planes bend. "The walls flap in the breeze like tapestries--they run like melted wax," "The floor flows like a river" [126e].

It would seem that such perceptions of the nonhuman environment as Savage describes here are a result of the subject's loss of ego differentiation, allowing for projection upon the nonhuman environment of an instability which in reality characterizes the patient's psychological state; he mistakenly experiences the instability as an outer one. I have reported here (pages 150-151) similar material from schizophrenic patients, and will give further instances of this phenomenon in the brief clinical examples soon to be presented. Burnham, in a paper in 1955 concerning communication with schizophrenic patients, mentions that He [i.e., the schizophrenic patient] also is unaware of inconsistencies such as attributing animate qualities to inanimate objects, as in these statements ~ "The pillow propelled itself away from me." Or, 'The violin felt the same way I did ..' Such examples also reflect the blurring of the boundaries between the realm of his ego and that of the outer world .[21]. Heiman, in his paper previously mentioned ( pages 15..17), presents excellent examples of (presumably neurotic) patients' projecting upon (as well as identifying with) a specific element in the nonhuman environment: household pets, In the case of one of his female patients, for instance, . . . the identification of the patient with the dog was so complete that almost imperceptibly she changed from talking about the dog to talking about herself. Her own libidinal wishes which she cannot master or accept are displaced on to the dog. She

Psychosis and Neurosis

311

wonders, for instance, whether she should place the dog in an obedience class. In this session the patient herself howls and whines and is demanding, the same way that she describes her

dog [73]. He also quotes a nice example from a paper by Dunbar, in which Dunbar reports her patient as saying,

C'I simply could not live without cats in the house. . . . I guess it's lucky I have a cat, or I would be doing all these things to my child. Even worse things than I do now. Perhaps that's why I am afraid not to have a cat around. Yesterday, as I was sitting alone in the house I heard a noise, a live footstep like a eat's. I wondered if it was my son getting out of bed) stealing downstairs. I became more and more afraid and said, under my breath, 'Don't come in, don't come in.' I felt that if he did I would give a yell, and jump at his throat" [29]. Here, with Dunbar's patient, it appears that not only was the cat being used as a target of the patient's aggression in place of her child; but also her feline savagery was being projected upon the cat. Heiman suggests, in his theoretical formulations, that the dog (the kind of household pet with which most of his clinical material is concerned) becomes a true protector of the psychic balance in man, by serving as a ready carrier for instinctual forces which are too intense for our own capacities to contain unaided. The paper by Elklsch and Mahler (33) about the seven-yearold boy, who confused his own impulses with machines in his environment, contains some vivid examples of what I am terming projection onto the nonhuman environment. Of the wall telephone in the therapist's office, for example, he once commented to her, "It was not so loud today, because it knew we were waiting for it to buzz," and on another occasion he said of it, "It will come down from the wall and take a bite out of you." His equally intense anxiety about elevator shafts, manholes, and toilets involved the fantasy that they would swallow him up.

312

The Nonhuman Environment

The little girl described by Furman (56) showed, between the ages of about three and six years, this phenomenon-namely, projection onto the nonhuman world-in an equally striking way: . . . she once picked up the scissors, then retreated with them to the other end of the room, crying in terror, "You [addressing the scissors] are going to hurt me!" Another time she grabbed a toy man aggressively and screamed out, "The man is going to break

me all up." • . . Carol could not cut out paper because she feared it would hurt her in revenge. . . .. She treated toys and make-believe as live reality and therefore was practically unable to play; e.g., she wished very badly for a doll's house in the therapy room) but when it finally arrived she became so jealous of the doll's having a house to itself that she only wanted to snatch the house away from the doll and destroy it, since she could not live in it herself. CLINICAL MATERIAL

In the examples given below one sees, as with those above from the literature, instances of patients' projecting of undiffer. entiated feelings of inner chaos--confusion, craziness, messiness, bewildering change-as well as instances of patients' projecting of more specific, more clearly differentiated feelings such as scorn

and sexual desire. 1. A twenty-one-year-old schizophrenic woman, deeply confused in her thinking and disorganized in her behavior, for many months was shielded from becoming aware of the severity of her illness by projection, not only upon other persons but also upon her nonhuman environment, of the disorder which actually characterized her own thinking and behavior. For example, she came into my office for one therapeutic session with, typically, her clothing very disheveled and dirty and partially undone, her hair very messy, and her shoes broken down at the heels and stuffed with many bunched-up silk stockings. She brought with her a glass of ice cubes, some small bottles of perfume, a number of magazines, and a purse overflowing

Psychosis and Neurosis

313

with various miscellaneous items. She then proceeded, as usual, to spend the bulk of the hour in rubbing her forehead, limbs, and genitals with ice; arranging the magazines on the seat of her chair before finally sitting down; sniffing at intervals from the bottles of perfume; and wiping various parts of her body with Kleenex. Also characteristically, when the session was over, her chair and the area about it were left in a messy, littered state. But during this particular hour she had managed to verbalize the following new and significant statements: "This place [the sanitarium] is getting very unconventional. . . . This place is a mess . • . The second floor [where she roomed] is a mess." That is, she was apparendy projecting her own messiness and unconventionality not only upon other persons (as her words at other times often indicated) but also upon the place-tltt sanitarium in general, and the hospital ward where she lived. Likewise as regards her confusion, although she did manage to show, during the same month as that in which the above session occurred, some awareness of her confusion, it was still necessary for her to project this to some degree upon the environment. She said that, in reading, "I look straight at 'Ralph' and see 'Randy,' n and said of the wadded-up stockings in her shoes, "They are just like glasses. For a while I thought they uiere glasses." Then she summed it up with, "I feel confused in this place," as if it were the place, not she, wherein the confusion arose. She had long been distressed whenever one of the maids used a mop in her proximity, and during this same month one of the daily nurses' reports contained the following item: ... The maid went down the hall with a mop. Edna said, "Don't use that mop now. Pick it up," The maid didn't sayanything. Edna put both hands to the sides of her head and hollered, "This place is so craz'Y!"

Eleven months later, she was still projecting onto the environment, including the nonhuman environment, much of her own psychopathology. During one of her hours she said in exaspera-

314

The Nonhuman Environment

non, "This place acts like a nitwit I"~ which actually was a precise description of some of the pathological aspects of her own behavior-a silly-sounding laugh and a simpering, empty-headed type of behavior toward people whom she passed in the hospital corridors, It gradually became apparent that her projecting so diffusely upon the environment as a whole, including the "place," was perpetuated partly because of her fear of me, to whom she re .. acted as being a frighteningly powerful father figure. It required about six more months of work before she could focus the projection of the above..described qualities onto me, her therapist, and tlet me know quite directly that she considered me to be a nitwit. Interestingly, along with this development carne her de-repression of the feeling that her father, for a long time enshrined in her estimation as an omniscient person incapable of error, was actually quite a nincompoop} both as regards the things he said and the way he behaved. This last development facilitated the resolution of some of her long-standing, self.. detrimental unconscious identifications with her father---silly flirtatiousness, the uttering of remarks which other persons found meaningless, and various other eccentricities. 2. In my work with a paranoid schizophrenic woman, thirtyone years of age, it quickly became apparent to me that she, like the patient just described, was unconsciously avoiding an awareness of her own psychological instability by the process of projection of this instability-projection of it upon not only other persons, but also upon her nonhwnan environment. But it was a long time before she herself came to realize this. For more than three years after beginning intensive psychotherapy with me she maintained, as far as I could tell, an utterly unvarying, starkly simple conception of herself, as being a sincere, well-intentioned person who wanted to be left alone to lead a quiet Iife--a person completely devoid of any feelings whatsoever, whether of friendliness, tenderness, dependency, sexual desire, an .. ger, murderousness, envy, jealousy, scorn, competitiveness, nostalgia, grief or whatever. She seemed genuinely to maintain the conviction that her mood never changed, that her opinions of vari-

Psychosis and Neurosis

315

ous other persons never changed, and that, when it came to her intellectual experiences, she had learned literally nothing new since the age of eight. The repression of her feelings seemed also to date from about that age. As she often put it, she was "completely grown up" by the age of eight; thereafter, she indicated, she had never experienced the humiliating business of having any feelings about any thing-a business characteristic, she was sure, only of children. This woman, as one might surmise, was actually as changeable, to the observer, as her conception of herself was changeless. She manifested in great intensity all the various emotions which she so steadfastly warded out of her awareness. From one hour to the next her demeanor varied so greatly that she seemed scarcely the same person one had seen during the previous hour; and oftentimes she was so mercurial from one moment to the next that in the very midst of a tirade of murderous intensity she would, in the same breath, ask one, in an unmistakably friendly way, for a light for her cigarette. As I mentioned, I had begun early to find evidence that she unconsciously defended herself against the recognition of her own psychological instability, through projecting this instability upon not only other persons, but upon her nonhuman environment as well. That is, she indicated that she not only experienced the other person in her presence (including myself, in the therapeutic session) as being replaced, repeatedly, by different persons; she also experienced the hospital buildings, the contours of the landscape, and the locations of the trees as changing more or less constantly. She could only conclude that all of her surroundings were a giant movie set which was changed continuously. This included even the neighboring village, and the adjacent city of Washington; when she went into the village or the city) she was sure, each time, that this was a different community from any that she had ever visited before. She was certain that there were thousands of Chestnut Lodges, thousands of Rockvilles, thousands of Wash.. ingtons. Changes in these physical surroundings, as well as changes in the appearance of other persons, would occur right before her eyes. She had had a similar perception of her environment, including the nonhuman environment, for years before my

316

The Nonhuman Environment

first interview with her. She once confided to me that even before the age of eight, "I used to feel as though I were walking on quicksand," It is of incidental interest that this woman evidently found it more tolerable to experience even her own body as changing continuously, than to feel that her personality was in any state of flux. She frequently experienced her body as varying markedly in size, as falling to pieces, as changing in skin color from white to black or yellow; but she clung desperately to the conviction that her personality traits were as durably fixed as steel. The psychotherapy provided abundant evidence that the "they" who, she was convinced, possessed the vast powers to replace one Waslrington with another, to replace one hospital landscape with another, to replace the other person in her pres .. ence with another similar but unidentical person, to alter mark.. edIy her own physical self-and, I should add, to shift her about all over the world, so that she found herself now in India, now in Alaska, and so forth-was in actuality her own superego. Her superego possessed, in fact, such power over her as to warp her perception of outer reality to this extent, in order to enforce its dictates. On pages 150-151 I gave brief descriptions of this same phenomenon (projection, upon the nonhuman environment, of inner psychological change) from my work with two other patients. I should like to interject here a related point which my clinical experience has confirmed many times over: patients experience even beneficial psychotherapeutic change as threatening; they try, therefore, to avoid the recognition of it; and a frequent unconscious defense against its recognition consists in projection of the change upon their environment. In keeping with this unconscious striving to project the change comes, then, an urge to change therapists or to change hospitals. If the patient is successful in his endeavor to get a new therapist or to obtain transfer to a different hospital, this does indeed stave off his recognition of the psychological change which has taken place in himself, for this change is not nearly so clearly highlighted either in his own view or in the view of the therapist (or, if he goes to

Psychosis and Neuf'osU

317

another hospital, the new doctors and nurses who deal with him) as it would be if he continued in the same external environment. 3. A forty-year-old schizophrenic man, deeply confused for many years before beginning psychotherapy with me, and for a number of years after we had started our work together, evidently first became aware of his confusion as a function not of himself but of his nonhuman environment He was saying relatively little to me during his hours at that time, and his first known statement concerning confusion was quoted in a nurses' report: "Every now and then outbursts of cursing, about what a God damned mixed-up place this is:" It was not until three months later that he made-this time, to another nurse-his first known verbal acknowledgment of the fact of his confusion: "Said to me, 'You know, I can't tell if I'm coming or going-it's awful: " 4. A thirty-four-year-old schizophrenic woman, in the course of her psychotherapy with me, spent a number of months in protesting about the "craziness" of the hospital-of not only other persons about her, personnel as well as patients, but also of such inanimate things as the furniture and other objects of interior decoration-before becoming able to recognize her own "craziness':' (she used this term in each instance). Specifically, she used to complain of jumbled discoordination, disharmony, in both her human environment and her nonhuman environment, before coming to describe her own experiencing of discoordinate thoughts and feelings which shifted rapidly and often coexisted simultaneously in her awareness. For several months she showed an urgent need to keep her material belongings in order; it was as if she strove to keep her own inner confusion under control by preventing these inanimate possessions from becoming "mixed up." She eventually came to express all the bewilderment about her own inner experiences which she had previously voiced in relation to her environment. At another point, when she was in a period of preparing, with the cooperation of the hospital personnel, to move to outpatient status, she projected onto the nonhuman environment the precariousness, the fragility, which, at an unconscious level, she

318

The Nonhuman Environment

sensed to be true of her own psychological adjustment. She commented, critically and protestingly, about some water stains on my ceiling, saying that it would do no good simply to paint over the ceiling if the water-pipe leak} the basic cause of the stains, were not fixed. She had not yet reached the point, apparently, where she could consciously recognize anxiety concerning the fact that her own basic emotional difficulties had not yet been resolved, and anxiety, therefore, at moving out of the hospital. Later in this same hour she described a crack, extending from floor to ceiling, on the living-room wall of the house into which she was making preparations to move; she commented, in an anxiously joking fashion, that she guessed she'd have to hold the building up. Many times, throughout her stay in the hospital} she had manifested great concern lest the building fall to pieces; she had listened anxiously for any creaks which might presage such a disaster-not yet able, evidently, to be aware of her anxiety lest she herself suffer a more complete breakdown in personality functioning. d 5. A thirty-five-year-old schizophrenic woman, required by her family to move to outpatient living quarters before there bad been sufficient resolution of her illness to make this a clinically sound move, was helped by one of our social workers to locate an apartment in the neighboring community. The social worker's report, midway along in the house hunting, contained a striking example of projection, or readiness for projection, upon the non• This material, about this womants equating of herself with the building. is reminiscent of some of the data presented by Erikson (34) in his article in 1937 entitled, "Configurations in Play-Clinical Notes." He mentions that (lin piay a house-fonn •.. may represent tbe body as a whole," and that the particular kind of house constructed by a child in play therapy Uaften reveals the child's specific conception of and feeling for his own body and certain other bodies.'} He describes the extraordinary house constructed, in a play-therapy kind of experiment, by a schizophrenic young man who complained of having no feeling in the front of his body. This house had only a screen rather than a solid front; the solid part of the house was confined to a projection at the back, corresponding with the builder's experiencing his own feelings as being localized to his spine and rectum. Further, in tbe outline of the house-form could be recognized the posture-e-Le., with protruding buttocks-of the young man.

Psychosis and Neurosis

319

human environment. Specifically, here, the patient showed a tendency toward projection of her own scorn onto the nonhuman

environment: During the latter part of November and early in December, Mrs. Haynes and I have gone looking for apartments four different times. " . . With one exception she handled herself well on these visits with apartment-house managers. . . . One day when she seemed quite disturbed was when a manager named Mr. Smith took us through an apartment building. . . . I'm not sure what happened to upset her but it was possibly because Mr. Smith talked more to me than to Mrs. Haynes, and I wasn't able to redirect his attention. Also, the building was minimally attractive on the outside but was very nice looking on the inside. We hadn't much more than gotten in the front door when Mrs. Haynes decided that she wasn't going to look around. She refused to go into the back part of the building to see the vacant apartments there, or up to any of the upper floors, and insisted on examining the building's exterior at great length, saying that it was a beautiful building with one breath and in the next breath running it down, so that it was really quite a disagreeable

situation. When we got back into my office, I asked what in the world had happened and she asked me if I had heard Mr. Smith say, "Imbecilic." When I denied this) she wondered if the walls of the building had said it or had I said it. However, after we talked a little while, she decided that nobody had said it.

This woman did finally become settled in an apartment and, as her psychotherapy progressed, became able to tell her therapist of the hallucinations she had experienced while in the depth of her psychosis, in the hospital. These hallucinations had included her finding that the floor itself talked to her. It appears that in the particular situation detailed above, about the apartment hunting, the patient sensed that she was doing badly in a setting where it was important that she demonstrate capability, that her already great self-criticism became heightened as a result, and that she projected onto the environment her own scornful attitude toward herself. It is further probable that,

320

The Nonhuman Environment

because this was a situation where she herself was, as it were, on trial, any scorn which arose in her toward the manager, toward the social worker, and toward the building itself, had to be repressed, and was therefore also projected onto the environment. My over-all acquaintance with her psychodynamics, gained over a period of several years of serving as a consultant to the therapist in this case) supports such formulations. 6. A fellow therapist, in a staff presentation of his several years of work with a twenty-four-year-old woman who had been severely ill with schizophrenia since childhood, included in his description of the course of the psychotherapy some commentswhich provide another example of projection upon the nonhuman environment: About the spring of 1949 she began presenting another kind of problem.. That was the problem with the logs, . . . She seemed to be getting closer, ever more into awareness of this feeling of being dependent on people and being hurt by people, her wanting to be an independent person; and in this setting came the problem of the logs. What would happen is that she would be walking in the woods-as she often did-and she would see a log, and if she couldn't move it she would be stuck. She would have to get a pole and work at the log, whether it weighed a pound or a hundred tons, until she could in some degree be satisfied that she had budged it. This meant to her that she was superior} and that she would not be degraded by this log. Well, after working on this for about four months-s-and this was almost the only theme during that time-there finally came to her, one day, the thought (after it had been suggested to her about three months previously) that maybe the logs were in some way a misplaced feeling, the feeling of any kind about other people--a warm feeling, maybe-and somehow that she was terribly frightened by these feelings and so had to destroy them, that perhaps in some way her superiority, her strength, was demonstrated in the way she controlled the logs.

From the therapist'S description, given above, it appears that what the patient was projecting onto the logs was, specifically, the paralyzing inertia which her emotional conflicts tended to

Psychosis and Neurons

321

impose upon her. That is, it appears that she tended to become psychologically immobilized by her conflicts between desires for dependence and desires fOT independence, her wann feelings toward people mingled with conflicting desires to avoid being hurt by people, and, no doubt, various other emotional conflicts. By demonstrating to herself, then, that she could move the logs, she was unconsciously reassuring herself, apparently, that she could achieve some measure of success in her struggle against the paralyzing emotional conflicts within her. 7. A twenty-five-year-old schizophrenic woman began, about nine months after her admission to Chestnut Lodge, to behave during her psychotherapeutic hours in a fashion which showed unmistakably that she was involved in hallucinations that her father was raping her. She verbalized her experience of this frankly and in detail, and showed a most intense anguish and anxiety about this-while conveying subtle hints, of course, that the very distressing experience had voluptuousness in it, too. Then, after two weeks of this, although she continued to express distress, as she had before, about tingling sensations all over her body, she no longer described it that her father was ravishing her. Instead, now, she expressed the conviction that the tingling was due to the fact that something was being done to her by metal in her environment. She went on to explain that this phenomenon had begun at the time of her becoming married, five years ago. She and her husband, upon being married, had in· stalled a mirror in their dark dining room, she said, and she had found that upon gazing into the mirror she became a part of it. She said that her image had become trapped by the metal in the back of the mirror. She went on, in subsequent therapeutic hours, to speak repeatedly of mirrors as being dangerous things; one becomes entranced with one's image in the mirror, she said, and she termed this process self-mesmerization. As she developed this theme in the therapeutic sessions, she came to the conclusion that the beginning of her downfall (ostensibly referring to her nervous breakdown) had been her getting trapped in the metal of the mirror. She then telephoned, from the hospital, to her husband in her

322

The Nonhuman Environment

home city in New England, telling him to get rid of that mirror, which he agreed to do. In her hours with the therapist immediately following the telephone call, she described a feeling of her thoughts being suspended, a feeling that they were suspended all the way from the hospital to her home city, and described a tearing feeling in her head, which she related to the fact that the mirror was being removed from her home in that city; she could feel their moving the mirror, she said. In one of these hours she put it that, "When you look into a mirror you enter a trancelike state," to which her therapist made some remark about Alice in Wonderland. The patient agreed, saying, "You enter another world.." She made clear to her therapist that not only was she feeling that her image was in the metal, but also she was feeling that there was something in her which attracted metal. That is, she felt that metal attracted her image, and that something within herself attracted metal.. In keeping with this impression, she repeatedly pleaded) at this time, to be moved into a different room in the hospital, saying that the metal furniture in her roomher bed, her dressers, her window screen, all of which were, indeed, made of metal-was causing her to feel extremely uncomfortable. This discomfort was comprised of generalized tingling sensations; these she described in much the same terms as those she had used in describing the physical sensations she experienced while being ravished by the father-hallucination. With this she expressed the conviction that all these feelings came from outside her self-that they were all due to an outside "influence"; she never spoke of the sensations as arising from emotions within herself. She -repeatedly expressed the conviction that these sensations were due to the influence of metal-metal outside herself or, as she sometimes said, metal within her; but she could not yet realize, evidently, that the sensations had to do with emotions within her. She had long been pleading to her therapist to be allowed to go home, and she continued to make this plea) protesting that for her to stay on here and become "adjusted to Chestnut Lodge"

Psychosis and Neurons

323

would have no relevance, no usefulness, to her later "adjusting to home," In pondering over such clinical material as this, one realizes that when such a patient-a patient, that is, who feels so thoroughly at one with her environment, including the nonhuman environment-speaks of the difficulties of becoming adjusted to first one place (the hospital) and then another (her horne), she is using the term "adjusted" to mean something deeper than we usually mean when we use that term, To her, evidently, an environment-including not only human beings but also inanimate objects-became an integral part of herself, growingly, no doubt, as time went on. Hence, apparently, some of her anxiety about staying longer in the hospital: she was faced with the prospect that the hospital would become literally more and more a part of her; so that then, when she came to leave it (all along here assuming no further psychological maturation were to take place), she would be literally leaving behind a large part of herself. And, further} in returning to her home she would then have not simply to get adjusted to a new environment in our sense of the term, but would have to form a new self, as different from her seIf-in-Chestnut...Lodge as the environment of her home was different from her environment here in the hospital. This woman showed, incidentally, an inability to distinguish between herself and other persons, as well as this inability to distinguish between herself and her nonhuman environment. The former inability is always seen, in my experience, in patients who show this latter, much less well-recognized inability. This woman showed, for example, a conviction that her eldest son was within one of her own feet; she could feel, she said, the child's foot within her own foot, during a transient period when her feet and ankles were edematous. She had been on a disturbed ward of the hospital throughout these events described above; her anxiety was severe throughout this time, and her therapist was left in no doubt as to the validity of the experiences which she was manifesting. It was his own impression that she had been having these experiences for a

324

The Nonhuman Environment

relatively long time-these experiences of being raped by the hallucinatory father, and influenced by metal-and that she was able to verbalize these experiences only during these relatively brief periods in the therapy. It would seem that it is specifically sexual feelings, laden with aggression and anxiety) which are being projected in the form of, first, the hallucinatory father-rapist, and then in the form of the magnetically influencing metal. The fact that this symptom began upon the patient's becoming married) faced now with the sexual conflicts which marriage presented) provides a bit of further evidence for this formulation, The patient is still in therapy and the data from the therapy which I have presented are very recent; there is not yet enough evidence at hand to demonstrate conclusively what had set into operation this defensive process of her becoming subjectively at one with the nonhuman environment.

Transference Distortions, and Miscellaneous 0 ther Distortions, in the Individual's Conception oj His Environment

CHAPTER

12

The preceding two chapters have been devoted to the general subject of disturbances in the psychotic or neurotic individual's conception of his environment. In them I have dealt with two types of such disturbances or distortions: his reacting to other persons as being nonhuman, and his reacting to elements of the nonhuman environment as being human. In this present chapter I shall conclude the discussion of this general subject with brief descriptions of two remaining types of disturbance in the psychiatrically ill individual's conception of his environment: (1) transference distortions in his relatednessto the nonhuman environment) and (2) miscellaneoiu distortions, difficult to define briefly, in his relatedness to it.

The Nonhuman Environment

326

Transjerence Distortions For many years it has been recognized that a human being's relatedness to an element in the nonhuman environment can be distorted by his unconsciously carrying over past feelings and attitudes from some person to, now, the nonhuman creature, or thing, in his presence. Incidentally, the older writers seemed to assume that the transference is referable only to the father or mother. For example, Freud in 1917 wrote, . . . A child can see no difference between his own nature and that of animals; he is not astonished at animals thinking and talking in fairy-tales; he will transfer to a dog or II horse an emotion of [ear which refers to his human father [49; my italics].

And Brill in 1943 referred to the dog as "the highest type of a transference animal" (17) By this, Brill meant that the dog is, more frequently than any other animal, the target for man's transt

ference feelings.

Heiman sums up the long-established psychoanalytic conception of animal phobias, and of perversions with animals, in the following words: In the phobia, as well as in the perversion with animals, the animal is identified with either the mother or the father figure, or with aspects or attributes of these figures [73]. And Fenichel in 1945 pointed out that Nature may " . • represent another person, and feelings connected with it may have originated in feelings toward that person. A mountain, for example, may represent the father's penis, the endless ocean or desert may represent the mother's womb [40f].

This long-recognized variety of transference phenomena was strikingly manifested by a paranoid schizophrenic woman, thirtyone years of age, whom I saw in intensive psychotherapy for several years. Here, as so often happens, we find that a phenom-

Pj'YCh05is and Neurosis

327

enon which is experienced only unconsciously by the neurotic person is experienced consciously and quite literally by the schizophrenic person: this woman expressed the conviction that certain animals literally were certain persons she had known. I first became aware of this particular delusion of hers in a session immediately following one during which we had discussed horseback riding, an activity in which she had been keenly interested for many years. When I came into her room for this subsequent session she was evidently in a state of more than usually severe anxiety; she was looking very tense and threatened, and was complaining of numerous physical symptoms, as she usually did at times of increased anxiety. Very early in the session she loudly reprimanded me for not being "honest" with her in the last hour, when she had been talking about horseback riding. "They've known how to tum people into horses and animals for centuries," she asserted, implying that I knew this and had failed to tell her so during the previous session. She went on to express remorse about having done horseback riding, and indicated that she had vowed never to ride horseback again. She explained that she now realized that when she had been doing what she had thought, during her upbringing, to be horseback riding, the horse may actually have "been her grandfather: "just like that beagle running around the grounds may be Melvin Tompkins," she added by way of illustration. The beagle was one which was frequenting the hospital grounds currently; Melvin Tompkins was a fellow patient who had left the hospital some months before and whom-from various indications she gave, which I shall not go into here---she evidently unconsciously

missed. She had said these things in a tone which carried genuine conviction, and her underlying anxiety was unmistakably intense. In other words, I felt sure that she was not fooling, and I likewise felt sure that she was not fooling when, several months laterafter many verbalizations from her of this delusion in the interim ~the nurses' reports on two successive days contained the following items:

328

The Nonhuman Environment

Back in before dark. Watched TV.. Was very amusing with her wit. Would make funny remarks about everything on TV. For

example, this man was talking about his brother and was pointing toward a tree.. Mrs. Crowley [this patient] said laughingly, "Does he think that's his brother?" Asked if the bug on the porch was her brother--was convinced that it was.

Many times during my long experience with her I saw her manifesting various psychotic defenses against feelings of missing her brother, who had been very important to her during her upbringing. And her confusion, which she usually tried to conceal from others by expressing her confused thoughts in witty terms, was so profound that I personally have no doubt whatever that she was susceptible, many times, to thinking that a tree or a bug was, indeed, her unconsciously yearned-for brother.. So much for this phenomenon of transference of feelings from other persons to elements of the nonhuman environment. Now I come to a phenomenon which, although of probably at least equal importance, has not been reported previously in the literature, to the best of my knowledge: namely, the transference of feelings from an earlier nonhuman environment to a later nonhuman environment. My clinical experience, as well as my personal experience, suggests that to the extent to which an individual is unable to respond to other human beings in his adult life on their own terms, free from transference distortions in his re.. Iatedness to these other persons, he is to that extent unable also to respond to his current nonhuman environment in its own right. In this latter respect also, his past shrouds him from experiencing in valid terms the world in which he finds himself at present. I expect that some readers will object to this hypothesis with something like the following argument: "In one's childhood, such nonhuman environmental features as were deeply meaningful to one possessed this significance only by reason of a transference of one's feelings to them from significant persons (mother, father, and so on) in one's life. It is inaccurate, therefore, to speak of transference of feelings from an early-life nonhuman environment

Psychosis and Neurosis

329

to a later-life nonhuman environment" It is basically a matter, here too, of transference from early-life persons to the present nonhwnan environment." In answer} I can only reply that to me a beautiful work of art, for example-whose beauty I could not appreciate, to be sure) if my appreciation of the beauty of my mother, my father, my sister, and other persons in my childhood, had undergone a lasting repression early in my life-possesses beauty in its own right, and thereby possesses psychological significance in its own right. And by this same token do the hills and forests, the lakes and rivers, the village streets and the familiar buildings and the myriad other nonhuman inhabitants of my childhood possess psychological significance for me, a significance inextricably interwoven with my childhood interpersonal relationships, but a significance nonetheless real in itself. It would be absurd to deny that OUf childhood appreciation of the nonhuman things about us is rooted, in the final analysis, in interpersonal relationships including our relationship with our mother from whose body we emerged at birth. But on the other hand it would be equally absurd to consider that a lofty, luxuriantly foliaged tree is comprised only of roots.. It is as wrong, I think, to deny that the nonhuman environment possesses psychological significance for us in its own right as it is to deny that the tree} in the analogy) possesses foliage, branches, and

a trunk, I am engaging in this relatively lengthy digression because this matter lies at the very heart of what this whole book is about. This book is an endeavor, that is, to make the point that the nonhuman environment possesses great psychological significance in its own right. One sees relatively little clear-cut evidence for this point anywhere in this whole section dealing with psychosis and neurosis, for this reason: to the extent that one is psychiatrically ill, one cannot relate to the nonhuman environment in its own right. So we find, in all this section, little if any clinical data which portray what I think of as genuine reality relatedness to the nonhuman environment. It seems to me that the highest order of maturity is essential to the achievement of a reality relatedness with that which is most

330

The Nonhuman Environment

unlike oneself. That is, a developing child finds it easier to fonn a relatively close relationship with another child of his or her own sex than with a child of the opposite sex; very many persons who are chronologically adult have not in fact matured sufficiently to form a reality-based, close relationship with a person of the opposite sex. It is as though the differences-from-oneself comprised, or connoted, by the other's membership in a sex different from one's own, cannot be fully acknowledged without a loss of the sense of basic human kinship. And, similarly, for an adult to develop a close reality relatedness with a person whose age, or cultural background) or skin color is markedly different from his own-to develop a relatedness in which there is a full experiencing of both difference as well as kinship--requires a higher degree of matur.. ity than the development of a comparably close relatedness with a person who in this regard is a member of one's own group. Lastly, and most pertinent here, it calls for a still higher degree of maturity, I believe, to achieve a reality relatedness with something which differs even more vastly from oneself-something which is not human; one tends instead, as do the persons, patients and otherwise, from whom the clinical data of this section come, to deny its psychological significance altogether, or to personify it, or what not-anything to avoid the recognition of its possessing ex.. treme difference from, and yet in various respects basic kinship with, oneself. Now I shall mention some of the clinical and personal experiences which seem to me to be examples of this particular phenomenon at present under discussion: the transference of feelings from early-life nonhuman environment to adult-life nonhuman environment. A twenty-two-year-old woman had been working for several years as a nurses' aide in a children's hospital when she developed a schizophrenic illness, and now, in a state of very severe personality disorganization, she was in therapy with me. After many months of difficult work we had reached a point where we were now able to have-although still infrequently-meaningful verbal exchanges for as long as a few moments at a time. During one session, while sitting on her bed and leafing through a Life mag-

Psychosis and Neurosis

331

azine, she called my attention to one page of small pictures, each of which had a considerable area of white space around it. She asked, in a tone of anxiety which had a peculiar, weird quality in it, "Do those look pasted on, to you?" I replied, "No. They do to you, Susan?" She said, "Yes," in a worried, puzzled way. I commented, "I guess you've seen a lot of such pictures-pasted-on pictures-s-In your work in the children's hospital," She agreed. It is my distinct impression, supported by my long experience in the over-all work with her, that here was another instance of her doing something which I saw her doing on hundreds of other occasions: misperceiving her present environment as being the environment which had actually surrounded her at an earlier time in her life, in an unconscious effort to avoid the feelings of loss, of grief and separation anxiety, fostered by her being separated now, in actuality, from that earlier environment-separated by years of time and hundreds of miles of space.' For many months, during our work together} she gave innumerable evidences of believing that she was in her home city, living in the home which was familiar to her, or at the country club which she had frequented, and so on. I regard the above clinical incident as involving her transference of feelings about an early nonhuman environmental element ---pasted-on pictures which she had seen not only during her work in the children's hospital but also, probably, during her own days as a pupil in nursery school-onto the pictures in the Life magazine. Most of this woman's behavior traits, during that period of the therapy, were those of a child of certainly no more than nursery-school age. I have mentioned this same patient earlier (page 150): when I would go for walks on the hospital grounds with her, she let me know, with manifestations of great insecurity} that she perceived the buildings and landscape which we passed as constantly changing. I am inclined to think that here, too, transference phenomena were involved-that the land.. scape and the buildings kept assuming forms which she had known in the past. 11n thi. context lee Arlow's interpretation of ilji va phenomena .. a defense (48).

332

The Nonhuman Environment

A twenty-one-year-old woman had been hospitalized for most of the time since the age of fourteen) because of a hebephrenic illness, when the following incident occurred. Long years of difficult work on her part and mine had already taken place and she was just becoming able to start facing the grief and the nostalgia which had been buried within her for many years. One of the relevant circumstances, here, is that she had not visited her home city (Boston}, for which-as was now becoming increasingly evident---she possessed much positive feeling, for seven years. At this time she was still living in a locked building, where she had been living for a number of years; but she had recently begun to show some interest in moving to an unlocked building, called Little Lodge. Early in the particular session which I wish to describe, she spontaneously brought up the question of moving to the unlocked building, by saying, "I'd prefer to live at Little Lodge, except for eating," and went on to explain that she would have to walk over from Little Lodge (which has no dining room of its own) to the dining room (in the basement of the main building, on an upper floor of which she was presently living) three times a day. That, plus "coming to my hours" (in my office in the main building), would be "too much. I'd use up all my food energy-my food wouldn't do me any good, and I'd lose a lot of weight." She also phrased it that all this walking would "tire me out too much." "Of course." she ruminated aloud, "I could have my hours at Little Lodge." I said nothing as yet, but privately felt thoroughly accomodating about going to Little Lodge for the hours, as I had often done with other patients. A bit later she said, "If I had a car and a chauffeur I could have him drive me over [to the main building for her hours]. That would be all right." When she had made the first of the above comments, my initial reaction was to consider it amazing, preposterous, that she should regard SO short a walk (about 175 feet from Little Lodge to my office) as too much for her. But I held my tongue, thinking that for he" perhaps it was indeed a staggering job to do that amount of walking. 1 thought that it might be a matter of her feeling, while outside on the hospital grounds, so strongly tempted to ron

Psychosis and Neurons

333

away that it cost her a tremendous expenditure of energy to resist that temptation. One or two years previously she had revealed that she was feeling strong urges to run away.. But what she went on to say, as the hour progressed, was quite unexpected and very memorable. She began voicing memories of her walking in Boston, walking in various locales-the Common, Beacon Hill, and so on. I had heard very little from her before, in all our long work together, of memories of her life there. As she talked now, one sensed that these memories were viviclIy detailed. The most poignant moment of all came near the end of the hour when, after having talked for some time in the above vein, she laughed in an embarrassed way and said, "Oh I-I know what was so funny = I thought Boston was right around here! Isn't that funny?" The "right around here" had the connotation of "right outside the window" (i..e., on the hospital grounds). The emotional tone of her words, unconcealed by her embarrassed laughter, was one of tremendous nostalgia. I replied, deeply moved, "I guess you must miss Boston an awful lot, Doris," She expressed, then, a wholehearted verbal agreement which was, as yet, unusual for her: "Yeah," she agreed ruefully, "I guess I must miss Boston an awfullot.. u She had made clear, I felt} why a walk of negligible length (by ordinary standards) on the hospital grounds tired her 80 greatly: such. a walk tended to bring home to her these vivid memories, laden with nostalgia and grief, about Boston-memories which it required great energy for her to maintain under repression. Before turning to a few comments about transference distortions of the nonhuman environment as seen in neurotic persons, let me say one more 1VOrd about these distortions as manifested by psychotic patients; this will consist simply in a rephrasing of the point which 1 have been illustrating with the foregoing clinical examples. Misidentification of other persons, detennined often at least in part by the phenomenon of transference, has long been known to be a common symptom in psychosis. My experience indicates that misidentification of the nonhuman enuironmeiu,

334

The Nonhuman Environment

on the same psychodynamic basis, is an equally common symptom. Among neurotic patients, one evidence of the existence of the phenomenon of transference of feelings about an early nonhuman environment to a later one is the not-infrequent reporting of dreams in which, for example, a house changes from one's childhood home to the home one lives in now in adult life; one finds similar shifts as regards landscapes, and so on. As examples of neurotic transference phenomena of this va . . riety, I shall present briefly three personal experiences. The first of these occurred relatively late in my psychoanalysis, and the remaining two occurred after the analysis was over. Each of these experiences was associatively related, in my thoughts and feelings, to my very deep attachment to the Catskill village where I grew up and to the surrounding mountains and lakes where I spent countless hours in hiking and swimming. It was partially through these three experiences which I shall describe that I realized, in fact, how very deep and absorbing was this attachment. Over the preceding years I had already worked through a great deal of grief and other separation feelings in reference to the persons of my childhood-my parents, my sister, and so on. The first of these experiences took place while I was standing for a moment, alone, on a street comer in Washington-one where I had been many dozens of times before, since it was near a building where I had worked for years. I was feeling unhurried, un anxious, at peace. Suddenly, while I was looking up the street, I felt that I was really seeing it for the first time and, more than that, that I was for the first time experiencing the world about me (not simply the street itself) in immediate terms, I felt astonished, then, with the realization of how very deeply, and quite unwiltingl,,~ I had been immersed in my past, all along. I felt that heretofore, when I had been in this particular place, for example, I had not really been seeing these streets, but had been moving about as if the streets of my beloved home village were about me. Now, seeing these streets with new eyes, I found my surroundings to be wonderfully interesting and beautiful-beautiful not in any

Psychosis and Neurosis

335

especially artistic way, but beautiful simply because of their being so vividly, immediately real to me for the fimt time. The aspect of this experience which impressed itself particularly deeply upon me was the revelation of the extent to which my everyday experience, until then, had been drained, quite without my knowledge, of much of its potential immediacy and beauty and reality, through the working of this transference phenomenon, I had come to see, now, how much I had unconsciously been missing, all along, in my moment-to-moment experience.. The experience involved precisely the same feeling-the feeling of scales' having fallen from one's eyes-which I have had upon the sudden resolution of a transference feeling toward another person. A second experience of this sort occurred perhaps two years later, quite a number of months following the completion of my fonnal analysis. While driving alone, I was turning from the main highway into the housing development where I had been living, with my wife and children, for some years now. Suddenly the thought came to me, "What am I doing keTeJ~I belong back in Hancock." The housing development looked drab to me; I compared it, in my mind, to the natural beauty of the thinly populated area about my home village. This realization, unlike the one described above, was not an exhilarating one, not a pleasant one. But I immediately felt it to be a valuable discovery: it brought to me the sobering realization of how relatively little libido I was really investing into tlds housing development and into, by the same token, my whole adult life. I felt that I had been treating my adult life as if it were an unwanted child, rather than giving it the wholehearted love and interest which it wanted and needed. This momentary discovery, like the above-described first one, had lasting effects in terms of my coming to feel, in my day-to-day life, an increased sense of living satisfyingly in the present. Several months later, still another such discovery occurred, which showed me that there was a still deeper level of relinquishment of the past that I had yet accomplished, and, by the same token, a deeper experience of living in the present than I had

336

The Nonhuman Environment

been able to enjoy so far. I was working, with fellow members of our Parent-Teachers' Association, on the school grounds near my home, planting trees. The school is on a knoll and commands a view of the surrounding gently rolling Maryland countryside. Until now I had scarcely given these hills a second glance; if there were any aspect in which this geographical area were contemptibly inferior to that about my childhood home, I had felt, it was in regard to the relative size and beauty of their respective hills. One might say that the concept "hills" had been carrying, to me) only the connotation of a memoTy of the Catskills rather than any connotation of a perception in the present, of the Maryland hills. So, while working now on the school grounds, I neither glanced at the surrounding countryside, nor gave it a thought. Then, to my surprise, I heard a man saying, with the accent of one from the deep South, "This sure is pretty country." I looked up and saw a fellow worker standing and gazing appreciatively at the gently rolling hills which led away to the horizon. I experienced a momentarily scornful reaction, "That poor cluck hasn't ever seen really beautiful country"; then I began looking at this view myself with, for the first time, real interest and growing appreciation. Since then I have had other experiences of a similar sortexperiences of transference resolution and heightened appreciation of the nonhuman environment in which I have been living for several years. For instance, with each succeeding spring I find it more difficult to ignore the quite simple and quite unmistakable fact that spring in Maryland is much more full-blooming, opulent, and varied in its beauty than is spring in the Catskills. But it is unnecessary to detail such experiences any further. During the several months which have followed my writing the above personal reminiscences in a preliminary draft of this book, the conviction has grown upon me that what I had described, in each of these instances, was not really a transference process, but only a process of my preoccupation with beloved scenes and relationships in my past. It finally dawned on me, after a number of these months had transpired, that transference had indeed been

Psychosis and Neurosis

337

at work in each of these personal experiences, but that the above account had failed to point out where the transference actually

lay. I realized, now, in the face of considerable inner resistance, that this transference was of a negative sort, a combination of negative feeling-attitudes-clisinterest, disappointment, boredom, a sense of emptiness and drabness) and so on-which had been present in me all along with respect to those scenes of my childhood, scenes which I had preferred, as it were, to remember with affects solely of fondness, nostalgia, and grief. I now realized, with as I say appreciable reluctance, that my long-accustomed reaction to the streets of Washington as being relatively unalive and unbeautiful would, in fact, have been much more appropriate as a mem.. ory of the main street of my home village, during a certain, very prolonged, period of my growing up-namely, during the financial depression, when this street was, much of the time, almost as drab, deserted, and lifeless as that of a deserted village, and when all..e mbracing anxiety shrouded my father's store and our homean anxiety which I would like to delete from my memories of boyhood. And even the hills-an inner voice says, "No, no) not the hills!"-must at times have seemed flat and tame, in contrast to such mountains as the Rockies and the Alps, mountains which one saw in moving pictures; they must have seemed especially so to one bursting with the energy of youth, and with only an economically depressed small town in which to express

that energy. So here, then) lies the transference which my original account had failed to point out. And this revised view coincides with what we know, after all, of transference: transference consists, in essence, in the carrying over of preconscious or unconscious emotions, referable to persons and things in our past, into a conscious experiencing of persons and things in the present. It is not those feeling-components which in childhood were readily accessible to awareness which go into the formation of transference experiences in adult life.

338

The Nonhuman Environment

Miscellaneous Distortions There are various additional kinds of distortion in individuals' perceiving the nonhuman environment, kinds which are not adequately covered in the categorical descriptions of various specific types of distortions presented so far in this chapter and in the preceding two chapters, I do not know how to define these additional types of distortion; but they can be described, in toto, as resulting from the individual's relating to the nonhuman environment not as being what it really is, but rather as if it were a limitlessly plastic modeling clay which he unconsciously molds and remolds to serve the momentary needs of his intrapersonal and interpersonal existence. This description covers, as one can see, each of the so-far-described types of distorted relatedness to the nonhuman environment; but it covers, I think, more than those alone. I hope that the two clinical examples which I shall give, from my work with schizophrenic patients (and I do not mean to imply that these additional distortions are manifested only by psychotic patients), will suffice to bring out what I have in mind here. These examples will have to serve, that is, in lieu of a definition. The first patient, a thirty-seven-year-old woman with a deeply disorganizing schizophrenic illness, manifested, for many months after my beginning therapy with her, a grossly disturbed perception (as nearly as one could tell; one can never know with certainty what such a deeply schizophrenic person is perceiving) of her nonhuman environment. One of the most prominent respects in which she apparently misperceived her environment was her peopling it-the walls, floor, and ceiling of her room, her closets,the quiet landscape outside, and so on-with hallucinatory figures. During one session in the first few weeks of the therapy, for example, she looked apprehensively at the closed closet door of the room in which we were sitting and asked, "Dr. Searles, what do you see there?" I replied, "A closet door, with a knob and with panels," She said, anxiously, "I used to see a lot of figures coming through that door. They would come through the door and shock me." From

Psychosis and Neurosis

339

the many experiences I had with finding her describing anxietyladen present experiences as if they had taken place in the past, I have little doubt that at the moment when we were discussing this, she was perceiving this door as pouring forth many halluci-

natory figures. Similarly, on many subsequent occasions she was talking to hallucinatory figures whom she located, variously, as being "in the floor," "in the ceiling," "on the 000£/) and so on. On one occasion she said, "My father is down there," looking at the floor in such a way as to give me the peculiar conviction that she meant "down there in the floor" rather than in, more mundanely) a lower floor of the building. On another occasion she nodded toward the radiator and said in a tone of feeling reassured, protected, "That is Daddy's place," again saying this in such a fashion as to make me feel sure that she meant not on the radiator, but in the radiator itself. On one occasion, she revealed her conviction that there was some "she" high up in the wall, "reporting." During one period of my work with her, for several weeks she darted about, from one wall projection to another, seeking shelter from bullets which, she indicated, she was sure were being fired at her-fired from, among other places, the quiet landscape outside. As the months passed and her anxiety slowly lessened somewhat, it appeared that she no longer perceived her environment as being, unrelievedly, in such a chaotic disorder. Such perceptions became now, apparently, more and more sporadic andwhat I wish particularly to emphasize-increasingly relatable to events which were taking place in the therapeutic relationship. More and more clearly now, I could see that it was at times of heightened tension in her relationship with me that she behaved as though she perceived the walls or floor as moving unsteadily, or perceived the room to be crowded wth hallucinatory figures, or saw the actually quiet landscape outside the window as flowing rapidly past, such that she felt herself to be on a train. Now I had occasion to see, too, how almost incredibly greatly was her perception of the nonhuman environment distorted, at times, in the service of her communicating something to me. I

340

The Nonhuman Environment

shall give only one brief example of this, from many such experiences with her. During one particular session Miss Edwards, as I shall call her here, looked at me and addressed me as "Robert Edwards." This was a name I had not heard before. Hundreds of times before this, she had misidentified me as being a wide variety of other persons, and I had grown increasingly anxious, impatient, and disgusted with her so rarely perceiving me in my own identity. I retorted this time with impatience and scorn, "Well, since you call me Robert Edwards, who the hell is Robert Edwards?-is he your father's brother?" Thereupon she commanded, loudly, "Don't go any farther on that track!" looking back over her shoulder (we had been ap.. proximately facing one another) in an uneasy, upset, threatened fashion. What I wish to stress here is that she did this in such a fashion as to leave no doubt in my mind that she was literally hallucinating a train-a train, apparently) rushing at her from behind-and her words had been barked out as if she were giving a loud command to the train's engineer. I was astonished at what she had conveyed to me, here, and would not have believed this possible had I not seen) innumerable times) how extraordinarily indirect were most of her communications to me, and how in.. tensely constrained she was, for a long time) about expressing any direct criticism toward me. There were many occasions when, during the hours with me, she was unmistakably experiencing the landscape outside as being a chaotic welter of colliding automobiles, clanging trains, and crashing airplanes. It was a memorable time when, many months later on, as we were sitting in chairs placed close together and side by side) facing toward the windows on the other side of the room, I started to say something and she stopped me with a quiet

but finn command) "Be quiet and let's watch the scenery," whereupon we lapsed back into the quiet, relaxed feeling of to... gethemess which we had been enjoying. I felt here, for the first time in all my work with her, that now at last we were both seeing the same quiet scenery through the windows. The second patient, a thirty-one-year-old woman with para· noid schizophrenia whom I have already described briefly in

Psychosis and Neurosis

341

another regard (pages 314-316), showed innumerable distortions in her relatedness to her nonhuman environment. After eighteen months of work with me, she confided to me that even as a child, when she would become intolerably frustrated with people around her because they would never listen to her ideas, ~'I used to go off by myself and imagine a great deal. I'd imagine I was in the Himalayas. When I'd get uncomfortable I'd get a book and read, to relieve that feeling." I asked, "That is, you'd sometimes imagine so vividly that you weren't sure it wasn't real?" She nodded, "Sometimes I'd imagine so much that I was in a jungle and wild animals were eating me up, that I'd break out into a cold sweat." Many of her distorted perceptions and distorted interpretations of the nonhuman environment now, in adult life, had to do with her reacting to this environment as expressive of communications to her from more or less vaguely conceptualized other persons~ or groups of people (communications from the Baptist church, from her eldest brother) from various fellow patients, from myself, and so on). Contrariwise, she was tremendously concerned, in her necessary daily-life manipulations of the nonhuman environment, lest she unwittingly communicate, in the process of dealing with various mundane things, some unintended message to these per.. sons or groups of people, some message the meaning of which she herself did not know, but a message which would be clear to "them" and which would be acted upon by "them" with disastrous results to herself or to other persons. A few examples may suffice to show something of the welter of her distortions in this regard. She gave many indications, during her hours, that as she moved about through the nonhuman environment, those elements which fit in with her complex delusional system were highlighted in her perception of the world about her and were, of course, interpreted as having a special significance. In one hour, for instance, she informed me, "Whenever you see a red brick building, It's part of British investment. Whenever you see a Schlag or a Yale lock, it's part of the chain system." Contrariwise, those elements of the nonhuman environment which did not fit into her delusional system were, apparently, overlooked by her; upon innumerable

342

The Nonhuman Environment

occasions, during our work together) she showed massive blind spots in her perception of the world about her. During one session she described to me, in unusual detail, a shopping trip from which she had just returned. She had set out to purchase a tennis racket and some face powder, and her description of the shopping trip brought home to me how almost awesomely complicated a task this had been for her, by reason of her reacting to these elements of the nonhuman environment, for example, as being so saturated with obscure communicational potentialities. As she described it to me, the salesman in the sporting goods store had said, significantly, "You say you want a racketi" When I asked her, at this point, if his question had caused her to pretty much assume that he was referring to a "racket" in the sense of peoples' exploitation of other people, she agreed. She went on to describe the salesman's commenting, again with special significance to her, while she was looking at the decorative strings at the top and bottom of the heads of the rackets, "They don't make colored strings any more-they are all black.." Again I wondered to her, on the basis of my knowledge of her delusional system, whether she had taken his use of the word "strings" to refer to strings placed on people by other people; again, she agreed. But the really appalling thing, to me, was that she had felt it necessary to choose, among the many rackets which she inspected in the store, one which would be least apt to convey some special significance to the "runners of the radar," some significance which she did not intend to convey and which was obscure to her. Thus, she passed over rackets with signatures on the handles, rackets with decorative items on them. She finally selected one with a black sheath over the handle, and even after having made this purchase she decided to take the sheath off) lest it convey some unintended sign to the controlling powers. After some inquiry as to what she had in mind here, she revealed that she was afraid that these powers might draw the unintended inference that, for example) she wanted some one to be killed or that she wanted to be killed herself. She went on to describe her having

Psychosis and Neurosis

343

purchased, later during the shopping trip, a horseshoe-shaped box of face powder which she had wanted to have; she had felt uneasy in making this purchase, and still felt uneasy about it, for fear "they" would infer from her buying this article that she was volunteering to be run as a horse at Havre de Grace-s-which, she vigorously asserted to me now, she had no wish to do. During another session shortly after she had returned from a visit to Washington, she told me of having seen three mosques and a cathedral. She described the arrangement of these in some detail, saying with pointed emphasis that the cathedral had a road running all the way around it, and so on. She looked significantly at me as she described all this, as if assuming that I saw the same significance in it which she was finding there. She then asked, in a tone full of puzzled protest, ~'Why do they go to all that trouble to get an idea across, when they could do it so much more easily in wOYds."'-in actuality a description of her own way of communicating. She evidently assumed that "they" had gone to all the trouble of erecting these buildings, and arranging them in some special fashion) simply in order to get across to her~r perhaps to people in general; this was left unclear--some idea. What the idea was, I do not know; I got the impression that it was quite obscure in her own mind. The vague implication was that the idea had to do with the Mohanrmedans' being dominant over the Christians. As was usual with her, she left this largely unsaid-touched upon, as it were, mainly by significant looks and by special emphasis upon certain words. The material from this session formed only one among many examples, in my over-all work with this woman, of her perceiving the nonhuman environment at large as being there solely in the form of a communication from "them." I saw many instances in which this woman's geographic orien.. tation in her environment was grossly disturbed in the service of her unconsciously keeping various feelings out of her awareness. One such instance occurred in an hour which took place during a phase of de-repression of much nostalgia and grief. The subject of Philadelphia-her home city, which she had mentioned only

344

The Nonhuman Environment

about three times in almost two years of therapy thus far-came up, and she referred to it as though it were overseas. I asserted that it was only about 140 miles away) and that there was no ocean between it and us. But she said, with conviction, tel know it is on the other side of the ocean." Significantly, as she.was talk.. ing about this, she had to wipe tears from her eyes; her weeping had been a very recent development in the therapy. I then said, gently, eel don't doubt that an ocean of tears, so to speak, stands between you and your memories of Philadelphia." This she derided completely} as making no sense at all; with rare exceptions she was still, in the therapy, utterly resistant to my efforts to help her see these so-literal experiences of hers in metaphorical terms. But three months before, when she had spoken of the ocean, in another connection, as being a dangerous, threatening place, and I had then inquired, "I wonder what you think of in connection with the ocean?" she had stated immediately and vehemently, "A vale of tears !" I remarked earlier (page 316) upon this woman's experiences of being shifted about all over the world. In one hour, only two days following that in which she had spoken of Philadelphia's being overseas, she described a recent experience of having been "moved" (her usual term for this particular experiencej-e-described it now, for the first time, in such a way as to corroborate quite clearly my long-growing impression that her experiences of feeling moved geographically actually had to do with being moved emotionally, at an unconscious level. She told me, protestingly, referring to a male aide who was working on the ward, "Braddock moved me last night." She had seldom, if ever, before described this type of experience in such personal terms. I immediately felt that this 'meant she had been moved emotionally, and surmised that the unconscious affect had been one of sympathy. So I asked her whether this might be a way of saying that she had felt emotionally moved by him. She immediately and vigorously rejected this suggestion, and complained, significantly to me, that I was always trying to make out that she was affected "erotically." This latter comment was particularly revealing, for

Psychosis and Neurosis

345

it had not occurred to me that her initial statement, "Braddock moved me last night," might be a way of conveying the fact that she had felt sexually aroused, erotically moved, by him." Now, in summary, when one looks back upon the various kinds of distortions which have been described in this chapter and in the preceding six chapters (i.e., beginning with Chapter VI), one can see in how many different ways, and to what a tragically great degree, neurosis and psychosis can impoverish a human being's relatedness to his nonhuman environment. If I have belabored various points unduly much, I have done so with the thought in mind that this area, as with the whole general subject of this book, has been so largely neglected, to date, in psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature. It needs to be generally recognized that neurosis and psychosis exact a grievous toll not only with regard to the afflicted person's interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships, but also with regard to his relationship with his nonhuman environment. Just how important a part of psychologically healthy human living this environment can provide, when the human being is not largely cut off from it by all these pathological processes of projection and introjection, transference and so on, I attempted to illustrate in Part Two. I shall conclude this chapter with another lengthy quotation from Alberto Moravia's novel, Two Adolescents. Here the author is describing the final triumphant emergence of Luca from his illness-the same Luca who had had earlier feelings of being 'This material ties in with Tauakts (153) paper on the ,cinfluencing machine'· in schi20plueniaJ in which he gives examples of adult Ichizophrenic patients' attributing to a delusionaUy fantasied influencing machine) outside themselves. sexual impulses which are unacceptable to the ego. It is relevant. also) to the yormg child's experience of aUenation from his Own body by reason of unasaimilably in tense physical pain or erotic arousal; Elkisch and Mahler (33). for example. found that one reason for their leven-year-old patient·s identification with machines consisted in his having .dered recurrent and severe paint at the age of six monthsJ from an inguinal hernia, such that he evidently became aliedated from this body from which emanated pain that he was 10 helpless to controlJ and experienced his body .. being equivalent to a machine in the outside world. See also Edith JacoblOn's description of a patient with chronic pyelitis, who as a child would, in unci· pation of bladder inigations, scold and puniah her bladder by telling it to "stand in the comer," and recall the bladder after it stopped hurtins (84b).

346

The Nonhuman Environment

treated by his parents as an inanimate object, of being relegated by them to a world of hostile inanimate objects. Luca has been encouraged, now, to come out of his emotional isolation and to tum toward life. He has been helped in this by a kindly, loving nurse, and has just become aware of awakening sexual desire toward her. The progressive resolution of his interpersonal difficulties enables him not only to experience himself as a human being among human beings, but also to feel an additional, likewise wonderful, sense of significant and intimate relatedness to the homely, familiar, nonhuman things about him-the furniture of his room, and so on. Then in the following deeply meaningful and beautiful passage, we see evidence that Luca most fully experiences himself as a human being only after undergoing the "phylogenetic regression" which I have discussed; he experiences his aliveness first with the sensation that he is a proliferating tree, which goes on, then, to change into a man.

. . . he had a curious dream . . . in which he thought he was a tree. Shaped like a tree-black, leafless, rain-soaked, numb with cold-he was standing on the top of a bare, frost-bound hill, stretching out his arms which were branches and his open fingers which were twigs. An immense landscape extended all round, with hills and woods and rivers and fields, and the whole of this landscape was streaked with snow and darkened by winter mists. The sky, heavy with black" unmoving clouds, was mirrored in the flooded fields, and over all there was a profound silence, as of a dead, timeless world. But far away the sun was rising on the horizon. At first it was only a cold, red globe; then, as it rose gradually into the sky, putting the clouds to flight, it became more and more clear and radiant, and he could feel its heat even through the ice-cold bark. Beneath the rays of the sun a vast movement took place over the whole landscape, as though the woods, and every single tree in them, had shaken off their winter stillness, as though the rivers were swollen with flood-water, the fields fermenting with life, the hills softened and filled with nourishment, like a woman's breasts. AU of a sudden a harsh sound- exultant, prolonged, amorous, like the call of a hunting horn- filled the air, breaking that cold silence. And to him it seemed that, starting from his roots deep-sunk in the earth, a wave of joyous hunger

Psychosis and N eurosls

347

spread upward through his trunk; and this, overflowing the casing of bark, burst out through his branches in a thousand green and shining buds. These buds, in their tum, swiftly opened, became leaves) tendrils, boughs. And he felt himself growing) multiplying) pullulating endlessly, in an irresistible, fabulous rush of abundance, in every direction and from every part. All at once he was no longer a tree, but a man, standing upright with his arms raised toward the sun. And, with this sensation of rush and thrusting in

his limbs, he awoke [106b].

Detailed Data from the Patient- Therapist Relationship

CHAPTER

13

It is the patient-therapist relationship which is, naturally, of greatest interest to me and, in the belief that this relationship may be of especial interest to many of the readers of this book, I shall present, in this chapter which concludes Part Three, a more detailed sample of the rich data which this relationship provides with regard to the whole subject of the nonhuman environment in man's psychological life. These data will concern but a few of the various facets of the subject which have already been discussed in a less detailed way; as I say, my effort here is to give but a sample of the wealth of clinical material which is to be found in the patient-therapist relationship. The data will be presented under three headings: (a) the therapist's relating to the patient as being nonhuman; (b) the patient's relating to the therapist as being nonhuman; and (c) the therapist's anxiety in

Psychosis and Neurosis

349

this regard (that is, his feeling his own sense of humanness to be threatened) in either of the two foregoing types of situation) .

The Therapist's Relating to the Patient As Being Nonhuman The therapist may find himself doing this---reacting to the patient as though the latter were, for example, a mindless robot or a strange, frightening animal-for reasons of his own, so to speak; relating to another person in such a fashion may be among his own characteristic defenses against intense anxiety. But certainly a powerful factor which inclines any therapist toward functioning in this manner, unbeknownst to himself, is the patient's transference. That is, such patients as those I have described are so uncertain of their own humanness, so deeply convinced that they are something other than human, that they persistently behave so in the relationship with the therapist. It is, then, almost inevitable that the therapist will find himself, at times, experiencing them accordingly.. I have examples of this from my own experience with only two patients; it is probably difficult for any therapist to collect many examples of his own behaving toward his patients in such a fash.. ion. Such views of one's own therapeutic behavior do not fit very well with any pictures one may like to maintain about oneself as an ideal therapist. 1. One of these two patients I was aware of treating, on a numher of occasions, as if she were an unruly animal, rather than a person with a mind of her own" For example, on one occasion, after she had darted from the room several times, I became furious at her, dragged her into the room and slammed the door and told her, "For Christ's sake, stop running out l" On another occasion, when I was out walking on the hospital grounds with her, and she kept rapidly walking off on various tangents) despite my asking her to stay nearby, I finally became, again, thoroughly angry and disgusted with her and told her flatly, "Look here, Pauline-God damn it, if you're going to go on walks with me, you've got to mind better!" very much as if I were talking to a dog. About such incidents I must say that, although one tends to feel a bit apologetic about them, I think they actually had much

350

The Nonhuman Environment

therapeutic usefulness at the time. This patient showed, for years, a tremendous need for guidance, a great inability to assume responsibility for her own life; this was shown by her chronically hallucinating various persons in the floor, in the ceiling, and about the room who were giving orders to her, and was shown also by her behaving-not only toward myself but toward the other personnel members-in such an uncoordinated, unruly, helpless way as to ensure her being given a great deal of guidance. 2. With the other patient, also a schizophrenic woman, an incident occurred which suddenly brought home to me the great degree to which I had come to fit into her father transference to me. Her father had treated her, throughout her upbringing, pretty much as being a mindless puppet) and this incident made me realize that I had been doing likewise toward her for months: We were returning from my office in an outlying building to the main building where she was housed. We came to a small mud puddle. I stepped around it; but she stopped at its edge, and

stood still, I said, impatiently and in a flat tone as if talking to something without a human brain, "Walk around it, Florence." She did so, dutifully; but when I had heard myself saying this-ewhen I heard the scorn, the utter lack of respect for her, in my tone-I realized that I had come to feel toward her} and to treat her, in a way which coincided precisely with the way her father used to say to her (as she had once told me), "Come along, Florence," as if he were talking to a dog. This second patient, like the fonner one, showed many indications of feeling a need for some one or something else to assume complete responsibility for her existence. For about two years she evidenced a delusion that there was a "Watcher-Ma· chine" which incessantly supervised her behavior, and she made quite clear to me that she felt this machine to be a lifesaving protection to her, rather than a form of unwanted constraint. For more than four years she maintained an intense fixation upon an internist on the hospital staff, and openly regarded him as an omniscient, omnipotent, protecting father. Nonetheless, I hold no brief that my way of addressing her at the mud puddle was of therapeutic value. It was in exactly the same manner as that in

Psycho~

and }{eufons

351

which she was very often addressed, throughout the day, by many other patients and personnel members, including the particular nurse who wast for a long time, in charge of the patient's ward: a destructively scornful, dehumanizing manner. Five years later I was very much interested to hear, in April, 1955, a talk at Chestnut Lodge by Dr. Erving Goffman, a sociologist at the National Institute of Mental Health, in which he described some patients' being treated, by the staffs of psychiatric hospital wards, as "non.. persons," His sociological data in this regard corroborated the impressions I had gained from my own experience, particularly with this second patient, and from my informal observations of the manner in which certain other patients have been treated on the closed wards of Chestnut Lodge, from time to time. This kind of thing we attempt to keep to a minimum; but it is not an easy task.

The Patient's Relating to the Therapist As Being Nonhuman Here) for, I think, obvious reasons, it is easier for me to supply clinical examples. 1. To make the central point of this first example, I must lead up to it by presenting some pertinent background data. I worked for some years with a deeply disorganized schizophrenic woman, in her late thirties, who throughout her upbringing had been extraordinarily closely attached to her father. He was her idol throughout her childhood, her adolescence, and her young womanhood until the psychotic illness overwhehned her- at the age of twenty-nine. She and he went hiking together, played golf and tennis together, went swimming and horseback riding together. She repeatedly and openly compared her boy friends unfavorably with her father, to his undisguised pride. He expressed to her, not tong before the onset of her illness, the hope that she would never marry. For many months after my beginning psychotherapy with her, her transference followed a pattern, predominantly referable to her relationship with her father, of her simultaneously inviting and beseeching me to be everything to her-to meet her every need and to guide her every move-and, on the other hand, try..

352

T he Nonhuman Environment

ing desperately to defend herself against what she evidently felt to be the life-endangering, incorporative nature of such a relationship. By her manifest helplessness to think clearly or to express herself verbally in any but a highly fragmentary way, and by her persistent efforts to injure herself, she placed great pressure upon me to step in and complete sentences for her, and to guard her against various self-injurious acts. But by various other aspects of her behavior-peopling the room with, usually, a whole crowd of hallucinatory figures; and verbalized comments indicating that I was invading her privacy, that she resented my intruding presence-s-she showed her anxiety and antagonism toward any close relationship with me. Her reacting to me as being nonhuman occurred at a time when I probably had moved in. too close to her, figuratively speaking, as in the opinions of my colleagues I tended to do. She said apprehensively, in clear reference to me, "There's a weird doctor around here that doesn't make sense to me. He's metal~ he's [looking about uneasily at the walls of the room] everything." I asked, "Wooden?" thinking of the wood on the walls. She nodded agreement and added, "He's everywhere." I asked, "He's all 800 guys?" in reference to her having indicated earlier in the hour that she felt there were "800 guys" present. Again she nodded. When she still volunteered nothing further, I asked, "He doesn't give you much room, eh?" Once again, she agreed con.. vincingly. As this woman's ego developed and her ability to express her feelings improved and I gave her increasing room to do so, she was able to make a number of significant communications to me in a series of hours nine months after the above incident. In one hour- she warned me, "If we got together, we might kill one another," In another session she made clear beyond doubt that she was experiencing in relation to me the repressed feelings of being constricted, hemmed in, which had been developed throughout the yean of her ostensibly idolizing her father, who had actually placed tremendous, enslaving, almost incessant dependency demands upon her. For a full half hour she was pacing

Psycho~

and lVeU10JU

353

frantically about the room, at random, stamping her foot, weeping intermittently, and rapidly hurling phrases at me in a tone of intolerable frustration. All but a few of the things she said were incoherent and fragmentary; it seemed that she could seldom find words to express her outpouring of feeling. But she made clear to me that what she was telling me was to get off her neck, to get out of her hair, to give her room to breathe.. Out of the bulk of unrecallably fragmentary phrases that tumbled forth, there emerged the following complete statements: All I see is General Motors and National Carbide [businesses with which her father was connected]! Don't you think I can see? •.. If I could just get to Hawaii for a few minutes! (She had told me in a previous hour that her father had refused to allow her to visit Hawaii] ... Don't you think I know any people besides 'YOu? •.• 1 don't know what you want [when I asked, she confirmed my impression that this meant that she felt I looked to her to make my own desires known to me; she agreed further that she felt helpless to do this; that was about all the commenting which I was able to do) since the pressure of words from her was so great] . Let's call it quits . . . What do you think IJm trying to do? . In an hour a week later, after she had made a few fragmentary

remarks and had appeared helpless to complete them, I said something in an effort to round out what she had started to say, to help her along with it. She thereupon expressed the same sort of intense exasperation with me, but this time more simply and directly: "I feel hemmed in, constantly! . . . I can't stand having words taken out of my mouth!" The incident which I wish to highlight here, however, is that of nine months before, which I have described. At that earlier time, her ego had been, evidently, too weak to enable her to objectify me as an individual who was taking words out of her mouth, not giving her room enough in the relationship to regain her own communicative abilities. Instead, then, she had felt, evidently, so completely hemmed in by my constricting personality that she had experienced the totality of her environment, includ-

354

The Nonhuman Environment

ing what we would think of as the nonhuman environment (the waUs of her room) and so forth) , as expressive of my all..pervasive personality. The factor which I find difficult or impossible to convey in words, in reporting this, is the eerie sensation I felt upon her saying, "There's a weird doctor around here that doesn't make sense to me-s-he's metal, he's [looking about at the walls] everything." It is this kind of emotional response within oneself which convinces one, more than mere words can do, that the patient is making no mere figurative communication, but reporting a literal experience-of, in this case, reacting to the therapist as being the walls) and so forth, of the room. In 1951 I reported a number of clinical examples of incorporative processes within the transference-countertransference relationship (132). But at that time I had never received so clear a communication from a patient in so profoundly regressed an ego state as this woman seems to have been. I think this incident illuminates something of how a child, for example, involved in a relationship with an "overprotective" parent, may experience his entire environmental world as being an expression of the parent's personality. Much has already been said in the literature of how grievously this interferes with the child's developing relationship with other persons. But in my opinion, another great personality-warping aspect of such a relationship lies in the child's consequent lack of opportunity to relate himself to his nonhuman environment. Scott, in a stimulating paper entitled "Narcissism, the Body) the Body Image and the Body Scheme" (131), included several examples of dreams, from neurotic individuals) which showed what he termed "symbols of identification with the world or cosmos, and symbols of infinity," and he commented that "In analyzing the transference aspects of such dreams we may see how the analyst .represents a great deal-not just a person or a part of a person but often the whole world-whether good or bad." 2. A thirty-seven...year-old schizophrenic woman frequently treated me, during her psychotherapeutic sessions for many months, in a scornful fashion which seemingly had, as at least one of its unconscious motives, the concealment of her depend-

Psychosis and Neurosis

355

ency feelings toward me. This at times involved her behaving toward me as if I were a dog. For example, when at least once during each hour she would leave my office to make a trip to the bathroom (at a period during her hospital stay when she represented an escape risk), she would behave in such a fashion that I was put very much into the position of a sheep dog, herding a stray sheep between the bathroom and my office. This analogy struck not only me but various of my colleagues who observed us in transit. Another example occurred during an hour when she was lying on the couch, and asked me courteously, "May I have some Kleenex, please?" Usually there is Kleenex near the couch in my office; in this instance there was none. So I went across the hall to another office, obtained some, and brought it to her. She used it to wipe her axillae slowly, while gazing at the ceiling, and then held the Kleenex out to the side toward me, where I was sitting in my chair, and meanwhile she said, "Here -kk-kk-kk!H as one would call to a dog which one wanted to come to one, without even looking toward me-just continuing to gaze at the ceiling. I said, half in amusement and half in irritation, something to the effect that I wouldn't take it, that I wasn't a dog; I felt this to be typical of the scorn she had shown toward me for many months. She then dropped the Kleenex upon the floor in a grande-dame manner, and never picked it up thereafter. But then something happened which, I felt, revealed the infantile dependency which lay behind her overtly treating me, scornfully, like a dog. After I had given her, at her successive requests, several cigarettes and the ash tray, she started holding the ash tray up under her chin and under the cigarette in her mouth, in a way which reminded me of a baby whose mother is holding a plate under his chin while feeding him, so that the food will not spill. I got the distinct feeling that this was a way of her asking me to hold the ash tray there for her, which I did not do. I realize that her holding it in that manner may also have represented an unconscious protest to me that I had been

356

The Nonhuman Environment

treating her like a baby. There was much evidence for such an interpretation of the incident. But there was also abundant evidence for the formulation that her treating me like a dog was an unconscious defense against her repressed dependency feelings toward me. I regarded similarly her frequent addressing of me, for many months, as if I were an inanimate object, requesting or demanding things from me-to close the window, to turn off the air conditioner, to hand her the ash tray, and so on-in the infuriatingly fiat, utterly impersonal tone with which some persons address a servant, as if the servant were a sub.. human automaton rather than a fellow human being. She frequently addressed other members of the personnel in such a tone; she addressed her mother over the telephone in this same tone; and she herself was subjected, in the hospital, to being addressed in very much that tone by various members of the ward personnel, frequently, for long periods when her behavior was being chronically grotesque and unmanageable. It is, of course, difficult if not impossible to demonstrate here, beyond doubt, that the patient not only treated me (and others) as if I were a dog, but literally experienced me as being equivalent to a dog. I am convinced that this latter was the case; but the most significant evidence for this lay, in this instance as in others, in the feeling-tone of her communications, a feelingtone which cannot be reproduced adequately here, in writing. I can only say that when, for example, much later on in the therapy when the transference origins of her behavior began to be more clearly revealed, in describing her mother's behavior in various situations she expressed it that "She looked like something mechanical and animal," saying this in a tone which conveyed a quite literal} rather than merely a figurative, impact -strongly indicating that, in these certain situations which she was now describing, she had literally experienced the mother as being something other than human. 3. A paranoid schizophrenic woman, twenty-five years of age -the individual who was described as showing extraordinarily intense scorn toward other persons (pages 206-209)-behaved in many of her therapeutic sessions with me as though she were

Psychosis and Neurosis

357

dealing with a subhuman entity. Toward therapy with me she maintained a tremendous resistance which diminished only slightly and sporadically in the course of the fifteen months of my work with her. She had had four years of work with two previous therapists and had presented throughout that time, as she did with me, a massive denial of her need for treatment. Behind this denial were} of course, intense dependency needs, and it appeared that her reacting to me and to other persons as being, in effect, subhuman, represented, more than anything else, an unconscious defense against these dependency needs. Her "dehumanizing" (my term) of other persons appeared at various times, too, as a defense against anxiety, grief, humiliation, and various other emotions. The few comments of hers which I shall quote, from among her innumerable "dehumanizing" communications, convey no more than a hint of her very real capacity to make me feel (closeted with her as I was throughout one hour after another of tremendous resistance, for many months) myself to be, in actuality, something distinctly less than human. These verbalizations from her, quoted below, do not represent the highest in... tensity of her treating me as nonhuman. Rather they represent moments at which her doing this was at a lower ebb than usual, moments of relative liveliness between us. The more usual, and for me more burdensome, "interaction" was our sitting, silently and woodenly, at opposite comers of my small office, being} in the phrase of a previously mentioned patient, "like furniture." Each of us was nearly Immobile most of the time during the hours, for perhaps a year, and (following the rapid subsidence of the acute phase of her psychosis, within a few weeks after her hospitalization) she spoke seldom, while I felt unable to talk but little, myself} feeling hemmed in by her flat rejection of practically anything I attempted to get across to her. This was early in my experience with psychotic patients; but I am sure that such an intense and almost unwavering scorn as she directed toward me would be a formidable problem for any therapist. In the twenty-fifth hour, during the acute phase, still, of her

358

The Nonhuman Environment

psychosis, after we had sat down in my office, neither of us said anything for several seconds. She then demanded, curtly, "Tell me, are you in good faith about my being here?" I asked, "You mean, do I want you to be able to get out of here?" "Yes," she said. I replied, "Yes, I do; but it isn't feasible right away." She stated, flatly, "That's absurd, of course. This is very obnoxious. It's a dull place. Everybody is dun here. Y ou're dull," she added, looking straight into my eyes, as she did much of the time. "Those glasses you have on-you ought to get new ones. Dr. Prescott [one of the previous therapists] wore glasses, too," she said in a bored, impatient tone. Later in the hour she commented, "Maybe even you can understand that for me, as Queen Marie of Romania, it's very boring to sit and listen to you talk about the childhood of SybyUe Marsh [her name]. . . . I feel all right. I felt all right when I came here. I felt all right when I was here before." During an hour two weeks later while she was showing, as usual, a great deal of scorn toward and impatience with me, she said at one point, with a sneer, "You look monotonous," staring at me fixedly. In the third month of our work together, she referred to her administrative psychiatrist as "that young fool, Sawyer," and went on in a furious, extremely sarcastic tone, "It would be very condescending of me to ask him for privileges of any sort. It is infuriating to me that I don't have them in the first place.') Later in this hour, after I had brought up some suggestion which I had made on several previous occasions, she observed, as a reply, "You've brought that up several times, haven't you? I can see you're quite interested in it," in a tone of haughty, detached curiosity, as though she had just discovered some infinitely petty interest of an earthworm. In another hour, during the eleventh month of our work (and I use the term "work" advisedly), while the liveliness of our interaction was, overtly at least, approximately equivalent to that which two statues in a room might have, I asked whether she had had some anticipation as to how I might respond to something she had brought up, a few moments before, and

Psychosis and Neurosis

359

concerning which we had exchanged a few words. She replied, flatly, "I don't care anything about the way you respond. I care about how I respond.. Y 01'1 feelings don't mean anything more to me than if you were one of the lines on that wallpaper there." 4. A thirty-six-year-old woman with borderline schizophrenia of a catatonic type showed, during many of her hours with me, a prominent transference to me from a horse which had been her closest friend for many years during her upbringing. In fact, it was in the fonn of such a transference that her fond feelings toward me began emerging, after more than two years of intensive psychotherapy. Once, for example, after some comment from me, she expressed a mixture of annoyance and of sheepishness, confiding that she felt I had no right to my own opinions. When I encouraged her freely associating to this, she thought immediately of her horse, and made clear that she had a feeling that I should be to her as her horse had been, over the years. Similarly, one of her fondest communications to me carne when, late in the therapy, she confided, "Lots of times I used to wish you were a big old horse. . . ," and then stopped, shyly. I encouraged her to continue. She said, ". . . because then I could pat you on the neck and give you a lump of sugar," smiling shyly and very fondly. 5. I worked for some years with a schizophrenic man who, forty years old at the time of my undertaking therapy with him, had been hospitalized continually for ten years, and had already had more than three years of intensive psychotherapy. This is the same man who was described, in another connection, on

pages 300 and 317. The first year and a half of our work took place in a multiple-therapy setting; another therapist and I were working with both this man and another schizophrenic male patient present. Thereafter, I continued seeing him on an individual basis. Throughout the eighteen months of multiple therapy, and for almost one year of my individual therapy with him, his ego development appeared to be profoundly rudimentary-unusually so even when compared with that of other schizophrenic patients. It was almost two and a half years after my first experience with

360

The Nonhuman Environment

him that he began referring to himself as having any self, any existence as an individual who possessed an ego of his own. Previously, he had shown a consistent denial that any of the thoughts or feelings which he expressed-and these were very few, indeed-came from him, or had any reference to him. That is, he would occasionally verbalize what were, in essence, reminiscences about his own life, for example. but never couched in such terms; he spoke always as though someone might go to this or that place and might do such and such, but would quickly disclaim any idea, suggested by the other therapist or by myself, that he had been to these places or done these things, or that he might have any wishes in such directions. He projected, massively, practically all psychological ex.. periences which transpired within him-projected them in the form of auditory and visual hallucinations, and projected them, often, upon other· persons, including myself in the individual therapeutic sessions. The greater part of each session he spent, however, in silent apathy; with him I spent a longer time-approximately two years-of almost totally silent sessions than I have ever spent with any other patient. I learned, in the course of many arduous months, that placing any sort of pressure upon him, beyond the inescapable demand presented by my physical presence in the room with him, only made things more difficult for him. I realized, eventually, that the only manner in which I could participate usefully with him was by serving, for several months, as in effect an inanimate object-silent and rarely in motionupon which he could project his own thoughts and feelings without interference. As I became more and more able to accept. at a feeling level, this status vis-a-vis him, he throve-despite the fact that practically nothing was said by either of us throughout the hours. There were a number of memorable evidences that, just as he was for a long time unaware of the ego boundaries delineating himself from other persons, he was unaware, too, of any boundaries between himself and his nonhuman environment, and unaware of the fact that other persons about him were

Psychosis and Neurosis

361

distinct, in their humanness, from the inanimate objects about him. During the period of multiple therapy, in one session he gazed at the other therapist and myself and began talking, "They take the upper halves of the bodies of two men and attach them to the lower halves of the bodies of two women . . .," convincing both the other therapist and myself, independently, that this was how he was perceiving us-not really as human beings but as the strange kind of, as it were, manufactured combinations which he had described. This fit in with his own manner of walking, which was a grotesque, disharmonious combination of exaggeratedly feminine hip-swinging and mincing gait, plus a carriage of his arms, chest, and shoulders which caused one of my colleagues, seeing him for the first time emerging from my office, to take me aside and ask in astonishment, "What was that?" I replied, in some amusement, "What did it look like?" He replied, "It looked like somebody trying to walk like a gorilla." During another hour in the multiple-therapy phase of his treatment, when his fellow patient was convulsed and literally howling in grief, tears streaming down his face, a profoundly tragic figure, this man sat looking at him, burst into delighted giggling and cackled, "They got it goin' good, ain't they?" I could hardly believe my ears; it was unmistakably clear that he was perceiving this fellow patient as some kind of nickelodeon, or animated contraption, or some similar entertainment device being run for his own amusement. After I had started seeing him on an individual basis, for many months he spent the so-nearly-silent hours either in sitting apathetically in his chair, belching or passing flatus sporadically; or in leaning toward me and fascinatedly watching my face, as if he were viewing something in the nature of a motion picture, giving occasional grunts which were expressive, variously, of interest, delight, astonishment, awe, shocked discovery, and so on. When I would, at infrequent intervals, start to say something in inquiry of what he was experiencing, he would snap at me, "Don't be so self-conscious!" or, at times, would say in a reassuring tone, "Don't be self-conscious, Dearie."

362

The Nonhuman Environment

On one such occasion, as he was gazing at me in this fashion, he broke into a description of a dilapidated Cape Cod house, with the roof sunken in (it is more than possible that I was sitting in a slumped posture in the chair)--old, worn out, abandoned, useless. I realized, in amazement, that this was how he was perceiving me. And, although I am quite aware that the reader ~ay scoff at me, here, as having a feverishly wild imagination, I do not mean that he so regarded me figuratively, but literally. It seems that he was projecting upon me a conception of himself, a conception which we might think of as being a figurative one (a view of himself as being like an old, abandoned, useless house). but which in his own unconscious was, evidently) literal and concrete: he was manifesting an unconscious attitude toward himself as being, literally, a dilapidated old house. Such a formulation is substantiated by, for instance, the following incident which occurred between himself and an aide. He had begun to say something to the aide) and had suddenly stopped in mid-sentence (as he often did during his hours with me). The aide urged him to continue. He replied, "That's all that comes out, Georgie,'> as if his voice were something which he experienced as being apart from himself, and uncontrollable by himself, coming not from within his body but from an inanimate instrument or something of that sort. The following brief nurse's report, of which I have italicized a portion, suggests the same kind of feeling of alienation, in the patient, with regard to his own body: When invited to O.T. activity, said it was "too much trouble to drag this old thing (indicating himself) ouer there." Then cursed about so much "hot air" around here and to just get the hell out and leave him alone. The state of this man's ego was evidently, for years, comparable with that reported by Savage as being transitorily present in subjects with LSD~25 psychosis. The following passages from Savage's previously mentioned published article ( 126) are strongly reminiscent to me of manifestations which I have

PS'jchosis and Neurosis

363

observed in this patient, and in a number of other schizophrenic patients whose illnesses were of a somewhat comparable depth: .. " many changes can be observed in the body ego feeling...... The body outline seems lost and it appears confluent with the bed, like a sheet lying on the bed..•.

With the changes in body ego feeling are associated changes in the ego boundaries of the body. Ego feeling is withdrawn from them, and they become weakened, fluid and variable. It becomes increasingly difficult to tell where the body leaves off and the rest of the world begins. Initially" the change is in the direction of enlargement of the ego boundary so that anything that happens within the room is felt within the body. The motions of others are felt within oneself. The individual looks out the window at the cars passing by and feels the cars running over him. He hears noises in the next room and feels that he is making them. When he lies in bed, the bed feels like part of his body, and when he gets up, he feels as though the bed were still a part of him. . . . Gradually, the ego boundaries are constricted. The clothes, the shadow, the mirror reflection, the skin and finally the extremities are shed chrysalis-like and are no longer felt as belonging to the body. The body ego feeling for them has been lost... " In time the body is totally estranged. The individual feels that his body is not his, that it functions automatically, that he has nothing to do with its activity. He watches the movement of. his hands and does not feel that he has initiated it..... He feels that the saliva in his mouth is not his, that someone is pumping it in from the outside....

In one subject the depersonalization proceeded to a degree where his body was projected as an influencing machine which made him see pictures (hallucinations) and controlled his thoughts, feelings and actions. He complained of "an indwelling television set," that the LSD had transformed him into a television set and that someone else was controlling him by sending out impulses which caused him to see pictures and induced sensations in

364

The Nonhuman Environment

his face and lips, which were misinterpreted as the fade out and ripples on a television screen.•. " His concept of spatial relations is impaired. He loses the ability to integrate objects in space. The stability of the outer world is lost. Comers lose their rectangularity; solid objects move; lines and planes bend. "The walls flap in the breeze like tapestriesthey run like melted wax." "The floor flows like a river." ....1

Eventually the individual withdraws ego feeling from not only the extemal world (objects) and from his body, but also from his thoughts, ideas and feelings. He no longer has any identification with his own feelings.. He laughs; yet, he feels no mirth. He weeps, yet he feels no sadness. It is as though he were standing by watching the emotions of another person ..... [126c].

Savage's two papers (126~ 127) provide good examples of a phenomenon which I have repeatedly emphasized here: the schizophrenic individual's experiencing, as a concrete perception} that which to us would be a figurative psychological concept. In the paper from which I have just been quoting, Savage reports that Thoughts can be shown to be directly translated into symbols which are seen as visual hallucinations. One subject was asked, I'What does a 'warning' bring to mind?" He saw "an owl chasing people down a street." . . . Insanity suggested "a wall and a drawbridge being slammed shut" [126d].

And in the previously mentioned unpublished paper (127) Savage describes, among various other examples, a subject's perceiving another person as being literally colored yellow-a 1 Wemer~ in reviewing some of the literature concerning experimental in· toxication with hashish and mescaline, presents similar material" and he coaeludes that in such a ,tate, 'JEgo and world. " . conatitute a diffule togethernell. The objectivity of the world, the resistance offered by the thing-like, become. relaxed and vanishes. 'Objects give the impression that they are made of robber; the walls, too, are loft~ and rigid objects have a waxen malleability! And it may happen that the person·, own body cfloods over without limit into the aurroundinga'·' (162z).

Psychosis and Neurosis

365

person whom the subject, when not under the influence of the LSD, considered to be figuratively "yellow"--eowardly. I regard Savage's data as providing us with richly detailed views of the kind of experience which, I feel sure, is endured for years by many deeply schizophrenic patients----experience which they, unlike the subjects with LSD-induced psychosis, can only relatively rarely communicate to us. When one compares his data with those from anyone of the schizophrenic patients whom I have been describing, one is impressed with the close similarity. Savage formulates his clinical findings, concerning LSD psychosis, in terms of Federn's theories of ego psychology (39), and I should like to add that I myself have found these theories to be extremely meaningful and clarifying in the interpretation of clinical material which I have obtained with regard to the status of the ego in deeply regressed schizophrenic patients.

The Therapist's Anxiety in This Regard Now I shall present some clinical examples of a therapist's experiencing anxiety upon finding either that he is dealing with the patient as if the latter were nonhuman, or that the patient is dealing with him as if he, the therapist, were nonhuman, or upon finding that both are doing so, mutually, to one another. When the therapist experiences such anxiety, he may well be sampling at first hand the kind of anxiety which assails the child who, in later years} develops schizophrenia-anxiety which assails the child in the course of interpersonal events, presumably comparable with those to be presented below, which interfere with his developing a durable conception of himself as being human. 1. The first example is from my work with a schizophrenic woman whom I have already mentioned: the person who referred to her head as if it were an inanimate object, saying that the whole left side of it "is gone .•• caved in," and on another occasion demanding of a nurse, "Why did you take that piece out of my head?" This woman, for many months after my beginning psychotherapy with her, often glanced at me with an expression on

366

The Nonhuman Environment

her face of mingled fear, shock, and awe, as if I were a weird monster at which she scarcely dared to gaze for an instant. My discomfort at being so regarded amounted. at times, to a fonnidable level of anxiety. This anxiety was heightened by the circumstance that I felt toward her, much of the time during that period of the therapy, an intensity of hatred and loathing which, my superego repeatedly admonished me, no human being should feel toward another person-and which a physician, in particular, should never experience toward his patient. I shall not go into the reasons for my feeling so negatively toward her at that time. My point here is that my conception of myself as a human being was under assault from two directions: the patient was reacting to me as being a kind of monster, and my superego was condemning me as being monstrous, inhuman, in terms of the way I was feeling toward this woman. The fact that her own appearance and behavior, throughout this time, was extraordinarily freakish) in the opinions of personnel members generally (suggesting that her reacting to me in this fashion, as being a weird monster, involved much projection of her part), was only partially reassuring to me, and her becoming able to confide to me, "I know I look weird sometimes, but I'm all right," was a later development, when this difficult though necessary period, of her projecting upon me these weird selfconceptions, was drawing to a close. I felt additionally threatened in one of the hours when, as I walked into her room, she looked closely at my face and head and asked me in a shocked, awed voice, "How is your head injury?" as if she regarded my head as an inanimate object which had been damaged to an almost unmentionably grievous extent. My knowledge of this as representing a projection on her part, of at-the-moment unconscious feelings about her own head, was not instantly there to comfort me. I should like to describe, as material of relevance and interest, although not as data precisely limited to the matter under consideration at the moment) an hour which helped to reveal the defensive nature of this woman's treating me as something subhuman. By way of introduction to this material-material

Psychosis and Neurosis

367

which has already been touched upon, very briefly, on page 295 -let me mention two items of background information: the patient had shown on a number of occasions a self-condemnation for having, as she felt it, not taken proper care of her aged aunt who lived in the family home; and she often reacted to me not only with the shock and fear and so forth which I have just described) but also with intense loathing. In this particular hour she was sitting on the floor in her room} leaning on the end of her bed. At one point she said, "Would you like to go to California with Auntie? .... I should have been there with you," in a self-reproachful tone. I asked, "You perhaps felt, every time that you went out anywhere, that you were deserting Auntie?" recalling that the parent, had told me that, whenever the girl went out on a date, her aunt would wait up until she got home. At this she smiled ruefully, then broke into sobs, with tears dripping copiously onto the floor. I felt much moved by her grief, and asked gently, after a few moments, "You feel so deserted?" Thereupon she looked over and said directly to me} uGod, you're so slimy!" in a tone of intense loathing. After a few moments of similar expressions of loathing-during which she called me, among other things, "nail biter!" [her own lifelong nail biting had been a source of great exasperation to both her parents]--she went over and sat on the far end of her bed, curled up, and hugged her pillow, while she alternately (a) wept with intense grief, hugging the pillow closely to her, with her head buried in it, and (b) said to me, "God) you're freakish! -slimy !-dopey I" At the times when she said this, she was looking directly into my eyes, and speaking in a tone of utter loathing. Then she would bury her head in the pillow, clutch the pillow closer to her, and burst out again in overwhelming grief. My reaction at the time was not of personal defensiveness, which I often experienced with her; rather, I clearly saw that she was so afraid of closeness-closeness to which her grief repeatedly exposed her-that she had to try to defend herself

368

The Nonhuman Environment

against it by loathing me, while at the same time the desire for closeness with me was being expressed in her hugging the

pillow.

2.. This material is from my work with the forty-year-old schizophrenic man described on pages 300,317 and 359.362, the person with whom the therapeutic sessions for nearly two years were spent very predominantly in silence. I often felt, as I sat in the room with this man} who dressed untidily and who rarely made any sounds except for grunts} belches, and the frequent passing of flatus, that I was cooped up with a creature more animal than human. Beyond this, I experienced myseH in the therapeutic relationship as being, oftentimes, animallike, This eventually came to be at times a comfortable feeling; but for the first several months, while I was getting used to this extremely nonverbal fonn of relatedness, it felt quite threatening to me. My anxiety at what I experienced as a threat to my own humanness seemed to stem from at least the following sources: a. The almost entirely nonverbal nature of the therapeutic relationship, for very long periods, gave me to feel that the patient and I were relating to one another as animals do, with that element which is uniquely human-s-speech-c-shut out of the situation. After several months I was able to feel this----our relating to one another as animals do-e-as an enriching, pleasurable experience. But prior to that time I felt it as a distinctly threatening lack in the situation; this process of verbal com.. munication, upon which so much of my own sense of humanness, I believe, rests, was for all practical purposes denied to me in my relationship with this man. It is unnecessary to go into detail here as to why verbalizing seemed to be forbidden me; briefly, whenever I spoke it seemed only to frighten him, infuriate him, or cause him to become even more withdrawn. Much of the time, in the early months of the individual therapy, I felt too afraid of him to speak} knowing that my doing so tended to infuriate him, and having abundant reason to feel that his control over his rage was precarious. b. A second factor was, again, a function of the extraordinarily predominant silences. These tended, I think, to render

Psychosis and N eurosls

369

my ego boundaries indistinct, tended to make me feel at one with this patient whose appearance and behavior were so animallike. I have observed not only in my work with him, but also in my experience with various other patients whose therapy involved long periods of silence, that prolonged silence seems to promote a great deal of projection by each person, patient and therapist, onto the other individual-projection which is at once revealed as such at the moment when either person starts to verbalize. t That is, during a lengthy silence it is easy, and in fact inevitable, for one to become involved in assumptions as to what the other person is thinking or feeling; it is easy to assume that he is sharing one's own experiences, and easy to attribute to him various experiences which one does not wish to acknowledge within oneself. But when either therapist or patient begins to speak, his words serve at once to set him apart from the other person, to demarcate his own personality from the other's personality. Every therapist has been startled, I am sure, to hear a patient begin to verbalize, after a prolonged silence, thoughts which are entirely different from those which one has been attributing to him. To phrase this differently, I think that one of the reasons why prolonged silences are so often uncomfortable to us, as therapists, is that these silences tend to threaten our conception of ourselves as human beings, tend to take us back to the "anirnallike" preverbal period of our very early lives. The prospect of such regression is something to which we react, I think, ambivalently: we long for it, and we feel threatened by it as representing perhaps the most basic kind of castration. c. A third element in the situation which pushed me toward a subjective sense of oneness with this animallike patient, and another threat to my ego boundaries, was his previously menJ This mutual projection selVes. however, constnsctive purposes. It .erves to maintain a primitive object relationship; it functions, that is, as a defense agaimt breaking of all contact between the two persons, Furthermore, the fluidity of ego boundaries, in such a aituation, enables the therapiJt to experience at fint hand, as it were-i.eo. by introjection-the patient's anxietyarousing CODfticu. . . I have described elsewhere (134). Thil latter phe.. DOInenon U an invaluable. although at time. most uncomfortable, aid to the therapist in his efforts to learn what is ailiDg the patient.

370

The Nonhuman Environment

tioned massive projecting upon me of his own unconscious experiences. This was a function of the manifestly great fluidity of his ego boundaries, and the silences presumably fostered his already great tendencies toward projection, as they fostered my own. He treated me persistently as if I were an extension of his self which from my view was animallike. On these infrequent occasions when he was verbalizing, my own self was barraged by these projections-projections having an intensity, an utter conviction on the part of the patient as to their being real aspects of myself, which are so characteristic of many schizophrenic patients, and which are so much more formidable than the often relatively halfhearted, uncertain projections of neurotic patients. d. A fourth factor was) as in my work with the schizophrenic woman just described above, an intensity of negative feeling in myself, toward the patient, about which I felt self-condemnstory. That is, it was threatening to my conception of myself as a human being to find myself thinking and feeling, upon looking at this man, things like, "The pig! . .. . The crazy son of a bitch!" and often} to find myself feeling murderous toward him. 3. This twenty-five-year-old woman, diagnosed as a severely schizoid personality, was in therapy with one of my colleagues. Two of the patient's most prominent symptoms were emotional detachment) and overeating; she was a markedly, and to most person repellingly, obese individual.. The following excerpts from her therapist's presentation, to the hospital staff, of his work with her at the end of the first four months, will serve to show something of the anxiety which he felt in terms of her regarding him, and his own regarding her,

as nonhuman: The treatment with her has been very difficult for me. There has been a great deal of silence in the hours, a great deal of a kind of deadly sort of silence. It just seems as if one is sitting there with a patient who is refusing to talk, and I have often had the fantasy, when I get something out of her, of extracting a tooth or something of this sort. This went on for a couple of months. Alternately I would feel utterly hopeless--that I could do nothing

Psychosis and Neurosis

371

-and utterly angry, and several times I expressed a lot of anger to the patient which did not do any good whatsoever. Some of the early work: I'll just mention one fantasy of the patient during some of these terrible silences. Finally I'd get things moving a little and I'd hear words from the patient that 1 looked like a strange animal to her, that I seemed to be distorted, that my face looked angry and cruel and she thought of Joan of Arc being faced by the Grand Inquisitor. Then she thought that the J18m e of the Inquisitor was "Cochon" (I think the actual name is "Couchon"; but she had it as "Pig," anyway), that I looked to her like a pig and that 1 looked, on the other hand, as if I were far above her. We got into quite a lot of things about living in different spheres) the patient seeing me as far above her, but, from the way I heard it, she was seeing me as far below her.... Let me tell you some of my own fantasies during this time. One was that 1 was sitting there working with a great amoeba, and I thought very much of the amoebas that I had formerly looked at under a microscope. I thought of the amoeba ingesting a particle of food-and ingesting me, actually. If one thrust out with any kind of comment toward her, instead of this provoking a reaction, it just sank in and vanished-just was consumed. 1 had this fantasy a lot. Another fantasy I had in response to several people telling me that "What that girl needs is for somebody to really kick her good and hard," and several people actually told me this. I tried it some} not literally, although I felt like trying it literally. When I did this, I thought of the old Uncle Remus tale of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby.. Br'er Rabbit was hitting Tar Baby with one hand and it gets stuck, then the other hand gets stuck) then the two feet, and then he hit it with his head and his head gets stuck) too. This is what would happen to me when 1 would lash out and say, "Now, it is about time you began getting here on time I" She had a habit of coming late.

4. A twenty-two-year-old woman was in therapy with another therapist on the hospital staff, for chronic schizophrenia with paranoid and hebephrenic features. This patient, too, was upon admission an unusually ugly-looking person, one of the small

372

The Nonhuman Environment

percentage-possibly 5 per cent~f our patients who are, for a longer or shorter time after their admission, difficult to regard as fellow human beings. This young woman had already been hospitalized, in three other hospitals) for the greater part of seven years, and her relatives held little hope for her recovery. She had shown considerable evidence of dangerous homicidal tendencies; on one occasion, for example, she had threatened her mother, a cold and domineering individual, with a hammer. The patient had received not only psychotherapy but also a large number of both insulin coma treatments and electroshock treatments, and COW'8es of Thorazine and Serpasil, without benefit, before her admission to Chestnut Lodge. The admission physician here was shocked to hear her father express the belief that his daughter should be chained up somewhere) and that people should come near only to feed her.' Her therapist, in twice-weekly seminars with five other therapists including myself, confided to us, early in his work with this woman, that he felt very anxious in the sessions with her. He described her behaving in a physically threatening manner toward him, and her saying very little to him except for growling I I t is by no means unheard of for such deeply ill psychotic patients to be treated, in aetuality~ in almost such an animallike way. One young schizophrenic patient, for example, prior to his admission at Chestnut Lodgea man who had been labeled 88 Clutterly unmanageable" by the hospitals where he had been housed prior to his transfer to the Lodgehad lived for six months in one of these hospitals in a seclusion room which bore the sign, UVery Dangerous. Keep Away. Do Not Disturb This Patient," It was deeply gratifying to our whole staff' to see this young man progress, at the Lodge, from an initial state, here, of unusually dangerous assaultiveness to a state, within about one year, of being a fellow human being who was generally liked. At the Lodge, we find that when an inspiring therapeutic result such as this does occur, it comes as a product of dedicated and courageous working logether. by the patient, the therapist, the IKychiatric administrator, the ward nursing personnel, and the occupational therapy personnel. Dr. FrommReichmann once.phrased this to me in a way which I shall always remember: "It takes many minds and hearts to cure a schizophrenic!" Gertnld SChwing's volume, .If Way 10 eh, Soul of 'he MeneGll" III (130). contains accounts of patients- improving) as did this young man, from an initial animaUike state to a condition of clear-cut humanity and relative mental health. It would appear that her patients improved solely through the beneficial therapist-patient relationship; but in our experience, the efforts of the therapist alone are not enough.

PJrychosis and Neurosis

373

occasional curses and threats of physical violence. He particularly stressed how shocked he felt at times when, during long silences when she was lying on her bed facing away from him, she would then roll over and he would see her monstrous-looking face. In one seminar, awed at the magnitude of the therapeutic task, he said, "What a patient like this needs is a therapist who can train wild animals and be comfortable with people, too." During the seventh month of the therapy, we had the pleasure of hearing him describe a crucially important change which had taken place in the therapeutic relationship. The first indication of this change which we noticed was that he now, for the first time, was referring to her not as "Morrison," her last name, but as "Elaine," her first name, giving one to feel that he was speaking of a feminine human being, rather than-as had previously been the case-a creature which he felt to be quite alien to himself. I shall present his brief, informal recapitulation of the change as he summed it up to me, at the end of the seminar meeting in which he had first told us about it. He said that prior to the change, it had been As though there wasn't a person there at all, but instead a wild beast. One of the things that kept bothering me was that there was nothing about the relationship that was of a positive nature to me, as though there were no limits on what this girl might do if she lost control of herself-like being with a lion and having no assurance that the 'lion would set limits on what it did.

Last week as I was sitting there I became aware" for the first time, that she was Elaine and I was I J rather than being overwhelmed with a lot of anxiety. [This came, he explained, upon his seeing a relaxation in her facial expressions, in response to which he realized that she was a girl rather than CCa fierce beast."] Rather than seeing this horrible-looking face, with the mouth movements and opening and closing her eyes, I would see the face of a girl.

One sees, in his description, evidence of the same phenomenon which I have described as my own experience in my work with

374

The Nonhuman Environment

the second patient in this present series of clinical examples-the schizophrenic man, so animallike in appearance, with whom I spent nearly two years of almost totally silent sessions, That is, this therapist had evidently come to feel, partly as a function of the ego-boundary-threatening silences, a sense of oneness with the "monstrous-looking" patient. It was of much interest to me that, apparently, his realization of his own separateness from

her-s-t'that she was Elaine and I was I"-eame simultaneously with his realization that she was a human being, a girl, rather than a wild beast. I was interested, also, to find ( and this was specifically substantiated by him when I asked him further about it) that silence had been the context of all this important transformation in the relationship. That, too, coincides with my own experience with the schizophrenic man just mentioned. During my work with him I had come for the first time to the realization that a long period of silence, covering the initial months (or, as in his case, even years) of therapy is not to be looked upon as merely a prelude to a deeper, verbally communicative relationship. Rather, within this nonverbal phase itself, I had realized, a profound evolution may take place in the relationship, a profound transformation of the attitudes of each person toward the other, from predominantly negative feelings to predominantly positive feelings, all in the practically complete absence of words. Next I shall briefly summarize what I believe to be the main factors which contribute to the therapist's anxiety-in working with such patients as these-lest he himself be, or become, nonhuman: a. Simply witnessing another human being appearing, and functioning. in such an animallike way tends to make the therapist feel, "If this incredible thing has happened to him, then it could befall me, also." b. The patient's own anxiety lest he be nonhuman tends to become communicated to, and shared by, the therapist. c. The patient's relentless relating of himself to the therapist as if the latter were nonhuman tends to undermine the therapist's assurance of his own humanness. It may be that the therapist

PsychOJis and Neurosls

375

fears the threat of utter nonrelatedness as being even greater than the threat of relating in whatever fashion to the patient, and hence feels pulled toward relating on the patient's own terms, as a nonhuman creature or object. d. Prolonged, ego-boundary-threatening silences are often encountered in work with such patients. Then the therapist tends to feel at one with his animallike patient. e. Toward such patients, the therapist often finds himself experiencing attitudes (of Ioathing, horror, intense hostility and rejection, and so on) which, in the eyes of his own superego, render him nonhuman. f. The therapist, like human beings in general, has unconscious desires to become nonhuman. These desires, largely unacceptable to him, add fuel to his anxiety lest he become nonhuman. Michael Balint, in a recent article entitled "Friendly Expanses -Horrid Empty Spaces" (9), has presented some theoretical formulations which are of much relevance to the present topic, fonnulations having to do with extremely early ego states antedating even the establishment of a sense of infant-mother identity. I shall not try to detail his concepts in full, for they are too elaborate to condense succinctly. The following two passages convey his major technical point that it is essential for the analyst to be able to function, at times when patients have repressed very deeply in the course of psychoanalysis, in what one might call a nonhuman mode of participation with the patient, so that these very early ego states can be re-experienced with a more fully mature outcome. Balint says that, in approaching this deep regression, the patient makes known his wish

. . . that the analyst should keep quiet and should not demand attention from his patient. On the other hand it is most important that the analyst should be there, should stay with the patient, should not only do this but should enable the patient to remain aware all the time that the analyst is there for him.... To quote an example: one patient when in this state asked me not to speak, to keep quiet, but occasionally to move a little, for instance to make my chair creak gently, or let my breathing become somewhat audible, etc. But I was not allowed to use any words, because

376

The Nonhuman Environment

they demanded to be understood, which meant coming out of this regressed state into the adult world {9a]. [Balint acknowledges that this transference relation is, of course, overdetermined, but emphasizes that a] possible determinant, in my opinion a most important one, is that the analyst should become part and parcel of the patient's world, Le, should assume the qualities of a primary object in complete harmony with him. In other words, the analyst should not be an entity in his own right, with his own ideas) clever suggestions, and profound interpretations; in fact not a separate object at all, but should merge as completely as possible into the "friendly expanses" surrounding the patient [9b].

I have observed, in my own psychotherapy of unusually deeply regressed schizophrenic patients, precisely this clinical phenomenon which Balint has found in his analysis of (presumably neurotic) patients, and it is gratifying to leam from him a theory which gives these clinical observations a clearer meaning than I had been able to find in them. In the work with the schizophrenic patients, this phase (of the patient's relating to the therapist as being a "primary object" -Balint's term-s-rather than as being an entity in his own right) is, in my experience, much longer and of far greater importance than it is in the work with neurotic patients. In analysis with neurotic patients--where I have also observed it-the successful working through of this phase can add a good deal to the depth of the patient's self-awareness and personality integration. But in psychotherapy with such deeply regressed schizophrenic individDais as those whom I have been describing, a successful therapeutic dealing with this phase is, in my experience, absolutely crucial; I believe that the whole issue of whether or not the patient emerges from his "nonhuman" or animallike state, and goes on later to a resolution of his psychosis, depends upon the therapist's success or failure in helping him to work through this phase of his regression. In my experience with such patients) this phase may predominate at the beginning of the psychotherapy, or

Psychosis and Neurosis

377

may ensue only some months or years later; but it is likely to last for several months or even, as in one of my cases, for

years," I shall describe briefly my experience in this respect with two patients, as examples, to highlight the relatively great prominence of this phase in psychotherapy with schizophrenic individuals, as compared with its more subtle appearance in analysis of neurotic patients such as Balint has described. It was partly through such clinical experiences as these that I became convinced of the validity of the concept, presented in Chapter IX, of "recovery via phylogenetic regression." One schizophrenic man was in this phase when I began working with him, and remained so for more than two years. In various, largely nonverbal, ways he made clear to me that my presence was of great importance to him; but he showed fury of murderous intensity whenever I would try to say anything, however briefly and infrequently, and showed great anxiety and anger when I would move about in my chair. After several 4 Incidentally, I believe we have here one hint as to why the p8ychotherapy-venus-psychoanalysis controversy engenden, year after year, such remarkably passionate feelings when it is discussed in professional meetings. I have long felt that there must be some early developmental phase, some phase which normally involves deeply conflictual feelings for the infant or young child, which one group of individuals resolve by a predominant characterological emphasis upon one Bide of the conflict, and the other group resolve through a major emphasis upon the opposite side of the conflict. Only the presence of such a previously unsuspected phase in nonnal human development would account) it has seemed to me, for lome of the quite irrationally deep splits which occur in the ranks of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists whose working lives are devoted to the resolution of psychological suffering. Specifically, I surmise that those who champion, with a zeal approaching ferocity, the "neutral screen" technique of classical analysis, and who condemn any noteworthy emotional respomiveneas in a colleague as prims Isei. evidence of unwanted countertranaference j and at the other extreme, those who have nothing but scorn for the analyst'a functioning as a neutral screen) and who advocate a ceaseless ·_activity1i and '-Warm respcnsiveness" on the part of the analyst or theraput-] surmise that these two groups of practitionen have established, characterologically, opposing solutions of that early developmental phase which involved conflict between a self.identity as inanimate, or a self-identity as animate. The ideal analyat or therapist would be one who feels entirely free to be animate--aJive, warm, responaive--as the needs of the situation may dictate, but who feels also unafraid to function as a ftlatively "neutral screen," 81 a kind of inanimate object, much of the time-without fear. that ii, that he will thereby 10le his alivenesl and his human essence.

378

The Nonhuman Environment

months he came to commanding me, openly, to "Shut up and just sit there!" Similarly, when he himself was being active, either physically or verbally, whether making violently sudden physical movements, or bursting out in a furious, cursing "inter... change" with a hallucinatory figure or, later on in the two-year period, similarly cursing at me, I grew to realize that therapy went better here, too, if I simply sat, silent and motionless) most of the time. I had many trying, and often frightening, times with him; but by the end of about one year of this I had become firmly convinced that he needed for me to simply be there and not threaten him by making my presence felt as a separate entity, any more than was absolutely necessary. The other patient, a schizophrenic woman, for about three years was so deeply involved in an autistic world that, although she was able to verbalize fairly freely to me, she did not seem to react to me at an emotional level as being someone capable of showing initiative myself, apart from her. It was only after about three years, as she started to move out of her very long-standing psychosis, that she began to be extremely irritably conscious of the real world about her, including myself during the therapeutic hours. Previously, I had been amazed, many times, at her utter obliviousness to any sounds on the disturbed ward where the hours were held; more than once I had felt considerably upset by the loud raging or terrified screaming of one or another patient in nearby rooms, and had marveled at the degree of apartness from all this which she had achieved, as it were. But now, by contrast, it seemed that even the slightest sounds-the faint ticking of a watch, the sound of someone's shifting position slightly or momentarily brushing their clothing with their hand, and so forth-were almost intolerable to her. She was now in a phase which lasted several months, during which time she absolutely insisted that I not look at her, that I sit in a certain corner of her room, that I not talk; and she was, like the male patient I have just mentioned, extremely irritated at any physical movements that I made. After I had become able to go through these hours with her, accepting at an emotional level the need for them to go in this fashion

Psychosis and N'eurosis

379

(and my acceptance of this came only after intense feelings of frustration, anger, hopelessness) and so on), she was able to progress to a further resolution of her psychosis, concomitantly with an increasing tolerance on her part for my functioning more freely. It seemed to me abundantly clear that her formerly very deep psychosis had served as an insulation, protecting her from an intolerably irritating awareness of the real world outside herself. In my experience, if the therapist is to be successful in helping his patient to go through, and emerge from, this phase which Balint terms the primary object relation, wherein the therapist is related to as being not an entity in his own right but rather a harmonious part of the patient's self, then it is necessary for the therapist to be able to be aware of, and to cope with, his own anxiety lest he become nonhuman. That is, in this phase the therapist is treated by the patient more like an inanimate object, a piece of furniture, for example, than as a human being; and upon being treated in this fashion persistently, over a long period of time, the therapist inevitably tends to be confronted with that particular anxiety.

PART

FOUR

FROM THE CULTURAL FRAME OF REFERENCE

Cultural Attitudes Concerning Man in His Nonhuman Environment

CHAPTER

14

Thus far I have dealt with this over-all subject primarily in terms of the human individual. In this chapter the subject will be discussed in a difierent, and broader-scale, frame of reference, Here we shall be concerned with the effects which the institutions of various cultures have upon human beings' relatedness with their nonhuman environment.. In what follows, here, I shall use the term "nonhuman environment" to include, as usual, not only the world of nature surrounding man, but also the world of his own artifacts. L. K. Frank in Nature and Human Nature (44) says, . . . man has created his symbolic, cultural worlds of meanings and values which, like a screen or pattern, he has interposed between) or imposed upon nature and himself so that he sees everything, thinks about everything) acts toward everything and every person, including himself, largely in terms of these self-created and self-imposed meanings and purposes [44b].

384

The Nonhuman Environment

.•. According to their customary ethos, people will ••. impute value and worth to plants, animals or certain individuals and deny it to others [44c]. The degree to which any particular culture fosters, or on the other hand interferes with and distorts, the members' healthy relatedness with their nonhuman environment is doubly important because it has repercussions, for good or ill, upon the members' relatedness with their fellow human beings. Specifically, an interfering culture may result in the individual's failing to relate to his fellow human beings as human. He is prone, instead, to regarding these other human beings as either superhuman or subhuman (equivalent, for example, to animals or inanimate objects). This point will be developed, as I say, more fully as this chapter proceeds. To give some inkling of the variety in this regard, among various cultures, I shall touch very briefly upon two cultures other than our own; by "our own" I mean contemporary Western culture, and most particularly the culture of urban areas of the United States. First, in this following glimpse into a "primitive" culture (of an aboriginal. tribe in the interior of Ceylon}, we catch something of how intimate a relatedness may exist between the individual and his nonhuman environment, an environment consisting predominantly of the elements of nature in a state only minimally altered by man's own hand, an enviromnent in which man's own artifacts are sparse indeed. This quote is from a work by Robert Ranulph Marett, and is included in Primitive Heritage (104), the anthropological anthology edited by Margaret Mead and Nicolas Calas: •.. Said a Vedda cave-dweller .•. : "It is pleasant for us to feel the rain beating on our shoulders, and good to go out and dig and sit around It" [104e].

yams, and come home wet, and see the fire burning in the cave, Such a glimpse as that given above lends conviction to the following opinion of the anthropologist Paul Radin:

The Cultural Frame of Reference

385

It is one of the salient traits of so-called primitive man .•. that he allows a full and appreciative expression to his sensations. He is pre-eminently a man of practical common sense just as is the average peasant. . . . primitive man is endowed with an overpowering sense of reality and possesses a manner of facing this reality, which to a western European implies an almost complete lack of sensitiveness.••• It is true that facts of everyday life, in every primitive community, are clothed in a magical and ritualistic dress, yet it is not unfair to say that it is not the average native who is beguiled into an erroneous interpretation of this dress but the ethnologist .[104f].

Secondly) let us consider, similarly briefly, the culture of Western Europe of the Middle Ages, prior to the industrial revolution. Here, too, there prevailed an intimacy of relatedness between man and his nonhuman environment which, although of distinctly lesser degree than that prevailing in so-called primitive cultures, was still very considerable. The vast majority of the adult individuals of the culture were either peasants or craftsmen. The peasants lived in dwellings which they had built with their own hands, out of the materials which were provided by environing nature. They wore clothing which they themselves had woven from the fibers of plants which they had grown on their land, or which they had fashioned from the hides of animals which they had fed and tended.. The food with which they nourished themselves was food which they themselves had grown, in the form of plants and animals, upon the land surrounding, or close to, their home. The craftsmen lived and worked in comparably intimate relatedness with a nonhuman environment in which Nature was dominant, and toward the elements of which it was presumably easy to feel a kind of respect, a sense of personal kinship, which seems difficult for members of our culture to experience, living as they do in an environment containing so much which has been made over by the hand of man. That is, these craftsmen began their work process with raw materials which were still a part of, or only one step removed from, a natural state (hides, lumber, stone, metal, and so on), and themselves carried through the complete process until these materials were transformed into the

386

The Nonhuman Environment

definitive state in which they were utilizable in the daily life of fellow human beings-human beings who, moreover, were probably not uncommonly personally known to the craftsman himself. When we come to consider now, thirdly, our own culture, we find that this culture fosters, in its members, a distinctly nnhealthy psychological estrangement from the nonhuman environment, whether part of nature or manmade. For example, in our culture relatively few persons are fanners, living and working in intimate relatedness with a nonhuman environment wherein nature predominates. As fanning grows rapidly more mechanized, even here man becomes increasingly separated, by his own artifacts, from the nonhuman manifestations of the larger nature of which he is a part. Similarly those other inhabitants who wrest an existence from nature-lumbermen, miners, and so on-make contact with environing nature in an increasingly indirect way, through the medium of increas.. ingly abundant and complex machinery. The formerly greatly valued domesticated animals which aided man in his workhorses, dogs, oxen-have been largely relegated, particularly during the past fifty years, to a position of little significanceto his labors; he has, therefore, little occasion to experience his erstwhile sense of respect, of meaningful kinship} toward these nonhuman creatures. The steadily increasing majority of the population who live in large cities have, of course, still vastly less daily contact with nature. They work, and many of them have their homes} in buildings whose architecture is minimally expressive of the special beauties of the environing nature of the city's geographical region. I remember vividly, for example, the sense of unpleasant surprise which I experienced when} after a number of days spent amid the natural beauties of a small Maine seacoast village, I traveled into an industrial city only a few miles away. Upon entering the city I suddenly found myself in what could have been an ugly factory city anywhere. This city was geographicaIly adjacent to Maine's natural beauties, but psychologically as far removed from those beauties as though one were now in a different world, a squalid

The Cultural Frame of Reference

387

world of ugly factories and tenements in which the beauties of seacoasts and neat litde hamlets had no part whatsoever. Further, in our culture it is a rare inhabitant indeed, whether city dweller or countryman, who builds his home with his own hands. And only a small percentage of inhabitants even own the home which has been built for them by others, or the ground upon which their home stands. Much more often, the house and land are owned by a bank somewhere, and I, at least, am convinced that this makes a real-however subtle-difference in the kind of relatedness, or nonrelatedness, which one feels toward one's "own" home and land. The advancement of our technology has made for a psychological distancing of man not only from his home and land, but from innumerable other elements of his nonhuman environment. Probably not one person in ten thousand has ever seen the specific tree from which was fashioned some article of furniture which he uses, and probably not one person in ten would even recognize along the highway the kind of trees from which the article came. By contrast, see the psychological linkage which Thoreau could perceive between his own homely furniture and the nature from which it came: . . . It was pleasant to see [during house cleanings] my whole household effects out on the grass . . . It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedsteads,......... because they once stood in their midst [154g].

Not only has man in our culture lost, to a large degree, contact with nature, in other words, but he does not view the manufactured substitutes in his possession as cherished objects with which be has had, as it were, a richly meaningful shared experience.

388

The Nonhuman Environment

Our culture encourages him to regard these possessions simply as prestige symbols, to be acquired or discarded primarily in keeping with the demands of his prestige needs. Probably there are many reasons for the prominence of this factor in our culture; certainly two major reasons are (a) the extreme social mobility which our culture allows, thereby rendering social prestige a matter of urgent and pressing concern to the inhabitants; and (b) a highly industrialized, capitalistic economy which requires, for its maintenance, that the inhabitants be perpetual overconsumers of the products of this economy-requires that, for instance, the inhabitants buy far more of automobiles, electrical appliances, clothing, items of furniture, and so on and on, than these individuals actually need. Thus the average individual lives with an overabundance of manufactured nonhwnan things about him, and the person is considered eccentric who continues to use an old automobile or to wear an old suit of clothes because he is fond of it, when he has money enough to exchange it for a new and more prestigious automobile or suit. Similarly, family heirlooms are almost unknown, now, in urban homes. When one works with schizophrenic patients, to whom these matters are so important that they can no longer remain disguised, one sees clearly how deeply a human being can cherish, for example, an old and tom shirt, or a worn purse, or a worn and, by ordinary standards, unattractive dresser, if these things have ac.. companied the person through a great deal of life experience. It is not, I believe, that the "normal" culture member is so very different from the schizophrenic in this regard; it is that the "normal') person continuingly underestimates, or entirely over.. looks, a fact which the schizophrenic simply cannot afford to ignore: the material objects in one's life are an emotionally mean-

ingful part of it. Certainly I would not assert that such objects possess the degree of emotional significance to the average culture member, whose interpersonal life is more or less rewarding, which they do for the schizophrenic. But I surmise that when one considers the average infants and children of the culture, we may :find that nonhuman objects possess fully as high a degree of emotional significance

The Cu.ltural Frame of Reference

389

for these particular human beings as they do for the adult schizophrenics. Thus the culture member who repeatedly discards his material possessions-his house, his car, and so on-for more prestigious ones probably is not only unwittingly keeping his own emotional life impoverished to a significant degree, but is inflicting upon any small children in his family an emotional impoverishment, a continuing series of losses, of a much more traumatic degree. This point is readily believable to one who has come to know, as I have, schizophrenic adults who have been the children of rapidly socially advancing, highly prestige-conscious parents. I recall the astonishment I felt on an occasion when my young son expressed a great deal of personal fondness for the particular car which our family owned at that time, a car in regard to which I had consciously experienced little except a sense of some social embarrassment because it was a somewhat aging Chevrolet. After I had then taken courage from the example which my little boy had set for me, I suffered only moderate sheepishness when, some time later, I found myself noticing some similar feelings of personal fondness toward this "prestige symbol.n Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson in Communication-The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (119) find various of these cultural factors much more accentuated in the United States than in the countries of Western Europe, whose culture is in so many other regards much like our OYm. They point out that Europeans, in contrast to Americans, have great interest in protecting inanimate objects, even going so far as to place the guarding of works of art, furniture, books, houses, and churches ahead of the needs of the individual. The caste society in Europe, the authors say, with its limitations upon social mobility promotes mastery and virtuosity as ends in themselves, whereas in the United States the worker will strive for mastery only to the point where success is secured. and, significantly, almost all our artisans and skilled workers are of immediate European descent. Ruesch and Bateson note also that in America, by contrast to the situation in Europe, houses are built to last only a generation, and in structure and aesthetic appearance are determined by the needs of the moment. As to the psychological consequences of the fact that we spend

390

The Nonhuman Enotronment

our lives, in this culture, amid such an overabundance of material possessions, we wonder, as we read the following passage from Admiral Byrd's description of his solitary life in the Antarctic, whether this fact of our dally lives may not be of greater detriment to our emotional well-being than we have realized. He describes how he found out what it was like to live without masses of material things: There were moments when I felt more alive than at any other time in my life. Freed from materialistic distractions, my senses sharpened in new directions, and the random or conunonpJace affairs of the sky and the earth and the spirit, which ordinarily I would have ignored if I had noticed them at all, became exciting and portentous [22g].

Erich Fromm, in The Sane Society (55), makes many relevant and penetrating observations about our culture. He points out that there are two ways of relating oneself to an object-in its concrete uniqueness, or in an abstract way by emphasizing only those qualities which it has in common with all other objects of the same genus. A full and productive relatedness involves both modes of relatedness, he says, and he emphasizes that in contemporary Western culture we have come to a one-sided view in which everything is unduly abstractified, with a consequent loss, on our part, in the relatedness to the concrete reality of people and things. Things are experienced now, he asserts, as being mere commodities, possessing only exchange value. And he notes that we are still further alienated, psychologically, from the things which surround us by reason of our ignorance of their nature and origin. We do not understand the working of the complex machines which are part of our daily lives, nor do we know even how bread is made, or how cloth is woven, and so on; we live in a world of things which we can only manipulate or consume. Having dwelt thus far primarily upon the relationship (or lack of relationship) per se between the individual and his nonhuman environment, I shall attempt to show how closely interrelated is the culture members' psychological orientation toward this environment, on the one hand, with, on the other hand, their social,

The Cultural Frame of Reference

391

political, moral, and philosophical attitudes and approaches to their living with one another. L. K. Frank has portrayed the beneficial effects upon the social order which have flowed from man's increased understanding of the physical processes at work in the nonhuman world about him. He points out that the old beliefs in supernatural forces which supposedly laid down incontestable laws governing social behavior for all time tended to maintain the social foundations, among the citizenry, for authoritarian govenunents; whereas Newton's insights into the physical forces actually governing the universe encouraged people to participate in the making, and administration, of their own laws in accordance with natural laws. But, Frank notes, though the carry-over of Newtonian concepts of physics to man's thinking about himself was helpful in making man less ready to assume that he stood helpless in the grip of superhuman authority figures, these concepts nonetheless left him feeling that, just as there were universal physical laws which governed the processes of Nature, so was his own social life governed by similarly large-scale social processes in which his own individual activity counted for little or nothing. Frank asserts that here, again, more recent discoveries in the realm of physics point the way to a still more effective participation by individual man in his own social affairs. As quantum physics has come to realize how important is the dynamic inter.. relatedness of the single electron with the total field in which it exists, he says, so, too, are we beginning to realize that we can understand the large-scale operations of a society only as we can come to understand the psychological functioning of the individual member in the social field. And with the development of nuclear physics and the promulgation of such concepts as relativity} space...time, curved space, and so on, physics has come to see the universe as possessing unbelievable potentiality and plasticity; this, Frank suggests, provides us with a comparably lively orientation to social life as well. The particular tone in which Frank speaks of these mattersa tone of soaring optimism-is one seldom heard in descriptions of the state of social and psychological life in our culture. Much

392

The Nonhuman Environment

more often, the voices raised about this general subject register not exuberance but deep concern. Paul TOOch ( 156) , for instance, finds that modem life, for the individual of our culture, is permeated with a profound sense of meaninglessness. The particular point which I wish to emphasize at the moment is that Tillich at least implies, when he speaks of "man's separation from the whole of reality" (156a), that this so-prevalent meaninglessness derives not only from impairment of man's relationship to himself and to his fellow men, but also from impairment of his relationship to his nonhuman environment. TiIIich describes how the individual's mode of dealing with his own "anxiety of meaninglessness,') namely, by identifying himself with something transindividual, such as authoritarian organizations, makes for fanaticism in his social life. Here again we have then, in sum, a reference to the repercussions in various areas of human living (in this instance, Tillich refers to the sociopolitical area) which result from disjointedness in the individual's relationship with his nonhuman environment. In saying that the member of our culture, habituated to dealing with his overabundance of material possessions in a noncherishing manner, deals with his fellow men in a way which is similarly impoverished as regards meaningfulness, I do not wish to overstress the possibility of such a causal relationship; it may well be that our culture simply fosters our relating alike to our material possessions and to our fellow men in such a fashion-that these are simply two parallel manifestations of a common cultural cause. But I do think that the former causal relationship applies at least to some degree. When one recalls that in terms of sheer volume, the vast preponderance of one's total environment is comprised of nonhuman environment, one can believe that a culture-fostered impairment of relatedness to this vast section of our environment can have a significant effect upon our relatedness to that much smaller section of the environment-namely, that section comprised of our fellow human beings--and an effect which is in the direction of similar impairment. Fromm points out that millions of persons in our culture look and feel like automatons; the neurosis from which they suffer is

The Cultural Frame of Reference

393

not perceived as such by themselves or by other persons, for this neurosis is regarded as "normal" in our culture. In our capitalistic culture, Fromm protests, •.. a man, a living human being, ceases to be an end in himself) and becomes the means for the economic interests of another man, or himself, or of an impersonal giant, the economic machine [55h].

He says that man's relatedness to his fellow man is one between two abstractions, two living machines, who use each other; and that man experiences even himself as a thing to be employed successfully on the market, rather than as a real human being rich in emotion. In the various critical analyses of Capitalism we find remarkable agreement. While it is true that the Capitalism of the nineteenth century was criticized for its neglect of the material welfare of the workers, this was never the main criticism. What Owen and Proudhon, Tolstoy and Bakunin, Durkheim and Marx, Einstein and Schweitzer talk about is man and what happens to him in our in.. dustriaJ system. Although they express it in different concepts, they all find that man has lost his cen tral place, that he has been made an instrument for the purposes of economic aims, that he has been estranged from, and has lost the concrete relatedness to, his fellow men and to nature, that he has ceased to have a meaningful life. I have tried to express the same idea by elaborating on the concept of alienation [55i]. [Fromm condemns both Capitalism and Communism alike for the following reasons:] Both systems are developing into managerial societies, their inhabitants .... automatons, who follow without force, who are guided without leaders, who make machines which act like men and produce men who act like machines; men, whose reason deteriorates while their intelligence rises, thus creating the dangerous situation of equipping man with the greatest material power without the wisdom to use it. . . . The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots [55j].

Next, I wish to make brief mention of the influence upon

394

The Nonhuman Environment

philosophy which derives from the relative nonrelatedness of man to his nonhuman environment which we have seen to be a characteristic of our culture. In essence, this nonrelatedness tends, I think, to foster one or another variety of solipsism. Solipsism is a philosophical theory or belief (a) that the self knows and can know nothing but its own modifications and states; (b) that the self is the only existent thing.. Certainly William James comes close to solipsism. when he asserts that "Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are . . . pure gifts of the spectator's mind" (8St). Martin Buber, in taking issue with the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, expresses a viewpoint which amounts, in essence, to a vigorous and eloquent rejection of solipsism, and a statement of the importance of man's developing a meaningful, personal relatedness with an outer reality-a reality which is acknowledged by man as being real in itself. Rejecting Sartre's belief that God is dead and that life has no meaning or value except the meaning which the indivi.dual man chooses to give to it, Buber asserts that In our age the I-It relation, gigantically swollen, has usurped, practically uncontested, the mastery and the rule. The I of this relation, an I that possesses all, makes all, succeeds with all, this I that is unable to say Thou, unable to meet a being essentially, is the lord of the hour. . . . man has become incapable of apprehending a reality absolutely independent of himself and of having a relation with it [54e].

To go OD, now, to another point: in Chapter VII, I described the individual's (particularly the psychotic or neurotic individual's) anxiety lest he become, or be revealed as, nonhuman; but we know that this anxiety is a culture-wide phenomenon also. The whole world is now, and for a number of decades has been, occupied with great anxiety concerning what Buber terms "the struggle of the human spirit against the demonry of the subhuman and the anti-human." My point, here, is that man's impaired relatedness with his nonhuman environment may contribute significantly to the magnitude of this threat with which mankind is grappling.

The Cultural Frame of Reference

395

Huber, having been the leader of the Gennan Jews in their spiritual battle against Nazism, can speak with authority about man's large-scale inhumanity toward his fellow man. Friedman quotes portions of the speech which Buber made upon the occasion of his acceptance in 1953 in Frankfurt of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. &; an explanation of his felt sense of duty to accept his prize,

Buber says, Manifestations such as the bestowal of the Hansian Goethe Prize and the Peace Prize of the Genoan Book Trade on a superannuated arch-Jew . . . are moments in the struggle of the human spirit against the demonry of the subhuman and the antihuman.. . . . The solidarity of all separate groups in the flaming battle for the becoming of one humanity is, in the present hour, the highest duty on earth [54f].

It seems to me that, in our culture, a conscious ignoring of the psychological importance of the nonhuman environment exists simultaneously with a (largely unconscious) ooerdependence upon that environment. I believe that the actual importance of that environment to the individual is so great that he dare not recognize it. Unconsciously it is felt, I believe, to be not only an intensely important conglomeration of things outside the self, but also a large and integral paTt of the self. That is, I hypothesize the existence, in this regard, of an intrapsychic situation which is analogous to that situation which is well known to exist in neurotic and psychotic patients as regards interpersonal matters: the patient steadfastly and sincerely denies the importance to him of certain other persons upon whom he is unconsciously extremely dependent and who constitute, via his unconscious identification with those persons, important parts of his very personality. If such a psychodynamic process goes on in our culture to a large extent, as I believe it does, then it becomes understandable that we are inordinately vulnerable to the anxiety lest we become, or stand revealed as, nonhuman. Our personalities have become so greatly invaded by elements of the nonhuman environment with which we have unconsciously identified-c-or, to put it in a

396

The Nonhuman Environment

more accurate way, the institutions of our culture have so greatly hindered us from psychologically differentiating ourselves from the nonhuman environment, from growing out of that state, normal in infancy, of subjective oneness with the totality of the environment-that, in a real sense, we are less than fuUy human. Looking at these same matters from a different viewpoint) we have much evidence from psychoanalysis and psychotherapy that only through a growingly close and direct relatedness between the analyst or therapist and the patient, does the latter develop a growing sense of his own individuality as distinct from the personality of the therapist; prior to such a development, unconscious identifications with the therapist (as well as with persons from his past life) tend to hold sway.. I believe that a similar situation obtains as regards the relationship between the individual and his nonhuman environment: as long as he cannot experience the nonhuman environment as something meaningful and real "over against') (to use Buber's phrase) himself, he cannot, at a deep psychological level, distinguish between himself and that environment. He can feel, then, neither a sense of profound kinship with that environment, nor a sense of profound difference from it. I believe that this psychodynamic formulation illuminates certain features of one of the most important and pressing situations in our culture: our living under the imminent threat of atomic annihilation. Whether we think about it frequently or rarely, it remains true today that, as Einstein wrote in 1946: The construction of the atom bomb has brought about the effect that all the people living in cities are threatened, everywhere and constantly, with sudden destruction [30c]..

Now, my belief is that when other persons are conscious of this threat, the threat usually takes somewhat the form that it does in my own conception of it: one relatively seldom experiences it as a threat of being killed by enemy human beings; much more often, one experiences it that the atomic bomb (or, in more recent years, the hydrogen bomb) threatens to destroy us. It seems to

The Cultural Frame of Reference

397

me, in other words, that our basic fear is that the most alien portion of our nonhuman environment (the inorganic portion of it, in the fonn of the atomic bomb) will rise up and destroy us, along with the rest of humanity and much of all the rest that is animate in our environment.' It seems to me that the members of our culture (and, likewise) the members of cultures in the other highly technological nations, including Russia) tend to project the "nonhuman" part of the self and perceive it as a nonhuman thing which threatens the conscious self with destruction; it is too threatening to let oneself recognize the extent to which the nonhuman environment has, as it were, already invaded and become part of one's own personality. The real threat of atomic annihilation readily lends itself, then, to becoming the bearer of this paranoid projection, and thus, I think, the danger that we will indeed be destroyed by the atomic bomb becomes intensified. That is, clinical experience with paranoid patients shows clearly enough that the patient, after projecting onto the outer world an attitude which is sensed as an inner danger, threatening to the integrity of the self, unwittingly sets about behaving in such a way as indeed to bring upon him1 Another point which is tangential to my main argument here: an additional reason for the sense of shock with which I believe most persons, like myself,) read of. the dropping of the atom bomb upon Hiroshima is that one sensed here that, for the fint time, man had the power to dlstro1 his own ,nviTonmlnt-the nonhuman as well as the human elements of that environment. Any 8uch anxiety was heightened by the published opinions of Var10W nuclear physicists, after the development of the hydrogen bomb, that it might now be posaible to produce an explosion which would set off such an uncontrollable chain reaction that the whole earth would be destroyed. Although such a fear has since been demonstrated to be) apparently, unwarranted, our anxiety in thia regard still finds much to feed upon: the televised photograph. of the total destruction of a small Pacific island by a test explosion; the news reports that vast areal of the Pacific are rendered unfit not only for human habitation but also, perhaps. to other forms of life; and so on. In general terms, one can say that the advent of the atomic bomb was profoundly shaking to the individual man not only because he felt his life to be now in unprecedented jeopardy. but also because hia orientation viJ..a-vD his nonhuman environment, a deep-seated and ordinarily unquestioned area of his being. was shaken in its very foundations. Now he had reason to feel that not only might he be tleslroYBd but also that he might d.st'o,~ this environment, this environment which throughout his life had provided him with t among myriad other benefits, a vast protection against his own relatively puny destructive pawen.

b,.

398

The Nonhuman Enoironment

self that threat which, he is convinced, looms in the outer world. k a simple example, a paranoid patient who is unable to face the fact that he has a brutal streak in him will perceive the personnel as brutes and will relate himself to them in such a fashion as to make it very difficult for them to avoid treating him in a really brutal way; if he "succeeds" in receiving brutal treatment from them, his own brutality remains, then, safely projected. In medical school one of my professors who was a specialist in diseases of the thyroid gland seemed to be convinced that most of the world's troubles were traceable, in the final analysis, to one or another malfunction of the thyroid gland. It is easy enough for a specialist of any sort to see the world only through his own pair of glasses, SO to speak, and to convince himself that there is nothing really significant outside the narrow realm which he perceives. I realize, that is, that for me to attempt to formulate the problem of threatened atomic warfare as a problem which grows out of this area of human living of which I have been making a special study-the area of man's relatedness with his nonhuman environ. ment-may appear to be a ridiculous oversimplification of a problem which has, in reality, myriad roots-not only Individualpsychological and sociological, but economic, political, and so on and on. My reply to any such objection is that the problem is, to be sure, vastly greater than the confines of anyone scientific specialty; but because of this very fact it can be met successfully only if each scientific discipline contributes toward a solution any such findings and recormnendations as emerge from the work of that particular discipline in regard to this great and supremely important problem. To repeat, then, our culture tends to discourage our conscious recognition of the importance of our nonhuman environment, and to foster our acting out of the esteem in which we unconsciously hold it, with the result that we paradoxically deny its importance at a conscious level, while unconsciously allowing it to hold, in our daily lives} a position whose paramountcy overshadows our own, uniquely wonderful, humanness. I believe that our culture fosters, actually, an unconscious identification with the ingredients of our nonhuman environment,

The Cultural Frame of Reference

399

to such a degree that we are barred from experiencing either the fulness of the realization of our own uniqueness or the rich sense of relatedness with that environment. I believe there is at work here a culturally fostered pathological process which one unquestionably encounters in the exploration of a deeply ill patient's interpersonal relations: a severely neurotic or psychotic patient may be so strongly identified, at an unconscious level, with one of hi~ parents- with, most frequently in my experience, his mother -as to interfere grossly with any sense of his own individuality, and to interfere, by the same token, with any sense of relatedness with this mother who is so poorly demarcated from his own self. Then, when the therapeutic process has advanced sufficiently far, one finds that there appear on the scene, concomitantly, (a) the patient's realization that he is a separate person, and (b) his presentation to us of accounts of meaningful interaction with his mother. It is this kind of maturational development, I think, which the institutions of our culture make it difficult for us to achieve with respect to our nonhuman environment. These views which I have advanced above are ones which I have not encountered in any literature-whether newspapers and news magazines, or psychiatric and psychoanalytic books and periodicals. But Einstein, in the following excerpts (the first, from an address in 1948; the second, from a paper in 1947) presents some views which approximate certain of those which I have expressed above. I have italicized the especially relevant portions of his statements:

.... where belief in the omnipotence of physical force gets the upper hand in political life this force takes on "life of its own" and proves stronger than the men who think to use [orce as a tool. The proposed militarization of the nation. . . immediately threatens us with war [30d]. It is characteristic of the military mentality that nonhuman factors (atom bombs, strategic bases) weapons of all sorts, the possession of raw materials, etc.. ) are held essential, while the human being, his desires and thoughts--in short) the psychological factors-are considered as unimportant and secondary [30e].

400

The Nonhuman Environment

In the few years which have intervened since Einstein presented these views, international tensions have become such that one rarely hears a voice raised for demilitarization, and it is irrelevant, both to my purposes here and to my professional qualifications, to enter into this subject. But I think it pertinent to add a note concerning the dilemma in which we in the United States find ourselves in this connection: Our government is founded upon a cherishing of the worth of the individual human being, and we reject Communism as placing the worth of the human individual far secondary to the needs of a gigantic and impersonal State, those needs being determined by a relative handful of persons who wield despotic power. But in our struggle to keep up with, or preferably keep ahead of, the military power of the Communist countries) we are driven into more and more gigantically impersonal military projects, projects many of which (such as the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the intercontinental ballistic missile, the earth satellite, and other programs) must, worst of all, be eanied on in a top-secret fashion. Such secrecy prevents not only the general public, but also nearly all the "participants') in the projects themselves, from really psychologically participating at all fully in what is going on. Here the dehumanizing effects of modem scientific technology are at their worst. Our dilemma is that if we shift our national effort away from intensive militarization, we stand in real danger of being incorporated by countries which possess a dehumanizing political system, whereas increasing militarization tends in itself to erode away our psychological status as participating human individuals. Thus far I have referred, here, to the advances made by physical science chiefly in terms of their negative effects upon our relationship with the nonhuman environment-s-by pointing out, for instance, how these advances have fostered in us a kind of grandiose view of the nonhuman world about us, a kind of contempt for that world which does not allow for a more psychologically meaningful relatedness with it; and by pointing out how the superabundance of material products of our scientific technology

The Cultural Frame of Reference

401

tends to surround us and shut us off from a healthier relatedness with that environment. But on the other hand through these advances we have become largely free, over the past few centuries, from many of the animistic distortions which caused ancient man, and which still cause the people of the so-called primitive societies today, to react to the nonhuman environment with irrational fear and awe," Frank points out not only the task which is still before us in this regard -the task of reformulating culturally ingrained patterns of thinking and feeling so that these patterns will be more in accord with the recent findings of the physical sciences-but suggests by implication that through the successful accomplishment of this task we can reap great benefits in terms of an improved psychological relatedness with the physical universe about us. And Einstein emphasizes, in a similar vein, the advances in man's sense of security, in the face of his own self as well as of nature, which the scientific understanding of the universe has brought. In a description of the classical advances in astronomy made by Johannes Kepler, he shows that such advances are won only through the overcoming of barriers, barriers both outside and inside oneself, which have been placed there by the existing culture. He points out that Kepler was investigating a subjectnamely, the movements in space of the earth and the other planets in our solar system-which held immediate danger for him who professed the truth, because this troth challenged the authority of the Church. He shows that Kepler's lifework was possible only after the latter had succeeded in freeing himself to a great extent from the intellectual traditions, concerning both religion and science, into which he had been born. And he describes how Kepler's letters reveal, in occasional remarks about astrology. a :I Although it may be, u was suggested by my comments about our psychological reaction to the threat of atomic annihilation, that we are less free from animism than we might like to suppose; perhaps some animism persists, unbeknownst to us because it wears a modern guise in keeping with modern technology. To be sure, we are no longer convinced that the nonhuman environment is peopled with devils and ghosts; but we react to the atomic bomb and to such concepts or phenomena as "creeping socialism," "inflation," "television," and so on, as though they were living and threatening entities.

402

The Nonhuman Environment

continuing inner struggle with the animistic beliefs of that day. The values-including psychological ones--to mankind of Kepler's discoveries have not yet ceased; for instance, they will presumably form one of the foundation stones, some day, of interplanetary navigation, which in tum can bring to man the enrichment, not only material but also psychological enrichment, of a first-hand knowledge of worlds other than his own. The achievements of the natural sciences can help man to develop a richer ego than was ever possible in prescientific times. Modem means of transportation and communication which have been brought into existence by these sciences enable the average member of our culture to come into contact with his nonhuman environment on a vastly broader--and therefore much more varied-scale than was ever attainable by his predecessor of several hundred years ago. The latter could seldom, if ever, range far beyond the town or the valley where he had his home, whereas the average person now can know at first hand much of the rich variety, as regards nonhuman environment, which is offered by our whole country-its forests and plains, its mountains and seacoasts, its great and infinitely varied works of man himself. And travel even to foreign lands is, of course, much more within the reach of the average person that was even remotely possible a few hundred years ago. The crucial issue, I believe, is whether the members of our culture are able to integrate their experiences a of this vastly broader) richer, and more varied nonhuman environment which science bas opened up for us within, particularly, the past two hundred years. In so far as one can assimilate these experiences) can make them an integral part of one's conscious self, can find a sense of personal feeling-participation in these experiences) to that extent they enrich the ego-they help one to become literally a greater human being. But, on the other hand, in so far as one is exposed to these exI A phrase I borrow from Jurgen R.uesch who, in the previoualy mentioned book by himaeU and Gregory Bateson, expresses the opinion that "because of the great speed of things {in the American culture], the essence of therapeutic procedures in America should consist of giving the patients enough time to integrate their experiences" (119a).

The Cultural Frame of Reference

403

periences in too great a variety and abundance, and at too rapid a rate, for one to be able to so integrate them, to that extent they tend instead to overwhelm the ego. These experiences then become so anxiety-laden that they must be dissociated from our conscious experience, and subsequently such experiences only contribute to an increasing accumulation of undigested, unintegrated "foreign bodies," as it were, in one's personality: experiences which are not available to the conscious self, experiences which represent a chronic drain upon one's energy to maintain them in their dissociated state, experiences which chronically threaten to well up from the unconscious and, with their chaotic disorder, overwhelm the ego. Another way of phrasing the criticism of our culture which I have expressed in this chapter, then, is to say that the cultural institutions (including here all the emphasis in our culture upon the physical sciences and their products) are such as to make it inordinately difficult for the culture members to integrate their experiences with the nonhuman environment. The predominant tendency is instead, I think, for us to be overwhelmed by those experiences. I believe that a few examples, taken along with what has already been said earlier in this chapter, will suffice to illustrate our tendency to become overwhelmed by our contacts with a nonhuman environment which, in this culture, we find to be bewilderingly changeable and varied. An airplane trip, which to an Anne Morrow Lindbergh-as shown in her book, North to the Orient-r-ot to an Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Wind, Sand, and Stars) can be a beautiful and even glorious experience of personal participation in relatedness with the nonhuman environment, is to the average airline passenger of today, apparently, little if anything more than a mode of getting with time-saving rapidity from one place to another; incredibly enough, he may barely glance out of the window during the whole trip, but instead may bury himself, with a kind of world-weary nonchalance, in his newspaper.. Ostensibly this phenomenon of our culture is due simply to the fact that the novelty of air travel has worn off; actually, I believe, it is due also to the fact that the traveler has uncon-

The Nonhuman Environment

scious anxiety about his nonhuman environment's shifting at such a great rate that he cannot assimilate this experience as a personally meaningful one. He reacts in a very similar way, too, I believe, during the train and automobile trips which are so very prominent a part of the lives of the people of our culture, and which used to be, a few decades ago, relatively rare and personally cherishedexperiences. I have already made a number of comments about the super· abundance, in our lives) of the material products of scientific technology. Here again one can find a homely example of what I am talking about. The average home library today is one in which only a small percentage of books have been read, or ever will be read, by their owners; and a much smaller percentage of the books are personally cherished. The others are there largely for appearance's sake, for reasons of social prestige. Books today are produced in a superabundance far beyond the output even a few decades ago, and are more or less shoveled upon us through the medium of giant book clubs which utilize, in their vastly impersonal operations, various procedures (of marketing their product and billing the consumer for it) which science had not yet brought into being several decades ago. We have come a long way, and in some psychological respects a quite unfortunate way, from the days when one bought much fewer books, one bought them at the neighborhood bookstore, one selected them with one's own hands, one took them home and read them, and consequently, much more often than is now the case, one cherished them as valued participants in one's life. It is of course obviously easy, but equally obviously questionable, to assume that the "good old days" were really much better than the times in which we are now living. With that matter of the books, I personally value the advantages which are afforded by these giant book clubs-the ease with which one can obtain a greater variety of books than could readily be procured in earlier years, even within my own lifetime. The crucial point, again, is for the individual culture member to determine for himself to what degree he can integrate his experiences with the nonhuman environment-to find out that degree beyond which such experi-

The Cultura.l Frame of Reference

405

ences become a psychological burden and disruption to his self. Schizophrenic patients, for all their undeniably great differences from normally functioning human beings, provide, once more, a striking example of the pathological process which, at a much lower intensity and in a much less readily detectable fonn, I consider to be taking place here on a broad scale among the "normal" members of our culture. One patient of mine, for instance, whose state of regression was so profound that her ego remained very feebly integrated for many months, showed this process in an especially clear-cut fashion. She was able to tolerate only the barest simplicity as regards room furnishings; whenever the ward personnel tried in a wellmeaning way to afford her somewhat more of what are ordinarily thought to be the bare conveniences of living, her personalityfunctioning became so profoundly fragmented that in my hours with her I had no feeling of being able to deal with any remnant of integrated ego in her for more than an occasional fleeting moment. In later months, as she became well enough to venture an occasional trip to my office for her hours, she showed, while in it, an unmistakable sense of being overwhelmed by the sheer number of material objects in the room, objects which to us are takenfor-granted concomitants of daily living, but which to her evidently possessed a kind of myriad, chaotic unfamiliarity. In still later months, she became able to go with an attendant for occasional shopping trips in the shopping district a half mile from the sanitarium. Prior to each shopping trip she had become, by now, sufficiently well integreted so that I was able to have meaningful communication with her throughout the greater part of each therapeutic session. The attendant would describe her behavior, on each shopping trip, as a kind of rather indiscriminate buying up, with hectic artificial gayety, of everything she could get her hands upon, until the attendant placed a limitgenerally a very liberal limit-upon this, each time. During the first therapeutic session with her following the shopping trip, then, I would find her in a shockingly worsened state-almost palpably fragmented, and quite unable to maintain any continuous relatedness with me whatsoever. It would be two or three days

406

The Nonhuman Environment

before she was able to regain the level of personality integration which she had manifested prior to the shopping trip. I had the distinct impression that each of these first several and rather widely spaced shopping trips, for which she evidenced a pathetic yearning, proved to be quite overwhelming to her, and that one of the reasons why the experience had this traumatic effect upon her was that she was exposed, each time, to such a multitude and variety of objects in the nonhuman environment that she was quite unable to cope with them psychologically. In the cases of a very considerable percentage of the psychotic patients with whom I have worked, I have seen evidence that one of the reasons for the patient's initial seeking (consciously or unconsciously) hospitalization was that the hospital represented a refuge wherein the nonhuman environment is relatively simple, a refuge from a world in which he had found the comparable environment to be progressively overwhelming to him. It is as though he had to find surroundings where the number and variety of incoming perceptual stimuli are sharply reduced, reduced to a level, now, such that he could deal with them while simultaneously dealing with the great amount of nonintegrated memories of past experiences. I am well aware that the members of our culture are not all . or preponderantly, schizophrenic. But a not inconsiderable percentage of them are, and even that great majority who are not schizophrenic may bear more similarity with schizophrenic patients than is at all obvious, This is one of the many respects in which, I believe, we "normals" are akin to the schizophrenic patient: we, too, have a limited tolerance for exposure to complexity and change in our nonhuman environment, a limit up to which we can find such complexity and change to be ego enrich.. ing, but beyond which it becomes disintegrating to us. My colleague Joseph H. Smith makes the valuable observation that we might best consider it a quite open question as to what is "the mature attitude" toward a nonhuman environment such as man had never before, until a relatively few decades ago, confronted--a nonhuman environment which is, for the first time in the hundreds of thousands of years of mankind's existence on

The Cultural Frame of Reference

407

earth, dominated, in a breathtakingly accelerating degree, by man's own scientific devices. Smith points out that one of the primary attributes of maturity is the courage to brave the uncertainty aroused when one faces such an open question rather than fleeing to some pat "answer" as a refuge. Such a note of healthy skepticism, of searching for ever more meaningful "answers" rather than settling for lesser ones, should certainly characterize the individual who aspires toward unceasingly deepening personal maturity in a mid-twentieth-century world made up of not only human beings and the face of Nature, but also of increasingly awesome scientific devices. But it is still rightful, I believe, to point to a circumstance of his life which will always be there, and which can help him find the courage to face his future with open eyes: his relatedness with Nature, a relatedness which, though raised to increasingly complex levels which bear less and less similarity to Thoreau's relatedness with. his homely environment at Walden, will always be there for him to feel if he will but open his heart to it. It is there, for him to feel and know, in the working of man's proudest scientific achievements. To cite but a single example, one can sense this relatedness between man and Nature when one stands on the darkening land at twilight and sees, high above the sunset, a transcontinental jet.. liner drawing its golden vapor trail, thin as a pencil line and straight as an arrow, slowly-at this vast distance-across the sky. Here is beauty which man could not create alone, and which Nature could not create alone; here is beauty which man and Nature, working through man's increasing knowledge of Nature's processes, can create only in their mutual relatedness.

PART

FIVE

TOWARD THE FUTURE

The Potential Value in Further Investigation oj This Subject

CHAPTER

15

Further exploration of this subject can be expected to yield information which will, I believe, be of significant value in various areas of scientific endeavor and human living. In this concluding chapter I shall deal with three such areas. Of these, I shall take up first that one which is most concrete, and then go on to the other two, increasingly abstract and theoretical, areas.

The Daily Care oj Institutionalized Psychiatric Patients Much that has been said in this book has implications for the administrative and nursing care of hospitalized psychiatric patients, and if such work will be approached with an eye to finding out more about the significance of this general subject, many additional implications will, I think, come to light-implications for improvement in our care of these patients.

412

The Nonhuman Environment

When one realizes how integral a part of the deeply psychotic patient's self is formed by the nonhuman environment, how a total loss of the familiar nonhuman environment may be experienced as, literally, a loss of the sense of self, then one may be somewhat less ready to recommend hospitalization in the first place. And if-as will surely still be the case in a great many instances-it is impossible for the patient to be maintained in that environment which is familiar to him, then at least we may see if he can benefit from being permitted to keep with him, on entry into the hospital, a few long-cherished personal possessions. Such possessions might be of real help in affording him some remnant of personal identity, some continuity in his sense of self, upon his being admitted to a ward peopled by strangers whose actions are bewildering to him.' I do not overlook the possibility that the patient's relationships with the entirety of his familiar environment, including the nonhuman as well as the human ingredients of it] may have become so detrimental to him that he needs to throw off that environment quite completely, in order to get a fresh start in life. It is entirely possible that he might not wish to carry with him into the hospital any unnecessary reminders of a life which has become so bankrupt for him. But at least we should give him. a chance to have them if he wishes them. And even if such things could not be a useful part of his life at the outset of his hospitalization, later on, after he has passed through the most profound phase of his illness and is trying to make contact with such elements of his prepsychotic life as can be built into the foundation of a new and better existence, such formerly cherished personal possessions may now come upon the scene in a constructive, integrative way. Dr. Otto A.. Will has done some (unpublished) work at Chestnut Lodge in this regard, work of sufficient promise so that further efforts along this line I After the above passage had been writteD t in a preliminary draft, there appeared the volume, Chf"onie Schizophrenia, by Freeman, Cameron, and McGhie) which contains a brief discussion of the importance, to hospitalised schizophrenic patients, of their personal possessions, and which notes that "the habit of dressing patients in the clothing of others has a marked effect in perplexing them and reinforcing their doubts about their personal identity" (45b) .

Toward the Future

413

are worth making, in a research spirit, to see how much of a place there is for this kind of activity as a part of the over-all hospital treatment of patients. The data which I presented in Part Three suggest that patients, in the course of development of a psychotic illness prior to hospitalization, can in many instances maLntain meaningful relationships with some of the nonhuman elements of their environment (a dog or cat or horse, or a household plant, or various material possessions) for some time after their relationships with other human beings have become swallowed up by the illness. It may well be, then, that as they later start to emerge from the illness, during the course of hospital treatment, relationships with nonhuman, rather than the human, elements of their environment may be the initial development in their slow struggle back-to reality. If that is so, as I believe, it would then be most worth while for us to pay attention to the patient's developing ability, or inability, to relate himself to nonhuman objects-s-whether new ones, or ones which have been procured for him from his home. The clinical material which I have presented here suggests that a timely provision of such objects may help the patient to develop a sense of self, where an unwise allowing him to be exposed to myriad such objects, too early, may undo some ego building which he has already accomplished. I do not mean that it is for us simply to manipulate his nonhuman environment; more than anything, we could gain much information of great clinical as well as theoretical value from observing closely how the patient himself goes about dealing with his nonhuman environment, in the course of the deepening or lessening of his illness. I was much interested to find, after having developed some tentative thoughts in this direction as a result of my own experience, that Margaret Schoenberger Mahler had published in 1952 a paper which touches upon this very subject, in connection with the psychotherapy of psychotic children. In this paper., entitled "On Child Psychosis and Schizophrenia: Autistic and Symbiotic Infantile Psychoses" (101), Mahler describes two types of psychosis found in young children. The less severe, or symbiotic, type occurs, she states, in children who in infancy participated in the

414

The Nonhuman Environment

symbiotic infant-mother relationship which Mahler considers a part of normal infancy; but these children were not able subsequently, prior to treatment, to mature beyond this symbiotic interpersonal relatedness. Of special interest to us is her discussion of the more severe, or autistic, type of psychosis, in which a symbiotic infant-mother relationship never became established in the first place. Concerning these children she says, in part, that . . . the most striking feature is their spectacular struggle against any demand of human (social) contact which might interfere with their hallucinatory delusional need to command a static, greatly constricted segment of their inanimate environment, in which they behave like omnipotent magicians. . . • the autistic child is most intolerant of direct human contact. . . . Such children must be gradually approached with the help of inanimate objects.

In line with the concept of phylogenetic regression which I presented earlier in this book, it seems to me that many deeply regressed schizophrenic patients experience themselves as more inanimate, or animal, than truly human) and that many of them go through a prolonged phase, a phase roughly analogous to in.. fancy, in which much of their meaningful relatedness has to do with nonhuman objects, before they can move on to durable relatedness with other human beings. Further investigation of the daily-life behavior of hospitalized patients who are in intensive psychotherapy may enable us to discern that before they manifest much improvement in interpersonal relationships, they have already gone through a significant) but heretofore unnoticed by us, evolution in their relatedness to the nonhuman elements of their enviromnent. We shall also come to count it, I think, a most significant landmark of progress for any particular patient to whom most of the personnel had been reacting as being nonhuman, when most or all of them now find themselves thinking and feeling about him as a fellow human being. And we shall count it as similarly significant when a patient who has been addressing, or otherwise dealing with, other persons about him as though they were inanimate objects or animals, begins to show a realization that they are human beings. To date, we have paid

Toward the Future

415

too little heed to such clinical developments, and if they have actually come to our attention we have had no theoretical basis for assessing their significance. I hope that this book has succeeded in providing such a theoretical basis.. As regards the selection of personnel for the ward care of such deeply ill patients, it seems to me that a primary requisite should be their having the capacity to sense, and respond to, the fellow human being in these ill, and sometimes quite unhumanappearing persons. By contrast, it is the personnel member who is characterologically prone to reacting to his fellow human beings as nonhuman who does these patients the most harm. For these patients, it seems to me, any cc human" response that another person can feel and express toward them---whether it be a response of kindness and solicitude, or of anger or even of contempt-rnay be felt as a form of loving relatedness; on the other hand, the thing which they can least endure, and which is most harmful to them, is to be reacted to as a kind of nonhuman object, as a something which is on a different plane of existence from the personnel member himself." A head nurse who is prone to reacting to the patients as being nonhuman objects-clothing-store mannequins, for example-to be clothed and fed and bathed and kept quiet, can nullify much of one's labor in intensive psychotherapy with these patients. Chestnut Lodge has been fortunate in having only rare experience with such nurses. I do not mean to say that a patient should never be dealt with as if he were a nonhuman object. It is possible that, at times when he is minimally able to assume responsibility for himself, to be so dealt with may come as a great relief to him. But the per· 2 As one paranoid Ichizophrenic woman phrased it, with reference to aD oft-recuning situation in her childhood when abe was witneuing a struggle of wills between her mother and the maternal grandmother, UI wasntt even given the acknowledgment of a piece 01 furniture in the room]" The motherJ when not absorbed with her relationship with her own mother, was often immersed in highly.aututic fantasies, such that her daughter could seldom experience a perscn-to-perscn meeting with her. It is not surprising that a patient, after this kind of experience in her formative years, cannot endure to regard any of the actions of other persons as connoting indifference to) or ignoring of, herself; it is Jess anxiety provoking to her to construe these actions as expre!sive of murderow feeling or contempt toward herself, rather than to realize that no acknowledgment of her existence is implied in them.

416

The Nonhuman Environment

sonnel about him should not be accustomed to dealing with people in this fashion; they should be capable of meeting the patient as a fellow human being at the earliest indication that he is seeking for such a relatedness.. The deeply regressed patient, more than anyone else except for the infant, needs to have a nonhuman environment which is not only relatively stable and relatively uncomplex, but also beautiful. Beauty is here of far more than merely aesthetic significance. I think it not too much to say that a schizophrenic patient who has gone through many months of living on a drab, and even ugly, disturbed ward of a hospital has suffered the additional trauma, beyond those which he had suffered prior to entry into the hospital, that this drabness and ugliness has become an integral part of himse1f-a detrimental effect which will require much additional psychotherapy, and much of a more beneficial life experience, to undo. Contrariwise) whatever of beauty we can bring to him may be of great and lasting benefit to his personality.. There are many other implications, from what has been presented in this book, for the hospital care of these patients. For example, patients should be freely allowed to cherish nonhuman objects for "sentimental") reasons, as a small child does, irrespective of the so-called practical value of these objects. They should have much greater access to animal pets and to plants than is now generally the case; some tentative efforts have been made at Chestnut Lodge in providing animal pets for hospitalized patients, and further experience needs to be gained in this regard. I shall not try to cover any further details here; such detailed applications of what has been said here will become obvious enough to anyone who continues to give long and serious consideration to this subject. One general benefit which I would expect to see emerge from further attention to all this is a more meaningful collaboration between psychotherapists on the one hand and the occupational therapy department of the hospital on the other hand; I am assuming that the difficulty which obtains at Chestnut Lodge in this respect is present, in varying degrees, in other psychiatric hospitals.. That department, much of whose activity involves the patient's relating himself to the non-

Toward the Future

417

human environment (in various crafts, gardening, and other forms of work) has thus far existed in a realm somewhat far apart from that of intensive psychotherapy, which to date has concerned itself almost exclusively with the patient's intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships. Heretofore our psychoanalytic theory has been too limited to help us bridge the gulf to a meaningful collaboration with those fellow personnel members who work in the occupational therapy branch of the hospital. I hope that this book will provide some of the theory which can fonn such a bridge.

Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy An increased alertness, on the part of the analyst or therapist, to data concerning this general subject as those data come to light in the course of his ongoing relationship with the patient will, I think, yield rich information both for a deeper understanding of individual psychology and interpersonal relations in general, and for improved psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic technique. Particularly would we benefit, I think) as regards a deeper understanding of early ego formation. An increased ability to detect data of this sort) and to assess their significance, would enable us to arrive at psychodynamically more meaningful diagnoses, sounder prognoses, and more effective techniques of therapeutic intervention. For instance, we may be able to find that the various types of neurosis and psychosis involve differing psychodynamics, each characteristic for that particular variety of illness, in this area of the patient's relatedness with the nonhuman environment. If it were established that this is the case) then in undertaking psychoanalysis or psychotherapy with a patient of any particular diagnostic category, we would not consider our task complete until those particular psychodynamics had been dealt with and the neurotic or psychotic mechanisms here had been resolved. I have not sufficiently explored this matter of differential psychopathology in respect to the relatedness of different patients to the nonhuman environment, to attempt more than to suggest

418

The Nonhuman Enuuonment

some of the possibilities with reference to a few diagnostic entities. As regards schizophrenia, it seems that one characteristic feature is the patient's inability to conceive of a nonhuman environment which is apart from, and vastly larger than, either individual man or collective mankind. The patient instead seems to conceive of that environment as an expression of the personality of an omnipotent other person, or of himself at those times when he himself is subjectively omnipotent. I do not know, but I think there may be further distinctions among three of the subtypes of schizophrenia. The paranoid schizophrenic seems relatively inclined to conceive of the nonhuman environment as being under the more or less finn control of some omnipotent human beingwhether another human being, or himself. By contrast, I have seen some evidence that the catatonic patient conceives of himself as coterminous with a nonhuman environment in a state of imminently threatening chaotic uncontrollability. "And from what I know of hebephrenic schizophrenia} it appears that the "self" of anyone of these patients exists in the form of innumerable fragments, completely indistinguishable to the patient from a similarly highly fragmented nonhuman (as well, of course, as human) environment. These three different types of ego states can be found in the course of future investigation, I think, to have their parallels in the early ego development of the normal infant Concerning hysteria, Harry Stack Sullivan (151) has made the comment that the hysteric was treated, during childhood, as a toy-"as something of a plaything-a decoration of the parent's personality-s-rather than as a growing personality," and my findings in my own work with such patients have indicated likewise that this is one of the characteristic features of this kind of neurosis. As regards obsessive-compulsive states, it may be that the patient's time.consuming preoccupation with keeping (for instance) his office and his desk top in an excessively neat condition, while the secret contents of the desk drawers are in great disorder) may be indicative not alone of such interpersonal difficulties as a highly ambivalent compliance-defiance and an anal sexual orientation, but also may be expressive of a deep-seated confusion, disorienta-

Toward tne Fuiur«

419

tion, comparable perhaps with a state of ego development in the infant wherein the latter is struggling to find order in the totality of the outer environment. It is noteworthy that in severe compulsive states the patient spends a disproportionately great amount of time in relating to nonhuman objects around him (whether in straightening furniture, checking gas jets and doors, fussing with clothing or books or papers, or what not) and a relatively small amount of time in relating directly to other human beings; even when he is doing the latter, he tends to deal with them as relatively unmanageable inanimate objects rather than as truly human. All this suggests to me that part of his ego exists at a primitive level wherein, as is perhaps the case with the normal infant, it is struggling to establish some perceptual order in the nonhuman environment before it can go on to form truly interhuman relationships. In fetishism, it may well be that the patient's sexual interest in the particular nonhuman object in question rests not alone upon various transference determinants, sexual and otherwise, but also upon a remnant of unconscious identification with his nonhuman environment. His symptom may indicate, that is, a failure fully to differentiate himself from that environment, an ego defect qualitatively akin to that of the schizophrenic, although much less pervasive a defect than one finds in the latter. I have had some experience with patients who manifested the symptom of fetishism, but not enough experience to advance this as a more than quite tentative hypothesis. A special study of patients' Rorschach responses) and of their dreams in the course of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, with an eye to data indicative of the patients' state of relatedness to the nonhuman environment, might well yield valuable information as to their current level of ego development, information which would help in assessing, in the first instance, their ability to utilize psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, and, in the second instance, subtle evidence of change for better or worse during the course of treatment. Also as regards prognosis, we may find historical data indicative of meaningful relatedness with the nonhuman environment which, even in the absence of many indications of con-

420

The Nonhuman Environmen'

structive interpersonal relations in the patient's past, will show us that the patient does indeed have some foundation to build upon in our present work with him. My basic conviction, here, is that in every patient, of whatever diagnostic category, we will become able to detect, in the course of deeply reaching psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, evidences of an unceasing struggle toward fuller differentiation as a human being as distinct from that which is sensed as nonhuman within the personality. Perhaps this struggle can be more accurately described as an unceasing effort to transform those elements of the personality which are subjectively nonhuman into increments of the subjectively human area of the personality. This is a struggle analogous to, and probably at many points linked with, the ongoing struggle to transform id into ego. It is a struggle which is, I believe, universal among human beings, rather than being limited to psychiatric patients. The deeply repressed nature of this struggle, the anxiety attendant upon it, in psychoanalysts and psychotherapists themselves accounts, to my way of thinking, for the widespread neglect of this area of psychodynamics to date. In the future, if we can carry our psychoanalysis and psychotherapy deeply enough to include the unearthing of this struggle, we can help the patient to a deeper realization of his own humanness, than is achieved at present when we work exclusively within conventional "intrapersonal" and "interpersonal" concepts. We need to become able to sense the existence of this struggle behind the more superficial struggle within the patient toward establishing a sexual identity as either a man or a woman; behind this stands a deeper conflict) the conflict between a desire to be human and a desire to be nonhuman. 'When a patient spends much of a session in talking about an animal pet, we need to be aware that this may be another manifestation of that basic struggle, despite however many data-data still worthy of investigation in their own right-suggesting that the patient is experiencing toward the animal various feelings and attitudes which are transferred from some other human being. When we find the patient reacting to us as being nonhuman (as when one of my

Toward the Future

421

male patients, awed and incredulous at the degree of "my" being so nonhuman, so like a machine, said ironically, "How long ago did they install you at Chestnut Loclg~ght years? I didn't know that Univacs had been invented that long ago!"), or when we find ourselves unable to react to our patient as being a fellow member of mankind) we can surmise that this basic struggle in the patient is now on the analytic scene. Our cue is not to take such developments "personally," as primarily indicative of our own being less than human, but rather to see them as opportunities to help the patient become aware of this basic struggle within himself, a struggle which does not set him qualitatively apart from ourself or from the rest of mankind. The therapist's or analyst's own increased awareness of this basic conflict) or struggle, in himself win pay dividends in his work not only through his avoidance of taking those just-mentioned developments "personally." In addition, there is probably a phase in the course of every psychoanalysis or psychotherapy) a phase while the patient is deeply involved in regressive feelings of subjective oneness with the totality of his environment, when the therapist or analyst may participate most usefully as a kind of nonhuman object, a relatively silent and motionless piece of furniture, for example. For him to participate with more overt activity may interfere with the patient's experiencing a sense of oneness with the totality of his surroundings, and thus may interfere with the patient's going on to a really profound awareness of himself as a distinct human entity. Thus the analyst or therapist needs, not only for his own personal comfort in his work but also for his performing it with deeper capability, to be able to meet this conflict within himself. There is another view of this matter which John L. Cameron, a colleague on the Chestnut Lodge staff, has helped me to see. For the deepest levels of therapeutic interaction to be reached, both patient and therapist must experience a temporary breaching of the ego boundaries which demarcate each participant from the other. In this state there occurs, we believe, a temporary introjection, by the therapist, of the patient's pathogenic conflicts; the therapist thus deals with these at an intrapsychic, unconscious

422

The Nonhuman Environment

as well as conscious level, bringing to bear upon them the capacities of his own relatively strong ego. Then, similarly by introjection, the patient benefits from this intrapsychic therapeutic work which has been accomplished in the therapist. For both therapist and patient to participate in this profoundly therapeutic interaction-for, that is, this deepest level of therapy to be reached ~ach must brave the circumstance that such "interaction" tends to give one the horrifying sensation that one is not fully human; one tends to feel, instead, as though one were an animal, or even something inanimate. Cross-Fertilization Between the Behavioral Sciences and the Physical Sciences

It seems to me that further investigation of this subject, the place of the nonhuman environment in human personality development and functioning, may show us heretofore-unseen connections between the data of the behavioral sciences on the one hand and the data of the physical sciences on the other hand.. That is, various of the processes which have been detected in nature, for example, by physicists and chemists and astronomers and so on, may have more to do with psychology and psychiatry and sociology than we have thus far realized; and, conversely, our study of this particular subject may very possibly unearth data which are not Without relevance to those other sciences, the physical sciences, which to date we have fructified practically not at all. Certainly a process of fertilization working in the former direction is easy to visualize; my very mode of presentation of the subject in this book has indicated how heavily one must rely, in investigating this area, upon the findings of persons who work in other fields of human endeavor-physics, chemistry, embryology, philosophy, ethics and religion, art, and so on. At many points in my work here, I have felt convinced that if only I possessed an expert knowledge of anyone of these other fields, I would be able to perceive new facets of the subject before me.

T award the Future

423

Historically, psychology and the other behavioral sciences are generally acknowledged to have benefited repeatedly by utilizing, in the acquisition and evaluation of their own data, concepts which have been developed by the physical sciences. In each instance, the concept proves eventually to be a chain which needs to be" removed, but only after it has served as a guide-line in e'xpaneling our view beyond its former horizon. From the science of hydrodynamics, Freud borrowed his hydraulic theory of the libido, a theory which carried psychiatry a long way forward before the limit of its applicability was reached; and from the same gen. eral field (Le., the science of physics) we have found that the concepts of cybernetics can illuminate some of the data of human behavior, From chemistry, the discovery of the phenomenon of ambivalence-e-of a combined positive-and-negative electrical charge upon certain chemical elements in solution-helped to pave the way for our discovery of the state of emotional ambivalence in human beings; and our knowledge of the state of dynamic equilibrium that obtains in a chemical reaction which has progressed to "completion" helps to prepare us, after we have passed from a study of chemistry in college and medical school and come to the study of psychiatry, for seeing intraper... sonal conflicts and interpersonal processes in similarly dynamic terms. Likewise, what we have learned from physiology, of the body's physiological state of dynamic equilibrium termed the milieu interne by Claude Bernard and "homeostasis" by Walter B. Cannon, assists us in becoming aware of similar dynamic equilibria in human groups-whether the families of psychiatric patients, or the group of patients-and-personnel on a psychiatric ward, or whatever other social group.. More than once, the influence of these physical concepts upon the behavioral sciences has been deplored; but I think they have been detrimental only when we have let them outlive their usefulness in our field-when we have tried to adhere to them after they have been discarded even by the field of science in which they originated and to which they were, once, most applicable.

W. R. D. Fairbairn, in An Object-Relations Theory of the Personali'y (38) , says in this regard:

424

The Nonhuman Environment

It is a curious feature of modern times that the scientific atmosphere of a period appears to be always dominated by the current conceptions of physics. . . . the scientific atmosphere of Freud's day was largely dominated by the Helmholtzian conception that the universe consisted in a conglomeration of inert, immutable and indivisible particles to which motion was imparted by a fixed quantity of energy separate from these particles. However, modem atomic physics has changed all that; and, if psychology has not yet succeeded in setting the pace for physics, it is perhaps not too much to expect that psychology should at least try to keep in step

[38a].

Gregory Bateson, in the previously mentioned book by Jurgen Ruesch and himself (119), presents evidence for his impression that psychiatric thinking is currently undergoing changes in the same direction as is the thinking in various other scientific disci.. plines. He says that there appears to be a convergence between psychiatry and the mathematical, natural) and engineering scien-

ces.

J. Robert Oppenheimer in The Open Mind (110) expresses) on the other hand, concern over what he regards as a tendency toward increasing compartmentalization of the different sciences from one another, and particularly compartmentalization of science as a whole from the daily thinking and living of the nonscientist majority of our people. I know that it is a very happy occasion at the Institute [the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton of which Oppenheimer is director] when some piece of work turns up which is of interest to both the mathematicians and the physicists. I t is a very rare occasion and we tend to ring bells when a small bit of cement can be found between their interests [I lOa]. I believe that the science of today is subtler, richer, more relevant to man's life and more useful to man's dignity than the science which had such a great effect on the age of the enlightenment, had such a great effect, among other things, on the forms and patterns, traditions and hopes--reflected in our Constitution-of human society. Science is not retrograde; and there is no doubt that the quantum mechanics represents a more interesting, more

Toward the Future

425

instructive, richer analogy of human life than Newtonian mechanics could conceivably be. There is no doubt that even the theory of relativity, which has been so much vulgarized and so little understood, that even the theory of relativity is a matter which would be of real interest to people at large. There is no doubt that the findings of biology and astronomy and chemistry are discoveries that would enrich our whole culture if they were understood. And what is perhaps more troublesome, there is a gulf between the life of the scientist and the life of a man who isn't actively a scientist, dangerously deep [110b].

It seems to me that if psychiatry is ever to arrive at the proud day when it can unearth findings which will be of value to the natural sciences, that day can best be reached by our pursuit of this particular subject, the psychological significance of the nonhuman environment in human living. It may well be that the individual natural scientist who has gained unusually great access to, awareness of, and psychological freedom vis-a-vis, that portion of the nonhuman "environment" which is in himself will be in an unusually favorable position to make significant discoveries about the nonhuman environment of the universe about him. And surely his advance to a position from which he can make such discoveries will be facilitated if he lives in a climate of public opinion which is relatively enlightened with regard to the role of that environment in human living. I believe that psychiatry-and psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in particular--may come to be of value in this regard, in three different respects. First, we may help the individual natural scientist to achieve a fuller awareness of the nonhuman "environment" within himself. Secondly, we may make some contribution to a more enlightened public opinion with regard to this subject, possibly through such publications as this one and, more probably, through sufficiently deep-reaching psychoanalysis or psychotherapy with our patients to include this area of their personality development. Thirdly, analysts and therapists who have achieved some detailed familiarity with one or another of the natural sciences may, in the course of exploring this area of personality development in themselves and in their patients) detect processes at

426

The Nonhuman Environment

work which can be found to have analogues, as yet undetected, in the processes of the physical universe about us. To return to earth now, in closing, after having entered into increasingly speculative realms, we come to the solid and unmistakable fact that we simply cannot know, ahead of time, what benefits may flow from research into any particular subject. But there is every reason to expect that the fruits of further investigation concerning this subject which I have been discussing will be abundant indeed.

Bibliography

1. Ackerman, N . W. & Behrens, M. L. A study of family diagnosis. Amer.]. Orthopsych., 26:66-78, 1956. 2. Andersen, H. C. Andersen's Fair'Y Tales. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1945.. This tale is on pp. 192.. 211. (a) pp.83...93. 3. Arey, L . B. Developmental Anatom~A Text-book and Laboratory Manual of Embryology.. Philadelphia: W. B. Saun..

den Company, 1938. 4. Arieti, S. Interpretation of Schizophrenia.. New York: Robert Brunner, 1955. (a) pp.214-215. 4a.. Arlow, J. A.. The structure of the deja vu experience. J. Amer.. Psychoanal.. Assn .., 7:611-631, 1959. , 5. Bak, R. C. The schizophrenic defense against aggression. Int. l- Psychoanal., 35: 129-134, 1954. 6. Balint, M. Early developmental states of the ego. Primary object-love (1937). Int. J. Psyahoanal..~ 30:265-273, 1939. 7. Balint, M. On love and hate. Read at the Seventeenth Inter.. national Psycho..analytical Congress in Amsterdam, 1951. Published for the first time in authors book (ref. 8), pp.

141-156.

428

Bibliograph1

8. Balint, M. Primary Love and Psycho-analytic Technique. New York: Liveright, 1953. (a) p. 100. (b) p. 145. 9. Balint, M. Friendly expanses-horrid empty spaces. Int. J. Psychoanal., 36:225-241, 1955. (a) p. 239. (b) p. 239. 10. Benjamin, J. D . A method for distinguishing and evaluating formal thinking disorders in schizophrenia. Language and Thought in Schizophrenia: Collected Papers, edited by J. S. Kasanin. University of California Press, 1944. 11. Benson, E.. F. The horror horn. In:The Grip of Terror, edited by G. Conklin. Garden City, N.Y.: Permabooks, 1951. (a) pp. 65·67. (b) p. 70. 12. Bertschinger, H . Process of recovery in schizophrenia. Psychoanal. tu«, 3:176-188, 1916; quote is from p. 187. 13. Bleuler, E.. Dementia Praecox OT the Group of Schizophrenias (1911). New York: International Universities Press, 1950. Quote is from p. 64. (a) p. 67. 14. Bornstein, B. The analysis of a phobic child . The Psychoanalytit Study of the Child, 3/4: 181-227. New York: International Universities Press, 1949. 15.. Boss, M. The Analysis of Dreams. New York: Philosophical Library, 1958. (a) Chapter 12. 16. Bradbury, R. The Martian Chronicles. New York: Bantam

Books, 1954. p. 144. 17. Brill, A. A.. The universality of symbols (1943). The Year.. book of Psychoanalysis, 1:63-78. New York: International Universities Press, 1945; quote is from p, 76. 18.. Brodey, W. M. Narcissistic relationship-s-a paradox (1958). To be published. 19. Brodey, W. M. Some family operations and schizophrenia: A study of five hospitalized families each with a schizophrenic member (1958). To be published in Arch. Neurol. & Psychiat. 20. Buber, M. Distance and relation. Psychiatry, 20:97.. 104, 1957. 21.. Burnham, D. L. Some problems in communication with schizophrenic patients. [. Arne,. Psychoanal. Assn., 3~67-81, 1955; quote is from p, 78. 22. Byrd, R. E. Alone. New York: G. P.. Putnam's Sons, 1938. Quote is from pp.. 141-142. (a) p. 278. (b) pp. 56-57. (c) pp, 84-85. (d) pp, 144-145. (e) p. 189. (f) pp. 295-296. (g) p.. 120.

Bibliography

429

23.. Carson, R. L.. The Sea Around Us. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951. (a) pp. 13·15. 24. Collier, J. Green thoughts. The Touch of Nutmeg. New York: Press of the Readers Club, 1943.. 25.. Collodi, C. (Carlo Lorenzini). Pinocchio-The Sto,'! of a Puppet. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. 26. Custance, J. Wisdom, Madness and Follry---The Philosoph'Y of a Lunatic. New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1952.. (a) pp. 18-19. (b) pp.55-56. (c) pp.. 25-26. 27. Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. New York: Modem Library, 1932. (a) p. 71. (b) p.72. 28. Darr, G. & Worden, F.. Case report-30 years after an infantile autistic disorder. Amer.. J.. Orthoprychiat.J 21 (3), 1951. 29. Dunbar, F. Psychoanalytic notes relating to syndromes of asthma and hay fever. PSt)'choanal. Quart..~ 7: 25-68, 1938; quote is from pp. 47-48. 30. Einstein, A. Out of My Later Years. New York: Philosophical Library, 1950. (a) pp. 10t-l02. (b) p. 78. (c) p. 141. (d) p. 146. (e) pp.213-214. 31. Eissler, K . R. Notes upon the emotionality of a schizophrenic patient and its relation to problems of technique. The Psychoanalytic Study of the ChildJ 8:199-251. New York: International Universities Press} 1953. 32. Ekstein, R. The space child's time machine: on "reconstruction" in the psychotherapeutic treatment of a schizophrenoid child. Arner. l- Orthopsychiat., 24:492-506) 1954. 33. Elkisch, P. & Mahler, M. S. The "influencing machine" in the light of the psychotic child's body-image development. Pre.. sented at the American Psychoanalytic Association, New York, Dec. 6, 1958. Published as: On infantile precursors of the "influencing machine" (Taw). The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 14:219-235. New York: International Universities Press, 1959. 34. Erikson, E. H. Configurations in play-clinical notes. Psychoanal. QuaTt., 6:139-214, 1937. 35. Erikson, E. H. Childhood and Society. New York: Norton, 1950.. 36. Erikson, E.. H. Growth and crisis of the "healthy personality." Personality in Nature, Society and Culture, edited by Clyde

430

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

45a.

45b.

45c.

46.

47.

Bibliography

Kluckhohn and H. A. Murray. New York: Knopf, 2nd ed., 1953; pp. 185-225. Erikson, E. H. Young Man Luther-A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Norton, 1958. (a) pp, 261-262. Fairbairn, W. R. D. An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality. New York: Basic Books, 1954. (a) p, 150. Federn, P. Ego Psychology and the Psychoses. New York: Basic BooksJ 1952. Fenichel, O. The Psychoanalytic Theory of N'"70sis. New York : Norton, 1945. Quote is from p. 417. (a) p. 34. (b) pp. 417-418. (e) p. 440. (d) p. 427. (e) p. 146. (f) p. 205. Ferencsi, S. Stages in the development of the sense of reality (1913). Sex in Psychoanalysis. New York: Robert Brunner, 1950. See pp. 227-228. Elugel, J. C. The Psychology of Clothes. London: Hogarth Press, 1930. Fountain, G. Adolescent into adult: an inquiry (1958). Pre.. sented at the American Psychoanalytic Association, New York, Dec. 5, 1958. Frank, L. K. Nature and Human Nature-Man's New Image of Himself. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1951. (a) p. 144. (b) p, 84. (c) p. 91. Freeman, T., Cameron, J. L., & McGhie, A. Chronic Schizophr,nia. New York: International Universities Press, 1958. (a) p.74. (b) p. 114. Freud, A. The Ego and the Mechanisms of De/ens, (1936). New York: International Universities Press, 1946. Freud, A. Some remarks on infant observation. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 8:9-19. New York: International Universities Press, 1953. Freud, A. In: Problems of infantile neurosis: a discussion. The Psychoanalytic Study of the C hild, 9: 16-71. New York: International Universities Press, 1954. Quote is from pp. 68..69. Freud, S. Psychoanalytic notes upon an autobiographical acCOWlt of a case of schizophrenia (dementia paranoides) (,1911). Collected Papers, 3:387..470. London: Hogarth Press, 1953. Freud, S. On narcissism-an introduction (1914) . Collected Papers, 4: 3D-59. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.

Bibliogra ph'Y

431

48. Freud, S. Instincts and their vicissitudes (1915) . Collected Papers, 4:60-83. London: Hogarth Press, 1953. 49. Freud, S. One of the difficulties of psycho-analysis (1917). CoUected Papers, 4~347.356. London: Hogarth Press, 1946. Quote is from pp. 351-352. 50. Freud, S. Beyond th» Pleasure Principle (1920). London: Ho.. garth Press, 1948. 51. Freud, S. Neurosis and psychosis (1924). Collected Papers, 2: 250-254. London: Hogarth Press, 1953. Quote from p. 253 . 52. Freud, S. On negation. Int. ]. PJ'Ychoanal., 6:367-371, 1925. 53. Freud, S. Analysis terminable and interminable (1937). Int. J. Prychoanal., 18:373.405, 1938. 54. Friedman, M. S. MaTlin Buber-s-The Life of Dialogue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. Quote is from p. 258. (a) p. 57. (b) p. 58. (c) P: 61. (d) p, 139. (e) pp, 130-.131. (f) p. 9. ~5. Fromm, E. The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1955. (a) pp. 48-49. (b) p, viii. (c) pp. 23..24. (d) p, 25. (e) pp. 26-27. (f) p. 32. (g) p. 178. (h) p. 93. (i) p. 270. (j) pp. 359-360. . 56. Furman, E. An ego disturbance in 'a young child. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child J 11 ~ 312-335. New York: International Universities Press, 1956. 57. Gantt, W. H. An experimental approach to psychiatry. AmeT. ]. Psychiat., 92: 1007~ 1936. 58. GesellJ A. & IIg, F. L. Feeding Behavior of Infants. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1937. 59. Gheerbrant, A. Journey to the Far Amazon. New York: Simon 8t Schuster, 1954. (a) P: 220. (b) p. 347. 60. Ghiselln, B., ed. The Creative Process-A Symposium. New York: Mentor Books, 1955. (First published by the University of California Press in 1952.) Quote is from "Notes on Sculpture" by H. Moore, p, 75. (a) pp. 14-15. (b) p. 58. (c) p. 59. (d) p. 63. II 61. Goldfarb, W. The animal symbol in the Rorschach test and an animal association test. Rorschach. Research Exchange 9 ~ 8-22, 1945. 62. Goldstein, K. The significance of psychological research in schizophrenia. J. Neru, & Ment, Dis., 97: 261-280, 1943. 63. Goldwater, R. Vincent van Gogh. The Pocket Library of J

Bibliograph,

432

Great Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with Pocket Books, 1953. Quote is a commentary on Plate II. 64. Graves, R. The Greek Myths (Vols. I and II, 1955). Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1957. 65. Greenson, R. R .. The struggle against identification. J. Arner. Psychoanal. Assn ... 2:200-217, 1954. 66. Hamilton, E. Mythology. New York: A Mentor Book published by the New American Library, 1953. Quote is from p. 279. (a) pp, 143·146. (b) pp. 211-212. (c) p. 239. (d) pp. 290-291. (e) p, 292. (f) pp. 88..89. (g) pp. 73-74. (h)

p.312. 67. Hartmann, H. Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. (1939). Translated by David Rapaport. New York: International Universities Press, 1958. (a) pp. 102-103. (b) pp. 25-26. (c) p. 59. (d) pp. 48-49. (e) p, 51. (f) pp, lffi-49. (g) p.59. (h) pp.36.37. 68. Hartmann, H. Psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. The Psychoanal'jJtic Study of the C hild, 5 ~ 7-17. New York: International Universities Press, 1950. (a) p. 12. (b) pp.8-9. 69. Hartmann, H. Comments on the psychoanalytic theory of the ego. The PS'Ychoanalytic Stud" of the Child, 5: 74-96. New York: International Universities Press, 1950. (a) p. 86. (b) p. 79. (c) p. 78. (d) pp. 78-79. (e) p, 79. (f) pp. 81·82. (g) p. 75. (h) pp. 80-81. (i) p. 77. 70. Hartmann" H. Contribution to the metapsychology of schizo.. phrenia. The Ps~choanal'Ytic Study of the Child, 8: 177·198. New York: International Universities Press, 1953. (a) pp. 185-186. (b) p, 169. 71. Hartmann, H. Notes on the reality principle. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child3 11: 31-53. New York: Intemational Universities Press, 1956. (a) p. 42. (b) pp. 34-35. (c) p.36. 72. Hartmann, H., Kris" E., & Loewenstein, R. M. Comments on the formation of psychic structure. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 2:11-38. New York: International Universities Press, 1946. (a) pp. 20-21. (b) p, 19. (c) pp, 20-21. (d) pp.20..21. 73. Heiman, M. On the role of animals. Psychoanal. Quart., 25: 568-585, 1956. 74. Heron, W., Bexton, W. H., & Hebb, D. o. Cognitive effects

Bibliograph'Y

433

of a decreased variation to the sensory environment. Arney. Psychologist, 8:366, 1953. 75. Hertzman, M. & Pearce, J. The personal meaning of the human figure in the Rorschach. Psychiat,'Y, 10:413-422, 1947. (a) pp.413-415. (b) pp. 417,419. (c) p.421. 76. Herzog, M. Annapuma. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1953. (a) p, 16. (b) pp. 208·209. (c) p. 12. 77. Heyerdahl, T. Ron-Tiki: Garden City, N.Y.: Pennabooks, 1953. (First published by Rand McNally, 1950.) (a) PP4

96-97. 78. Hill, L. B. Psychotherapeutic Intervention in Schizophrenia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. Quotes are from p. 76. (a) .pp. 65-66. (b) p.52. (c) p. 115. (d) pp. uo-in. (e) p. 115. (f) pp. 144-145. 79. Hoffer, W. Development of the body ego. The Psychoanalytic Stud'Y ~f the cuu, 5~ 18-23. New York: International Universities Press, 1950. 80. Hofler, W. Oral aggressiveness and ego development. Int. /. Psychoanal., 31: 156-160, 1950. 81. Hudson, W. H. Green Mansions. New York: Modem Library, 1944. (a) p. vii. (b) pp. 31-32. (c) pp.56·57. (d) p. 159. (e) p.vii. (f) p, 240. 824 Inhelder, B. & Piaget, J. The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence. New York: Basic Books, 1958. (a) pp.342-346. (b) p.346. 83. Jacobson, E. On psychotic identifications. Int. [. Psychoanal., 35: 102-108, 1954. 84. Jacobson, E. Contribution to the metapsychology of psychotic identifications. ]. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 2~239·262, 1954. 84a. Jacobson, E. The self and the object world: vicissitudes of their infantile cathexes and their influence on ideational and affective development. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 9: 75.127. New York: Jnternational Universities Press, 1954. 84b. Jacobson, E. Depersonalization. ]. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 7:581-610, 1959. See pp. 602·610. 85. James, W. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York. Modem Library. (a) p, 481. (b) p. 157. (c) pp. 307-308. (d) p.63. (e) p.66. (f) p. 147. (g) pp. 148-149. (h) p, 70. (i) p. 71. (j) pp. 56·57. (k) p. 269. (I) p. 147.

Bibliography

434

86. Kafka, F. The metamorphosis. German Stories and Tales (edited by R. Pick). New York: The Pocket Library, pub. lished by Pocket Books, Inc., 1955. 87. Kanner, L. Problems of nosology and psychodynamics of early infantile autism. Amer. J. OrthoprychitJt., 19:416-426, 1949. Quote is from p. 416. (a) p, 421. (b) p.422. (c) pp.424425. 88. Klein, M. The psycho-analytic play technique: its history and significance. New Directions in Psycho-Analysis, edited by M. Klein, P. Heimann 8t R. E. Money-Kyrle. New York: Basic Books, 1955. (a) p. 20. 89. Kris, E. Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. New York: International Universities Press, 1952. (a ) Chapter 7. (b) p. 312. (c) p. 197. (d) p. 284. 90. Kuhie, L. S. The distortion of the symbolic process in neurosis and psychosis. /. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 1: 59.86, 1953. 91. Langer, S. K. Philosophy in a New Ke')'-A. Stud,), in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. New York: Mentor Books, 1956. (First published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1942.) (a) p. 100. (b) p. 133. 92. Lewin, B. D. Reconsideration of the dream screen. Psychoanal. QutJ1't., 22: 174-199, 1953. 93. Liddell, H. S. The manifestations of experimental neuroses. Handbook of Experimental Psychopatholog,,~ edited by C. Murchison. Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press, 1942. 94. Life;l Editorial Staff of; and Barnett, L. (1955). (These arti... cles have been published, more recently, in book form) : The World We Liue In. New York: Time Incorporated, 1955. 95. Lilly, J. Illustrative strategies for research on psychopathology in mental health. Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry

Symposium, No.2: 13-44, 1956. 96. Lindbergh, A. M. North to the Orient. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935.

97. Little, M. "R"-the analyst's total response to his patient's needs. Int. t. Psychoanal., 38~240·254, 1957. 98. Little, M. On delusional transference (transference psychosis). Int.J. Psych 0 anal. 39:134-138. 1958. 99. Look Magazine. October I, 1957, p. 106 ft'., unsigned article entitled "Titian." j

Bibliograph'Y

435

100. Lorenz, K. Z. King Solomon's Ring-New Light on Animal Wa"s. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1952. (a) pp. 128129.

101. Mahler, M. S. On child psychosis and schizophrenia: autistic and symbiotic infantile psychoses. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 7:286·305. New York: International Universities Press, 1952.

102. Mahler, M. S. Autism and symbiosis, two extreme disturbances of identity. Int. t. Psychoanal., 39: 77-83, 1958. 103. Massennan, J. H. Principles of Dynamic Psychiatry. Philadel.. phia: Saunders, 1946.

t04. Mead, M. & Calas, N., eds. Primitive Heritage. New York: Random House, 1953. (Passage is by Frank Hamilton Cush-

ing). Quote is from p. 261. (a) p. xxiii, (b) pp, 33-34. (c) p. 135. (d) p, 143. (e) p. 33. (f) pp. 258-259. 105. Miller, N. E. Experimental studies of conflict. Personalit" and the Behavior Disorders, edited by J. MeV. Hunt. New York: Ronald Press, 1944. 106. Moravia, A. Two Adolescenls. New York: Signet Books, 1952. (The first English translation of this Italian novel was published by Farrar, Straus and Company, New York, 1950.) (a) pp.73-76. (b) pp.254-256. 107. New York Times. Sunday, November 28, 1948 (editorial page) . 108. New Yorker 1950-1955 Album. New York: Harper, 1955.

109. Nunberg, H. On the catatonic attack (1920). Practice and Theor')' of PS1Cho4nal,sU. New York: International Universities PtfSS, 1955. Quote is from pp. 8-9. (a) p. 9. (b) p. 8. 110. Oppenheimer, J. R. The Open Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955. (a) p, 123. (b) p, 126. 111. Patten, B. M. The EmbryJOlog'Y of the Pig. Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1931. 112. Piaget, J. The ChiltlJs Conception of th8 World (1926). New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929. 1 t 3. Piaget, J. The Child's Conception of Physical Causalit), (1930). New York: Humanities Press, 195 i. (a) p, 283. (b) p. 244. (c) p, 60. (d) p.61. (e) pp. 73-74. (f) p. 249. (g) p.255. 114. Piaget, J. The Origins of Intelligence in Children (1936). New York: Intemational Universities Press, 1952.

Bibliography

436

115. Piaget, J. The Construction of Reality in the Child (1945). New York: Basic Books, 1954. (a) pp, xii-xiii. (b) p. 88. (c) p. 13. (d) pp. 79, 96. (e) p.313. (f) p, 13 (g) p.318. 116. Rank, B. & Macnaughton, D. A clinical contribution to early ego development. The Psychoanalytic Stud" of the Child, 5: 53-65. New York: International Universities Press, 1950. 117. Rapaport, D. The theory of ego autonomy: a generalization. Bull. Menninger Clin. J 22: 13-35. 1958. 118. Ribble, M. A. The Rights of In/ants. New York: Columbia University Press, 1944. 119. Ruesch, J. & Bateson, G. Communication-The Social Matrix of Prychiat,'Y. New York: Norton, 1951. Quote is from p. ~33. (a) pp, 148-149. 120. Russell, B. The Impact of Science on Society. New York: Simon &: Schuster, 1953. Quote is from pp. 82-83. 121. Sachs, H. Uber Naturgefiihl Imago. 1: 119...131, 1912. 122. Sachs, H. The delay of the machine age. Psychoanal. Quart." 2:4Q4-424, 1933. 123. Sachs, L. J. On changes in identification from machine to cripple. The Psychoanal"tie Stud" of the Child, 12: 356-375. New York: International Universities Press, 1957. 124. Saint-Exupery, A. de. Wind" Sand and Stars. New York: Reyna! & Hitchcock, 1939. 125. Saroyan, W. My Name Is Aram. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940. Quote is from p, 39. 126. Savage} C. Variations in ego feeling induced by d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25). Psychoanal. Reu., 42: 1-16, 1955. (a) p. 2. (b) p, 3. (c) pp.8-13. (d) p.3. (e) p, 11. 127. Savage, C. The LSD psychosis as a transaction of the psychi.. atrist and patient. (To be published.) 128. Schilder, P. The Image and Appearance of the Human Bod" (1923). New York: International Universities Press, 1950. (a) p. 202. (b) p. 203. (c) p, 191. (d) pp, 204-205. (e) p.192. 129. Schweitzer, A. Out of Life and Thought. New York: Mentor Books, 1953. Quoted passages from pp. 174-175. (a) p.

M,

126. 130. Schwing, G. A. Way to the Soul of the Mentally III (1940). New York: International Univenities Press, 19~4.

Bibliography

437

131. Scott, W. C. M. Narcissism, the body, the body image and the body scheme. Delivered before the Washington Psychoanalytic Society on March 9, 1956. 132. Searles, H. F.. Data concerning certain manifestations of incorporation. Psychiatry, 14:397-413, 1951. 133. Searles, H. F. Dependency processes in the psychotherapy of schizophrenia. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Asm., 3: 19-66, 1955. Reference is to pp. 24-25. 134. Searles, H. F. The schizophrenic's vulnerability to the therapist's unconscious processes. J. Nero & Ment. Dis., 127~247.

262, 1958.. 135.. Searles, H . F. Positive feelings in the relationship between the schizophrenic and his mother. Int. J. Psychoanal., 39:569586, 1958. 136.. Searles, H. F. The differentiation between concrete and metaphorical thinking in the recovering schizophrenic patient.. Presented at the American Psychiatric Association, Philadelphia, April, 1959. In print, ]. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 137. Sechehaye, M. A. Symbolic Realization. New York: International Universities Press, 1951. 138. Sharpe, E. F. Psycho-physical problems revealed in language: an examination of metaphor. Int. J.. Psychoanal., 21 :201. 213, 1940 139. Smith, P. B. A Sunday with mescaline.. Bull. Menninger Clin., 23:20-27, 1959. 140. Spits, R . A. Diacritic and coenesthetic organizations--the psychiatric significance of a functional division of the nervous system into a sensory and emotive part. Psyeh 0 anal. Reo., 32: 146.162, 1945.. 141. Spitz, R. A. Hospitalism-an inquiry into the genesis of psychiatric conditions in early childhood. The Psychoanal"tic Stud, of the Child~ 1 :53.74. New York: International Universities Press, 1945. 142. Spitz, R. A. Hospitalism-a follow-up report [on investigation described in Volume I, 1945]. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 2:113.117.. New York: International Universities Press, 1946.. 143. Spitz, R.. A. Anaclitic depression-an inquiry into the genesis of psychiatric conditions in early childhood.. The Psycho-

438

Bibliography

analytic Study of the Child, 2:313-342. New York: International Universities Press, 1946. 143a. Spitz, R. A.. & Wolf, K. M. The smiling response: a contribution to the ontogenesis of social relations. Genet. p~ chol. Mon.~34:57.125, 1946. 144. Stanton, A.. H. & Schwartz, M. S. The Mental Hospital. New York: Basic Books, 1954. 145. Starcke, A. The castration complex. Int. I . Psychoanal., 2: 179-201, 1921.. 146. Stevenson, o. The first treasured possession: a study of the part played by specially loved objects and toys in the lives of certain children. The Psychoanalytic Stud" of the Child, 9: 199-217. New York: International Universities Press, 1954. (a) p, 200. (b) p. 203. (c) pp. 199-201. (d) p.202. (e) p. 204. (f) p.. 207.. (g) p. 208. 147. Stevenson, R. L. D,.. ]ekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: Grosset &DWllap. 148. Storch, A. The Primitiue Archaic Forms of Inner E%perience and Thought in Schizophrenia. New York: Nervous and Mental Diseases Pub.. Co.., 1924. 149. Sullivan, H. S. Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry. Washing· ton, D.C.: The William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation, 1946. 150. Sullivan, H. S. The illusion of personal individuality. Psychiairy, 13:317·332, 1950. 151.. Sullivan, H. S. Clinical Studies in Psychiatry.. New York: Norton, 1956. Quote is from p. 211. 152.. Szalita-Pemow, A. B. Further remarks on the pathogenesis and treatment of schizophrenia. Psychiatry, 15: 143-150, 1952. Quote is from p.. 149. (a) pp.145.146. 153. Tausk, V. On the origin of the "influencing machine" in schizophrenia (1919). Psychoanal. Quart. J 2: 519-556, 1933. (a) pp. 550-551. 154. Thoreau, H. D. Walden. Walden ana Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau. New York: Modem Library, 1950.. Quote is from p. 21. (a) p.74.. (b) pp. 197-198. (c) pp. 118-120.. (d) pp, 111...112. (e) p, 101. (f) pp. 158·159. (g) p, 103. 155.. Thurber, J. M1 Life and Hard Times. New York: Harper, 1933. 156.. Tillich, P. The Courace to Be. New Haven: Yale University

Bibliography

157. 158.

159.

1604 161. 162.

163. 164.

165.

166.

167.

168.

439

Press, 1952. (a) pp.49..50. (b) p. 120. (c) p. 121. (d) pp. 104·105. Trevett, L. D. Origin of the creation myth: a hypothesis, J. Arne,. Psychoanal. Assn .., 5~461-468, 1957. van Vogt, A. E. Vault of the beast. The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology; edited by J. W4 Campbell, Jr., New York: Simon 8t Schuster, 1952. (a) pp. 60-61. von Uexkiill, J. Umwelt und lnnenuielt der Tiere. Berlin: Springer, 1909. Washington Post and Times Herald. February 6, 1955, page 1. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1951. Werner, H. Comparative Psycholog'Y of Mental Development (1940) .. New York: International Universities Press, 2nd rev. ed., 1957. (a) p.59. (b) p. 19. (c) p. 361. (d) p. 16. (e) p. 476. (f) p. 320. (g) p. 52. (h) pp. 34-35. (i) p. 59. (j) p. 644 (k) p. 69. (1) pp. 77-78. (m) pp. 75.76. (n) P4 233.(0) P4 338. (p) p.447. (q) pp.426-427. (r) pp. 419.. 420. (5) P4 1884 (t) PP4 80-81, 361. (u) p, 418. (v) pp. 25·28., 145. (w) p. 361. (x) p4368. (y) pp. 370-371. (z) P4 461. J Whyte, L. L. The Next Development in Man. New York: Mentor Books, 19504 (a) p. 61. Winnicott, D4 W. Transitional objects and transitional phenomena-a study of the first not-me possession. Int. ]. Prychoanal., 24: 89-97, 1953. Winnicott, D4 W. Withdrawal and regression (1955). In: D. W. Winnicott-Collected Papers. New York; Basic Books, 1958, PP4 255-261. Winnicott, D4 W. Metapsychological and clinical aspects of regression within the psycho-analytical set-up. Int. [, Psycho4nal., 36: 16-26, 1955. (Reprinted in: D. W. WinnitottCollected Papers. New York: Basic Books,1958J pp. 278-294.) Wordsworth, W. Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13J 1798J A Treasury of Great Poems English and American" edited by L4 Untenneyer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942, pp. 638-641. Zilboorg, G. A History of Medical Psychology4 New York: Norton, 1941.

Index

Ackerman~ N. W., 36 Ac.ting out, 252 Adler. A., 3 Adolescence, 37, 89-99 t 102 Aebenold, P. C., 9 Andersen, H. C.) 181 Animals, SII Dog, Identification, Psychology, Transference Animism" 6-7, 15, 35-36, 44~ 52, 5863, 66, 83) 147, 247-249, 292295, 302-304~ 309·310, 396-397, 401 Anthropology, 6-7, 12,3 23 t 35-36J 38, 4~45J 88, 110-112, 383

•.o\nxiety

in infancy, 30-53" 56, 69, 84, 151J 153-154 s•• also Castration anxiety~ Sex Arieti, S.J 174 Arlow, J. A.J 331 Art(iBt), 11, 129-130, 248-249 .Autism, S04, 378 Bak, R. C., 145

~

Balint, M..) 34, 269-270, 282.283, 375-379 Bateson, G., 21) 389, 402, 424 Behrens, M. D., 36 Benjamin, J. D., 174 Benson, E. F.. , 266-267 Bernard, C., 423 Bertschinger, H., 254 Bexton, W. H., 49-50, 166 Biology) 12 Bleuler, E., 270, 304 Body image, 61, 128J 152-156, 178197, 234, 242,3 317 ..318 Borderline cases) 50,3 245, 291-292, 297, 359 Bornstein, B., 73 Boss, M.,48 Bowen, L. M., 170 Bradbury, R., 2#-245 Brain damage, 35 Brill, A. A., 326 Brodey, W. M., 170, 201.202, 270 Buber, M., 102, 116-119, 394-396 Burnham, D. L., 310 Bychowski, G., 304

Index

442 Byrd. R. E., 125-126, 131, 135, 156, 167-168, 390

Calas, N.,

Cameron. 422

23~

44-45, 384-385 75, 296, 412, 421-

J. L.,

Cannon, W. B., 423 Caricature, 62, 176-1 77 Carson, R. L., 12~ 40 t 109-110 Castration anxiety, 39, 152-155 Change of function, 71-72 Chemistry, 9, 12) 423 Child (ren) autistic, 79, 89-91~ 200-203, 413 .. 414 depression in; s" Depression, anaclitic; Hospitalism normal, psychology of, 35, 66-70, 78-88, 389; see also Thought processes in children objectless) 68-69 psychotic, 77, 79~ 166, 196-197, 234-235) 311-312 ~ 320, 345 1 413-414 Collier. J., 182 CoUodi, C., 45 Communication, schizophrenic, 296297) 310, 338-345 ; see also Schizophrenia, psychotherapy or; Schizophrenia, subjective experience of the patient Confusion, 152-154, 176, 178, 230, 241..246) 289-291~ 312-314, 317S18, 418-419; see also Dedillerentiation: Schizophrenia, subjective experience of the patient Countertransference) 232-233, 236238~ 255-256, 349-351, 365-379 Creativity. 107, 128-130 Custance, J., I5} ~1 Dante Alighieri, 181-182 Darr, G., 200 Darwin, C. R., 4, 5 Davies, L., 133-134

Death

fear of, 16 122, 224-226, 396·397 t

instinct, 4 Dedifferentiation, 58, 73.77, 129 t 143-149, 174...183, 187, 198, 242...243, 253 t 289·290, 307-312, 352-354, 359-364) 368-379 t 416, 4-20-421; se« also Regression

Defense, 223-249, 272-324, 344-346,

367 Dejll vu phenomena, 331 Delusions, 165-166, 183.186, 192196, 233-234, 283-288, 296, 314-316, 326.328 t 340-345) 350 Denial, 166-167, 190-191) 284, 357 Dependence, 255-256, 352-359, 395 Depersonalization, 84, 363 Depression, 97-98) 191-192 anaclitic, 58, 69 Derealization, 84 Diagnosis, problem of, 417-419 Differentiation between animate and inanimate, 56-70~ 147, 174-177, 191-204, 377, 396-397, 420-421 between infant and mother, 29. 57-58, 63-70~ 147-148, 202 Displacement, 296-298

Dissociation, 104, 403 Dogs, 15-16, 86·87, 171] 189, 255256, 300, 310-311, 326, 350 355 t

Dream screen, 44

Dreams general remarks about, 47 of neurotic patients, 212-213, 261· 264 J 354 of psychotic patients, 47-48) 146 phylogenetic regression in, 55 Dunbar, F., 311 Duncan, 1., 129 Ego autonomy, 70-76 boundaries, loss of, 107, 129 t 145, 174-177, 187, 242-245, 308~ S88 also Dedifferentiation development, 29-53) 71-75J 190· 191J 375-379 fragmentation, 80-81, 241-246, 405-406, 418 j $" QUO Dedifferentiation identity) see Identity Einstein, A.• 24-25, S96t 399-401 EisslerJ K. R., 147) 203, 293 Ekstein, R., 73, 79, 147) 196, 234-

235 Elkiseh, P., 59,

77~

79, 147-148, 202-

203) 242, 311 t 345 Embryology~

10, 41

Index Erikson, E. HI, 50, 71, 76, 80, 92, 103, 318 Ethics, 13 Ethology, 131-132 Evolution, Darwinian" 12, 40 t 109· 110, 265 Fairbaim, W. R. D., 34" 423-424 Fairy tales, 4, 45, 181 Federn, P.,) 365 Feeding, early experience, 30-33, 39 Fenichel, 0., 29, 38, 52, 165) 190191, 308-309, 326 Ferenczi, S., 66, 73 Fetishism, 65, 419 Field theory, 23-25 Fountain, GI, 92 Frank, L. K.) 1,) 122-123t 383·384., 391 Freeman, T., 73~ 296) 412 Freud, A.) 31, 304 Freud, S. bibliographical references to, 3., 4, 5, 25~ 52 on death instinct, 4 on development of object relations, 34, 71 on ego development, 74, 76, 191 on libidinal development, 144-145, 423 on mants animal nature, 4, 5, 254255, 326 on narciJsism, 34 on schizophrenia, 34, 144) 159~ 160, 165 Friedman, M. S., 117-118, 395 Fromm, E., 43, 105-106, 119, 128, 246·247, 390, 392-393 Fromm-Reichmann, F., 372 Furman, E., 77, 147J 166, 312 Galsworthy, 1.,) 93, 97 Gheerbrant, A., 110-112 Ghiselin, B., 129·130 Gibson, R. WI' 291 Goffman, E.) 351 Goldfarb, W.~ 211 Goldstein, K., 173 Goldwater, R.,) 249 Grave,~ RI, 42 Greenson, R. R .., 245-246 Grief, 97.98" 107, 258~ 278-279., 295) 300, 332-333, 343-344~ 367

443 Hallucinations, 48, 166, g19~ 321324" 338-340, 352, 363" 378 Hamilton, E.. 6, 42, 180-181, 225226 Hartmann, H., 29, 34, 52, 57-58~ 62, 10-71, 74-76, 1#t 146, 251 Hashish, experimental intoxication with, 364 Hebb, D.O., 49-50, 166 Heiman, M., 15-16, 88, 310-311, 326 Heron, W., 49-50, 166 Hertzman, M., 271 Herzog, M., 133-135 Heyerdahl, T ", 124.125 am, L. B., 29, 165, 113-(74) 200, 265-266 Hoffer, W.~ 29, 36-37, 57.58 Homosexualityt 145 Hospital administration, 14, 159~ 351, 411411 Hospitalism, 33. 50-51, 58 Hudson, W. H.,) 92-99 Humor, 11-12, 45-47 Hypnosis, 50 Hysteria, 84J 211-214~ 308-309, 418 Identification with animal, 15·16, 36, 47-48, 82, 172-173 t 182-183, 191) 203209, 215, 218, 255-257, 266268~ 271t 310-311, 372-374 with inanimate object, 31-33) 36 t 47-51, 57-59~ 73, 77-80 9798, 147-150, 158..159) t87~ 192-206~ 211..212, 216-217" 219-220J 229-23St 236-238, 242-243, 270, 311 t 345 Identity disturbances, 92, 152, 245..246 loss of, 152-153 Inanimate objects diRerentiation from animate, se. Differentiation identification with, Ie, Identification with inanimate object Inc~poration) 354 Inhelder, B.., 31, 92 Introjection, 148" 308, 369, 421; Ie, also Identification j

Jacobson, E.~ 34, 246, 345 James, W., 8. 84 J 106~ 108" 114.115" t 23., 187-188, 227-228, 394

Index

444 Jung, C. G., 3, 48

Kafka, F., 182 Kanner, L., 200-202 Klein, M., 34, 299 Kris, E., 29, 58, 62, 75, 129, 176..

177, 251 Kubie, L. S., 73 Langer, S. K., 73, 81-82 Language, 62~ 64-65, 112-113, 174175; also Communication Levi, J., 130 Lewin, B. D., 44 Lilly, J., 49, 166 Lindbergh, A. M. t 403 Linn) L.) 16-17 Literature, 11 Litde, M.;t 73 Loewenstein, R. M.~ 29, 58, 75 Loneliness, 105, 122, 168-169~ 171, 247-249, 300..3 01, 305·306 Lorenz, K. Z., 131 ..139 Loss, $" Object> loss of human; Object. losl of nonhuman LSD psychosis, 48-49, 158-159, 188, 309-310, 362-365

s"

Macnaughton, D., 13 Mahler. M.. S., 31, 57-59 77-80, 147148, 202-203, 242, 311, 345. 413-414 Manic-depressive psychosis, 15, 41, 163..164, 272..2 78; se« also Mel.. ancholia Marett, R. R., 984 McGhie, A., 73) 296, 412 Mead> M., 23, 44-45, 88, 384-385 Melancholia, 42, 107-108, 155 187188; see also Depression. Grief, Manic-depressive psychosis Mescaline, experimental intoxication with, 364 Moore, H., 128 Moravia, A.., 219-220, 345·347 Mother-child relation in normal development, see Differentiation; Ego development; Feeding. early experience; Object relations, development j

j

of

in schizophrenia, 139. 169-1 73, 199-203, 206-211, 215-216,

236-238~ 258 ..261, 265-266, 270, 300, 356, 415 Mourning, 304; Stl, Qlso Depression, Grief Multiple therapy, 359-361 Mysticism, 13, 106, 108, 118 Myths, 4, 6, 41-44, 180-181, 186, 225-226, 247

Narcissism primary, 34, 61 regression to primary. 144-145 J 160 Nature identification with works of, 12..13, 47, 104~ 106, 123, 125..126,

246-24-7 pJychologicaI significance of, x~ 1113, 17, 88·89, 92-139, 156, 246-247, 326, 383-384, 406407 Nunberg, H., 186, 188, 308

Object animate and inanimate) 58' Differentiation, Identification loss of human, 20, 39, 69~ 80.81, 304

loss of nonhuman, 20, 39) 55-56, 152-160. 323, 3+5, 397 transitional, r" Transitional ob.. jectl Object relations developmen t of, 29-53, 65..82, 146· 147, 375-379 undifferentiated phase of, 29-53, 70-76, 81-82, 103, 143-144J 170, 176, 375-379 Obsessional neurosis, 79, 86~ 89.91, 157~ 418..419 Occupational therapy, 14-15, 416-41 7 Oedipus complex. 158 Omnipotence, 39, 88~ 106-107, 130135, 138-139, 233-241 Oppenheimer, J. R., 424-425 Pearce, J.• 271 Perception in infancy, 65, 76 in schizophrenia, 166-167,269·288, 326-333, 338-345> 850,1 359· 365; s" also Schizophrenia, subjective experience of the patient

445

Index Philosophy, 12-14, 115-116, 390-394 Phobias, 65, 308-309, 326 Phylogenesis, 10, 40 Physics, 9, 12, 24-25, 391, 423-426 PhyJiology, 8, 9, 423 Piaget, J., 17-18, 30, 37, 50, 57-60 t 92. 103, 146 Picasso, P.~ 129..130 Play therapy, 299, 318 Poetry, 11, 91, 123 Pragmatism, 13-14

Primary love, 34Prognosis, 4-17, 419420 Projection, 190-191 on to nonhuman en\1ironment, 16, 78-82, 307-324, 396-397; SI8 also Dedifferentiation Psychoanalytic therapy and tech.. nique, 167, 375-379, 417-422; S88 also Paychotherapy; Schizo.. phrenia, psychotherapy of Psychology animal. 8 comparative, 8, 34-36

Psychotherapy with silent patients, 84, 257, 294295, 356·362, S68-379; see also PsychOanalytic therapy and technique; Schizophrenia» psychotherapy of

Rina, Norman C., 79 Rorschach test, 270-271, 419 Ruesch, J 21, 389, 402, 424Russell, B.) 13-14 I)

Sachs, H., 60~ 61. 73, 144, 309 Sachs» L. J., 73, 79, 147, 196-198 Sadism, 205 Saint-Exupery, A. de, 403 Saroyan, W., 46 Same, Jean-Paul, 394Savage» C., 48-49, 158..160, 188, 309-310, 362-365 Schilder, P., 42, 146, 155, 234 Schizophrenia acute, 151, 157-158 187, 257-258, 309 catatonic, 74, 84, 144, 186-187.1 203, 236-238, 297, 301-302, 308, 359, 418 childhood, S'8 Child (ren) t autistic; Child (ren}, psychotic hebephrenic, 74. 253, 255-257, 332-333. 418 object relations in, 145-146; $66 also Dedifferentiation; Regres.. sion, "phylogenetic"] Schizo.. phrenia, subjective experience of the patient paranoid, 74, 84, 114, 138-139, 145, 160-161, 168-169 172173, 183-186, 192-198, 206210, 226-227) 253. 258-261, 283..288, 296-297, 304-306) 314-316) 340-345, 356-359, 397-398, 415, 418 psychotherapy of, 51, 84, 160-163, 167, 172, 175-176, 18g.187, 191-196, 202-219~ 226·238, 247-248J 253, 255-261) 278S33~ 338-345, 348-379, 397399, 405-406, 418 subjective experience of the patient, 41-42, 48, 51, 83, 98, 114, 116, 136-139) 146-154, 157-160, 165-169, 179, 183219, 229-233, 236-248, 252 ~ 258, 268, 278-333, 338-345 t 350-365, 405-406, 415, 418 Scbweitzer, A., 13 Schwing, GI, 252, 372 Science, 8, 17. 391, 399-402, 406401, 422-426 j

j

Radin, P., 384-385 Rank, B., 73 Rank. 0., 3 Rapaport, D.) 50, 71, 74-76, 115, 160 Recreational therapy, see Occupational therapy Regreuion) 250-252 fear of, 179.190, 242-243, 266-268. 283-288, 369 in service of ego. 129, 250-268 ·~hylogenetic,u 4041, 55, 97-98, 105-107, 145, 179-180, 250268, 283-288 jIflS.,

also

Dedjf..

ferentiation Religion Christian~ 7, 8, 104, 106, 181,

227·228 Eastern, 186-187 Greek, 7, 104primitive, 7, 82, 247 Ribble. M. A., 93

Index

446 Scott, W. C. M., 128-129, 354Searles, HI F.) 62, 245-246J 295 J 354, 369 Sechehare, M. A., 252 Sensory deprivation, 49.51, 166-167

Thoreau, HI DI~ 99, 127, 135-136, 156, 248 J 387 Thought processes development of) 37, 63, 73-74, 174-177

Sex

in children, 62 in "primitive" people, 62, 64-65, 385 in schizophrenia, 62~ 84~ 146, 148· 149, 173..177, 192-196, 286287, 339-340, 343-345, 364365 Thurber, J., 12, 45 Tillich, PI' 122, 130, 392 Totemism, 4, 16 Toys, 22, 50, 66-70, 80, 85 Transference, 295, 314-, 325-337, 350-354 to animals, 16~ 326 to therapist as nonhuman, 255256, 351-362, 365-379, 421 Transitional objects, 22 t 66·70 Treatment, see Psychoanalytic therapy and technique; Psychotherapy Trevett) LI D., 43

anxiety concerning, 96, 99, 188190, 204, 228-233, 263-264, 344-345 identity disturbances in regard to, 188-190) 229-233, 263-264, 321-324, 420 Sharpe, EI FI, 73 Silence in treatment~ S66 Psychotherapy with silent patient Smiling response, 31 Smith, J. H., 101, 406-407 Smith, P. B., 121 SociologyJ 351, 386-404 Solipsism, 114-115, 394 Spender, S., 129 Spitz, RI A., 31, 33, 50-51, 57-58, 60, 65-66, 69 Starcke, AIJ 31-32, 39, 153·155 Stevenson, 0., 22,66-69, 88 Stevenson, R. L., 182 Stimulus nutriment, 50 J 160 Storch, A., 146) 165 245, J09 Suicide, 268 Sullivan, H. S., 3, 23, 29, 418 Superego, "archaic," 183..186, 235241, 246, 283, 316 j

Symbiosis in normal infancy, 29-53, 72

in patient-therapist relationship, 368-374, 421-422 in schizophrenic patient's background, 259-260, 413-414 Symbol formation, 97, 66:73-74~ 80~ 82, 174-177~ 192-196, 286-287, 339..340~ 343-345, 364-365 Syncretism) 35, 146 SzaIita·Pemow A. B., 83 j

Tausk, V., 61. 73J 77, 145, 197·.198~ 308, 345 Therapy, sle Psychoanalytic therapy and technique, Psychotherapy

Uncanny feelings. 37-38, 61, 232. 290-291~ 309, 365-367 Unconscious, 337, 344, 399 van Vogt, A. EI, 243 Werner, H.) 30, 34-36; 38 45, 59-60 J' 62-65, 111, 144, 146, 165-166, 309, 364 Whitehead A. N. 129 Will, O. A., 412-413 Whyte, LI L., 104-105 Winnicott) D. W., 66-67, 69, 252 Worden, F., 200 Wordsworth) W., 91~ 123 j

j

j

Zervos, c., 129-130 Zilboorg, G.J. 14

Zuni Indiana) 7