9. Psychiatry and Economic Organization

9 Psychiatry and Economic Organization DAVID MCCORD WRIGHT There is a story about a landscape gardener who became an architect-not because he originally planned to be one-but be· cause people "would keep building houses in his gardens." My psychological and psychiatric knowledge, such as it is, has the same sort of derivation. Many students of those disciplines do keep building houses in my garden. I mean they keep advancing ideas either avowedly about economics or of profound im· portance to economics and the organization of economic life. It is particularly in the case of economic growth and of the transi· tion to effective political democracy that one finds oneself con fronted with precisely the basic aspects of phenomena with which the psychologist and the psychiatrist concern themselves. And, in my opinion, it is just not possible to reach real understanding of the political and of the growth problem unless one is prepared to cope with psychological and psychiatric ideas. As I find this relationship of economic growth to psychiatry far from self· evident to many people, particularly those untrained in economics, it may be well to stop here for a brief explanation.

176 Psychiatry and Economic Organization 177 I One of the most widely accepted and noncontroversial ideas in economics is the "law of diminishing returns." More a tech nological than an economic principle? "diminishing returns" means that, if we hold methods of production unchanged and increase the supply of anyone aid to production, the rest remain ing unchanged, the increments of resulting output eventually will decline. Some fertilizer, for example, stimulates a plant, more has little effect, still more kills it! Malthus felt that laws of this sort applied to economic growth generally. Hence his prediction that population would constantly tend to outstrip wealth, keeping man in "misery" or at a subsistence level. Now, one of the main factors that has prevented Malthus' pre dictions from· being fulfilled in the West has been the activity of the inventors. "Diminishing returns" still holds as a general principle, but each time an important new invention is made, we move on to a higher technical plane and a new area of expansion appears before the "diminishing" begins to take effect. Thus, scientific change lies at the base of economic growth.

But the area of change is much greater than simple invention. Even if no new technique is involved, mere expansion neverthe less implies some venture into the unknown. For the techno logical relationships alter as the scale of a project is increased. For example, if we took a blueprint of a yacht and simply doubled every dimension, it is quite possible that the yacht, upon being launched, would immediately capsize. The historical record is full of failures of this kind, from factories to boats, where mere size was increased without adequate forethought. An especially telling case of this occurred with the introduction of the Salk vaccine. It had been found safe when applied to large population groups, but still from batches of vaccine produced in relatively small lots. The formula and margin for safety, however, unex pectedly no longer were true when the vaccine, without being checked in the intermediate steps, had to be produced for the whole United States population, this time in larger units. Several 178 Psychiatry and Responsibility deaths occurred. In Canada, by contrast, with a much smaller population, the original method for production of the vaccine could be retained, and no adverse cases were reported. l Finally, as output rises, the pattern of consumers' wants will change. The man who lives in one small house will not necessarily live in two small houses. He may want a bigger house. The man who drinks a bottle of beer a day will not often drink a barrel of beer a day. He will try something else. Thus, in any growing society in which any effort is made to satisfy the consumer to any degree, the directors of production will be confronted from time to time with shifts in wants, quite often unforeseeable. Hence, economic growth under any type of social organization is, to a considerable degree, always a risky venture into the unknown, for frequently the full impact of a change is only discoverable by changing. If, therefore, the individuals composing a nation lack the personal self-confidence to run risks and venture into the unknown, if the rank and file are too frightened to tolerate change, the nation will not develop. It will be evident, however, that a man's personal self-confidence is related to how he views life and how he sees hims.elf. What sort of life-view he derives from psychiatric ideas, among others, can thus be an important influence upon the general rate of economic progress.

Politically, too, as later explained in this paper, the individual's psychiatric balance is important. The satisfactory voter would be neither gullible, terrified, irrationally envious, intolerant, nor mentally dependent. I submit that if men cannot rule themselves to· some degree, they can scarcely be left free from external com pulsion, if society is to endure. The ultimate base of successful democracy is character. And again the individual's range of self control is, in considerable degree, a function of the ideas he entertains about himself and his place in the world. Thus, we reach the conclusion that to analyze the achievements of a civiliza tion we must first begin with the culture concept, or the Zeitgeist -frequently a function of a nation's religion (as well as its psychiatry)-and then build out to its institutions, laws, and eco nomic structure. Also, A. N. Whitehead has shown that even a nation's science has similar roots in its cosmology.2 Psychiatry and Economic Organization 179 The suggested techniques involve a discussion of religious ideas, which may be distasteful. But surely no one can deny that, on a purely scientific plane, religion has been an important factor in culture. We must therefore allow for it and examine it, whether we happen to be believers or not. References to religious concepts appearing in the remainder of this paper, therefore, should be read in that light. They are important ideas, practically speaking, whether one considers them objectively true or not.

It will also be helpful, before we return to the main stream of our analysis, to explain just what we are trying to evaluate here in connection with psychoanalysis and psychiatry. The therapeutic value of the confessional technique has been realized for ages" particularly, in more recent times, by the Christian church. Freudian emphasis upon various sources of maladjustments-the Oedipus complex, etc.--eertainly brings out one source of possible dislocation that no scientifically minded person could deny, al.. though the degree of· novelty involved in the "discovery" can be easily overemphasized. But when the psychoanalyst or psychiatrist, particularly the Freudian, goes beyond individual therapy or counseling and attempts to generalize his doctrines as the sale or nearly sole source of social disease, or when he asserts that a particular social taboo is irrational or evil, or when he lays down schemes for social reconstruction based more or less unilaterally upon his ideas, then he has ventured into the field of general social science. And it is at this point that we are justified in beginning our evaluation and criticism. With these qualifications in mind, we may proceed to the main stream of our analysis.

II In one of the classic treatises upon the nature and significance of economic science, one finds the subject defined as "the science dealing with the allocation of scarce means among alternative ends." The economist generally holds that the wants of "free" men are "insatiable"-not that the want for anyone good is in satiable, but that history shows that, in a reasonably "open" cul ture, new wants appear about as fast, on the average, as new 180 Psychiatry and Responsibility means of production. The economist, therefore, holds that "scar city," in the sense that everybody cannot have all he wants of everything, is, again on the average, a permanent characteristic of social life. Economics is therefore built around the need for choice. The author of the treatise mentioned above-Professor Lord Robbins-points out how all-embracing the choice problem is in the real world. One can be an architect or a lawyer, a great painter or a great scientist. I have known a vocational guidance expert who told me that the hardest type for him to advise (and the person who often found it hardest to succeed, in any worldly sense anyhow) was the "well-rounded" person with many apti tudes. The only way to deal with such a person, he said, was to give him so demanding a career that he would not spend too much time thinking about the other things he might be doing. If such a person were not so fortunate as to hit reasonably early upon an adequate challenge, he might well scatter his efforts in too many directions and accomplish far less than other much less gifted men. "Your economist," again quoting our economic treatise, "is a true tragedian." 3 Now with this outlook on life, how do psychology and psychiatry appear?

With great respect I cannot help feeling that the three char acteristics of much I now read in, say, the mental-health literature are (a) innocence, (b) ignorance, (c) narrowness .. Let me explain. By "innocence" I mean a happy unawareness of the tragic aspects inherent in existence. By "ignorance" I mean a failure to explore thoroughly the objective range of social choices. By "narrowness" I mean that a few important, but limited, aspects of human per sonality are seized upon for intense overdevelopment. The part, in other words, is mistaken for the whole. But psychiatry and allied fields are not alone in this tendency toward one-sidedness. Many writers in my own field of economics are also just now recovering from a similar attack of one-sidedness. Let me explain. In our society inequality of money income and of wealth has been so outstandingly a source of other kinds of in equality, and conflicts over income and wealth have been such a source of friction, ~hat around the middle of the nineteenth cen tury the view developed that if only we got rid of those forms of Psychiatry and Economic Organization 181 inequality and conflict, we would get rid of all inequality and conflict. In the same way, if we got rid of economic insecurity, we could get rid of all insecurity. The history of European socialism, and not only of socialism, in the last hundred years is very largely the history of the slow (but now rapid) crumbling of these beliefs under the lessons of ex.perience. Yet may I suggest that what inequality of income was to the social view of, say, Bernard Shaw or G. D. H. Cole, sex has been to many psychia trists-an undoubtedly important factor and source of disturb ance, but magnified out of all proportion as ~pe sole or nearly sole factor and source of disturbance.

Coming to more practical problems, how do I, as a "growth" economist and hence unavoidably (as e,xplained above) a student of comparative 'cultures, see human nature and the human mind~ Well, the first aspect that impresses me is a very great variety and plasticity. I mean that human life has a wide range of possibilities and that, in consequence, various cultures have picked a varying series of attributes to develop. But the really basic point to recognize is that development means specialization. Some societies specialize in ritual orgasms; some specialize in sociability; some in oratory and elaborate status-seeking; some in war; some in hunting; some in art; some in contemplation; some in work; and so on. But always the excellence in a particular attribute is ob tained by some neglect of other attributes. There is (or was) a school of thought at Columbia College and elsewhere to the effect that capitalism was the result of "sexual frustration." This always seemed to me a good example of how one can be very nearly right and yet entirely wrong. I mean that it is true that our society is more "work-valuing" (if I may coin a phrase) than orgiastic. We do stress one set of human poten tialities more than another. But it seems to me a complete non sequitur to treat the achievements in the (culturally) preferred line as merely a pathological manifestation of a "frustrated"

natural urge, which by a tacit (albeit often not quite recognized) normative judgment one says ought to be more satisfied. Might one not equally infer that at some earlier period of tribal history particular experiences led a group to come to prefer the total 182 Psychiatry and Responsibility pattern of existence (feelings) of a work-centered culture to the total pattern of existence (feelings) of a sex-centered culture? In a nutshell, if one must use this language, all cultures "frustrate" some urges and encourage others. The real question is, then, what is the best way to be frustrated? Or, putting it more construc tively (and accurately) what is the best line in which to be overdeveloped? III One of the great limitations of social thought is our highly restricted capacity for vicarious experience. We know and feel the uncomfortable aspects of our own culture, but we cannot really evaluate, comparatively, save through pale intellectual copies, the uncomfortable aspects of alternative cultures. Now modern man knows, first hand, the inconvenient side of an individualistic culture, in which there is usually plenty to eat, but where status and wealth are both insecure, needing to be worked for, and promiscuity is frowned upon. He does not kno,v first hand the inconvenient side of a family-type, static, tribal society, in which status is inherited and protected, sex receives wide liberty, but where frequently there is neither health nor enough to eat and hardly any opportunity for creative thought.

It is thus easy to get out on twigs in our social judgment. We are told by some mental health experts that the desire to make money is responsible for mental illness in our society, or that the "strain" of modern living is responsible. Here I have to stop for a moment to reverse my emphasis. All cultures, I have said, stress some aspects of personality and 'play .down others, and this is necessary for achievement. On the other hand, I must now admit that any aspect can be overstressed, any incentive can be overdone. But the problem of balance in life is a different prob lem from that of choosing incentives. There is a' naive notion that "unselfish" ambition is mentally healthier and less liable to distortion than private ambition. "Pecuniary ambition," it may be thought, is ignoble, but the ambition to serve the state is noble and mentally healthy.

Psychiatry and Economic Organization 183 In my books I have shown that some type of incentive is (a) unavoidable and (b) desirable and that all types of incentives can be sources of neurosis and, in theological language, occasions for sin.4 The reason that incentive is unavoidable is that authority is unavoidable. Even the sophisticated communist admits the need for technological authority, though he tries to deny the need for political authority in his eventually fully conditioned society. But, if authority is unavoidable, incentive is unavoidable, for to many people it is pleasant (an incentive) to have authority. Furthermore, incentive is often desirable since, by supplementing the pure instinct of workmanship, it increases the supply of effort in whatever happens to be the socially desired direction. Yet the incentive can also and always be a source of neurosis. The man lvho aims too high, say for office, I have pointed out in my books, can drive himself "crazy" just as easily as the man who becomes too obsessed with the money urge. I have said in other lectures that I a,vait a new play, "The Death of a Com missar," in which the happy farm boy determines to become a conspicuous state servant and drives himself mad, or to death, in pursuit of this aitn. And a very little research in literature will produce any number of books about men driven over the edge by "good" ambitions-to be bishops or prime ministers or what have you. One can start out, also, seeking power to do good and then unconsciously work over merely to wanting power. As to "occasions for sin," the record of mankind both in history and in literature is simply overwhelming as to what can be done once a man has allowed himself to be overpossessed of a noble ambition.

The civil servant can steal his subordinate's ideas, lie about his rivals, prostitute himself personally-all in pursuit of nonpecuni~ ary power. "To do good," he tells himself, but often really just for the sake of exercising power. I do not mean to imply that civil servants are any less moral than others; I merely want to point out that their incentives have accompanying dangers and tempta tions too. And the "Piltdown man" hoax, as C. P. Snow has reminded us quite recently, is a sufficient indication of what can happen even in the case of pure science.5 But shall we, therefore, say that it is wrong to try to achieve 184 Psychiatry and Responsibility or accomplish anything at all? Thorstein Veblen comes close to saying so. Particularly in the Instinct of Workmanship he very nearly identifies achievement with aggression. He there holds up, as the model for society, the smooth monotony of unin terrupted routine-an ideal which he was clear-sighted enough to realize was opposed to technical progress. Veblen, for example, regarded the invention of the telephone as a social disaster.

Yet in Veblen we have a particularly outstanding example of a good brain lacking an adequate sense of social balance. He did not realize that his ideal society would not have the one thing that made his own life bearable (it was not a very happy life, I might say, and not for lack of sex)-namely, the chance to use one's brain creatively. War is often attributed to hunger. But my guess is that, among primitive peoples at least, an equal source of war was boredom ! For war can be a highly intellectual exercise and, save for a very limited field of art and ritual, it is almost the only field open for an intellectual man, in a primitive tribe, to use his talents. The oriental myth that attributes the invention of chess to a pacific prime minister who wished to give his bel licose master some other way of passing his time thus expresses a profound truth. Many of us can no more be happy without using our brains than without using our other organs.

As for the "strain" of modern life, when was life not a strain? Our pioneer ancestors, say on the Oregon trail, in the Yemassee War, and during the Deerfield Massacre were certainly not leading lives of quiet contemplation. Mediaeval life is seen as peaceful and quiet only in stained glass windows. Go back to prehistoric man wending his way between mammoths and sabre toothed tigers just to get each bite to eat. Was he free from strain? Nonsense. Modern life is not physically or objectively a greater strain, I submit. The trouble is a less effective mental outlook for bearing strain. But we must postpone for a while discussing the full implications of this point. What all the world wants, of course, is to eat its cake and have it too. Here in fact is a practical issue that may well blow us and all our works quite literally off the earth. For what the "unde veloped" nations want today is not economic growth on any terms, Psychiatry and Economic Organization 185 but economic growth on impossible terms. 1 mean that they want not just a Western standard of living, but to be "magicked" into a Western standard of living while retaining the sociability and the status and the "feasts" and the family relations of all sorts that they now have. But this is just the one combination that is impossible. 6 There is not enough wealth in the world to do it on doles, even if we left aside the Malthusian dilemma. What is needed is a tremendous increase in production. But Western pro duction, 1 have shown elsewhere, is rooted in the culture concepts and politico-economic patterns of Western society. And not so much in present concepts and patterns as in those formerly pre vailing. (I wonder in fact if part of the success of Japan in in dustrializing itself was not due to the fact that Samuel Smiles rather than Kenneth Galbraith was the best seller when they returned to large-scale contact with the Occident. Self-Help rather than The Affluent Society. But this is a secondary point.) The basic issue is that growth, as we have comm,enced by ex plaining, comes through change and causes change, and that it can easily be shown that continued effective growth requires a radical readjustment of the whole pattern of culture. Now the undeveloped nations do not know the real choice before them, and we are not telling them, partly because many of us no longer know what it is, and partly because it upsets too many United States interest groups to say it. The social chaos that may emerge when a people who think they are being let into a candy store discover what the price of economic growth really is, is something 1 hesitate to think of.

IV Returning now to the main line of our thought, the basic point I am trying to make is that all achievement involves selec tion and that all selection has a price in forgone alternatives. We should not, therefore, ask merely whether there is a price and weep over it as Hfrustration," which is what much psychiatric thought tacitly does, but we should ask whether the final pattern is worth the effort involved in producing it. The Christian ideal 186 Psychiatry and Responsibility of marriage is in no sense a denial of the difficulties involved and the failures risked. The assumption is that, by channeling the sex instinct into a deeper groove, one achieves a more satisfying total ultimate pattern of existence. True, family life can some· times be Mauriac's Noeud de viperes and Freud's family "ro· mance," but it can also be many other things. We know the emotional complications involved in monogamy. Our literature has no comparable dissection of the emotional complications in· volved in polygamy (though the Old Testament and a study of Muslim dynastic history would furnish a wide field for the corn..

parative psychologist) nor in polyandry. At some point some group came to prefer our pattern. I sometimes wonder if much of our reference to primitive cultures were not a little like our try ing to rebreed the Eohippus. I mean that these various arrested cultures are in the same position as anatomical "missing links." They are the discarded, unsuccessful social experiments. To hold them up as relevant patterns for today is much as if one were to substitute the ape man of Java for the Hermes of Praxiteles as an anatomical model. But, in talking so much of alternatives and total products, we are sidestepping what is, perhaps, the basic question: Is man a rational, self-determining being, and what are the consequences upon political life of a negative answer to this question? So much of discovery is terminology and "projection"! As I watch the Id, the Ego, and the Superego, and "Eros" and "Thanatos" chasing one another through the jungle of modern literature, I cannot help feeling that here are the products of a brilliant imagination being unconsciously projected into the data, much as Charcot is said to have unconsciously projected his triad into his subjects.

The psychiatrist often reads his "facts" into the data, and from lack of effective scientific controls he frequently deceives himself in so doing. 7 I have encountered some egregious examples of this kind of thing. I thus doubt the scientific factual base of a good deal of psychoanalytic analysis and theory. On the other hand, as we began by saying, Freud does develop some of the possible sources of maladjustment. The existence of the subconscious, for example, of the deeply irrational drives, of distorting obsessions Psychiatry and Economic Organization 187 would have been no "news" to the authors of the New Testament. But they felt that that was not the whole story. The real question is: Shall 'we go beyond the recognition of some conditioning to view man simply as a determined mechanism, capa~le of being taken to pieces like the nuts and bolts of a machine. Here, however, language catches us in a curious trap. When ,ve say that Joe did something because he preferred X to Y) all we are actually doing is recording the tact of choice. But the use of the word because brings in the (often unrealized) inference that Joe had to choose X-the psychic pull of X was greater than that of Y. Joe is treated as a passive agent-a needle pulled by magnets of varying strength. The whole delicate process of reflexive self-criticism, imaginative reconstruction of the problem, weighing of hypotheses, and so on is erased in a bland tautology.s If we are not careful, we will find that what we "explain" we illicitly determine.

There is no profit in my following this problem into its technical literature. 1 am dealing here pragmatically. However difficult it may be to explain (there goes that word again), I hold that the existence of conscience and a measure of free will and self-determination should be treated as an empirically given fact. I, personally, derive great conviction from the generally ad mitted fact that people who believe they are responsible tend, on average, to behave differently-more responsibly-than those who do not so believe. I am, of course, familiar with the argu ment that, when we tell a child he has a conscience, we create the conscience, which previously did not exist. But (a) I do not believe that all conscience has to be intruded from outside-one can have some conscience JUSt as one can talk prose, without knowing the label-and (b) even if our telling him does fortify the activity, would it do so if the fact were not already essentially true?

Russian history, of all things, furnishes us with relevant source material. There is an excellent little book, The New Man in Soviet Psychology) by R. A. Bauer. 9 In it he points out that the Russians began, after the Bolshevik Revolution, in logical Marxist style, to treat people as mere products of social conditioning. The 188 Psychiatry and Responsibility word "crime" was abolished and people spoke instead of "social disease," to be remedied by changing environment. But all that is now discarded-not merely because the change in environment did not soon change behavior, but also because it was found that insistence upon environment produced an undesirably passive outlook. Today, Russian psychology stresses individual responsi bility in every possible way. The Russians have discarded Freud -explicitly-because they say that he has a man spending his life battling the past-that he can give no help in shaping the futureJo And I wonder if this psychological shift may not turn out to be one of the Russians' greatest sources of strength. I mean, if a tough-minded, self-reliant, responsible group comes up against an effete, irresponsible leave-it-to-society group-who 'will win? It does not matter that this emphasis on personal responsi bility is difficult to square with Leninist-Marxist ideas of social predestination. Inconsistency has seldom bothered a social gospel that has emotional appeal. Like Calvinism and Mohammedanism before it, abstract belief in predestination and stress on individual responsibility-combined-produce a wonderful mixture for active achievement.

In a pending study of the "Transition to Democracy," I point out that one of the elements of character needed in a good voter is a certain psychological independence. He should feel more responsible for the state than to the state. Deriving the meaning and purpose of life from personal, extrapolitical standards, he can criticize state behavior, not draw his own self-reassurance from reliance upon the state. This is the psychological fact behind the Catholic doctrine of the "two swords." But the modern man who believes himself to be merel y the hel plessly conditioned result of his family and social past-who has no private (non government) sources of conviction-such an individual makes a very poor citizen, all too easily prone to look toward the state as a supermother or father who will give him all the qualities, psychological and economic, that he believes he cannot give himself. But yet once more we have to reverse our emphasis. Man is not ,vholly rational. Man is not wholly free. Man is deeply shaped Psychiatry and Economic Organization 189 by the obsessions of the subconscious. And I have recently read various writings which maintained that this disproved the old fashioned liberal political point of view. This is an extraordinary misunderstanding. Classical liberalism of the Whig type, as distingushed from Rousseau's perfectionism, is expreSSly founded on a recognition of the irrational, the cruel, the evil elements in man's nature. Liberalism of the classical type seeks to confine these elements by limiting individual power, relying, on the one hand, upon the market to limit economic power and, on the other, upon the diffusion of political authority. Thus, our American orthodoxy, on the one hand, constantly appealed to and encouraged man's conscience and rational nature, and, on the other, sought to contain the cruel and irrational by allowing no man too great a control over others. Finally, it did not expect to do a perfect job in any respect, but, by a firmly realistic pessimism, thought that more would be accomplished, in practice, by aiming for a reachable, albeit imperfect, goal than the romantic goal of "all or nothing." But this leads us to our final point.

v Earlier in this essay I said that the real difference in modern life was not so much that it had more objective strain in it as that we were less prepared in our mental outlook for bearing strain. We have, in short, less peace in the ultimate meaning of the word. What, then, do I mean by "peace"? I will follow White head's definition: "A quality of mind steady in its reliance that fine action is treasured in the nature of things" (italics added).l1 According to my outlook on life, there are only three things man can be sure of in life: work, pain, and death. Even the very rich create work for themselves to escape boredom. Life is for everyone and always bound to be at some point a grim and pain ful business. We can remove some pains, ameliorate others, but there will be new disappointments, new stresses coming. The Freudian or neo-Freudian idea that, if everyone has "good" orgasms, all will be well is either tautologous or incredibly naive, springing from a disregard of all factors save one. What is good in 190 Psychiatry and Responsibility life we must largely make for ourselves. The qualities most worth having all have to be worked for-and paid for. Of course the rich find life easier, but only if they have the moral wisdom to make it that way. Living in society too is often a grim, silly, cruel business. We make it also bearable to the extent that many of us force ourselves to live up to a different standard from what innate ego would produce.

Now, if each time the ·shoe pinches, we run around like chickens with our heads cut off, convinced that if we only change society or make better use of "science" or something like that, all will be well, we will have no peace. But if, on the other hand, we go ahead, realizing that pains of some sort are bound to come, but being thankful for the good that does come, then we do find real happiness. If we realize that following our ideas of right will not necessarily make us rich or successful or "happy" in the obvious sense, but will help to give us a little more self-respect, then when evil comes we are not surprised, we are not· thrown into a panic, we are not overwhelmed. This is the only manly, strong outlook that will carry us through. In short, psychiatry may possibly tell us the sources of frustration, more or less accurately, but 'will not give us the assurance that pain too has its purpose and value, which is the real source of mental health in a world in which pain is from time to time inescapable.

Here we encounter the weakest point in the usual Freudian psychoanalytic technique. Let us suppose that, by confession on the part of the patient and by analysis on the part of the therapist, the root of the trouble has been discovered-we will suppose accurately. Say, next, that the patient has been brought to an admission and confrontation of the urge or maladjustment that is troubling him. What next? In many cases the analyst may have no real conviction that the patient is on an intrinsically wrong track. He may well. think that it is society that is wrong. All, then, that he can say is that it is inconvenient, society being organized as it now is, to violate the particular rule involved. We have here confession without either absolution or a decalogue. The nearest thing to absolution is to assure the patient that what he does is not really his fault anyhow, and the only positive sane..

Psychiatry and Economic Organization 191 tion is mere prudence. Is it any wonder, then, that, as Dr. Mowrer points out in this symposium, the therapy often either fails, or the patient develops a "character disorder" and starts "acting out"? In other words, being told, or inferring, that he is "sick" merely because of a bad society, and assured that there is no rational basis for the prohibition troubling him, he says, llThe hell with society!" and goes his own way. Of course, I realize that I am putting the matter extremely, but I do not think the descrip tion is far wrong as an account of psychiatric thought as it is interpreted by the general public-and acted upon. Contrast now a similar process of confession, analysis, and con frontation in, say, an explicitly Christian setting. The objective value of, and reason for, the restraint may be explained, while the denial is seen as a moral opportunity) rather than an unreasonable taboo. "Take up your cross and follow Me." There is repentance and compassion, on the one hand; insistence upon the value of righteousness, on the other. It is easy to dismiss all this as "super stition." But if the objective, scientific analysis of the first part of this paper is correct, do not these ideas meet the problem, while Freudianism in essence runs away from it?

The basic Freudian critique of religion is that it is an attempt to return to the womb, or to a mother or father image. But an alternative account is that it is an attempt to press forward to a basic understanding. Man, it can be said, is born with a funda mental drive toward intellectual understanding and reassurance, just as he is born with a need to eat. His parents are the first to feed him, and his parents are usually the first people to explain and interpret the world to him. But would anyone maintain that a man eats today only because his parents fed him forty years ago? 12 Why, then, should we say that he seeks ultimate understanding only because his parents were his first instructors? For all these reasons I cannot avoid the conclusion that the true basis of the achievements of the West lies in its metaphysical ideas -in a happy combination of beyond-world reassurance with eluphasis upon worldly activity. The pious did not forsake the world. On the contrary, the slave trade was abolished and the 192 Psychiatry and Responsibility prisons rendered more humane by precisely the people one would have expected to have been most hampered by the "opiate" of an otherworldly religion. The fact that they did not expect to make the world perfect did not keep them from trying to make bits of it better. If man has hope only in this life, he will tend either to cling desperately to whatever little shred of stability he has, in what seems fundamentally a vast, changing meaninglessness, or else he becomes a barbarian egotist, concealing his essential cos mic fright in a ruthless search for thrills and power.

NOTES 1. See Paul Meier, "Safety Testing of Poliomyelitis Vaccine," Science~ Vol. CXXV (May 31, 1957), pp. 1067-1071. 2. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), chap. I; cf. David McCord Wright, "True Growth Must Come through Freedom," Fortune, December, 1959, and "The Open Secret of Economic Growth," Fortune} February, 1957. 3. Professor Lord Robbins, Essay on the Nature and Significance of Eco nomic Science (London: Macmillan, 2nd ed., 1949), p. 30. 4. David McCord Wright, "Moral, Psychological, and Political Aspects of Economic Growth," Ekonomisk Tidskrift~ October, 1954. 5. Cf. Science, Vol. CXXXIII, pp. 256 fE. 6. David McCord Wright, "Community, Mobility, Security-A Footnote on Economic Growth," Journal of Business of the University of Chicago} January, 1959. 7. When the psychologist deals with substantially controllable objective situations-rats running through mazes, fatigue studies, etc.-he is operating within the field of scientific research. In the psychoanalyst'S cubicle also, the diagnostician is at least hearing the patients' side however misconceived or misunderstood it may be. In what might be called observational or applied psychology, and human relations, how ever, such controls are often lacking. Many of the techniques used were evolved in intelligence and psychological warfare work and have little of pure science in them.

As Professor McNair of the Harvard Business School has said, a "sneaky love of power" may be involved. For example, if the attention of the subject is drawn by a rationally surprising object, no conclusion can be drawn unless the subject reacts "unduly." But what is undue? Can we trust the intuitive judgment of an unchecked observer eager to "prove" a theory (his) or to eliminate unsympathetic colleagues? The "unconfronted contradiction" casually elicited in conversation is equally deceptive. Perhaps there is a higher level of factual synthesis possible, which the subject could give-if asked. In the field of historical Psychiatry and Economic Organization 193 research he may have sources not known. Or there may be errors in his sources that are unknown to him. All of this would appear if the rules of fair play-which happen to be also the rules of scientific proof were evoked. These are only samples.

The fact is that psychological theories grow in such lush profusion that, given a small amount of biographical information on any indi vidual, I will guarantee, in ten minutes, to produce a plausible theory of "mental illness" to cover that individual's case. And if provided with the weapons often used, and the sort of post hoc reasoning often allowed, the chances are such a theory could be easily "proved" particularly if the subject is both normal and honest. 8. The essential point to grasp here is that an individual's ultimate choice is not a mere function of relative external pressures, but of how he imaginatively reconstructs or envisages the situation-including his assessment of consequences. A strong, powerfully logical brain can carry this much further than others. Yet the process is not just a chess game. Beliefs and emotion enter in, as well as past habits. But here too there is a feedback from the logical mechanism that can reverse beliefs and evoke off-setting emotions. I mean that a good logic "machine" can confront the emotive "apparatus" with an unexpected possibility pro ducing a strong "emotive" response. Vice versa, it would seem that sometimes a strong subconscious emotion can cut off the logic "machine."

Thus, each decision has ~n objectively indeterminate subjective element, sometimes negligible, sometimes important. 9. The New Man in Soviet Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1952). 10. Bauer, ibid., p. 99. II. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 353. 12. Of course there is an area of conditioning here: "Pies like the ones mother used to make," "The same causes that made him a Christian in London would have made him a Buddhist in Peking." But the problems raised by comparative religion (manifestly impossible to be handled in this footnote) are not the same thing as the basic problem of the reasons for and rationality of the drive toward religions in general.