In order to understand the functioning of an organism, medicine begins with cytology, which studies the variegated structures and functions of cells. If we want to understand the laws governing social life, we must similarly first understand the individual human being, his physiological and psychological nature, and fully accept the quality and scope of differences (particularly psychological ones) among the individuals who constitute two sexes, different families, associations, and social groups, as well as the complex structure of society itself. [...]
Man’s descent from the animals, bereft of any extraordinary occurrences, is accepted [generally] .... man has an instinctive endowment, i.e. something in common with the rest of the animal world... [however, little money is granted to] work studying this basic phenomenon of psychology.
In order to understand humanity, however, we must gain a primary understanding of mankind’s instinctive substratum and appreciate its salient role in the life of individuals and societies. This role easily escapes our notice, since our human species’ instinctive responses seem so self-evident and are so much taken for granted that it arouses insufficient interest. A psychologist, schooled in the observation of human beings, does not fully appreciate the role of this eternal phenomenon of nature until he has years of professional experience.
Man’s instinctive substratum has a slightly different biological structure than that of animals. Energetically speaking, it has become less dynamic and become more plastic, thereby giving up its job as the main dictator of behavior. It has become more receptive to the controls of reasoning, without, however, losing much of the rich specific contents of the human kind.
It is precisely this phylogenetically developed basis for our experience, and its emotional dynamism, that allow individuals to develop their feelings and social bounds, enabling us to intuit other people’s psychological state and individual or social psychological reality. It is thus possible to perceive and understand human customs and moral values. From infancy, this substratum stimulates various activities aiming at the development of the mind’s higher functions. In other words, our instinct is our first tutor, whom we carry inside all our lives. Proper child-rearing is thus not limited to teaching a young person to control the overly violent reactions of his instinctual emotionalism; it also ought to teach him to appreciate the wisdom of nature contained and speaking through his instinctive endowment.
This substratum contains millions of years’ worth of bio-psychological development that was the product of species’ life conditions, so it neither is nor can be a perfect creation. Our well-known weaknesses of human nature and errors in the natural perception and comprehension of reality have thus been conditioned on that phylogenetic level for millennia.
The common substratum of psychology has made it possible for peoples throughout the centuries and civilizations to create concepts regarding human, social, and moral matters which share significant similarities. Inter-epochal and interracial variations in this area are less striking than those differentiating persons whose instinctual human substratum is normal from those who are carriers of an instinctual bio-psychological defect, though they are members of the same race and civilization. [...]
Man has lived in groups throughout his prehistory, so our species’ instinctual substratum was shaped in this tie, thus conditioning our emotions as regard the mining of existence. The need for an appropriate internal structure of commonality, and a striving to achieve a worthy role within that structure, are encoded at this very level. In the final analysis, our self-preservation instinct is rivaled by another feeling: the good of society demands that we make sacrifices, sometimes even the supreme sacrifice. [...]
Our zeal to control anyone harmful to ourselves or our group is so primal in its near-reflex necessity as to leave no doubt that it is also encoded at the instinctual level. Our instinct, however, does not differentiate between behavior motivated by simple human failure and behavior performed by individuals with pathological aberrations. Quite the contrary: we instinctively tend to judge the latter more severely, harkening to nature’s striving to eliminate biologically or psychologically defective individuals. [...]
It is also at this level that differences begin to occur between normal individuals, influencing the formation of their characters, world-views, and attitudes. The primary differences are in the bio-psychical dynamism of this substratum; differences of content are secondary. For some people the sthenic instinct supersedes psychology; for others, it easily relinquishes control to reason. It also appears that some people have a somewhat richer and more subtle instinctual endowment than others. Significant deficiencies in this heritage nevertheless occur in only a tiny percentage of the human population; and we perceive this to be qualitatively pathological. ...
A more subtle structure of effect is built upon our instinctual sub-stratum, thanks to constant cooperation from the latter as well as familial and societal child-rearing practices. With time, this structure becomes a more easily observable component of our personality, within which it plays an integrative role. This higher effect is instrumental in linking us to society, which is why its correct development is a proper duty of pedagogues and constitutes one of the objects of a psychotherapist’s efforts, if perceived to be abnormally formed. Both pedagogues and psychotherapists sometimes feel helpless, if this process of formation was influenced by a defective instinctual substratum.
Thanks to the memory, that phenomenon ever better described by psychology, but whose nature remains at least partly mysterious, man stores life-experiences and purposely acquired knowledge. There are extensive individual variations in regard to this capacity, its quality, and its contents. A young person also looks at the world differently from an old man endowed with a good memory. People with a good memory and a great deal of knowledge have a greater tendency to reach for the written data of collective memory in order to supplement their own.
This collected material constitutes the subject matter of the second psychological process, namely association; our understanding of its characteristics is constantly improving, although we have not yet been able to shed sufficient light upon its nurturance. In spite of, or maybe thanks to, the value judgments contributed to this question by psychologists and psychoanalysts, it appears that achieving a satisfactory synthetic understanding of the associative processes will not be possible unless and until we humbly decide to cross the boundaries of purely scientific comprehension.
Our reasoning faculties continue to develop throughout our entire active lives, thus, accurate judgmental abilities do not peak until our hair starts greying and the drive of instinct, emotion, and habit begins to abate. It is a collective product derived from an interaction between man and his environment, and from many generations’ worth of creation and transmission. The environment may also have a destructive influence upon the development of our reasoning faculties. In its environment in particular, the human mind is contaminated by conversive thinking, which is the most common anomaly in this process. It is for this reason that the proper development of mind requires periods of solitary reflection on occasion.
Man has also developed a psychological function not found among animals. Only man can apprehend a certain quantity of material or abstract imaginings within his field of attention, inspecting them internally in order to effect further operations of the mind upon this material. This enables us to confront facts, affect constructive and technical operations, and predict future results. If the facts subjected to internal projection and inspection deal with man’s own personality, man performs an act of introspection essential for monitoring the state of a human personality and the meaning of his own behavior. This act of internal projection and inspection complements our consciousness; it characterizes no species other than the human. However, there is exceptionally wide divergence among individuals regarding the capacity for such mental acts. The efficiency of this mental function shows somewhat low statistical correlation with general intelligence.
Thus, if we speak of man’s general intelligence, we must take into account both its internal structure and the individual differences occurring at every level of this structure. The substratum of our intelligence, after all, contains nature’s instinctual heritage of wisdom and error, giving rise to the basic intelligence of life experience. Superimposed upon this construct, thanks to memory and the associative capacity, is our ability to effect complex operations of thought, crowned by the act of internal projection, and to constantly improve their correctness. We are variously endowed with these capabilities, which makes for a mosaic of individually variegated talents.
Basic intelligence grows from this instinctual substratum under the influence of an amicable environment and a readily accessible compendium of human experience; it is intertwined with higher effect, enabling us to understand others and to intuit their psychological state by means of some naive realism. This conditions the development of moral reason. This layer of our intelligence is widely distributed within society; the overwhelming majority of people have it, which is why we can so often admire the tact, intuition of social relationships, and sensible morality of people whose intellectual gifts are only average. We also see people with an outstanding intellect who lack these very natural values. As is the case with deficiencies in the instinctual substratum, the deficits of this basic structure of our intelligence frequently take on features we perceive as pathological.
The distribution of human intellectual capacity within societies is completely different, and its amplitude has the greatest scope. Highly gifted people constitute a tiny percentage of each population, and those with the highest quotient of intelligence constitute only a few per thousand. In spite of this, however, the latter play such a significant role in collective life that any society attempting to prevent them from fulfilling their duty does so at its own peril. At the same time, individuals barely able to master simple arithmetic and the art of writing are, in the majority, normal people whose basic intelligence is often entirely adequate.
It is a universal law of nature that the higher a given species’ psychological organization, the greater the psychological differences among individual units. Man is the most highly organized species; hence, these variations are the greatest. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, psychological differences occur in all structures of the pattern of human personality dealt with here, albeit in terms of necessary oversimplification.
Profound psychological variegations may strike some as an injustice of nature, but they are her right and have meaning.
Nature’s seeming injustice, alluded to above, is, in fact, a great gift to humanity, enabling human societies to develop their complex structures and to be highly creative at both the individual and collective level. Thanks to psychological variety, the creative potential of any society is many times higher than it could possibly be if our species were psychologically more homogeneous. Thanks to these variations, the societal structure implicit within can also develop.
The fate of human societies depends upon the proper adjustment of individuals within this structure and upon the manner in which innate variations of talents are utilized.
Our experience teaches us that psychological differences among people are [also] the cause of misunderstandings and problems. We can overcome these problems only if we accept psychological differences as a law of nature and appreciate their creative value. This would also enable us to gain an objective comprehension of man and human societies; unfortunately, it would also teach us that equality under the law is inequality under the law of nature.
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The human personality is unstable by its very nature, and a lifelong evolutionary process is the normal state of affairs. Some political and religious systems advocate slowing down this process or achieving excessive stability in our personalities, but these are improper states from the point of view of psychology. If the evolution of a human personality or world-view became frozen long and deeply enough, the question enters the realm of psychopathology. The process of personality transformation reveals its meaning thanks to its creative nature, which is based on the conscious acceptance thereof as the natural course of events.
Our personalities pass through temporary destructive periods as a result of various occurrences, especially if we undergo suffering or meet with phenomena which are at variance with our prior experiences and imaginings. These so-called disintegrative stages are often unpleasant, although not necessarily so. A good dramatic work, for instance, enables us to experience a disintegrative state, simultaneously calming down the unpleasant components and furnishing creative ideas for a renewed reintegration of our personalities. True theater therefore causes the condition known as catharsis.
A disintegrative state provokes us to mental efforts and attempts to overcome it in order to regain active homeostasis. Overcoming such states, in effect, correcting our errors and enriching our personalities, is a proper and creative process of reintegration, leading to a higher level of understanding and acceptance of the laws of life, to a better comprehension of self and others, and to a more highly developed sensitivity in interpersonal relationships. Our feelings also validate the successful achievement of a reintegrative state: the unpleasant conditions we have survived are endowed with meaning. Thus, the experience renders us better-prepared to confront the next disintegrative situation.
If, however, we have proved unable to master the problems which occurred because our reflexes were too quick to repress and substitute the uncomfortable material from our consciousness, or for some similar reason, our personality undergoes retroactive egotization, but it is not free of the sensation of failure. The results are devolutionary; the person becomes more difficult to get along with. If we cannot overcome such a disintegrative state because the causative circumstances were overly dramatic or because we lacked the information essential for constructive use, our organism reacts with a neurotic condition.
The diagram of the human personality presented herein, summarized and simplified for reasons of necessity, makes us aware of how complex human beings are in their structure, their changes, and their mental and spiritual lives. If we thus wish to create social sciences whose descriptions of our reality would be satisfactory enough to enable us to rely on them in practice, we must accept this complexity and make certain that it is sufficiently respected. Any attempt to substitute this basic knowledge with the help of oversimplifying schemes leads to loss of that indispensable convergence between our reasoning and the reality we are observing. It behooves us to reemphasize that using our natural language of psychological imaginations for this purpose cannot be a substitute for objective premises.
Similarly, it is extremely difficult for a psychologist to believe in the value of any social ideology based on simplified or even naive psychological premises. This applies to any ideology which attempts to over-simplify psychological reality, whether it be one utilized by a totalitarian system or, unfortunately, by democracy as well. People are different. Whatever is qualitatively different and remains in a state of permanent evolution cannot be equal.
The above-mentioned statements about human nature apply to normal people, with a few exceptions.
However, each society on earth contains a certain percentage of individuals, a relatively small but active minority, who cannot be considered normal. We emphasize that we are dealing with qualitative, not statistical, abnormality. Outstandingly intelligent persons are statistically abnormal, but they can be quite normal members of society from the qualitative point of view.
Thus there are people who reveal morbid phenomena, and such in whom mental deviations and anomalies of various qualities and intensities can be observed. Many such people are driven by internal anxieties: they search for unconventional paths of action and adjustment to the life with their characteristic hyperactivity. In part, such activity is pioneering and creative, which ensures societal tolerance for some of these individuals. Some psychiatrists, especially Germans, have praised such people as embodying the principal inspiration for the development of civilization; this is a damagingly unilateral view of reality. Laymen in the field of psychopathology frequently gain the impression that such persons represent some extraordinary talents. This very science, however, explains that these individuals’ hyperactivity and sense of being exceptional are derived from their drive to overcompensate for a feeling of some deficiency.
The truth is that normal people are the richest of all.
