(From Esquire Magazine)

The reading of yet another book about modern psychological theories is always, I find, a rather exasperating experience. Clothed in an ugly and hardly comprehensible jargon, the obvious is portentously enunciated, as though it were some kind of esoteric mystery. The immemorially ancient is presented, with fanfares, as a brand-new, epoch-making discovery. Instead of open-mindedness, we find dogmatism; instead of comprehensive views, we are given theories which ignore whole provinces of given reality, whole categories of the most significant kinds of facts. And instead of the concreteness so essential in a science of observation, instead of the principle of multiple causation which must govern all thinking about so complex a creature as man, we are treated to shameless displays of those gravest of intellectual sins, overabstraction, overgeneralization and oversimplification.

All this does not mean, of course, that treatises about modern psychological theories should not be read. These treatises are conspicuous facts in the life of our time and, as such, they must not be ignored. Besides, it goes without saying that, in spite of all their defects, the formulators of modern psychological theories have made substantial contributions to the sum of practical wisdom and have done something to deepen our understanding of human nature.

As a history of modern psychology in terms of “an integrative evaluation of Freud, Adler, Jung and Rank,” Doctor Ira Progoff’s recent book, The Death and Rebirth of Psychology, is clear and illuminating. So clear, indeed, and so illuminating that not only the virtues of modern psychology’s founding fathers, but also their shortcomings stand out, in its pages, with glaring distinctness.

Let us begin with what is, I suppose, the most serious, as it is certainly the most conspicuous, shortcoming of them all—the absence from all these theories (with the partial exception of Adler’s) of any mention of the body as a conditioning factor in the formation of a personality, or as a determinant of thoughts, feelings and behavior. Adler, it is true, made a number of penetrating remarks on the consequences of a sense of organic inferiority; but even Adler was very far from giving the body its due as a shaper of individual character and destiny. Freud, Jung and Rank seem to have imagined that they could understand human minds without taking into account the bodies with which those minds are indissolubly associated. Their one-sidedness is the mirror-image of the one-sidedness of the exclusively physiological physician. But just as it is perfectly clear that bodies cannot be understood or successfully treated without reference to their minds, so too it is perfectly clear that minds cannot be understood or successfully treated without reference to their bodies. Doctors are at last reconciling themselves to the idea of psychosomatic medicine. It is time for psychologists to reconcile themselves to the complementary notion of a somato-psychic approach to the problems of mind and character.

It was not only by psychology’s founding fathers that the body was neglected. The same absurd one-sidedness was and still is observable in most of their successors. How rarely, in recent books on psychology, do we come upon a passage like the following from Doctor Erich Fromm’s work on dreams, The Forgotten Language. Commenting on the words of an ancient Hindu writer, Dr. Fromm remarks that “he points to a significant connection between temperament (i.e., those psychic qualities which are rooted in a constitutionally given somatic basis) and dream content”—a connection “which has found hardly any attention in contemporary dream interpretation, although it is a significant factor in dream interpretation, as further research will undoubtedly show.” After which Dr. Fromm passes on to other, one-sidedly psychological considerations. Let us hope that this passing reference to the significance of temperament may serve as an opening wedge to a new somato-psychic approach, not merely to dreaming, but to all mental activities. It will not be difficult to make such an approach; for all the really hard preparatory work has already been done by Doctor William Sheldon and his colleagues. Using Sheldon’s rigorous and powerful methods, it is now possible for any psychologist or psychiatrist to make an accurate assessment of the “constitutionally given somatic basis,” in which our “psychic qualities” are rooted. But though the means are available, they are hardly ever used, and psychologists continue to treat minds without reference to bodies, and to publish what they are pleased to call “case histories” without deigning to give the slightest indication of what sort of people, somatically speaking, their patients were. How much did Mrs. X weigh—ninety pounds or two hundred? Did Mr. Y have the physique of an ox or a daddy longlegs, of a panther or a jellyfish? To these questions most psychologists never vouchsafe an answer—presumably because, unlike the rest of mankind, they have never thought of asking them. In his monumental Atlas of Men, Dr. Sheldon has published several thousands of photographs showing the continuous variation of masculine physique, and assessing those variations within a frame of reference having three coordinates, endomorphy, mesomorphy and ectomorphy. Turning over the pages of this book, one sees at a glance that it is obviously impossible for creatures so unlike one another as men at the extreme limits of possible variation to feel, think and behave in the same way. This is something which every one of normal intelligence has known for the last two or three hundred thousand years. It has remained for modern psychologists to ignore this self-evident fact and to talk, in their vague, rhetorical way, about “Man,” “Modern Man,” or even “Man in the Era of Sexuality,” as though there were standardized objects corresponding to these words. But in fact, of course, nobody has ever encountered these mythical beings. Nobody has ever encountered anyone but Tom, Dick and Harry, Dolly, Molly and Polly. But, as everybody knows perfectly well, Tom is congenitally unlike Dick, and Harry is constitutionally different from both of the others. And the same is true of Dolly, Molly and Polly. They are profoundly different one from another, and many of their differences are built in, or (as Dr. Fromm would say), “rooted in a constitutionally given somatic basis.” Why, one wonders, do the men and women whose profession it is to understand and treat people’s minds neglect to study these constitutionally determined differences between individuals? Such voluntary ignorance can be accounted for, I suppose, partly by the force of inertia and ingrained habit; the one-sided approach is traditional, time-hallowed, sanctioned by the bad example of the founding fathers. Nor must we forget that it is a great deal easier to be one-sided than to think and act realistically in terms of multiple causation. Wherever the line of least resistance can be followed, it generally is followed.

We see, then, that in their theories, as in their practice, the founding fathers completely neglected the “constitutionally given somatic basis,” which determines so much of our thinking, feeling and behavior. However, they did not neglect heredity altogether. Jung and, above all, Rank lightheartedly maintained that acquired characteristics are inherited—a doctrine which all geneticists, even (since the fall of Lysenko) in Russia, now repudiate. It was assumed in their theorizing that notions popular in earlier periods of history are somehow built into the hereditary make-up of twentieth-century babies. According to Rank, “the meeting of the points of view of these two eras (the Spiritual Era and the Sexual Era) and the resulting tension that remained in man ever afterwards [italics mine] comprise the main source of those inner conflicts that a later age described as ‘psychological.’ “ This, surely, is pure balderdash. Hardly less nonsensical is Jung’s equation of a human culture-pattern with the built-in behavior of an insect. For the East African tribe of the Elgonyi, he writes, their morning ritual “is a part of the pattern of behavior that life requires, just as the leaf-cutting ant cannot do otherwise than live out the pattern inherent in the nature of its species.” But in fact the behavior-pattern built into the cells of the leaf-cutting ant is of a radically different kind from the behavior-pattern acquired, during infancy and childhood, by an East African tribesman. Take a batch of ant’s eggs from the tropics and hatch them out in a greenhouse in Stockholm; the adult leaf-cutters will behave precisely as adult leaf-cutters behave in Africa. But now take a new-born Elgonyi baby and bring him up in Stockholm. By the time he grows up, he will be thinking, feeling, speaking and behaving like any Swede of his particular physique and temperament. The morning ritual performed by the Elgonyi in Africa is no more built into them than are their table manners or their language. And now consider the following statement. “When Jung refers to Christ as a ‘symbol of the Self,’ he means to indicate the fact [italics mine] that for the western psyche some variation of the image of Jesus Christ is inevitably [italics mine] the center, around which the symbolism of individuation is expressed.” But it is an observable fact that many people born and brought up in the West (and so, presumably, possessed of a “western psyche”) do not experience the image of Christ as a central symbol. Its presence or absence depends on the nature of the conditioning to which the individual happens to have been subjected.