Freud deserves our gratitude for his splendid analysis of the human mental apparatus into its various realms or regions which he calls the id, the ego and the super-ego. Although he is sadly mistaken about the nature of the urge in the unconscious, which he regards as sexual, yet it appears that his general theory about the supreme importance of the unconscious as the dynamic power of human action, has laid the foundations of a far-reaching progress in the knowledge of human nature. From our own point of view the unconscious urge of the human mind is for Beauty or Perfection and not for sex. His theory, when purged of its principal error, will accord almost completely with the theory of human nature already outlined in this book. The error of Freud has led him to a most unfortunate distortion of facts, as we shall presently see.

 

Briefly, the theory of Freud is that a very small part of the human personality is above the level of consciousness, while the rest of it is below this level. The portion below is known as the “unconscious mind” or simply the “unconscious”. It is the large as well as the more important portion of consciousness. All the contents of the conscious mind are derived from the unconscious and they are to the unconscious as foam is to the ocean. The unconscious self is uncivilised and intensely selfish. Its chief concern is to gratify its desires which are sexual in nature and which are tremendously powerful. It cannot satisfy its desires except through the conscious self. Hence it forces the conscious self with the whole pressure of its desires to strive for their satisfaction.

 

The conscious self, which is really a creature of the unconscious, feels the necessity of meeting the needs of the unconscious but it is often helpless, because it is under a strong pressure from an opposite direction which requires it to behave in a respectable, law-abiding and orderly manner and that is the pressure of the society. Since the shameful and unruly desires of the unconscious interfere with the respectability and reputation of the conscious self, the latter tries to check them and keep them below the level of consciousness. This function of the conscious self is called the censor. Unconscious desires which suffer continuous discouragement and repression from the censor are, in spite of their great and insistent power, finally disappointed and no longer insist on rising into consciousness, that is, they are forgotten. They, however, avenge themselves, so to say, for the rough treatment meted out to them, by creating a diseased condition of the mind, known as a complex, of which the symptoms are hysteria, nervousness, obsession and neurosis. The psychoanalyst claims to cure these nervous diseases by merely bringing to light the repressed desires and thus altering their character. The repressed energy which is the cause of trouble is played off in this way. The censor, however, permits those desires to rise to consciousness which purify themselves enroute by a process which Freud denotes by the name of sublimation. Freud seems to hold that all contents of the conscious mind are sublimated versions of elements in the unconscious. This is true not only of our desires and aversions, hopes and aspirations but also of our ideals, beliefs, thoughts and tastes of all varieties.

 

In his later publications Freud uses the words id and ego, respectively, for the unconscious and the conscious selves. He used a third term, super-ego for a part or a function of the ego to which he allocates the activities of “self-observation, conscience and holding up of ideals”. The super-ego pursues its own ends and is independent of the ego as regards the energy at its disposal. The ego is at the mercy of the super-ego which dictates to it sometimes very severe standards of morality. Our sense of guilt or sinfulness is the result of the tension between the ego and the super-ego. Unlike sexuality which exists from the very beginning, the super-ego is a later development and is the result of what Freud calls the Oedipus complex.

 

The sexual urge of the child results in his intense love for his parents, who dominate him by granting proofs of affection and by threats of punishment which create an anxiety in the child, because they suggest to him a loss of their love and because they must be feared also on their own account. The objective anxiety which the child develops in this way is the forerunner of the later moral anxiety. So long as the former is dominant there is neither conscience nor super-ego. When the child grows in years he succeeds in overcoming more and more the Oedipus complex and its place is taken up by the super-ego which thereforward observes, guides and threatens the ego in just the same way as the parents acted to the child before. The super-ego differs from the parental authority in one respect. It takes up and continues its harshness and the preventive and punitive functions but not its loving care. Moreover, its harshness need not be inherited at all from the parental authority. It is relentlessly harsh and severe in any case, no matter how lovingly the parents may have brought up the child, scrupulously avoiding punishments and threats of all kinds.

 

When the Oedipus complex passes away, the child gives up the intense object cathexes which it has formed towards its parents and to compensate for the loss of object it identifies other objects or persons with its parents. The identification becomes intense in proportion as the object-cathexes lose their influence.

 

“The super-ego,” writes Freud, “does not attain to full strength and development if the overcoming of the Oedipus complex has not been completely successful. . . . The super-ego also takes over the influence of those persons who have taken the place of the parents, that is to say, of persons who have been concerned in the child’s upbringing and whom it has regarded as ideal models. Normally the super-ego is constantly becoming more and more remote from the original parents, becoming as it were impersonal. Another thing that we must not forget is that the child values its parents differently at different periods of its life. At the time at which the Oedipus complex makes way for the super-ego, they seem to be splendid figures, but later on they lose a good deal of their prestige. . . . We have to mention another important activity which is to be ascribed to the super-ego. It is also the vehicle of the ego-ideal by which the ego measures itself, towards which it strives and whose demands for ever-increasing perfection it is always striving to fulfil. No doubt this ego-ideal is a precipitation of the old idea of parents, an expression of the admiration which the child felt for the perfection which it at that time ascribed to them. . . The super-ego is the representation of all moral restrictions, the advocate of the impulse towards perfection. In general parents and similar authorities follow the dictates of their own super-ego in the upbringing of their children. . . . The result is that the super-ego of the child is not really built up on the model of the parents but on that of the parents’ super-ego.”

 

Now something about the nature of the conscious and the unconscious minds which Freud calls the ego and the id.

 

The unconscious or the id is a cauldron of seething excitement. It has “no organization and no unified will, only an impulsion to obtain satisfaction for the instinctual needs in accordance with the pleasure principle. The laws of logic—above all, the laws of contradiction—do not hold for processes in the id. Contradictory impulses exist side by side without neutralizing each other. . . . There is nothing in the id which can be compared to negation and we are astonished to find in it an exception to the philosopher’s assertion that space and time are necessary parts of our acts. In the id there is nothing corresponding to the idea of time, no recognition of the passage of time and (a thing which is very remarkable and awaits adequate attention in philosophic thought) no alteration of mental processes by the passage of time. Conative impulses, which have never got beyond the id, and even impressions which have been pushed down to the id by repression are virtually immortal and are preserved for whole decades as though they had but recently occurred.”

 

“Id knows no values, no good and evil, no morality.” The ego may be regarded as “that part of the id which has been modified by its proximity to the external world and the influence that the latter has had on it. . . . The ego has taken over the task of representing the external world for the id and so of saving it, for the id blindly striving to gratify its instincts in complete disregard of the superior strength of outside forces could not otherwise escape annihilation. . . . .In popular language we may say that ego stands for reason and circumspection while id stands for the untamed passions. . . . The ego is after all only a part of the id, a part purposely modified by its proximity to the dangers of reality. From a dynamic point of view it is weak, it borrows its energy from the id. . . . By identifying itself with the object it recommends itself to the id in place of the object and seeks to attract the libido of the id on to itself. . . . On the whole the ego has to carry out the intentions of the id, it fulfils its duty, if it succeeds in creating the conditions under which these intentions can be best fulfilled. One might compare the relations of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotive energy and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go. . . . .

 

“The proverb tells us that one cannot serve two masters at once. The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters and has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three. These demands are always divergent and often seem quite incompatible; no wonder that the ego so frequently gives way under its task. The three tyrants are the external world, the super-ego and the id… It [the ego] is designed to represent the demands of the external world but it also wishes to be a loyal servant of the id, to remain upon good terms with the id, to recommend itself to the id as an object and to draw the id’s libido on to itself. In its attempt to mediate between the id and the reality it is often forced to clothe the unconscious commands of the id with its own rationalisations, to gloss over the conflicts between the id and the reality and with diplomatic dishonesty to display a pretended regard for reality even when the id persists in being stubborn and uncompromising. On the other hand, its every movement is watched by the severe super-ego which holds up certain norms of behaviour, without regard to any difficulties coming from the id and the external world and if these norms are not acted up to, it punishes the ego with the feelings of tension which manifest themselves as a sense of inferiority and guilt. In this way goaded on by the id, hemmed in by the super-ego and rebuffed by reality, the ego struggles to cope with its economic task of reducing the forces and influences which work in it and upon it to some kind of harmony and we may well understand how it is that we so often cannot repress the cry, ‘Life is not easy’. When the ego is forced to acknowledge its weakness it breaks out into anxiety, reality anxiety in face of the external world, moral anxiety in face of the super-ego and neurotic anxiety in face of the strength of passions in the id.”

 

Since, according to Freud, man is vicious by nature being swayed by an unlimited and passionate sexual desire, he is compelled to deny that our higher activities like art, science, religion or philosophy have any intrinsic worth or merit of their own. He has tried to show in his book Civilization and Its Discontents that these activities are attempts of man to compensate for his unsatisfied sexual desires. They are no more than a useful sop for salving his wounded instincts. They have their root in the evil nature of man which he is unable to express in an undisguised form. Conscience is the result of instinctual renunciations. Its verdict is based on the nature of instincts which society feels to be most dangerous to it. Religion is a desire for a heavenly father necessitated when the earthly father fails us in youth. Ethics and morality are barriers imposed by society to hold in check the undesirable instincts. Reasoning of all kinds is rationalising and a compensation for the instincts that are denied expression. We prove things to be true when we want them to be true. Art is needed “to create illusions” and to protect man against the unbearable reality of things. “These illusions are derived from the life of phantasy.” “At the head of these phantasy pleasures stands the enjoyment of works of art.” Art is “a mild narcotic,” a temporary “refuge from the hardships of life”. Intellectual activity is also a compensation for thwarted instinctive desires. Our views on abstract questions, on right and wrong, are determined by the instinctive desires whose substitute gratification is being sought. The evil impulses of man, according to Freud, create a big necessity for him to delude himself by means of the “so called” higher activities that they are being satisfied, without satisfying them actually, in order to be able to pacify an oppressive society. The higher activities are not higher but they are unreal and illusory substitutes for our real desires. In short, man must choose one of the following three alternatives:

 

(1)      To give full expression to the shameful urge of his nature and become as wicked and licentious as he desires. Of course, the society will inflict disgrace, degradation and censure upon him, but let him try not to mind these things if he can.

(2)      To repress his sexual desires in order to be able to please the society and thereby expose himself to the danger of suffering from nervousness, hysteria, obsessions, worries, neurosis and madness.

(3)      To renounce his instinctive desires and try to deceive himself by such substitute activities as art, religion, science and morality which, he must remember, are, as a matter of fact, no more than illusions devoid of any merit or worth of their own.

 

Obviously Freud portrays a very miserable picture of human being. He depicts him as an intellectual beast doomed to disgrace, misery or madness if he does not deceive himself by using all his intellectual powers that the desires of his intractable evil nature are being satisfied.

 

But matters need not be as thoroughly bad as he has represented them to be. The apparently distorted and disappointing view of Freud about the lot of man and the value and worth of our higher activities is necessitated by his hypothesis that the nature of our unconscious desires is sexual. If this hypothesis is absurd, as we shall endeavour to show that it really is, the conclusions derived from it must be also absurd. In fact, his conclusions cast a further suspicion on the validity of his basic assumption because, when engaged in our higher activities, we do not feel that we are deceiving ourselves, or that our pleasure is an illusion. If this had been the case Freud himself would not have devoted the whole of his life to the search for truth.

 

The passages of Freud quoted above from his New Introductory Lectures require only a small modification in order to suit the hypothesis that Beauty or Perfection and not sexuality is the urge of the id.

 

We shall attempt to show that this hypothesis makes the whole theory of the unconscious simple and intelligible. Not only does it fit in with all the facts eminently but also explains many things which were unintelligible to Freud. Above all, it reconciles the conflicting schools of psychoanalysis.

 

Freud has given an unjustifiably and even a ridiculously wide meaning to the word “sexuality”. From the beginning the ordinary man has believed on the grounds of experience that the sex instinct first manifests itself in adolescence except in the case of some precocious children who are considered as diseased and abnormal. The urge of the unconscious mind is of a permanent nature, and in order to give the sex instinct the status of a permanent urge, which remains active from the first day of life to the last, Freud has tried to prove its activity from the earliest childhood by suggesting that such simple activities of the child as swallowing, secreting, sucking the nipple or the thumb are sexual in character. He holds that the child’s love for his parents is due to his sexual urge. The child develops a sexual attitude towards the parent of the opposite sex and simultaneously a rivalry towards the other. This he calls the Oedipus complex. When the attitude of the child is the reverse of this, Freud suggests that the Oedipus complex, although still sexual in nature, has become inverted. He believes that the function of the sex instinct is not as simple in man as it is in the animal. In man it consists of various component parts that have to fuse into a single whole and often fail to do so. In man, moreover, it has to pass through two periods of development, one commencing from about the age of four and the second beginning just above the age of puberty. In the interval there is the “latency period” during which there is no progress.

 

Freud assigns a sexual origin not only to all mental and nervous disorders and dreams but also to normal mental processes that have apparently nothing to do with sex. He thinks that the love of ideals which the child develops later on is also of a sexual origin, because it is the substitute of the Oedipus complex which disappears gradually yielding place to the love of ideals. Freud makes the Oedipus complex as the very foundation of his whole theory. Ernest Jones writes about it: “All other conclusions of psychoanalytical theory are grouped around this complex and by the truth of this finding psychoanalysis stands or falls.”

 

The idea of infantile sexuality, supported as it is by fantastic arguments, although fundamental to the theory of Freud, has failed to carry conviction with serious students of psychology. Freud was accused of being “sex-mad”, of “reducing everything to sex” or of “pan-sexualism”. The worst criticism of psychoanalysis has centred around this point. This is in fact the rock on which the school of psychoanalysis was shattered into three parties. Adler and Jung, the co-workers and pupils of Freud, found it difficult to agree with their master that the nature of the urge in the subconscious was sexual and advanced their own theories about it. Adler maintains that this urge is the impulse to power while Jung seems to hold that it is for both power and sex. The great amount of disagreement that exists among the psychologists in this respect, at least, creates a suspicion that none of their theories is perfectly satisfactory and that there is room enough for a fresh theory explaining the nature of the unconscious urge in an entirely different way.

 

The clue to a different theory is afforded by some of the facts which were observed by Freud himself but of which the true significance he was unable to realise.

 

We gather from the quotations given above from the writings of Freud that the child loves his parents as “splendid figures”, that he feels an “admiration” for his parents and ascribes a “perfection” to them, that he loves his teachers because they are “ideal models”, that the super-ego (which is a name given by Freud to the mental function causing the love of ideals and which takes the place of the parents’ love) “is the advocate of the impulse towards perfection”, and that the super-ego demands “an ever-increasing perfection”. Is it then too much to say that an individual is under the powerful influence of a desire for the perfect, the admirable and the splendid, throughout his life? In childhood this desire finds an outlet in the persons of the parents and teachers because nothing more perfect and more admirable than them is known to the child. As his knowledge increases he finds other and better objects and ideas worthy of love and devotion and he is naturally attracted by them being compelled by the urge of his nature. The super-ego appears to be demanding an ever-increasing perfection of ideals because the child’s idea of perfection improves as he grows in years and develops his powers of comparison and thought. His idea of what is perfect grows with knowledge and shifts to better and better objects continuously. This explains why, as the child grows, the parents “lose a good deal of their prestige”, why the “super-ego is becoming more and more remote from the original parents”, why it is becoming more and more “impersonal”, and why the child “values his parents differently at different periods of his life”. This urge is the cause of the so-called “Oedipus complex” as well as of the “impulse towards perfection” of which, according to Freud, the super-ego is “the advocate”. Super-ego is not the result of the child’s love of parents. On the other hand, both the love of parents and the super-ego are the result of the urge for Perfection in the unconscious.

 

To my mind, one of the weakest links in the theory of Freud is his assertion, which he mistakes for an argument, that the super-ego or the mental function responsible for the love of ideals is the substitute of the Oedipus complex in the sense that the former is caused by the latter and is dependent upon it. He skips over the difficulty of proving that it is so and yet assumes it as a fact secure enough to serve him as the very foundation of his theory.

 

The fundamental attitude of parents towards the child is that of love. Their occasional harshness is also due to love, and the child fully appreciates this fact when he comes of age. If the super-ego is the heir of the parental function, why is it that it inherits from that function only harshness (expressed in the rebukes and reproaches of conscience) and nothing of its love and tenderness? Moreover, the super-ego is harsh even if the parents have never been harsh to the child on account of their extreme fondness for him. Why is it that the super-ego inherits nothing whatsoever from the parental function in such cases? The Oedipus complex has two aspects— the child loves the parents and also fears them. His fear is the result of his love. What he fears principally is not punishment but the loss of love. Why then does a grown-up man fear the super-ego or the ideal and act up to the standards prescribed by it when it does not pay back this effort in terms of love or affection like that of the parents? Why is it that the Oedipus complex, in spite of its alleged sexual origin, takes such a turn in later life as to emerge in a form which has no relation whatsoever with sex, that is, in the form of a conscience or an ideal of conduct? Freud tells us that the super-ego has a tendency to diverge more and more from the Oedipus complex as time goes on. Why so? If it had been a successor of the Oedipus complex we should have expected it to conform as much as possible to the character of its origin. Again, sometimes the super-ego prescribes ideals which are not only different from, but also opposed to, the wishes and desires of the parents. These facts are inexplicable if we assume that the love of ideals is not an independent natural urge in man but is the resulting substitute of the so-called Oedipus Complex.

 

Freud himself writes:

“I cannot tell you as much as I could wish about the change from the parental function to the super-ego. . . . . partly because we ourselves do not feel we have fully understood it.” [1]

 

The change from the parental function to the super-ego is not clear to Freud because of his persistence at all costs in the belief that the desires in the unconscious mind are of a sexual nature. He could not ascribe a sexual basis to the urge for the ideals without asserting that the super-ego is the result of the Oedipus complex which has a sexual nature. This is no doubt a far-fetched idea.

 

Here there was a sufficient ground to expect that the cause of the super-ego may not be the accident of the Oedipus complex but something deep down in the nature of man in which we may discover the cause of the Oedipus complex as well. But, unfortunately, Freud missed the clue and lodged himself into difficulties. All the above facts are explained easily when we assume that the unconscious urge is for Beauty and Perfection and the super-ego is the representation or interpretation of the desires of the id by the ego. The love of ideals is directly caused by the pressure of the unconscious desire for Perfection and Beauty and is a natural function of the mind independent of the so-called “Oedipus complex” which is itself caused by it. The unconscious urge for Perfection or Beauty is permanent. It functions in childhood as well as throughout the rest of the life of an individual. It finds satisfaction in various objects ranging from the parents and teachers to the highest ideals depending upon the stage up to which the ego has developed its knowledge of the perfect at any time. This hypothesis explains the cause of infantile repressions and thereby dispenses with the highly disputed theory of infantile sexuality which Freud has advanced as an explanation of such repressions.

 

Freud stretches our imagination rather too much when he explains the child’s love for his parents as due to sexuality. It is indeed possible that the child may sometimes love the parent of the opposite sex slightly more than the other parent, but it may be largely due to the fact that the parent of the opposite sex loves the child more than the other parent does and the child merely returns this extra attachment on his or her part. We may even concede that there may be an increased attachment for the parent of the opposite sex on the part of the child even on account of his own sex inclinations, particularly in precocious children, but the fact that the child generally loves both his parents almost to the same extent and sometimes the parent of the same sex more than the parent of the opposite sex and that the child may love other persons too like teachers, etc., who are concerned in his upbringing and whom he regards as perfect and admirable irrespective of their sex, does point to a source of love in him which should be different from sexuality. Obviously, the child’s love is turning on some internal desire for perfection, which cannot but find an outlet in the persons of his parents and teachers for the time being.

 

The ego forms an ideal at every stage of its life and the nature and the standard of perfection of its ideal depends upon the amount of knowledge and experience it has gained at any particular time. Naturally, on account of the child’s limited knowledge and his proximity to some superior, authoritative and affectionate persons (whom he understands as his parents and teachers), he cannot think of any other models of perfection, love and goodness except them. This first ideal of the child has to be given up by him quite naturally as his knowledge increases and he comes to know of certain other objects, persons or ideas more satisfactory than this. The urge of the id is to love the best that is lovable, to love the object of the highest beauty and perfection known to the self at any time, be it the parents, the teachers or the ideals of ever-increasing perfection.

 

But the question arises: If the unconscious urge is for Beauty or Perfection and not sex, how are we to explain the fact that Freud actually discovered in his experiments that some of his nervous patients were actually suffering from sex repressions or that the treatment to which they were subjected on this assumption actually brought about the cure in very many cases? It can be explained as follows:

 

Attraction, love, or the search for Beauty is the principal urge of consciousness and this urge has been manifesting itself at every stage of evolution in a manner suitable to and consistent with that stage. There is every truth in the Biblical saying that “God is Love”. Hate or repulsion is the negative aspect of this urge. It indicates a direction opposite to that in which life is moving, opposite to that of love. Consciousness has made use of its own urge of attraction and its opposite repulsion for pushing itself through every stage of its own evolution. Both attraction and repulsion have been essential for the progress of life at every stage and they will remain essential for the future progress of life as well. These two tendencies in some form or shape form the characteristics of all life. In the material stage life developed the physical laws which can be explained as various forms of attraction and repulsion. We see the evidence of it in the affinities of atoms, in a chemical action, in the attraction between the opposite poles of magnets or the opposite charge of electricity, in the force of gravitation and in all fundamental properties of matter. In the animal stage life evolved the instincts. All instincts are similarly fashioned by life out of its own urge for love and its antithesis, hate.

 

While other instincts share the principal urge of consciousness, that is, its urge of love for Beauty, by implication and as tendencies subservient to it, a part of the sex instinct—that part on account of which the animal is first attracted to the mate and made available for the later sexual act—is fashioned directly out of this urge. In the operation of the sex instinct, that is, the initial part is played by the attraction for the beautiful. When in the course of evolution the instinct passes on to man in whom the urge of consciousness comes into its own for the first time and gains the freedom to seek the real and the final object of its desire, viz. Beauty or Consciousness, the instinct acquires a force and a meaning which it did not possess in the animal stage.

 

Sex instinct is to be found in both man and animal, but it does not cause nervous diseases in the animal, because there it functions with its normal strength. But in man, in the period of adolescence in particular, the instinct of sex gets an influx of energy from the urge of consciousness which seeks Beauty and is, therefore, too ready to flow into the channel of the sex instinct (which is fashioned out of the urge for Beauty) and to express itself erroneously in the love of the mate. The very first joy of love which a man or a woman feels for his or her mate is not sexual in character. It is spiritual as can be understood from the nature of the pleasure attending it, which is akin to the pleasure we derive from the contemplation of a beautiful work of art. The pleasure derived from sex gratification is of a different quality. The idea of sex comes later on when the first, spiritual sort of attraction, has served its purpose of bringing together the male and the female. When on account of the proximity of the male and the female, sex instinct becomes active, the original spiritual joy makes room for the lower sexual pleasure.

 

Nature has no doubt utilised the larger desire for Beauty in all life, the principal quality of attraction in consciousness, for attracting the male and the female towards each other for the procreation of the race. This is to be found not only in man but also in birds and insects, in whom the beauty of colour, song or plumage is the agency which attracts the male to the female. The sex desire is initiated by a desire for Beauty. When the urge of consciousness is not having its own expression, a man feels a sort of repression on account of the force of the unconscious desire for Beauty and it appears to him that he can relieve himself by free sexual indulgence, but such a laxity is really harmful to him as the urge that really seeks expression is that of consciousness and not of sex. We know that the urge of self generally does not know the real object that can satisfy it and commits mistakes frequently. If the self is not already familiar with its own ideal, it mistakes the first attraction for the mate, in adolescence in particular, as the most satisfactory object and gives itself up completely to it, the urge of self having a full expression in it for the time being. But since the mate cannot be the real object of the self’s desire, the love of self is unable to run a smooth course and before long there is disillusionment and disappointment and sometimes a serious mental conflict and nervous disorder.

 

It appears to us as if the repression of the sex urge is the cause of all these miseries, but really their cause is the obstruction of the urge of consciousness which is for Beauty, Goodness and Perfection. That is why people disappointed in love find satisfaction in higher and altruistic activities and ultimately forget their love disappointments and that is why people devoted to such activities are able to control easily their sex desires. People who are trained to give suitable expression to their urge of the self need not suffer from mental conflicts or nervous diseases at all. All our interest in stories of love, in fiction, novels, poetry and drama is due to the urge of the self finding an expression in sex love, and thereby giving the latter a special meaning and importance. Life is made by the urge of the self and not by the urge of sex.

 

The arrangement of nature by which the sex instinct happens to share something of the urge of consciousness, that is, something of the spiritual, serves a useful purpose, as the peculiar joy that a man or a woman feels in the smooth course of his or her first attraction for the mate, which has not yet been replaced by the inferior kind of pleasure derived from the actual sexual act that follows this attraction, makes the self familiar with the nature of the joy that will be experienced by it in the love of consciousness and, therefore, serves as a guide and a stimulant to the urge of the self. When a man has once experienced the joy of an intense, pure and sincere love for a woman and when being ultimately disillusioned after a failure or a success, he wants to replace it by the love of his Creator through a course of prayers and devotions, he succeeds more readily than a man who has never gone through an experience of intense love. He discovers soon that a joy similar to his previous joy, but surpassing it by far in quality and intensity, is animating him gradually more and more.

 

To love sincerely and passionately is a great virtue, whatever the object of love. It gives a free and full expression, at least once in our life, to an urge which we need most of all to express. Such a love is bound to end in an intense love for the Creator. The fact that the urge of the self gets mixed up with the urge of sex explains why Freud erroneously regards the sex instinct in man as complicated and composed of various parts which have to fuse into an entity but seldom do so. If the urge of the id had been sex, the free sex indulgence should have given us a complete satisfaction while actually it makes us miserable in the long run because we feel that we have ignored and violated our ideal. The ideal satisfies one aspect of our desire for Beauty and the sex love, if a part of the urge of consciousness is finding expression through it, satisfies another, but at the same time the sex love comes into a clash with our desire for the ideal. This gives rise to a mental conflict because we want to satisfy two conflicting desires at once. These desires are really a single desire and are meant to be satisfied by a single object of love, the Divine Self, but we make them two desires because we are not able to see the whole of Beauty in our ideal for the time being and feel in a hurry to satisfy them at once. Complete satisfaction can come to us only when our ideal is able to satisfy the whole of the urge of consciousness for Beauty and that is possible only when we are able to feel increasingly the Beauty of Consciousness, the Perfect Ideal.

 

Nervous disorders are caused by the obstruction of the urge of consciousness and not by the repression of the urge of sex which in its unmixed form is no more than a biological function as simple and harmless as in the lower animals. But frequently, and in youth in particular, the urge of consciousness finds an expression in the love of the mate, so that the sex attraction is tremendously enhanced. The disorders will be caused whenever the urge of the self is suppressed or obstructed on account of the wrong choice of the ideal or on account of insufficient vision, impression or appreciation of the beauty of the Right Ideal. We are miserable whenever our desire for an ideal cannot find a full expression, whether the ideal is a mate or duty or the approval and admiration of society, sought through position, power or anything else.

 

What causes the worry or the nervous trouble is that the whole of the love of self is not being utilised by the ideal and a portion of it is being attracted by one of the instinctive desires making what is really one desire into two conflicting desires pulling the self in opposite directions. This happens when the ideal lacks intrinsic beauty or when its beauty is not sufficiently realised. All individuals having the same ideal do not love it equally. The beauty of the same ideal is felt differently by different persons at the same time and by the same person at different times. It is important to note that sex is not the only impulse that competes with the ideal in the case of a mental conflict. Sex instinct is only one of so many other instincts which come into a clash with the impulse for the ideal. The conflict may be caused equally by other impulses when they are competing with the ideal and dividing a portion of the self’s love. The shell-shock cases in the First and Second World Wars were due to the instinct of self-preservation vying with the ideal or the love of duty.

 

The conflict can be made impossible by increasing our love for the ideal, whatever the ideal may be.

 

But there can be no love unless there is faith, which means a feeling or vision of the ideal’s beauty and this ultimately depends upon what intrinsic beauty the ideal has. The nearer an ideal is to Beauty or Consciousness,. the greater the possibility of our loving it completely and constantly.

 

A patriotic soldier risks his life in the battle-field because he is convinced that it is his duty to do so. Duty is the call of the ideal and his ideal is his country. He desires to perform his duty because he loves his ideal. It depends on the strength of his love how far he will go in risking his life and performing his duty. If his attraction for the ideal is very great, that is, if he has really a vision of the ideal’s beauty, the desire to perform his duty will be strong enough to oust all other desires, including his desire to preserve his life. If, on the other hand, his attraction for the ideal is weak, some of the urge of the self will find expression in the love of life and there will be a conflict between two desires, one for the ideal goading him to lay down his life and the other for the preservation of life itself, goading him to run away. The conflict will reach its maximum when the shell bursts near the soldier resulting in what is known as a shell-shock.

 

The soldier has no faith in the ideal probably because the ideal has no permanent value for him. He thinks, for example, that all will end with his death and he will not be rewarded for losing his life. In such a case his ideal is imperfect and lacks the qualities of Beauty one of which is permanence so that the soldier is unable to be deceived by it. The Right Ideal, since it contains all the qualities that we desire (that being precisely the reason why it is the Right Ideal) is capable of attracting us in such a way that no instinctive desire is able to compete with it and make a conflict possible.

 

If, on the other hand, the soldier’s attraction to the ideal of his country is very great, he will readily lay down his life for it and will fight willingly while the shells are breaking all around him. He will not suffer from a shell-shock because his urge for Beauty is being satisfied completely by a single ideal throughout. In such a case, although his ideal is imperfect, yet, in his error, he invests it with all the qualities of the Perfect Ideal. He is mistaken. He may be deceiving himself, for example, by persuading the belief that he will become immortal by sacrificing his life for his country or that he wants nothing besides the good of his countrymen which will be permanently achieved by fighting to death.

 

Let us take another example in which the sex impulse is involved.

 

Supposing an orderly and law-abiding man falls in love with the wife of his neighbour. The approval of society is the ideal of his life and he loves this ideal. His ego interprets Beauty in the form of this ideal and hence all his actions are dictated by it. If his attraction for the ideal is strong enough, it will succeed in curbing all other desires, which come into a clash with it including his love for the woman. If his love for the ideal is not sufficiently strong, a portion of the urge of consciousness will find expression in the sexual impulse towards the woman. What was really one desire, for the Right Ideal, will be thus split up into two desires, opposite and conflicting in their nature, one for the approval of the society and the other for the woman’s love. The result will be a mental conflict and a dissociation of the mind manifesting itself in a nervous disorder. The trouble is caused by the fact that the man lacks sufficient faith in his ideal. He fears his ideal on account of his long attachment to it and yet thinks that it will be unable to reward him sufficiently for the sacrifice of his sexual impulse. The psychotherapist and the patient are both to be excused if they think that the nervous trouble is caused by the repression of the sexual impulse because the apparent circumstances are such, but the real cause of the trouble is that his ideal is incapable of giving the fullest expression to his urge for Beauty. He cannot love his ideal as much as his nature wants him to love it. He will be cured if we manage to increase his love for the existing ideal, that is, his regard for the approval of the society or if he can no longer be deceived by his ideal and considers it very low in the scale of Beauty, by making him feel the beauty of a higher, more beautiful and more attractive ideal which requires good intentions towards one’s neighbours and which is capable of monopolising the whole of his love, say, the love of the Creator. The ideal which is capable of absorbing the whole of our love permanently without deceiving us is the Right Ideal, and the love of that alone can make nervous diseases impossible.

 

The psychotherapist may tell the man to give up his repressions and have a liaison with the woman. But this will be a most dangerous advice and a very harmful method of treatment. It will make him worse. The doctor will diminish the patient’s love for his ideal of society’s approval and reduce its beauty in his eyes, so that for a short time the whole of the urge of his self will run into his sexual impulse and the woman will become his sole ideal. In this way the conflict will disappear temporarily but, since the woman cannot fill the place of the ideal in his heart permanently, the man will be, as a matter of fact, preparing himself for a bigger trouble. When his sex impulse is satisfied, it will lose its charm and the man will find that it is unable to satisfy the whole of his urge of the self for perfection. He will, therefore, return for the full satisfaction of this urge to his ideal and find it wounded and violated. This will make the man extremely dissatisfied with himself and, therefore, extremely miserable. This is another conflict which may be serious enough to drive the man to suicide. It is only a foolish psychotherapist who will treat his patient by asking him to give up his repressions in this way.

 

In the case of a mental conflict the urge of our self is divided into two parts and, by playing the libertine, we express one part of it but suppress the other which is the more important part, ultimately, and, therefore, make ourselves worse. The desire to be moral is not the result of social pressure but it is caused by our inner urge for Beauty. It is the complete expression of this urge that can cure a neurosis. We are afraid of the society because we identify Beauty with the approval of the society, and we cannot get rid of this fear by the persuasions of a half-witted doctor unless we see a greater Beauty and thus form a greater attachment elsewhere. The neurotic person suffers, not because he is unable to reconcile himself to society and its standards, but because he is unable to reconcile himself to himself. His libido is always compelling him to  seek Beauty and he cannot quarrel with it. He suffers from a conflict when, owing to the error of the ego, it appears to him that he can satisfy the libido by two opposite impulses.

 

The soldier who suffered from shell-shock could save himself by running away from the battlefield but the desire for Beauty, which takes the form of the society’s approval in his case, holds him to his post. He prefers the satisfaction of his urge for Beauty to the preservation of his life. If the pressure had not been internal, he could have easily given it up and made himself comfortable. He cannot be happy by breaking loose from the standards imposed by the society because the approval of the society satisfies his desire for Beauty. A respectable man cannot indulge in sexual laxity for the same reason. Libertinism starves the desire for Beauty instead of satisfying it. The desire for Beauty is much too large to be satisfied by sexual indulgence. The sex instinct in its pure form is capable of being satisfied completely like every other instinct, but the desire for Beauty is infinite and insatiable. Patriotism is really the last resort of scoundrels in some cases. The reason is that the man who has led the life of a rake and has continually thwarted his urge for Beauty wants to compensate for the wrong he has done to himself by resorting to higher altruistic activities—in which his urge for Beauty can find a natural expression.

 

The fact that free sexual indulgence cannot cure a neurosis is a further indication that our unconscious urge is not of a sexual nature, otherwise sexual gratification should have proved an effective cure for it.

 

Is the pleasure derived from our higher activities an illusion?

 

Freud admits that we derive a joy and a pleasure from our higher activities. This pleasure is sometimes much greater than the pleasure derived from the satisfaction of those desires of which these activities are alleged to be illusory substitutes. The question arises: why should our natural instinctive desires become at all transformed into a shape entirely different from their original character and why should they yield us any pleasure at all when they have thus changed their nature? How is it that the higher activities, that is, the activities of which the object is the search for Beauty, Goodness and Truth, alone, in exclusion to all others, are capable of taking the place of the renounced instinctive desires and of giving us a satisfaction enough to serve as a substitute for the abandoned satisfaction of our instincts and even more. There must be some reason for it inherent in our nature.

 

The fact does not seem to have been sufficiently realised that nothing (unless it is an abnormal and diseased activity which can be surely distinguished from a normal and healthy activity of the higher type like art, philosophy or science) can please or satisfy us if it does not meet a direct demand of our nature, and that it can please or satisfy us only to the extent to which it meets that demand. We cannot sublimate our desire for food into a desire for reading or playing permanently. Our higher activities no doubt satisfy a natural, independent and direct desire for Beauty—a desire which is surging like a stormy ocean in the unconscious mind and which is often misrepresented by the ego as sexual or other desires. They are not caused by the sublimated versions of our sexual desires but rather by the original, normal desires of the self, which, like all our natural desires, press for satisfaction and give pleasure when satisfied. The pleasure derived from the satisfaction of these desires is so comprehensive that we forget our lower desires. Unfortunately, Freud has reversed the reality. He regards the normal and real desires of the unconscious as unreal and the desires which are the abnormal mistaken representations by the ego of the real desires of the unconscious, e.g. the exaggerated sexual desires, are considered by him as real.

 

The phenomenon of “sublimation” in the sense of a transformation of desires does not exist. What happens in the so-called “sublimation” is not that our lower desires are converted or transformed into higher desires, as if by a feat of magic, but it is that we begin to satisfy our natural higher desires in such a way that, on account of the satisfaction derived from them, we are able to neglect or ignore the lower desires successfully. We know that our instincts are fashioned out of the urge of the self. They are tendencies which exist already in the nature of consciousness. Consequently, when we manage to satisfy the urge of consciousness properly, that is, when moral action or worship or the pursuit of art, knowledge or science becomes a source of real pleasure to us, we get a satisfaction alternative and parallel to the satisfaction we get from the instinctive desires and the pressure of the latter is reduced to a minimum. They are no longer a source of trouble to us and, if we choose, we can neglect them easily, of course, some of them more easily than others, depending in some degree upon the character and shape of the higher activity in which we are engaged. Neglect makes these instinctive desires still weaker till ultimately they appear to have ceased to exist.

 

Because every instinctive tendency has a second life in the urge of the self, by a full satisfaction of this urge, we secure a substitute satisfaction for the abandoned satisfaction of the instincts. The desires prompting our higher activities are always there but we neglect them owing to an error and try (never successfully) to get all the joy and pleasure that their satisfaction can bring us, from the satisfaction of our lower instinctive desires. In the case of so called “sublimation” the lower desires are brought well under control because the urge of the self is having its proper satisfaction.

 

The assumption that Beauty and not sex is the urge of the unconscious, therefore, explains the satisfaction derived from higher activities and their capacity to relieve the repression and bring peace to the mind. What is more, it removes all the divergence and incompatibility between the id, the super-ego and the “reality” on account of which Freud had imagined the lot of man to be so miserable. On this view we understand, moreover, that man is thoroughly good by nature. He need not be miserable nor suffer from nervous diseases if he rightly understands his unconscious urge. The demand of the id is not the satisfaction of its strong untamed sexual passions. Its only passion, which is, of course, very strong, is the love of the Truly Beautiful.

 

The ego represents the outside world to the id for the satisfaction of its desires. The id demands the satisfaction of its desires but, being out of contact with the outside world, it does not know how these desires can be fulfilled. The ego interprets these desires and tries to satisfy them as best as it can. It is the agent of the id and looks around for Beauty and tries to achieve it for the satisfaction of the id. The task which the id entrusts to the ego is very great and difficult since it has only a vague knowledge of what the id really wants. The ego tries its best to perform this service as ably and as efficiently as it can. It makes the wisest conjectures and estimates of its desires that it can. This function of the ego is the super-ego. The conjectures of the ego are the ideals. The continuous, strenuous efforts of the ego in this direction have created the whole of our history and all the knowledge that we have. The ego is always busy in searching for the object that is most satisfactory to the id. The reason is that for this service to the id it expects a great reward which is the enjoyment of friendship and terms of peace with the id and this is its greatest desire. In addition to that, it expects its own enlargement and extension and a share in the power of the id which is very great. Should the ego perform its service correctly it will get happiness and power in return for it.

 

The only knowledge of the object desired by the id with which the ego starts on its great search is that this object will satisfy the id perfectly and that it is something great and beautiful. With such a scanty knowledge the ego is bound to err frequently and its first error is that which Freud calls the Oedipus complex; the ego takes the parents for the model of all excellence and beauty. The error works well for a number of years, but as the ego develops its knowledge the parents seem to be less and less satisfactory to the id. Then the ego recommends other objects to the id. Frequently it identifies with Beauty objects which are really lacking in the qualities of Beauty and which, consequently, do not satisfy the strong passions of the id in the long run. The urge of the id is very strong and, therefore, the id feels extremely disappointed and discontented when the super-ego identifies itself with wrong ideals which do not relieve the urge of the id and do not give it a permanent happiness.

 

Every time that the ego makes a fresh choice, however erroneous it may be, it sincerely believes that it has after all discovered what must make the id happy. The id, not knowing the exact nature of the object so recommended by the ego, takes it (in its blindness) for its own desire and makes friends with the ego. Thereupon both of them go on happily with each other and advance a long way in the direction of their common deal, till contact and intimacy with the ideal reveal to the ego and the id the qualities of Beauty that it is lacking. The id discovers that the object recommended to it by the ego was unsatisfactory to its nature and hence there is a split between the ego and the id which we call a conflict, a shock, a worry or a nervous disorder. A conflict, a shock or a worry is a condition of the id’s non co-operation with the ego in its striving after the object that it had recommended. The ego thereupon tries to recommend another object immediately, if it can, but frequently the new object is not adequate or, else, the id is not free to love it or appreciate its beauty because it has not been able to disengage itself (its love) from the object that had caused the disappointment and, therefore, the nervous disorder continues. It is a sort of a revenge on the part of the id against the ego for misrepresenting Beauty and misusing a part of the energy of the id. A mental conflict ensues during which there is the absence of harmony between the ego and the id. Particular incidents which cause the disappointment of the id are, so to say, remembered by it in the form of repressions or complexes as grievances against the ego as if the id feels that it has been betrayed by the ego and left in the lurch. This makes the ego miserable as the personality is divided.

 

The id and the ego together constitute the whole consciousness or self of man. The superego is merely a function of the ego by means of which it holds up ideals and norms of behaviour. The super-ego would have been a needless discrimination except for the fact that a separate name draws attention to an important function of the ego. The ego performs this function by virtue of the push it receives from the id towards Beauty. The real force of which the ego and the super-ego are the products is the id. The ideals are the ego’s interpretations of the object desired by the id. They are the ego’s ideas of the highest Beauty which it forms from time to time. The self is thoroughly good by nature and wants to push itself towards the Truly Beautiful with perfect internal harmony which is broken only on account of the errors of the ego. All the miseries of man and all the evil in the world are due to the sincerely committed mistakes of the ego in translating the desires of the id.

 

When a tension arises between the ego and the id it can be removed, before it produces its worst results in the form of nervous diseases, if the person has an immediate recourse to a sincere repentance, and prayers and devotions to the Divine Self. That will be only a case of the ego returning to Beauty the real desire of the id. This restores the id to peace and contentment and makes the ego independent of the former super-ego, that is, independent of its own previous misrepresentations of the id’s desires. Sincere prayers are not possible without faith or, what is the same thing, without a vision or knowledge of Beauty, which is a matter of development. Therefore, regular habits of devotions and prayers are a safeguard against possible attacks of nervous diseases as well as a cure for them.

 

The id is too ready to make peace with the ego as soon as it finds that it is serving it right, as if it is generous and quickly accepts the repentance and the entreaties of the ego. Its grievances disappear as soon as the ego mends its ways and begins to seek Beauty. The ego and the id become friends as their quarrel is reconciled. The conflict disappears and the self (that is, the ego plus id) is able to move forward towards Beauty, the common goal of its two parts. When it does so the id gets greater and greater expression till the whole of it becomes the ego. The unconscious mind rises into the conscious and thereby the satisfaction and the power of the conscious mind are enhanced immensely. It is this process which we have described elsewhere in this book as the liberation or the highest evolution of the self which leads to the greatest happiness known to man.

 

Freud admits the value of prayers and devotions in altering the relation between the various regions of mind and says that psychoanalysis attempts to achieve much the same. He writes:

 

“It can be easily imagined too that certain practices of the mystics may succeed in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, so that, for example, the perceptual system becomes able to grasp relations in the deeper layers of the ego and in the id which would otherwise be inaccessible to it. Whether such a procedure can put one in possession of ultimate truths from which all good will flow can be safely doubted. All the same we must admit that the therapeutic efforts of psychoanalysis have chosen much the same method of approach. For their object is to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of vision and so to extend its organization that it can take over new portions of the id. Where id was there shall ego be.”

 

We have said enough so far to be able to assert against the writer that the clue to the “ultimate truths from which all good will flow” does lie in the power which the practices of the mystics possess to alter the normal relations between the different sections of the mind and that the writer is not at all safe in doubting or under-rating the importance of his observation. If we follow up the clue it must certainly lead us to the conclusion that the real desire of the id is Beauty and not sexuality. This fact, when known, will make a huge difference in our knowledge of human nature and enable us to solve many intricate problems of human life which have so far baffled all solutions.

 

Not only do prayers and devotions prevent nervous diseases but they also possess a genuine therapeutic value, for their treatment and psychoanalysis, although very valuable as a method of discovering the buried impulses and bringing them to light, does not constitute the whole treatment. The method of psychoanalysis has to be revised in the light of the truth that the unconscious urge is for Beauty. It has to be supplemented by prayers and devotions as a necessary part of the treatment based on the true and natural relationship between the ego and the id. The success of psychoanalysis all by itself in effecting a cure is doubtful unless it is employed by an expert psychotherapist. But, even if it succeeds, its cure must be temporary, because it does not fortify the patient against future attacks and does not remove the real cause of the trouble which is the choice of wrong ideals, unsatisfactory to the id. No physician can ignore the fact that prevention is always better than cure. In the case of nervous disorders prevention can be secured not by psychoanalysis but by regular habits of prayers.

 

Unless the ego chooses Beauty or Perfection for its ideal, it is sure to make the id miserable again. The ultimate deliverance of the id depends upon the right choice of the ego, whenever it is made. The “less ideal situation” mentioned by Freud in a quotation given above in which “the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it (the horse) itself wants to go” is not the result of what the horse (id) wants to do but of what the rider (ego) does, owing to an error. The rider and the horse always want to go in the same direction, the one leading to their common destination, but the rider commits frequent mistakes and misguides itself as well as the horse. Such mistakes, when discovered, create shocks and nervous diseases. If the ego succeeds in making the right choice it gives satisfaction to the id and draws the id’s libido on to itself. “The id becomes the ego and the ego is installed where id was.” The individual becomes a highly dynamic personality possessing powers not known to other people. The prayers detach the ego from the influence of wrong ideals and thereby give it relief and also pacify the id. This also explains why certain mystics are able to give information of future events at particular occasions. As Freud says, the “laws of space and time do not operate on the id” and, therefore, when ego becomes the id, it rises above space and time, so that for a moment the present and the future and the distant and the near become alike to it.

 

The fundamental cause of a nervous trouble is the choice or the love of a wrong ideal. The cure achieved through psychoanalysis is also ultimately due to the patient having changed his ideal. It is claimed that the mere recall of the repressed desire effects the cure. It is quite intelligible. The patient forgets the painful experience because he wants to forget it on account of its painfulness with the result that a portion of the energy of love in the unconscious is locked up in the thwarted and forgotten impulse. It is not available for a new ideal although the patient would very much like to love a new ideal in order to start life afresh and give up everything that had caused the trouble. As soon as the forgotten experience is recalled, the patient knows what was the wrong with him. He is immediately in a position to compare his old ideal with the new one which he now desires to love and to give up the old ideal as unsatisfactory and troublesome with the result that the locked-up energy is at once liberated and made available for the new ideal. The wholeness of the mind is restored. The suggestion and consolation of the physician play an important part in the treatment because they help the patient to change his ideal and to start on a new road. What we need for the prevention of future nervous troubles is to have an ideal which we can love completely and continuously and which we never require to change. It is the change of ideal made possible by the revival of the buried impulse to which Freud refers when he says that psychoanalysis attempts to make the ego more independent of the superego and to widen its field of vision. Unfortunately, he ignores the fact that absolute independence of the super-ego is impossible for the ego on account of the very nature of the unconscious mind. The super-ego merely presents another ideal instead of the one that had caused the trouble and that is the sense in which the ego’s field of vision is widened or in which the ego becomes more independent of the super-ego. But be it remembered that the ego’s field of vision can never be large enough to protect it from nervous diseases permanently unless it chooses the Right Ideal.

 

It is well known that in very many cases a patient is made worse by psychoanalysis. The reason is that psychoanalysis can succeed only if the patient’s ideal has changed between the first attack of illness and the end of its treatment. If during this period the patient cannot be made free from the impulses causing the trouble or, which is the same thing, if his ideal cannot be altered or raised higher, bringing the complex to light is certain to make him worse for reasons already explained. This fact supports the view that the real cause of the cure does not lie so much in the discovery of the conflict as in the changing or the raising of the ideal.

 

In cases where the patient is able to realize the folly of his attitude and thus changes his ideal, as soon as the complex is brought to light the portion of the self’s love which was attached to the old ideal is directly attached to the new one, with which the self has now learnt to identify itself. Thus the store of love in the unconscious is placed at the service of the ideal again and the self begins to function as a whole once more. We see the result of it in the form of an increased efficiency of the individual, because he is enabled to give the whole of his love to his ideal. The skill of the psychoanalyst consists in recalling the forgotten circumstances which led to the conflict. The cure is due to the developed self-knowledge of the patient and the consequent alteration or elevation of his ideal helped by the influence of the physician suggesting verbally or by his mere presence and the atmosphere around him, that he is no longer swayed by the impulse that had caused the injury. Neurosis is only an extreme form of our common worries or misfortunes. The ultimate cure of all such troubles consists in raising the ideal in the scale of Beauty. Repentance and prayers and devotions to the Divine Self are the most effective methods of raising the ideal.

 

The id may be compared to a blind king whom the circumstances have thrown far away from his kingdom. He wants to return to his country but, unable to see his way back, he has hired a servant (the ego) to help him on condition that should he succeed in guiding him back to his kingdom rightly, he will share the royal authority with him. From the spot where he is there are innumerable roads leading in different directions all appearing to be equally beautiful, but there is only one road which leads right upto the king’s country. Every other road is closed at some distance from the starting point or else leads into the territory of deadly enemies, or dangerous forests. The servant makes conjectures and leads the king into one road after another but every time both have to return disappointed and disillusioned. Every time that the servant chooses a new wrong road, he does so with all the care and wisdom that he commands and makes perfectly sure that this time he is not mistaken. Therefore, every time both the king and the servant walk happily on the selected road with full confidence that they are approaching nearer and nearer to their destination. The road appears to the servant to possess all the signs of the right road about which the king has supplied a vague sort of information to him. The servant interprets this information in the signs of the road and finds it to be perfectly applicable to them. The only sign that the wrong toad happens to be lacking is continuity which they soon discover to be their lot. In the absence of continuity all the other signs also prove to be mere illusions.

 

The right road is that of Beauty. The ego’s knowledge of the signs is the super-ego. The troublesome journey backwards after the discovery of each error is the worry, nervousness or conflict. What psychoanalysis does is to help a quick journey backwards and, if possible, to put the ego and the id on a new road again but it has no means of making sure that the new road chosen by them now is the correct one. It cannot prevent future errors and, therefore, future attacks of nervous diseases.

 

The View of Adler

We may now consider the alternative view of Adler about the character of the unconscious urge.

 

According to Adler, “the key to human psychology is the desire to compensate for an unconscious feeling of inferiority. The individual comes into the world weak, insignificant and helpless; ridiculously ill-equipped in the struggle against nature, he is completely dependent upon his elders for warmth, food and shelter. Moreover, they dominate him psychologically impressing him with a sense of their superior powers, their knowledge of the world and their freedom to live as they please. For everything he must turn to them and the dependence thereby engendered imbues him from his earliest year with a sense of personal inferiority. To compensate for this inferiority the child tries to impress himself on his environment. He endeavours to assert himself and become the centre of interest and win the praises of his fellows.”

 

The question arises: Is this desire for self-assertion due to external causes or to the internal nature of the child? If the fact is that the child is accustomed to seeing only superior people around him from the very beginning, why is it that he does not reconcile himself to an inferior position and take it as a matter of course and as the only thing that is natural?

 

Obviously, the child cannot want to assert himself and seek what he considers to be a greatness and a superiority unless it is a part of his nature to regard certain things as great, superior and worthy of effort and achievement as well as to strive for the achievement of those things. It is this part of human nature that we have described as the urge for Beauty.

 

And then what is the child’s object in gaining this superiority and power. According to Adler, his object is that he may win the admiration and praise of his fellow-men and become the centre of their interest which means that with him and with others the superiority or the power that he wants to achieve is something which is praiseworthy, admirable and worthy of being the object of attention and interest. As such the power that the child wants to attain is clearly another name for Beauty and the urge of self-assertion  in the child is nothing but the urge for Beauty. Beauty, according to our definition, is that something which is the object of the self’s love, praise and admiration. Power is Beauty, because we love it. Conversely, Beauty is Power because it calls forth love and thereby rules and dominates the lover. We have already seen that Beauty is not one quality but a system of qualities which includes Power. Power is not a separate kind of Beauty. Beauty has no kinds; it is one and indivisible. Power is a quality of Beauty as well as the whole of Beauty; it includes all the qualities of Beauty. Every quality of Beauty is the whole of Beauty and includes all its other qualities. If any quality of Beauty does not contain all its other qualities, it is not that quality at all. A man who has achieved only one quality of Beauty, and not the others, cannot get a complete satisfaction in the long run. A powerful man will ultimately have a sense of inferiority, however powerful he may be, if he does not use his power for the achievement of Beauty, Goodness and Truth. Power for this reason is not the ability to be cruel. Power is an ultimate weakness if it is divorced from Truth and Goodness. Similarly, Truth and Goodness have no meaning without Power. No quality of Beauty remains itself when it is excluded from the rest of its qualities. Reality is always pure. A mixture of the real and unreal is unreal. No part of Beauty can be identified with the whole of it. We cannot be ultimately satisfied by owning some qualities of Beauty and neglecting the others. The urge of our consciousness is for the whole of Beauty and we continue to feel inferior ultimately as long as the whole of it is not satisfied.

 

Beauty or Consciousness is Power and it is a power which asserts itself for the realisation of its own purposes. On the divine side the whole course of evolution is a record of this self-assertion. On the human side also it is asserting itself for the realisation of the purposes of the individual selves which we have called the ideals. On the human side the power will be real power if it is serving the Perfect Ideal. If the ideal is imperfect, the power that serves it is also imperfect and unreal because it is unable to achieve perfection. It will only achieve imperfection, defect and ugliness to the extent to which the ideal is imperfect, defective or ugly. It will expend itself in vain, defeat its object, and thus bring about its own ruin. It will be a weakness and not power. Power is power only to the extent to which it is able to achieve Beauty or Perfection. Power is worse than weakness if it cannot be utilised for the achievement of Beauty. In view of these facts it is perfectly correct to say that there can be no Power without Beauty and no Beauty without Power.

 

Since Power is meant for the achievement of the ideal and is measured by its capacity to achieve the ideal, to achieve Power is, therefore, to achieve the ideal. We frequently mistake power for the prospects or the possibilities of wielding power. But actual power is that which has been actually expended in the achievement of the ideal. It is power only to the extent to which it has actually achieved the ideal. Power, therefore, includes the ideal; it includes Beauty. Power and Beauty are two aspects of one and the same thing. They go hand in hand with each other; in fact, they cannot be distinguished from each other. Power itself is the ideal; it is Beauty. Power has no meaning without Beauty and Beauty remains ineffective and meaningless without Power, because then we do not feel its attraction; it has no influence or effect on us. Beauty is Beauty only to the extent to which it is Power. If it does not exert its power on us, if it does not dominate us, rule us, or if it does not urge us to action for its achievement it does not attract us and, therefore, it is not Beauty at all.

 

We want Power for the achievement of our ideal whatever the ideal may be. Power elates us and gives us a sense of superiority because it is a message that at last we have achieved our ideal and have become as intimate with Beauty as we desired. Because Beauty is unlimited we never imagine that we have enough of Power or enough of Beauty. We want Power for more Power and Beauty for more Beauty. Our desire for Beauty or Power is insatiable because when we have achieved one ideal another rises up before our eyes and thus we go on achieving more Power and more Beauty always.

 

Power is meant for the ideal and because our ideals are different our ideas of power are also different.

 

Our desire for Power is really a desire for Beauty. We feel inferior and powerless only when we are unable to achieve our ideal. Just consider the various ways in which we assert ourselves for power and superiority and see whether what we really want to achieve by our effort is power or beauty. We have a sense of power and superiority when we win the love or approval of a person possessing admirable qualities, because thereby we feel that we have become sharers in his beauty. To secure the approval and love of society is a very powerful ideal with most people. They want power or position to win this approval. Again, we have a sense of superiority and power when we act morally because we introduce Beauty into our actions. We feel superior when we indulge in a truly creative activity like Art and Science because thereby we express Beauty or discover Beauty.

 

In short, all activities in which we seek Beauty give us, if successful, a sense of power and superiority. We attain Power by seeking Beauty and we feel inferior whenever we fail in the search for Beauty whatever the form it may take. Freud is right when he says that the sense of guilt and the sense of inferiority are exceedingly difficult to distinguish. We feel guilty when we are unable to display our power and we feel inferior when we are unable to reach the object that we consider beautiful. Thus Beauty and Power are one and the same.

 

In short, the reasoning of Adler leads us, even more easily and clearly than that of Freud, to the conclusion that Beauty alone is the urge of life. The fact that this hypothesis is a common formula, by means of which we can reconcile the two conflicting theories of psychoanalysis, is a further assurance of its correctness.

 

[1] Freud, New Introductory Lectures, p. 85.