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Praise for Letters to a Serious Education President

“Letters to a Serious Education President provides sound advice for what it would take to
provide all students in the United States with a high quality education. There is wisdom and
profound insights about how to improve public education in these letters, and, of course, Sarason
offers lots of common sense.”
—Pedro Noguera, Professor
The Steinhardt School of Education, New York University

“Sarason is a master of the use of cases and stories . . . what comes out is his voice, emotion,
commitment, and desire to make a difference.”
—Theodore Creighton, Executive Director
National Council of Professors of Educational
Administration; Professor, Sam Houston State University

“Letters to a Serious Education President underscores the brilliance of Sarason’s observations

about what is and continues to be missing in how we conceptualize and hence implement school-
ing in our society. . . . Indeed, Sarason is calling for a different education—one that enlivens the
curiosity and lifelong learning of all children and their teachers.”
—Rhona Weinstein, Professor, University of California, Berkeley

“After decades of thought and study, Seymour Sarason has uncovered the most critical barriers to
meaningful educational reform. In this book, he uses a novel device—letters to the President of
the United States—to describe what it takes for reform to make a real difference where it matters
most—in the typical classroom. Let’s hope that not only the current President will read this book,
but also all who are affected by and care about our schools.”
—Cary Cherniss, Professor, Rutgers University

“A brilliantly written treatise . . . Professor Sarason provides a most insightful glimpse into the
inner workings of the political/public policy process, skillfully reflecting the quiet musings of a
master observer.”
—Patrick H. DeLeon
Former Assistant to U.S. Senator Daniel K. Inouye

“Seymour Sarason has graced us with a jewel of a book that includes the central themes in his
lifetime of teaching and writing.”
—Ann Lieberman, Professor and Co-Director
National Center for Restructuring Education,
Schools, and Teaching, Teachers College, Columbia University

“The timing of this book could not be more fortuitous; the challenge could not be better framed;
and the need to learn how to educate our children—all children—could not be more urgent.
Policymakers, take heed.”
—Keith Geiger, Former President, National Education Association
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page ii

In Appreciation of
May 22, 1943
and
September 2, 1954
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page iii
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page iv

Copyright © 2006 by Corwin Press

All rights reserved. When forms and sample documents are included, their use is
authorized only by educators, local school sites, and/or noncommercial entities who have
purchased the book. Except for that usage, no part of this book may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.

For information:
Corwin Press
A Sage Publications Company
2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, California 91320
www.corwinpress.com
Sage Publications Ltd.
1 Oliver’s Yard
55 City Road
London EC1Y 1SP
United Kingdom
Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd.
B-42, Panchsheel Enclave
Post Box 4109
New Delhi 110 017 India

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sarason, Seymour Bernard, 1919–

Letters to a serious education president / Seymour B. Sarason.— 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-4129-2649-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4129-2650-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Education—Aims and objectives—United States. 2. Educational
change—United States. 3. Education and state—United States. I. Title.
LA217.2.S27 2006
370.973—dc22
2005026779

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

05 06 07 08 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Acquisitions Editor: Elizabeth Brenkus

Editorial Assistants: Candice L. Ling and Desirée Enayati
Production Editor: Jenn Reese
Copy Editor: Catherine Chilton
Typesetter: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd.
Proofreader: Scott Oney
Cover Designer: Michael Dubowe
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page v

Contents

Foreword vii
Andy Hargreaves
Acknowledgments xi
About the Author xiii

Introduction to the Second Edition 1

The Letters 25
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page vi
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page vii

Foreword

I t is an honor and a privilege to be asked to write the foreword to

a book authored by a living legend of educational thought; one
who is still writing prolifically in his eighties. Seymour Sarason is
undoubtedly one of the world’s leading thinkers and writers on the
culture of the school and its relationship to educational change. The
large number of books Seymour Sarason has written over his pro-
fessional lifetime—the most important of them since his fiftieth
year—encompass subjects as diverse and interconnected as school
culture, teacher education, the role of the arts in teaching and learn-
ing, educational handicap and deficiency (as it was once known),
counseling, careers and aging, and educational change and reform.
As a psychologist, historian, and public intellectual, Sarason’s con-
tribution as an analyst and activist in the world of educational change
and reform has been persistent and profound. Environmentalist Henry
David Thoreau once remarked that “reformers are the greatest bores of
all.” Sarason brings to this world of reform and reformers a critical yet
accessible perspective that urges them to understand the peculiar cul-
ture of the school and its people; that admonishes them for having no
sense of or willingness to learn from history; and that appeals to them
to acknowledge the capacity of people (learners and teachers alike) to
change and improve themselves if they are provided with the right con-
ditions and encouragement.
Seymour Sarason has written that teaching is in some ways like
performance art. It is therefore fitting, perhaps, that in this book, he
should distill his ideas and engage them with the present reform
environment through the dramatic device of a set of “letters” to the
President of the United States at the beginning of the 21st century.
This “dialogue,” or Sarason’s side of it, is preceded by one of the
most cogent and articulate critiques of the No Child Left Behind
legislation that has yet been published.

vii
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page viii

viii——Letters to a Serious Education President

As I write this, I am in the midst of a speaking tour of the United

Kingdom. In that country, politicians have been obsessed with their
own reform agenda, subjecting schools to the necessity of meeting
short-term achievement targets in literacy and math, and imposing
prescribed programs of mandated and micromanaged instruction in
these subjects for one hour each per day. After apparent early suc-
cesses, these reform efforts (from which the United States has bor-
rowed heavily) have turned out to be not only disappointing but
severely damaging as a consequence. After just a few short years, the
seeming improvements in results reached a plateau when the system
began to run out of quick-fix tricks. Large-scale research studies
indicated that the improvements were deceptive, many of them
resulting from the test items being made progressively easier over
the years. And the latest research by the government’s own inspec-
tion agency, OFSTED, shows that competence in writing and
children’s basic pleasure in reading, is being sacrificed on the altar
of ever-rising scores in just the measured technical skills of reading
literacy.
No Child Left Behind, Sarason contends, only engages with
measured achievement and testing and does not have even the most
rudimentary grasp of children’s learning. It calls for and insists on
having more highly qualified teachers but does not get to grips with
what quality teaching truly requires. It is an act full of answers that
has no way of prompting classrooms to become places where inquis-
itive children can ask more intelligent questions. The proponents of
No Child Left Behind, Sarason argues, are impervious to criticism,
immune to involvement of the profession, unwilling to evaluate their
own efforts, and destined to experience only disappointment and
failure.
While the ensuing letters are addressed to a hypothetical
President of the United States, Sarason’s introduction to them berates
a real one—“the first president of the twenty-first century”—as some-
one who was “never in doubt that he had all the answers.” Sarason’s
letters instead engage Socratically with a putative “learning
President,” a President who needs to act but also wants to learn and to
know, a President who has as many questions as answers, a President
whose White House is the nation’s first and best classroom—
disciplined and authoritative, but also concerned to treat all its people
with care and justice, in a way that seeks their involvement, respects
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page ix

Foreword——ix

their contributions, and expects the very best of them, never presum-
ing that the presidential teacher is the omniscient possessor of all the
solutions.
The letters themselves have messages that seem radical in the
current context, yet epitomize the essence of common sense—let
children ask more questions; teach writing as well as reading; connect
learning and literacy to the words that children actually want to learn;
put children’s learning before curriculum content; understand that
there are limits to what schools can accomplish and that they cannot
change society all by themselves; avoid mandating pedagogy; recap-
ture the great social visions of post–World War II history; and don’t
become overly fixated on the results of standardized tests.
Seymour Sarason has repeatedly argued that schooling and
educational reform cannot be understood without addressing power
relationships. The current reform environment is preoccupied with
exerting power over teachers in cultures of fear, rather than building
power with them in cultures of hope. This position is not only
morally reprehensible and organizationally ineffective, but at a time
when the boomer generation of teachers is retiring in great numbers
and teaching needs to be seen as an attractive profession again that
will attract the very best applicants to it, the present oppressive
reform environment is a demographic disaster of qualified teacher
shortages just waiting to happen.
Letters to a Serious Education President, Second Edition, speaks
instead to a thoughtful presidency, a learning presidency and a hope-
ful presidency that understands its people, expects them to improve,
and makes them partners in the effort to do so. This is a presidency
that wants the very best educationally for all its people, not just a set
of test results that are merely good enough for the poorest of them.
And it is a presidency that does not assume but really wants to learn
the best ways to get there.
In this book as in his others, Seymour Sarason leaves a valuable
legacy. He bears witness to the arrogant folly of most reform efforts,
he provides succor to those who must endure or seek to subvert them,
and he reactivates memories and images of more humanistic, inclu-
sive, and democratic forms of educational being that represent the
best of what we can achieve as educators. When urging us in these
directions, Seymour Sarason sometimes feels he is talking to a wall.
We live in a world of too many walls. If we can be inspired by the
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page x

x——Letters to a Serious Education President

courage and tenacity of this enlightened octagenarian, let us hope that

instead of talking to the wall that separates educational policy from
its people, we can now begin to break it down. Sarason’s letters help
us make a start.
—Andy Hargreaves
Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education
Boston College
October 2005
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page xi

Acknowledgments

PUBLISHER’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Corwin Press gratefully acknowledges the contributions of the
following individuals:

Pedro A. Noguera
Professor
Steinhardt School of Education
New York University
New York, NY

Rhona Weinstein
Professor
Department of Psychology
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA

Theodore Creighton
Professor
Educational Leadership and Counseling
Sam Houston State University
Huntsville, TX

Michael Fullan
Professor and Author
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto
Toronto, ON

xi
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page xii

xii——Letters to a Serious Education President

Patricia Wasley
Dean and Professor
College of Education
University of Washington
Seattle, WA

Cary Cherniss
Director of the Organizational Psychology Program
Professor of Applied Psychology
Rutgers University
Piscataway, NJ
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page xiii

About the Author

Seymour B. Sarason is Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Yale

University. During his distinguished 48-year career, he has been one of
the most astute observers and incisive critics of efforts to reform our
schools. Among his more than 45 published books are The Predictable
Failure of Educational Reform (1990), Schooling in America:
Scapegoat or Salvation (1983), The Culture of School and the Problem
of Change (2nd ed., 1982), Charter Schools: Another Flawed
Educational Reform (1998), and And What Do You Mean by Learning?
(2004).

xiii
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page xiv
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page 1

Introduction to the
Second Edition

S chools are sites provided by society to pass on to its young

its traditions, values, and history, as well as the skills they
will require to assimilate and act appropriately in regard to those
features. A society is conservative in that it seeks continuity between
its present and future. Society is always changing, but there is
change and there is change. The social change of the post–World
War II era has been and is one of the most comprehensive social
changes in our national history. Not only comprehensive but also
marked by turmoil, divisiveness, puzzlement. Fault lines in the
social fabric that had been long ignored or patched over became
wider and more exposed as never before. Wars change everything
and everybody, and World War II is as clear an instance as one will
find. We are living with those consequences today, and we will live
with them for decades to come. It was predicted—it should not have
been surprising—that America will change and in some untoward
ways as seen by some, and in liberating ways as seen by others.
Schools were one site where the social change was reflected.
It is not my purpose here to indicate how issues of race, gender,
poverty, civil rights, and more were affected by and in turn affected
the social change. The fact is that society was made aware that the
social change was bringing in its wake knotty (too weak a word)
problems challenging their heretofore traditional role and purposes
and criteria for judging their adequacy. Anyone today who is less
than 50 years of age will have to make a major effort and a good deal
of reading to begin to comprehend the sizzling sixties and the mis-
named “silent fifties.” That is especially the obligation of those indi-
viduals concerned with educational reform because all the different

1
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page 2

2——Letters to a Serious Education President

strands comprising the social change were in one or another way in

the debate about how to improve schools.
I decided to write the letters focusing on a problem unarticulated
by any president or his advisors, and yet it is a problem fateful for
the outcome of educational reform. The problem was and is that the
modal American classroom reflects a conception of learning that
ensures unproductive learning. What I wanted the president to know
is that unless and until one can distinguish between contexts of pro-
ductive and unproductive learning the outcomes of schooling will be
puzzling, disappointing, and disillusioning. In my letters I am not
contentious (I think), I do not blame the victim, I do not take pot-
shots at this or that group, I take no sides on the contents and direc-
tion of the pervasive social change, and I try hard not to convey the
impression that I have cornered the market on truth and wisdom.
What I was asking the president and his advisors to do is to take the
obvious seriously. Let me illustrate by analogy.
Two things were obvious during the constitutional convention of
1787. The first was how polarized the northern and southern states
were on the issue of slavery. The polarization was bitter, rancorous,
and divisive, to such an extent that it was obvious that unless there
was a face-saving compromise there would be no United States of
America; the southern states would go their different ways and the
northern states their ways. The fact is that the compromise arrived
and left no one in doubt—it was too obvious for doubt—that far
from resolving the slavery issue it made it almost certain that the
fledgling nation had a ticking time bomb in its midst. I need not say
more about what happened.
For reasons I shall try to make clear in the following pages,
educational reform over the decades was focused on an obvious
problem heretofore neglected. I have no intention of downplaying
the importance of most of these problems but rather to indicate that
all of them failed to recognize what I consider an obvious problem
of fundamental significance, a lack of recognition that would mam-
mothly limit the degree of the desired general effects. The problem
concerned the differences between contexts of productive and unpro-
ductive learning. It was not a problem I “discovered.” John Dewey
wrote about it over a century ago. It is also implicit and explicit in
the writings of Jean Piaget. What was obvious to Dewey and Piaget
was not and is not obvious to educators who were influenced by his
illuminations of the features and course of child development. I did
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page 3

Introduction to the Second Edition——3

not appreciate their contributions until my interest in the culture of

the school and the problem of change became an all-consuming ven-
ture for me, and the obvious could not be ignored.
Thirteen years ago the person to whom I was writing would be
the first president of the 21st century. There were several reasons
I decided to write to that president. The first was that the books on
educational reform I had written made clear that I have concluded
that the post–World War II reform movement would not achieve its
purposes. Indeed, in 1965 I predicted, orally and in print, that fail-
ure. From that point on I wrote many books explaining why that pre-
diction was not dreamed up in an academic’s armchair and why in
1990 I wrote The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform. The
second reason was a confirmation of historical and political factors.
The word education is nowhere to be found in our constitution. That
was not happenstance but a reflection of a deeply held belief that
education was the responsibility of parents, communities, and states;
the federal government should never, but never, have formal power
to intrude in any way into the schooling of children. The colonists
had fought a war for independence from a central authority wielding
power in insensitive, intrusive, power pressuring ways, to which its
constituencies near and far had to conform. The founding fathers
wanted no central government in any way to influence the education
and minds of its youth. The first departure from that tradition
occurred in the early years of the Eisenhower administration, and
that departure was considered temporary. Far from being temporary,
the role of the federal government increased steadily as each reform
was clearly ineffective. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that
the “separate but equal” doctrine and practice were unconstitutional,
it guaranteed that the role of federal government would increase. The
third reason I wrote my letter to a president had nothing to do with
the issues surrounding a federal role in education. In the abstract I do
not look kindly on an increasing federal role in matters educational
but that is not because I think there is more wisdom about these mat-
ters in states and communities. What has troubled me—troubled is
too weak a word—is that none of these players recognize what I
have come to see as a basic problem, which if it stays unrecognized
dooms the reform effort. That is not to say that if the problem is rec-
ognized the road ahead is clear and smooth. On the contrary, such
recognition exposes how complex and difficult reform will have to
be. No, the basic problem is not one which, if recognized, means we
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page 4

4——Letters to a Serious Education President

will have no need to take Prozac. But for as long as the problem goes
unrecognized all efforts of reform will have minimal or no positive
consequences. Therefore, the fourth reason I wrote the book was my
way of stating the problem in a more focused way than I had done
before. So, the reader rightly can ask, why do it in a book of letters
to a president? Why not in a book for educators who teach, guide,
influence students? After all, no matter how difficult reform policies
and implementation may be, their goal is to change this or that fea-
ture in the classroom. Why write to a president? What do you expect
him to do? Read your book, go on TV, and tell the country he knows
what the root problem is? Well, yes. Is not the moral obligation of a
president to inform and educate citizens about a problem of vital
interest to them that if not confronted will continue negatively to
impact on the society? Why has it become fashionable for newly
elected presidents to want to be seen as a serious education president
who has new ideas or programs that will cause the clouds to dissi-
pate and the sun to shine? They sincerely want to be seen as a serious
education president. And by serious they do not mean accepting the
status quo or not using the bully pulpit to gain support. When I wrote
the book I did not know, of course, that the first president of the 21st
century would be President Bush II. Nor could I know that he would
propose and get enacted a program that will, I predict, ultimately dis-
appoint him and everyone. Some wit titled the program the No Bad
Idea Left Behind Act.
In recent years I have posed a question to individuals and groups
of educators, highly educated people in various fields, and elected
public officials I happened to meet: What do you mean by learning?
Now, you would think that these people would not have difficulty
answering the question given the fact that the word learning proba-
bly has the highest word frequency count in the educational litera-
ture. With no exception, the response was by no means quick. A
puzzled look frequently appeared as if they were surprised that they
had no ready formulation. Then someone would say something like,
“Learning involves a change from one point in time to another.”
Some said, “Learning takes place when you have absorbed knowl-
edge or skills you did not have before.” Without exception no one
was satisfied with his or her response. A few said with embarrass-
ment, “I’ll have to think more about it.” I would then be asked what
I meant by learning. I always preceded my answer by saying that for
years I thought I knew what learning means but for reasons I was not
FM-Sarason.qxd 11/3/2005 3:30 PM Page 5

Introduction to the Second Edition——5

clear about I realized that what I meant, what others meant, was an
unintended caricature of the internal and external features of the con-
text of learning. Let me list the features.

1. The word learning is not like the words sticks and stones,
which you can see, touch, manipulate. In brief, learning is not
a thing, it is a process.

2. Learning is a process that takes place in an interpersonal

context; there is a teacher and a student or students. A student
may have interpersonal relationships with other students, but
he or she knows that the relationship with the teacher is
more important and consequential for how the student will be
judged and how that student will judge him- or herself.

3. The teacher is expected to come to know and understand

how the overt behavior and performance of the student can be
explained, intuited in terms of the strength and content of
covert, non-visible thoughts and feelings experienced by the
student. Those covert features are conventionally categorized
under such labels as emotion, attitude, cognitive, motivating
anxiety. Those features are omnipresent; the strength of none
of them is zero. The dynamic relationships among these covert
features vary dramatically among students who have the same
teacher. For any one student the relationships among those fea-
tures can be experienced differently with different teachers.

4. The learner does not use these labels. His or her thoughts and
feelings have concreteness and immediacy he or she cannot
or is reluctant to put into spoken words, depending on the
degree to which his or her relationship to the teacher is one
in which both feel safe with and trustful of each other.

I could have said the above in far fewer words. I could have said
that the world of the teacher is not that of the student and that the
teacher should never minimize that difference. Students do not min-
imize that difference. It falls to the teacher to know how to seek and
employ ways by which two worlds do not collide or pass by each
other but begin to intersect, to become known to the other to some
degree that is productive to the goals of both.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Exactly the same process takes place in the opposite of
exhibitionism, which in its primitive form we term observationism.
“Peeping Tom” is a celebrated example of this. We have a
displacement of observationism in the fairly average young man,
who likes to observe all that he can of the charms of every woman
he comes into contact with, who takes an eager interest in her
shoulders, breasts, underclothing, and any part she may exhibit. And
we have the third or sublimated stage in the scientist, who has
turned most of his primitive sexual instinct of “looking” in the sexual
sense into looking down the microscope, or searching for the secrets
of Nature, and delving amidst her hidden laws, instead of using the
same primitive desire to look in an unsublimated and rather more
infantile manner.
It is exactly the same with a large number of other primitive
instincts, which even did I mention them here would not be grasped
or understood at all by many without very much further explanation.
Suffice it to say, that many of our higher activities and desires are
sublimations of lower and more primitive instincts, which we are
learning to develop and control; and that education and environment
have, as their object, the training of the child by turning the forces
at work in his primitive instincts through the stage of displacement
into the final one of sublimation.
It should be clearly grasped that the energy lying behind our
primitive instincts, whether it be repressed, displaced or sublimated,
is a very real force, comparable with the physical energy which we
are accustomed to deal with in everyday life. And this energy must
find some outlet for its discharge. Thus,[2]“We know as regards
physical energy that there are not several kinds of energy, but
merely several manifestations of it, and that it may be changed from
one form of manifestation to another, but that still the sum total of
the original energy remains without addition or loss.”
Thus there is a given amount of energy stored in a ton of coal. This
energy can manifest itself as heat in the furnace and boiler. By
means of an engine we can change the manifestation into that of
motion, then with a dynamo to electricity; the electricity we can
again change into light, or back again into heat or motion. There is
one energy, but by suitable means we can turn it to different uses,
and give different manifestations of it. Owing, however, to the
imperfection of the boiler, machinery, etc., we never transform the
whole of our energy into another form. In transforming heat into
electricity, there is always some heat wasted; it is not destroyed, but
it remains as heat for a time, and is absorbed by surrounding
objects. A complete transference of energy does not take place, and
the less efficient the machinery the less is the transference.
Now evidence tends to show a considerable similarity between
psychic and physical energy. In all probability there is only one
ultimate psychic energy which, like physical energy, can be directed
into different channels. Thus, the energy of erotic desire can be
directed to a large extent into the energy of desire for music,
religion, science, or sport; or the energy of the desire for sport may
be changed into the energy of the desire for mental exercise, such
as chess, mathematics, or science. For example, an individual feels
“restless,” he then desires to play tennis; the afternoon is wet: he
plays chess instead. His psychic energy has been diverted from one
channel into another with its accompanying excitement and
satisfaction of desire: with its final feeling of fatigue and repletion.
Psychic energy, like physical energy, can never be entirely diverted
from one channel to another. There is always some, often a large
quantity, which is not altered in character. The amount of this
depends largely on the person concerned, just as the amount of
physical energy, changed from one form to another depends on the
efficiency of the engine or machinery.
This possibility of transference of energy of desire from one form to
another is of the utmost importance to the psycho-analyst. By the
technique of psycho-analysis the energy of repressed desires is first
freed from deleterious objectives, and then transferred to legitimate
ones. The energy behind the conflicts which lead to alcoholism or
drug-taking may, under suitable conditions, be transferred to energy
of higher types of desire with more suitable outlets. These processes
are known as transference and sublimation respectively.
It may be taken that every mind has a given amount of psychic
energy which must find somewhere its suitable outlet in satisfying
desire, whether for accomplishment or for enjoyment.
We may here again take the opportunity of stating that the efficiency
or lack of efficiency demonstrated in different individuals in their
attempts to transfer the energy of desire from a lower to a higher
channel depends not only on heredity and constitutional
circumstances but to an extraordinary degree on the individual’s
environment and the actions of the parents in the first three or four
years of his life. The reason why seemingly excellent parents
produce sometimes execrable progeny becomes clearer under
psycho-analysis. The over-strict parent produces one type of
inefficient children, the parent who spoils produces other inefficient
types. The nurse, the nursery, the casual visitor, the trivial
conversations, the unconsidered sights and experiences, all have a
terrific influence in the first few years of the child’s life. Parents do
not realise that conventional or arbitrary methods of education,
whether in one direction or another, are not going to effect the
results they expected. The primitive unconscious mind of the child
understands and absorbs in a manner that civilised man does not
recognise. The bad father may by accident or neglect produce an
excellent child—the good father with all his designs may produce a
bad one. This is not an attempt to show that as the child grows up
all its actions are dependent on the early environment; merely that
we can never compare the good or bad in individuals; that an
apparent failure, owing to his inefficiency of powers of sublimation,
may yet be devoting more energy to ascent than the successful saint
whose early environment made for efficient transference of energy
of desire. Some of the commonest of errors made by well-meaning
parents will come to light at a later period. “They teach their children
to repress erotic and other desires but they omit at the same time to
assist the development of that sublimation of them which is
absolutely essential.”

§4
We now come to the third great factor in character formation, and as
this particular factor is going to occupy the major portion of this
book, I will not do more here than indicate briefly the symbolic
meaning of the term Narcissism; the reason why this term is used in
connection with our primitive feelings of pride will then gradually
unfold itself.
Narcissus was the son of the river god, Cephissus. In his mother’s
eyes he was extremely beautiful, and later in the eyes of all others,
including himself. It was his wont to walk abroad in solitary places
lost in admiration of the graceful form which he thought no eyes
worthy to behold, save his own. On one occasion, he wanted to
drink from a cool spring and catching sight of his face in the water
for the first time in his life, at once fell in love with it, not knowing it
to be his own likeness. On his knees at the edge of the pool, he
stretched himself, and looked down upon a face and form so
entrancingly beautiful, that he was ready to leap into the water
beside it.
“Who art thou, who hast been made so fair?” cried Narcissus. And
the lips of the image moved, yet there came no answer. He
stretched out his hand towards it, and the beautiful form beckoned
to him. But when his hand touched and broke the surface, it
vanished like a dream, only to return in all its enchantment when he
was content to gaze motionless, even then, again, growing dim
beneath the tears of vexation he shed into the water. Repeatedly, he
tried to gather the lovely image in his arms, but it always eluded
him, but when he entreated and implored, it imitated his gestures
with unfeeling silence.
Maddened by the strong allurement of his own likeness, he could not
tear himself away from the mirror which ever mocked his fancy.
Hour after hour, day after day, he leant over the pool’s brink, crying
in vain for that imaginary object of adoration. But at last from
despair his heart ceased to throb, and he lay still among the water-
lilies that made his shroud.
* * * * * * *
Before proceeding further and examining the development of
Narcissism, and those factors which come to preserve it, and make it
forceful in our unconscious mind, we must first briefly consider the
subject of determinism.

FOOTNOTE:
[2] “Elements of Practical Psycho-Analysis,” by Paul Bousfield.
 CHAPTER IV
DETERMINISM AND WILL POWER

Determinism is the doctrine that all things, including the will, are
determined by causes. It is the antithesis of the doctrine of free will.
In its complete form, it holds that the individual has no direct and
voluntary control over his thoughts and actions but that every
thought and action is inevitably the result of a large number of
previous thoughts and actions which have gone before.
There is a very large amount of evidence, and indeed, whether we
admit it or not, the evidence is quite irrefutable, that in regard to the
majority of our actions the doctrine of determinism holds good. But
the evidence is by no means sufficient to enable us to conclude that
we have no free will.
[3]Freud in his book on the “Psychopathology of Everyday Life” and
in other works gives many convincing examples that much in our
character, that many of our actions, evil and good, are quite beyond
our control at any given moment. But there is one thing that appears
to have been overlooked, and that is, that in all the examples given
one could not conceivably utilise free will in any case. If I ask you to
think of a number what opportunity do you get of using your will
power? If you put the wrong latch-key into the door by accident,
have you made any effort to use will power? When a patient is
suffering from hysteria due to repressions of various kinds, in that
particular matter the will power has already been lost. When a
chronic alcoholic is unable to cease from drinking his will power in
reference to this has disappeared, therefore determinism holds the
field completely. The will has no opportunity of working then. In all
the examples which Freud gives one discovers on careful
investigation that for some reason or another there is no opportunity
for the use of free will. Such evidence as we have certainly does not
prove the nonexistence of free will, but merely shows that in a very
large number of our thoughts and actions we do not use any will at
all, and that in other cases we are unable to use our will effectively.
[4] When determinism does rule we may liken it physically to this: a
patient sits down and crosses one leg over the other and leaves the
one leg hanging free. On tapping it smartly beneath the patella the
foot will kick; the knee jerk has been elicited. If this be done fifty
times the result will be the same fifty times. There is movement of
the leg, but this movement is predetermined. On the other hand this
does not prove that no other movement of the leg is possible. Under
the conditions just given the man’s will, or the freedom of the leg, is
merely eliminated during that period. Or again, we may liken it to a
locomotive standing at the top of a hill; if the brake be taken off, the
locomotive will run down the hill, and will do it every time; but this
will not prove that did somebody happen to put the brake on half-
way down the hill the engine would still go on running. However, all
actions which we may ascribe to our will are no doubt strictly limited
by other determined conditions. The man on the engine may run it
backwards or forwards, but only within the very much prescribed
limits which the rails allow. We may safely accept this much
determinism, that although the will exists, its capabilities are strictly
circumscribed by determinism.
It is rather in his general direction than in any specific act that a
man has most control. We certainly have not the amount of free will
which we like to believe we have. For example, the reader of this
chapter may have returned home to-night and have said, “I will not
have a meal to-night, it is too hot.” What are the factors (or
determinants, as they are called) in this case? Perhaps external heat,
producing langour by various physiological processes, combined with
lack of appetite, in its turn produced by several causes, and added
to this, depression, produced by a bad business deal, and in its turn
the result of many other determinants outside the reader’s control.
There is no desire to eat, and these various determinants, added
together, prove stronger than the habit of eating the evening meal.
Having, however, read this chapter as far as this point, the reader
desiring to disprove my unpleasant suggestion, immediately says,
“Ah! I will prove that I have free will. I will eat my meal in spite of
not wanting it.”
Alas! this does not prove free will, new determinants have merely
been added on the other side, and desire to prove strength of mind
has now out-weighed accumulated efforts which prevented you from
eating.
Since it has been shown that a man’s control is constantly being
limited by other determinants, it follows that the criminal whose
environment and determinants, conscious and unconscious, have
been manufactured for him from evil sources, yet who, on the
whole, is progressing upwards in spite of these, may be forming a
far better character than the arch-bishop whose environment from
the beginning has been such as never to give him criminal
characteristics, yet whose growth has been, on the whole, towards a
more selfish position, even though this be not noticeable to the eyes
of others.
Now many of the determinants forming our characters lie in the
unconscious. They are unknown to us and only the results of their
activities are visible. Herein lies the difficulty of controlling ourselves.
How can we efficiently control that of which we do not know the
existence? Herein, also, lies the value of psycho-analysis, for it
brings many of these determinants to light, and we are thus able to
control them consciously. Only a part of all this can be accomplished
by such self-analysis as may be indicated in this book. Yet even so, a
much greater degree of self-control may be obtained.

§2
Let us now consider briefly why persons who have not previously
been irritable, should suddenly become irritable; who have not
previously been hysterical, should suddenly become hysterical; who
have not previously been in the habit of weeping, should at some
time after reaching adult life, revert to that infantile habit.
The explanation of mental troubles of various kinds involves two
factors. In the first place, any individual is capable of bearing a
certain amount of conflict and a certain amount of repression. It is
only when the accumulated force is more than he can control, that is
when new determinants are added, that the symptoms begin to
appear. He is like a steam engine in which as long as the steam is
being used up in doing work, or as long as the safety valve is
working efficiently when work is not being done, the boiler stands a
pressure of 100lbs. very comfortably. If the safety valve gets
jammed, and the energy cannot be transferred from the steam to
the work, the pressure in the boiler rises higher and higher until it
bursts from the joints and rivet-holes.
The second factor which determines the mode of expression of this
out-burst of repressed energy is known as the law of regression.
This means that if the adult outlet of energy becomes dammed up or
is insufficient, the energy will flow through an earlier channel which
has once been used. The individual will, in fact, revert to some
method which he was wont to use in earlier years, or in infancy. It is
true that this may be disguised and not recognised as an infantile
mode of expression until it is looked into more closely. This question
of regression, however, need not be more than touched upon here.
It will be much more fully dealt with when we come to actual
examples at a later stage.

FOOTNOTES:
[3] “The Elements of Practical Psycho-Analysis,” by Paul Bousfield.
[4] The doctrines of determinism and free-will respectively can be
brought entirely into line with one another if we include freewill itself
as one of the determinants. Thus, if in the formula
S = a + b + c + d + etc.
where S is the resultant action, and a, b, c, d, etc., are the several
determinants, it happens that d = 0. The presence of d does not
invalidate the formula. But if d does not happen to be zero, the
absence of d would invalidate the formula. If d represents the “will”
component there may be plenty, even a majority of cases in which d
= 0, but there may be cases in which the omission of d will render
the result erroneous.
 CHAPTER V
NARCISSISM

The term Narcissism has already been mentioned and some slight
indication of its importance in character development has been
given. We have also examined the derivation of the term, and found
that it implies self-interest, self-importance, self-worship; all of which
characteristics are in modified degrees possessed by everybody.
There are, however, many other manifestations of Narcissism, many
tricks by which it gets past our conscious intentions, many ways in
which it associates itself with other instincts, and unknown to us
works our undoing. We shall therefore, in this chapter, examine the
development of Narcissism from its very earliest stages, and trace
out in some detail whither it may lead.
Most people were they asked at what moment the child’s mind first
began to register feelings, thoughts, and emotions, would probably
at once and without hesitation say, “At the moment of birth.” It
seems the obvious thing to say, but like many other obvious things
such a statement appears to have but little evidence in support of it
and much against it.
The act of birth has performed no sudden or miraculous change
upon the growth and tissues of the body. It is true that oxygen is
now absorbed through the lungs instead of as originally through the
mother’s blood, but the essential tissues, the brain, the muscles and
the bones have undergone no sudden change. Before birth, they
were living tissues, and we know that the muscles were at work, for
we had felt the baby’s movements in utero; we know that the heart
was at work, driving the blood through the child’s arteries. We had
learnt this also by means of the stethoscope many weeks before the
child was born. Why then should we assume that the brain had
registered nothing at birth? We do indeed know that it must have
been at work in part, for it was learning to regulate the action of the
child’s heart and the child’s secretions, the blood pressure, and the
motions of its limbs. We are therefore justified in assuming that it
must be capable of registering impressions, even though it were
incapable of reason or thought.
It is true that at birth it commences to undergo many vivid new
experiences, but that is no reason for assuming that it has not
undergone any experiences in utero, and that these experiences
have not made some impressions on the brain. Let us see for a
moment what impressions it is likely to have received and registered.
First of all, it would most certainly hear sounds, the sounds of the
blood rushing through the mother’s arteries and the sounds from the
outer world, muffled and indistinct when they had penetrated the
mother’s body. All these sounds would be of a soft crooning nature,
and those caused by the blood in the mother’s arteries would be of a
rhythmic, humming, rising and falling nature, a kind of rhythmic
lullaby very similar in many respects to the lullaby the mother will
hum to the child when she wishes to put it to sleep at a later period.
We should expect these sounds to be registered on the child’s brain
so that if it ever heard their like again, some chord of feeling-
memory would be struck, and some emotional association brought
to mind. In the second place, external movements would be
registered on the child’s mind as the mother walked about. There
would be a swaying or swinging movement. Again we should expect
that when, in after life, the child experienced a swaying or swinging
movement, a chord of memory would be touched again, and these
earlier associations would be revived; not as a conscious memory or
fact, of course, but as a feeling.
Again, conscious movements of its own limbs might be impressed
upon it. It would find, when it tried to move, that its movements
were limited, and that it attained more perfect peace by refraining
from attempting to struggle and change its position. It would be
impressed by the pleasantness of inertia as opposed to the
unpleasantness of making an effort. And finally, its general position
with the knees drawn up and the chin bent down would be firmly
registered, so that when in after-life it again assumed this position,
once more the chord of memory would be struck, and the old feeling
of repose would be likely to return.
Now, we cannot assume that the child has any active mental state
before its birth, but we know that its condition (taken in conjunction
with its extremely limited experience) is one as near omnipotence
(from its standpoint) as may be. It breathes, or rather absorbs
oxygen without any effort of breathing. It is fed, it is kept warm and
comfortable without any effort whatsoever. It lives in a world entirely
its own, where everything works together for its comfort and well-
being. It has to make no struggle for existence. It has to deal with
nothing real, save perhaps that its voluntary movements are limited,
and this perhaps is bad for its education, since at that period of its
life it learns that it can be most comfortable by making least effort!
And here we see the beginning of that which we all possess in after-
life, inertia, the difficulty of making a beginning at anything, the
objection which we have to making efforts.
Now let us see what happens to this omnipotent little creature at
birth. It goes through the probably painful process of having its
position roughly changed and being thrust into an atmosphere which
is cold and unusual to it. Moreover it has to make its first struggle
for breath, its first effort to sustain existence. And in its struggle for
breath it utters cries, which by experience it very soon finds to be
magic sounds which enable it to fulfil its wishes. But of this, more
later.
After its first rude awakening, let us once more see what happens. It
is wrapped up in something warm; that is, it is returned to a
semblance of the womb, by having something round it which keeps
out the cold. It is gently rocked to and fro by the nurse or other
attendant, and again the semblance of the previous rocking in the
womb is returned to it. Crooning sounds are murmured over it, and
the semblance is still more complete. It frequently draws its knees
up somewhat if it is placed in such a position that it can do so with
ease, and falls asleep. It has attained as nearly as possible once
more the semblance of its pre-birth condition, where it has no cares,
and is warm and comfortable again. And though it has become
acquainted with effort, it is quite obvious that its feeling of
omnipotence, if we may so term it for the moment, is hardly yet
disturbed, and the world it has come into differs but slightly from the
world which it has left; it is still a world in which the infant is the
centre and ruler, in which its every want is attended to without an
effort on its part, save that it may sometimes have to call attention
to its wants by means of that magical cry which it soon learns how
and when to use, and which acts in a truly magical manner in
accomplishing the fulfilment of all its desires.
During the first few weeks of the infant’s life this delusion on the
part of the child is largely kept up. Few people think there is any
harm in attending to all a baby’s wants in the first month of its life.
They do not think it could possibly be wrong to spoil it at that age,
because its intellect has not developed. They forget entirely that its
mental condition and attitude towards life, apart from actual
thought, may inevitably be affected at this period. Hence, whenever
the baby cries, it is not uncommonly rocked to sleep, or fed, or if it
holds out its hand and shows its desire to possess anything, it is
immediately allowed to possess it, and to play with it. It has to make
but the faintest attempts to adjust itself to its environment, it has to
face but the slightest reality; all its desires are immediately fulfilled,
and kept in a condition of almost continual fulfilment. And it may
remain for a considerable period as near being an omnipotent
creature as it is possible for any living thing to be. Its omnipotence,
however, is really a fallacy, or as I prefer to term it at a slightly later
stage, a phantasy, for the world in which it lived before birth, which
seemed to it as a world, was not really a world at all, but a very
small and a very temporary abode, and the world in which it is living
for the first few months after birth is again not really a world but a
combination of extremely limited and carefully selected portions of
the world, in which every attempt is made to disguise from it the
realities of the actual world.
Again let us emphasise the fact that the chief effort that the infant
has to make is the effort of crying. And it may learn very quickly that
this is so all-powerful as to practically efface the unpleasant task of
having to adjust itself to the realities of life. This process is carried
on with slight modifications for many months. The infant has but to
wave a magic wand, as it were, has but to emit a little magic noise
from its mouth, and all the world it knows is set in motion to give it
satisfaction and some semblance of its pre-birth omnipotence.
This cry which brings it gratification, if it has been really effective
over a too-prolonged period, will tend to fix permanently in the
child’s mind the fact that either weeping or making a magic noise
with the mouth will always attain for it gratification. And although at
a later stage the conscious mind will be obliged to accept a
considerable amount of reality and to reject the idea of
omnipotence, yet the unconscious mind will persist in the struggle
and will make futile efforts to forget reality, to change reality into
phantasy, and to regain its omnipotent state.
When a man uses expletives because some task of his has failed to
result in success, he is really repeating the infant’s cry. He is really
uttering a magic sound which his unconscious mind hopes may
somehow remedy the failure. He has not definitely accepted the
reality of failure as a commonplace hard fact of life at the moment at
which he utters his expletive.
When a person weeps at some unpleasant happening or in anger at
something which has touched his pride, exactly the same is taking
place. He, or she, has failed to make a complete adaptation of
himself to the facts and realities of life. He has obeyed the law of
regression, to which I referred in a previous chapter, and has
returned to the infantile method of expression, namely weeping,
with the unconscious hope that a magic compensation will result;
that instead of his having to adapt himself to the facts of life, the
facts of life will somehow adapt themselves to his phantasy.
Hence, the first piece of advice that one must give to parents is that
they should, from the earliest possible moment, train the infant to
understand that the magic cries will not at once produce their
expected result; and the first week in the infant’s life is all-important
in this matter. The choosing of the nurse who has charge during that
period should be done with great care, and what is required of her
should be insisted on. Too great emphasis cannot be laid upon these
points.
The child should be fed at regular and proper intervals, and should
be kept warm. But if it cries, as it will do naturally, it should be left
to itself to cry. It should not be picked up, rocked to sleep, given
another meal nor petted. If it is left to cry, it will learn very rapidly
and at the right period of its life that the sounds which it emits are
not magical, and it will begin to adapt itself to the fact that it lives in
a real world which has not been built solely and only for its own
delight.
It is curious to note how regression, this instinct to return to the
earlier mode of expression, to return apparently even to the pre-
birth state, persists in the unconscious mind.
During the war, I knew a youth who was intensely agitated by the
air-raids. He felt perfectly safe, however, if he could crawl under the
bed or table, where he would curl himself into practically the same
position as that of a normal baby before birth. When questioned, he
had not, of course, the slightest conscious knowledge of why he felt
safe in such curious circumstances. But it does not seem improbable
that the association of ideas produced by his position and by the
confined space created a feeling akin to that feeling of safety which
has been his in his pre-birth omnipotent position where nothing
could harm him. A similar feeling of security was experienced by
many normal persons in cellars and other confined spaces and was
probably of the same origin; for there is no doubt that this safety
was felt even though their reason told them that a bomb was as
likely to reach their confined space as any other place in the
neighbourhood.
Again, I know of innumerable cases in which soldiers felt very much
safer from bombs which fell at night when they were under cover of
a canvas tent. Logically, of course, the thing was absurd;
emotionally, it was a fact. And all were equally unconscious of any
possible reasons for the feeling of security produced. An example of
this same tendency at an earlier age is seen in children who cover
their heads with the bedclothes when they are frightened.
To return to our Narcissistic infant, we are now impressed with the
fact that one thing of the utmost importance in the first years of its
life is that it shall gradually come into contact with reality, shall
discover that all things do not belong to it, that its omnipotent
feelings are based purely upon phantasy and not upon reality; and
upon the method of its disillusionment and the age at which this
begins largely depend the future powers of adaptation of the child to
its surroundings. It has now become obvious that the new-born
infant lives in a world of phantasy, in which, the relative importance
of itself to things outside itself is not merely distorted but is entirely
absent. And if we can suppose a child kept artificially in this
condition till it reached adult life, every wish satisfied
instantaneously, every force it knows directed entirely towards
gratifying its immediate desires, we do not require much imagination
to understand how absolutely helpless and lost this omnipotent
creature would be if suddenly turned into the world to face life and
reality. His one desire would be to return to his omnipotent state, his
one effort to keep at bay reality and turn it into the pleasant
phantasy of the previous twenty years. For he would surely, before
his disillusionment, have really come to believe himself omnipotent,
the only real thing in a phantasy world of his own fashioning and
dreaming.
An extreme case of this kind is, of course, an impossibility. But there
are many and various degrees in which it is approached. Probably
the nearest approach to it may be found in cases where some sort of
moral or mental conflict has been too much for an extremely
Narcissistic mind, which has then completely regressed, refused to
recognise the outer world, and developed a certain form of insanity;
and from this stage of complete Narcissistic regression all degrees
and kinds of manifestations of it may be found, until we reach at the
other end of our list a person who expects everyone around to
consult his wishes and peculiarities or who is merely somewhat
impatient, or inclined to irritability, or merely over-sensitive to either
mental or physical pain.
There is no more certain fact than that if an infant be allowed to
postpone its acquaintance with reality too long it becomes fixed in a
more or less degree in conditions in which phantasy plays too
prominent a part, and regression of some kind takes place as it
meets with real difficulties.
 CHAPTER VI
FACT AND PHANTASY

In the last chapter we emphasised the fact that one of the first
products of Narcissism was the infantile difficulty of distinguishing
between fact and phantasy, of realising the world outside oneself.
This tendency to mix up fact with phantasy is by no means only to
be found in an abnormal mind. It is present in some degree in all
persons; each one feels himself to be the most real thing present,
and in feeling this he has a tendency to believe that others round
him are in some way less real, though, fortunately, very few carry it
far enough to imagine that all the others are merely part of a dream
in which the dreamer is the only real figure, as the Red King in “Alice
Through the Looking Glass” is supposed to have done, when the
remark is made to Alice, “You’re only a sort of thing in his dream! If
that there king was to wake you would go out bang—just like a
candle!”
And yet quite a large number of people find it difficult to realise
firstly, that they must die, and secondly that the rest of the world
will not die also when they die. They know, of course, that this latter
is not the case, yet they cannot look upon it as a commonplace fact.
Their Narcissism refuses to contemplate their own mortality. It
represses the fact and leaves the idea vague and unreal to them.
In children, the difficulty of distinguishing between phantasy and
reality is quite normally much more accentuated than in adults. And
since they start in a world of phantasy and their training is to lead
them to a world of reality, it is obvious that the halfway stages will
be obscured by a strange mixture of the two. All children go through
the stage in which phantasy and reality are by no means clearly
differentiated, and most young children succeed, day by day, in
fulfilling impossible wishes in phantasies in a manner which a
properly developed adult can never do.
A little boy desires to possess a pony; if this be impossible his
imagination gives life to a rocking-horse, and failing that he may tie
a piece of string to a chair, and with great pleasure and much
emotion urge on his fiery untamed steed across mountain and
desert. He fulfils his wishes immediately by means of a phantasy,
which, for the time being, successfully replaces reality. If this child
grows up normally, this possibility of phantastic fulfilment should
gradually disappear. How many adults, for instance, could take a
bath-tub into their dining-room, sit in it, and with the aid of a vivid
imagination thoroughly enjoy a pleasant sail at sea? We trust no
one, at any rate of our readers, for they would be of that type which
has no perspective, and they would most certainly fail in their
vocation as practical men and women. Yet remnants of phantasy
thinking remain with everyone, and in a moderate degree, so far as
we know, such remnants do but little harm if they are present in
small measure only, and kept in water-tight compartments.
Adult phantasy thinking very largely consists in what is known as
identification, which may be either conscious or unconscious. Of this,
we shall have more to say shortly. At the moment let us trace out
what should happen to the normal child as it grows older. Education
and environment should be gradually convincing the child of the
unreality of its phantastic thoughts and of its early world, should be
inducing it to think in terms of facts and to adjust himself to these
facts, instead of attempting the impossible task of adjusting these
facts to suit his own phantastic conceptions of them. The method of
thought which he should develop in order thus to fit himself to meet
the world adequately has been conveniently termed “directive
thinking.” Directive thinking is controlled thought based upon facts
seen in their true perspective, and with a purpose in view which is
both definite and possible. It is the very opposite of phantasy
thinking, which is generally indefinite, based upon a lack of
perspective, and attempts continually to obtain the fulfilment of
wishes impossible of fulfilment.
In directive thinking, the purpose in view must be purposive to the
thinker, a change to be produced in the world, either in its
happiness, its morals, its commercial prosperity or in other forms of
progress or even of deterioration; or the purpose may be to effect
changes in the individual’s own happiness or prosperity, or it may be
directed towards a mental change in the thinker himself with no
immediate idea of changes in his external surroundings.
Thus a man may wish to improve his own character by eradicating a
bad habit. He may do this by thinking carefully about it, by analysing
the causes of the habit, by giving himself auto-suggestion in
opposition to the habit. All this, even if the habit may not in the end
be eradicated must be classed as directive thinking. Directive
thinking is thus obviously, controlled thinking requiring an effort of
attention and concentration as opposed to phantasy thinking which
knows but little control save that of desire, and little effort or
concentration.
In all the business of everyday life, directive thinking must be
employed; whether we are merely using our minds to decide the
most trivial problem, such as the best way of eradicating weeds from
the garden, or whether we are deciding upon a policy to be pursued
in some great commercial or political enterprise. Every time we use
our brains in directive thinking we are establishing a habit which
gradually gives us power to produce changes in our environment
and in the world in general. Every time we indulge in phantasy
thinking we encourage the habit of living in a world of our own
ideas, and we are destroying the habit which enables us to create in
reality.
The two forms of thinking may, of course, overlap considerably. The
novelist or playwright, for instance, is very largely a phantasy
thinker. He may feel the emotions of the various phantasy characters
which he evolves, but in order to arrange the words and sentences,
and furthermore in having an idea to portray or in drawing attention
to evils which he thinks should be remedied, he is using considerable
energy in directive thought. So that it becomes obvious that directive
thought need not merely apply to the things of the immediate
present nor even the near future, and in trying to draw distinction
between the two, one is often confronted with a superficial criticism,
that certain ideas must pertain to phantasy thinking, because they
can never come to pass. That, however, is quite incorrect. The
possibility that an idea may come to fruition in two or three hundred
years time, and that the thoughts which have been given to the idea
must assist its growth and ripening, is sufficient to constitute these
thoughts as directive.
We must now look at the second important element in the child’s
early education, which would follow logically upon the first one that
it should be made to face the facts around it; and that is, that in its
games and occupations it should be encouraged, as far as possible,
to take lines of directive thought, and not obtain its pleasures
through phantasies only.
Thus, it would be much better to give him bricks to play with, so
that he may use directive thought in designing and building a house,
than to give him a ready-made toy, such as an engine wherewith he
will merely carry out the phantasy of being a driver or a passenger
and of travelling wheresoever he wishes. A toy wheel-barrow which
he can take into the garden and fill with real stones and earth is far
better than a doll which he will merely imagine to be something to
be brought up like himself, which he will endow with phantastic life
and feelings which are quite unreal. In fact, as far as possible, the
child’s games and occupations should involve his doing something,
rather than merely imagining something. Of course, imagination and
phantasy will come into its games, and are bound to do so, but as
much directive thought as possible should be added.
The ordinary fairy-tale should be swept from the nursery; here the
child does nothing but identify himself with the hero or heroine in
the most impossible of situations of a purely phantastic type. There
is plenty of scope for giving a child an interest in stories from the
fairy-land of science, or from the lives of famous persons in the
centuries that have passed; all of which, if properly selected and
dressed up, will assist the child’s directive thought. For though the
facts with which the stories may deal are as wonderful as any of
Grimm’s fairy-tales, they are facts of which the child will never have
to be undeceived, and he will never have to have his faith shaken in
the stories which he has learnt; thus the child will learn from the
outset to think directively.
I know that many mothers, when they read this, will be inclined to
shake their heads and say to themselves, “Poor little darling, I could
never treat it so.” And that they will be inclined, as is shown very
early in this book, to say “These things cannot be true,” for they are
not the ideas they are accustomed to. Yet I can assure them that by
means of carrying out many of those actions and teachings which
they think are pleasant and harmless, they are really damning the
child, while many of these ideas which they might term cruel are
really of the greatest value and kindness to it. Moreover, experience
has shown that if diplomacy be used, the child will be as equally
interested in wonderful facts as in wonderful phantasies. The only
difference is that it is more trouble to the parent or educator to
search out and deal with facts himself. It is quite true that the child’s
imagination requires training, as part of its intellectual education.
But there is vast difference between encouraging it to imagine the
possibility of impossible things, and encouraging it to exercise its
imagination in realisation of facts, however far they may be removed
from the experience of everyday life. Many people have the idea that
a child should be encouraged to use its imagination; whereas in fact
the child’s imagination requires curbing, training, sublimating. Such
people do not realise that the early life of a child is lived almost
entirely in imagination, that it has no difficulty whatsoever in using
its imagination, and that the real difficulty is in preventing it from
using too much imagination directed into false channels and by-
paths of permanent unreality.
 CHAPTER VII
IDENTIFICATION

We must now traverse another path through which Narcissism

wanders. We have emphasised the fact that when a child comes into
the world, he is to himself the only real thing; the rest of the world
is merely seen from his phantastic view point, and at this stage he
accepts himself as the one all-powerful centre of everything. Another
important fact which arises from this, however, we have not dealt
with, and that is, that he does not separate the outer world from
himself as a separate entity. His unconscious view point is that the
world is subordinate to himself, beneath his omnipotent control, if
you like, that it is a dream of his own imagining, that it is something
which belongs to him in every sense of the word. This, summed up,
means that it is part of himself, that his identity and the identity of
the dream-world around him are part of the same thing.
Thus, the infant does not at first distinguish between himself and his
mother. When he is hungry, he cries, and he probably has almost as
ready access to his mother’s breasts as if they were part of his own
body. And such imagination is more than encouraged when he is
allowed the use of a rubber teat to suck in the intervals between his
meals.
It is generally a comparatively slow process through which the infant
passes, this one of separating himself in thought and feeling from
objects surrounding him. It is one which is hardly ever completely
accomplished. We have already mentioned the fairy-tale which
encourages the child’s phantasy thought. Let us now see how he
really obtains pleasure from that fairy-tale. It is by identification. In
imagination he is a fairy prince or princess, as the case may be; his
pleasure in the triumphs and progress of the central figure of the
story is that of performing his prodigious deeds by proxy; and if he
thus identifies himself with the hero of the story, he is also
encouraged to believe that he possesses the power and qualities of
that hero. He is less able to realise that he, unlike the hero, cannot
perform magic deeds with a mere wave of a wand. Indeed, when
the story is over, he will probably play at being a fairy, and in
phantasy perform the magic deeds again.
This demonstrates the force of his identification with the hero of the
story. And it must be remembered that sooner or later the child will
have to wake up, will have to realise that it possesses no magic
power, and the struggle within it will be great. It is obviously a
mistaken form of kindness to enhance such pleasures of the
moment, when you are merely accentuating the struggle which the
child will have to make at a later period to overcome his Narcissism.
In passing, I may mention that you have probably already done the
child considerable damage by allowing him to have his rubber teat at
the beginning of this period of identification, since he identifies it
with the mother’s breast, and is thus encouraged to think that the
breast is always with him.
Let us now see where this Narcissistic identification may come out
later in life.
First of all, it is this which enables us to enjoy novels, just as we
enjoyed fairy-tales as children. We identify ourselves with the hero
or heroine of the book, and in phantasy perform their various
wonderful feats. Thus we satisfy our Narcissistic desire to be great
and powerful. If we lack cleverness, and the hero is clever, by
identification and imputation we may attain the pleasures of feeling
clever and superior. If the heroine is beautiful and everyone falls in
love with her, we may by proxy be the same. If the hero is a sailor,
and we have always desired to sail, yet have never been on the sea,
our ambition is now attained—and see how easily attained—in a
truly omnipotent fashion, without effort on our part, just by reading
about it. Exactly the same thing takes place at theatres, where the
Narcissist identifies himself with the actors on the stage. So far so
good; if a person can content himself with an occasional theatre or
occasional novel, wherewith to take a restful regression to an
infantile outlet of energy, no harm is done. There are times when we
must rest, and there are times when we must sleep, which also
appears to be Narcissistic regression to a condition somewhat
resembling our pre-birth state. But there are many who cannot
control their identification in this way, who cannot confine it to the
stage and the novel, who bring it into the affairs of life continuously.
They may unconsciously identify themselves with their father or
mother, their relations or friends, or even their enemies, and
perhaps, in turn, with everyone with whom they come into contact.
Like a looking-glass, they reflect everything that goes on around
them. They feel the pleasures of their friends, they also feel their
pains. They are called sympathetic, they are often ultra-sympathetic
—they are a nuisance.
I remember on one occasion I had asked a woman of strong
Narcissistic temperament to take a fly out of the corner of my eye.
She absolutely refused to do so under any consideration, as she was
sure she would hurt me too much. Inquiry showed that Narcissism
had exaggerated her own feelings, so that a speck of dust in her
own eye was torture. Yet her eye was so tender and important to
herself that she could not bear anyone to touch it even in order to
get something out. And she could not imagine that anybody else
could have feelings that differed from hers; and since she identified
herself so much with other people, I have no doubt it would have
been a real agony to her, had she attempted to extract the fly from
my eye.
Such people are by no means uncommon. We all know the person
who cannot bear to hurt us, even for our good. For instance, some
cannot bear to bandage a wound for us since they cannot bear to
see pain in any form. They state that it is almost as if they felt it
themselves, and they call themselves “sympathetic.” But in spite of
popular belief to the contrary, such sympathy is not a virtue, there is
nothing altruistic about it; it is an inconvenient fault of an entirely
selfish kind. In order to help one’s friend, one does not need to feel
his feelings and suffer his pains, one wants to understand them; the
more one enters into his feelings, the more one’s judgment is
biased, and the less one is able, as a rule, to be of assistance. Worse
still, in connection with these people, they not only pour out
sympathy in this way, but attribute it to themselves as a virtue, and
they cannot bring themselves to believe their friends to be really
good, unless their friends also can react in a similar way towards
them. They call a normal person unsympathetic, perhaps exaggerate
the term and call him brutal, wishing indeed that their friends who
have climbed higher from Narcissism should regress to their lower
stand-point.
I have given here but one type of Narcissistic identification with
other persons; it seems to me unnecessary to carry it further since
any reader who chooses to think the matter out for himself will find
endless modifications of such identifications. We all possess it in
part, and on the whole women are more Narcissistic than men. Let it
not be thought, however, that this is a reflection on women; it is a
reflection on the way they have been brought up, for from the
earliest times environment impresses them with the idea that “little
boys are made of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails, and little
girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice!” And hence on
such lines as these, their Narcissism is encouraged, and their
capabilities of facing fact and reality discouraged from the very
outset, until differences of temperament are produced in the adults
of the two sexes, which in no way belong to Nature, but purely to
our conventional and somewhat barbaric stand-point.
There are yet more important results of Narcissistic identification
than those already mentioned; Narcissism leads, in many instances,
to the choice of a particular love-object. Narcissism is, of course, by
no means the only or chief factor in the choice of love-objects, as
anyone who has studied psycho-analysis will at once realise. It is,
however, the only one I intend to touch on in this particular work.
Just as the mythical Narcissus himself fell in love with his reflection,
so does his prototype of to-day. An infant is not only the omnipotent
centre of all, he is also the only interesting portion of the universe in
his early days. His interests are entirely self-centred, and his joys
and pleasures belong to himself alone; and as he grows older,
everything that is like him is identified with himself. In the worst
form of Narcissism in the adult, the individual remains entirely
selfish, and is incapable of loving anybody outside himself at all.
By identification, however, he can love in a sense those attributes of
his own personality which he sees in other persons. Thus, he may
love somebody for a facial similarity, for a voice which is like his, or
for tastes which are like his own, but most commonly he loves them
for a body like his own. And from this we see that he may fall in love
with somebody of his own sex. Hence, homo-sexuality,[5] as it is
called, is frequently one of the distressing results of an early
Narcissistic upbringing. But it need not be necessary for such homo-
sexuality to be of a grossly erotic type; such desires may be for the
most part repressed in the unconscious, or appear only in minor
ways such as the desire to kiss, fondle or touch favoured persons of
the same sex. On the other hand, frequently the early education and
environment of the Narcissistic person has been such as to leave him
quite incapable of complete repression; and we then have expressed
more or less open erotic desires and actions for persons of the same
sex. Such persons, however, should not be treated as criminals in
this particular matter; they are by this time as hopelessly
incompetent to deal with themselves, as is the kleptomaniac or a
person having any other form of so-called degenerate mentality.
Here again, we see the reason why homo-sexuality is so much more
rife amongst women than amongst men. The minor details of their
early environment tend so much more to confirm them in
Narcissism. It is partially repressed and partially displaced homo-
sexuality which causes some women to kiss one another, to call one
another by affectionate names and so forth, to delight in taking hold
of one another’s hands on occasion; actions which normally,
between persons of opposite sex, would at once be taken to indicate
some sort of erotic affection, but which we are so used to seeing
amongst women that we do not realise their repressed and
unconscious significance.
Let it not be thought, however, that this subject of homo-sexuality is
based on this one simple problem; there are many other early
infantile fixations, which play a very large part in causing persons to
become homo-sexual. I only mention this one Narcissistic complex
as being another example of how identification takes place as one of
the chief results of the Narcissistic temperament, and to what
lengths such identification may, on occasion, lead. Of course, all
degrees of such identifications may be met with, and it is quite
common to find persons who can love hetero-sexually as well as
homo-sexually; that is to say, who can love persons of the opposite
sex in the usual way, as well as persons of their own sex. But such
people, even in their hetero-sexual love, tend to choose a love-
object which resembles themselves in some manner or the other.
However, a certain amount of Narcissism (which fortunately
everyone still possesses), may be of value in this way, for it is
certainly good for a man and woman to have similar interests when
they marry; it is excessive Narcissism, excessive identification,
excessive sympathy, which is deleterious, just as in other
manifestations of Narcissism, with which we are going to deal
shortly, it is excessive impatience, excessive anger, excessive tears
which are really harmful, and lead to the greatest unhappiness.
Although perhaps in these latter instances, to be without impatience,
anger, or tears would be better still.
Thirdly, there is yet another method of Narcissistic identification. Just
as a child identifies itself with its living surroundings, so does it
identify itself with its inanimate surroundings. As its mother and
nurse are treated as part of it in the early stages, so also are its
rubber teat, feeding bottle and toys treated. If you take away the
baby’s rattle, it will cry or stamp or weep with as much vigour and
display of emotion as if you had caused it bodily pain by means of
rigorous physical punishment. You have in fact taken away part of
itself from the little omnipotent person. In later stages in his career,