In the sphere of sex this process is, alas, most potently at work. The man in whom the sexual instinct still lives a more or less independent, uninhibited life of its own, tends--unless he has special evidence to the contrary, and often even then--to interpret the behaviour and the minds of others in the terms familiar to himself, and to suppose that they too must be stopped by the fear of punishment or of loss of caste if they are not to commit excesses.
On the other hand, those in whom there is a constant conflict with a sexual origin project it here, there, and everywhere into the breasts of those they know, and interpret others’ motives in terms of their own repressed wishes.
Furthermore, most of our existing laws and customs are based on a state of society in which the changes to which we have referred had not progressed as far as they have to-day, and man’s psychology was a little less removed from that of other mammals.
The result is that those who attempt the complete emancipation possible to a properly-organized mind are confronted first by the lag of our institutions and traditions, and secondly by the unconcealed suspicion of all those--and they are as yet the large majority--in which the conflicts arising out of sex are unresolved. It is from the sum of those conflicts that the spirit prevalent with regard to sex to-day derives its character--shocked and shamefaced as regards one’s own sexual life, vindictive and grudging as regards the difficulties of others. The bulk of men and women cannot treat sexual problems in a scientific spirit, because of the store of bottled-up emotion in the wrong place that they have laid up for themselves by their failure to come to proper terms with their sexual instincts. The soul should grow to deserve the words Crashaw wrote of St. Theresa--“O thou undaunted daughter of desires!” But this the soul of such disharmonic beings can never do.
This brings us to our other pressing question. Should the results of psycho-analytic methods, the knowledge that the sex instinct is fundamental and is interwoven into the roots of the highest spiritual activities--should the inculcation and demonstration of this be part of education? Some would say yes, and would argue that to know oneself is essential to a proper realization of one’s capacities. Personally I am extremely doubtful of the correctness of this answer. Knowledge of the processes of digestion is not necessary to digest well--so long as we go on digesting well: it is only necessary when we digest badly. In that case the processes involved are automatic: but even in processes which require a great deal of learning, we find a similar state of affairs. A man can become expert at, say, a game requiring the most delicate adjustments of hand and eye without analysing the processes he employs, but by practising them as finished articles, so to speak; and it is equally obvious that Shakespeare and Shelley and Blake and other great writers produced their works without the least analytical knowledge of the obscure and rather unpleasant processes which, if we are to believe the critics who psycho-analyse dead authors in the pages of Freudian journals, were “really” at work below the surface. Analysis constitutes a serious surgical operation for the mind, and, as one of the leading Austrian psycho-analysts has recently said, we do not want to perform this operation on healthy people any more than we want to open their abdomens merely for the sake of seeing that their viscera are normal.