Part 10
In trying to analyse these facts further, we are brought up against new depths of complication. It is becoming ever clearer that the gonads do not operate as independent organs, but in conjunction with the whole of the rest of the endocrine system--thyroid, pituitary, adrenal, and the rest. In the first place, it seems to be established that the reproductive organs must be in some way activated by other ductless glands before they become normal, just as they in their turn must activate the sexual centres in the brain. This phase of the matter is being investigated by many workers to-day; provisionally we may say that pituitary and adrenal cortex are especially concerned. In the second place the gonads, once activated and in normal working order, react upon the other ductless glands. It thus comes about that the relative proportion or relative activity of the parts of the whole ductless gland system is different in male and female. Blair Bell is the protagonist of this view. A woman is a woman, he says, not merely because of her ovaries, but because of all her internal secretions, of her endocrine balance as a whole.
It cannot be said that we have any certainty on the details of this subject. It is clear, however, that some such fundamental difference does exist, and it is therefore further probable that if a woman has a thyroid, say, or an adrenal which for some reason (and there are many possible reasons) is producing an amount of secretion abnormal for a woman but more like that which is produced by a man, she will, in spite of her ovaries, be more masculine in tendency.
I will content myself with one example. The cortex of the adrenal gland, if active beyond a certain measure, assists the development of male, prevents the development of female, characters. Women with adrenal tumours frequently develop moustache and beard and other appanages of the male. One presumes that a slight preponderance of the adrenal cortex in the normal endocrine make-up will lead to a less feminine type of woman than normal. I repeat that we are but on the verge of the matter and that premature speculation is certainly risky and probably fallacious. But all the same, there is very little doubt that we are on the right track, and that we shall have to search for the finer shades of temperamental difference between man and woman not so much in differences in the quality of the secretion of testis or ovary as in differences of balance in what the Americans call the “endocrine make-up.”[37]
There is, however, also the possibility of difference in the quality of gonad secretion, and of recent years Steinach and his followers have been claiming that this may be at the bottom of many cases of so-called “perversion of sexual instinct.” The latest claim of this school is that homosexual men may be rendered heterosexual in instinct by removal of their testes and implantation of a testis from a sexually normal person--from a man, for example, who is being operated on for cryptorchidism. It is frankly impossible as yet to say whether their conclusions are well founded: a very much larger series of cases will be necessary, and the possibility of suggestion’s action must be eliminated. It is well to remember, however, that there is no theoretical objection to the possibility. We know that in various lower animals, such as moths and flies, the balance between the male- and female-determining factors in the chromosomes may be altered in certain crosses, and that this altered balance in the constitution is reflected in some cases in a state permanently intermediate between male and female, in others by a reversal of sex at some point during development. For various reasons we should not usually expect reversal in mammals; but if such abnormal balance should exist in the constitution, as it well might, we should expect a gonad secreting an abnormal, intermediate secretion. This we might also expect as the result of certain accidents of embryonic life, as actually happens in the abnormal female cattle known to farmers as free-martins. These animals are always born co-twin to a male, and their abnormality is due to the blood-systems of the embryonic membranes of the twins having fused, so that the secretion of the developing male’s gonad acts upon the developing female.
Further light on abnormally-directed sex-instinct is thrown by recent analysis of abnormal domestic animals by Crew.[38] In both goats and swine he finds that by far the commonest form of sexual abnormality is one in which the external appearance, at least in youth, is so nearly female as to raise no question in the mind of the casual observer; about the time of maturity, however, male secondary sex characters begin to develop, including male instincts; and dissection reveals the presence of a double set of ducts--the female uterus and vagina, the male epididymis and vas deferens, but only a single uniform reproductive organ, and that always a testis. The simplest explanation (although it is admittedly tentative) appears to be that the testis has not been activated during embryonic and juvenile life, and that therefore until puberty the animal, though really male, has been physiologically in a neutral state, which permits the growth of the internal apparatus proper to both sexes. Externally, the “neutral” condition approximates more closely to the female type, and the animal is thus first classed as a female. Some other gland is then responsible for the second activation at puberty, and this occurs in a normal manner.
This is of considerable interest, since it appears that in man too the largest class of sexually abnormal individuals are those whose external appearance is almost or quite feminine, but who possess male instincts. It is at least probable that examination will show that they, too, or many of them, will be of the type described above--males with delayed activation of testis, a consequent classification as female at birth, and a girl’s upbringing, with male instincts arising in the unhappy creature at puberty.
It is the fashion nowadays to write down abnormal sexual psychology wholly to the account of the mind, to an abnormal development with causes entirely psychological. It is clear, however, that if some abnormal individuals can be cured by implantation, and others are abnormal owing to an early failure of activation, this conception falls to the ground, and the Freudian is robbed of some of his most cherished examples.
In any case, the work on animals definitely shows that, unless the mechanism of activation of instinct by gonad secretion has altered between animal and man more than we have any right to postulate a priori, the quality of gonad secretion and the balance of all the endocrines has to be taken into account far more than is done by the average psycho-analyst.
This, however, is not to say that the genesis of our attitude towards sex, our sexual behaviour, and our general mental organization in so far as modified by sex, is not normally determined for the most part by purely psychological causes. If there is a physical abnormality, this will react upon the mental; but in the vast majority of cases the physical variation will not take the individual beyond the limits of normality, and when the normal physical limits are not exceeded, the wide range of mental variation still observable is to be ascribed to psychological causes. In other words, abnormal sexual behaviour and instinct may be due either to physiological or psychological abnormality, and the latter is probably the commoner cause.
I am not competent to attempt to treat of the vast and complex psychological aspect of the sex-problem which the analytical psychologists have opened up to such an extent within the last few years; I can only deal with it in the broadest way, and content myself rather with stating than with solving problems.
As regards the place of sex in our mental organization, there are two contradictory extremes possible. Either all ideas connected with the physical side of sex may be repressed with great vehemence, and the sexual contribution to various emotions ignored or dismissed, while a constant attempt is made at sublimation; or else there is little or no repression beyond that necessitated by convention and custom, sexual matters are taken at their physical face value, and sublimation is not consciously attempted and exists only to a negligible amount.
There is no doubt that the first alternative represents one of the commonest neuroses of modern life, and one in which an interpretation on principles made familiar by psycho-analysis is the most satisfactory. Repression, through whatever cause initiated (and psychologists, I understand, are coming more and more to recognize that chronic misuse of the mind as well as single violent shocks may be effective), leads to a more or less complete dissociation of two parts of the mind, of which one only is in the main connected with the conscious personal life. As a result, curious phenomena are met with. There is, it is true, a constant effort necessary to keep life a-going with the aid of an incomplete mental organization; but when satisfaction is attained, its very rarity brings with it a certain glow, an irradiation of peculiarly pleasurable nature. Furthermore, dissociation in most cases is not complete; now and again, and especially when there is successful sublimation--in some people when in love, in others with religious ecstasy, in others again with some form of art--now and again re-association of the parts occurs, and there is an extraordinary sense of the irruption of some vast beneficent force, some great extra-personal flood of soul, into the meagre stream of everyday life. The lives of a certain number of saints and ascetics, mystics and poets, abound with phenomena of this sort; and apparently the sense of value attaching to the occasional complete attainment of such satisfactory states of the soul, combined with the conscious daily quest for sublimation which is inevitable when the most important part of the primitive emotions are repressed, is such a vivid experience that it satisfies the mind and enables such persons to carry on, and to do work sometimes of the highest value.
On the other hand, men and women with this type of mental development naturally tend to be unstable; they cannot be sure of their capacity, whether for routine work or creative thought or spiritual experience, from day to day. Their mental life has a tendency to wear thin, their sense of effort and struggle to increase and lead to breakdown. It is in the long run an unsatisfactory way of organizing the psyche, because the conscious mind has less than it ought to have upon which to fall back.
The opposite extreme is equally unsatisfactory. If individuals of the first type are trying to build high without adequate foundations, those of the second are mistaking the foundations for a complete building. A dissociation of a different type occurs in them--a dissociation due to lack of use, to a mere failure to connect up that part of the mind concerned with sexual emotion with a great many of the mind’s other activities. Thus the sexual side has few and lower values associated with it than it might, and other possibilities of thought and feeling and action remain as mere possibilities, never realized in actuality. The result is a definitely incomplete personality of a more or less arrested or rudimentary type.
Those are the extremes: of course there are all intermediates between them. They may crop up with apparent spontaneity, determined more by the hereditary constitution of the man or woman than by external happenings: or they may be mainly or at least largely determined by the accidents of the environment during the period before maturity. One of the most potent factors in the environment will be the attitude of the parents towards sexual matters. On the one hand they may adopt the common, horror-stricken attitude towards sex, hushing it up, making it clear to the sensitive mind of childhood that there is something thoroughly bad about it, and so laying the best possible foundations for future repression. Or, on the other hand, they may openly adopt the psycho-analytic view as to the rôle of sex in the development of mind, may further believe that the fullest analysis and self-knowledge is always desirable, and may accordingly be pointing out to the child interpretations of its actions and sayings in terms of sex, familiarizing it with sex from the outset, not merely not discouraging but actually encouraging reference to sexual matters. This will tend, _ceteris paribus_, to the development of a mind in which many of the more complex mental operations will not usually persist because the subject will be continually unbuilding them into their constituent parts, of which sex will be the most unvarying and important.
Both these types are to my judgment obviously unsatisfactory. The ideal organization of the mind must be one in which first there is a minimum of waste of energy, secondly a maximum realization of potentiality. The operations of mind may further be thought of from two different angles--a subserving the biological needs of the organism, or as ends in themselves. From the first point of view, thought is action _in posse_: efficiency and full utilization of energy are here the requirements, and it is obvious that any method which even partially separates one part of the mental organization from the rest must be a poor one, that a refusal to face any portion of reality, such as, in our special case, the physical side of sex, must put the organism at a disadvantage in a world in which that portion of reality plays, as it obviously does, an important rôle.
The correct type of organization is one of the type which has been developed over and over again in the course of evolution, for different functions: it is the hierarchical one, in which some parts are dominant, others subordinate, the dominant parts helpless without the subordinate, the subordinate different, through the fact of their subordination, from what they would otherwise have been, doing most of the hard work, but under the guidance of the dominant. Only in this way is a unitary organization arrived at in which there is the minimum of waste, of antagonism between the parts.
The psycho-analysts have, by analysing the pathology of mind, shown us how waste of energy may arise in particular cases, and so make it easier for us to avoid it in general.
One may recognize the merits of Freud as an investigator without accepting all or even the majority of his conclusions. As the late W. H. Rivers pointed out, Freud will always be remembered in the history of psychology because he introduced new ideas and new methods into the science. Previous workers had discovered the realm of the subconscious; but they had not discovered the real nature of its relation to the rest of the mental organization. Freud pointed out that there was often a biological value attached to the power of forgetting as well as to that of remembering, and that in any case in most of us a large amount of experience is rendered unconscious by suppression, or an attempt made to force it into the unconscious by repression. He and his followers and other schools of psychologists have pointed out the importance of unresolved conflicts in determining thought and behaviour, and have made it clear that in the ordinary civilized community of to-day a large proportion of those conflicts arise out of difficulties connected with the sex-instinct. And, even if we reject the extreme claims made by many Freudians, we must admit that psycho-analysis has shown that many cases of actual perversion of instinct may be cured by analytic methods, and that sex occupies a very much larger space in the mind than was previously supposed. It had not been previously supposed, because of the fact that it tends to appear in consciousness in disguised form--either sublimated and thus intertwined with other emotions and instincts or with unusual objects, or else rationalized as something else, or kept below the surface of consciousness as an unfulfilled wish; and because there is a resistance in most of us to recognizing its importance.
This revolution in our thought has proved very unpalatable to many. In just the same way as a large proportion of Darwin’s opponents opposed him because they believed that to accept man’s simian origin was a repulsive degradation, so many of the opponents of psycho-analysis oppose it because they believe that to ascribe this huge rôle to sex in the genesis of our psyche is a repulsive degradation.
To my mind there are two very general questions which the student of human sex psychology now has to face, if he takes not necessarily the whole but the central theses of psycho-analysis, however much pruned, as proven. The first is this: granted that sex does play such a large part, especially in early years, in the genesis of our mental organization, is it desirable that the average adult or adolescent should, by analysis, be given full self-knowledge on the subject?
The second is this: granted that sex does penetrate into more corners of mind in man than in lower organisms, is this really a regrettable thing, or can we find any grounds for believing it to be desirable or biologically progressive?
To answer this we shall have to go back a little to first principles, and consider, however briefly, certain facts as to the march of evolution.
Evolution is essentially progressive. It proceeds on the whole in a certain direction, and that direction is on the whole towards a realization of what seems to us to have positive value. The direction, however, as a matter of fact, is most striking when we consider the maximum level attained, much less so when we consider the average, not at all when we look at the minimum.
The method or mechanism of progress may differ in different types, and it does differ in man from that which is found in other mammals. In most higher animals progress is brought about chiefly by natural selection operating upon individuals, although in a few forms selection operates chiefly upon groups of communities: in both cases the changes in the inherited constitution of the species are the important changes. In man, however, in all except the very early stages of his development, changes in inherited constitution have been small and unimportant, and the chief changes of evolutionary significance have been those in tradition; selection among individuals has been of relatively little importance, and selection has fallen mainly upon groups and, to an ever-increasing extent, upon their ideas and traditions.
In spite of differences in method as between different types of organism, the tendency has been in the same direction--towards a possibility of greater control, greater independence, greater complexity, and greater regulation or harmony.
Looked at from the evolutionary point of view, the moving, dynamic point of view, we have to think of human sex-psychology in yet another way. So far we have been treating it as what it is; now we must think of what it may become.
The general rule in evolution--the natural and obvious rule--is that acquisitions are not thrown away when change occurs, but built upon, utilized for some new function. The endostyle of the lowest chordates, part of a very primitive type of feeding mechanism, was converted, when they changed their mode of life, into the thyroid gland: the parathyroids develop from the remains of the gill-apparatus when gills are discarded for lungs: the secondary sexual differences which originate as accidental consequence of the primary difference between the sexes are, over and over again, elaborated into special characters employed in courtship.
So the sex-instinct and its associated emotion, at first simply one among a number of separate and scarcely-correlated instincts, has in man become the basis for numerous new mental functions. It can enter into the composition of various emotions, though its character is often disguised and its presence often undetected. It contributes to some of the most exalted states of mind which we can experience. The sexual relationship, which in lower animals involves neither contact nor even propinquity, but simply simultaneous discharge of reproductive cells, and in most animals is a purely temporary affair, is very different in man. Even in those birds and non-human mammals in which the sexes remain associated for long periods or permanently, the different departments of life are more in water-tight compartments, the psychical activity is subordinate to the physiological: in man the physiological side, though of course still basic and necessary, is more--and can be much more--subordinate to the psychological, and all parts of the mental life interpenetrate to a much greater extent; so that the sex-instinct may become transformed by a psychological process roughly analogous to the transformation of physical energy, and reappear in altered guise in various other activities of mind.
If we look at the matter broadly, we see that man is in a period of evolutionary transition as regards sex. We found previously that the greatest change connected with sex which has been made in the evolution of higher animals was the change by which there was evolved a brain and mind with associated sense-organs in which accurate perception of objects at a distance could occur, a mechanism which really dominated the working of the organism as a whole, and in which memory and emotion seemed to play an important part. Once this happened, the sex-instinct could be linked up with general emotional reactions and connected with external objects capable of inducing emotion.
What was the result? That in every group possessing such a type of mind, epigamic characters of a beautiful or striking or bizarre nature were evolved. This first linking-up of sex with mind produced, eventually, a large proportion of the beauty of the organic world. It coloured and adorned not only many a bird, but even newts and fish and spiders; it helped elicit song and music from mere sounds and noises; it moulded our own bodies, coloured our lips and eyes, and everywhere helped in adding grace to mere serviceableness; it saw to it that, as St. Paul puts it, “even our uncomely parts have an abundant comeliness.” But, as we have just pointed out, its connection with the mind’s higher centres was in all pre-human forms still temporary, under the control of cyclical physiological changes, and the mind as a whole was still constructed in compartments, so that different instincts and different experiences did not necessarily or even usually come in contact with each other.
The next great change is being made now; it concerns a further development of mind and a consequent fresh mode of connection of sex with mental life. As we have outlined above, this change in mind consists in the tendency towards uniting the different parts of the psyche, both those portions given by heredity and the modification due to experience, into a single organic whole, and in making this whole more dominant over the other aspects of the organism; the consequent tendency as regards the relationship of sex to the organism is towards taking it out of its single groove, its water-tight compartment, and bringing it into more complete and more permanent union with the rest of the mind. Furthermore, the main change and the consequent change as regards sex are both of a biologically progressive nature.