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Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture

It is both an honor and a pleasure to beable to accept an invitation to join the groupof those who have memorialized the life and workof Alfred Korzybski, and it is flattering to beconsidered worthy to be a member in so distin-guished an association . My own particular in-terests have long been very close to those ofKorzybski, with special reference to the problemof meaning and the pursuit of specifically se-mantic concerns . At the same time, there is agap between some of the convictions expressed byKorzybski and those to which I have increasinglybeen impelled by the events of the quarter cen-tury since Korzybski's death .

Korzybski's deep faith in science in thetraditional definition was relatively easy tosustain in his lifetime . But as the more andmore remote implications of an orientationtoward the incessant pursuit of power in thescientific mode through an incessant generationand testing of novel ideas appear in this alltoo obviously threatened globe, one wonderswhether the evaluation of science that hasemerged over the past two hundred years islonger tenable . It is here that I see--perhapssimply because of a 'constitutional' bias towardpessimism--that the method of science that is inso many ways man's greatest achievement may alsobe inherently self- and species-destructive overthe long run .

Perhaps the most instructive comment I haveencountered in relation to the general strategyof science was made by Eugene Wigner : he empha-sizes that physicists are not interested in ex-plaining the regularities in the behavior of ob-jects . 1 This means that scientists have the goodsense to select soluble problems and to ignoreinsoluble problems . The corollary of Wigner'sprinciple is a 'law' on the tragicomic pattern

THE PARADOX OF HUMAN SELF-DESTRUCTIVENESS

Harley C . Shands, MDDepartment of Psychiatry

Roosevelt Hospital, New York

Address given 4 April 1975, The Harvard Club, New York

of Parkinson's Law and the Peter Principle :the solution of soluble problems inevitablyleads to the accumulation of insoluble prob-lems . To illustrate the law, an observer needonly look at the population explosion traceablein large part to the success of modern medicinein eliminating communicable disease, the rapiddepletion of natural resources in the serviceof progress, and the massive accumulation ofall kinds of garbage (including the radioactivevariety) throughout the developed world .

Implicit in the notion of progress is anincreasing separation of the developed from theundeveloped peoples of the modern world, in amanner illustrating perhaps the most signifi-cant difference between the animal and the humancondition . Ethologists have shown in many spe-cies how inherent patterns organize the beha-vior of members of the species so as to protectcon-specifics . The lack of such patterns in man(in war, for example) has made some theoristspostulate some special inherent aggressivenessin the human species . An alternative possibil-ity is that in man, the specific identifyingpattern is not that of membership in the speciesbut that of membership in the linguistically-defined group . Thus, the special protectivenessin any human system is oriented to the co-linguistic or co-dialectal relation . A goodillustration is found in a recent report thatduring this century alone, in the progressivecivilization of the Amazon jungle, ninety-sixdifferent preliterate peoples have been de-stroyed, a 'genocide' of astonishing propor-tions . The implication is that all preliteratepeoples are similar to 'endangered species' .

From the standpoint of civilized people,preliterate tribes living naked in the junglesimply do not exist as human beings, and we

find ourselves in the situation human beingshave known since the beginning of time--thestranger is not human, no matter how much weare assured by anthropological scientists thatall those sharing the human form are con-specifics, 'brothers' as we say . But then weremember that the first story with which we arefamiliar in relation to brothers is the story ofCain and Abel. In a more civilized form, theremote development of the continuing story ofthe Cadmus family is the mutual murder of eachby the other fratricidal son of the parricideCEdipus and his incestuous wife and mother, thesuicide Jocasta . We do not have to move veryfar into either prehistory or history to en-counter the repetitive, characteristically humanattribute of self- and species-destructiveness .

Perhaps the principal point to make is thatthe genocide in the Amazon jungle is inadvertentin large part, the consequence of extending thepower of civilization into previously virgin ter-ritory. The civilizing process appears to be oneof increasing homogenization of ('developed' or'modern') human beings with the production of a'power elite' increasingly characterized by akind of personality that may with justificationbe called a generalized self. Such a self is,in one direction, a triumph of the process ofreflective thinking that results in the develop-ment of rational systemization, with the goal oftaking an objective view in every situation . MaxPlanck describes this goal as that of 'measuringevery measurable thing and making every unmeas-urable thing measurable .' These days we wouldchange 'measurable' to 'computerizable' .

In the opposite direction, again to my ownpossibly jaundiced view, the generalized self isthat one which gives a 'Yes' answer to the poet'squestion, 'Lives there a man with soul so dead /Who never to himself hath said, / "This is my own,my native land"?' The generalized self, in itsmost modern manifestation, is an international-ized self, in many ways an expatriate self, thelogical consequence of world-wide disseminationof methods of communication in the 'mass media',which in turn often require as programmaticmaterial the most routine and trivial programs .An acquaintance familiar with the problems ofestablishing television broadcasting de novo in'developing' countries was asked about the re-sult of this technological advance ; his answerwas 'Global Peyton Place' .

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Korzybski was unfortunate or fortunateenough to die at the precise point at which thetechnological revolution in communication wasjust aborning in the advent of the computer andthe television, inventions so closely and in-timately linked together that I speak of thetwo as computelevision . In my understanding,human speech, the universal and unique attri-bute of the human species, moves into two de-rivatives in its evolutionary process, as inphysics we speak of acceleration as the 'firstderivative' of velocity . In the communicationscontext, the first derivative of speech isgraphic transformation, the most powerful andwidespread example of which is writing-reading,that pursuit which Bacon tells us 'maketh anexact man .' The second derivative is compu-television ; processes of change accelerated bythe shift from Spoken to Written are then fur-ther accelerated by the shift from Written toBinary .

To me the most interesting hypothesis thatcan be drawn from this notion is a variant ofthat one usually attributed to Whorf. I tendto state it as that the mode of communicationwhich one thinks he is using is actually trans-forming the user in the process . This trans-formation is accomplished through differentialselection, the primary method of biological evo-lution, clonal selection, operant conditioning,and language-learning, to mention only a few ofits applications . The method is perhaps mosteasily seen in the concrete act of vaccination,in which the introduction of a small amount ofa pathogen under controlled conditions changesthe immunological apparatus of the human bodyin a predictive way . In a very different ex-ample of the same basic process, John Deweyonce said that .he would in all probability havebecome a Marxist had he not been 'vaccinated'against orthodoxy by an early training in arigid Protestant sect .

Progressive differential selection resultsin a marked change, and as the process contin-ues new 'species' are favored . In developedcountries this happens in a subtle process con-cealed by the fact that all members of the cul-ture supposedly speak the same language . Thedifference is then a dialectal variant, and theprocesses of discrimination are much more subtle .We know that the Yoruba regard the Ibo as essen-tially non-human, in a way resembling that in

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which the Cypriot Turks regard the CypriotGreeks, or the Arabs and the Israelis confronteach other . In American armies, the terms 'gook'and 'wog' indicate a disregard for the humanstatus of enemies that culminates in massacresof the My Lai variety. In the 'inner' contextof a social system in which the difference is adialectal one, the negative selection of theunfit is far more subtle .

Non-specific modern man has a differentadaptational goal, one that uses the same basicmethod to a different selection . In the newmode, the adaptation is to the generic ratherthan to the specific, and we see its world-wideapplicability in the ease with which the assemblyline is adapted to factory use in every countrythat can afford the original capital expense .An ancient goal of mankind is that of attaininga universal language--but now it is clear thatwe have attained a universal technology that car-ries with it the awareness that technology under-lies all forms of language . The internationallanguage we know is mathematics, a completelyartificial, arbitrary, and value-free dialectthat is constituted, amazingly enough, of a mas-sive structure of tautology .

Mathematics is an artificially simplifiedhighly abstract language that clearly definesits own territory--that having to do with regu-larity, as Wigner notes . Secondly, however,mathematics progresses toward simplification,and in many ways its ultimate achievement ap-pears to be that of the development of so simplea dialect that it is universally applicablewherever mathematics is, so simple that iteasily transcends all national boundaries, andso powerful that the 'embodiments' of Binary inthe innumerable applications of computelevisionproceed in accelerated manifestation .

Perhaps the chief function of mathematicsis that it allows and enforces 'hard edge' dis-tinctions (its influence in modern painting isobvious here) . Mathematical distinctions are'black' and 'white'--and the metaphor empha-sizes that the function exploited in mathemat-ics is that which differentiates human beingsfrom their primate relatives, primates fromtheir mammalian relatives . It is the sense ofvision that makes possible mathematical formu-lation in graphic technology--and the sense ofvision that is so systematically developed

throughout human education in the 'three R's' .Graphic transformations allow the invention ofthe zero upon which all subsequent mathematicalprogress depends--and zero is a symbol refer-ring to the emptiness of a 'box' in which other-wise some number occurs . The eventual simpli-fication of Binary depends upon the use ofenormous numbers of 'boxes' each of which iseither empty or contains a 'one' . When we be-come acquainted with the enormous advantagesof simplicity, we understand better how it isthat English has now become the first languageof the developed West and the essential secondlanguage of the remainder of those to whom com-munication with developed nations is important .It is now routine, especially when speaking forthe television news reporter, for every poli-tician of any country, every prominent scien-tist, every international musician, anyoneaspiring to wide public status, to speak Eng-lish, often with only a trace of a local accent .It is of major interest that most of the dis-coveries in modern communicational context havebeen made 'in English' though often by scien-tists and mathematicians immigrant to thiscountry and England to whom English is not anative language .

The transactional relation we encounteragain and again between the human species andthe cultural evolutionary progression of changein relation to speech-and-language recurrentlysuggests to me an outrageous hypothesis . Thecore of this hypothesis is the obvious fact thathuman education cannot proceed without the usefirst of speech, then of language . Havelockdiscusses in detail the success of Plato indisestablishing an oral tradition and establish-ing a written one in accordance with the prin-ciples spelled out in the last book of TheRepublic--and since Plato's beg nning the evo-lutionary process has continued . On the otherhand, it is equally obvious that speech existsonly in the human species and language only inthe educated human group . It is fascinatingto see this relation as that of a 'concrete'biological organism, Homo sapiens, to an 'ab-stract' organism, a kind of parasite or (atleast) symbiont the existence of which is es-sential to the identity of its host (or symbi-otic partner) .

This fantastic hypothesis was suggestedby the many resemblances between the behavior

of the almost abstract quasi-organism we knowas a filterable virus . A virus is nearly an'abstraction' in that its form is the ultimatein biological simplicity ; crystallized andstored in a bottle on a shelf, some viruses ap-pear to be non-living, static crystals . In theusual case, the virus 'lives' as a part of thegenetic material of chromosomes, 'repressed'within the chromosomal mass in a living cell,appearing as an integral and inherent part ofthat cell . When the cell in which it is a partis in danger of disintegration, the virus maybecome 'derepressed' and take over the wholecell machinery, now with the sole purpose ofreplicating itself in multiple 'virions' whichthen can act as analogues of seeds disseminatedwidely in a search for new cells in which toenter again the same sort of repressed, passiveexistence. On those occasions when the virussuddenly becomes derepressed, the host shows themanifestations of an illness, often a secondaryillness (perhaps the simplest example is herpes,the 'cold sore' that often follows a cold) .

Language appears to act in somewhat thesame way that a virus does . In its usual mani-festation, language is 'repressed' within every-day human transactions . But upon occasion, inthe form of an ideology, language clearly sup-ports revolution and influences the group act-ing as its host toward a disorganization havinga strong resemblance to illness in the 'bodypolitic' . Note that the term ideology means,by derivation, 'same word' ; the principal goalof an ideology is that of replicating itselfagain and again in various hosts in politicalsystems . Ideological implications occur as thenormative standards to which we attach the words'faith', 'patriotism', 'honor', even 'value' .The central norm of any social system is aliento the biological organism, and it is the domi-nance of the alien that must be progressivelyemphasized if we are to preserve, not the mem-bers of the group, but its forms .

If this is so, then the most significantachievement in the acceleration of change inthe human condition occurred when it became pos-sible to preserve form independent of a livinganimal body. This point occurred with the in-vention (the 'mutation'?) of graphic technol-ogy, a method that allows , human beings to thinkthat they have learned how to 'represent', topresent again, a form that is thereby made'real' . It is thereafter routinely ignored

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that there is a fundamental difference betweena series of events and a static record--a dif-ference that assures an absolute discrepancybetween 'life' and 'records' .

Malinowski tells us that preliteratepeoples understand speech (without thinkingabout it) as a mode of action in a category withpaddling a canoe--while it is only after graphictechnology begins to allow record-keeping thatwe find language-as-a-system becoming an in-strument of reflection .

We do not often take into account the pos-sible significance for scientific thought ofthe Bible as a milestone in literacy, since we'look through' rather than 'at' records of thissort . My thesis noted above, however, is clear-ly stated in the gospel attributed to the 'in-tellectual' John, 'Saint John the Divine' .There we read, 'In the beginning was the Word,and the Word was with God, and the Word wasGod.' Obviously, from the standpoint of a re-ligious institution, the Word of crucial sig-nificance is the written word--establishedofficially in the Tables of the Law in whichMoses formulated an abstract God . The subse-quent most important event for Western civili-zation is reported by John in the apparentlymystical statement that 'The Word became fleshand lived among us .'

My suggestion is simply that this is lit-erally true, not solely in the person of Christ,but in the systematic institutional structurewhich has progressively appeared as the Wordhas undergone its own evolution and so has suc-cessively revolutionized, again and again, the'personality' that is the manifestation oflanguage-and-culture-as-a-system in each ofthose products we call 'individuals' or 'humanobjects' . The underlying linear structure ofthe alphabetized written word is closely anal-ogous to that of the assembly line--except thatthe cultural system allows more deviance, showsmore 'degrees of freedom', than does the manu-facturing process .

Although in the usual ways of thinkingscience and religion are considered antago-nistic to each other, there is a very clearrelation between the ideology of science andthe ideology of the Judaeo-Christian traditionof Western thought . In the first place, scienceis based upon symbolic manipulation, and the

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Jewish tradition has featured practice in sym-bolic manipulation as long as we can trace itback. What differentiates the Jewish and theChristian tradition is the xenophobia of the'chosen people' in sharpest contrast to theactive recruiting of the latter . A point re-peatedly emphasized by Saint Paul is that inhis teaching belief takes the place, in termsof cultural identification, of the painful con-crete act of circumcision that is the typical'badge of membership' in the older tradition .The emphasis upon abstraction is further devel-oped in Paul's insistence that it is belief(faith) rather than actions (works) that countsas far as religion is concerned .

The central usefulness of an ideology isshown in the Jewish ability to survive repeatedpersecution and dispersal--but the limitationsof xenophobia are shown by the small numbers andprecarious status of Jews throughout recordedhistory . The transformation ('mutation'?) ofgreatest implication in the Christian heresy wasthe recruitment of faithful through the processof believing. Again we find a pattern of accel-eration in the missionary activities of theRoman Catholic Church, with an acceleration ofacceleration in the secondary heresy of Protes-tantism . In this the process of abstraction wasmoved another step, one which has resulted in amore 'catholic' church when we use the term inits generic rather than in its specific, upper-case, form to mean 'universal' .

With reference to graphic technology andcultural evolution, Protestant missionaries em-phasize the translation of the Book, the Bible,into every possible tongue--so as to facilitatethe universal practice of interpreting that Bookin 'individual' ways . The Protestant method de-nies the necessity of the specially trained in-terpreter, and emphasizes the possibility of adirect relation to God . Weber emphasizes thecloseness of the relation between the Protestantethic and the 'spirit' of capitalism, and we seein the emphasis upon a direct and immediate re-lation to God a version of 'free private enter-prise' . 3 In many instances, the evolutionaryprocess is seen most clearly in the way in whichmissionaries ostensibly seeking to win primitivesavages for God succeed in taking over the landsof those primitive savages for themselves, theircountries, and their descendants in a 'peaceful'colonialization process that often results inmodified genocide .

In human affairs, Spoken allows the for-mation and preservation of cultural groups inwhich norms and patterns are 'embedded' andpreserved (much like the virus) from generationto generation. It is not until Spoken is trans-lated into Written, however, that those patternscan have an outside, 'independent', existence .The crucial transformation involved is describedin Saussure's words in the relation of the dia-chronic to the synchronic, in the contrast be-tween the 'axis of successions' and the 'axis ofsimultaneities' . Speech-in-action becomes lan-guage-as-a-system, which in turn gives rise tothe book and to the upper-case Book, The Book ofThe Word . The transformation is from the tempo-ral into the spatial, from the moving into thestable--and it is precisely that transformationwhich allows human beings for the first time to'see' language . The magical implications ofthis method are astonishing when one examinesthem closely. Record-keeping in a most im-portant sense creates the subject matter it sup-posedly preserves in some neutral fashion . Themetaphor is perhaps more easy to grasp when wesay that it is the reflection that creates theobject .

In common sense, and with reference to in-animate objects (tables and chairs) that sur-round us in all their concreteness, this notionappears absurd . On the other hand, when we be-gin to examine critically some recent findingsin self-psychology, the notion becomes more andmore pertinent and compelling . It is extraordi-nary that so little of this kind of investiga-tion has been done when we consider that apersonality, the reciprocal of the personal pro-noun 'I', is the 'object' with which psychologyand psychiatry are principally concerned . Butthen the question becomes different again whenwe take into account the possibility that theconception of personality upon which both psy-chology and psychiatry rest is a function ofthe evolution of language-as-a-system ; the cor-relation is with personality-as-a-system . TheOxford English Dictionary attests to this innoting that 'psychology' appears first in 1693--while the use of the term to refer to a treatiseor system occurs first nearly a hundred yearslater, in 1791 . The word 'psychiatry' definedas 'medical treatment of diseases of the mind'appears first in 1846--and it is apparent thatit is only when 'mind' can be conceived of insystematic terms as an 'object', the core of a'personality', that a ,mind can be considered to

have 'a disease' . The fascinating questionthen appears as to whether this is a great sci-entific discovery--or whether it is, in White-head's term, a 'fallacy of misplaced concrete-ness' .

Another illustration of the evolutionaryprocess through which modern concepts and atti-tudes emerge is seen in-the shift in the use ofthe term 'conscience' . Originally, consciencewas a qualitative term, and a group of humanbeings was said to have more or less conscience,a notion of an 'analog' type . It was not untilthe Calvinist emphasis upon the directness ofthe relation of one's separate soul to God thatthe notion of Ey conscience and your conscience,my mind and our mind, began in its contemporaryusage, a quantitative 'digital' meaning .

The paradox is that when we delve deeplyinto the implications of thinking in 'objective'terms, the kind of thinking that allows us toconceive of an 'individual' owning an 'object',we find how truly relativistic is the basis ofobjectivity. Kuhn points out that a scientifictheory is over-turned in a 'revolution' when agenerally accepted paradigm is then rejected bya substantial consensus and a new paradigmachieves 'universality' .4 But universality issimply consensus, and consensus is always 'pub-lic opinion', a 'subjective' matter--so thatwhenever we seek ultimate objectivity, we findit paradoxically in consensual subjectivity--asin the jury trial .

Similarly, Piaget talks about the signifi-cance of 'decentering' in arriving at a cogni-tive grasp of any complex observable . 5 He speaksof a 'distorting' relativity of perception thatis traceable to the 'centering' effect of focus-sing upon the field, in whatever sense modalitythis occurs . This centering is modified by in-tegration of several sequential views from dif-ferent standpoints, and we arrive at the 'cor-recting' relativity of conceptualization. WhatPiaget ignores in this comment is that the 'cor-rect' conceptual view is one derived entirely byinference, and its correctness can never beestablished by direct, always established onlyby indirect, approaches . The 'correct' valuefor a colorimeter reading is obtained by averag-ing, so that it is usually different from anysingle observation and is thus correct only ina statistical, probabilistic sense .

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When we 'realize' that one cannot say that'reality' exists in the mind or in the object(as the warring sects of idealists and realistsargue, each in the own 'territory'), we come toconfront the basic transactional situation thatknowing is a relation involving parties of thefirst and of the s6e coed part, as Dewey andBentley emphasize . One understands the processperhaps most precisely in following the vicis-situdes of a sensory organ separated from itsreciprocal . In the fish of Mammoth Cave, theeyes have degenerated from generations of dis-use : light is functionally related to sight,and in the most significant way, neither can besaid to be primary or 'causal' : the developingevolutionary transaction changes both partnersas new modes of processing data emerge . Thesame is precisely true with the evolution oflanguage. The revolutionary implications ofgraphic technology involve relations of reflec-tings that are reciprocally related to re-flecteds . What is often ignored, however, isthat it is the reflecting that 'generates' theobject as sight can in a loose way be said to'generate' light. When we arrive at this point,we suddenly 'realize' that it is only becauseof the linear structure of language that a 're-lation' has to be made into a sequence .' Did hehave intercourse with her or did she have intercourse with him? It is clear that it is therecord that preserves 'reality' in inferentiallyand consensually establishing the object .

With specific reference to the notion ofreflecting, we can return to mythology to findthe pattern demonstrated in the Narcissus storyand in that of the conquest of Medusa, themortal Gorgon, by Perseus . Narcissus was abeautiful youth without self-consciousness un-til he discovered his own image in a quietpool--at which point he fell so madly in lovewith the stranger as to be immobilized and fadeaway to his own death. The point is the domi-nance of the reflected over that which is re-flected . The positive power of reflecting isdemonstrated in Perseus's use of a highly pol-ished shield in which to look at Medusa, whosevisage was so horrifying in direct view as toturn the viewer into stone . By looking only inthe mirror, Perseus was able to behead her .Then, mounting the severed head in the midst ofthe shield, Perseus enjoyed a magical advantageover adversaries frozen in horror at the sight .

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From the standpoint of self-psychology,the reflecting process is of the greatest inter-est in the emergence of a self in the sense inwhich we know it in a highly literate or even'post-literate' culture . Perhaps the mostpoignant, informal evidence is given in HelenKeller's report of the emergence for her of aworld that could be consciously known . MissKeller had developed, as a precocious child oftwenty months, a considerable proficiency inspeech before being affected with a severe dis-ease that left her both blind and deaf . In thesucceeding five years, she lost all words excepta crude 'wah-wah' and became a very clever 'ani-mal' who indicated her wants in meaningful ges-tures . One such gesture was the child's act ofdemonstrating the pattern of unlocking with akey to indicate that she wanted a bag opened toget a present from a stranger . Still, accordingto her own testimony, Miss Keller had no con-scious knowledge and no conscious memories duringall this time .

When she was trained, in an astonishinglyshort time though with active battling with thenew teacher, she showed a very great facility forlearning new gestures to expand her repertory ofskills--but still without any consciousness shecould report . When her teacher finally suc-ceeded in communicating to her that a set of al-phabetically significant finger-patterns corres-ponded to a familiar sensory pattern, the childsuddenly grasped the fact that this cool flowingsensation corresponds to the finger-pattern-sequence w-a-t-e-r, she suddenly attained con-sciousness in the recognition by generalizationthat every thing 'out there' had a correspondingpattern 'in here' . Suddenly she began to livein the human world by becoming able, as she putsit, to 'live in the mind' . But the method isthat of living in reflection, as it were in amirrored universe, 'through the looking glass' .The general implication is that a consciouslyknown world can only be a world known insidethrough the application of the reflective po-tentialities of language .

A report by Zazzo of a study of his ownson over a period of months showed that thechild made a crucial transformation in the lat-ter part of his third year as he became able toattach to his mirror-image first his own name,then the revolutionary equivalent, the pronoun'I' . 7 Following up this lead, Fraiberg and

Adelson have demonstrated in several blindchildren that, even with intensive care andtraining, such children suffer an extended de-lay in learning to use 'I' in the abstract,adult sense .8 These children achieve what wehave called the 'embedded I' (Zazzo's 'syn-cretic I') at around the same age as sightedchildren--in the middle of the third year--butthen the sighted children go on to make thecrucial transformation into an 'abstract I'within the next half-year while the blind childmay be delayed up to two years or longer .

The discovery that blind children cannoteasily make is that described by Piaget withreference to the brother relation . The childlearns relatively early 'I have a brother'--the 'embedded I' serving as what some linguistshave called a 'place-holder' . But then it isfar more difficult to achieve the reflexiverealization that 'My brother has a brother, andthat brother is I,' or, as Fraiberg and Adelsonput it, 'My "you" is your "I" .' The relationonly becomes abstract when it becomes recipro-cal and reversible, when one learns at leastminimally to 'put oneself in the place of theother .'

Many of these observations simply confirmin a systematic way what parents have repeatedlyobserved . The most important implication, how-ever, is the realization that 'I' is a word thatcan only be skillfully used in the modern con-text when it comes to refer to an abstractionthat is the rationalization of a reflection .We learn to use 'I' appropriately only by firstcoming to terms with the realization that theoutside, the alien, is that which 'describes'the self . The extension into social praxis isthe realization that the 'me' described byothers is more 'true' for social purposes thanthe 'me' felt 'inside' . Again the significanttask is not that of learning either the 'ideal-istic' or the 'realistic' (in the philosophicalsense) version of 'me' but rather it is learn-ing how to integrate the inside, the feeling,with the outside, the reflection .

What this means, to return to the commentmade above, is that the consensus must win, atleast to the extent necessary for the humanbeing to move easily within the group . Theheroes of any culture are those who have sacri-ficed their own lives in the interest of the

group, the norms, the faith, the law or theparty--all originally alien entities .

Of the greatest interest to the practicingpsychotherapist are the many demonstrations thatit is precisely here that many psychiatric prob-lems appear, always in a paradoxical sense .Psychoanalysts often make much of the idea thatthe task of therapy is that of achieving an 'ob-jective view' of the self--but the operationaltest of 'objectivity' in terms of institutionalhabit is that of passing the barrier from stu-dent to practitioner, from 'candidate' to'graduate' and then on to 'training analyst' .'Graduation' in this sense 'means' that the'patient-student' (often a necessarily verypatient student) has developed an 'objective'understanding of himself--but in fact, thatobjectivity is clearly a function of the opinionof his analyst, his supervisors, and the train-ing committee . We return again to the demon-stration that 'one man's meat is another's poi-son,' that 'one man's freedom is another'sslavery .'

The development of a psychiatric disorderis often the deviant development of the self asobject . A young woman seen some time ago exhib-ited a chronic, repetitive tendency to attemptsuicide, to cut and burn herself, on one occa-sion even slashing her face with a razor . Indiscussing with her this bizarre behavior, whatappeared to my own astonishment was the clearstatement that when she injured herself in thisway, with clear conscious intent, she felt nopain whatever . On the other hand, when she ac-cidentally sat down upon a set of hot hair curl-ers, she burned her seat and was very uncom-fortable for several days . The inference isthat the own body treated as an 'object' is in-sensitive, as much so as if it were that ofanother or that of an animal .

A curious form of self-destructive behaviorin psychiatric patients is that of the maso-chistic forms of sexual deviance . Here againthe inexperienced observer 'knows' that the maso-chist being whipped feels severe pain--but whencareful inquiry is made, this turns out not tobe the case . As long as the masochist is in hispreferred perverse pattern, that in which he as'director' of the scene prescribes to the sadistprecisely how the sadist is to attack him, the'victim' feels no pain . He is an 'object'--

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even though in the same context, as 'subject'the masochist is identified with the 'perse-cutor', What we find, again and again, isthat the basic process of self-formation isthat of identification-with-the-other, oftenmost importantly identification-with-the-aggressor . The 'perversion' most significantlyfound is not so much sexual as it is social, adeviant kind of deformation of the self throughinadequate internalization .

The human being involved in the pursuit ofpower, when 'on top', is specifically pro-tected against 'feeling' in any of the soft ortender versions of that human attribute . Air-plane pilots drop bombs on human groups andwatch with distant interest as bodies are thrownabout and fragmented; they are involved in ex-erting a dominion over the 'objective' others .Maximum feeling, good or bad, tends to occuronly when the human being is in the status ofpassivity, the 'patient' to whom an 'agent' isdoing something . We are moved, we fall in love,our hearts are broken, we are carried away ortransported or illuminated--but only when wecan allow ourselves to remain in a posture ofpassive expectation . Hamlet's dilemma is thatof whether to remain in his affectively dis-tressing state of knowledge or to 'take arms'and do something ; the resolution of the dilemmais the self- and other-destructive consequencesof doing both .

We return to Narcissus : the 'sight of one-self' may have lethal implications to the un-prepared human being--but to be able to seeoneself in reflection is essential to the de-velopment of reflective intelligence . Narcissusis an allegory of the danger of reflection, whilePerseus's use of a mirror to conquer Medusa isthe reciprocal legend . Anthropologists who havevisited preliterate peoples not yet at the stageof development of Narcissus report bizarre be-havior when they offer mirrors . At times thegift of a mirror is rejected in breaking it--and at times the introduction of the mirror hasa revolutionary impact on the tribe . What ismost interesting in many of these studies is theimplication that the saying 'They became whatthey beheld' is true .

In a sophisticated civilization the 'I' thatemerges is the 'I' found first outside, then in-ternalized in a process of establishing an inner

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conversation . The participants to this con-versation have been described by Mead as a selfand a 'generalized other'9 But what is appar-ent when we study modern processes of educationin which the student is exposed to an enormousnumber of 'reflections' of the human experienceis that the other party is a generalized self .When it becomes possible to abstract the 'I', italso becomes possible to 'objectify the self'and the more objectified the self, the more isthat self at risk of being alienated from thegroup in which we claim membership .

We find in the relation of a generalizedother and a generalized self the possibility ofknowing oneself as understood by others, as an'objective self' or as an 'object' . Freud usesthese terms, in fact, in describing the goalsof psychoanalysis . The emergence of the objec-tive self is a specifically modern development .Its utility is apparent in the degree to whichan objectified self tolerates repetitive changeof location, change of human network, change ofcultural conditions . The objective self is, parexcellence, the expatriate, and the expatriateis essential to the function of complex machin-eries of industry and political institutions inthe increasingly intense world-wide communica-tions network . An amusing comment upon modern-ity is that the most successful company in themost successful of modern industries is knownby its employees as 'I've Been Moved .'

What seems the most interesting of themany implications of this process of develop-ment--a process I identify as that of becomingable to supply the data through which one iden-tifies the self-object in the explicit appli-cations of the pronoun

that we findanother crucial split in the body politic . An-cient praxis separates groups of human beingsthat are internally bound together in closemembership relations ; such societies are tra-ditional, using extended kinship systems, an-cient forms of religious ritual, and they tendto appeal to the wisdom carried by the aged .They are rigidly conservative, and the greatestthreat is that of innovation . Still, many ofthese systems have lasted for hundreds or thou-sands of years ; they are not only conservative,they appear to have been conserved .

Modern praxis increasingly makes a differ-ent form of separation, between what lnkeles and

Smith identify as the 'modern' and the tradi-tionalists lO Modern man is predominantly as'object' to his employer, his political leader,and himself . In a cross-cultural study of sixdeveloping nations, Inkeles and Smith show thatthis 'horizontal', intragroup, separation be-comes the more important one . 'Modern' man inone culture is very much like his counterpartin another . A 'modern' man is capable of anincredible number of transplantations, to dif-ferent cities, different countries, differentnetworks, different employers, different tech-nical jobs . He is 'multipurpose' in the sameway that a gasoline engine can be adapted toany number of different operations as a powerplant--or, even more modern, as the computeris totally indifferent to whether it is count-ing grains of sand, accumulations of diamonds,or numbers of those mugged and raped piling upin great modern cities such as New York .

Inkeles and Smith have pursued and deniedthe suggestion held by many that modern man inhis successful manifestation is subject topsychiatric disorders and psychosomatic ills .We have for many years been inquiring into thisproblem, and we would tend to agree that 'beingmodern' in the successful sense is usually quitecompatible with reasonable states of socialadaptation and relatively few symptoms . On theother hand, we find a great deal of evidencesuggesting that the emphasis upon modernity hassevere implications for those unprepared by therigid preparatory undertaking to live in themodern factory and the modern industrialorganization .

The results of our clinical inquiry can besummarized as indicating that in industry a lackof education predisposes to the inability toadapt in crisis . Perhaps the most interestingfinding is that the uneducated are unable toperform acts of creative imagination that aninterviewer takes for granted, to find, for ex-ample, the categories in which 'apple and ba-nana', 'dog and lion', 'chair and table' belong .Our findings indicate that this inability isclosely related to the inability to re-learnnew 'self' after an accident has temporarilymade ordinary activity impossible . The subjectswe have studied have routinely declared thatthey were 'not themselves', that they no longerknow 'me' as they did before the accident . Inour experience, however, this accident itself

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is not sufficient to produce the persistent andextensive disability without physical findingswe have found in some 70% of a large group ofdisabled workers . The apparently necessary ad-ditional factor is the expectation of compensa-tion without understanding the legal basis uponwhich compensation is to be allowed or refused .In our understanding, the availability of com-pensation in principle completely transformsthe situation for the injured workman by remov-ing him from employment in a tangible factoryor business establishment, while substitutingthe modern political institution, the compensa-tion bureau, for the employer . Thus the workeris now related primarily--because most of thesemen and women appear to identify themselves pri-marily in terms of an occupational 'self'--notto a concrete knowable boss but to an ever-changing group of vaguely understood role occu-pants whose major characteristic to the claimantis their near-total inaccessibility and theirpurely formal relation to him .

Thus we find the paradox that it is pre-cisely that institution designed to help thesuffering injured workman temporarily over abad time that, by comprehensively frustratingthe worker's need to identify himself by a re-lation to a concrete employer in a concreteindustry, apparently leads on to producing inthe uneducated and uncreative worker preciselythat situation it proposes to avoid . We findanother example of the destructiveness of help-fulness, the misadventure involved in many otherbureaucratic forms of publicly administeredhelpfulness .

It is of considerable interest to look backagain at the context of systematization and ra-tionalization that Max Weber points to as thesource of western power and the extraordinaryimplications of capitalism . In the specificallypsychiatric context, we find that the replace-ment of the notion of madness by that of mentalillness is another of the examples of systemati-zation with which we are familiar . The princi-pal such illness, in the opinion of a formidableconsensus, is schizophrenia, a word that meansmost proximately a 'divided self' . In less for-mal description, the term is close to that usedby William James, a 'schism in the soul' .

When we examine the derivation of thisterm in a lexicographical sense, we find some

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very interesting implications . 'Phrenos' isthe Greek word for diaphragm ; from it we de-rive the idea that the diaphragm is the seatof the soul, a concrete localization consider-ably more reasonable than to locate the soulin the pineal gland as did Descartes . 'Psyche',the term basic to psychology, is less distantlythe word attached to the beautiful princess whowas visited by an unknown lover in the dark .Obsessed with curiosity, Psyche lit a lamp toexamine her partner after he had fallen asleep .In doing so she dropped hot oil on his sleepingbody, astonished by his beauty . He awoke toreprimand her for her lack of patience and toinform her that he was the God of Love himself .

Psyche thus becomes a metaphor for 'soul'or 'spirit' and as systematization develops, wefind its use in the term psychology (with-loos added) and psychiatry (with -iatros,physician, added) . If we use the method notedabove and ask the question, 'What is alikeabout psyche and phrenos?' we find the answerin that technique of naming that uses thefigure of speech, metonymy, naming by conti-guity . In the original Greek verb form tobreathe is psychein, and breathing is theprincipal activity of the diaphragm . Psych-and -phrenic are then closely related as as-pectsl of the breathing function ; we can saythat they refer to the 'breath of life'--butit would appear that we speak here not ofbreath in the literal sense of supplying oxy-gen and eliminating carbon dioxide--but breathin the sense in which expiration appropriatelyshaped yields the forms of speech, Some sup-port for this idea is apparent in the use ofthe term 'inspire' to refer not only to intakeof breath but also of the acceptance of spirit-ual stimulation through the internalization ofsome creative stimulus from outside . Where thebreath of life in the concrete sense is sharedby all animals and even by plants, the breathof life in the specifically human sense isshaped breath, expired through a set of reedsand sculptured obstructions so as to yield thosetransient forms that constitute 'eternal verity' .

The story of Psyche tells us of the self-destructive implications of curiosity--but aswell of the irresistible urge to know more . Inmany ways the lesson is the same as that of theprimal sin of Adam and Eve, not, as many crudelythink, that of enjoying each other sexually, but

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rather of the irresistible urge to eat of thetree of the knowledge of good and of evil . Theurge is to know and in knowing to gain power--and the penalty of knowledge is the loss ofparadise, whether that paradise be symbolizedas sex in the dark or as the paradise of igno-rance .

What is most evident in modern times isthe clear and increasing conflict between thosewho know, those who are educated to high levelsof skills in reflective thinking, and those whoremain in ignorance, Passionate believers inthe American meliorist theme that says as aslogan, 'The difficult we do at once, the im-possible takes a little longer,' remain con-vinced that the way out of our dilemma is thatof universal education to a high level of uni-formity in the skills of reflective thinking .Much suggests, however, that as the level ofeducation rises in a culture such as this one,the simplest effect is that of elevation of thelevel of demand on those who are to succeed,with a corresponding increase in the demand onthose who are to fail . The pattern shows whatI once called the 'principle of the conservationof misery', a principle indicating that the moresome succeed, the more most tend to fail . Per-haps the clearest indication of this pattern inmeasurable terms is to be found in the coexist-ence of large numbers of incredibly disadvantagedand hopeless numbers of our society to be foundin the ghettos and the welfare hotels of thegreatest city in the world . The point of refer-ence is to the expatriate billionaires, Getty,Hughes, Niarchos, Onassis, and Gulbenkian, allof whom achieved vast anonymous wealth by ex-ploiting modern man's insatiable need for read-ily available power .

Much suggests that we see here a manifes-tation of a fundamental rule of physics, theentropy principle . The accumulation of infor-mation in one context, and the accumulation ofthose tokens of power we know as pounds, dol-lars, and francs in another, are examples ofnegative entropy, as Wiener and Shannon havemade clear in the basic theoretical work sub-serving the computer age1 1 We forget that thelaw is that entropy always increases, neverdecreases--and that the accumulation of nega-tive entropy in any one context must imply theincrease of entropy, of disorder, in another .The fact seems to be that the billions owned by

the rich, modern, international financier arein a real sense taken away from the grindinglypoor at the bottom of the social scale . Whatwe appear to have created in the context ofmodernity is not only a systematic view ofschizophrenia in the 'individual', but a con-dition that might warrant the term 'schizo-demos' . Those of us who know, even if at somedistance from the crude reality, the human situ-ation of the conspicuous failures of this so-ciety might agree that an appropriate name forthis metropolis might well be Schizopolis . Itis an appropriately ironical comment that Lud-wig Boltzmann, the genius to whom it was firstgiven to see that the apparently concrete no-tion of entropy is creatively transformable intothe much more useful idea of disorganization ordisorderliness, and who through this transfor-mation led us directly into the possibility ofinformation theory and so to the computer, waschronically disappointed by his inability tomake his discovery widely known and committedsuicide!

To sum up the implications of some of thenotions I have tried to present, it is perhapssimplest to refer again to the basic law ofmotion, namely that for any action there is anequal and opposite reaction . I take this tomean specifically that for whatever increase wemay find it possible to secure in predictabil-ity, there must be an equal and opposite in-crease in unpredictability; for any increase inorderliness, there must be an equal and oppo-site increase in disorderliness ; for whateverincrements of negative entropy we manage, wemust expect similar increments in entropy. Weseem to be in the position of the owner of themagical Monkey's Paw, each of whose wishes isimmediately magically granted, at a terribleprice .

Modern man's triumphant progress on and onin the service of order, power, predictability,clarity, and orderliness leads us on into greaterand greater problems . Because we have been sobrain-washed for the last two hundred years inthe sublime faith that systematic objectiverational inquiry is the best of all possiblepursuits in the best of all possible worlds, wehave totally lost sight of those warnings whichCassandras have always given to an unheeding andimpatient audience . Perhaps the most precise il-lustration of my point is that, if anyone does

take the time to listen to some such warning,the invariable answer immediately appears :'What objective scientific rational remedymight there be?' In my view, this questionsuggests an attempt_ to snuff out a fire bydrowning it in gasoline. The non-answer Ipropose is the ancient saying that 'Pridegoeth before a fall'--and the more modern com-ment by Lord Acton that power corrupts, whileabsolute power corrupts absolutely. I amtransfixed by the paradox of modern man's head-long and irresistible search for ever more

REFERENCES

1. Wigner, E.P . Symmetries and Reflections : Scientific Essays . Ed . by M. Striven and W . Moore .Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 1967 .

2 . Havelock, Eric . Preface, to Plato . Cambridge, Mass . : Harvard University Press, 1963 .

3. Weber, M . The Protestant Ethic. and the Spirit of Capitalism . New York : Charles Scribner'sSons, 1904 .

4. Kuhn, Thomas . The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Chicago : University of ChicagoPress, 1962 .

5 . Piaget, Jean . The Psychology of Intelligence . New York : Harcourt, Brace, 1950 .

6 . Dewey, John and Bentley, Arthur F . Knowing and the Known . Boston : Beacon Press, 1949 .

7 . Zazzo, R. 'Image du Corps et Conscience de Sor . Material Pour 1'etude Experimentale de laConscience.' Enfance Psychologie, Pedagogie, Neuropsychiatrie, Sociologie 1 :29 - 43, 1948 .

8 . Fraiberg, Selma and Adelson, Edna . 'Self Representation in Language and Play.' PsychoanalyticQuarterly : 539-562, 1973 .

9 . Mead, George H . Mind, Self and Society . Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1934 .

10 . Inkeles, Alex and Smith, David H . Becoming Modern . Cambridge ., Mass . : Harvard UniversityPress, 1974 .

11 . Wiener, Norbert . Cybernetics . New York : John Wiley & Sons, 1948 and Shannon, C .E . 'AMathematical Theory of Communication .' Bell S stem Technical Journal, XXVII : 379 - 423,, 1948.

power, ever more development, ever more ex-ploitation, ever more control . In the contem-porary television series in which Jacob Bro-nowski proudly calls the roll of man's scien-tific achievements in his 'ascent' from ananimal condition, a sobering note was soundedby the commentator in repeating Einstein'sremark that, although he did not know whatweapons would be used in the third World War,it is apparent that the weapons to be used inthe fourth will be stones .

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