(Discusses the beginning of consciousness, in the infant and in primitive man, and the problem of its adjustment to life.) We have now to consider the relationship of man to his fellows, with whom he lives in social groups. Upon this problem floods of light have been thrown by the new science of psycho-analysis. I will try to give, briefly and in simple language, an idea of these discoveries.
One of the laws of biology is that every individual, in his development, reproduces the history of the race; so that impulses and mental states of a child reveal to us what our far-off ancestors loved and feared. The same thing is discovered to be true of neurotics, people who have failed in adjusting themselves to civilized life, and have gone back, in some or all of their mental traits, to infantile states. If we analyze the unconscious minds of "nervous patients," and compare them with what we find in the minds of infants, and in savages, we discover the same dreams, the same longings and the same fears.
The mental life of man begins in the womb. We cannot observe that life directly, but we know that it is there, because there cannot be organic life without mind to direct it, and just as there is an unconscious mind that regulates the bodily processes in adults, so in the embryo there must be an unconscious mind to direct the flow of blood, the building of bones, muscle, eyes and brain. The mental life of that unborn creature is of course purely egotistical; it knows nothing outside itself, and it finds this universe an agreeable place—everything being supplied to it, promptly and perfectly, without effort of its own.
But suddenly it gets its first shock; pain begins, and severe discomfort, and the creature is shoved out into a cold world, yelling in protest against the unsought change. And from that moment on, the new-born infant labors to adjust itself to an entirely new set of conditions. Discomforts trouble it, and it cries. Quickly it learns that these cries are answered, and satisfaction of its needs is furnished. Somehow, magically, things appear; warm and dry covering, a trickle of delicious hot milk into its mouth. At first the infant mind has no idea how all this happens; but gradually it comes to realize objects outside itself, and it forms the idea that these objects exist to serve its wants. Later on it learns that there are particular sounds which attach to particular objects, and cause them to function. The sound "Mama," for example, produces a goddess clothed in beauty and power, performing miracles. So the infant mind arrives at the "period of magic gestures" and the "period of magic words"; corresponding to a certain type of myth and belief which we find in every race and tribe of human being that now exists or ever has existed on earth. All these stories about magic wishes and magic rings and magic spells of a thousand sorts; and nowhere on earth a child which does not listen greedily to such fancies! The reason is simply that the child has passed through this stage of mental life, and so recently that the feelings are close to the surface of his consciousness.
But gradually the infant makes the painful discovery that not everything in existence can be got to serve him; there are forces which are proof against his magic spells; there are some which are hostile, and these the infant learns to regard with hatred and fear. Sometimes hatred and fear are strangely mixed with admiration and love. For example, there is a powerful being known as "father," who is sometimes good and useful, but at other times takes the attention of the supremely useful "mother," the source of food and warmth and life. So "father" is hated, and in fancy he is wished out of the way—which to the infant is the same thing as killing. Out of this grows a whole universe of fascinating mental life, which Freud calls by the name "the ?dipus complex"—after the legend of the Greek hero who murdered his father and committed incest with his mother, and then, when he discovered what he had done, put out his own eyes. There is a mass of legends, old as human thought, repeating this story; we cannot be sure whether they have grown out of the greeds and jealousies of this early wish-life of the infant, or whether they had their base in the fact that there was a stage in human progress in............