The Twilight Years, Part VI

Dark Have Been My Dreams of Late

In this series of posts on the Twilight Years, as presented by historian Richard Overy, we have seen how firstly historians, followed by economists, then biologists in Britain during the Inter-War years were all harbingers of doom, all warning of the coming collapse of civilization. In almost every case, the solutions and preventatives offered involved a vast expansion of state powers in an attempt to do something to prevent the decline.

At the turn of the century the universal consensus was one of unbridled optimism for the future. Within twenty years it had swung to dark ideas of the breakdown and collapse of Britain. We have argued that this bi-polarity of manic optimism followed by dark pessimism is intrinsic to secular humanism, the dominant religion of the age.

But there is another bi-polarity present within secular humanism. It is the tendency to lurch between rationalism and irrationalism. It was rationalism which insisted upon endlessly repeated historical patterns of ebb and flow, and upon the inherent contradictions within an economic system built upon private ownership of property and free-exchange of goods, and upon the threats of miscegenation. It was rationalism which urged a vastly expanded role of government planning to counteract these threats. (What else is “planning” but an attempt to extend "rational" patterns over the chaos of an unregulated economy?) But when rationalism was at its height, irrationalism suddenly surged up and became very popular at the same time, arguing that all such attempts were ultimately useless and futile.

The particular manifestation that irrationalism took in the Inter-War years was the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis. In the 1920's, psychoanalysis was a new branch of psychological science. It immediately captured widespread interest. Suddenly, it was the irrational which was the dominant reality, not the rational. Overy writes:

There is an unavoidable impression that psychoanalysis was precisely attuned to the age in which it emerged. Barbara Low, author in 1920 of the first popular introduction to psychoanalysis in Britain, recalled Freud's own observation that, “increasingly manifest in modern civilised life are the Neurotic and the Hysteric”. Low reflected that pressure of civilization had been “too extreme, too rapid in its action” for many people to adapt to its demands. Psychoanalysis was the therapeutic instrument for dealing with the dysfunctional nature of modern society by liberating mankind from the paralysing fear of the primitive instincts that lay concealed in the unconscious portion of the mind. (Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars [New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009], p.137,8)

The implicit promise in psychoanalysis was that if the irrational and suppressed neuroses asserted to lie within each individual were teased forth by psychoanalysis, so that they could be faced and one could come to terms with them, much of the dysfunction of modern society would evaporate. Freudianism argued that what was on the surface of man and society—which could be rationally analysed, evaluated, argued over and examined—was not what was real. The Real was what was subliminated unconsciously within the human psyche. The sublimated neuroses were essentially irrational. The rational man was therefore captive to the dark forces of irrationalism. Psychoanalysis held out the hope that these dark motivations could be exposed and corrected (that is, treated). This would free man to behave far more reasonably and constructively.

When psychoanalysis was taken out of the medical academic cloisters and popularised, it was immediately seized upon by the leading intellectuals of the day. Kingsley Martin, later to become editor of the New Statesman professed himself shaken to the core by the approach.

The fear that reason could no longer be relied upon to sort out the problems of the modern world was, Martin continued, “the most devastating of all”. (Overy, p. 145). Emphasis, ours.

Freudianism—in its narrower, stricter, medical manifestations—was unable to win sustained support. It could so quickly be reduced to absurdity. The obsession with sex was seen as ludicrous, if not distasteful. But in the Inter-War years the notion that the unconscious irrational mind lying beneath the rational superficial exterior and pulling puppet strings to control rational processes proved very attractive and even compelling to the wider public. It offered an explanation as to why things were "breaking down". Quite rapidly the theory morphed to its “mature” stage. The unconscious came to be seen not as something which just afflicted those who had neuroses of various kinds: rather the unconscious was one of the core realities of being human.

At work in every individual and in society and nations corporately were hidden irrational passions of love, hate, aggression, sadism, masochism and narcissism which would come forth unconsciously, at any point, to overthrow reason. Irrationality ultimately trumped rationality.

The effect of mass-circulation popular psychology was not to provide effective therapy but to familiarize growing circles of the population with the idea that every individual is prey of inner demons which could manipulate at will the outer person. (Overy, p.169).

It is difficult to conceive of a more dark, irrational world view.

By the 1930's most psychoanalysts had abandoned the consulting couch and had become social commentators, applying guilt, repression, eros, and the death drive to the wider society, to the social order, political behaviour, international crises and war. (Overy p.163). Civilization, it was thought, was about to be swamped by irrational dark forces of the human soul.

By 1939, as one sociologist put it, there had emerged a wide popular expectation among political and social scientists that only psychoanalysts could properly explain “man of the causes of our 'Modern Discontents'. Even socialists, argued the journal of the National Labour Colleges, should recognize “the melancholy truth” that man “is not at bottom a rational animal” and adapt their tactics accordingly. (Overy p. 173)

Under this variant of secular humanism, the irrational pole, civilization was the rational, the structured, the ordered, the controlled and restrained. But it was paper thin. Underneath were irrational, chaotic, primitive, infantile and arbitrary forces, and a

seething mass of instincts and drive that . . . was capable of a terrible aggression and an urge to morbid self-destruction. . . . (T)his paradigm . . . only served to illuminate what many people already suspected, that beneath the thin veneer of civilization there lurked a monstrous other self whose release would spell the end of civilized life and the triumph of barbarism. (Overy, p. 173).

In the end the Freudians, despite the wide public appeal and interest, could offer no hope. In their case, no amount of government planning, spending, or programming would ever be great enough to win. But the irrationalism of psychoanalysis added fresh impetus to the pessimism of the rationalists: not only was doom coming; it was inevitable and unavoidable, for man could not escape his unconscious, repressed, evil and brutal self. It served only to pour petrol on the fires of despair, which had been already burning brightly.

In our modern day, of course, humanist psychology has swung back to its more rationalist pole. Generally evil, violent, masochistic or destructive human passions are believed to be a result of conditioning by society itself. This offers the prospect that such dark forces can be ameliorated by social planning, government programmes, and above all, by government education. Once again, we labour under the fallacy of false cause, and therefore false cures. When the remedy proves a failure, the appeal of darker, more pessimistic alternatives is likely to rise once again.